In 1996, 291 copper plates, engraved with images of botanical specimens, were re-discovered (according to a later account) ‘in use as counterweights to a lift in the Radcliffe Science Library’,[1] one of the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford.
They had been engraved by leading engravers of the time for two volumes of Robert Morison’s herbal, Plantarum historiae universalis Oxoniensis, published in 1680 and 1699. They had been wrapped in newspaper in the 1950s and stacked together but were found to be in very good condition. Twenty plates were expertly cleaned by the Conservation and Heritage Science team at the Bodleian Library, and re-housed in acid-free tissue with foam surrounds.
When The Old School Press proposed to print from these cleaned plates, the opportunity was taken to print these exceptional survivors once more on the rolling (or etching) press; twelve of the twenty were chosen as examples.
The Old School Press printed from the twelve chosen plates for a limited edition book. To limit any possible degradation of the plates, just forty prints were allowed to be taken from each, and the work of printing them was entrusted to Master Printer Jim Nottingham. To accompany the prints, Professor Stephen Harris, Druce Curator of the Oxford University Herbaria, prepared descriptions of the subject matter of each of the plates; Cambridge historian Scott Mandelbrote provided an introduction to Morison’s herbal and its history; and Jim Nottingham described the plates and the process for printing from them. The book, Plates for a Herbal, was published in May 2025.
Following the cleaning of twenty plates, the Bodleian Library initiated a project to examine in detail portions of both cleaned and uncleaned plates. During 2019 these were scanned in Optical 3D profilometry (O3D) in an Alicona machine at the Department of Engineering Science, at the University of Oxford. (See the earlier blogpost: https://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/theconveyor/copper-plates-in-the-bodleian-libraries/ )
After printing of only a few pulls from a few of the plates in 2024, the same portion of one cleaned plate was measured again using O3D. The results showed that this method requires much refinement before it is able to provide conclusive measurements of the wear on the copper plates. The initial profilometry had been able to show the complete contours of the plate surface, including the canyon created by the engraved lines, but the re-scanning following printing was unable to follow the contours into the depth of the lines due to wet ink trapped below the surface of the plate; at the bottom of the lines the Alicona machine was not able to take an accurate measurement due to the reflectivity of the new ink. Considering that the abrasion to plates during cleaning is one of the sources of wear, it was decided to forego further cleaning for the purposes of measurement. On inspection the plates did not appear to have suffered damage in undergoing the process for which, after all, they had originally been made.
The imaging of copper plates contributed to the results of a project begun at the Bodleian in 2021, a collaboration with the Factum Foundation, to make high-resolution images of low-relief surfaces. The ARCHiOx project has yielded further discoveries, the technological equivalents of finding historical printing surfaces in a lift shaft. (See the earlier blogpost: https://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/theconveyor/archiox-research-and-development-in-imaging/ )
The entire collection of the surviving plates for Morison’s herbal has now been returned to the Sherardian Library of Plant Taxonomy at the University of Oxford.
To watch Jim Nottingham printing from one of the plates visit https://youtu.be/1vfIE5i_Lv0.
To learn more about the published book visit www.theoldschoolpress.com/bookpages/pfah.htm
[1] Anne Hancock, ‘Robert Morison, the first Professor of Botany at Oxford’, Oxford Plant Systematics, 13 (2006), 14-15.