Hi, this is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  Welcome back to another episode.  The other day, I found a copy of the Lithographer’s Manual.  Not any Lithographer’s manual, there have been many published over the years.  This is from 1940, and this was the second edition, the first edition was in 1937 when Walter Soderstrom put together a book called The Photolithographer’s Manual and created an association called NAPL, National Association for Photo Lithographers.  

Today that association still exists as the National Association for Printing Leadership.  In the manual, he put together all the information about lithography… 

Now, lithography goes back to 1798 or so with the litho stone, there’s one of them right there, they weigh a phenomenal amount.  Just lifting that up took some work.  And Alois Senefelder developed this process using this porous form of limestone where anything you wrote on it with a greasy material, like ink, could be printed, reproduced, over and over again.  And for anything you could draw or write on the stone.  So, illustrations, graphics were routinely done with stone lithography.  

About 1900, a printer in New Jersey discovered that he doesn’t need the stone anymore that he can use aluminum and that with a negative can burn, that is, expose the plate and create an image that can be reproduced.  The image area accepts ink; the non-imaged area rejects ink.  **** with that.  Well, this reminded me of the fact that from that point on, 1900 or so, when we started to really make it into a process, it took another 60 or 70 years before photo lithography really found its place. 

By 1940, the government was starting to use it to reproduce maps. 

And there were many printers out there who were reproducing fine material, fine printing or whatever.  But even at that point, 1951 is a good example, there was an article written that said, “Offset lithography is only good for quick and dirty printing.”  It was relegated to being a secondary process, letter press being the main process.  In fact, for many years, lithographic printer could not join the main printing association because they were all letterpress people.  

It reminds me of what’s happening today with digital printing.  When I see printing competitions where they don’t allow digital printing, they’re segregated it into a separate area.  I think printing is printing.  True, you can have competitions for only Gravure printing, only Flexo printing, only offset printing, only digital printing, but at some point in time I think we need to just put them altogether and say fine printing is fine printing, no matter how you do it.  

So, with digital printing coming in today, we’ve never had a digital printing manual because there was no consistency in the way digital printing was done.  Every manufacturer applied it differently.  And, of course, now you’ve got the laser or toner world as opposed to the inkjet world that’s evolving.  So there’s probably some need for some codification of all of this into some kind of a reference publication, although, it’s probably so complicated it’s not gonna happen.  

But again, looking at the Lithographer’s Manual reminded me that technologies change and sometimes it takes a long time before they change for the better.  And that’s my opinion.