Just what is Xylography anyway?

Over the years I have come across this book several times and been intrigued by it, but it wasn't until a dear friend sent me several copies and urged me to reprint it that I had a chance to look at it up close and admire it.

It was printed all the way back in 1875 by one of my favorite publishing houses, Frederick Pustet & Company.  You have seen many images from their sumptuous Missals and Breviaries. They really did things right.  And this book is no exception to that rule. It's gorgeous.

One thing I was curious about, of course, had to do with how these illustrations were created.  They are intensely colored and breathtakingly beautiful. On the cover there, it says they are "executed in xylography."  Well, I've heard of lithography and xerography, but what is xylography?

So I did what I always do when I have a question...as my son would say, "consult the oracle!"  I walked over to my portal to Google University and looked it up on the internet.  It's a fancy name for woodcuts!  Xylo is the Greek word for wood.  

Well, these are the fanciest woodcuts I've ever seen.  Usually when I think of woodcut illustrations, I think of monochrome prints that are usually not highly detailed.  But these looked like engravings, with fine little lines and cross hatching, only in different and very vibrant colors.

When I showed the books to a dear friend who is a printer, he remarked on the saturated colors of the inks, pointing out that it is impossible to get such rich colors nowadays. The orangey-red is vermilion, a color derived from cinnabar (mercury sulfide). This color was the principal red used in painting for hundreds of years until it was replaced by a less toxic cadmium red. Then there are vivid oranges and yellows made from lead chromate... "They're all totally poisonous, but don't they look great?" Well, yes...they do.

Apparently this type of color printing was very much in vogue at the time this book was printed. The more curious among you can read more about it here and see a broad range of examples used in trade cards and other ephemera from that era. Highly detailed illustrations like the ones in this book may have used up to 12 different blocks to apply equally as many colors to a page.  I know I counted at least ten colors used here.  

What makes this most amazing is this: when you are making a single print on a piece of paper using 12 (or even the standard modern 4) different printing blocks, the finished image is only as good as your ability to make sure that all 12 of those blocks align perfectly with each other so that the various colors don't get shifted around and go outside the lines, messing up the print.

Having spent countless hours carefully restoring these illustrations, I can tell you that the registration (the fancy name for making sure all those printing blocks line up perfectly) was incredibly precise.  Not only that, but the parallel lines used to print things like the sky, or the fine cross-hatching that combines the blue with magenta to make the rich purples...they are so perfectly straight and parallel that when using digital tools to sample the image and fix the blemishes, I could move those lines all around and they would line right up.  That's pretty amazing for a pre-digital technology.  How did they get those lines so perfectly straight and so perfectly spaced???  That, my friends, is true art.

But that's not all.  These illustrations were first designed and painted by Leonhard Diefenbach, a member of the Munich school of painting.  Then they were translated into these woodcuts by Heinrich Knöfler in order to reproduce them for this book. Both had to be at the very tip-top of their skills to produce this book, not so that it could hang on a gallery wall somewhere, but so that it would be placed somewhere even more precious: into the hands of children...and why? Because it mattered to them that children would be given such a rich exemplar of faith to be handed down through the generations.

At the time, what had once been the lowly printing house of Pustet & Co. had earned such a reputation for its fine work that it had been appointed as one of the official publishers to the Holy See, commissioned to print all the major liturgical books for use by the Church. Thus, while their original home was in Regensburg, Germany, they also had branches in New York, Cincinnati (considered the "Rome of the West") and in Rome itself. Their books have graced many an altar for more than a century, and their work here for children was no less lovingly appointed.

The original version of this book was a German book called "Goldenes Weihnachts-Büchlein für fromme Kinder" or "Little Golden Book of Christmas for Devout Children."  It was translated into English to be printed for the American market, but the verses were later replaced by ones written by Miss Rosa Mulholland, who wrote numerous stories for Charles Dickens' weekly magazine, All the Year Round. I had copies of both versions, and in some cases it was difficult to choose which verses were better, but in the end, the vote went in favor of the Mulholland verses.

Of course, the metal plates used for printing engravings are much more durable than the wood used here, so during the restoration process, it was interesting to note that the same lines and blemishes were found in each copy of the book, indicating that the wood blocks themselves had suffered some minor damage. There were places where they had become scratched and even gouged. And those fine lines for the sky had lots of little pieces missing here and there, making unintentional dotted lines.

I will leave you with a few animations showing before-and-after views of the restoration of these illustrations, because it was just too fun. But I hope you will have a chance to see these illustrations for yourselves when this book arrives (and please say a prayer that they arrive in time for Christmas!).