Printing of Cotton Fabrics

SWATCHES VS ILLUSTRATIONS 

After the invention of coal-tar dyes, which quickly made hundreds of new fabric colorants possible, companies like Bayer and Cassella published large catalogs of novel colors for consultation by industrial fabric dyers and clothing manufacturers around the world. Unfortunately, ink for book illustrations could not economically reproduce the colors of dyes with any precision until the invention of CMYK color printing (CMYK refers to the four ink plates used in printing: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (key)) in the second decade of the 20th-century. The only way to communicate dye colors across a global market before that was by offering samples of them on cloth.  

— Written by Sarah K. Rich (Art History, Center for Virtual/Material Studies)

The Printing of Cotton Fabrics with the Dyestuffs of Leopold Cassella & Co. 
Frankfort: The Co., 1905
Purchased with funds from the Hastings Libraries Endowment