REPRODUCTION OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



a great amount of mechanical skill, for even the slightest 

 slip of the tool could ruin an engraving, or a considerable 

 portion of it, that may have taken hours or even days to 

 produce. 



If only a single engraver worked upon a single large 

 engraving, as he usually did in the best class of work, 

 the time required to produce such a block was so great 

 that for ordinary weekly, or monthly, periodicals, 

 where timeliness is a determining element, its use was 

 out of the question. To hasten the engraving-process, 

 therefore, it was customary to cut the block into several 

 smaller pieces after the artist had finished his drawing, 

 turning over the pieces to a corresponding number of 

 engravers, each of whom engraved the section of the 

 picture assigned him. This was of course a great saving 

 of time, as the blocks could be clamped together when 

 finished, ready for printing, presenting the same ap- 

 pearance and giving the same result as in the case of the 

 single block. In such cases the individuality of the en- 

 graver was, of course, lost a most important element 

 in fine engravings. 



Waiving questions of the relative artistic effects ob- 

 tainable by wood-engraving as compared with modern 

 photographic methods, two other elements were de- 

 terminative in deciding the question of the survival of 

 wood-engraving when in competition with photographic 

 processes. These elements are time and cost of produc- 

 tion. The time consumed is of course commensurate 

 with the cost where human labor is concerned, and the 

 relative time of producing a wood-engraving as com- 

 pared with a photographic block may be roughly repre- 



