A collection of carefully selected cute retro mineral paintings that you won't get tired of even if you look at them over and over again. Beautiful prints such as hand-colored copperplate engravings and multicolored lithographs have become increasingly popular in recent years. This book mainly contains encyclopedias and illustrated encyclopedias published from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century. Author of ``Mysterious and Beautiful Stone Illustrated Book'' based on a huge number of illustrated plates. Mr. Hideharu Yamada, who is also an agate collector, has carefully selected outstanding mineral paintings. A retro and antique world where you can enjoy the subtle textures of ores and gemstones that cannot be seen in photos. A permanent collection that also includes mineral paintings from the Insel Bunko edition printed in Leipzig. ★Excerpt from “Explanation and Afterword” at the end of this book ...Until the late 19th century, polychromatic expression in printing was generally done by hand-coloring monochromatic woodblock prints or copperplate prints, and beautiful natural history paintings such as Audupont's Birds of America (1827-1838) All were hand-colored. However, this method required a great deal of time and money to produce detailed expressions, making it difficult to mass-produce. It is said that a production cost of 100 million yen was spent. In the late 19th century, when the technology of multicolor printing (chromolithography) was developed using stone printing, the efficiency and expressive power of printing suddenly increased. Sekihanga was created at the end of the 19th century because the plates could be created by drawing directly on the polished surface of limestone or by transferring the original image, so it did not require highly skilled carving techniques and the plates were more durable. It was widely used for commercial printing such as posters. In the world of books, a variety of illustrated encyclopedias and runner-up books with many color illustrations were created, in line with the growing desire for knowledge among the middle class at the time. Chromolithographs were capable of overprinting up to 20 colors, allowing for detailed and profound expressions close to those of paintings. However, it still relied heavily on the experience of skilled workers, and books with many illustrations could take several months to print, so in the mid-20th century, there was a need for technology that could produce larger quantities of printed matter at lower cost and in a shorter time. , it will be replaced by color printing using the same four-color combination as today. However, the color gamut that could be expressed with four colors was limited, and the tint dots were initially coarse, so compared to hand-colored or chromolithograph printing using more than a dozen colors, it fell behind in terms of fineness and color expression. There was a feeling. The reason why copperplate engravings, hand-colored or chromolithograph-printed illustrations are still popular today is because the images themselves are attractive, and at the same time they have a range of colors and textures that are not found in modern printed matter. (Omitted below)