Perhaps the most famous periodical to adopt wood-engraved illustrations was The Illustrated London News (1842). One of the first periodicals in the UK to effectively use this technique was The Penny Magazine (1832), whose proprietor, Charles Knight, emphasized his magazine’s ability to bring useful knowledge and high-quality illustrations inexpensively to the masses. Wood-engraved illustration was thus ideally suited for the economies of scale of periodicals as they rapidly expanded in the early nineteenth century. Engraved woodblocks could also be set alongside type in a press bed (locked together in a form), thus allowing text and image to be printed together. Second, these engravings can withstand hundreds of thousands of impressions in a press, far outlasting copper and even steel. First, lines engraved on the endgrain of boxwood (think cross section) can be much finer than previous woodblock techniques, which gouged out wood on the plank side. It uses squared sections of the trunk of the boxwood tree, so hard and densely grained that it allows two significant advantages for printing illustrations. Woodblock engraving was significantly developed by a British engraver, Thomas Bewick, at the end of the eighteenth-century.
Ironically, when the industrial revolution came to the periodical press, it would have to abandon metal for wood to print illustrations at scale.
The newspapers investigated in this project - including The Penny Illustrated Paper (1861), The Illustrated Police News (1864), and The Graphic (1869) - all used a technique called end-grain woodblock engraving. (Front page of The Illustrated Police News from February 16, 1867.)
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