`LITHOGRAPHY`

The late Qing journalist Huang Shiquan spoke of it in terms poetic: “stone plates from the West, rubbed smooth like a mirror … millions of pages of books are not hard to do in a day, fine like an ox’s hair and sharp as a rhinoceros horn.” What Huang had in mind was a multifaceted printing process that was radically changing information orders around the world: lithography. Coined in French at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the word derived from the ancient Greek words for stone, lithos, and “to write,” graphein. “Printing from stone” was also the expression used in Arabic; “stone printing” the literal compound in Chinese and Japanese. Yet an emphasis on stone alone does not fully capture the process. The credited inventor of lithography, an aspiring playwright named Johann Alois Senefelder (1771–1834), first described the technique as “chemical printing” (chemische Druckerey), and it is this label that is most apt for tracing lithography across its diverse metamorphoses. For independent of the printing substrate, lithography rested on the principle that oil and water are mutually repellent. From this seemingly everyday observation arose a host of methods whereby the contents of one flat surface could be reproduced on or transferred to another, without the intervention of relief blocks, type, or intaglio plates. Lithography transformed how one could print. And in doing so, it also transformed who might enter the world of printing, as well as what, fundamentally, printing might faithfully reproduce.

Geographical contingencies were essential to lithography’s emergence. Too poor to hire the services of job printers, much less acquire movable-type equipment himself, Senefelder began experimenting with alternative methods of printing from his base in Munich at the beginning of the 1790s. His trials eventually brought him in 1796 to experiments with Kelheimer limestone, abundant in the Solnhofen district of his Bavarian surroundings. Senefelder’s initial instinct was to employ an acid etching process to produce a relief plate from the stone. Over the course of the next three years, however, his approach changed. This culminated in 1799 with the discovery of a new method for treating limestone, the chemical principles of which would remain central to lithographic printing throughout the nineteenth century.

At its core, Senefelder’s new method comprised two innovations. The first was a process that allowed for planographic printing from stone. Content that one desired to print was drawn in reverse on limestone with a greasy substance. Water was next applied to the stone, seeping into its porous surface except where the grease repulsed it. Thereafter, one rolled a special ink onto the stone that would adhere only to the greasy areas on its surface. Paper might then be pressed onto the stone, resulting in a mirror-reflection of the inked image.

The second of Senefelder’s innovations, which he dubbed “autography,” considerably lowered the skill required to print by obviating the drawing of reverse images onto the stone. For this method, one used a greasy ink to write normally on paper treated with gelatin. This sheet, which came to be known as “transfer paper,” would then be pressed onto the stone’s surface and wetted, washing away the gelatin but leaving the ink’s grease. Transferred thereby onto the stone was a mirror image of the paper’s contents, allowing for copies of what had originally been written on the page to be printed.

In time, these processes would come to be adapted for a variety of other materials, such as zinc plates, photographic negatives, and rubber blankets. But even in its early limestone stage, lithography already presented several distinct advantages over existing techniques of printing. Obvious among these was its suitability for heavily graphic *genres, a usage made all the more appealing after the emergence in 1830s France of chromolithography, which allowed for the use of different colored inks. In Persia, lithography enabled a rich printed illustrative tradition to blossom. Apart from images and artistic compositions, this facilitated the printing of maps, technical diagrams and plans, musical scores—a field in which Senefelder himself was involved—and not least calligraphic and non-Latin scripts. Lithography also served increasingly as the backbone for a teeming world of ephemera such as visiting cards, stamps, permits, bonds, circulars, calendars, labels, playbills, posters, and even pornography. In this capacity, lithography proved a central component of global revolutions in commercial and retail technology during the nineteenth century.

More broadly, during its early stage, lithography opened the boundaries of participation in printing, lending itself to the reproduction of a wide range of content without imposing heavy demands on economic and human capital. Compared to letterpress printing, startup costs for lithography were relatively small. Limestone was the most expensive fixed component, but these stones withstood large print runs, and their surfaces could furthermore be ground down for reuse with new content. Beyond this, the range of requisite tools was minimal: a roller, a sponge, a scraping knife; special ink, transfer paper, and printing paper. Dispensed with also was the need for compositors, imposers, press operators, woodcutters, engravers, and other skilled artisans. Cheap, portable, and easy to master in comparison to movable type, lithography allegedly made “Every Man His Own Printer”—so, at least, claimed the title of a popular 1854 manual on the process.

