More about the woodburytype

To add to my terse mention of the woodburytype the other day, I bring you a paragraph of text, and a video.

The paragraph is from Richard Benson’s book The printed pic­ture [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008]:

The woodburytype plate was hard to make, but once done it could generate a lot of inexpensive prints. They curled ter­ribly and the borders were always a mess, from the excess gelatin squeezing out, so they were always mounted. The wood­bury­type used no silver, which saved money, and it could produce mono­chro­mat­ic prints in any color, ac­cord­ing to the pigment used. The prints were also never wet, so all the com­plex handling of wet paper was avoided. Most of them were colored to imitate albumen prints, so the viewers believed they were seeing a “real” photograph. The tech­nol­o­gy didn’t allow prints much bigger than eight by ten in­ches [20 x 25 cm], but these beautiful little prints never had to go into a hypo bath so they are remarkably permanent.

This video from George Eastman House shows the wood­bury­type printing process in action: