Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Elizabeth Savage, editors, Printing Colour, 1700–1830: Histories, Techniques, Functions, and Receptions

A magisterial, ambitious, and ground-breaking survey of its subject, this book is the sequel to Printing Colour, 1400–1700, edited by Ad Stijnman and Elizabeth Savage, published in 2015. The new volume has necessarily a wider scope, addressing the various advances in printmaking and print publishing in this later period but also examining the application of color printing to products such as wallpaper, calico, and ceramics, consumer products generally not otherwise considered in traditional print scholarship. The emphasis throughout is on the means of printing color, with less attention to aesthetics, but it is clear from the twenty-eight essays here that color was to prove transformative in many applications of printing—notably in science (botany, anatomy), in decoration (book wrappers, wallpaper, designs for the decorative arts), in the reproduction of drawings and paintings, in illustration, and in commercial and promotional material. With plentiful judiciously chosen plates, the book is sumptuously illustrated and includes a valuable selection of details and magnifications to illuminate aspects of process, such as embossing, the fine dots of stipple engraving, the subtleties of à la poupée inking, or the physical character of pigment deposited by a wood block.