Introduction to our reference library:

To increase the enjoyment of your visit to art-emporium.com and to enable you to fully appreciate the individual assets of the item that catches your interest, we are continually researching for our "library" of light lectures, discerning descriptions, fascinating facts, and pertinent pithy little paragraphs. We hope you will be "bitten by the bug" of collecting antique maps and prints!

Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to tell exactly how many of a specific "print" were "pulled" or "struck" so many years ago. Some more important works such as atlases and portfolios included a list of subscribers when originally published. These were the royal and otherwise 'notable' patrons, who contributed funds to enable the information to be compiled and the map or print to be engraved, (and who were subsequently presented with a copy of the work). In these cases this provides a clue only as to the minimum number of copies produced. In some cases insolvency resulted in less than the subscribed number of prints being produced by the publisher.

Here at art-emporium.com you can find information on the identification of antique maps and prints; processes used in the production of these wonderful early graphics; and short summaries on some cartographers, engravers, artists and publishers who through science and art have contributed so much to our knowledge and enjoyment today.

Another fantastic site you might like to visit is mapclassifieds.com, which is an area for the trading of antique maps (and prints) by auction or classified advertisement.

If we can help you with your search or even offer any advice with regards your collection or its preservation or presentation, please drop us a line. Happy hunting!

ORIGINAL PRINTS are taken from the original engraved or lithographed plate.

Whilst the term original print may seem a contradiction, it is not. Think of the print (whether lithograph or engraving in style) as being the process; and the term "original" to indicate that it was the original work of its kind, taken from the original plate. The original print was often published hundreds of years ago.

If there are two identical original prints (of the same image and date - taken from the same plate), there is always a slight, though often almost imperceptible difference between the works. Perhaps the depth of inking and the definition of the engraving varies; or perhaps, if hand-coloured, the depth or tone of colour differs slightly. In older works the condition of the "plate" will vary considerably, dependent on the material used in the plate. The different condition of individual images of the same 'original print' will thereby also affect the value.

Original antique prints offer an exclusive, rare and "individual" item. Undoubtedly, the availability of individual images on just about any subject of interest guarantees an absorbing interest for those introduced to antique prints. The fascination lies not only in the early method of the artwork, but also in the sometimes wondrous interpretation of the subject involved, whether an engraving of a newly discovered animal or a map of a newly charted coastline long since found to be fancifully inaccurate.

Interest in a subject matter does not always guarantee a happy collector however. The most desirable result comes with the ability to purchase from a reputable dealer who not only is sympathetic to the interests and knowledge of the purchaser, but is also able and willing to provide the purchaser with relevant information. Whilst a knowledge of this specialized field is not a pre-purchase requirement, appreciation and enjoyment are certainly enhanced by an understanding of the method of production and some knowledge of a work's source.

Print collecting is an addictive hobby! But don't forget to frame your treasures with conservation-quality materials so they can be enjoyed fully. If you've bought wisely, they can only appreciate in value whilst you appreciate their beauty. We have over 100,000 images to choose from. If you cannot find it listed at art-emporium.com please just ask us.

GLOSSARY of terms commonly used with antique maps and prints and their display.

Cartographer, artist, designer, draughtsman, composer of the work: Indicated by delineavit, del., delin., descripsit, descript., invenit, auctore, composuit.

Engraver: Indicated by engrav., engr., sculpsit, sculp., sc., sec., fecit., fec., incidente, incidit,

Printer or publisher: Indicated by excudit., excud., exc., ex officina, formis, lith., sumptibus.

Proof: a print taken from a plate before an engraving is finished, prior to publication.
State: various stages during the alterations to a plate.
Impression: a single print produced from a plate.
Edition: the actual published impression from a plate.
Re-issue: a later publication from a previously published plate.
Restrike: a modern impression taken from the original plate, usually also coloured in the style of the original publication date.
Reproduction: A copy of an original print that is usually photomechanically produced.

