New sources for dating illustrated Victorian popular books
Speaker(s): Francesca Tancini
Related events: New sources for book history – International Conference
Releated Working Group(s):
Collection: CERl conferences
Recorded: November 28, 2017
Abstract:
Francesca Tancini (University of Bologna), New sources for dating illustrated Victorian popular books: illustrators’ diaries, printers’ ledgers, woodblocks and drawings
Tied to development of mechanical printing processes and of railway transportation, Victorian popular books were specially designed to catch the eye of hurried travellers from their bookstalls. They were sold at a very cheap price, were usually bound in paper and bore illustrations on front cover printed from wood and drawn by renown artists of the time (as the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Everett Millais, or Dicken’s illustrator “Phiz”, Walter Crane, and so on).
Taking art-history tools as a point of departure, this paper will analyse illustrators’ diaries and sketchbooks, printers' ledgers, illustrators’ and printers' marginal notes inscribed on proofs and drawings, variations in wood-matrices and paper-colour. It will take profit of these data and tools as historical sources to identify the creative and commercial processes beneath the production of illustrated popular books in Victorian times and to recognise and date different issues and printings.
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