Traditionally, Bavarian limestone was used for this purpose, as it had the ideal porous texture required for the process As early as 1801, in his original patent application, Senefelder mentioned the possibility of using

plates made from zinc in a similar manner to lithographic stone. Zinc, however, was not in common commercial usage In Britain until the mid-1840s, at which point zincographs’ began to be more common.

An exceptionally early use of the technique exists in the oeuvre of C.J. Grant, however. His Pictorial

Compankm to the f4ewspapers & Every Body’s Aibumwas published in January 1835, specifically stating

of image desired. A polished stone could be used to achieve smooth and unbroken lines, ideal for simulating the style of a pen drawing, while a roughened, textured surface was required to give the granular, disrupted, chalk-like effects which allowed the creation of more subtle tonal nuances. Once the image was drawn, the stone was treated with a mixture of acid and gum arabic in order to bond the greasy constituents to the stone. The surface was then dampened with water, which would settle only on the unmarked areas of the stone, since it would be repelled by the greasy drawing medium. A roller covered with greasy printing ink was then rolled across the stone, the ink now adhering only to the drawn marks, as the water would repel the ink from the rest of the dampened surface. Finally, the image could be printed by running both paper and stone together through a flat bed scraper p re s s . 10

This was a time-consuming and laborious process and, prior to the introduction of the first powered lithographic press in 1851, lithography had its greatest disadvantage at the printing stage. Although it was much cheaper and faster to draw an image directly onto stone than it was to engrave a woodblock, to actually print it with a hand press took considerably longer due to the necessity of damping the stone before each impression and then pulling it through the press under pressure. Generally speaking, a lithographic printer could expect to produce no more than a hundred impressions an hour of even the simplest ink drawings. 11

This had obvious implications for the potential circulation of an image, and is one of the principal reasons why lithography was not widely used for the production of periodicals - especially those which were predominantly text-based. While The

Looking Glass, an entirely pictorial monthly publication, had plenty of time for the

printing of each issue's run, the production of a weekly periodical of any reasonable circulation would have presented greater difficulties. Dawson and Grant claimed in 1835 that their fortnightly lithographic sheet, Every Body’s Album

and Caricature Magazine, had a circulation of 30,000 copies. 12 This seems

somewhat improbable (and could well have been simple exaggeration), although it

10 Griffiths, op.cit,pp.100-108.

11 Michael Twyman: The Lithographic Hand Press, 1796-1850’ In Journal of the Printing Historical Society,III

(1967), pp. 41-50. By 1854, powered lithographic presses could print 800-1000 sheets per hour. Twyman,

Printing(1970), p.52. It should be em phasis^, though, that even a hundred Impressions an hour Is still around three times faster than could be expected when pulling an Intaglio print (an etching or an engraving), which required a much greater degree of skill at the printing stage. In this sense, a hundred Impressions an hour is quite productive, although not productive enough for any journal with a large circulation.

would certainly have been possible under certain circumstances. To achieve such a circulation, however, would have required a single press to be manned virtually twenty-four hours a day for the entire two weeks between each and every is s u e . 13

If more than one press had been available, however, this problem could be overcome by the process of ‘offsetting* the image. This was quite easily achieved by duplicating the greasy image onto another stone with an offset roller, so that two or more presses could be set to work printing the same image simultaneously, thus considerably reducing the time involved in printing an edition. This was the method which Philipon used to print the lithographic sections of Le Charivari and Le

Caricature, employing teams of printers to work day and night to meet the daily and

weekly deadlines, but it inevitably required both increased manpower and sufficient funds to acquire two or more p re s s e s . 14

The demands of the periodical press were much more readily met by wood engraving, the basic principle of which was the carving of an Image into a block of wood (generally boxwood, cut across, rather than along, the grain), which could then be inked and printed, much like a w o o d c u t . T h e use of endgrain boxwood provided an especially hard and durable surface on which to work (and from which to print), but had the considerable drawback of restricting the size of that surface to only a few square inches because the trunk of the box tree was so narrow.16

However, by working against the grain, it was possible for the skilled engraver to execute extremely fine work within the confines of this space. He could achieve this by using a variety of tools, closely related to those used by metal-engravers, of

13 The exact number of presses which Dawson operated at his Leicester Square premises, where Every Body’s

Alburnumsprinted, is uncertain, but it was certainly more than one, which implies that this circulation figure

was possible. W.B. Todd lists him as owning “presses” without specifying how many. A Dictionary of Printers

and Others in Ailied Trades, London and Vicinity, 1800-1640(1972).

14 Beatrice Farwell, The Charged Image. French Uthogrs^jhic Caricature, 1816-1848 (1989), p. 12.