In Praise of Collotype: Architectural Illustration at the Turn of the Century

SAHGB Publications Limited

In Praise of Collotype: Architectural Illustration at the Turn of the CenturyAuthor(s): Alan CrawfordSource: Architectural History, Vol. 25 (1982), pp. 56-64Published by: SAHGB Publications LimitedStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1568411 .

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In praise of collotype:~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Architectural illustration at the turn of the century

by ALAN CRAWFORD

Plates A-G are bound in fo/lowping pa,ge 6o

One of the pleasures of British architecture in the years around i1900 is the quality of the printed illustrations that accompanied it; the stylish pen drawings of Andrew Prentice or Gerald Horsley, the atmospheric pencil of C. B. Mallows or F. L. Griggs, the carefully composed photographic plates of Dockree, Bedford Lemere and many anonymous photographers. True, the letterpress pages of the architectural weeklies are yellowing and dirty now, and the plates in the centre are invariably too tightly bound in, or frayed at the edges; but those plates are remarkable nevertheless for their freedom, crispness, delicacy of tone and sheer size, made possible by the introduction of photolithography in the iM8os,, 'lo7s and '8os. Late Victorian architectural books also have their excellences, not the least of which is the process known as collotype, used for reproducing halftones and photographs. It was expensive, and therefore never used very widely, but in architectural books of quality, and particularly in those published by B. T. Batsford, it produced spectacular results.'

The collotype process is like lithography in that the printing surface is flat, or almost so, and that the image is achieved by way of the antipathy of grease and water. But instead of a printing surface made of stone or metal, collotype uses gelatine mixed with potassium or ammonium bichromate. Light, falling on such a mixture, causes it to become hard and non-absorbent. The mixture is poured evenly over a plate, made of metal nowadays, but in the nineteenth century of glass. It is then exposed to light passing through a photographic negative of the image to be printed. The gelatine will become hard and non-absorbent in exact proportion to the amount of light which falls upon it. The gelatine plate is then washed in glycerin and water so that the unexposed parts (shadows in the negative) absorb moisture and become repellent to ink; in the positive image they will produce highlights. The hardened, non-absorbent parts retain the ink and will print as shadows. The plate is placed in a press, a sheet of paper is laid over it, and an impression taken. Both hand presses and powered rotary machines have been employed in collotype printing, and equally a variety of papers can be used.

The advantages of collotype are evident in the quality of the image produced. In the first place, collotype grain is almost as fine as that of a photographic emulsion; it is scarcely ever apparent to the naked eye, and only a strong magnifying glass, held over the middle tones of a collotype plate, will show its fine puckered texture. Secondly, a collotype plate will show a continuous gradation of tone from the lightest grey to the deepest black, in exact proportion to the photographic negative from which it has been made. This is quite remarkable. Almost all other methods of printing pictures can only



IN PRAISE OF COLLOTYPE

manage a more or less inadequate approximation to a halftone; they either jump from one crude tone to the next, or they introduce a screen. Collotype does neither.

The principal drawback of the process is that the collotype plate is very sensitive to temperature and humidity. Each sheet, when printed, will take up a certain amount of moisture from the plate. How much moisture is replaced will depend in part on the humidity of the press room, which, in the nineteenth century, was difficult to control. As a result, collotype printing was a slow and careful business, with variations in temperature and humidity forcing the printer to give the impressions almost individual attention.2

The technical development of the process began in i 855, when a Frenchman, A. L. Poitevin, first understood the effect of light on bichromated gelatine; but its practical and industrial application was perhaps chiefly due to Joseph Albert in Munich between 1867 and I87 .3 It began to be used in England around 1870 by the Autotype Company, and by Ernest Edwards of the Heliotype Company; and one of the first books to be illustrated in this way was Charles Darwin's Expression of the Emotions in Man ... (i 871), a work in which the accuracy of a photograph was important.4 Because of the high cost of the process, collotype was never likely to sweep the market in book production, but it found a place. Taking all the books classified under 'Art' in the Bodleian Library and published between I85o and i900, Geoffrey Wakeman has shown that collotype accounted for about 70% in the i87os, fell back to about 5 % in the i 88os, and then rose to about 8% in the I89os.5

