Catherine Greenaway was an English Victorian artist and writer, known for her children's book illustrations. She received her education in graphic design and art between 1858 and 1871 from the Finsbury School of Art, the South Kensington School of Art, the Heatherley School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art. She began her career designing for the burgeoning holiday card market, producing Christmas and Valentine's cards. In 1879 wood-block engraver and printer, Edmund Evans, printed Under the Window, an instant best-seller, which established her reputation. Her collaboration with Evans continued throughout the 1880s and 1890s.
Thomas Bewick was an English wood-engraver and natural history author. Early in his career he took on all kinds of work such as engraving cutlery, making the wood blocks for advertisements, and illustrating children's books. He gradually turned to illustrating, writing and publishing his own books, gaining an adult audience for the fine illustrations in A History of Quadrupeds.
Letterpress printing is a technique of relief printing for producing many copies by repeated direct impression of an inked, raised surface against individual sheets of paper or a continuous roll of paper. A worker composes and locks movable type into the "bed" or "chase" of a press, inks it, and presses paper against it to transfer the ink from the type, which creates an impression on the paper.
Gwendolen Mary "Gwen" Raverat, was an English wood engraver who was a founder member of the Society of Wood Engravers. Her memoir Period Piece was published in 1952.
The Kelmscott Press, founded by William Morris and Emery Walker, published 53 books in 66 volumes between 1891 and 1898. Each book was designed and ornamented by Morris and printed by hand in limited editions of around 300. Many books were illustrated by Edward Burne-Jones. Kelmscott Press books sought to replicate the style of 15th-century printing and were part of the Gothic revival movement. Kelmscott Press started the contemporary fine press movement, which focuses on the craft and design of bookmaking, often using hand presses. While their most famous books are richly decorated, most Kelmscott Press books did not have elaborate decoration, but were published simply.
The Golden Cockerel Press was an English fine press operating between 1920 and 1961.
Wood engraving is a printmaking technique, in which an artist works an image into a block of wood. Functionally a variety of woodcut, it uses relief printing, where the artist applies ink to the face of the block and prints using relatively low pressure. By contrast, ordinary engraving, like etching, uses a metal plate for the matrix, and is printed by the intaglio method, where the ink fills the valleys, the removed areas. As a result, the blocks for wood engravings deteriorate less quickly than the copper plates of engravings, and have a distinctive white-on-black character.
Dr Alexander Anderson was an American physician and illustrator.
A voluntary association established in 1965 by Geoff Spencer, the Alcuin Society is a non-profit organisation founded for the book arts. It is located in Canada. It should not be confused with the Alcuin Club, an Anglican publishing society.
Meadowridge School, located in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, is a coeducational, independent school teaching Junior Kindergarten through to Grade 12.
The history of printing starts as early as 3000 BC, when the proto-Elamite and Sumerian civilizations used cylinder seals to certify documents written in clay tablets. Other early forms include block seals, hammered coinage, pottery imprints, and cloth printing. Initially a method of printing patterns on cloth such as silk, woodblock printing for texts on paper originated in China by the 7th century during the Tang dynasty, leading to the spread of book production and woodblock printing in other parts of Asia such as Korea and Japan. The Chinese Buddhist Diamond Sutra, printed by woodblock on 11 May 868, is the earliest known printed book with a precise publishing date. Movable type was invented by Chinese artisan Bi Sheng in the 11th century during the Song dynasty, but it received limited use compared to woodblock printing. Nevertheless, the technology spread outside China, as the oldest printed book using metal movable type was the Jikji, printed in Korea in 1377 during the Goryeo era.
Paul Hambleton Landacre was an active participant in the cultural flowering of interwar Los Angeles, described by Jake Zeitlin as a "small Renaissance, Southern California style". His artistic innovations and technical virtuosity gained wood engraving a foothold as a high art form in twentieth-century America. Landacre's linocuts and wood engravings of landscapes, still lifes, nudes, and abstractions are acclaimed for the beauty of their designs and a mastery of materials. He used the finest inks and imported handmade Japanese papers and, with a few exceptions, printed his wood engravings in his studio on a nineteenth-century Washington Hand Press, which is now in the collection of the International Printing Museum in Carson, California.
Edmund Evans was an English wood-engraver and colour printer during the Victorian era. He specialized in full-colour printing, a technique which, in part because of his work, became popular in the mid-19th century. He employed and collaborated with illustrators such as Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway and Richard Doyle to produce what are now considered to be classic children's books. Little is known about his life, although he wrote a short autobiography before his death in 1905 in which he described his life as a printer in Victorian London.
Peter Lazarov is a Bulgarian/Dutch artist printmaker.
Michael McCurdy was an American illustrator, author, and publisher. He illustrated over 200 books in his career, including ten that he authored. Most were illustrated with his trademark black and white wood engravings, with occasional color illustrations. His illustrations often have historical or natural themes.
Jim Rimmer was a Canadian graphic designer, letterpress printer, proprietor of the Pie Tree Press and is especially notable as a designer of typefaces.
Richard Wagener is an American wood engraver known for his prints and fine press books. His work has been collected by over one hundred and thirty public institutions. His first livre d'artiste, Zebra Noise with a Flatted Seventh, was included in Artists' Books in the Modern Era, 1870–2000 at the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Victoria Dailey has called Wagener the first California artist since Paul Landacre to achieve prominence in the art of wood engraving.
George Alexander Walker is a Canadian artist and writer best known for his wood engravings and wordless novels.
The Aliquando Press is a small press book publishing company in Canada, owned and operated by William Rueter.
Crispin Elsted is a Canadian poet and publisher. He was born on May 31, 1947, to Dennis and Isabel Elsted. He is the co-founder, with his wife Jan Elsted, of the book-publishing company Barbarian Press. His poetry collection Climate and the Affections was a shortlisted finalist for the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry and the Gerald Lampert Award in 1996.