By sharply lowering entry costs to the world of print, lithography changed the dynamics of a radically asymmetrical process of globalization. As indicated by an 1864 Mumbai handbook addressed to the “Indian amateur,” lithography promised in theory to foster the emergence of small native-run private presses against the monopolizing backdrop of colonial and Indigenous states. This held especially true in areas where local scripts, whether by their inherent qualities or by their numerousness, posed a challenge to the adoption of movable type. Indeed, Christopher Reed has helpfully suggested that lithography be thought of as a “compromise technology”—one that allowed non-Western actors to negotiate the transition to print capitalism on their own terms, culturally and economically. Placing lithography, rather than movable type, at the center of analysis therefore yields a substantial revision of our narratives of modern printing. Specifically, instead of a deficit model of the world marked by movable type’s “haves” and “have-nots,” lithography proposes the existence of a coeval and connected print modernity, wherein “the West” and “non-West” were simultaneous newcomers to a mode of textual and graphic reproduction, the meanings of which had yet to be articulated, and the possibilities of which thus remained open for determination by a plurality of cultures around the world.

Yet asymmetries remained that shaped the spread and reception of the new technology. At first, global networks of expertise privileged European actors. In the case of Egypt, for example, it was the Parisian engineer and cartographer Edme-François Jomard who may have encouraged the provincial Ottoman state to import lithography in the 1820s. This man had traveled with Napoleon Bonaparte’s army to invade Egypt from 1798 to 1801, and in 1803 he watched Senefelder himself demonstrate how lithography worked in the city of Regensburg. Some years later, he served as an adviser to Egypt’s governor, shaping the curriculum for the state’s student missions in Paris when it began purchasing presses from Europe. Once these presses were set up in Egypt, the state mainly applied lithography to diagrams, forms, and maps, printing most Arabic typographically perhaps on account of European influence. In the Ottoman imperial capital of Istanbul, lithography was likewise imported in the early 1830s by the French orientalist Henri Cayol, who, backed by the sultan, bought the equipment necessary to establish a government atelier for reproducing technical drawings. He had learned the art from his cousin, who had in turn served as a French consul to the Ottomans in Bârlad. Private ownership of lithographic presses in these cities began in the 1850s, a development that helped to spread the technology to places in the Islamic world that it had not already reached. For example, Tunisians traveled to Cairo, Alexandria, and Constantinople to commission lithographic printings, while the first lithographic press in Morocco arrived via Egypt alongside an Egyptian printer named Shaykh Muḥammad al-Miṣrī, who trained others in its use.

A similar story might be told for late imperial China, this time focused on missionary activity. The lithographic production of Chinese texts commenced at the London Missionary Society’s Malacca press in 1829, with stations in Macao and Canton quickly following suit. American Presbyterians likewise established lithographic facilities in Ningbo after the First Opium War. Foreign missionary control remained the pattern until 1877, which witnessed the founding of China’s first native-owned and privately operated lithographic printing house—the Dianshizhai Studio in Shanghai. From this point onward, native commercial lithography thrived and formed the basis of the modern Chinese print industry.

As for Japan, the earliest lithographic traces date to the Dutch printing house at Dejima in 1857. The impact of the Dutch, however, was minor compared to investment from the Japanese state and native entrepreneurs after 1860, the year when lithographic presses and stones were provided to the shogun by a Prussian diplomatic expedition. Admittedly, lithography was not the only technology of interest. Unlike China, Japan concomitantly and successfully pushed for the adoption of movable type. Lithography never exercised decisive sway over the establishment of the country’s modern printing industry. Nevertheless, by the early 1870s, Japan had established a firm regional reputation in lithographic production through specialists such as Matsuda Atsutomo, Umemura Suizan, and firms such as the Gengendō Studio. In subsequent decades, Japanese lithographers came to be employed as key advisers in Chinese printing houses.

What changes in information orders resulted from lithographers’ activities? On the one hand, lithography had the ironic consequence of multiplying the old. In the Ottoman Empire, private printers working in Arabic overwhelmingly used the new technology to reproduce standing titles from both the handwritten and the typographical traditions, largely on commission from the religious scholars who were the main users and producers of books through the end of the nineteenth century. Presses composed their lithographs in the style of manuscripts, as seen in figure 1, with elaborate ornamental or floral headpieces at the start of texts, and triangular or circular *colophons at their ends. They also took advantage of shorter print runs that lithography made economical as typography had not. But with time, those presses that could afford to purchase movable type gravitated to it because of its prestige. Analogous trends were visible in East Asian contexts, in particular after the rise of photolithography, which allowed the contents of a negative to be transferred onto a lithographic surface. Photolithographic techniques spurred a market for facsimiles of older texts, now priced more affordably and available in larger quantities. The mass reprinting of early Qing examination essays, for instance, was a hallmark of China’s lithographic industry, much to the chagrin of late nineteenth-century native reformers, who branded lithography an ally of “traditional” knowledge. Japanese actors, meanwhile, consciously differentiated between genres. Lithography was typically deployed in ways coterminous with xylography, replicating the look and feel of a centuries-long woodblock print culture, while movable type was reserved for works deemed more “modern” or “Western.”

