The Virtue of the Hand-Coloured Plate
Before offset lithography standardised the field guide, a single plate passed through five hands in six weeks — and the results were worth every hour.
I spent the better part of last winter in the print room at Bloomsbury, turning over plates from the great ornithological folios with cotton gloves and a rising sense of indignation. Not at the birds — the birds are magnificent, each gorget glittering with gold leaf laid on by a colourist whose name the record-keepers never troubled to write down. My indignation was reserved for the present century, which has decided that four-colour process on coated stock at eighteen plates an hour is an acceptable substitute for what a proper lithographic workshop achieved in 1861.
The Invisible Hand at the Stone
Lithography in the mid-nineteenth century was not yet the industrial process we imagine. Each plate began as a drawing on limestone by a principal artist, whose line-work captured the structural iridescence of a hummingbird’s throat in a way no camera of the era could approach.
A single plate of Oreotrochilus chimborazo demanded thirty-two separate colour applications. No two copies are identical.