Rotogravure

Rotogravure (roto or gravure for short) is a type of intaglio printing process, which involves engraving the image onto an image carrier. In gravure printing, the image is engraved onto a cylinder because, like offset printing and flexography, it uses a rotary printing press. Once a staple of newspaper photo features, the rotogravure process is still used for commercial printing of magazines, postcards, and corrugated (cardboard) and other product packaging.

In the 19th century, a number of developments in photography allowed the production of photo-mechanical printing plates. W H fox Talbot mentions in 1852 the use of a textile in the photographic process to create half-tones in the printing plate. A French patent in 1860 describes a reel-fed gravure press. A collaboration between Klic and Fawcett in Lancaster resulted in the founding of the Rembrandt Intaglio Printing Company in 1895, which company produced art prints. In 1906 they marketed the first multi-colour gravure print.

In 1912 Messrs Bruckman in Munich produced proofs for Bavarian postage stamps which went into production in 1914. Also in 1912 newspaper supplements printed by reel-fed gravure were on sale in London and Berlin (The Illustrated London News and Der Weltspiegel ).

Irving Berlin's song "Easter Parade" specifically refers to these type of supplements in the lines "the photographers will snap us, and you'll find that you're in the rotogravure". And the song "Hooray for Hollywood" contains the line "…armed with photos from local rotos" referring to young actresses hoping to make it in the movie industry.

In 1932 a George Gallup "Survey of Reader Interest in Various Sections of Sunday Newspapers to Determine the Relative Value of Rotogravure as an Advertising Medium" found that these special rotogravures were the most widely read sections of the paper and that advertisements there were three times more likely to be seen by readers than in any other section.

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