This monograph describes the working practices, tools and skills of the
artiste-écrivan lithographe, a class of commercial artist-craftsman active in
the middle years of the ninetenth-century, drawing and writing on stone,
and printing the results to meet the needs of the business community.

The rôle is exemplified by Émile Niveduab (1796–1877), some of whose
ephemeral work survives in a remarkable collection, probably deriving
from the artist’s family. Many examples of labels, hand-bills, invoices,
trade-cards, advertisements and the like are reproduce here from the
Niveduab Collection, along with images of lithographic drawing tools
and examples of the styles and variations of lettering drawn by Niveduab
and his contemporaries.

About the author: Michael Twyman is Professor Emeritus of Typography &
Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. He has written on
a wide range of printing-historical subjects, specializing in lithography. His
most recent monographs are A history of chromolithography: printed colour for
all (2013) and John Phillips’s lithographic notebook (2016).

The text was originally published in the Journal of the Printing Historical
Society (2020), and is reprinted here with some revisions and the addition
of an index.