Practical Lithography

'Practical Lithography' is a guide to practicing lithography, which is a planographic method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water. The printing is from a stone (lithographic limestone) or a metal plate with a smooth surface. It was invented in 1796 by the German author and actor Alois Senefelder and was initially used mostly for musical scores and maps. Lithography can be used to print text or images onto paper or other suitable material. A lithograph is something printed by lithography, but this term is only used for fine art prints and some other, mostly older, types of printed matter, not for those made by modern commercial lithography.

A comprehensive practical guide to the many lithographic techniques current in the nineteenth century.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

First edition published 1878. "Undoubtedly the most importanttextbook of this half-century was Richmond's Grammar which found its first readership amongst the subscribers to a lithographic trade periodical and, after republication in book form, remained in print virtually unaltered as the standard "trade" manual for the next 30 years. Richmond acknowledged the help of four luminaries of the old school, Louis Haghe, Michael Hanhart, William Simpson and Harry Sandars (i.e. W. J. Stannard), and they no doubt helped him to achieve a balanced coverage of traditional and modern workshop approaches as well as enhancing the work's authority." -Bridson/Wakeman p. 129 and D67. Bigmore & Wyman: "Up to the date of the publication of the first edition of this work there had been no hand-book in the English language of the art of lithography that was of any practical use except the English translation of the work of Senefelder himself and the translation by Hullmandel, of the work of M. Raucourt." (II, pp. 256-7) (Charles Wood 160/96).