Lithographic prints from stones prepared in this way are made on a flat-bed press. The stone is carried forward to print and on its return is dampened and inked, an operation slower than that of rotary printing.
Corrections and changes are made on the stone by carefully scraping or polishing away the parts to be corrected and making the changes with a crayon or pen, but the design can not ordinarily be corrected twice in the same place, as the scraping or polishing removes a part of the surface of the stone and thus lessens the pressure at that place, and the impression there may be imperfect or may completely fail.
This form of lithography is seldom used for Survey illustrations but was formerly much used and is well adapted to the reproduction of drawings of fossils, particularly of remains of dinosaurs and other types of large extinct animals. Examples may be seen in Monographs 8 and 10 and in other early reports of the Geological Survey. The drawings for these illustrations were made directly on stone.
A drawing made on one stone may be transferred in duplicate or in any desired number to another stone, or to a properly grained sheet of zinc and aluminum, from which impressions may be printed on a lithographic press. Both these metals are also used for lithographic printing on rotary presses, the zinc or aluminum plate being bent and secured around a cylinder which rotates continuously in one direction. As one impression is made at each revolution of the cylinder the printing is rapid; but the best printing from a metal plate is inferior to the best printing from a lithographic stone.
Photolithography, like other lithographic processes, has been improved greatly during the last few years--not particularly in results but in methods--by the introduction of metal plates, the rubber blanket offset, the Ben Day films, and many mechanical and chemical devices, so that a brief description of it will not explain the process except in a most general way. As photolithography is a direct process and is relatively cheap it is the one most used for reproducing large maps and other line drawings that have been carefully prepared. Zinc and aluminum plates are now much used in photolithography, for a direct contact photographic print can be made on them, they can be printed flat or bent for use on a rotary press, and they can be stored for future use more economically than stones.