The Photozincographic Edition
This process, which led to the publication in 1861, was the brainchild of Colonel Henry James, the Director General at the Ordnance Survey. The process involved the transferring of a photograph onto zinc or stone, which could then be used directly for printing or, alternatively, onto the waxed surface of a copper plate where the image formed a guide for engraving. It was a system that enabled facsimile reproduction en masse and thus, following a meeting with William Ewart Gladstone in 1859, in which James was allegedly asked by the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer, whether he "knew of any process by which some of our ancient manuscripts in the Record Office could be copied", James emphasised the superiority of this process over other reproductions, such as lithography, which used heavy and brittle stone blocks and claimed that the process would be ideal for making cheap facsimile copies of the Domesday Book.
In a letter to the assistant Secretary to the Treasury, George Hamilton in October 1860, James outlined the cost of a complete reproduction of the Domesday Book as an estimated £1575 for 500 copies or, alternatively, £3. 3s. per copy. James further outlined the cost of a single county to demonstrate the affordability of the process, using Cornwall as an example of one of the shorter entries in the volumes (eleven folio pages) and estimating the cost of 500 copies to be £11. 2s. 4d. On 14 January 1861, James was granted permission to photo-zincograph the Cornwall fragment of the Domesday Book as a Treasury-funded experiment to determine the success of the process and, consequently, by 1863 the Ordnance Survey had photozincographed the Domesday Book in its entirety, publishing it in thirty two county volumes.
The general public were excited about the invention of photo-zincography. Period newspapers such as the Photographic News reported on the events surrounding the invention and even supplied their readers with an example of a document which had undergone the process.
Read more about this topic: Publication Of Domesday Book
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