Hi there. This is Frank Romano from WhatTheyThink.com. All right, this is kind of unusual, I’m shooting this thing into a mirror because I wanted to show you a book that I have and this is probably the easiest way to do it. The book is called, Penrose’s Pictorial Annual. It had been published from 1895 to 1978.
Of course, I’ve outlived it.
It was at time capsule of everything that was happening in the printing industry in any particular year. This one happens to be from 1907-1908, and it then represented everything that was happening technologically in the printing industry at that time. And they would literally go around the world to find printers or other that were doing interesting things and ask them to print samples and they would then bind them into this annual. There’s nothing like it today. Perhaps if you go back GATF did something that was similar to a minor degree where they tried to summarize new technology, but the Penrose Annual was unique in trying to take everything that was happening in the printing industry and put it into one volume at one time.
So, when I am in London I always haunt antiquarian bookstores and this allowed me now to complete the collection, except for volumes 1, 2, and 3, 1895, 1896 and 1897. So, if anybody knows anything about those particular issues, please let me know, I’d love to buy them.
The Year’s Progress and Process Work, so here’s an article. They have various articles that summarize everything that’s happening; they have articles that have many samples in it of different kids of photography, different kinds of printing, different approaches. There are duotones; there was a lot of activity in three-color printing and duotones. Process printing was just starting to come in, and this publication tried to give you an idea of what was happening. Some of the articles are very technical, some are management oriented. Happy Thoughts in Process Work. I don’t know this is an interesting headline.
You can also get a sense of the technology of the day and the dress of the day because many of the samples that they printed were from advertising and promotional materials or rich people who had their pictures reproduced in some way, shape or form.
None of the color is really that dramatic because again, they were limited to the color – the ink set that they had at the time and to the printing reproduction that they had at the time. There was a lot of activity in color type, which was a hot technology at the time. Lithography was just coming in, the Hammers Brothers had just built the first lithographic presses, and they were starting to change the way printers thought about printing and moving away from letter press printing.
Probably you’ll notice that there are tissue overlays in most cases in order to protect many of the – especially the color pictures that are in the book. I mean, some of the work is very dramatic.
The Application of Bromide of Silver in Printing out Processes, that sounds like an interesting article. Again, the illustrations are all over the lot.
This particular book, by the way, according to the little stamps I see in it came from a library in the northern part of the UK. That’s how I get a lot of these books, by the way, is because libraries get rid of some of their collections that they considered to be not important anymore. And there are people like me who want to preserve this kind of information. Why?
Can there be too many old guy jokes?
I’m just interested in the way technology evolved, and this publication makes it easy for you to see how things changed. You can see when we’re starting to apply new technologies, how they work, what they’re problems are, and there’s lot of discussion about it in this publication.
By the way, it had the same editor for I think 40 or 50 years. And then over the course of its live, it only had five editors altogether, which is rather interesting.
Here’s pencil sketch that’s being reproduced, it’s put on a special insert and put into the publication. Again, I could go and an don about this, but I think that would be rather boring, but you get an idea of what we’re talking about.
The Chromatic Aberrations of the Eye in Relation to Three-Colour Photography. That sounds like a winner. I’ll wait for the movie.
Registering Colour Work. Various processes. Injurious Materials Used in Photography, well the chemistry at that time must have been very interesting.
So, the Penrose Annual. Here you have one example of an interesting publication that summarized everything that was happening in the printing industry every year from 1895 until 1978. There’s nothing else like it, it’s a rather interesting time capsule.
Thank you all very much. Take care.
Next time…
Q: What kind of presses do you have?
A: Uh, we have a Heidelberg Press, it’s a two-color press, a Quickmaster, and we have a RISO duplicator.
