A · PRACTICAL · HANDBOOK · OF ·
DRAWING FOR MODERN METHODS
· OF · REPRODVCTION
BY
CHARLES G. HARPER,
AUTHOR OF “ENGLISH PEN ARTISTS OF TO-DAY.”
Illustrated with Drawings by several Hands, and with Sketches
by the Author showing Comparative Results obtained by the
several Methods of Reproduction now in Use.
LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, Ld.
1894.
TO CHARLES MORLEY, ESQ.
Dear Mr. Morley,
It is with a peculiar satisfaction that I inscribe this book toyourself, for to you more than to any other occupant of an editorialchair is due the position held by “process” in illustrating the hazardsand happenings of each succeeding week.
Time was when the “Pall Mall Budget,” with a daring originalitynever to be forgotten, illustrated the news with diagrams fashionedheroically from the somewhat limited armoury of the compositor. NorI nor my contemporaries, I think, have forgotten those weapons ofoffence—the brass rules, hyphens, asterisks, daggers, braces, andother common objects of the type-case—with which the NorthumberlandStreet printers set forth the details of a procession, or theconfiguration of a country. There was in those days a world ofmeaning—apart from libellous innuendo—in a row of asterisks; for did[Pg iv]they not signify a chain of mountains? And what Old Man Eloquent wasever so vividly convincing as those serpentine brass rules that servedas the accepted hieroglyphics for rivers on type-set maps?
These were the beginnings of illustration in the “Pall Mall Budget”when you first filled the editorial chair. The leaps and boundsby which you came abreast of (and, indeed, overlook) the otherpurveyors of illustrated news, hot and hot, I need not recount, noris there occasion here to allude to the events which led to what somealliterative journalist has styled the Battle of the Budgets. Onlythis: that if others have reaped where you have sown, why! ’twas everthus.
For the rest, I must needs apologize to you for a breach of anetiquette which demands that permission be first had and obtainedbefore a Dedication may be printed. To print an unauthorized tribute toa private individual is wrong: when (as in the present case) an Editoris concerned I am not sure that the wrong-doing halts anything beforelèse majesté.
London,
May, 1894.