There are a couple of things that I found rather interesting about this Mystery thing...
1.) The fact that it was names...
2.) The fact that there wasn't any other text around them....
3.) They are engraved into the surface...
Now, what I'm wondering about... and this is based on some of my own work doing etchings...of the artistic variety rather than the commercial....
First of all, when you are inking for an etching, you can control "where" you put the ink on a plate... If you don't want to ink the whole plate, you don't have to bother... Because, as Coby has pointed out earlier, your goal is to push ink into the cut away (engraved or acid-etched) lines of your drawing or of... in this case... the writing...
So, it would be very easy to just ink one signature on the plate...then clean away the ink around it... Artists do stuff like this a lot when they are working with a plate... Just make one or two plates to print from and just ink a part of each plate with a particular colour of ink, etc....
OK... so... what if the whole point of this "thing" is for mass producing a signature on something??? Like maybe the signature that is often printed out on the edge of an etching print... on the... (can't remember what it's called... but it is the large white border that remains after you have pressed the etching plate into dampened rag-type paper to create a print. I have a nice etching here at my place... very large and about 200 years old... and it has the artist's signature pressed into that white space well away from where the edge of the plate marked the paper... It was done with something lighter that didn't crush into the page... but it isn't hand-signed... it's the same ink that was used on the plate... I'm sure of that....
Anyhow, that still doesn't mean it isn't a practice piece, but that there also must have been times when a single signature would have been engraved on some kind of plate for doing repetitive signatures... and that it would have been possible to just ink any particular line of print and do a small run with the plate...
Would be interesting to know who some of the people on the plate are... if they were artists, politicians, bankers or some such thing... |