Collotype will reproduce many different kinds of image; but it is particularly suited to reproducing photographs because it is so sensitive to halftones; and there was a considerable market for books illustrated by photography in mid-Victorian Britain. Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature (I844) was the first of many books illustrated with actual photographs, pasted in; and Autotypes and Woodburytypes, which occupy a middle ground between photographic and printed images and were also pasted in, enjoyed great popularity in the i 87os.6 One would have expected a ready market for collotype, which equalled these processes in fidelity but had none of the awkwardness of pasting in; but in fact the early history of British collotype was very tentative. The earliest British architectural book illustrated in this way seems to have been Digby Wyatt's Architect's Notebook in Spain of I872, in which all the illustrations were in line, and so did not exploit its qualities. The only British architectural book to use collotype on any scale before Batsfords took it up was Edward Meyrick Goulburn, Henry Symonds and Edward Hailstone, The Ancient Sculptures in the roof of Norwich Cathedral (London and Norwich 1876), which was published by the Autotype Company.

The opportunity to reproduce architectural photographs really well was taken more consistently on the Continent, in such titles as J. J. Van Ysendyck's Documents Classes de l'Art dans les Pays Bas du xieme au xviiieme siecle published by Plantin of Antwerp in

8 880-8 i. Ysendyck presented the decorative arts and architecture of his period in three large folio volumes under a quite anarchic series of alphabetical headings; most of the plates were copied by collotype from engravings; but there was a scatter of large photographs, of good quality (Plate A).

A Londoner wanting a copy of Ysendyck in the i 88os or i 89os might well have gone to Batsford's bookshop in High Holborn. There he would have found the old

57



ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY 25: I982

proprietor, Bradley Thomas Batsford, who had started the business in I843, and still thought of himself as an ordinary bookseller, piling his new and secondhand wares into boxes outside the shop; and with him his two sons, Bradley and Herbert, men of greater ambition and definite tastes. If they could not supply their customer with Ysendyck, they might draw his attention to their fine collection of eighteenth-century engraved books, Gibbs, Kent, Richardson and Batty Langley. Herbert Batsford, in particular, had a taste for such things, and all but filled a warehouse in Lincoln's Inn Fields with photographs and drawings of details of Wren City churches for a long and never published series on craftsmanship. And if the brothers didn't have in stock a copy of that prized publication, the three-volume folio of the work of Robert and James Adam, they might point to their own reprint of selections from it; for the Batsfords were publishers as well as booksellers. And just as their taste was for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century work, so their publishing style resembled that of the eighteenth- century bookseller-publishers.7

It was in this spirit that they embarked, in 189 , on a series of large books on English architecture, illustrated with collotype plates. In their size, comprensiveness and careful layout, they would be worthy successors to the eighteenth-century books; they could stand beside them on the lower shelves of a good architectural library; but they would also be up-to-date in two important ways: they would incorporate the most recent historical scholarship; and they would be illustrated by modern methods, that is, photography and the best possible reproduction process.

Before describing these books, it is worth pointing out that the Batsfords were not alone in their enthusiasm, either for the English Classical tradition or for illustration of high quality. On 2 July i886 The Architect published the first of a series of illustrations sponsored by 'The Architectural Illustration Society'. An accompanying note explained that the Society consisted of a number of architects who, wishing to have a larger say in the illustration of their work, would take responsibility for the style of reproduction of all plates published over their name.8 Over the next six years the Architectural Illustration Society sponsored some six hundred plates in The Architect, in which, whether of set purpose or not, they certainly exploited the potential of the new lithographic processes. Despite the fact that it had been possible to reproduce drawings directly since i868, the architectural weeklies still contained crabbed, unadventurous illustrations, drawn in the dense style proper only to wood engraving; the Society's plates, by contrast, ranged from light austere measured drawings to dark, romantic penwork by Beresford Pite.9 Equally, although the first photograph in an architectural periodical had been published in i88i, using the 'Ink-Photo' process, an adaptation of collotype to long-run halftone reproduction, only a dribble of photographic illustrations followed, until the Society was formed. They published their first photograph, showing a house by Ernest Newton at Bickley, on 21 January i887, and by the late i88os the majority of their illustrations were photographic and of outstanding quality. Slowly, the rest of the building press followed suit.

