[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Uh uh uh uh.
Arthur. Arthur. Thank you.
Henry. Hey.
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to, uh, the lecture theatre.
Um, to our second, uh, session of talks on Reading in the Woods.
Um, and on behalf of the Bodleian I'd like to, uh, thank Tom Barron, who has kindly supported this project, uh, financially.
So, um. We've got two speakers, uh, in this session, in the first part of this session, and then there's two later on.
And we have, first of all, Alex Franklin, who is hHead of the Centre for the Study of the Book here at the Bodleian.
And she's going to talk to you about, um, woodcuts and woodblocks from the point of view of a librarian.
And then following Alex, uh, we have Andrew Honey, who is, um,
book conservator for research and teaching in the book conservation team, and he will be, um, talking about first impressions.
And, uh, I'm not sure if there is time for questions at the end. Oh he will be available in the hall after
the talks for informal questions because we don't have time for, for question and answer sessions in,
in this, uh, session. So without further ado, Alex.
Thank you so much, Nicole. Um, so after the morning's talks, which were about wood as part of the library fabric, uh,
these afternoon talks are about wood that came into contact with the pages of books,
Um, as a medium for printing. And we'll be talking about woodblocks and the printing impressions made from them.
You'll hear a lot more technically about woodblocks in the next session.
So I'm just going to gloss over that. But we have some examples on the table here. For clarity,
I'll try to say woodcut impression when I mean the printed image on the paper, and woodblock when I mean the piece of wood that made the impression.
Some of the oldest surviving printed texts were made from woodblocks, uh, and cutting designs in wood for printing is still practised today.
Uh, for instance, outside and Blackwell Hall, you can visit Debbi Sutcliffe, a member of the Society of Wood Engravers, demonstrating that method.
Um, I will just show you a slide, uh, showing some woodcut impressions as they come across the desk of a Rare Books librarian.
So, uh, on and one part of this slide, we have a page from a book made in Germany in the 15th century,
um, that is fully printed from a wood block but coloured by hand, I should say.
Um, and then we have, um, on the right hand of the slide, a proof for a book cover printed in the 19th century.
Um, and if you look closely, you can see that it's printed from several wood engraved blocks of different colours.
Um, so, uh, uh, ingeniously, the name of the author is cut into the wood.
Crawley. Captain Crawley a pseudonym, I should say. Um, and that shows up, uh, as the page colour, um, not printed.
Uh, and that is the technique of wood cut.
And what involves wood cut and wood engraving. What you cut into the block does not print.
Um, what you leave standing up will print, uh, but in the detail here you can see there are several blocks used.
So from, from a long span of time using wood to print on the page.
Um, and so I'd like you to get an idea in your head of a wood block like one of these, or a more massive one being used to print,
being used to print, possibly the whole page of the book, including the text as it is.
Um, uh, in that early, uh, block book on the left, um,
and then the page being hung up to dry and the wood block being put away, uh, in a drawer for future use.
And that's where then the fortunes of these two things diverge.
Uh, on the one hand, we have the, um, the wood cut impression,
which is then going to go into, let's say, a book or some other, uh, published material.
And then on the other hand, we have the wood block. Well, what happened to the impressions?
They were sold. They were read. Then later, with any luck, they survive in libraries and museums, uh, or collections of picture prints.
And we'll get back to those in a few minutes.
Meanwhile, wood blocks, on the other hand, that survive in library or museum collections are those which were put into a drawer one day,
and then at a certain point, decades, maybe centuries later,
it became clear that they would never be taken out to make another print, uh, to make another publication.
Their working days were over.
Um, and what would happen to them next if not used as fuel for a stove, which is a perfectly, uh, interesting way to use a piece of wood.
Um, whether they were kept seems to have depended on the prestige of the publication they'd been designed for.
Um, the authors or publishers wish to preserve the research that went into the making of the images.
There are pretty obvious reasons for some museums and libraries having collections of old woodblocks and printing matrices.
Today. I'm just going to rattle through these quite quickly.
Um, so on the slide, I'm showing, uh, screengrabs from three different websites that feature wood blocks.
Um, one is the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, a museum of printing founded within the buildings of a great printing firm.
Uh, so no surprise that in that printing firm, the printing blocks that they use to print their, their great publications were retained.
And thousands of woodblocks from that firm's history of printing are now happily catalogued.
And, um, also many images are available online.
