Welcome to the lithographer’s workshop! Step by step, she reveals the secrets behind the art of the lithograph, a printing technique that can be so amazing, it seems like magic. She explains how water and oil do not mix, how drawings vanish and then later reappear. In this workshop, materials are drawn, inked, etched, rolled, and ground with sand until magical pictures can be printed. This wonderful volume is illustrated in lithographic style—in blue, red, and yellow—and takes us back to the origins of this fascinating reproduction technique. It tells of the many attempts the inventor Alois Senefelder made more than two centuries ago to be able to print multiple copies of ideas, musical notation, and art more easily. He experimented like a chemist until he succeeded in providing stone with a memory, as it were. To this day, lithography is a special art, yet at the same time it also gave rise to the processes that are still used today to print books, newspapers, and posters.

GABY BAZIN (*1992) lives in Pantin, north of Paris, but grew up near the French Mediterranean coast. While studying applied arts in Paris, she discovered her love for books and their manufacture. Today she is a graphic designer, illustrator, and printer, as well as a member of the collective La Briche Foraine in Saint-Denis.