As it happened, the tastes of the Architectural Illustration Society ran rather in the same direction as the Batsfords'. The pupils of Richard Norman Shaw seem to have been prominent in the Society - Mervyn Macartney was the first Secretary - and the plates reflected their point of view. The best of modern Gothic was there - Scott

58




Junior, Bodley, Bentley, Sedding - and so was design work exhibited at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society; but most of the new work illustrated belonged to the later and more sober phase of 'Queen Anne' known as 'English Renaissance'; and their admiration for the English Classical tradition can also be seen in their illustrations of old work, which go so far as to include work by C. R. Cockerell.10 It is not surprising that some of Batsfords' authors were drawn from the ranks of the Society.

The format for each of Batsfords' large collotype books was much the same. The pages measure about i 8 in high x I3 in wide; they are technically folios, but most libraries use a more realistic classification, such as 'Outsize' or 'Elephant'. Each begins with twenty to thirty pages of prefatory matter, including notes on the plates; then come the plates themselves, anything between fifty and a hundred and fifty, each on a single sheet, and each measuring about 13 1 in x 9? in. Some of the plates are measured drawings, but most are photographs printed in collotype. In all these respects the Batsford books resemble an important Continental collotype publication, the series published by Wasmuth on Palastarchitektur von Ober-Italien und Toscana vomn xv bis xvii

jahrhundert, the first volume of which, Robert Reinhardt on Genua, was published in Berlin in i886; perhaps Batsfords took Wasmuth as their model. In the first of their books the collotype plates were printed by Sinsel and Co. of Leipzig; in later volumes we are not told who the collotype printer was, though he was probably German or Dutch. 1 Most of the books were published by subscription, wisely in such an expensive undertaking, and in that case they include a list of subscribers, a pleasant archaism.

The first was Architecture of the Renaissance in England by J. Alfred Gotch, a busy and learned Northamptonshire architect. It covered the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century and was issued in six parts between i891 and I894 at a guinea a part, or eight guineas for the finished work bound in two volumes. The preface shows that the book was thought of as breaking new ground in the illustration of English architecture by photography. It begins A work illustrating the architecture of the Renaissance period in England hardly needs an apology, when it is borne in mind that nothing has been done in this direction since the development of photography placed new methods of illustration at our disposal, and that these methods have been employed with singular success in illustrating the same period in other lands.12

The last phrase no doubt refers to the publications of Wasmuth, Plantin and others. The preface continued: One of the most important considerations in the undertaking was the quality of the photographic illustrations. The art of fitly illustrating architecture by means of the camera has not been widely acquired, and we hold ourselves fortunate in having acquired the services of Mr. Charles Latham, of Balham, for this part of the work.13

They paid handsomely for those services, since Latham charged ?3 ios. for each exposure, plus expenses; but the results justified the expense, and on the whole the Gotch has the characteristic virtues of good collotype.14

There are, however, signs of tentativeness in this early effort. For one thing collotype, with its delicate gradations of tone, seems to work best with a subject that has soft or even flat lighting. Plate 83 in Gotch illustrates the gatehouse at Stanway, Gloucester- shire; it is strongly back-lit and dissolves into fuzziness over the left-hand gable. The

59




view of Burford Priory, on the other hand, is in a flat light and perfectly solid (Plate B). The only thing that makes one slightly uneasy here is the clear-cut roof-line; it is a curious feature of the Gotch that none of the plates has any sky tones. Why this should be so is a mystery, since even if they were not in the negative they could be put in afterwards; the result is that some of the buildings have the look of a cardboard cut-out.

