Traveling litho stone on display at local office
A piece of printing history will be permanently displayed at Marion Historic Museum.
A litho stone, used in lithographic printing, will be donated by Les Broadstreet of Marion.
"I acquired six stones from Jack Goldberg, a renowned photographer from Wichita," said Broadstreet, when Broadstreet helped the photographer move in the 1970s. Goldberg used the compact limestone as weights.
Broadstreet has given five of them to family members and the last one will be displayed at the museum.
The stone will be on display for the next two weeks at the Marion County Record before making the museum its permanent home.
The stone is a very fine-grained, compact limestone. Although limestone can be found all over the world, the Jura Mountains, Bavaria, have the quality required for lithography.
A design is drawn or engraved on the grained surface of the stone with greasy inks or crayons, and the whole surface is then dampened. The grained surface helps to hold water while the ink repels it.
The whole stone is then rolled up with a printing ink which sticks to the greasy drawing but not to the wet surface of the untouched stone.
This process was the forerunner of lithography which uses photographically- or digitally-made metal plates on large presses.
