Coming soon.
Bijoux Coloring Book #8
From Gems Press
Paperback
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Welcome to Chromatic Wood Type Specimens to Color Volume One: A Coloring Book of 26 Classic Illustrations Inspired by Specimens of Chromatic Wood Type, Borders, Etc. By William H. Page & Co. 1874.
In 1874, the William H. Page & Co. of Greeneville, Connecticut, published a specimen book unlike any other in the wood type trade: 100 plates of chromatic type and borders, printed in up to seven colors apiece. It wasn’t for sale to the public, but for the company’s traveling agents, who used it to show to printers around the country.
Chromatic type worked by splitting a single letter into two or more matching pieces, each inked a different color and run through the press separately. A letter that passed through red ink, then through blue, might come out red on top, blue on the bottom, and purple where the two overlapped. Lining up each pass by hand, a process called registration, took real skill.
The 100 plates in Page’s book are still considered the high point of the art. The 26 plates in this coloring book are drawn from that collection. You can see more pages from the original book at the Public Domain Review (publicdomainreview.org), or download the whole volume from the Internet Archive (archive.org).
We’ve also reproduced all 26 original illustrations in color on the cover of this book.
We’ve inserted “blank” pages between the drawings so you don’t have to worry about your markers bleeding through. But instead of leaving those pages truly blank, we’ve added mini-images of creatures from Chromatic Wood Type Specimens to Color Volume Two for your enjoyment.
