Printing Products Past and Present I
This blog is the first of a set of unique posts, which are curated collections of articles, first published by Print Week as part of its Prints Past series which ran for ten years from 2011. In these blog posts, we selected articles that reveal interesting and sometimes little-known facts about printing history. The articles share a common theme, and in this blog, the theme is printing products that might seem insignificant, but used to or still occupy important roles in our daily lives. Are you familiar with all of them?
Greeting Cards
Today we have cards to celebrate, commemorate or commiserate all events: engagement, marriage, death; new job, house, or baby; Ramadan, Diwali, Hanukkah. That’s a lot of cards to be printed.
The first Christmas card was designed in 1843 for the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). Three years later he had 1000 copies printed and sold 1000 lithographically printed Christmas cards. The fashion for Christmas cards took off in the 1860s, and by 1880 the Post Office asked the public to post early for Christmas. The valentine card goes back further, though its commercial development corresponded with that of the Christmas card. Their popularity emerged out of the growth of the middle classes, and their success depended upon technical improvements in lithographic machine printing; the availability of a relatively cheap industrial colour printing; inexpensive and plentiful female labour for handwork; and an efficient postal service. The leading publishers of greetings cards were Raphael Tuck, De La Rue and Marcus Ward.
Nineteenth-century greetings cards were normally characterised by their graphic treatment; they were often chromolithographed in numerous workings frequently with one or more additional feature: embossing, cut outs, tassels or moveable parts. Today, there are an estimated 2.7 billion cards sold in Britain. The largest publisher of greetings cards is Hallmark UK. Most cards do not have a very long life as tastes, situations and markets change, but one Hallmark design featuring pansies has been available for over sixty years and is the world’s all-time best-selling card.
A happy new year, Kate Greenaway, c 1900, 14.5 x 9 cm, Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books, Toronto, Canada
Lavatory Paper
‘Today’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper’ is a familiar phrase, but before the nineteenth century that may well have run ‘today’s news is tomorrow’s lavatory paper’.
The development of lavatory paper as a commercial product began in the 1840s. Before then people were left to their own devices. Newspaper provided a readily available source of lavatory paper for centuries and it was the rise of popular literature in the nineteenth century that led to the pervasive and enduring custom of hanging printed sheets from a nail in the privy. In an attempt to stop this practice, early lavatory-paper manufacturers made much of the dangers of printing ink and warned against improvisation claiming that printers ink was a rank poison and that persistent use of printed paper would induce piles!
The first proprietary lavatory paper was produced as individual sheets and marketed in a cardboard container for hanging on walls. The containers carried a logo or printed legend that also appeared on the individual sheets. When the sheet was superseded by the roll in the 1890s printed legends and logos tended to disappear, although many public utilities and other undertakings including Barclays Bank, National Coal Board and London Transport continued to identify their lavatory paper. Toilet papers marked ‘Council Property’ and ‘Government Property’ are still in widespread use.
Printed images survive today and it is not uncommon to see your toilet roll decorated with rose buds or fleur des lys. ‘Fun’ toilet rolls take the form of different cartoon jokes on each sheet and are a survival of novelty paper used for propaganda purposes in World War II.
Playing Cards
Next time you sit down to a game of poker, reflect on the fact that the cards in your hands have a history as long as that of printing itself.
Playing cards appeared in Europe after the mid-fourteenth century when the invention of woodblock printing on paper assisted mass-production. Playing cards arrived in England in 1459 and their appearance has stayed extraordinarily constant ever since. Traditionally, the court card outlines were printed from wood blocks and the colours and pips were added by stencilling, but in 1832 Thomas De La Rue patented a method of printing card faces from wood blocks or lithographic stones using oil colours. Once printed, the face sheets had layers of paper pasted onto their back before being cut into cards about 9 x 6.3 cm.
Playing cards had plain backs until the nineteenth century; this allowed the backs of waste or discarded cards to be used as a ready-made source of pasteboard for other purposes. Decorative all-over back-designs appeared in England in the 1830s, but gave way to bordered formal and fancy designs when problems of ensuring registration of faces to back had been solved.
Some cards had specially designed court cards, and the Victorians made some attractive chromolithographic cards depicting historical royal figures.
Novelties such as circular cards have had no lasting impact. Pips in four colours have made sporadic appearances, primarily as aids to players with poor eyesight. Cards made entirely of plastic appeared after 1934 but never really took off, though today all playing cards are coated to give extra wear.
A photo of four playing cards, Enoch Lau
News Bills
On your way home tonight glance towards your newsagent or look down at the newspaper street vendor and you will see a news bill proclaiming the day’s headlines. This is a particularly British tradition that first appeared in the eighteenth century when small handbills were distributed broadcasting the day’s news. The first poster type bills appeared in the nineteenth century. The original news bills announced multiple headlines, rather than the single major item of news that is favoured by today’s media magnates.