The Society of Antiquaries in London published a journal illustrated with engravings and woodcuts since the 18th century,
and the Society has kept in its library. Thousands of woodblocks are used in the journal, and these are now also shown online.
And just occasionally, um, so there's one where there's a printing actual printing house that's keeping the blocks,
another where the organisation itself is the publisher, so they own the woodblocks.
Just occasionally there's another way of collecting which is represented,
and that is when printing matrices are deliberately assembled by a collector.
Um, and I believe you'll hear a little bit more about this, uh, collection,
this last collection, uh, later on.
Um, these woodblocks in Berlin, which were collected in the late 18th and early 19th century, but they are, uh, 16th century blocks.
Um, these again, also are catalogued, and these these here are displayed online.
The Bodleian does hold over 2000 printing matrices, but the largest number of these are not woodblocks but engraved copper plates,
and most of these, like the collections of the Plantin Museum or the Society of Antiquaries,
are the residue of publication projects that were done in Oxford or have arrived in the Bodleian, um,
because the publication was led by one of the donors or benefactors of the uh, of the library who left their collections.
You may have heard recently about the discovery of doodles by William Blake on the back of a couple of copper plates.
Uh, Blake was a hired engraver for a publication directed by the antiquarian, uh, collector and and, uh,
scholar Richard Gough, whose collections eventually came to the Bodleian in 1809, including these copper plates.
Um, and including on the back of them, um seemingly, uh, doodles by William Blake, uh, as an engraver.
Um, again, a slight outlier in this library is a collection of 750 copper plates which were, uh, assembled second hand.
So, in other words, bought up, uh, by a collector in the 18th century.
Um, most of the things that are in the Bodleian are the result of publications that had something to do with Oxford University Press.
The Bodleian, as far as I know at the moment, holds fewer wood blocks than copper plates.
Um, but seeing where these are scattered through the building collections today will give us an idea of some of the reasons why they are here.
In this slide, I'm showing some printing books that have come into the Bodleian collections, uh, since they're in the 20th century.
Um, as part of personal or institutional archives,
Um, on the left are five colour blocks made by Leonard Baskin, and they are posed around one image, uh, for the work Capriccio Poems by Ted Hughes.
Uh, in 1990. And again, this is an example of different, several different blocks coming together to make that multicolour image, colour image on the page.
Um, on the right. I've cheated a bit here. These, uh, there are woodblocks involved in this, but of course, the surface,
the printing surfaces of these anti-slavery society blocks that are in the Anti-Slavery society archive are halftones.
They're halftone blocks, uh, attached to wooden blocks.
Uh, and these were used for the Anti-Slavery society's publications.
The Anti-Slavery society reporter and the Aborigines Friend.
But the library has also deliberately collected a few, uh, wood cut wood blocks as teaching tools to explain how books were made in earlier times.
And a fairly recent example of this is a couple of Chinese printing blocks that were bought
by the previous curator of Chinese collections to enable himself and future curators to show,
as well as tell, how Chinese books were printed.
Well, what do these things tell us? Really? Uh, the exhibition next door that's open next door.
Write Cut Rewrite is brilliant at showing, uh, that literary genius doesn't just sit fully formed in the author's head,
uh, but emerges through many incremental adjustments made along the way.
Similarly, the printed pages of books in the library show, uh,
an arrangement of possibly woodblocks and maybe also metal type letters in one arrangement, but it's not the inevitable one.
There was a moment in the creation of all these books when that arrangement could have been different.
It could have been interrupted, censored, disputed, broken, or accidentally misplaced.
And I haven't been able to, uh, resist showing the Bodleian's copy of a printed edition of Dante's works from 1481,
with the engraved illustration placed upside down.
When you think about the way that the printing was done,
Uh, it's easy to see how this could happen.
Um, so thinking about wood as a material, wood has certain affordances, the ones that make it good for carving images in the first place.
It can be cut, jointed together, nailed, glued, but it can also be eaten by woodworm.
And it can crack and break, uh, through environmental, uh, stresses or pressure.
And here's where we go back to that fork in the path of destiny between the, the woodblock and the impressions taken from it.
If one woodblock could make thousands of impressions,
it might seem obvious that those impressions stand a better chance of preservation than the block itself.
But there is a note of caution here.
Um, we should remember that woodcut impressions adorn some of the most highly illustrated materials in the centuries of early printed,
but also some of the most ephemeral materials playing cards, broadsides, single sheet,
uh, even a paper book cover, things which survive in very small numbers.
Uh, so that possibly we don't have all of the impressions, uh, that that were ever made.
What a treasure to find they are when we do find them
preserved. Bibliographers have made discoveries about the dates of publication, the printers behind publications based on matching woodcut impressions.
And also by finding those little changes I mentioned: Wormholes, cracks, missing borders.
All of those are clues to the bibliographer as to what part of the journey we are on with this particular woodblock.
Comparing woodcut impressions to make identify, but make identification of those coming from the same woodblock,
or to notice changes taking place indicating wear and damage on the block over time has always been a very laborious business.
Uh, there were great achievements in the first half of the 20th century.
Um, with R.B. McKerrow's description and analysis of printers devices in England and Scotland.
Um and Edward Hartnett's monograph on English woodcuts, uh, both published by the Bibliographical Society.
But personal communication has was always and still is really the key to sharing information about woodcut impressions.
And woodblocks are very small, and I think typical example which I'm showing on this slide,
is a letter written in 1950 from the then provost of Oriel College to Bob Lee's librarian, J.N.L.M. Myers.
The provost encloses some woodcut impressions, and he writes, here are pulls from the six woodblocks which I bought in 1920.
And then he goes on to say on the next page that another correspondent has told him
of a similar image to one of these in the chat book collection of the British Museum.
So this is how research is taking place. By letter, by hearsay, by by word of mouth.
The 1998 publication of Ruth Boesky and Elizabeth Ingram's Guide to English Illustrated Books, 1536 to 1603,
was certainly boosted by the vast microfilming project, uh, which uh, has of English printed books,
which has become the resource Early English books online for people, for people who use, uh, books from that period.
Uh, it is uh, it's a vast resource.
And in recent decades, bibliographers and cataloguers in several countries have worked brilliantly to identify and to list, uh,
woodcut impressions in particular periods and genres of printed material, always seeking to share digital images as well.
In the 20 tens, the Bodleian Library was lucky to be involved in another great technological boost to this important bibliographical method,
with Giles Bergels' invention of the Image Match tool applying computer automated visual matching,
developed by the Oxford Department of Engineering to the analysis of woodcut impressions.
Giles was working on a project describing the Bodleian's collections of British broadside ballads.
We see two of them on that slide right now.
These are single sheet items, and the image matching was focussed on the, uh, 17th and 18th century, uh, ballads.
So looking at these two, let me just ask if you see anything similar?
The consensus is 'yes'. And where is that similarity most located on the sheets? If anybody can shout out.
Illustrations of the illustration of a male figure and of the female.
Yes. So there's a man and a woman, and they seem to appear on both of these ballads, which are completely different.
Title song and everything are otherwise different.
But the man and the woman both, beth. Show there. Um,
so the question that automated image match was designed to answer was how to efficiently
match and discover all such multiple impressions across thousands of different broadsides?
It's fun to play and mix and match with these, but there's a serious bibliographical advantage to finding impressions made from the same woodblock.
So when you get a new toy, you want to play with it.
And just by chance, one of the first, uh, broadsides that we tested with Image Match had this, uh, image,
and that the man wearing the hat there on the left.
Um, looking more closely at that impression, uh, for the purpose of conducting, uh, an automated image search,
which was purely just put the mouse over and, um, drag and select, uh, we suddenly were confronted with a different question.
Um, why is this hat so big? So that was that was really the the kind of question we had about this.
Um, here he is again,
and here are the matching, the matches of his whole body, uh, himself with his hat on, with his big, big hat, um, with some wormholes in the hat.
Um, but what we found when we looked to match,
just the hat, was that it does appear on another man, a different man altogether, um, an entirely different man.
And, um, that just multiplied the questions that we had.
Here is a man with a hat, seemingly a similar hat that seems to be still attached to his head.
Here is a similar, but perhaps not the same man with a hat that has a little white line between the head and the hat.
Um. And here is a man with a hat that lives obviously.
Uh, a costume is obviously an imposter wearing somebody else's hat.
Um, so this was the kind of thing we found, and this was the kind of thing that, uh,
makes us think about, as I say, the affordances of what wood, what would wood, as a material do.
The other question for a librarian, though, in looking at this item, is how to communicate that to users of the collection?
What words can we use in a library catalogue to begin to describe this?
Um, it's not easy.
Uh, in truth, without the image match tool it would be very difficult to, uh, even come up with these matches, um, much less to, to tell, uh, users about them.
