Themes in Aquatint

San Francisco, CA: The Book Club of California. Near Fine in Very Good dust jacket. 1978. Limited Edition; 1st Printing. Hardcover. Color Illustrations; Limited to 500 unnumbered copies (printed at Cambridge University Press with colour plates printed at the Curwen Press, London). The Book Club of California Volume # 160. Typographical design by John Dreyfus. This book is in Near Fine condition and has a Very Good dust jacket. The book and its contents are in clean, bright condition. There is a small, inked previous owner's name on the rear pastedown page. The text pages are clean and bright. This copy includes the plain, unprinted original dust jacket, which has been marked with the title and date on the spine by a helpful former owner. The dust jacket has several edge tears and some light toning / sunning. "Aquatint is an intaglio printmaking technique, a variant of etching that produces areas of tone rather than lines. For this reason it has mostly been used in conjunction with etching, to give both lines and shaded tone. It has also been used historically to print in colour, both by printing with multiple plates in different colours, and by making monochrome prints that were then hand-coloured with watercolour. Demonstration sections of printed aquatint, magnified. It has been in regular use since the later 18th century, and was most widely used between about 1770 and 1830, when it was used both for artistic prints and decorative ones. After about 1830 it lost ground to lithography and other techniques. There have been periodic revivals among artists since then. An aquatint plate wears out relatively quickly, and is less easily reworked than other intaglio plates. Many of Goya's plates were reprinted too often posthumously, giving very poor impressions. " (from Wikipedia) .