“My father left me a considerable estate, most part of which I spent during my youth,” begins the history of Sindbad the sailor, “but I perceived my error, and called to mind that riches were perishable, and quickly consumed by such ill husbands as myself. I farther considered, that, by my irregular way of living, I wretchedly mispent [sic] my time, which is the most valuable thing in the world.”

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Elizabeth Newbery (1746-1821) first published this account of Sindbad the sailor from her London shop in 1784 (Cotsen Eng 18, Newbery 5017). There is no record of who made the woodcut illustrations to accompany the story. Ten years later, a pirated edition turned up for the first time in Boston, Massachusetts with the same cuts under the publisher Samuel Hall (1740-1807).

The brothers, Samuel and Ebenezer Hall began printing in Salem, Mass. from 1768 to 1775, the third printing press in the colony of Massachusetts. After the death of his brother, Samuel moved the firm to Boston where he published books and newspapers for adult and juvenile audiences. A nice biography of the “printer/patriot” has been posted at: http://tarquintarsbookcase.blogspot.com/2010/05/samuel-hall-printer-patriot-part-1.html and additional information can be found in Isaiah Thomas’s The History of Printing in America (1810):

“In April, 1789, [Hall] began printing, in the French language, a newspaper, entitled Courier de Boston. This was a weekly paper, printed on a sheet of crown in quarto, for J. Nancrede, a Frenchman… a bookseller in Boston; but his name did not appear in the imprint of the paper. Courier de Boston was published only six months. After Hall relinquished the publication of a newspaper, he printed a few octavo and duodecimo volumes, a variety of small books with cuts, for children, and many pamphlets, particularly sermons. He was a correct printer, and judicious editor; industrious, faithful to his engagements, a respectable citizen, and a firm friend to his country. He died October 30, 1807, aged sixty-seven years.”

The History of Sindbad the Sailor: Containing an Account of His Several Surprizing Voyages and Miraculous Escapes (Boston: Printed and sold by S. Hall, No. 53, Cornhill, 1794). Woodcut frontispiece and six full-page illustrations, one for each of the seven voyages. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2014- in process

Graphic Arts recently acquired an elaborately designed 18th-century satire on gout, praising those who attain the condition through drinking enough punch or having enough sex. Virtues are extolled with clever emblems and epigrams such as “Breve gaudium, longa miseria (brief joy, long misery).

Written in Latin and German, the four page title translates (very roughly): “Dissertations on the praises and causes of gout, under the auspices of the great and most famous, the most celebrated in the world.

[Dedicated] to the difficulties, sometimes, of the most patient Lord Claudius Expertus, Lord of and in Limping-House, the Valley of Ashes and Pains, his anonymous fellow-sufferer sets forth [for public distribution] to his allies.

Not so much to beguile leisure time, as to dispel the lame troubles of the feet, he has illustrated with emblems, with questions paradoxical to sane people, enlarged humorously with stories and verses, and not without the testimony of that most pleasant person, Caesar Severus, for the pathetic sentence to cases of gout.

Against interrupters assuredly the censorship of the law has strengthened and established it. In the year [1715].”

The date is a beautiful chronogram (time writing) in which the letters are also the numbers of the date: In Mense sIbI sVIsqVe DoLorosè hetero CLIto = IMIIVIVDLCLI =  MDCLLVVIIIII = 1715

The first of the satirical emblems is signed by the Austrian artist Johann Georg Guttwein (1678-1718), and the rest have been attributed to the same artist. In the plate above, “Bacchus, the god of wine, who begins the ‘foot-planting’ of those who are merrily occupied with exchanging wine glasses, and waters the plant favorably, so that it is inclined to be wed to his daughter-in-law, gout.” With this postscript: Drinking leads to repentance. Note the inscription in the print: Planta Rigatur=The plant is watered.

The emblem below is inscribed: “Inde genus durum sumus experiensque laborum / et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.” The text comes from Ovid’s Metamorphosis: “The earthy part, however, wet with moisture, turned to flesh; what was solid and inflexible mutated to bone; the veins stayed veins; and quickly, through the power of the gods, stones the man threw took on the shapes of men, and women were remade from those thrown by the woman. So the toughness of our race, our ability to endure hard labour, and the proof we give of the source from which we are sprung.”

Members of the gout club are congratulated in a proclamation folded into the back of the volume, signed with names that sound like expressions of pain, such as Mr. Ouch:

John Lewis Roget (1828-1908), Familiar Illustrations of the Language of Mathematics or a New
Picture-Alphabet for Well-Behaved Undergraduates; Wherein a Ray to Illuminate their Path is Transmitted through Nine Plates of a Rare Medium by Means of the Eccentrical Pencil of W.A.G. [pseud.] (London: Ackermann, 1850). Bound together with Cambridge Customs and Costumes (London: Ackermann and Company, 1851). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2014- in process

John Roget was the only son of Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869), the lexicographer best known for publishing the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (Roget’s Thesaurus) in 1852. Although John trained for the bar and worked together with his father on editions of the Thesaurus, his aptitude for painting and drawing was the primary focus of his life.

He become the Historian of the Royal Society of Painters and Watercolours and published several volumes of humorous sketches with academic puns. Two of these have recently been acquired by the Graphic Arts Collection.

Roget was joined in these publications by the very young Arthur George Witherby, a journalist, editor and part-time caricaturist who used the pen name W.A.G. and later drew for Vanity Fair.

Beyond the sketches themselves, these volumes present some of the earliest examples of anastastic printing, a technique often used to reproduce drawings and fine art etchings. By the mid-19^th century, Rudolph Ackermann and many British publishers had their illustrative plates printed by Rudolph Appel & Company’s Anastastic Press in Ipswich.

This was a metal (usually zinc) relief process probably developed by Charles d’Aiguebelle who earned a silver medal at the Exposition of 1834 for his “transports sur pierre d’impression anciennes.”

Luis Nadeau speculates that the first book with anastatic illustrations may be Sketches Printed at the Second Hampstead Conversazione February 2nd, 1846. Princeton University Library’s earliest example is John William Hewett’s 1849 Early Wood Carving . . . printed at Appel’s Anastatic Press (Marquand NK9744.E97 H48 1849). The books drawn by John Roget follow closely in 1850 and 1851, with excellent examples of anastatic printing to reproduce pen drawings.

See also: John Lewis Roget (1828-1908), A History of the ’Old Water-Colour’ Society (London, New York: Longmans, Green and co., 1891). Graphic Arts Collection (GA) Rowlandson 887

There are many 21st-century digital and 20th-century off-set reproductions of the the Book of Hours of the Emperor Maximilian the First, decorated by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), Lucas Cranach (1472-1553), and other artists, which was printed in 1513 by Johannes Schoensperger at Augsburg.

Early attempts at reproducing this exquisite work were rare, even at the time they were published. The Graphic Arts Collection just acquired the first and only edition of the reproductions–in the newly invented medium of lithography–of the marginal drawings by Lucas Cranach in Maximilian’s Prayer Book. Note in particular the very early use of multi-color lithographic printing.

Graphic Arts also holds a copy of the 1808, Albrecht Dürers christlich-mythologische Handzeichnungen (GAX Oversize 2007-0749Q), and Rudolph Ackermann’s 1817 Albert Durers Designs of the Prayer Book (Oversize 2007-0027F).

The Alnwick pharmacist and printer/publisher William Davison (1781–1858) was fortunate to have the experienced printmaker Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) producing illustrations for his books. At some point, he purchased a large collection of the woodblocks engraved by Bewick and issued a book of specimens of these and others available for printing at the Davison shop.

This specimen book is not dated but was issued around 1837 and offers 1,081 impressions from wood-engraved and cast metal ornaments. Over 50 cuts illustrate literary works by Robert Burns, Beattie, Blair and Fergusson. In addition, there are birds, fish, insects, and of course, tigers.

The German architect Friedrich Maximilian Hessemer spent two years traveling and studying the architecture of Switzerland, Italy, Malta, and Egypt. Thanks to the collection of letters he wrote (available in Johns Hopkins University), we know that he made at least 450 pencil sketches and color drawings of what he saw.

