Rotogravure


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What's a "Rotogravure"?

Rotogravure is the color printing technology that was perfected during the Art Deco period. A mass-production version of traditional copper-plate engraving ("gravure"), it involves wrapping the normally flat printing plate around a barrel-shaped drum in a "rotary" press that can then print an entire roll of paper continuously.

This enabled newspapers to publish high-quality color pictures, typically in the "rotogravure" section of their Sunday editions.

Thus, in Irving Berlin's 1933 song Easter Parade:

"The photographers will 'snap' us,
And you'll find that you're
In the rotogravure."