"Would you like to come up and see my etchings?" is a question that should always be answered carefully. But not - as here - if the questioner would really does have some etchings.
Strictly speaking, though, this is a drypoint. The image was simply drawn into a zinc plate with a sharp steel tool and then printed. But drypoint - and other intaglio etchings - are not printed like you might think - even for those who remember the now largely obsolete technology of the printing press. The processes are similar but there are some important differences.
Drypoint is not the only, or necessarily the most common type of etching. In fact, etching is more commonly used to refer to a print made from a plate which was first covered by a protective coating, called a ground. The ground is largely a wax material, often mixed with resins or bituminous materials. To insure the even distribution of the ground it is spread dissolved into a solvent (usually the type you don't want to inhale). The drawing is then made into the ground and exposing the metal of the plate. The plate is then immersed in an acid bath - again not something you want to do at home or without proper training - and the acid eats away at the metal. The concentration and timing is controlled depending on how dark you want the print. The "ground" is removed by rinsing with a solvent. You end up with an image below the surface of the original plate.
But because the drawing is etched into the metal, if you just ink and print it like printers used to do for printing newspapers, at best you'll get a negative image. But more likely you'll get a big smear of black ink with maybe a hint of the picture. So you have to modify the normal printmaking process.
Instead an intaglio plate - whether etching, drypoint, mezzotint, aquatint, or the other varieties - the plate is inked using a particularly thick ink. The ink is pretty stiff and you have to use using a squeegee type applicator - which nowadays is usually a small rectangle of thick cardboard. You spread the ink back and forth so it not only covers the whole plate, but also completely fills in the etched areas of the plate. Excess ink is then scraped off with the cardboard at which point you can generally make out the image as it will be printed. Then the plate is further wiped using a starched cheesecloth (called tarlatan) which picks up more ink. Using decreasing pressure, more and more ink is lifted from the highest areas of the plate leaving the ink in the etched recesses. Finally you can finish up with a very gentle wipe with newspaper, but in any case, what you end up with is an inked image that looks like what you want to print.
The printing of an intaglio print requires special presses which generate more pressure than traditional printing presses. That's because the paper has to be forced into the etched parts of the plates. The printing in this manner also requires that the paper be soaked in water and excess water blotted off. If you're lucky, you get the type of print you want.
Many etchings are combinations of various techniques. Drypoint produces particularly dark lines since when the lines are cut into the plate, the metal shavings remain attached to the edges of the lines in what is a called a "burr". This holds extra ink which also gets printed. There are a number of other techniques used to achieve half tones and various types of shading.
Although an involved process, it is a fairly forgiving one. Mistakes can be largely "burnished" out using a tool called - what else? - a burnisher. The etched areas are generally very shallow - tenths of millimeters - and rubbing the plate with the burnisher rubs the metal plate down so the etched are disappears. You can also bring back highlights with the burnisher.
From this brief description, the reader will realize printmaking is a difficult, messy, and potentially hazardous process but it was the standard method for reproducing art from the fifteenth century to the late twentieth century when digital reproduction swept away old technology. Even after the invention of the daguerreotype, engraving was the process for reproducing photographs in magazines and newspapers although the preferred plates were those with the dark areas raised, not recessed as in intaglio prints.
By the late nineteenth century hand engraving was still common but well-to-do engravers had equipment where a photograph or drawing could be used to mask light a sensitive ground. The ground was a naturally occurring asphalt material called bitumen of Judea and as the name implies it was imported from the Middle East. If you coated the bitumen onto a plate and exposed part of it to sunlight, the bitumen would harden where light fell. A solvent - generally something like turpentine but generally specially formulated - would dissolve the bitumen that was not exposed to light revealing the metal. The exposed plate could then be etched with acid and the print made.
So you could take a transparency of a photograph and place it on the plate and expose it to the sun. The bitumen protected by the dark regions of the photo would wash away and after etching you had your picture etched into the plate. Such etchings tended to be high contrast and the intermediate tones were not rendered exactly. However, the plate could be further treated using other engraving methods - burnishing, scraping, and drypoint - if you really needed the half tones. A good photogravure which was carefully prepared would be almost indistinguishable form the original photograph. In fact what is now usually considered the first real photograph is in fact a plate that was etched in this manner by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. But it was not used to make a paper print and the metal plate - like the later daguerreotype - is the official photograph.
So how did a 19th century photographer make a transparency? Well, one way was to take the glass plate negative and make a new negative of the negative. Developed in the darkroom, the negative negative was a positive image on a new glass plate.
Another way - which was quicker but not as good - was to place the picture on a glass plate sitting on top of the etching plate. You then added turpentine often with a bit of wax added. The wax and turpentine rendered the paper highly translucent and very nearly transparent. Such reproductions were not as good as those from the glass plate positives, but sometimes were good enough, and were much easier to make.
Photogravure was used well into the 20th century and was actually the method that Bill Mauldin used to obtain the plates for his first cartoon after he and the 45th Division News landed in Sicily. To produce the papers - often under trying conditions - the staff had to rely on the resources of the local engravers whose equipment had often been rendered in less than pristine conditions by the fortunes of war.
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