The Pictorial Album: or, Cabinet of Paintings. Containing Eleven Designs, Executed in Oil Colours, by G.Baxter, from the Original Pictures, with Illustrations in Verse and Prose

Baxter, George (1804-67), printer. The pictorial album; or, cabinet of paintings. Containing eleven designs, executed in oil colours . . . [4], xvi, 71pp. 11 plates (10 in color) plus color-printed vignette on title. London: Chapman and Hall, [1837]. 249 x 185 mm. Publisher's binding of full straight-grain morocco with elaborate gilt stamping on the covers and spine, red and green leather inlays, all edges gilt; boxed. Minor scuffing and edgewear, first few leaves coming loose, some foxing but very good.

First Edition, variant without the date in the title; some other copies have the title reading "The pictorial album; or, cabinet of paintings for 1837." George Baxter invented the first commercially viable color printing process, a combination of intaglio and relief methods that he dubbed "oil-color printing." The process, which he patented in 1835, involved "the coloring of an impression from an outline or key block, which could be either a copper, zinc or steel plate, or a litho stone-though the latter was but seldom used-by successive impressions from color blocks of wood or metal, one for each tint used . . . there was, in fact, no color printing in use in England at the time when Baxter commenced his work, and for a few years he had the field to himself" (Burch, p. 126). Baxter remained in the oil-color printing business until his retirement in 1860, at which time his methods were beginning to be superseded by cheaper color-printing processes like chromolithography.

One of the best examples of Baxter's color printing is The Pictorial Album, which contains 11 oil-color-printed illustrations; it has been called Baxter's greatest collection of his work. According to Geoffrey Wakeman, Chapman and Hall planned to issue the Album as a Christmas gift book in 1836, but "it missed the mark and was not published until 1837, with the result that it was a financial failure" (Wakeman, p. 9). Copies were issued in full morocco bindings with inlays of red, green, yellow or blue leather, the colors of the inlays varying from copy to copy. This binding would have been primarily done by hand with the using of a stamping machine to create the elaborate gold tooling. Wakeman, Victorian Colour Printing (1981).