Lithography Stone

[musket]

Inherited from my dad. Around 10" x 12". Don't know how old but from the style my guess would be late 19th to early 20th Century.

 

[Artyczar]

Now those are cool.

 

[musket]

Yeah it is. There's only one, inked on both sides.

 

[stlukesguild]

Odd that the image wasn't ground off after the end of the run of the print.

 

[musket]

True, but I'm happy about it.

This thing weighs a ton.

 

[stlukesguild]

The print department in my Art School employed stones for lithography almost exclusively. They had literally hundreds of stones. I took one semester of Lithography but preferred intaglio and woodblock,

 

[snoball]

Those are neat to own.

 

[stlukesguild]

They weigh a ton.

 

[WFMartin]

I'm a retired lithographer, so those represent some nice "litho history" to me. I never worked with litho stones, because I began working in the lithographic trade much after those were used. However, I did do some work with zinc, litho plates upon which I drew with a wax-ey crayon. That was in a "General Graphic Arts" class I took in college. Litho stones are fascinating, because of their incredibly smooth surface, and the skill that was involved in the application of the litho ink to them by highly-skilled artisans. Keep in mind that the application to the litho stone had to be REVERSED, because this was a form of DIRECT lithography, as compared to the "offset lithography" that we have today, in which the plate is right-reading, the impression on the "offset blanket" is reversed, and then......THAT image (ink) is transferred to the paper.