"All Fairly Engraven"?: Punches in England, 1695 to 1706

During the first decades of the eighteenth century, John Walsh (?1665/6-1736) was clearly the leading music publisher in all of Europe. A large part of his success was the result of him refining the music engraving process by stamping musical symbols onto zinc or pewter plates with metal punches. A few early critics decried a loss of aesthetic quality, but the modern consensus is that "punching" musical notation was faster and cheaper than other techniques in use at that time. The production techniques that Walsh used contributed to his success and ability to deliver to consumers in London a vast array of the most recent and popular music composed in Europe.¹

When exactly were punches first used in England? Based on his study of Walsh's songbook publications, David Hunter has suggested that Walsh introduced both pewter plates and punches by 1700.² Thomas Cross, however, possibly as early as around 1690, made the claim that "Gent[s] may have their works fairly engraved, as cheap as Puncht & Sooner."³ This seems to suggest that the technique was growing in popularity before its adoption by Walsh and the Amsterdam printer Estienne Roger. Furthermore, John Hawkins suggested that Dutch engravers were responsible for developing the technique of engraving with punches, reporting that they had developed a way to soften copper "so as to render it susceptible of an impression from the stroke of a hammer on a punch."⁴

The use of punches in the engraving process, however, predates Dutch artisans. They are evident in Venetian maps from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Italy was the center of map printing in the sixteenth century, with printers in Venice utilizing the most highly developed cartographic techniques of the day. Tony Campbell credits the development of punches for engraving map symbols to the German printer Konrad Sweynheym, noting that the 1478 Rome edition of Ptolemy's Geographia contains the earliest evidence of the technique.⁵ Although Campbell claims that a German introduced punches to the engraving process, prior to the seventeenth century their use was confined almost exclusively to Italian map printers. While map engravers used punches primarily to produce letters (the most laborious part of the process), other punches included numbers, stars, and an assortment of symbols used to denote towns.⁶ Campbell confesses, however, that while there was a formalized and continuous practice of using punches for engraving maps, only a relatively small number of instances have been detected.⁷ Furthermore, he notes that although punches reappear intermittently and for a variety of features in later centuries, by 1600 their systematic use in the printing process had declined significantly.

Meanwhile, a flourishing map trade had developed in Antwerp and Amsterdam, effectively succeeding the Italian craftsmen as the leading experts in copper plate engraving. They were especially influenced by German and French developments in printing techniques.⁸ Hawkins's assertion that the art of engraving music with punches was learned from map printers in the Netherlands, therefore, remains credible.

A more obvious model for the use of punches in the engraving process is found in the history of moveable type, where punches were used to form the matrices from which type was cast. The most significant difference is that the matrix punch is cut to a wrong-reading (reverse) orientation like those used in leather and metal work. For intaglio engraving, the punch must be cut to a right-reading orientation so as to leave a reverse image on the surface of the plate. Punch cutters in the seventeenth century, therefore, were experienced at carving musical symbols on the ends of steel punches, and it would not have been difficult for music engravers to acquire suitable punches for their craft. Evidence of the use of such tools before the end of the seventeenth century may still be inconclusive, but it looks stronger in the light of the evidence just mentioned. In any event, the music published by John...