Screen printing is a comparatively young process, originating in America around the turn of the 20th century. Surprisingly, no comprehensive history of the medium has appeared until now. Whilst a considerable body of technical literature has been published over the years in various countries, the overall picture has remained speculative and incomplete, leading one 1970s exhibition text to observe:
Despite the fact that it is the only major graphic medium to emerge this century, it is as difficult to piece together the early history of screen printing as to reconstruct 15th-century relief printing from the incunabula of the woodcut.
The task of investigating the diverse and fragmentary sources and crafting them into a coherent narrative, a mammoth undertaking, has been accomplished by Guido Lengwiler in his account of the medium over the first half of the 20th century.
The scene is set with a brief introduction to the different kinds of printing in use at the turn of the century, followed by quite a comprehensive survey of the different applications of stencils, from colouring printed books and games to the early technology of office duplicators, which contributed to the rise of screen printing. The first major screen-printed items in mass production were felt pennants sold as souvenirs or used as advertising. The simple graphics and bold lettering were well-adapted to the technique and influenced the look of early 20th-century American commercial graphic design. The processes patented for decorating pennants came to be applied to other graphic media including signs, posters and ‘displays’ (show cards or point-of-sale graphics for retail). The advantage of screen printing over more established processes like lithography for these formats was the relatively low set up cost and the consequent economic feasibility of relatively short print runs responding to changing product lines.
Lengwiler goes on to commemorate the unsung pioneers and chroniclers of early graphic screen printing, marshalling an impressive array of sources, patent applications, business contracts and licenses, correspondence, memoirs, advertisements and articles in trade journals, bringing vividly to life the achievements of the inventors, designers and entrepreneurs who founded evocatively-named enterprises like Velvetone, Vitachrome and Selectasine. The Selectasine company was especially active in promoting ‘screen process printing’, as it was then called, all over the United States and abroad through a highly developed and tightly controlled system of licensees. Some of these industry ground-breakers explained their work in the trade journal Signs of the times but Selectasine also published regular ‘service features’ (supplements to the handbook issued to all licensees), passing on technical know-how and explaining new processes and materials. The period between the two world wars saw an exponential growth of advertising and associated technologies like screen printing. This section of the book provides a fascinating view of the social and economic history of the United States in the era spanning the First World War, the ‘Roaring Twenties’, the Great Depression and the Second World War. This period also saw the foundation of industry bodies such as the Screen Process Printing Association and the adoption of screen printing, re-christened ‘serigraphy’, as a fine art medium, a departure nurtured by the Federal Art Project, one of the work-creating initiatives of Roosevelt's ‘New Deal’.
Later chapters include a technical history of the various components of screen printing, stencils, screens, printing inks and presses, recreated from patent applications, technical handbooks, and company archives, which will interest practitioners as well as historians. The chequered early fortunes of the industry in Europe, where it encountered a markedly different business culture, are entertainingly recounted. This is followed by the story of screen printing's conscription to the allied effort during the Second World War, which drove a frenzy of innovation in many industries, one result being the invention of the screen-printed circuit boards that revolutionised electronics. Finally screen printing's applications in other industries like textiles, glass and ceramics are described.
The broadly chronological narrative thrust of Lengwiler's account with its many biographical vignettes make it enjoyably readable. The writing style is accessible for the general reader, the many inevitable technical definitions are briefly outlined without detaining the more specialist reader with laborious redundant explanations. One way this is achieved is by the liberal provision of informative side panels presenting condensed accounts of the key individuals, companies, processes and industries discussed in the main text. The text is followed by endnotes, a list of patents, acknowledgements, and an index, and the book is attractively and sturdily bound. The layout is attractively designed and to describe the book as lavishly illustrated is an understatement. An astonishing wealth of photographs from family and company archives, technical illustrations from patent applications and industry handbooks, advertisements from trade journals, business contracts and licences, and (most appealingly for this reader) the industry's often sumptuously coloured and beautifully designed products themselves are reproduced on almost every page. This makes the book a rich visual resource for contemporary students and practitioners in graphic and other design disciplines as well as a key text for historians of art and design, advertising and communications, business and industry, sociology and political economy.