Regular postings of news bills began in the 1890s when weekly newspapers began to produce news bills carrying up to a dozen headlines on sheets 76.3 x 50.8 cm and 50.8 x 38.1 cm. Multiple headlines continued into the twentieth century, but major news items such as the death of Queen Victoria were given the now familiar treatment of 2 or 3 words in outlandishly large wood type capitals. Improvements in production speeds and the introduction of curved wood type for use on rotary machines led to the use of news bills by both the daily and weekly papers. By 1910, fresh bills would appear on the streets both morning and evening. Each newspaper had its own printing colours for its bills and gave newsagents boards in which to display the bills. Some bills were overprinted onto waste printed sheets of newspapers.
The bills disappeared during World War II and were replaced by chalk-boards. In the early post-war period news bills re-emerged with hand executed brush lettering and then silk-screened hand lettering.
Illustrated Writing Paper
Few people write letters these days; instead they send e-mails that they attempt to personalise by attaching little emoticons or display pictures that have been supplied courtesy of Microsoft. These e-mails are, in a strange way, descendents of the illustrated writing papers that first flourished in the nineteenth century and which continue to be used by those who prefer their communications to be paper rather than electronic.
The Victorians loved illustrated or pictorial writing papers. These papers hit Britain in a big way in the 1840s when writing papers carrying the ‘wish-you-were-here’ message were produced for the seaside holidaymaker market. As well as text they would also carry engraved or lithographed images of spa towns, beauty spots, country houses and celebrated cities. The images did not necessarily correspond to the place in which they were bought, but even so, they were used in much the same way as current day picture postcards.
Humorous illustrations of seaside holiday situations, accompanied by laconic captions, were also popular on writing paper. They were forerunners of the saucy seaside picture-postcards.
The format of British illustrated writing papers was usually double-page octavo (19 x 11.5 cm) or double-page quarto (23 x 18.5 cm). The illustrations were general reproduced from steel engravings, which were seldom produced specifically for the letterheads. Lithography was also used, but was less common. Sometimes the illustrations appeared in colour, which had been applied by the printer using simple wood blocks or by the recipient who coloured them by hand.
Girl Writing, Robert Barnes, 14.2 x 10.2 cm, Wood-engraving with watercolor on moderately thick, slightly textured, cream card mounted on moderately thick, slightly textured, beige wove paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America
Stickers
Where would we be without stickers, the nasty price tags that just will not come of the sole of newly purchased shoes?
Before the introduction of gum-coated paper in 1880, the adhesive on most labels or stickers had to be applied with a brush and paste. They were primarily used in offices for labelling packets, but because they reacted to changes in temperature and humidity, they had a propensity to curl and stick together. In 1905 non-curling gummed paper was invented. Breaking the coating into fine particles by flexing the paper over two blades prevented the curling. When polyvinyl alcohol coating was introduced in the late 1940s, gummed paper became even more curl resistant, and further advances were made when ‘particle coating’ was pioneered in 1962. But it was the introduction of pressure-sensitive stickers that brought the now ubiquitous sticker into universal use. The great advantage of pressure-sensitive stickers was their ability to adhere to most surfaces, including plastic.
Most early uses of stickers occurred in the office and included change-of-address labels; filing labels; address labels; and envelope reuse labels. Outside the office stickers were used as school bookplates, hotel baggage labels, and pharmaceutical stickers. When Stanton Avery, Los Angeles, produced the first self-adhesive sticker in 1935, their use was expanded to flag-day emblems, shop price tags, garment tickets, cassette labels, and car windscreen and bumper stickers.
From the late 1960s, the propaganda sticker became a familiar feature of the urban landscape and was found stuck to lampposts, bus shelters and derelict shop faces.
Advertising Fans
If the globe keeps warming and Britain continues to enjoy Mediterranean summers, then perhaps we will see the return of that very gentile accessor: the fan.
Between 1880 and 1910, fans were produced that carried advertisements for commercial enterprise, or which were meant as souvenirs to commemorate special occasions. They also provided a useful source of work for a number of printers. There are two types of fan: the screen and the folding fan. Both were used as promotional giveaways, and both carried publicity either on their blades, sticks or face.
As with ordinary trade cards, chromolithographed stock designs were available for overprinting with the advertiser’s message; the same design was often used for wholly unrelated businesses. However, specially produced designs were made for large corporations that could buy in quantity. Big hotels, restaurants, department stores and rail and steam ship companies were all major users.
The great international exhibitions of the nineteenth century were all commemorated with a printed fan. The theatre was a prominent user, and first nights and gala evenings were all celebrated on the back of a fan.
By the start of the twentieth century the folding advertising fan was an established marketing medium. Restaurants, hotels and major department stores distributed them freely and hundreds of thousands of cheaper and small fans were produced for makers of aperitifs and chocolates. Airlines too gave them away to their passengers.
Perhaps with our changing climate, it is now time for some enterprising printer to reintroduce the concept of the advertising fan.
We’re grateful for authors of these articles and Dr Caroline Archer at Birmingham City University for the permission to use the articles in this blog.