Waddleton Chronology of Books with Colour Printed Illustrations or Decorations : 15th to 20th Century

Quacks Books, 1993. Hardcover. Very Good/No Jacket. Ex-library: No. Previous owners inscriptions: No. Book Condition: Good+. Jacket condition: No jacket. Published: 1993. 1st Edition: 5th. Pages: 656. Description: A bibliographical checklist with a wealth of information on the colour illustrations in thousands of books to 1890 (arranged chronologically by year of publication). The checklist entries give author, title, printer, number of plates, binding size and occasional annotations. Contents include: Notes on the Study; Chronological Listing; ; Title Index; World Index of Colour Printers; World Index of Colour Printers by Location. From the author's preface: "The least ephemeral part of the history of colour printing is its use for the illustration and/or decoration of books.The various collections of children's books, such as the Osborne Collection in Toronto, of necessity include many colour-printed books since this was an area in which colour-printing flourished in the period of the 1840s to the 1890s.The present collection is aimed to provide a broad sequence of books with colour-printed illustrations and/or decorations covering the period from the fifteenth century to the present day and with examples from as many countries as possible in which craft colour-printing was performed. The collection does not include examples of half-tone colour-printing which took over from the 1890s onwards except for early examples to illustrate how it started. So far as possible hand-coloured illustrations are excluded except where hand-colouring is added to a tinted or colour-printed base. Unique to England was the school of relief colour-printing initiated by William Savage and George Baxter and which in England was more prolific than the chromolithography practised simultaneously in England and almost universally elsewhere. The only other country in which woodblock relief colour-printing was used was Austria where Heinrich Knoefler and later his sons were the sole exponents from the 1860s until the early twentieth century and some examples of this work are included in the collection. Until the use of chromolimography intaglio colour-printing was the rule except of course in the isolated case of the work of William Blake. Colour printing is reputed to have started in China as early as the ninth century and spread to Japan where it was entirely a hand-operated method. Such examples as first produced in Europe in the fifteenth century were essentially woodblock colour-printing but were followed by a very long gap until intaglio colour-printing was introduced probably by Taylor in seventeenth century Holland.