Illustrated London News
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Illustrated London News was a magazine founded by Herbert Ingram and his friend Mark Lemon, the editor of the magazine Punch. With Lemon as his chief adviser, the first edition of the Illustrated London News appeared on 14 May, 1842. Costing sixpence, the magazine had sixteen pages and thirty-two woodcuts. The first edition included pictures of the war in Afghanistan, a train crash in France, a steamboat explosion in Canada and a fancy dress ball at Buckingham Palace.
Although 26,000 copies of the first number were disposed of, there was a great falling off in the sale of the second and subsequent numbers. Herbert Ingram, however, was determined to make his property a success, and one that is still spoken of as a brilliant stroke of journalistic enterprise. He sent to every clergyman in the country a copy of the number containing illustrations of the installation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and by this means secured many new subscribers.
The magazine was published weekly until 1971, when it became a monthly. From 1989, it was published bi-monthly, then quarterly and currently bi-annually.[1]
Notes
The first modern news picture appeared in the "The Illustrated London News" in 1842. It showed the attempted assassination of Queen Victoria.
However the picture was simply an artist's impression of what had happened. No camera at the time could have caught the action and there wasn't a mechanical way to reproduce the photograph even if it had been taken.
Artists at that time would make a sketch of the scene, followed by a more detailed drawing. The drawing would be copied, sometimes in reverse, onto a smooth block of wood. A craftsman would cut away all the surface except the lines to be printed. In these pictures shadows were represented by many small separate strokes.
The finished block would then be pressed into clay, making an impression of the image. Molten type metal was then poured onto the clay making a cast. This cast plate was used in the ‘letterpress’ printing process where raised areas of metal carry the ink.
When photography came into use in the 1840’s it did not alter newspaper reporting because the wood engraving and printing processes of the time could only render solid backs and whites. The intermediate shades of grey found in a photograph could not be reproduced.
Photography simply supported the engraving process by replacing the initial artist drawn sketch of the scene. In 1891 in the USA alone there were 1,000 artists producing more than 10,000 drawings a week for the press. --http://www.ted.photographer.org.uk/photohistory_inprint.htm [Dec 2004]
On May 14th 1842, the first issue of the Illustrated London News was published. Its founder was a young printer, Herbert Ingram, a native of Boston, Lincolnshire. He had come to London and had decided that the time was ripe for the public to have a newspaper full of pictures in addition to the printed word.
Each picture had to be drawn by an artist and then engraved by hand on pieces of box-wood. Captions and articles had to be hand-set, letter by letter. A small steam engine powered the printing machine.
The new paper was a success from the beginning: 26,000 issues of the first copy were sold, and by 1851 , the year of The Great Exhibition in Hyde Park,sales reached 130,000 per week. The issue of March 14th, 1863, dealing with the marriage of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, numbered 310.000 copies. Special numbers in those far-off days cost Three Shillings.
In the year 1879, The ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS claimed to be the fastest wood-cut printing establishment in the world. The Ingram Rotary machine had been invented. It printed both sides of the paper at once aand turned out 6,500 copies per hour. It required only four men to operate it, whereas thirty men and five machines were needed previously.
Although photography had been used since 1842 as a basis from which wood engravings were copied it was not until 1860 that an illustration was photographed onto the box-wood and then engraved by hand. --http://www.iln.org.uk/iln_years/ilnhist1951.htm [Dec 2004]
