Rare books, manuscripts, music, ephemera…
31st October 2019
We love to learn about new and obscure methods of printing, illustration, and reproduction, so it was a treat to recently stumble across a portrait produced by a method we had never encountered before: physionotrace. Physionotrace, ‘the first system invented to produce multiple copies of a portrait, was invented in 1786 by Gilles-Louis Chrétien (1774–1811). […]
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6th September 2019
We have come across some unique things here at Simon Beattie Ltd, but this one is new to us: lepidochromy, i.e., printing with butterflies. Yes, you read that correctly: there is a printing process wherein actual butterflies are ‘printed’. It is a type of transfer illustration, and not dissimilar to other types of ‘nature printing’ […]
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