What do you think?
Rate this book
The Handy Book of Artistic Printing
During the late nineteenth century, letterpress printers, engravers, and lithographers boldly challenged the rational sobriety of traditional design by introducing intricate borders, corner embellishments, quirky typefaces, and exotic imagery. The style was known as "artistic" and was quickly taken up by letterpress printers as the design idiom ofchoice for advertisements, packaging, and all of the other ephemera occasioned by the rapid expansion of America's economy. For a while, this commercial style represented the best in popular taste.
But just as quickly as this exuberant style was embraced, it fell abruptly out of favor. By century's end, the ornate bits of artistic printing were tossed into the gutter, and the style itself relegated to the dustbin of history. The rise and fall of this highly embellished idiom, which culminated in its denouncement as aesthetically and morallysuspect"a freak of fancy"are traced in this, the first comprehensive study devoted to the history of American artistic printing. Authors Douglas Clouse and Angela Voulangas explore the style's origins in the British Aesthetic Movement and analyze its distinctive idiosyncratic color harmonies, eclectic choice of type andornament, compartmentalized compositional strategies. They also present a landmark portfolio of letterpress printing samples, drawn from some of the most important public and private print archives. More than 150 examples of period ephemera, printers' own tour de force promotional pieces, and specimens of type and ornament are reproduced, many for the very first time since their initial circulation more than a century ago.
The Handy Book of Artistic Printing celebrates a previously berated and today largely forgotten episode of design historyone of increasing interest in light of the recent embrace of ornament by some leading contemporary designers. This book will be of value to graphic designers, but also to fine artists, visual merchandisers, and collectors of ephemera everywhere.
But just as quickly as this exuberant style was embraced, it fell abruptly out of favor. By century's end, the ornate bits of artistic printing were tossed into the gutter, and the style itself relegated to the dustbin of history. The rise and fall of this highly embellished idiom, which culminated in its denouncement as aesthetically and morallysuspect"a freak of fancy"are traced in this, the first comprehensive study devoted to the history of American artistic printing. Authors Douglas Clouse and Angela Voulangas explore the style's origins in the British Aesthetic Movement and analyze its distinctive idiosyncratic color harmonies, eclectic choice of type andornament, compartmentalized compositional strategies. They also present a landmark portfolio of letterpress printing samples, drawn from some of the most important public and private print archives. More than 150 examples of period ephemera, printers' own tour de force promotional pieces, and specimens of type and ornament are reproduced, many for the very first time since their initial circulation more than a century ago.
The Handy Book of Artistic Printing celebrates a previously berated and today largely forgotten episode of design historyone of increasing interest in light of the recent embrace of ornament by some leading contemporary designers. This book will be of value to graphic designers, but also to fine artists, visual merchandisers, and collectors of ephemera everywhere.
232 pages, Paperback
First published February 4, 2009
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 3, 2013
I love this book and refer to it often.
My dad was a printer, his dad was, and in a way, if you think of skin as paper, many nearby relatives practice the art of taking ink to a medium for artistic purposes. This is the first hint that some printers of the late 1800s took complexity to be art. The first color job i ever did, tried to properly register three colors, printing them of course one at a time, and made a great mess of it. So much can move between runs. Paper in two dimensions, the chase holding the form in one. The form inside the chase, if you're not careful. And then ink selection, to overprint with the right color and effect.
These insane guys attempted upwards of twelve colors, and the effects were alternately amazing, shocking, clashing and whimsical. Some are truly masters of design, others are just showmanship. All over the top in terms of technical chutzpah.
I love to find and recreate ornamental works of this age, like stationary, cabinet cards and business cards.
Mike
My dad was a printer, his dad was, and in a way, if you think of skin as paper, many nearby relatives practice the art of taking ink to a medium for artistic purposes. This is the first hint that some printers of the late 1800s took complexity to be art. The first color job i ever did, tried to properly register three colors, printing them of course one at a time, and made a great mess of it. So much can move between runs. Paper in two dimensions, the chase holding the form in one. The form inside the chase, if you're not careful. And then ink selection, to overprint with the right color and effect.
These insane guys attempted upwards of twelve colors, and the effects were alternately amazing, shocking, clashing and whimsical. Some are truly masters of design, others are just showmanship. All over the top in terms of technical chutzpah.
I love to find and recreate ornamental works of this age, like stationary, cabinet cards and business cards.
Mike
August 26, 2010
A Victiorian typographic feast.
May 30, 2019
A really beautiful book filled with examples of mostly Victorian era printing.
July 17, 2014
I discovered this book through the vectorian.net site. I had some credit at amazon and bought it immediately. The inside of the book is just like the cover--highly decorative, richly illustrated and beautifully colored. It's a history/tribute to the OTT ornamentation of 19th century typography. I've seen even more elaborate examples on archive.org but not in such high resolution as this book. The book references the names of groovy type foundries of that time, which I will look up on archive.org. (I sure wish I had one of those original specimen books.) Superlative book for fans of ornament.
December 28, 2014
Interesting, beautiful book. The images are fascinating, inspiring, and sometimes beautiful. Its greatest value, to me, is to get a better sense of what Tschichold and other modernists were rebelling against.
March 5, 2012
I want to eat all the pictures
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews