Algernon Börtzell

Swedish designer, 1840-1918

In January 1872 the Swedish crown sent a levelling engineer to Holland to learn how colour lithography was done there. Algernon Börtzell came back and spent the next quarter of a century running the General Staff's lithographic institute, where the country's maps were printed and where the number of inks a sheet could carry decided how much a map was able to say. Börtzell had trained at the Technological Institute and until then measured heights for the Geological Survey, so the journey turned a surveyor into a printer. He later ran his own printing works, and from 1893 held the contract for the Riksbank's banknote press, where colour registration is not a question of appearance but of whether a forgery can be told from a note. He sat on Stockholm's city council for two decades, which left considerably less mark on the work than the fortnight in Holland.