37 twyman 2001 59 n 107 38 ian proudfoot lithography

37
Twyman (2001), 59, n. 107.
38
Ian Proudfoot, “Lithography at the Crossroads of the East,” Journal of the Printing Historical
Society , 27 (1998): 116.
39
See the complaints of the Russian Bible Society on the absence of printing supplies in Saint
Petersburg in Paterson, The Book for Every Land , 166, 198, 200; Graham Shaw, Printing in Calcutta
to 1800: A Description and Checklist of Printing in Late Eighteenth Century Calcutta (London, 1981),
29–31.
314 Green
Downloaded By: [Green, Nile][University of California, Los Angeles] At: 16:39 20 May 2010

in greatest abundance on the surface of our globe.”
40
Nonetheless, the stones
most favored by early European art lithographers were those from the quarry
at Solenhofen in Bavaria. By around 1820 the Bavarian quarrymen and merchants
had created an efficient supply network, transporting their approximately one-
and-a-half inch thick stones to the major cities of Europe, including Saint Peters-
burg, whose print industry had long relied on supplies from the north German
ports to which it was closely connected.
41
Since we know that the early
Iranian lithographic presses were imported from Saint Petersburg, it seems
reasonable to assume that at least their original stones would have been
German imports. Again, the logistics need to be considered: if the first Iranian
lithographic presses were set up in Tabriz, then this would mean hauling their
stones up into the high mountains from the coast. In fact, rarely more than an
inch and a half thick and of dimensions of in some cases no more than a
square foot, the stones could have been packed easily and safely enough
into the woven saddlebags of the mules which carried the mountain trade.
42
While cracked stones were certainly the lithographer’s greatest headache, the
fact is that lithographic stones were tough and durable commodities which can
be compared in this respect to the portable iron hand presses of the same period.
Everybody Must Get Stones
Although the initial source of the Iranian stones is likely to have been Germany,
this is not to say that this would have continued to be the case when the number
of lithographic presses began to multiply rapidly in Iran. Here again we need to
think through this development with the physical matter of printing in mind.
While lithography’s expansion in Iran and India has recently attracted a good
deal of attention, scholarship has largely ignored the basic problem that each
one of these presses needed to be supplied with the very specific stones on
which the lithographic process depended. If British printers were complaining
about the high price of stones shipped relatively easily between, say, Hamburg
and London, then it is hard to imagine that every cottage industry lithographer
of Isfahan and Kanpur was relying on the same Bavarian quarries. The basic
answer to the problem lies in Raucourt’s observation from 1821 on the global
40
Antoine Raucourt, A Manual of Lithography; Or, Memoir on the Lithographical Experiments Made