Re: Gum speckles, sizing...glut versus gly website

Baird, Darryl wrote:
>
> OK, after somebody high-jacked my domain name and sent out of bunch of
> tacky sex spam, my website is back and functioning (?) again.
>
> I posted four examples of different gum and paper issues at:
> http://www.darrylbaird.com/ALT/GUM/
>

Darryl, I think the examples may be too small to really tell what you're
seeing. And I'm unsure about the cyanotype example-- which is the glut
and which the glyoxal. If the words are in the same order as the
pictures, then the glyoxal is on the right, and on my monitor it looks
better than the one on the left. But that may be because the image is
too small to see whatever it is we're supposed to be seeing; at any rate
I'm not sure what this has to do with speckling in gum printing.

 I thought this site was supposed to be about speckling in gum
printing-- to provide a taxonomy of speckling so that we could come to
some agreement on what we mean by speckles and by stains and so forth..
But as constituted at present, it looks more like images intended to
support Chris's position on glyoxal vs glutaraldehyde, which means I
would have to provide different images than I was thinking of in order
to participate in that debate visually, and that's not what I signed on
for. I've already said everything I have to say about the questionable
nature of comparing stain on one paper to stain on another paper and
drawing any conclusion about glyoxal vs glutaraldehyde from that
comparison, and I stand by that; I'm not sure it's worth spending any
more time on.

But back to what the images here do have to say about speckling in gum:
Chris has provided the example, thanks Chris, that shows what I mean by
one type of speckling: the speckling in the right side of the image that
she calls "Sizing Melted." These are the speckles that I have seen
several times caused by hot water disrupting the internal sizing of
certain papers. So I think we probably agree about that, except that we
disagree about what to call it.

Yes, I will concede that technically you could say that some parts of
the stain on BFK look like speckles, but to me it doesn't make sense to
call something stain on one paper and speckles on another paper, simply
because stain takes on different appearances on different papers. To me
that's just confusing. My insistence on calling this "stain" and the
speckling in Chris's example "speckles" has to do with the etiology of
the problem. Even if part of it looks like speckles, the unwelcome
appearance of the BFK example is caused by stain, and its appearance is
a function of the paper, as I've said already. To me, stain is stain, no
matter how it looks on different papers. And speckles have a different
etiology, hence a different name. But that's just me. I'm not asking
anyone else to be persuaded to my taxonomy, but I do despair, as I said
before, that we'll ever be able to come to any agreement on terms.
Katharine
Received on Mon Sep 12 11:51:57 2005