Antiquariana

A quick visit to a local book sale yielded two books, neither of which I had heard of, though the topics of both are of longstanding interest to me. The first, which I haven't started reading yet, bears the eyecatching but alas entirely innocent title of The Hookers of Kew: 1785-1911; the subjects are, of course, the British botanists William and Joseph Hooker, the latter a great friend and key ally of Darwin. Written by Mea Allan, it was published in 1967. This copy has been nicely rebound in green quarter-leather with raised bands on the spine, perhaps because the original binding fell apart. Sadly, the original decorated endpapers are gone, as is the genealogical table that would have been originally bound in at the back.

The other volume is a facsimile of Robert Robinson's 1887 work Thomas Bewick: His Life and Times. Bewick (the great wood engraver), the author, and the publisher of the facsimile, Frank Graham, were all based in Newcastle upon Tyne, and the printer of the facsimile was Howe Brothers in nearby Gateshead. (More on Graham at the bottom of this post.)

Robinson's book is frustratingly organized, leaves unaddressed matters one would have expected him to touch on, and veers into digressions of questionable relevance, but for all that it's a delight, elegantly printed and abundantly illustrated with some 200 crisp reproductions of wood engravings by Bewick and his circle. There is a list of subscribers at the front, and Robinson makes clear that the volume was aimed at a very specific clientele:

To meet the wishes of friends and collectors, the size of it has been altered to imperial 8vo, so as to range with the largest paper copies of [Bewick's] Birds, Quadrupeds, and Fables, thus enabling gentlemen [sic] to have a uniform set of the whole.

There's no bio of Robert Robinson on the facsimile edition, though it's evident from the contents that he was involved in the trade in fine books and prints. With a bit of digging I turned up an obituary. According to The Bookseller (October 14, 1903), he was

at one time one of the most famous booksellers in the North of England. Mr. Robinson was widely known in connection with the literature appertaining to Thomas Bewick's life and labours, and he was also an antiquarian bookseller of more than local distinction. He was apprenticed to Thomas Brown, of the Royal Arcade, Newcastle, in 1833, and he commenced business for himself in 1840 at the "Bewick's Head" at the corner of Shakespeare Street and Pilgrim Street, occupying the same quarters for little less than half a century. His enthusiasm for the great wood engraver was unbounded; he enjoyed the acquaintance of Bewick's daughters, Jane and Isabella; [...] He was greatly respected in the Tyneside town, and his funeral, which took place in Jesmond Old Cemetery on the 1st inst., was largely attended. We notice that more than one of our respected contemporaries refer to the deceased gentleman's friendship with William Pitt, but we are afraid to believe in this precocity.

As for Frank Graham, who reprinted the book in 1972, he had a backstory one would hardly have expected from the publisher of such regional titles as View on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway and Beuk O' Newcassel Sangs ("A fine collection of local songs with magnificent illustrations by Joseph Crawhall"). Born in Sunderland in 1913, the son of a draper, he became politically engaged, joined the Communist Party, and fought in Spain with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. Unfit for service in the Second World War because of wounds he had received in Spain, he pursued various occupations, including that of milkman, before becoming a teacher. Identifying a lack of regional books in the publishing market, he turned entrepreneur and eventually published nearly 400 titles (many of which he also wrote) with total sales in excess of three million copies. He sold the business in 1987 and died, age 93, in 2006. Northeast Labour History has a full obituary.

On Ants (Thomas Bewick)

"The history and œconomy of these vary curious Insects are (I think) not well known — they appear to manage all their Affairs, with as much forethought & greater industry than Mankind — but to what degree their reasoning & instructive powers extend is yet a mystery — After they have spent a certain time toiling on earth, they then change this abode, get Wings, & soar aloft into the atmosphere — It is not well known what state they undergo, before they assume this new character, nor what becomes of them after."

(Memoirs)

Thomas Bewick

In our image-saturated culture it may be hard to imagine a time when the average European's exposure to visual representations of the world might be limited to tavern signs, decorations in churches (where these were not proscribed), and the crude illustrations of chapbooks and broadsides, an era before photography, lithography, and their digital successors made possible the routine mass-production of pictures. Thomas Bewick's oft-reproduced wood engravings may appear quaint and bucolic to us now, at least at first glance, but in their day they represented a revolutionary advance in the production and marketing of images. For much of his audience, Bewick's depiction of the wonders of nature was a revelation.

Bewick was born in 1753 in a village a few miles west of Newcastle upon Tyne. By his own account he was a fairly incorrigible youth, given to pranks and outdoor escapades and subject to canings for his misbehavior. His saving grace was an early acquired fondness for drawing, his stroke of good fortune an apprenticeship to the Newcastle engraver Ralph Beilby, later his partner. Under Beilby's stewardship he took on a variety of metal engraving tasks, but it was his knack for the relatively novel technique of wood engraving that brought him renown and a good living for the rest of his long and largely fulfilling life.

Unlike traditional woodcuts, wood engravings use sections of wood -- boxwood from Turkey was the preferred source -- that are sliced across rather than with the grain. The resulting blocks are small but tough, and a skilled hand like Bewick's could achieve fine detail that could otherwise only be obtained through the more expensive metal engraving techniques.

The three images below are from Bewick's illustrations for The Fables of Aesop and Others (1818). Though confined within strict borders, they display vivid naturalism -- the result of the marriage of technique and first-hand familiarity with the countryside -- and a flair for drawing out the personalities of his subjects.


For Bewick's most famous productions, his illustrated natural histories of quadrupeds and birds, the borders were shed, allowing his subjects to come right up to the viewer's eye.


In printing the great natural history works, Bewick engraved a series of tail-pieces (or "tale-pieces," as he called them, with deliberate wordplay), intended to occupy empty spaces at the end of a chapter. These rustic slice-of-life scenes afforded Bewick an opportunity to make subtle satirical or moral statements that can be easy to miss with a cursory glance. Bewick was in his day what might be called a moderate radical, sympathetic to political reform movements, to the Scots, and to those displaced by enclosures, skeptical of sectarian creeds and war makers. In one "tale-piece," entitled "The Proper Use At Last of All Warlike Monuments," a jackass rubs its posterior against an inscribed pillar leaning over in a field.

Many of Bewick's pictures have been endlessly reproduced and are widely available on the web, but the number of high-quality scans is surprisingly low, especially for the "tale-pieces." (Bear in mind that the original blocks were often only a few inches tall.) I was unable to find good versions of the illustrations Bewick created for Oliver Goldsmith's poem "The Deserted Village" ("Ill fares the land, to hast'ning ill a prey, / Where wealth accumulates, and men decay;"), and only one of the copper engravings Bewick executed for Matthew Consett's A Tour through Sweden, Swedish-Lapland, Finland and Denmark.


With the exception of the reindeer, the images shown here are from the galleries of the Bewick Society, which also publishes a blog entitled Tale-Pieces. The Edmonton Art Gallery has a fuller selection with, unfortunately, fairly poor scans.

In the end, though, Bewick's engravings are best appreciated as they were intended to be seen, on paper, and fortunately, there are various collections of his work, ranging from inexpensive paperbacks to budget-breaking limited editions. Two years ago the Ikon Gallery published a hardcover catalogue of the first comprehensive exhibition of the "tale-pieces," and for those with deep pockets Nigel Tattersfield's three-volume Thomas Bewick: The Complete Illustrative Work will be published by the British Library and Oak Knoll Press this month.

Jenny Uglow's Nature's Engraver, the most recent biography of Bewick, has a number of illustrations, as does printing historian Iain Bain's definitive edition of the artist's posthumously published Memoir (Oxford University Press, 1975 & 1979), which is recommended both for its unaffected charm and as a valuable record of rural life and workshop practices.