printing house and engraving shop, part ii
illustration show that there is no lack of interest in the illustrated book but that little attention is being paid to how illustrated books are made. I argued that without understanding the production history of the illustrated book, we cannot properly interpret it. We not only need to try to understand how the book was viewed by its original readers, but as Peter Kornicki has remarked with reference to block-printed Japanese books (where the text is an image of the original calligraphy), physical books, books as material objects, ‘mediate between us and the mental worlds of the past.’ 1 To under- stand properly the illustrated book it will be necessary to develop methods of bibliographical analysis and description of illustrations as rigorous as those that we already have for the verbal texts. Little or no progress has been made here. The most important recent contribution to the literature of inta- glio book illustration, from a technical and economic point of view, is Karen Bowen and Dirk Imhof’s Christopher Plantin and Engraved Book Illustrations in Sixteenth-Century Europe . 2 In addition, the history of the technical side of making and printing intaglio plates is now much better documented thanks to Ad Stijnman’s Engraving and Etching 1400–2000 , an indispensable work of reference. 3 However, Stijnman has little new to say about the collaboration between printing house and engraving shop. Much more informative on the business of intaglio printing, both for single sheet prints and for book illustration, is Antony Gri Y ths’ magnificent The print before photography . 4 In a chapter on book illustration Gri Y ths is sensitive to the issues of printing plates for binding into books, ignored by Stijnman, such as leaving stubs for binding. Where engravings are printed in the text leaves, Stijnman inexplicably tells us that, ‘One of the unanswered questions in the history of illustrated books is … 1 . Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan. A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001) p. 39. 2 . Karen Bowen and Dirk Imhof, Christopher Plantin and Engraved Book Illustrations in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 3 . Ad Stijnman Engraving and Etching 1400–2000. A History of the Development of Manual Intaglio Printmaking Processes (Houten: Archetype Publications Ltd in association with Hes and De Graaf, 2012). See my review in The Library (2013) 14 (4): 467–471. 4 . Antony Gri Y ths, The Print Before Photography. An Introduction to European Printmaking 1550–1820 (London: British Museum, 2016).
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