Weekly expositor. (Brockway Centre, Mich.) 1882-1894, 1885-02-26
WOOD ENGRAVING n WOOD
- CARVING.

Jonah's gourd Go slow here; was it
Jonah or some other fishermen who
raised that prize gourdD -threatens to
undermine the foundations of Journal
ism and relegatc the press back to the
fourth estate, the position it occupied
in Ben Franklin's time, and the san
feels justified in speaking out in clar-
ionette, CfCd rOcC tones against the
evil before it is eyerlastingly too late.
As long as illustrations were confined
to books, magazines, Bibles. and Il few
special weeklies, we were Il happy and
contented nations; there was place for
cuts, and cuts were in their place; but
now, the little blaze which some one
klndled has become raging confla-
grafton. marring the fair pages of a
great proportion of the newspapers in
the land. OF YOU like "wet goods"
better than the fire simile, start it of
as little rivulct, increasing until it
becomes roaring torrent They are
both the same price,
There are several reasons why this
wood-cut craze is bad. First, large
per cent. of the cuts are execrable in
an artistic point of view, especially the
so-called portraits. Occasionally there
are some that are natural and life-like,
but the larger part no more resemble
the individual they are said to portray
than chalk is like cheese.
Again, newspapers that are in the
habit OF beating their readers out of
large quantities of good reading matter
to which they arc Justly entitled by the
payment of 1.-TWO dollars n year in adj
vance, (or less, as the case may be)
by filing space with these alleged por-
traits are liable to file the cuts away for
future reference, OF window lodges, in
the "bank, and various other handy
places, and spring them again on q
suffering public later. Thus, cut
purporting to be Henry Ward Beecher
this season will perhaps appear next
year as Gladstone or Henry Irving;
Lieutenant Greedy will be shown some
time in the hence as Prince Albert's
son, and so on.
Another evil growing out of this syn
dicate cut business is the cheap notori-
ETY. furnished TO Thomas, Richard and
Henry. Let q man or woman once get
his or her name in the daily papers,
from whatever cause-be drumming for
governor. running away with another
:
bng n bank, or inventing n sclf-acting
wheelbarrow-and forthwith their os-
tensible lincaments are gouged out on
lockwood or maple, stercOtypes or cleo
trotypcs arc made, and appear by the
hundreds in papers which are in the
pool for weeks thereafter. Some
papers squeeze two-column cuts into
one-column width, necesstating slicing
the party's shoulders of, and giving
him a sort of pinched up appearance.
This is bad.
Many papers make it point to pub
lish portraits of local celebrities, the
hero of the sketch standing in" with
the publishers on the cost of the en-
craving. IAN old resident" listens to
the seductive tongue of the interviewer
and is lost. a divorce suit is instituted,
the details are ''racy,h and the unhap-
Ply pair are presented to the public,
either separate and apart or linked to-
gether in wreath like Blame and
Logan cut. A new pastor is called
from somewhere, at raise over his
previous salary of S67.50 and his STU
dious countenance, '!furrowed Ger
with the sickly cast of thought, ="
is printed on seven-cent "print" paper,
with ten-cent news ink, the inevitable
sketch accompanying it, with appro-
pirate head lines, and the dominic is
disheartened and disappointed. 1t looks
more like a disciple of Jack Shepard
than dissemination of the gospel.
And so it goes. Papers in Arizona
and Wyoming, which ought to devote
only a modicum (out with your pencils
and iot this word down-it is of a
choice Variety of their space to polite
al and general affairs, are enabled by
the duplicate process to till several
hundred square inches with cuts of par
ties that their readers don't care a con-
tinental for, to the exclusion of impor-
tant happenings in Poker Fiat, Shirt
tail Gulch, Red-Dog Valley. DcadShot
Bar and various other localities.
Nor is the injury confined alone 10
the reading public There being an
apparent demand for illustrations,
there must be supply; and hence
many misguided youths and men in the
back counties who are handy ut tinker
ing around home with carpenter tools,
and know all about the internal econo-
my of sewing machines and clocks get
the idea that they are natural born en-
gravers, and proceed at once to sharp
en- up sundry brad-awls, broken files q
small chisel or two, and their jack
knives, and announce themselves as
designers and engravers. The local
paper, not to be outdone by the metro.
politan daily, prints the abnormal pro.
auctions of these wood-butchers, and
refers TO them as the work OF 'oul
special artist" Mr.. Soandso. and he
has the big head worse than ever
Many boys are thus ruined for life
While they would have succeeded vel
with scroll saw and simple carving
tools, and produced many handsome
brackets, paper-racks, whatnots, ETC..
which would have sold readily and real
ly been a credit TO them, they have lost
valuable time spelling lockwood and
maple and produced nothing but lo
of unearthly-looking pictures, every
one of which requires key 10 be I'M
derstood.
No, boys and gentleman, the art o.
engraving Is not at the finger-ends O
every ordinary whittier and 'ingeniou:
.'Jack-of-all-trades;" it requires months
of patient toll to even master the rudi
ments necessary to become first-clas'
artist, and years of practice under com
potent masters to rank with them.
These remarks are called out gener