Observations from Under the Book Pile

Ernest Lefébure. ‘Embroidery and Lace: Their Manufacture and History from the Remotest Antiquity to the Present Day.’ London: Grevel, 1888.

Happy New Year!

What better way to begin the New Year than with wood engravings of serene winter scenes by the New England wood engraver Thomas W. Nason (1889-1971). These images are from Here at Eagle Pond by the America poet, writer, and U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall (1928-2018), published in New York by Ticknor & Fields in 1990. Hall, along with his wife, poet and author Jane Kenyon (1947–1995), lived at Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire, a small town in Merrimack County, from 1975 until his death. This book is a meditation on life at Eagle Pond. When he moved there from Michigan, Hall, a New Englander himself, writes:

For me, it was coming home, and it was coming home to a place of language. . . . When I was twelve or thirteen, it was here that I began writing poetry. This farm provided the subject matter for the first poems I published, when I was sixteen. . . .

The evocative wood engravings of Thomas W. Nason were reproduced for this publication from the prints in the collection of the Boston Public Library. Our copy is another donation from our friend Jerry Buff.

We wish you a bright and wonderous New Year!

View posts from New Years past.

View more wood engravings by Thomas W. Nason.

nope! here are her baby pictures (from 2017)

Whalers medicine chest, c. 1835

This chest belonged to Robert Jillett, ashore Whaler stationed on Kāpiti Island, New Zealand, 1836-1845.

This Woodcut Wednesday, explore London’s Inns of Court in these intricate engravings by artist Hilary Paynter.

Kindle Unlimited is offering two free months of unlimited ebooks. As a trial. Which will then become a paid subscription.

Your local library is offering unlimited ebooks all the time. Forever. No contracts, no predatory practices, no tracking of how long you spend on each particular page in the hopes that information about your habits can be sold for a profit.

“Bouquetière” by Boué Soeurs, 1927-28

Wood Engraving Wednesday

HOWARD PHIPPS

British wood engraver Howard Phipps (b. 1954) began his artistic career as a painter. In 1976, after he began teaching, he discovered that wood engraving was ideal for long winter evenings. Phipps writes:

It  seems a remarkable transition from 4 x 6 ft. canvases to 4 x 3 in. boxwood blocks. However, equally dramatic and intense effects can be gained… . it was only by chance that I discovered this unusual medium, just at a time when there has been such a revival of interest in it. This has been largely brought about by the Society of Wood Engravers and the enthusiasm of a number of fine private press printers, and it is for this reason that I am sustained in what after all is a very solitary artistic activity.

These prints were printed directly from the original blocks and included in Phipps’s article “A Painter’s Approach to Wood-engraving” in Matrix 8, Winter 1988, inserted as a separate 8-page signature between pages 80 and 81. The color wood engraving entitled “Ox Drove” serves as the frontispiece to Matrix 8. It is printed in four colors, with the key block printed in grey and the colors (yellow, orange, and blue), which overlap to create secondary colors, printed from linocuts.

Matrix was printed by John and Rosalind Randle at the Whittington Press in England, and is a donation from our friend Jerry Buff.

View more posts from Matrix.

View other posts relating to the Whittington Press.

In contrast public libraries are disposing of mass market books that are in bad condition, out of date, or no one checked out.

Is it really fair to compare the disposal of books with mold damage and biographies about ‘NSYNC from 2001 to the deliberate wholesale destruction of irreplaceable documents about trans history with the intent to erase that history?

There are academic libraries that collect copies of Amelia Bedelia and Captain Underpants. You too can order digitized copies or go see them yourself for free. Trust me, they’ve retained all of the incredibly racist children’s books and people continue to research and publish about them.

But it’s not your local library’s job to keep ahold of books that one day one or two people might find useful. Their job is to serve their communities and provide their patrons with the books and information they want right now. If the library is filled with dirty, useless, and irrelevant books, people don’t go. And since funding is determined by how many people go to the library and how many books they check out, keeping these books might mean that the branch closes entirely or they are forced to move to a smaller building and end up having to throw out the books anyway.

Decorative Sunday: Songs for Little People

This week we are turning to an item in our Historical Curriculum Collection the children’s book Songs for Little People by the poet Norman Gale published in Westminster by the Archibald Constable & Company in 1896. The book features lovely Art Nouveau style illustrations by British artist Helen Stratton, one of her first major successes as book illustrator.

Norman Gale wrote in the introduction for Songs for Little People:

This book is designed for a position between such extremes as the frankly babyish songbooks and Stevenson’s exquisite and everlasting memorials of a child by no means typical. Considering the audience approached, it must be admitted that a few rather difficult words have been allowed entry into the verses; but these have not come by chance, for the author endeavored to attract children up to the ages of fourteen and fifteen, as well as those requiring, because of their tenderer years, poems for the simplest sort. Mothers and grown-up sisters or aunts will, it is hoped, translate and explain whenever a young reader appears to be perplexed.

I find the poem for the ”‘Logical Gardens” interesting. It is clearly referencing zoological gardens, which first became a popular public attraction in the 19th century.

The poem reads: