The Copper He Spoiled on Purpose

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, where the printers kept the lane behind the corn market, two copper-plate engravers worked within a hundred yards of one another.

Two engravers in one town, the same copper and the same box of gravers.
Both served seven years, and both cut a plate that held up for a thousand pulls.
Both worked the same hours, and neither was ever idle for a fortnight.
One spent every hour at the bench on work somebody had ordered.
One spent an hour a week ruining copper nobody would ever see.
Which was the better engraver at fifty, and what did the ruined copper buy?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two engravers, in a town I have never named. Both bought copper from the same rolling mill, both worked by a lamp with a globe of water set before it, and both could lay a field of parallel lines so even you would swear a machine had done it. Trade cards, billheads and book plates. A steady living for a careful man.

There is one thing in engraving that cannot be fudged. A long swelling curve, cut in a single pass, the burin pushed with the whole arm while the hand turns the plate beneath it. There is no going over it twice and no rubbing out. Spoil the stroke and you have spoiled the plate, and the plate cost three and sixpence.

The first engraver knew he was poor at it, had been poor at it as an apprentice, and built his working life around the fact. He kept to plain Roman capitals, which are short straight strokes and a compass arc. Asked for a flourished script, he set it in letters like type and said type was cleaner, which it was. Where a job needed the long curve, he cut it in three lengths and joined them, and held to the lamp, the joins showed. Most people did not hold it to the lamp. Thirty years of that left him the engraver he had been at twenty-two.

The second did a thing the lane thought foolish. He bought the mill's off-cuts, strips too narrow for any job, at a tenth the price of a plate. On Saturday mornings, shutters still up and nothing ordered, he cut that one stroke. Forty of them down a strip, badly. He cut one so badly the burin skidded and took a sliver out of his thumb. Then he scraped the strip flat, burnished it, and did forty more the week after, keeping the worst in a drawer so that in a year he could see what his hand was doing.

It took the better part of two years. By the end he was the only man between the estuary and the county town who could put a swelled script across a plate in one breath, and the work came looking for him: wine merchants' labels, the assembly rooms' card, the lettering for the new subscription library, which paid more in a month than billheads paid in a year. The committee had held a sample to the lamp and found no joins.

Be fair to the first engraver. He was neither lazy nor a fool, and every hour at the bench he was paid for, which is what a prudent man is told to aim at. He could not see how ruining three shillings of copper on a Saturday was anything but throwing away both.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Experience makes you better at the parts of your trade you can already do, and only practice makes you better at the part you cannot. They are not the same activity, and what separates them is who pays for the mistake. A customer's job is the customer's material, so you cannot experiment in it. Wherever a difficult route and a safe route both reach an acceptable result, you take the safe route, and you are right to. Do that honestly for thirty years and you have thirty years of experience at the things you could do on the first day.

Which is why the weakness survives so long. It is not neglected, it is protected. The engraver joining his curves out of three short strokes delivers a sound plate, and the sound plate conceals from him that he never learned the stroke. Then he designs his trade around the gap, talking customers out of the work he cannot do, declining the dearer jobs on grounds of taste, and calling it a style.

Practice has three requirements, and nobody can supply you with any of them but yourself. Material you can afford to ruin. An hour in which nothing is owed to anybody, which is work nobody is standing in front of you asking for and therefore gets done first or not at all. And some means of telling a good attempt from a poor one, which is why the drawer mattered as much as the cutting. Repetition without a verdict is forty chances to make one error permanent.

Two cautions. Your weakest skill is very often not worth a Saturday. The point is not self-improvement at large but the one skill standing between you and the work you want, and you identify it by what you turned away this month, not by an inventory of your faults. A man may write a dreadful hand and engrave like an angel, and nobody ever paid him for his hand. The other caution is that reading about the stroke is not cutting the stroke. Study the man who does it well, by all means, but an afternoon of watching leaves the hand where it was.

And do not practise on paying work. That is an experiment at somebody else's expense, and when it goes wrong you lose the customer and the lesson both, being too busy making the job good to study what your hand did. The same holds for the small recurring botches you have got used to, which are the dearest things in your shop, and which can only be mended away from the job itself.

Three questions, and the first you can answer tonight:

1. What did you turn down, hand on, or do the long way round this month? Go through the four weeks properly. One thing will appear twice. That is the skill, and your books chose it, not you.
2. What can you ruin that costs almost nothing? Off-cut copper, in your trade, might be a sample piece or a page written for no customer. Name the material before the hour, or the hour becomes an hour of thinking about it.
3. How will you know the fortieth attempt was better than the first? Keep the failures where you can see them. A judgement made from memory flatters you.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which was the better engraver at fifty, and what did the ruined copper buy?

The second, by a distance, and what he bought was the right to be wrong in private. Every stroke spoiled on a Saturday was one he did not have to avoid on a Tuesday. The first man's thirty years were not wasted, understand. They were spent entirely on the half of his trade he had already mastered, because paid work never asks you to attempt the thing you might fail at.

The verse:

The plate that nobody shall buy
Is where the hand is made.
What costs you three good shillings now
Is thirty years well paid.

Until next time. Go and write down the one job you turned away this month, then set an hour this week with cheap material in front of you and nothing owed to anybody.

P.S. There is a reason the second engraver kept his bad strips instead of scrapping the lot. A skill improves too slowly to be felt. Week by week the hand seems no better, so the hour gets called wasted and the Saturday goes back to paid work. That is how nearly every attempt at this ends, and the drawer settles the question with evidence rather than feeling. Keep your first attempt, dated, and look at it in three months.

Also in the archive: Settled in February, The Printer's Apprentice and The Shutter at Seven.