Photo books before scanning

[De_Corday]

Please excuse this if it's a dumb question from a young, but...

How were photo books made in the days before scanners?
I ask because I love my wet printed photos much more than my film scans, and I have to imagine the old photo books we all know and love involve a lot of old-school dodging and burning. I know that practically if I wanted to print a photo book I could scan my prints or photograph them with a high-res copy rig of some sort, but... back before any of that was an option, how were photo books made?
How did, say, Frank's negatives get turned into The Americans?

 

[tunalegs]

For many older books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photogravure

 

[Bill Clark]

Photo books before scanning

Made with prints. Simple ones like ours, 8x10 prints slid into clear plastic that became an album. Some mfgrs. had templates for different sized prints. Or, years ago, the triangular holders, one eacg forner if a print then the corners glued to a page then after several pages became an album.

Before I retired, I would make the wedding album pages using layers in Photoshop. I had blank templates for various sizes of albums I offered. I liked making albums this way as it gave me creative control over the album design with the only constraint was the album size and number of pages. After I completed the project I would email jpegs to the client for approval and/or changes.

 

[gns]

The original prints (not the negatives) were photographed on a process camera which produced the negatives from which the printing plates were made. Look up photo offset lithograhy for details.

Here is an interesting series of short videos you might be interested in. Richard Benson passed away last month, but he was one of the masters of translating black and white photographs to ink on paper.

http://www.benson.readandnote.com/videos/photo-offset-lithography

 

[Dwig]

There were a number of ways:

1. The first photo book, by Henry Fox-Talbot, was done with photographic prints individually attached (tipped) onto the book's pages. This was done in the mid 1840s.
2. Separate photogravure prints were tipped onto the printed book's pages.
3. Images could be printed by photogravure directly onto the book's pages after the text was printed and before binding.
4. Similar to #3, offset lithography could be used to print the images on the same press run as the text.

With photogravure and photo offset processes, a large "copy camera" was used to copy the original print and produce an appropriately negative that was used to create the printing plates. Photo offset lithography is the only classic process that is practical for color.

 

[De_Corday]

Thank you all -- this is wonderful.
I'm guessing some photo books today--the "fine art" books-- are made from (assumedly) high-res digital shots of prints?

 

[bayernfan]

great question, i've wondered about the specifics of this myself.

 

[x-ray]

Scanners and digital presses made a huge quality jump in books. Pre digital the printing was relatively coarse even on good paper. It was difficult for the press operators to hold dots in highlights and keep shadows from plugging up. Still there's a beauty to these old books that I really enjoy.

 

[gns]

Scanners and other digital tools have revolutionized the prepress world and led to improvements in the final product, but most commercially published books are printed using the offset litho process.
Of course, digital presses have opened up a whole world of self-publishing that wasn't practical previously.

Here's an interesting article on the great printer/publisher, Steidl...
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/22/gerhard-steidl-is-making-books-an-art-form

 

[Dogman]

For more information on printing processes, "The Printed Picture" by Richard Benson is an outstanding read. Unfortunately, it's out of print and some fools are trying to sell it on Amazon for over $500.

 

[sevo]

With photogravure and photo offset processes, a large "copy camera" was used to copy the original print and produce an appropriately negative that was used to create the printing plates. Photo offset lithography is the only classic process that is practical for color.

Well, no. The majority of colour printed pages you have seen prior to the mid 1990s will have been photogravure - photogravure was and is more consistent and less costly in high volume printing.

Things were a bit different in the earliest days of colour printing - but for different reasons. In the period up to WW I neither process could deliver true colour prints (except experimentally), and then, printers made do with colourized lithography, where painters in the print works manually painted colour plates which were superimposed (in transparent dyes) on top of the black and white halftone - something which was much easier to do in lithography than in intaglio.

 

[twopointeight]

A few ago I had a book of black and white images printed in Canada. I offered scans of the negatives done with an Imacon scanner to the account executive I was working with. He told me that my original prints would be much preferred as their scanner is very high end and customized to their process. And, the original prints would be what they match to. It was all duotone and came out well.

 

[gns]

For more information on printing processes, "The Printed Picture" by Richard Benson is an outstanding read. Unfortunately, it's out of print and some fools are trying to sell it on Amazon for over $500.

The site linked in my first post contains much of the same material, being video of his talks at MOMA during the show (which was also the source of that book). I have the book... It seems like an odd one to have grown in value so much.