Um, so the, the tool which we have in place doesn't yet talk about woodblocks, but it,
uh, is a lib guide to printed images and printing service surfaces in the Bodleian library.
Um, and it's mainly got here, um, the hand lists of copper plates.
And, uh, on this slide, I'm showing both the online lib guide and, uh, one page from the written hands
list, hand list, literally a written list that resides in the library and is accessible only to people in the library.
And then again, only people to people who know about that list.
Um, that is the kind of descriptive, uh, gap we're trying to fill, um, with, with work in the library.
And I'd like to describe what it was like to fall into that gap.
Now, um, by talking about, um, another group of woodcuts found in the public library,
the largest group, I think, known so far, which is, uh, something over 70
Of them. Um. Thomas Hearne was sub librarian.
This is not Thomas Hearne or anybody like that.
Thomas Hearne was Sub librarian of the Bodleian in the latter years of the 17th, and the early years of the 18th century.
And he was also an antiquarian scholar who published works by subscription and contracted all the printing himself.
He bought the paper, he employed the compositors, uh, engravers and woodcut makers.
Um, in a in one article it's noted that he probably employed Hugh Cuckoo, the joiner who worked for the Bodleian in this period.
Um, uh, in this same article in 1951, published in the Bodleian Library
Record remarked that some of the woodblocks used by Thomas Hearne in the early 18th century um had um had evidently been preserved after his death,
and a set of those have recently been found in the library, 1951 recently found in the library.
Well, that's a tantalising phrase. What did it mean in 1951?
Were those woodblocks part of the library collections or not?
Well, let's just rewind a couple of years.
In 1949, some library staff and professors of English language and literature had formed the Bibliography Room,
the Bodleian's uh Working Letter Press workshop, where people can experiment with, uh, hand printing.
Uh, and this slide shows how it looks today. Um, part of the teaching materials, there are specimens of printing blocks.
And I've brought to you that much, um, more appropriately housed printing blocks.
Uh, as they were in the, uh, room.
There, and this here is that some of you who are not looking at the table, this, that, that's that's what they look like
now. There was no notice in the library catalogue of the woodblocks that survived from Thomas Hearne's publications,
um, nearly 70 years after the foundation of the Bibliography room. In 2019,
when woefully ignorant of that 1951 article, I came across the item on this slide,
which is a printed sheet titled A Set of wooden Characters used by the learned antiquary Thomas Hearne.
As a frequenter of the Bodleian printing workshop,
I was accustomed to seeing woodblocks that looked very much like they had been used to print this item.
And there they are. I was startled to realise that these specimen woodblocks, um, must be over 250 years old.
Um. And they are in a working printing workshop. In 2019,
the sleuthing of Henry Woudhuysen came to the rescue in an article where he untangled
the story behind these silent objects and bridged the gaps in this record.
Um, the blocks belonging to Thomas Herne are now themselves in special collections of the Bodleian,
and are listed in the main library catalogue available for inspection.
But it was appropriate for a while anyway, that these woodblocks did sit in the bibliography room, even if they were not.
They were not necessarily used for printing there, but they were made as tools for printing,
and that's what they were able to demonstrate during their life in the bibliography room.
The salutary lesson of that story is that, um,
knowledge can die off. Even, even published knowledge can die off.
Um, and we need to join in events like this to keep reminding each other,
Of what? Of things that are in the library, of interesting in questions.
Um, I want to go back to the hats now. Um, again, on this theme of reminding ourselves about stories, reminding ourselves about questions.
After we discovered that the 17th century Ballard printers had made two woodcut men share a hat.
I decided that although we don't have the historical woodblocks that made these prints, we should try to recreate them,
or at least a version of them as a material way, uh, to communicate the potential of woodblocks, um, and the ingenuity of 17th century printers.
So here is a slide showing, as we saw that the man with the outsized hat appears on the same sheet as a woman there.
And I thought we should give the woman a hat as well.
So we've cheated. We've done photo etching to make a man with a detachable hat and a woman with a detachable hat, both printable.
Um, both can can reconstruct this, uh, strange decision by the 17th century printers to, uh, remove a hat from one person and put it on another.
In looking through the stuff collected in libraries.
You are constantly making discoveries and rediscoveries, and more often than not, you are meeting an earlier bibliographer coming around the corner.
I'll turn over now to another bibliograpery. Thank you.