Backed: The image is pasted or glued onto another material, such as cloth, to make the map stronger and more durable. (Many large maps or working maps were backed with cloth when issued. Maps are sometimes backed for conservation purposes, usually with thin tissue. Archival quality paste and backing material should be used to prevent chemical deterioration of the image base paper. Backing is not recommended for preservation unless necessary.)
Bird's-Eye View: A realistic view from an aerial vantage point.
Border: The printed area surrounding the edge of an image, usually a line or series of lines, which may incorporate scrollwork, geometric design or decorative panel with figures or views
Centrefold: Many large images have been folded to the size of the book or atlas in which they were published. Exposure of the fold over a period of years can result in browning. Frequent unfolding often results in weakening along the centrefold, which necessitates repair.
Colouring: Whilst the earliest illustrations were published in black and white, watercolour was added by hand to embellish many important early works, especially with regards the cartouche of a map destined for presentation to the person who had funded the voyage of discovery depicted. Later, a more economical method of printing in colour was devised.
Contemporary Colour: Indicating the colour has been added at the time of publication, although perhaps slightly with time, this is always preferable to modern colour. The earliest colouring, composed of natural ochres, can sometimes by detected on the reserve of an image by its oxidation through the paper. Colour was an inherent indication of a natural history subject so was usually contemporary. Views on the other hand were usually published in black and white. The decorative quality of maps and prints is greatly enhanced, even when colour is added later, as long as the "later" colouring is sympathetic to the style of the work.
Conservation framing: A readily reversible framing method that protects and preserves valuable art from the natural aging process.
Deckle-edge: A desirable characteristic of hand-made paper, this rough edge has often been trimmed off during binding or publication.
Dissected: The cutting into rectangle sections of a large work (usually a working map), and gluing it onto cloth, assists the folding for ease of transportation and storage.
Foxing: Spots, usually brown, which are caused by mould, result from storage under damp conditions. Exposure to dust, and soiling from poor handling, also contribute to foxing.
Imprint: Information when printed on a map or print give some indication to the work's artist, engraver or lithographer, publisher, place or publication, and date of publication.
Inset: A small image within the border of a larger work, it usually surrounded by a separating line.
Intaglio: Printing under pressure, causing the plate mark or "intaglio" impression.
Laid down, or Lined: As with backed, this is sometimes done to provide stability when a work is damaged, or for framing, in which case only conservation materials should be used.
Loss of printed surface: When a portion of a map or print is missing, usually through damage, this section is sometimes restored by pasting paper and drawing the missing design.
Manuscript: Hand-written notations or whole maps or other illustrations drawn by hand.
Margin: A wide margin is the desirable blank area outside the border of a map or print.
Medallion: A circular or oval bordered illustration usually contains a portrait or symbol of importance to the subject depicted.
Medium: The substances (e.g. oil or watercolour paint) used to create the work of art.
Offsetting: When an image is pressed against another surface over a period of years, as in a book which is stored tightly in a bookcase, the printer's ink is sometimes transferred onto the adjacent surface, producing a mirror image.
Original: A map or print is considered to be original if it is published from the original engraved plate or block.
Panorama: A realistic, usually wide angle, view from a point at ground level.
Plate Mark: Also called intaglio impression, it is produced from pressure of the external edge of an engraved plate on the printing surface.
Printer's Crease: A wrinkle is permanently caused by compression of the printing surface during publication.
Rag Paper: Paper made from cloth fibres, as opposed to wood pulp.
Remargined: The addition of paper to extend the edges, usually beyond the borders, to protect the border edge of an image.
Separately published or separately issued: Indicates a map or print published separate from a book, atlas or journal. Such illustrations were published for separate sale or circulation, but without the protection of the binding, were more vulnerable to deterioration.
Showthrough: Text or image on the reverse of printed paper, particularly with thin hand-made paper or heavy ink printing, are sometimes visible from the front.
Verso: The rear or reverse side of the paper from the image, frequently contained text.
Watermark: A design created in the paper when manufactured, it was created in hand-made paper by wires bent into the desired maker's pattern being placed on the rack prior to the deposit of the fibres for the construction of the paper. Whilst helpful in identifying the date of paper, it must be remembered that some paper survived in publishing houses long after the date of manufacture.
Worming, wormholes, worm tracks: Eating of holes or lines in paper by insect larvae.

