WOOD ENGRAVING. The art of wood engraving is also known as xylography, a dis tinctly modern term derived from the Greek words .rylos —wood, and grapko — to write, to inscribe. It is the art of producing in rend a reverse or negative of a picture on wood which when inked and impressed on paper or other surface will make a positive of the picture.
If to the an of pnnting we owe an inestima ble debt for bringing to us the record of the thought and history of all times, to the kindred and older art of the wood engraver we awe almost equal obligations. It gave to the cum mon people the pictures by which they could be made to understand the purport of written and printed words.
Technique.— While the recent inventions of •process engraving,' using photography, labor-saving tools, etc., make the technique of working complicated, the great works of the great masters of wood engraving were done in the very simplest manner. A block of close grained wood (boxwood only is used these days) receives on one side a perfectly smooth and polished surface. Its thickness is .918 of an inch, known as •type-high," or the height of the type along with which it may go into the 'form' for the press. The smooth side is next covered with a layer of white chalk (this is known as •grounding') which is better to draw on than the smooth wood surface. On this the drawing is made in negative (the reverse of what is desired in the impression), any lettering, therefore, must read backwards. The work is now done direct on the block by photography, necessitating a sera sitized surface instead of the above-mentioned grounding. From the artist or photographer the block goes to the wood engraver, who, using formeily a draw-knife but now a burin, cuts away cleanly to a certain depth all that the ar tist has left untouched, so that after the work is finished only the drawing remains on the up per surface, and it is in relief. If the finished woodcut be covered with printers' ink and pressed on paper or similar material it gives the imprint of the original drawing. Over and beyond manual dexterity, won by long practice, the wood engraver must also possess a certain degree of artistic temperament as well as being an expert draftsman, even when it is only a oues tion of reproducing the drawing. But, as is the
case with many illustrated sheets, there are fre quently no lines, but the drawing is in water colors or stumpwork. In such cases the en graver must translate the soft tones of the paintbrush either with his own technique or imitate them exactly (facsimile or tone cut). This latter art is the modern technique of American wood engravers, they being the in ventors of it. So great is the difference be tween the old and the modern methods of pro ducing wood engraving it is to de vote a few words to these differences in tech nique. From the 15th to the 18th centuries and even later the blocks were plank cut, that is to say the upper surface ran with the grain. Pear tree or apple-tree wood was generally used and it was engraved with the draw-knife The mod ern technique uses the cross-cut surface and boxwood exclusively, because it has the most regular texture or fibre- The knife has given way to the burin, used as on copper-plate en graving; the burins are of several forms used each for its separate purpose, whether for en graving outlines, or cross-hatching, or tone ef fects, etc. Again for a series of straight paral lel or curved parallel lines and for the backgrounds of landscapes and portraits spe cial machines have been invented which pro duce lines or stippling of more refinement and accuracy than is attainable by hand, at the same time greatly increasing the speed of execution. By changes in the process of treatment several new styles of wood en graving have come into being which will he treated of later, such as the crible, chiaro scuro, 'color° styles. An original woodcut pee ning the taking off of from 6,000 to 10,000 im pressions, but to increase its efficiency in the number of prints possible the process of elec tric deposition of metals has been called into practice and clichis reproduce, in metallic re lief, the surface engraved on the wood. As there is no limit to the number of clichis which can be taken from a single wood block, the number of impressions possible also be comes infinite.