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Welcome, Artist Printer!

Nos. 1 and 2 to hand. Beautifully printed, original, lively, and practical, it has stepped straight into the front rank of trade journalism, and we think it will keep there. In place of an ordinary running-head, it has its title device repeated on every page. The young lady in the apple-tree sits on the left in even pages and on the right in odd ones. She is very graceful, but as she makes her appearance some fifty times in the two numbers, there is perhaps a little too much of her. The new paper is very outspoken in its criticisms, both of its trade contemporaries, and of typefounders' novelties.

In the Printers' Register, under the head of « A New Zealand Caxtou, » Mr William Blades tells the story of Mr Colenso and the first Maori New Testament, gathered from Mr Colenso's « Jubilee » paper, already referred to several times in these pages. No man is better qualified than Mr Blades to deal with a subject like this.

Mr Hilton's British Printer for March-April, as a fine-art trade organ, has far surpassed any of its English contemporaries, and will bear comparison with the best periodicals of the kind published elsewhere. As we said before, we would be glad to see it more English and less German. In the present number we see a beautiful curtain combination, with a great variety of scrolls and fringes. There is no hint as to its origin, but it is self-evidently German. No English founder would venture to produce so elaborate a design, and no American combination would have been wrought out with so much delicacy and attention to detail. The leading feature in this number is a portrait, with ornamental border, in chromo-xylography—or, in plain English, wood-engraving, a special block having been cut in register for each color. We have never seen a piece of chromographic printing, by lithography or any other process, to approach this for beauty and delicacy. The portrait is that of Johan Rudolph Kutschker, first Bishop of Vienna, and is a masterpiece by the greatest master of compound wood-engraving the world has known—Heinrich Knöfler, who died near Vienna in 1886. A portrait and biography of this remarkable man appeared in the first number of the British Printer, and we intend one day adding the latter to our series of « Worthies of the Craft. » We are not surprised to read that an exhibition of works by this artist last year was a great attraction to English printers. The work possesses a fascination to us beyond anything of the kind we have ever seen. How many blocks have been used in the plate before us we cannot say, but a common number with the artist was ten to twelve. Part of the design before us consists of an oval of pearls, two or three hundred in number, about one-eighth of an inch in diameter, each one delicately shaded in two shades of gray! Each one of these must have been engraved in each of the eight or ten blocks, and the register is absolutely faultless. It is astonishing to read that the artist produced « numerous » works of this class, some very large. And it is gratifying to know that the art is not lost. His two sons were carefully trained by their father, and produce work of similar character. They have reprinted this splendid example of their late father's work specially for the British Printer. Some very good specimens of job-work are shown, indicating the increase of taste among the English printers. One of these—a photographers' business card, by Mr Jones of the Darien Press, Edinburgh, is very beautiful in its direct simplicity.

Our valued weekly Paris contemporary, the Gutenberg-Journal, is chiefly occupied with exhibition notes. Typo would give a good deal to see this show—the finest world's fair ever held.

The Paper World for June has a valuable and interesting illustrated article on typewriters. It has also portraits of two distinguished journalists—the late Horace Greeley and Mr George W. Childs of the Philadelphia Ledger.