Presentation of artwork may involve the following additional terminology:

Acid Free Paper: Paper or paperboard product in which the acidic content of the fibres, used to form the paper, has been neutralised. Paper made with cotton fibres is acid free; paper made with wood pulp is not. (Rag mat & rag board are cotton-based.)
Centre line: The horizontal line halfway between the top and bottom of a work of art, or of a group arrangement, for spontaneous appreciation of the works. An off-centre focal point can be created by re-adjusting the centre line, particularly if in a horizontal direction.
Glazing: A protective layer of transparent glass (these days available with ultra-violet screening) or plastic/acrylic sheets, in front of an image, usually held in place by a frame.
Mount (sometimes Matt or Mat): A protective housing for a flat work of art, usually a plate of cardboard, comprising a support base to which the artwork is fixed (backboard) and a window mat through which the work can be seen.
Ultraviolet light/ UV light: Certain rays of extremely short wavelength lying beyond the violet end of the visible spectrum. UV light, present in direct sunlight and produced by fluorescent light tubes, is extremely damaging to any artwork.
Shadowbox: A frame deep enough for 3-dimensional materials - in addition to backboard, mat and glazing.
Eye level: The horizontal line directly in front of a person, where the person's view focuses easily. Actually about 6 inches lower than a person's eye level.

PRINTING PROCESSES:

In producing early prints and maps, there are three main printmaking styles:

Relief process: The earliest technique of the woodcut, and later wood engravings and linocuts, etc. The outline to be printed is cut in relief on a woodblock base. Printing is done by inking the image on the raised surface - the area not cut away.
Intaglio process: Line engraving, drypoint, etching, aquatint, mezzotint and stipple engraving. The outline is cut into a metal plate, or is bitten into the plate by acid, and the image is then produced by the pressure of forcing the ink to be taken up from the incisions of the carved image, which results in an intaglio impression or plate mark border.
Surface process: Printing by application of paper onto an image drawn on a prepared smooth surface. (e.g. Lithography)

Woodcut and Wood Engraving.

The woodcut was the earliest technique for the making of prints. It was a means of creating an image for wider circulation.

A woodcut is made by outlining a design on a smooth flat plank, and then cutting away the unwanted background with a knife or gouge. The "relief" or raised portions of the block are then inked and paper applied under pressure against the block. This method was used as early as the year AD 8 in China, but in Europe the earliest surviving examples of this printing method were found in Germany at the beginning of the fifteenth century, Germany having already established a reputation for wood-carving.

As minimal pressure was required and the surface of the block could be made the same thickness as the standard height of letter type, the method was particularly suitable for book printing, with text and illustrations produced with one operation. Printing from woodblocks gave a bold, simple, black and white finish, which could show little subtlety, shading or graduation of tone except in the hands of a master such as Hans Holbein or Albrecht Durer.

In the case of maps, the lettering was often cut separately in metal and fitted as required into holes in the wooden block. Maps could be updated by filling gouged areas of a block and re-cutting. Type was once again re-set as required. Woodcuts were employed for the printing of maps in Europe for over one hundred years.

The woodblocks could be used for many years, though the outline of the image gradually lost its initial clarity and boldness. Whilst woodcuts were produced on the soft smooth flat surface of a plank of wood, wood engravings were cut into the hard cross-grain of the wood, enabling finer detail and greater longevity of the block.

After many years of alternative more durable printing methods, there was a resurgence of woodblock printing towards the end of the nineteenth century for the economical printing of illustrations for news items in periodicals and encyclopaedias.

Copper Plate and Steel Engraving:

Copper Plate and Steel Engraving refer to prints inscribed (in reverse) with a sharp tool called a graver or burin, which is a small metal rod with a sharpened point. The burin is pushed across the plate forcing the metal up into slivers in front of the v-shaped line being carved. These pieces of metal are removed from the plate with a sharp-bladed instrument or scraper. A finer tipped burin was used for inscribing on the softer medium of copper. The difference in the resulting line-work is readily recognizable.

