Rotogravure, the Second Variation of the Rotary Printing Press

Rotogravure (roto or gravure for short) is a type of intaglio printing process, that is, it involves engraving the image onto an image carrier. In gravure printing, the image is engraved onto a copper cylinder because, like offset and flexography, it uses a rotary printing press. The vast majority of gravure presses print on rolls (also known as webs) of paper, rather than sheets of paper. (Sheetfed gravure is a small, specialty market.) Rotary gravure presses are the fastest and widest presses in operation. Additional operations may be in-line with a gravure press, such as saddle stitching facilities for magazine / brochure work. Once a staple of newspaper photo features, the rotogravure process is still used for commercial printing of magazines, postcards, and corrugated (cardboard) product packaging.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, the method of image photo transfer onto carbon tissue covered with light-sensitive gelatin was discovered, and was the beginning of rotogravure. In the 1930s – 1960s, newspapers published relatively few photographs and instead many newspapers published separate rotogravure sections in their Sunday editions. These sections were devoted to photographs and identifying captions, not news stories. Irving Berlin's song Easter Parade specifically refers to these sections in the lines "the photographers will snap us, and you'll find that you're in the rotogravure." And the song Hooray for Hollywood contains the line "... armed with photos from local rotos" referring to young actresses hoping to make it in the movie industry.

In 1932 a George Gallup "Survey of Reader Interest in Various Sections of Sunday Newspapers to Determine the Relative Value of Rotogravure as an Advertising Medium" found that these special rotogravures were the most widely read sections of the paper and that advertisements there were three times more likely to be seen by readers than in any other section.