Hard to Fool the Fingers - Paper & Printing through the Ages

Digital

In the last few years we have seen an increasing shift to digital technology. All of digital printing methods have the computer as a common ancestor and most of them are so recent as to be of unknown value or durability. We now have a whole range of POD (print on demand) products which will make a copy of a book one copy at a time using digital technology and printers.

Will these books hold up? Who knows? Does anybody remember the early fax print outs, the ones where the printing came on a photo sensitive roll of paper? Can you still read them or have they become faded and almost invisible with the passage of just a decade or two? All of mine have.

Is a giclee print really a limited edition process or is it just an updated way to make a reproduction but one without dots that’s printed in small quantities by an ink jet printer? Is it stable? Will it fade? Who knows?

Is an e-book really a book? No, it’s a digital file and if you can’t tell the difference between a book and a digital file perhaps you’re reading the wrong article.

What’s coming next? I don’t know. My crystal ball is cloudy.

I do know that all the prior printing technologies had early phases, modifications and variants and that I expect the ones we are working with today will also change and evolve, perhaps rapidly. You will have to decide yourself if the newest, latest and greatest inventions of the digital age are going to last or if they are just blips on the historical timeline of communication using words and pictures.

Feeling a little confused? You should, this isn’t easy stuff and it isn’t always intuitive. If you want to learn more about these various printing processes there’s a vast bibliography of printed material available.

But for a real beginner I found a great many short informative videos on www.youtube.com Locate the subject by typing in the key word (such as etching, or engraving) then pick the videos that explain the process. Even if the clips are modern representations of older methods seeing how it's done makes it easier to understand.

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Susan Halas was a printmaking major in college and a printing broker in an earlier incarnation. She still owns a beat up copy of “Graphics Master” by Dean Phillip Lem which is a good basic guide in the later part of the 20^th century. For purposes of a basic understanding of modern offset printing any edition is good.

Have a comment or suggestion? Reach her at wailukusue@gmail.com