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When I was hired at Arader in 2020, I scrambled around for resources to prepare myself for working at this storied plate-book — a term now so out-of-fashion it has to be defined: books heavily illustrated, often colored — dealer. Mr. Arader kindly gave me a giant stack of reference works about our heavy hitters (Audubon, Redouté, Catesby), but I still felt unprepared to discuss the printing processes used in these books (other than letterpress, which I had the chance to do at Oxford in the Bibliography Room under the storied Paul W. Nash). The answer was Bamber Gascoigne’s How to Identify a Print, an infinitely useful and richly-illustrated survey of the history and techniques of printmaking, as well as the titular sleuthing-guide. My copy has, of course, disappeared (caveat lector: do not lend your books; give them outright or don’t) but it has stood me in good stead for describing simply and precisely the way of making multiples.

Fundamentally, explains Gascoigne (the inaugural quizmaster of the British TV show University Challenge), there can be just three modes of using a surface to print on paper: relief (that is, everything removed from the surface doesn’t print), intaglio (only what’s removed from the surface prints) and planographic (the surface is not carved but treated to make some parts print and others not).

This is the first in a series of three essays exploring those three modes. We’ll begin with the first, which is also the oldest (though all three are still in use): relief printing. Readers may even have made relief prints in Kindergarten: potato stamps, in which only what’s left on the surface of a split potato prints. Potatoes being latecomers to Europe (as well as good for eating), wood is the commoner medium. It was ubiquitous, easily worked, relatively cheap and durable; therefore woodcuts emerged with the printed book as the way to incorporate image with text. Crucially, relief prints are compatible with letterpress, such that a forme (the group of pages printed on one side of a sheet of paper) that contained text and images could be printed in a single pull, using moderate pressure.

The Nuremberg Chronicle, the most heavily illustrated incunable (XVc printed book), shows the tremendous possibilities of this integration, winding decorative elements not only around paragraphs but also across pages

Although it famously reuses woodcuts with different letterpress, the Chronicle sets the high-water mark for harmonious juxtaposition of pictures and words.

 

Woodcuts were particularly useful for herbals and other botanical books, as they could convey simply the outline of a leaf or flower, as in Le grant herbier of ca. 1521 or Robin’s 1620 pocket treatise on American plants. With a few well-placed lines the woodcutters could indicate the checkerboard petals of a fritillary or the serrated edge of a leaf, distinguishing it from other species or varietals.

     

The flower, if you’ll allow me, of botanical woodcuts is undoubtedly Fuchs’s 1542 De historia stirpium, which most unusually names the image-makers: Heinrich Füllmaurer and Albrecht Meyer the draughtsmen, Veit Rudolph Specklin the block-cutter. Doubtless Fuchs was crowned (one of three) father(s) of German botany in no small part because of these woodcuts at a folio scale that — especially when colored contemporaneously as our example is — convey the essential qualities of a plant. Whereas the engraver is tempted to show every vein and hair, the physical limitations of wood — viz. the finer it is carved the more fragile the block — encourage a thoughtful economy of line (even more impressive, perhaps, in our rare octavo edition of 1549).

     

 

Just as wood seemed a natural choice for illustrating the natural world, so too did it serve to make the earliest maps as European knowledge of the world expanded. The 1511 Venice Ptolemy used woodcut maps as did the 1513 Strasbourg Ptolemy, neither simply: the former pioneered two-color printing on maps and the latter contains an epochal color-printed woodcut map of Lorraine (home of the dedicatee), which took advantage of the polychromy to print coats of arms surrounding. Both are folios, allowing the comparative coarseness of woodcutting to be an asset, viz. clarity. The compatability of woodcuts with letterpress is taken to an even finer degree: cast type can in fact be set in to a woodblock, most famously in the 1532 Huttich-Grynaeus Novus orbis, with its Hans Holbein-designed figural elements, whose “genuine” map (probably the first state, though Harrisse is agnostic about precedence) is the “large ASIA,” i.e., with upper-case letter set in to the block.

      

 

Woodcut maps continued to be made right through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and beyond. For large maps, the relatively large minimum width of a line was no problem (which isn’t to say that they aren’t fine; boxwood — especially in Northern Europe — along with very hard woods such as walnut, cherry and pear could hold tremendous detail), as for instance in the 1601 woodcut version of a map of Greece that was originally engraved.

Even as late as 1677, Hubbard’s Present State of New-England was illustrated with a woodcut map, America’s first printed map. Cut by John Foster of Boston — presumably from an American tree — the map (ours from the London edition of the same year; the block was shipped back across the Atlantic) might be called naïve in style, but its graphic rendering of Cape Cod, the vast Lake Winnipesaukee and the long-tongued bear make the map somehow quintessentially American.

 

The aesthetics of early printed books are fundamentally tied to the possibilities and limitation of woodcuts. Because engraving presses require so much more pressure to produce an image, the economy of using a single press was difficult to surmount. Yes, there is an inherent crudeness — a particular favorite is the 1501 Sebastian Brant edition of Aesop’s fables, which is richly illustrated with woodcuts (my favorite being “De Judeo, qui cacando invenit pecuniam” — about the Jew who finds money while shitting) —

but this really underpins what we now call graphic art: bold, simple, persuasive. In that same vein, woodcuts can do readily something that intaglio prints struggle to do: create large solid passages, such as Valvassore’s 1523 Cita di Rodi christianisima col asedio del gran turco, 1522, where the black mass of the island of Rhodes pushes “El Gran Turcho” (Suleiman the Magnificent) to the fore, highlighted on the stage of his siege.

This is one of just two examples known; the other is at the Vatican.

 

In some ways, the greatest endorsement of the woodcut was its employment by Andreas Vesalius (Andries van Wezel, 1514–1564), the Brussels-born father of modern medicine. His 1543 De humani corporis fabrica, which is the first original medical treatise since the Classical period, employs woodcuts throughout. In part, it is because of the integration with the text — the images (ascribed, traditionally, to the school of Titian) were thoroughly annotated and keyed — but also because the clarity of the woodcut line. The intricate dissections, écorchés and skeletal views could easily have been engraved, but the ability to direct the student-reader to major and minor structures with lines too heavy to be practical must have outweighed the potential nuance of copperplate.

The original wood-blocks were “discovered” several times in the intervening centuries, but for the last time in the 1930’s by Dr. Willy Wiegand in the attic of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. They were re-inked and printed in a special limited run of 725 in collaboration with the New York Academy of Medicine and, because the blocks were bombed in WWII, this is certainly their last printing.

 

Till this past week we had to be satisfied with this superb production of 1935, but after the vagaries of German customs and new American tariffs, we can proudly announce the acquisition of the 1543 first edition of Vesalius’ magnum opus, not yet listed for sale — but please inquire for the description once it’s been made!