I was lucky enough to do a fair amount of travel for my work in academic publishing, flying to a dozen different cities in six countries and on three continents: Kyoto (Japan), Toledo (Spain), Venice (Italy), Hong Kong (China), Winnipeg (Canada) and more than half a dozen cities in the U.S. (where my conveyance was mostly by train). At both Princeton and Temple university presses, I was responsible for producing museum-quality art books and other volumes that required reproduction of images at a high degree of verisimilitude. Rendering fine detail and accurate color was critical.

The printer, no matter how skillful the press operator or technologically advanced the printing press, can’t be expected to know what the final product should look like. That’s why publishers send a qualified representative to be “on press” while the book is being printed. Not that every illustrated book is printed under the eye of an expert. Many picture books don’t need that level of reproduction. In such cases, the printer is instructed to render “pleasing color” — an image that looks pretty or lifelike, but maybe not the exact shade of fire engine red in the original. And publishers don’t want to spend good money to send somebody half way around the world for a few days or a few weeks to make sure the product is color-accurate. But if you’re producing an art book that the purchaser can take to the museum and compare it to the painting on the wall, the publisher’s reputation can be on the line. Once, to convince skeptics, I went to a couple of museum shops and picked up a couple of postcard reproductions of Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party. One rendered the background vegetation on the river bank a realistic shade of green, the other a somber blue.

Reproducing accurate color using offset printing technology is not easy. So many slips between cup and lip; that is, between the original in life and the two-dimensional image on the printing sheet. The journey from life to paper typically starts with a photograph of a scene or an object, let’s say, a painting by Vermeer. No matter how skilled the photographer or sophisticated the camera, color photography, whether digital or conventional, has a limited color gamut. The technology can capture only so much of the visible spectrum and no more. It’s a matter of physics, or, more specifically, optics. So, the production of an art book begins with an image that’s already a step away from verisimilitude.

to be continued . . .