Tag Archive: 0art

Something a little seasonal: this mezzotint reproduces Bartolomé Esteban Murillo‘s Rest on the Flight into Egypt. It is the work of James Walker (1759–1822), who had been recruited to go to Russia in 1784, where he was appointed engraver to Catherine the Great.  ‘Walker’s principal task was to engrave important pictures by old and contemporary […]

Of the Werther-related items in Anglo-German Cultural Relations, item 37 stands out as particularly striking and visual: a group of three etchings with stipple by Bartolozzi after Bunbury and Ramberg, each illustrating a scene from the novel. Goethe’s influential novel first appeared in English, via a French translation, in 1779, and soon grabbed the attention […]

This week we received the printed copies of a catalogue that has been in the works for some time, and have finally mailed them out. Published to mark my tenth anniversary as an independent bookseller, it has been years in the making.  Many people know me for selling Russian material, but in fact my interest […]

A bookseller’s year is marked by the book fairs.  Summer is a quiet time, but in autumn everything starts up again.  There was York, then the ILAB Congress in Budapest, and now there’s Grasmere (a first for the ABA), Seattle, Frankfurt, INK in London (another new fair), Boston, and Chelsea.  Obviously, I can’t attend all these, so […]

Théodore Géricault’s vast masterpiece Le Radeau de la Méduse (now at the Louvre) is, of course, based on fact.  But how did he find out about what happened on that ill-fated voyage?  Answer: he read a book.  The book he read, written by two of the shipwreck’s survivors, Jean-Baptiste Savigny (the ship’s surgeon) and Alexandre Corréard […]

Here’s an odd one for you: snapshot commentary on dystopian Seventies Britain, in words and images, from an anonymous poet in Bristol.  The inspiration is not just contemporary, either; he includes an eighteenth-century tomb inscription he came across in Bath Abbey. I bought the book because of the materials used in its production.  Sandpaper was […]