/lit/ - Literature

>>13873730

Answered above, I'll just continue a bit. As I've indicated I just know a little bit about the art history, but I'm not a practicioner so I'm just being a dilettante for a bit of fun.

But books on printmaking, itself, or the art form? I couldn't give any detailed advice beyond straightforward starting points, so let me at least do those. Literature related to printmaking is necessarily of a few different kinds: actual how-to manuals/textbooks (I am ignorant of these for reasons explained above), art history about prints themselves, and literature which invokes the graphical form of the print, or in this case woodcut.

For art history related to printmaking, any book on Dürer is a good start. Pic related is considered as one of his great engravings (as opposed to the above woodcuts/lithographs), a distinct technique (I'm pretty sure). I had the pleasure of seeing one instance of it in a museum about a year ago; the image itself was also plagiarized for the "Death" card in a famous Tarot deck (Rider-Waite), proof of its relevance.

For tertiary literature, one has a good sense of what to see about: any European literature from about 1600-1900. Think of Salem witch trials, the frontispiece of Hobbes' Leviathan, and the detailed figures of Gray's Anatomy. That kind of thing. Then begin to ask: who produced these images, and how... It (printmaking, engraving) was a quasi-mass reproducible form of imagery which preceded photography.