My talk this afternoon is going to, uh, will take a single piece of wood recently bought for the Bodleian's Biblio Press,
which we've just seen as a starting point. It's a wooden block engraved on one side with the letter K that is made out of four human figures,
and with some trial engraving on the back, where it's also inscribed W E, the K is reversed on the front and in part the sides.
Um, the k is reversed and the front, and in part the sides have been coloured black by printing ink.
Because you've all just been, uh, listening to Alex, we all know that this is a wooden printing block.
So here's the block slightly tipped, showing the engraving more clearly.
The letter K is formed by four figures a man holding a ribbon in one hand with morn heart there, or with my heart written on it.
He's down on one knee while presenting a ring, a ring to a woman standing behind him.
Together they form the stem of the letter, while two men fly out from them to form the arm and leg of the K.
It's a handsome thing, and my talk today will start to explain how the Bodleian bought this piece of wood earlier this year,
giving a behind the scenes glimpse into the workings of the library.
But more importantly, it will begin to explain why we bought it, how it relates to other items in our collections,
and the light it sheds on how our collections have been investigated in the past.
So our story begins on a Thursday evening in February when I spotted the block on Etsy.
And that's an online marketplace for independent traders.
I'll have to confess, I hadn't been looking for it. I've been looking for something completely different.
The description was not entirely correct, but I messaged a link, uh, via WhatsApp to Alex.
But because the Bodleian never sleeps, she quickly messaged back.
40 minutes is pretty quick for us. Uh, with the instruction 'buy'.
But but never one to act quickly. I then slept on it.
However, Alex hunted me down first thing the following morning and prevented me going
from having a cup of coffee and instructed me to go and buy it straight away.
So why had I messaged Alex and then used my own credit card to buy it so quickly?
This isn't the usual way for the Bodleian to acquire new items.
What was it about this blog that caught our attention?
Alex and I both knew this block from a woodblock grotesque alphabet book, thought to date from 1464, that is now in the British Museum.
And I show the printed letter K alongside the block in the alphabet book.
Each letter is printed on one side of a single leaf in a brownish ink.
The alphabet would have originally contained 23 letters, omitting J, U, and W,
though the letter S is missing, and of A,T and V, only fragments remain in the British Museum
copy. And that copy is only one of two known surviving copies of this grotesque alphabet, both of which are now in the British Museum.
But let's not get overexcited. Sadly, this is not a 15th century woodblock.
The block we've purchased is a facsimile copy of the letter K, and was used to print a treatise on wood engraving,
Historical and practical, with upwards of 300 illustrations engraved on wood by John Jackson.
That's what it says on the title page, published by Charles Knight and Co in 1839.
And now here I show the two other letters that were reproduced from the alphabet in the treatise L and Z, both printed in a brown ink.
And here I show you the block alongside the K in the treatise, where it is described as follows,
And I quote, 'There is in the print room of the British Museum a small volume of woodcuts, which has not hitherto been described by any bibliography.
It consists of an alphabet of large capital letters, formed of figures arranged in various attitudes.
There is only one cut on each leaf, the back being left blank, as in most block books, and the impressions have been taken by means of friction.
The paper at the back of each cut has a shining appearance when held towards the light.'
It continues,
'The ink is merely a distemper or watercolour, which will partly wash out by the application of hot water, and the colour is a kind of sepia.'
And then next to the K it has, describing the illustration.
'The above is a facsimile of the cut', referred to the letter K of the size of the original.
So the Treatise on Wood Engraving links this alphabet and its method of printing to block books.
And we saw one of these earlier. Here I show a copy of the edition of the third edition of the block book Biblia Pauperum from the Bodleian's collection,
the impression, dating from about 1645 to 70.
You can see it's also printed in a deep brown ink on only one side of the paper by rubbing from engraved wooden blocks.
The late Professor Nigel Palmer, who catalogued the Bodleian's collection of blocks books,
has said 'the simplest definition of a block book is that it is a book printed from wood blocks without recourse to moveable type',
and block books have an important place in the early discussions of the history of printing.
They were once thought to be the immediate precursor to Gutenberg's invention of moveable type.
The Bodleian has a small but important collection of eight block books, including some of the first discussed in relation to the history of printing.
The one I'm showing is one of two bequeathed to the library by Francis Dowse in 1834.
And the Treatise was also interested in the method of printing.
Explaining the colour of the paper, I quote.
'The colour of the above will give the reader, who had not an opportunity of examining the originals,
some idea of the colour in which they are printed, which in all of them is a kind of sepia.'