The Gotch was followed in I896 by London Churches of the i7th and r8th centuries, Herbert Batsford's great love, the author being G. H. Birch, the then Curator of the Soane Museum. Sky tones were very prominent in this volume, and there are definite signs that retouching was used; indeed some of the many roof-top views of spires seem almost too dramatic.15 The peculiar difficulty of the subject lay in finding satisfactory viewpoints, the subjects being so exceptionally boxed in by narrow London streets; the selection of plates consisted of a good many interiors, some roof-top views of spires, and a number of quite remarkable roof-top views of whole churches, such as St George's, Bloomsbury, which makes one feel for the camera, its powers of perspective correction stretched to the limit (Plate C).

897-I 901 saw the publication, in six parts at a guinea a part, of what is in some ways the best, because the most consistent, of these books, Later Renaissance Architecture in England by John Belcher and Mervyn Macartney. 'Later Renaissance' in this case meant c. i630-c. 1730 with a heavy emphasis on the age of Wren. Latham's views are now almost always softly lit, to achieve a good working compromise: the shadows gave an overall sense of mass, but they were not so strong as to lose the sense of detail and texture. The preface to Later Renaissance Architecture says that the photographs were all taken from points of view selected by the editors. Their supervision may explain what seems to be a feature of this book, the large number of views which have people in them. No doubt Belcher and Macartney did this for the sake of giving a sense of scale, rather than from any vaguer and more modern wish for human interest. But the effect is the same: despite what must have been slow exposures, the people are captured almost casually, gardeners going about their work, people chatting on the bridge at Wilton, and they give the photographs a pleasantly relaxed atmosphere (Plate D).

In I902 Batsfords published H. Inigo Triggs' Formal Gardens in England and Scotland, more 'English Renaissance' material with good photographs by Latham; and then there was a gap until 1911, when they issued Thomas Garner and Arthur Stratton's The Domestic Architecture of England during the Tudor Period. In fact, Garner had been working on this book in the early years of the century, and a number of photographs were taken by W. Galsworthy Davie, of whom more in a moment. One of these, a view of Ightham Mote in Kent, originally included a particularly twee dog kennel in the Tudor style, complete with decorative barge-boards. Garner quite rightly objected to this and wrote on the back of the print, 'I think that some tubs with myrtle or other trees might be placed before the kennel'.16 Did he mean that the photograph should be retouched, or retaken? In the event, the whole publication was interrupted by Garner's death in I 906; Batsfords then asked Stratton to complete it. When it appeared, Davies' view of Ightham Mote was included but the offending dog kennel had been simply removed by retouching, and the wall behind it 'made good'; it was as if it had never existed. For the rest, the plates were rather uneven in quality, for though they were specially taken, they were commissioned from at least six different photographers scattered across the country.

60o



The following plates have been printed by the collotype process in order to reproduce as far as possible the quality of the originals. In all but one case, however, they have had to be considerably reduced in size. They have been printed by the only remaining collotype printer in the country, the Cotswold Collotype Company, of Nailsworth, Gloucestershire. This text and the captions to the plates were subsequently overprinted by offset litho.

A. Plate i9 from volume i, part B of J. J. Van Ysendyck, Documents Classes de 1'Art dans les Pays Bas du xieme au xviiieme siecle (I880-8I) Reproducedfrom the collotype, original size 341 mm X 230 mm

B. Burford Priory, Oxon. Plate 34 of J. A. Gotch, Architecture of the Renaissance in England (r89I-94) Reproduced from the original photograph in the possession of B. T. Batsford Ltd, sige 28; mm x 82 mm

c. St George's, Bloomsbury Plate y9 of G. H. Birch, London Churches of the I7th and i8th centuries (1896) Reproduced from the collotype, original sire 33 mm X 263 mm

D. The Palladian Bridge, IWilton, Wilts. Plate 79 of J. Belcher and M. Macartney, Later Renaissance Architecture in England ( 897-I90I) Reproduced from the collotype, original siZe 276 mm X 342 mm