120 chromolithographic plates were created from these designs and issued with descriptions in parts between 1836 and 1841. The combined set has been translated and the plates reproduced as Historic Designs and Patterns in Color from Arabic and Italian Sources. Princeton is fortunate to have acquired a rare copy of Arabische und Alt-Italienische Bau-Verzierungen, with the original chromolithographic plates.

  

The New York Public Library has digitized the entire book, which can be viewed here: http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-690e-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

The Graphic Arts Collection is fortunate to have an extensive collection of prints by the artist and illustrator Fritz Eichenberg (1901-1990). Thanks to a gift of Charles A. Perera, class of 1926, we also have a number of the published books illustrated by Eichenberg. In a 1964 interview, conducted by Harlan Phillips for the Archives of American Art, the artist remembered how he began illustrating books.

 “Well, I picked my teachers. I worked as an advertising artist in my early youth. I was eighteen or nineteen when I left Cologne, and I worked in a department store as a guy for everything – you know; I did posters and advertising. I was an apprentice in a lithographic print shop before I took on my first job. … I [studied] with Hugo Steinerpark who was a well known illustrator and perhaps overrated, if you think of him now. At the time he gave me a feeling that this was the right man for me. He was not only interested in the illustration, but in the book as a whole – the design, the binding, the type – the illustrations were just a part of his work. He was the head designer for Ulstein Books, which are still beautiful. He did most of the bindings, and they were just marvelous. I studied under him and became almost immediately one of his master students; that meant that I had the privilege of having a studio by myself under the roof of the academy.  … Leipzig was the center of the book publishing world really at the time, which it isn’t any more. I had a marvelous time working more or less by myself for myself. I began to illustrate books right away. I did Gulliver’s Travels and Dostoevski, whom I always adored as an author. The first book was Crime and Punishment, and I did it while I was a student.”

                   

A collection of books illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg, 1901-1990, Gift of Charles A. Perera (Class of 1926).

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943), The Devil & Daniel Webster. Now printed with an appreciation by Henry Seidel Canby and wood-engravings by Fritz Eichenberg. (Kingsport, Tenn.: Kingsport press [c1945]).

Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855), Jane Eyre, with wood engravings by Fritz Eichenberg (New York: Randon House, 1943). This edition was planned by Richard Ellis and produced under his direction. The illustrations by Fritz Eichenberg were printed letter press form electrotypes of the original wood engravings. The text was composed in monotype Bodoni with long descenders. The composition, electrotyping, printing and binding were by Kingsport Press at Kingsport, Tenn.

Emily Brontë (1818-1848), Wuthering Heights; illustrated with wood engravings by Fritz Eichenberg (New York: Random House, 1943). “This edition was planned by Richard Ellis and produced under his direction. … Printing and binding were by Kingsport Press at Kingsport, Tennessee”–T.p. verso.

Mark Van Doren (1894-1972), The Witch of Ramoth, and other tales. Illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg (York, Pa.: Maple Press Co., 1950). Keepsake series, v.8  “This edition consists of seventeen hundred numbered copies”–Colophon.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), Crime & Punishment. Translation by Constance Garnett (New York: Heritage Club 1938).

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), The Brothers Karamazov : a novel in 4 parts & epilog, translation by Constance Garnett (New York: Heritage Press, 1949, 1933).

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), The Grand Inquisitor, reflections on the story by William Hubben. Illustrations by Fritz Eichenberg ([New York?]: Woman’s Press, 1948).

Fritz Eichenberg (1901-1990), Ape in a Cape: an Alphabet of Odd Animals (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1952).

Fritz Eichenberg (1901-1990), Art and Faith (Wallingford, Pa.: Pendle Hill, 1962).

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Gulliver’s Travels; an account of the four voyages into several remote nations of the world, illustrated with engravings on wood by Fritz Eichenberg (New York: Heritage press, 1940).

Terence Hanbury White (1906-1964), Mistress Masham’s Repose. Illustrations by Fritz Eichenberg (New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, [1946]). Endpapers by Raymond Grath.