`Figure 1. Multiplying the old, along with the new: the first page opening of the supercommentary of the Azhari Shaykh Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī (d. 1860) on the` `Introduction` `of the theologian Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf al-Sanūsī (d. 1490). Lithographed in the style of a manuscript by an unnamed press, likely from Cairo, in 1863. I. Bājūrī,` `Ḥāshiyat Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī ‘alā` `al-Muqaddimah al-Sanūsīyah` `(n.p.: n.p., [1863]).`

Whether or not lithography really favored old or new knowledge, the speed and simplicity of reproduction that it enabled unquestionably reconfigured information orders by undermining nascent regimes of global intellectual property. Lithographic reprints circulated promiscuously. In Egypt, presses reprinted one another’s works many times over, and these in turn could be found lithographed anew from presses in Persia and South Asia, still preserving within them the colophons of their printed forebears. Western printers in China lithographed Chinese books for sale on the local market. Japanese printers imported Chinese books and lithographed them for reexport. And as late as 1934, Chinese photolithographs of works such as Hall’s International Law (1880), Raleigh’s Elementary Politics (1886), and the Concise Oxford Dictionary (1911) were still being sold on the Indian market. Trademarks, commercial designs, and other objects of industrial property also became the frequent target of lithographic copying. Known for the obsessive protection of its mark, Bass Beer waged a protracted campaign from 1875 to 1888 against Japanese wares bearing its label, urging the confiscation of lithographic stones from native presses.

Throughout this long century of global lithography, the medium experienced a series of technological metamorphoses that ultimately altered its relation to conditions of print participation again. These metamorphoses largely stemmed from the discovery of methods of transference other than Senefelder’s transfer paper, and printing surfaces other than limestone. Anastatic printing, the first major development in the former arena, rested on the discovery that nitric acid could release the residual grease in dried ink. Any existing texts and images in ink, manuscript or print, might therefore be treated with nitric acid to transfer their contents onto a lithographic printing surface. The acid, however, had the drawback of frequently destroying the original paper, and anastatic printing all but disappeared from use following the development of reliable photolithography by 1859. Photolithography redefined the nature of facsimile printing and took over the bulk of work in European and East Asian lithographic industries. In Istanbul and Egypt, photolithography emerged by at least 1873, without the need for “factories which produce chemical products,” bragged the Frenchman Antoine Laroche, through the partnership between him and Pascal Sébah, an Ottoman. They used photolithography to print maps, handwriting, and a newspaper, and they relied on French technical books translated into Turkish to develop from their laboratory a way of using photolithography to reproduce engraved photos.

Meanwhile, by the mid-1830s, a move to using zinc plates rather than limestone as a lithographic surface was already underway. The switch was in part motivated by the realization that only Bavarian limestone possessed a rate of water and grease retention suitable for quality lithographic printing, spurring the search for a more widely and cheaply available substitute. Zinc, moreover, was significantly lighter and easier to transport. Consequently, although limestone usage persisted selectively because it offered a better tonal range, zinc proved more commercially popular during the second half of the nineteenth century, with aluminum as a second candidate. China transitioned largely to zinc after 1882, Japan after 1890, and Egypt as late as the 1900s under the British occupation.

Of even more far-reaching impact were lithographic methods for printing from curved surfaces, rather than flat stones or plates. An early impetus for this arose out of a desire to print designs directly onto tin cans. A process of treating rubber for lithographic printing was invented in 1903. Printing from curved surfaces proved to be advantageous because these surfaces could be wrapped around the cylinders of steam-powered, and later on electric-powered, rotary presses, ultimately enabling the full incorporation of lithography into industrial print production. Partnered with advances in photographic typesetting, this offset method of lithography eventually came to replace relief printing itself, dominating the commercial market after the 1960s. Modern print’s long good-bye to movable type, initiated over a century and a half earlier by “chemical printing,” had ended at last.

Yet the lithography that triumphed in this final farewell was structurally distinct from the kind that, during the century prior, had powered the emergence of small native-run private presses across the world. Initially, lithography had altered global information orders by bypassing obstacles of movable type and enabling local actors to adopt printing on their own terms. Now part of the sprawling technological assemblage of mass printing, the new lithography instead demanded extensive photographic apparatuses, complex rotary presses, and other forms of financial, mechanical, and human capital that by default excluded the amateur and everyman. There is, therefore, an untold history of information that would situate lithography as a central axis along which to grasp global reconfigurations of participatory power in modern print. Here, we have outlined its basic points in reference to Ottoman Istanbul and Cairo, Qing China, and Meiji Japan, in the hope that its broader tale will find future tellers and tellings.

Hansun Hsiung and Kathryn A. Schwartz

`FURTHER READING`

M. Nakane, Nihon insatsu gijutsu shi, 1999; C. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937, 2004; A. Senefelder, Vollständiges Lehrbuch der Steindruckerey, 1818; U. Stark, An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India, 2007; M. Twyman, Breaking the Mould: The First Hundred Years of Lithography, 2001; G. Zellich and A. Senefelder, Notice historique sur la lithographie et sur les origines de son introduction en Turquie, 1895.