E. Compton Wynyates, Warks. Plate 3i of T. Garner and A. Stratton, The Domestic Architecture of England during the Tudor Period (i9ii) Reproduced from the collotype, original size 26; x 371 mm

F. The Post Offce, Wickhambreaux, Kent Plate 73 of E. Guy Dawber, Old Cottages and Farmhouses in Kent and Sussex (1900)

Reproduced from the collotype, original sige If 2 mm x 108 mm

G. The Bank of England, Lothbury Angle Plate 17 of A. E. Richardson. Monumental Classic Architecture in Great Britain and Ireland during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (I914) Reproduced from an original photograph in the possession of B. T. Batsford Ltd, size 290 om x 2 8 mm



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The result was a series of plates which lack the consistency of the Latham books, the sense of settled skills and patience with the sky. Some are outstanding; the view of Compton Wynyates in particular is perfectly relaxed, sharp and informative; but others are weak, and Plate II 5, Daneway House in Gloucestershire, seems almost careless in composition (Plate E).

These big Batsford books were a peak in collotype printing; the size of the plates alone counted for much, since it showed the fine detail to advantage. But around I900

Batsfords did not think of collotype as a special process that could only be used in specialist publications. They used it in books of quarto format that were reasonably cheap and presumably printed in fairly long runs. Most notable was the Old Cottages and Farmhouses series which began in I9oo.17 The photographs for these were taken by Galsworthy Davie, an amateur photographer who is described in the Batsford centenary history as 'an elderly architect, timid but indefatigable'.18 One imagines him in some Surrey lane, loaded down with equipment, pausing to screw up his courage and approach the uncomprehending cottager. Plate F shows the Post Office at Wickham- breaux, from the Kent and Sussex volume. Batsfords also published, in i896, W. J. Anderson's The Architecture of the Renaissance in Italy, an octavo volume, and one of the first architectural text books illustrated by photography, using a mixture of collotype and process plates. It is said that Lethaby, on being shown this book by one of the publishers, displayed his habitual bigotry with the remark, 'What a charming little book it is, but how soul-destroying! !'.19 The collotype plates in these smaller books are not as admirable as those in the larger ones, just because of their size; but they are in their way more important, for they were an attempt to bring illustration of a very high standard before a wide public.

The experiment was, however, short-lived. In the years of Batsfords' enthusiasm for collotype, other methods of illustration were developing which would limit its application. The most important of these was the halftone process block; that is, a relief printing surface which can be produced by photomechanical means and is capable of rendering halftones (see note i). Such blocks were experimental in the i88os, but in- creasingly effective in the i89os. In the world of architecture, the illustration policy, and perhaps even the establishment, of such important periodicals as The Architectural Review, Country Life, and The Studio, were conditioned by this new method of illustration. The advantage of process blocks is that they are relatively cheap and can be printed alongside, and at the same time as, the text; at first their rendering of halftones was poor, both crude and indistinct; but it improved quickly and by the early 900oos it was rather better than Ink-Photo and only worse than collotype. The challenge to collotype must have been keenly felt at Batsfords in 1904 when Country Life published the first volume of H. Avray Tipping's In English Homes, a volume of some size and sumptuous- ness, covering the same ground as Batsford's big books, and illustrated by photographs specially taken by Latham, no less. Now the illustrations were all in process, and could not, to a fine judgement, compete with collotype in fineness of detail. But they were a great deal cheaper, and the future of general architectural publishing lay with them.

In high quality work likewise, collotype had a competitor in photogravure. In this process, the photographic image is transferred to a metal plate which is very finely etched to produce an intaglio printing surface. The resulting image is scarcely distinguishable

6i




from collotype, even with the use of a lens, and only the surrounding plate-marks will serve to identify it as photogravure. The process was developed in the I89os and indeed Batsfords themselves seem to have used it in the folio they issued in i893 on John Belcher's building for the Institute of Chartered Accountants. By the 900oos it was a real

competitor for collotype in high quality work, the chief difference between the two

being in the costing of each: photogravure plates are expensive and time-consuming to make, but can produce longish runs at some speed. Collotype plates can be made

cheaply and quickly, but the printing off is relatively slow. Thus, on a short print run, photogravure will be more expensive than collotype, because of the high initial costs. But, the longer the run, the more competitive becomes the cost of photogravure.

