Wood Engraving – how to do it || Simon Brett

I can’t find anywhere that “how to do it” is a promising new series, but the subtitle is prominent on the cover and it’s rather to be hoped, on the evidence of this volume, that it is.

Most instruction manuals these days adopt an illustration-led approach, with the amount of detail included and the length of explanatory text being determined by how elementary or advanced the book is intended to be. Here, however, the meat of the beast is in the writing. That’s not to say that there are no illustrations, or that they’re merely appendages to the text. Far from it, and there are several sequences that show the same scene treated in a variety of different ways, both technically and from a design and aesthetic point of view.

Wood engraving is as old as printing (if not older) and so it’s no surprise that the illustrations are almost all prints, there being hardly any photographs of actual blocks. The few there are show that these don’t in fact photograph easily, although I can’t help feeling that some careful cross-lighting might have helped and that maybe a few more indications of the starting rather than the finishing point might have been helpful. There is, however, a remarkable spread showing how different engravers hold their tools, which is a handy reminder that there’s no right and wrong here.

This is a very thorough guide intended for the serious practitioner rather than the dilettante and, as I said, the approach would develop well into a series.

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