He made many attempts with his pupils to produce drawings on stones, but
presumably his impressions were not successful, for those stones that I
saw afterward at Herr Schulrath Steiner's had been etched first and the
spaces then engraved away very deeply with all sorts of steel
instruments, after the manner of wood-cuts, so that they might properly
be called stone-cuts in relief. He had these stones printed in the
Schul-fond's book-printery, and I hear that the impressions were very
good. I saw none myself.
However, Professor Schmidt's experiments were the means of making me
acquainted with Herr Schulrath Steiner, who encouraged me so much that I
conceived many ideas in order to fulfill his wishes, so that at last the
art of printing from stone achieved its present honorable position.
Herr Schulrath Steiner, an intimate friend of Professor Schmidt, was
director of the Schul-fond's printery. As such he was concerned with
many prints. Herr Schmidt's idea of publishing stone-etched pictures of
poisonous plants for school use was approved by him; and as the attempts
did not satisfy him, he decided to turn to me. At that time the
Schul-fond was to print some church songs. This gave him the opportunity
of visiting me. He asked me if the musical notes could not be so etched
or cut in relief in stone that they could be made up with ordinary
book-types and thus printed in the ordinary book-presses. I promised to
try it. However, the necessary deep engraving of the spaces was too
laborious, so that it would have been easier to do it in wood. As an
expedient we printed the text first with ordinary types in the
book-press and then printed in the music with stones in the stone-press.
Meantime I tried to attain our purpose in other ways, connected with
some of my early experiments. My best success was with the following
method. On a stone polished with sand I painted a layer, equal to two or
three card-thicknesses, of burned, finely powdered gypsum, butter, and
alum, mixed with a proper amount of water. As soon as it was dry I
inscribed the music with steel needles of various sizes on the surface
of the stone, which was of a somewhat dark, almost gray color, so that I
could see it more easily through the soft, white mass. Having finished
the drawing I took warm sealing-wax smeared on wood, and applied it to
the stone while it was warm with a hand-press. After cooling, the white
mass was fast to the sealing-wax and quite loose from the stone, and it
was scrubbed away clean with water and a brush, after which the drawing
appeared on the wood in elevated wax extremely clear and clean, like a
wood-cut. The spaces were so deep that the plate could be printed in
regular book-printing manner.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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