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Victorian Artistic Printing (2009)
>>>To ARTISTIC PRINTING images ALBUM We tend to think of all Victorian design as overly ornate, cluttered and sentimental. Yet between the late 1870s and the mid-1880s a group of American and British letterpress printers developed a design aesthetic that, at its best, was clean, bold and graphic.
One account relates that in 1878 the proprietors of the Poughkeepsie, NY Daily Eagle newspaper decided to split off their book and job printing projects as a separate operation, and hired Haight, who came from Ulster County, New York (born 4 Feb 1842 in Ellenville), to run it. The first volume of The American Model Printer had this quotation from Ruskin: “It seems to me also that a lovely field of design is open in the treatment of decorative type—not in the mere big initials in which one cannot find the letters—but in delicate and variably fantastic ornamentation of capitals and filling of blank spaces or musically-divided periods and breadths of margin.” scorning the unrelated, centered line arrangement—the book printer’s contribution to display work—made full use of the point system to build up into panels complicated patterns of ornament intermingled with type and rules.”( Alphabet and Image, No.6 January 1948, p,4).
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