In I914 Batsfords published a book which seemed to take account of all these

developments, Albert Richardson's Monumental Classic Architecture in Great Britain and Ireland during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Like the earlier books, it was large, and carefully illustrated with photographs by E. Dockree; and it carried the story of

English Classicism, daringly, up to the i86os. But it was also a fresh departure. It was not as massive as the earlier books, and had a much more substantial text; and though the illustrations were excellent, they were not all printed in collotype. The majority were

printed from process blocks and accompanied Richardson's learned text; and then there were sixty special full-page collotype plates. Oddly, each of these was surrounded by plate-marks, for which the collotype process, being planographic, offers no explanation. They must have been introduced artificially, either to suggest that the plates were

photogravure or (more probably) just to give them an old-fashioned and exclusive air (Plate G).20

From this time onwards, the scope for collotype grew less, until today there is only one collotype printer left in Britain. Harry Batsford, who ran the publishing firm between the Wars, wrote of collotype, 'This delicate and fickle process was chiefly ours, until the last war, when revised production conditions restricted its use to special books.'21 It is not difficult to find good collotype work done in the I920S and I930s; Batsfords themselves re-issued Garner and Stratton in a reduced format in 1929; Emery Walker achieved technical standards which rivalled continental work; and among the most seductive collotype plates ever are those in Louis Hautecoeur's three volumes on the architecture of Burgundy which appeared in the Richesses D'Art de la France series in 1929. But all this was short run, academic work. There was little chance after the War that collotype could be used in fairly cheap and popular books, like the Old Cottages and Farmhouses series. The golden age of collotype was over.

It is a memorable process, and deserves to be better known. It was, after all, a pioneer, the first process to make it possible to reproduce photographs of architecture and publish them widely; the method which we now accept as normal had its origins here. And then, it did it so well. Its delicate gradation of tone made it possible to convey an extra- ordinary amount of information. The cross lights which an architectural photographer uses to give a sense of massing can so often lead to deep impenetrable shadows; but on collotype plates you can look into almost all the stages of shadow and still examine the fabric, while there is nothing dazzling about the highlights.

Equally, its fineness of grain makes it possible to convey plenty of detail. That the quality of a building depends to a great extent on its detail, on the mouldings and

62




texture, is a commonplace of architectural criticism; but it is not easy for an architectural illustration to convey that quality. It must be large enough and sharp enough to show the building as a whole and the detail which contributes to it. Two views, one general and one detail are a poor substitute, for they show the detail in itself, which is not the same thing. Not all architectural photographs can manage this kind of stretch, and few reproduction processes are sharp enough to represent it; the old photographers generally managed it, and when they did, collotype could do them justice.

These virtues are all the more obvious in comparison with much modern architectural illustration. The tastes of graphic designers and photographers coincide today; graphic impact is at a premium, the building itself discounted: all those threatening skies and hard, sooty shadows, the building shouldering its way out of the picture in violent perspective. Batsfords, their photographers, and their collotype printers cultivated that ordinary but neglected commodity, information. It is not exciting; it does not allow the photographer to indulge himself; but it is information we want, not the soot and white- wash to which we are so often treated today.

NOTES

i The development of reproduction processes for architectural illustration in the second half of the nineteenth century may be usefully summarized here. In periodicals, the vast bulk of illustrations in the I84os, '5os and '6os were printed from wood engravings. On 14 December i868 The Building News published a drawing of G. E. Street's St Margaret's Convent, East Grinstead, reproduced by photolithography; that is, the original drawing had been transferred, via a photographic negative and a transfer, to a lithographic plate, and then printed off. This was a development of great importance because it allowed a drawing to be reproduced directly, without the intervention of a woodblock engraver or commercial lithographer; however, photolithography was only slowly taken up and was confined to line drawings until I88i.

