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# 7 Plates

The engraver cuts the words exactly as written, reading none of them.

The engraver never met the author. A parcel came to his bench: a drawing, or a page of close description, and he cut what he was given into the endgrain of a boxwood block, line by line, until the picture stood in relief. If the scene needed lettering, a shop sign, a name on a hull, a headline on a discarded newspaper, he cut the letters in mirror image, exactly as written; if the brief had a misspelling, the block carried it. Publishers learned to write every word out fair, because a man cutting reversed letters at speed does not pause to wonder about spelling. When the book was bound, a list of plates stood in the front matter, each picture named with its page, so a buyer at the stall could riffle the copy and see that nothing promised had been left behind at the bindery.

The machine that cuts our blocks has never held a graver either, and every part of that old discipline transfers whole.

## 7.1 Brief the object

The devil will draw anything you can describe. A style label is not a description. Ask for a Victorian engraving and you get the average of every engraving ever scanned: correct hatching, dead scene. Describe the object instead. A hand press with the bed racked out. A devil no taller than the forme he staggers under. Morning light from one high window, falling left to right. Spoiled sheets on the floor and one clean proof pinned to the wall. Name the tools by their right names and say what each figure is doing with its hands. Everything you specify appears. Everything you leave open gets filled with the most probable furniture, which is how a composing stick becomes a vague tray and a chase becomes a picture frame. Write the brief as a bill of materials for the picture.

## 7.2 Every word on the plate, verbatim

Name every word that must appear on the plate, in quotes, letter for letter. Text left implicit will be misspelled or invented, and invented is worse: the sign over the door will say something almost like what you meant, in letterforms too handsome to doubt. The old engraver cut mirrored words in languages he could not read; he reproduced the shapes without reading them. The machine does the same until the shapes run out, and then it improvises. So the brief says: the sign reads SORTS BOUGHT & SOLD, exactly. The ledger spine reads 1893, exactly. Then one clause more: no other lettering anywhere. Leave that clause out and the machine will letter every surface it can reach, crate lids, window glass, the folded newspaper on the floor, all of it earnest gibberish.

## 7.3 One idea per plate

A picture arguing two points argues neither. If the plate is meant to show the folly of trusting an unread proof, it does not also get to show the virtue of good imposition. Cut two blocks. Each plate carries one claim, the caption states the claim, and everything in the frame either serves it or comes out of the brief. A rich scene tempts you the way a long sentence does. The test is the one you use on a paragraph: say what the plate is about in one sentence. If the sentence has an and in the middle, that is two plates.

## 7.4 Earnest hand, absurd subject

The drawing stays dead earnest. Whatever is funny in these plates is funny because a devil is gravely doing something ridiculous, rendered with the sobriety of an alderman’s portrait. Ask the machine for a funny picture and you get mugging: bulged eyes, sweat drops, a scene that elbows you in the ribs. Ask it for a solemn technical illustration of an absurd subject and the plate lands. The joke lives in what is depicted. The engraver of the old shop cut a satirical block with the same patient burin he used for a duchess.

## 7.5 Formats follow the grain

Engraving texture is thousands of near-parallel lines broken by crosshatch, closer to photographic grain than to flat line art. The thrifty lossless formats built for flat tone choke on it: every line is an edge, nothing repeats, and the files swell without one visible line gained. Photographic compression was tuned for exactly this kind of continuous texture and handles it without complaint. So the shop takes the pragmatic format, sets the quality dial at 88, checks the result under a loupe, and stops arguing. This offends people who want the archival format on principle. The principle is sound and the paper does not care. The test is the same as everywhere else in the shop: look at the plate at the size it prints. Either you can point to a fault or there is no fault.

## 7.6 The list keeps itself

The list of plates in the front matter is assembled, never maintained. The build reads every chapter, collects every plate the text calls for, and walks to the drawer to check. A plate referenced but missing stops the run before a sheet is wasted, the way a missing block stopped the old pressman before he inked a forme with a hole in it. A plate sitting in the drawer that no chapter calls for stops the run too. Removing a picture from a book means changing the text and clearing the drawer, and a check that watches only the text will bless a drawer full of orphans until one of them wanders back into print.

Captions are written for the list, where they stand alone, far from their chapters, so each one must name its picture outright: The devil pulls his first proof, never The result of the process described above. Read the assembled list by itself before a release. If every line makes sense with the book shut, the captions are done.

When the product is software, the plates are its generated assets, the diagrams, icons, and sample pages the build produces, and the list of plates is the manifest they are verified against: everything referenced present, everything present referenced. The buyer riffling at the stall is still with us either way. The list is the work’s promise of what it contains, and the build keeps that promise, because your memory will not.

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