Ink is wiped across the plate, filling the lines that have been inscribed. The inked plate is covered with a piece of dampened paper and passed under pressure through two rollers and the printed impression is taken up from the ink-filled recesses of the plate.

One of the characteristics of an engraving is the intaglio impression or "plate mark" border, which is caused by the pressure of the edges of the metal plate during printing. When more than one image was engraved on one plate, or when the paper was not as large as the external area of the plate, this intaglio impression does not appear around each image.

After many years of engraving on copper plates in Italy for printmaking, from the middle of the sixteenth century when the centre of map production moved there from Germany, copper plate engraving superceded woodcuts in the field of map-making. It proved particularly successful in this field. In the case of some maps, the relatively soft copper plate was beaten flat from the back and re-engraved with updated information or details of a new publisher over a period of up to 150 years after initial production. Different states of an engraving assist in determining the source and publication date of a map or print.

Reputable antique print dealers are usually able to recognize the approximate age of paper from their years of experience in dealing with the early works. Later colour is also detectable even when it is done well and in the style of the original.

Although the art of engraving or incising into metal began in antiquity when the Greeks, Romans and Etruscans employed it for decoration, the use of engraved plates for making prints did not occur until about 1430 in Germany. This was the earliest intaglio method, and it was not until around 1830 that steel plates generally superceded the use of softer copper.

Lithograph.

Lithography, discovered in 1796, is a process based on grease repelling water. On a treated flat, smooth surface, usually limestone, an outline is drawn with a greasy chalk, zinc, or tallow. The stone is acid-etched to make it porous, then wet and the water is taken up by the stone, except where the image has been drawn. Ink is rolled onto the plate and adheres only to the drawn image. Paper is evenly applied to the stone, and takes up the image the image.

The lithographic printing method was not widely used for quantity production until after around 1820. The much-improved fluidity of line, enabled by the drawing of the image onto a smooth surface, resulted in the print somewhat resembling a sketch with a pencil. These were for many years hand-tinted by watercolouring at the time of publication, but as the years progressed this proved to be both slow and uneconomical. Lithography was generally introduced for map making during the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Lithographs were next printed in colour, and are referred to as chromolithographs. By the use of separate stones for different colours, multi-coloured prints could be obtained by carefully realigning the paper for subsequent over-printing, taking care to maintain the precise outline so that there should be no overlay of colour. For an exceptionally detailed work up to twenty-two different stones have been prepared.

Modern offset lithography is based on the same original principle of grease repelling water, with the design transferred photographically onto rollers. Modern photographic prints from early lithographs and engravings do not reproduce the original detail well, and although still decorative, when viewed through a magnifying glass they can be seen to be composed of thousands of separate dots rather than the continuous lines of the original work. Many modern lithographs have been deceptively given intaglio plate marks to create a decorative and antique effect.

These are the most common printing processes used for the circulation of maps. For more details on processes used for printing, check out the PRINTS section of our Art Emporium.

Later colour: The majority of copper and steel engravings were published uncoloured - particularly with the many views and reproductions of early paintings - whether of views or people. The most notable exception is with engravings of natural history subjects, although for reasons of economy many of these were also published in black and white.

Lithographs were either hand-coloured at the time of publication or, more recently, printed in colour. There are once again exceptions to this, when the original owner of the plates and over-runs has had these works coloured to the early specifications at a later date. The colour-printed images will always obviously be "original" colour.
In most cases, if the hand-colouring is well done, and is sympathetic to the style of the period of the original work, it will enhance the enjoyment of the image; and if auctioned alongside the uncoloured work would usually achieve a higher price. A purist, in not appreciating the later-coloured work, would be in the minority!

Identification of antique maps and prints.

An experienced dealer will usually be able to identify a work from its style alone. Once you become familiar with the artists, cartographers, and engravers (whose names often appear at the base of an image), you should begin to experience a sense of achievement when you are able to recognize the works for yourself.

