A Photo-Engraved Caturday
This week we present this colorful cat illustration from Achievement in Photo-Engraving and Letter-Press Printing, 1927, compiled and edited by Louis Flader, and published in Chicago by the American Photo-Engravers Association. As the title indicates, this book was intended as a celebration of this printing technology, and offers detailed descriptions of the craft of photoengraving, and presents almost 500 pages of every conceivable example of the technique offered by the technology then available.
Our snarling cat was intended as “a college annual illustration” from an original drawing by R. Francis Richey. It was reproduced from Richey’s opaque watercolor drawing and engraved by Bush-Krebs Company of Louisville, Kentucky. Separate crayon drawings were made from each color, augmented by Benday tints, and printed using 133 Screen Halftone and three Benday zinc plates. The Benday process (made especially present in the public imagination by the use of enlarged Benday dots in Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop-art paintings) is a technique dating from 1879 and named after its inventor, the American printer and illustrator Benjamin Henry Day Jr., the son of the New York Sun founder and publisher Benjamin Henry Day.
View another photo-engraved illustration from this title.
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