THE OLD SCHOOL PRESS

Moments in the making of Palladio's Homes

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The line drawings arrive from Signor Rapp as pen-and-ink drawings on paper. It is quite normal to get line-blocks made from such artwork (the artwork is essentially transferred to a film which is then used to photoengrave a suitable material, and a variety of materials are used for them). I was a bit worried about the very fine lines that Signor Rapp used - clearly the line-block would need to reproduce these as faithfully as possible. But perfect reproduction isn't possible: a pen line that gets thinner and fades out finishes with grey but a line block is a binary thing: either there is black there or there isn't, so such faint lines can break up. As an experiment I initially had a photopolymer block made directly from the art-work, at the same time as the floor-plans for six of the villas - they are all thick lines and nothing subtle. The latter were fine but the Rapp drawing became very coarse and unusable. One solution - but a rather expensive one - was to have the line drawings digitally scanned and then output directly to film from which the line-blocks could be photoengraved onto magnesium. Another experiment showed that this would be a big improvement, though there was a price to pay.