Early Victorian Illustrated Books. Britain, France and Germany 1820-1860 by BUCHANAN-BROWN, John

The British Library - Oak Knoll Press, The British Library - Oak Knoll Press. 2005, 320pp. Illustrated. Cloth, with dust jacket. In very good condition. Pakketzending. Writing over fifty years ago, the bibliographer Percy Muir noted that the 'immediate post-Bewick period' had been 'unduly neglected,' and this is still true today. In this major new study, John Buchanan-Brown remedies this neglect and demonstrates the importance of the period from 1820 to 1860 in the history of the illustrated book. These years saw the establishment of the technique of end-grain wood-engraving as the dominant mediuum of graphic reproduction. Its great advantage was that, as a relief process, it could reproduce both the image and the text simultaneously, and this allowed the publishing industry to feed what had become an insatiable appetite for illustrated books and journals. Although end-grain engraving was an English phenomenon, it was the French who first applied the process to book design. In turn, German illustrators were to influence the style of British illustrators. Thus wood-engraving naturally plays a leading role in this study, but it does not overshadow the other means of graphic reproduction employed during this period lithography, chromolithography, and steel-engraving and etching. The study illustrates the work of French and German artists and their influence upon their British counterparts. The pioneering study also includes appendices on aspects of wood- and steel-engraving in England, notes on French and German illustrators and a glossary of technical terms. It is illustrated by some 250 reproductions in black and white, and eight pages in color. ISBN: 9781584561699