On i 6 April in that year, The Architect published a photograph of a neo-Celtic cross recently erected at Fence Houses near Durham. This was, as far as I know, the first photograph to be published in a British architectural periodical, and the process was one which was to become well known by its trade name of 'Ink-Photo'. A collotype plate was made from the photographic negative and printed onto a grained transfer; the transfer was then laid down on a lithographic plate for printing off the finished sheets. These two processes, in line and tone, were the technical basis for the achievements of late nineteenth century periodical illustration.

Their reign was, however, challenged in the i89os by the development of 'process' blocks; here the image is transferred, via a photographic negative, to a light-sensitive metal block; the block is then acid- etched, leaving the image to be printed standing in relief. Process blocks quickly reached a standard in line and tone near that of photolithography; but their growing popularity in the early twentieth century was due rather to their convenience; having a relief rather than a flat surface they can be printed alongside letterpress.

The illustration of architectural books presents a more complex picture. Wood engraving was useful throughout the period for cheap illustrations; for more expensive work the traditional techniques of engraving on metal, etching and lithography continued to be used. The new developments of the period were chromolithography, from the I 84os onwards, and techniques for reproducing photographs, including collotype, from the i87os. On books even more than periodicals, the impact of the process block was considerable, displacing virtually all the old processes in the early twentieth century.

A full explanation of all the processes normally used to illustrate architecture in the nineteenth century will be found in Geoffrey Wakeman's invaluable Victorian Book Illustration: The Technical Revolution (Newton Abbot, I973). 2 I am grateful to Mr Philip Brooke of The Cotswold Collotype Company for explaining the signifi- cance of the humidity problem to me. 3 G. A. Glaister, Glaister's Glossary of the Book (I979), p. I02. 4 Wakeman, op. cit., pp. iII-I8. 5 Ibid., pp. 159-63. 6 Ibid., pp. IOI-II.

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ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY 25: 1982

7 Hector Bolitho (ed.), A Batsford Century (I943), pp. 2 I-22, 24, 46-47, io8. 8 The Architect 36 (I886), p. 9. 9 See, for instance, R. W. Schultz's 'Design for a town church' vol. 36, plate i6, and Beresford Pite's 'Hebrew Conference Hall, Whitechapel', vol. 45, Second Series, plate 325. Outstanding among the contributors to the Society's plates were the two most artistic of Shaw's pupils, Reginald Barratt and Edwin George Hardy. io Plates 449-51 in the Second Series illustrated Cockerell's Hanover Chapel in Regent Street. (vol. 47). I Bolitho, op. cit., p. I 17. The collotype printer for the volume by Belcher and Macartney seems to have been German: the photographic collection of B. T. Batsford Ltd contains a print of the Fish Inn, Broadway, which was illustrated at Plate 9I, with the, to me, unintelligible inscription Nicht Zu bauchen. I am grateful to Mrs Clare Sunderland for help in exploring this collection. 12 p. [iii]. 13 Ibid. 14 Boltiho, op. cit., p. 34. I5 For example, Plate 56, St Giles in the Fields. i6 Print in the photographic collection of B. T. Batsford Ltd. I7 E. Guy Dawber, Old Cottages and Farmhouses in Kent and Sussex (I900). E. A. Ould, Old Cottages, Farm Houses and other half timber buildings in Shropshire, Herefordshire and Cheshire (I 904). E. Guy Dawber, Old Cottages, Farm-Houses, and other stone buildings in the Cotswold District (I905). W. Curtis Green, Old Cottages and Farmhouses in Surrey (i908). I8 Bolitho, op. cit., p. i 6. 19 Ibid., p. 34. 20 Basil Oliver's Old Houses and Village Buildings in East Anglia, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, (n.d. [c.I 9I 2]) represents a similar development in the quarto books: longish text, chiefly process illustrations, and a few, special collotype plates. 21 Bolitho, op. cit., p. 34.

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In Praise of Collotype: Architectural Illustration at the Turn of the Century

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