For the four centuries before photography, nearly every printed ‘image’ was an engraving. The engraver drove a steel tool called a burin across a copper plate, cutting parallel lines one stroke at a time; ink settled into the grooves and was pressed onto paper — the denser the lines, the darker the tone.

Around 1500, Germany’s Albrecht Dürer pushed the craft to mythic precision — in Knight, Death and the Devil, every plate of armour and strand of mane is a tone built from tens of thousands of hand-cut lines. Italy’s Piranesi turned it on imaginary prisons and Roman ruins, seeding Europe’s entire Romantic imagination.

By the 19th century, engraving had become the standard language of banknotes, bonds and spirits labels — too fine to forge. Look today at the Wall Street Journal’s portrait hedcuts, the Hendrick’s gin label, the Economist’s stippled covers — all are drawing styles ‘pretending to be engraved,’ because the style carries one message: old, trustworthy, worth paying a little more for.