And these are the only blocks in the book that are'nt printed with black ink.
So we now know that this block was used to print the Treatise on Wood Engraving in 1839, where it was printed in brown ink.
The title page only mentions the engraver John Jackson, who had been an apprentice to the wood engraver Thomas Buick.
But the book was actually written by William Andrew Chatto.
Chatto. And the absence of his name from the title page and alterations to his preface clearly angered him.
In a densely written, privately printed 36, 36 page third preface,
he gives us extra information that would otherwise be lost.
He's also very rude about Jackson, who he calls an illiterate, ignorant man with the nickname 'Old Hickory the Woodcutter'.
He says, and I quote, 'Of the numerous copies of old woodcuts contained in the work,
not a single one has been either drawn or engraved by Mr. John Jackson', and that Jackson and Knight had suppressed.
And I quote again 'The name of W F Fairholt,
the artist by whom all the elaborate facsimile facsimiles of old woodcuts contained in the work, except two were copied and drawn on the block.'
The best of the copies of old woodcuts were engraved by a young man named Stephen Rainbow.
At that time a pupil of Mr. Jackson's.
He also tells us that technical requirements means that the reproduction that we have is not a complete facsimile.
And I quote again, 'It is in consequence of the work having been originally intended to be printed in demy octavo,
that most of the cuts now appear so small when compared with the size of the page.'
It is from this cause that the so called facsimiles for the alphabet want the outer border line at the sides.
So we know far more about this new block than other printing blocks that have survived,
and that this one was used to convey the materiality when discussing early printing.
However, this still isn't the reason why Alex and I were so keen to buy it.
A great excitement in this new block is due to two other wood blocks that are also in the Bodleian.
They are two of four which I show here that have the shelf marked Douce woodblocks.
I first came across them in the stack of the New Bodleian beneath our feet, um, in the early 2000s around 2012,
I mentioned them in passing to Alex, who as we know, is interested in all things printing.
She realised that they had not been catalogued and were therefore not readily accessible to researchers.
I improved their housing the next year and show the fawn blocks now within the tailored archival box.
They were first catalogued in October, uh, 2014.
Francis Douce's collection, which we've, uh, which we've seen earlier in that block brick example, um, arrived in 1834.
So it was only a wait of 180 years for us to catalogue these two blocks.
Uh, we also managed to get the, uh, one of the letters wrong in that first catalogue description.
So two of the blocks are also copies from the same grotesque alphabet of 1464.
Here we have a single block with X and Y, with a print from it stuck to the back.
And you'll see the block has a major split and has been partially repaired.
And a smaller block with the letter Z, which has a hanging ring at the top of it.
Although they hadn't been catalogued by the Bodleian, and they had been noted in 1896 by the historian of early printing,
Robert Proctor, who relates that they had hung in the Douce Room.
And here I show you the Douce Room,
which contain the large collection of manuscripts and printed books from the from downstairs bequest, as it was in 18 as in 1939,
just before the library's collections moved from the school's quadrangle to the New Bodleian,
the building we're in now now known as the Weston Library.
And here is the room two years earlier, in 1937.
Could this darker rectangle in the window be one of the blocks?
I'd like to think so. I'm, I'm not convinced. Knowing that Douce
also owned two wood block facsimiles of the grotesque alphabet of 1464
was the clinching argument for us buying this new block.
There are further connections. Kept with the original prints at the British Museum
is a letter dated the 27th of May, 1819 from Samuel Lysonss to Sir George Beaumont,
its then owner, and I quote from the letter, uh, shown here on the screen.
'I return here with your curious volume of ancient cuts.
I showed it yesterday to Mr. Douce, who agrees with me that it is a great curiosity.
He thinks the blocks were executed at Haarlem and are some of the earliest productions of that place.
He has in his possession most of the letters executed in copper, but very inferior to the original cuts.'
So Douce had seen this then unique wood woodcut alphabet in 1819,
the same example that Frederick William Fairholt would copy some 20 years later for our new woodblock.
It's this example of the discoveries and rediscoveries that Alex discussed,
and the meetings with earlier bibliographers coming round the corner, or in our case, not a corner, but Etsy.
And going back to the 1839 treatise which explained, and I quote again, 'The colour of the abovve, that is, the grotesque K,
will give the reader, who has not had an opportunity of examining the originals, some idea of the colour in which are printed,
um, in which they are all printed, which in all of them is a kind of sepia'. Thomas Hearne, who we've heard about earlier,
the Oxford antiquarian and sub librarian here at the Bodleian, was trying to do exactly the same in 1714.
