  PHOTO-LITHOGRAPHY, with its many branches and its extended application, when used direct and also as handmaid for the lithographer and printer from stone, is, with the exception of phototypy and autotypy, indeed that process for the preparation of letterpress plates which has done the most towards making photography useful for the graphic arts, in the artistic sense as well as from the practical point of view. And in the near future it will be a great acquisition when it is once generally recognized that colour plates can be prepared by photographic means without any considerable amount of manual or artistic help. It is the more to be wondered at that photo-lithography has not yet found that extension and general use which it in so high a degree deserves. I have written this book, impressed with the urgency of stimulating the propagation of this useful process. In writing I have been careful to avoid all those details which are for the practical worker of minor interest—the description of the historical evolution, etc., so instructive as these must certainly be—so that I have abstained from many complicated and unintelligible formulÆ. I leave this willingly to a more ready writer. Starting rather from the standpoint of speaking as a practical worker to practical men, I have recorded all the experience which I have gained in the course of many years. Should it occur to me in the future that it was my task to have treated all photo-lithographic processes, with all their ramifications, in the most complete manner, I have still the consciousness of having described as completely as possible the practical processes, and think that I have thus been useful to many workers, {2} and I dare say with absolute certainty that only tested and tried formulÆ have been noticed in this book. With the earnest wish that this book may be received with a fraction of the goodwill with which I have worked at the writing of the same, I present it to the technical world. GEORG FRITZ. Vienna. On receiving this work for review I was greatly struck with the thoroughly practical manner in which it was written, and thought that an English translation might be acceptable to the large and ever increasing class of photo-mechanical workers who might not otherwise have the opportunity of reading it in the original. I have kept to the author’s text as close as is consistent with the idiomatic construction of German. I am indebted to Messrs. Hazell, Watson and Viney for permission to undertake the task of translating the work for another firm of publishers, and I hope the translation may prove as acceptable and useful to the readers as it has been pleasurable to me to do it. E. J. WALL. 1, Creed Lane, London, E.C. |
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