Reassembly (Transfer Press)
The 19th century transfer press allowed banknote printers to disassemble, re-configure and reproduce existing engraved plates into new compositions. The result of this technology was twofold: it led to the creation of spurious banknotes that appeared authoritative and it encouraged the extensibility of an abstract vocabulary of monetary design.
Someone who understood and wrote about both these processes was a printer named Waterman Lily Ormsby who published a book in 1852 illustrating how the transfer press could produce monetary design by a process of collage. In that book Ormsby reproduced a diagram of his own transfer press and Reassembly (Transfer Press) is a series of schematic re-fabrications of Ormsby's press, scanned from his own illustrations. The variations are made on the basis of aesthetic fancy, rather than any technical rationale.