Tag Archive: 0illustration

Later today, the Boston Virtual Book Fair will go live. Regular customers will already have received a copy of my fair list, to get a sneak peek at what I shall be showing. I thought this week on the blog I’d write about one of those books. Published in Budapest in 1922, this is a […]

This is a copy of the first edition of The Musical Bouquet (1799) by the Welsh harpist Edward Jones (1752–1824); the etched frontispiece is by Rowlandson. ‘Bard to his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales’ as the title-page here styles him, he had moved to London from Llandderfel in 1774.  ‘The harp was very fashionable […]

A few years ago, I wrote about an early piece of English lithographed music, from the 1820s. As I said at the time, British music publishers largely neglected lithography in the first four decades of the nineteenth century, but it did serve its purpose well for William Hawkes Smith’s privately-printed music with his own illustrations […]

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 […]

Today we will take a break from our series of ‘first appearances’ of carols to bring you a delightful early Victorian gift book, with chromolithographed illuminations throughout: Joseph Cundall’s A Booke of Christmas Carols, illuminated from Ancient Manuscripts in the British Museum (London, Henry G. Bohn, 1845): ‘After Pickering, the publisher with the most devoted […]

We have come across some unique things here at Simon Beattie Ltd, but this one is new to us: lepidochromy, i.e., printing with butterflies. Yes, you read that correctly: there is a printing process wherein actual butterflies are ‘printed’. It is a type of transfer illustration, and not dissimilar to other types of ‘nature printing’ […]