Rudbeck’s Remains
26 April 2024
I recently gave an online presentation at the Linnean Society on the surviving woodblocks cut for Rudbeck’s Campi elysii (Upsala, 1701–2). This was to be an ambitious encyclopedia of all known plants but only a few copies of the first two of […]
Illustrations of typesetting at Firmin-Didot in 1855
5 March 2021
The wood-engravings of typesetting, correction and imposition in Lefèvres printers’ manual are among the most vivid and informative illustrations of the delicate work – and heavy lifting – involved in hand typesetting. They are by the celebrated […]
Rare Book School online this summer
5 March 2021
All in person Rare Book School classes in Charlottesville have been cancelled for this summer and many classes are going online. For my class, Caroline Duroselle-Melish and I are offering a 10 hour online class, ‘Making the Early Modern […]
The Scientific Woodblock to 1800
16 November 2020
With Caroline Duroselle-Melish, I gave a Zoom presentation on 19 November 2020, which is now available online. This was a Rare Book School Online event. Text of the original announcement. In this presentation Roger Gaskell and Caroline […]
The Landseer juvenile etchings
1 June 2020
I recently sold a collection of copperplates etched by Sir Edwin Landseer when he was between 8 and 10 years old to the Graphic Arts Collection a Princeton University. The curator, Julie Melby has posted an announcement the department’s blog […]
Rare Book School rolling press
12 May 2020
Rare Book School have released a video featuring the wooden rolling press which John Milnes and I constructed in Oxford. The press is based on the designs published in the Encyclopédie in 1769. The following extracts from my original pitch for […]
What is the point?
1 April 2020
‘As in Geometry, the most natural way of beginning is from a Mathematical point … closing’. So begins Robert Hooke’s extended verbal and visual pun on Euclid’s Elements, at the start of his Micrographia (1665). The […]
Diagram
31 March 2020
Hooke Micrographia 1665 Diagram It is not known how the diagrams in the first edition of Euclid (1482), though it is clear they were not printed from woodcuts. In this article I will describe the ways that diagrams have been printed in books up to […]

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