Details about the use of the copper plates
for previous printings
(Illustration - Banks Florilegium Plate 676)

ED07

USE OF THE COPPERPLATES: DIRECT AND INDIRECT

It is known that the engravers took about three sets of black ink impressions in the
eighteenth century and that proofs of particular plates were sent by Banks to other
botanists for private use. A group of twenty-eight plates has been recorded as forming
a folio volume in the Berlin Library.

In the late nineteenth century the Trustees of the British Museum authorised the New
Zealand Government to obtain proof sets of the engravings of the New Zealand plants.
The intention was to reproduce them in a reduced form as illustrations to a botanical
work by Thomas Kirk. Kirk died in 1897 and the book was never published but James
Britten's book (Illustrations of Australian Plants collected in 1770) was published by
order of the Trustees between 1900 and 1905. The illustrations were reproduced by
photolithography.

The only twentieth-century direct printing, again in black ink, from thirty of the original
plates is the much prized book entitled Captain Cook's Florilegium with introductory
texts by Wilfrid Blunt and W. T. Stearn.