The printing process often indicates an approximate date of publication. The style of the printing process often indicates the artist or technician. The paper gives an indication as to the age of a work. When there is a name, or words or dates printed within the image, or along the edge outside the top or bottom of the image, it is an even greater assistance. If there is printing on the reverse, the text will often assist in date or origin. All of these are the basic indications of a work's identity and age. None of the above, however, guarantees originality; as many later editions, even by venerable publishers, did not show a change in the attribution or date as printed on the original plate.

Even today, unless you are familiar with the composition of the paper used over the years, you cannot assume an image is an original antique print or map - particularly if you are viewing a framed work through glass. It is always wise to unframe a work prior to assuming even its condition, as damage from a poor framing process can then be detected.

A damaged work can also look quite presentable once framed. Although the damaged image would retain its decorative value, its investment value could be negatively affected, even halved, by the damage and/or its repair. In many cases however, a collector might be pleased to find the work to complete a collection, and might settle for it anyway until one in better condition could be found to replace it.

The printed surface.

The condition of a map or print depends to a great extent upon the quality of the medium on which it is printed. Whilst the good quality of early hand-made paper can be credited for the survival of the majority of antique maps and prints we see today; many earlier works were printed on parchment, which is quite durable medium if treated kindly. Technically, parchment is a writing surface prepared from the skin of a sheep or a goat. Nowadays, parchment is frequently wrongly attributed. Vellum, which was a particularly fine type of parchment made from calf's-skin, was also used.

Fine quality early print making was done on strong, thick, hand-made paper from France, Germany, Switzerland, and - finest of all - the Ancona area of northern Italy. The English tended to import their paper from France until 1610, when their native cottage industry began producing good-quality, hand-made paper. A pulped mixture of linen and rags was pressed onto a close-meshed, wire tray. The vertical and horizontal lines which are still apparent on holding the paper up to the light, are evidence of the wire mesh on which the paper was pressed, all those centuries ago.

Watermarks are sometimes present on the paper, which can help in dating the work. However, they may also be slightly misleading, as a single batch of paper was occasionally used over the duration of two or three decades. The absence of a watermark does not imply the work is a fake, nor does it have any affect on value.

Conservation and Preservation.

Maps and prints which are in good condition should be free of 'foxing', the small yellowish-brown spots which mark the paper. Although these may lend an aura of antiquity to the map, they unfortunately signal an unhealthy-state of affairs, being the result of fungi or foreign chemicals penetrating the fibres of the paper. The most common cause of foxing is mishandling, although exposure to dust or humid climactic conditions can produce a fungus which will lead to the rapid deterioration of the artwork.

To start on a more serious note, the most important thing to remember if you wish to preserve artworks in their optimum state, is that when presenting them whether by framing or in the simplest method of preservation for handling, we would suggest you only use conservation materials. When storing rare and fragile loose-leaf items such as antique maps and prints for preservation, it is wise to seal them from contamination within an acid-free conservation product. Conservation envelopes such as transparent milar or polyweld are great for handling and viewing, which of course increases the enjoyment of the purchase. Acid-free boxes are also available. If these products are not available, at least wrap the work in acid-free tissue before enclosing it from the weather.

If handling actual prints it is always wise to wash hands with soap first. Unfortunately, hands continuously exude oil and pick up dust and consequently, stain the paper - although the telltale results may not surface for many years, and will annoy long after the mishandling! Cotton gloves are usually worn by workers handling old paper in museums, and by collectors of valuable works of art.

Prints should be carefully handled by their extremities. Many early engravings and lithographs have been damaged by the smudging of the inked or coloured image through mishandling. Also, paper works are fragile. Take care not to damage them, particularly if there is already a slight marginal tear, in which case they would be more vulnerable. Try not to bend or dint prints as this also can leave a permanent mark. Any damage will affect the ultimate value of a work.

Framed works should be protected from impurities and therefore sealed off from the environment. Conservation materials are these days readily available, although they are a little more expensive than previous framing materials. For absolute protection, the corners of a frame's timber moulding should be closely articulated, and the back of the frame sealed along its edges with an acid-free tape. Most importantly, the matt-board which touches the actual printed work should be acid-free.