window work 1882 (From Richard Flint)

window work 1882, originally uploaded by bucklesw1. One can likely date the origin of the word lithographer when used for a billposter to the 1850s-70s. Early posters were printed by letterpress (raised type and pictures as on a rubber stamp) and the first multiple sheets were also letterpress. When the printing method of lithography (where an artist uses a sticky crayon to draw an image on a flat stone, then ink is applied that adheres to the sticky areas while the excess ink is washed away, then a paper sheet is pressed on the stone absorbing the ink held on the drawn areas) was first used for posters, it was a slow process to print them one at a time on a flatbed press and hence expensive so multi-sheet lithos were not used. A few circuses began to use lithographed one- or half-sheets for advertising beginning in the mid-1840s and, therefore, the men who posted these smaller, high-quality pictorial sheets in downtown windows were called lithographers (pronounced litho-graphers by circus people but the printers who worked such presses were called li-thog-ra-phers). In the 1870s, cylinder presses (having a constantly rotating drum over the reciprocating flat stone to continually carry sheet after sheet through the press) began to be used for lithographic printing, greatly speeding up the printing time and lowering costs. Lithographic printing rapidly eclipsed the old letterpress poster process in the early 1880s. Lower prices meant that the big multi-sheet posters now could be economically printed lithographically (at a cost of about 4-5 cents per sheet). Nevertheless, as Ole Whitey relates, the downtown man with the smaller window work continued to be called a lithographer, a distinction that should have lost its meaning after the 1880s but it didn't. The above photograph, which can be attributed to 1882, shows the work of a Barnum & London "litho-grapher" and examples of both of the posters seen survive today. The Jumbo poster is the work of the Hatch Lithographic Co. of New York while the less clearly discerned "Continuation of the Compact" by the horse's head is an outstanding creation signed by artist Emil Rothengatter and lithographed by Strobridge. I am sure the value of those posters today vastly exceeds the volume of business done by this store over several years time! Dick Flint Baltimore