Recently, I have been scanning negatives of photographs which I took over fifty years ago. It is one of the delights of photography as a hobby that a diligent archive provides you with a record of your life which can both stimulate your memory and provide raw material for artwork. It has been an extremely emotional task.

I foiund that at one point in the 1970s, I took a few photographs of wood block style graphics from a book, presumably used to illustrate the beginning of each chapter in the book. I never printed them at the time, but now I found them very attractive, so I cleaned up the images, and here they are:

I find these images beautiful, and the mastery of the technique for producing them amazing. It involves flattening the wood surface to be used to generate the image, and then carving wood away from the light areas in the image. A roller carrying the ink is rolled across the surface, so that the flat uncarved areas transfer the ink to the paper.

I frequently find it difficult to interpret a black and white negative (impossible with a colour negative), but the carver of a wood block must produce the image as a negative! Amazing!

Near the wood block negatives in the photo album was a photo of this image:

Now this is a line engraving. This is produced on a highly polished steel plate, which is scratched (simplification!) to produce the image. At least the artist is producing a positive rather than a negative, but I remain in awe of the skill required to produce images in this way.

To produce a print, an inked roller runs over the surface, the surface is wiped clean, leaving ink in all of the scratches. The paper is placed in position on the plate and a roller presses it down so that the paper picks up the ink from the scratches.

I wanted to see the originals of these images, taken over fifty years ago, remember, and searched my bookcases and boxes in the attic, but without success. However, I did find this book, “The World at Home” by Mary and Elizabeth Kirby, published in 1871, which has obviously spent time in a secondhand book shop. I don’t think that I bought it, so it probably came to me from my parents.

This book would have been the equivalent of a 21st century encyclopaedia full of photographs because it is profusely illustrated, but only with line engravings. I presume that it was published before it became technically possible to produce photographic illustrations. One of the most impressive pictures is of the Icelandic volcano, Mount Hecla:

I googled “Mount Hecla” for pictures, and found some other line engravings of the volcano, as well as other views in Icelend. What is interesting is that there are several engravings from this point of view which are distinctly different. One does not have the figures in the foreground, another has the smoke from the volcano blowing from right to left.

It seems that there was a tourist scene in Iceland in the 1880s, at least among artists. Hardy people, those Victorians!