Here I show his essay on early printing ink within his diary
where he discusses the colour and texture of theink used for some block books and early woodcuts.
He says I quote again 'Anyone that will give himself the trouble of considering the first specimens of printing that we have in the Bodleian
library, being two thin folio books containing old pictures from wooden cuts will have will afford to a curious observer many speculations',
but because those books cannot be conveyed out of the library to give him a better idea of the nature of them,
I shall here subjoined the specimen of a fragment of another book that was communicated to me by Mr. Bagford.
That is John Bagford, the late 17th century and early 18th century bookseller and antiquary,
and the fragment given to him by him to Hearne, is part of a German block book,
Biblia Pamperum him updated the impression, dated between 1462 and 68, where the Treatise carefully reproduced the grotesque alphabet in brown ink.
Hearne's desire to convey the materiality of early water based printing inks was accomplished with, uh, a specimen.
John Bagford was working on a history of printing in the early 18th century, sadly never completed,
and these copies of the Grotesque Alphabet alphabet, later owned by Francis Doce, were cut for this project.
Recent work by a Whitney Trettion and Ed Potton, who will be speaking in a moment,
have linked our two blocks with a block for K and L at the British Museum and these
three alphabet blocks and a third Douce block here at the Bodleian join two others,
one at the John Rylands Library and one at the British Library, to form a group of six surviving woodblocks from Bagfords'
History of Printing. But the plot thickens.
We're also fortunate to have impressions from these, uh, blocks A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, X, Y,
and Z in Thomas Hearns collections which came to the Bodleian as part of Richard Rawlinson's donation in 1755.
Hearne's index, dated the 28th of January 1729,
describes them as quote figures of some odd letters which I had from Mr. Bagford, and I'm showing the index and, uh, A,B,C,D.
And here we have, uh, the impression from the blocks later owned by Douce, X, Y, and Z printed before the splits and damage.
Again, one of the ways that we can date or relate a chronology of of impressions to blocks.
Thank God for early librarians leaving notes.
Thomas Hearne had noted on the back of our impression, I quote, 'These are figures of odd letters which I had from Mr. Bagford.
I have an account of them from his own mouth in one of my diary books.'
They run to the published versions, run to many volumes,
but from them I've managed to find in a letter from Hearne to Bagford, dated the 6th of February, 1708.
We learn that I quote 'Mr. Wanley, has lately happened on some very old alphabets.
Antique, of sort of printing, cut on wood, which I shall exhibit in my book as soon as I've got them cut.
I shall send you a specimen of them. I daresay you will please you when you see them.'
Later that year on the 8th of October, and gives a fuller account, presumably after he had received these printed impressions.
And I quote again, 'Mr. Bagford has had a German printed book of the alphabet drawn.
Exactly. It contains nothing more than the alphabet, only here and there a sentence in German inserted in the letters.
They are all of a very large size for the for the use of the illuminators,
and are made up of several figures as heads of men, etc. the z is made, and he puts the Z backwards.
He has another alphabet, the letters of a stranger sort, though made up in knots with scrolls of parchment.'
So these earlier facsimile prints linked this group of early 18th century
printing historians to another specific copy of the grotesque alphabet of 1464,
one that was owned by the antiquarian and librarian Humfrey Wanley.
Again, 1672 1726.
It is by chance the second surviving copy, and one that was given to the British Museum by Charles William Dyson Perrins in 1947.
And here I show the iron K printed, this time on one piece of paper.
And by chance. And here is the John Bagford block. A block for iron K, the one cut in 1708.
The block is now at the British Museum and is from the same set as our Douce's wood blocks.
So I hope that my introduction to this new, or at least, uh, new to us,
Woodblock demonstrates the relevance of wooden printing materials to the library.
These examples are witnesses to a long engagement with the history of printing,
and highlight different approaches to attempting to convey the complex materiality of the originals to a wider audience.
All of these blocks link us back to earlier bibliographers and collectors as we rediscover them, and make them readily accessible to researchers.
We, uh, shouldn't forget, as Alex has said, that we are meeting earlier bibliographers coming around the corner.
Woodblocks might not always have, uh, fitted comfortably into the Bodleian collections.
And they've clearly caused problems for librarians and cataloguers over the years.
But I'm glad we have them. Thank you.