No Time

Time. I wish I had more of it. Earlier in the year, our business was quiet and we filled our time and rode out the recession developing new products. I put aside press projects since I didn’t even have the cash to buy paper. Now, when I most need to work on artistic pursuits, the [...]

Printing 19th century wood engravings

Work has begun on printing the collection of 19th century wood engraving blocks loaned to me about a year and a half back. I’ve already taken proofs of the blocks, and will illustrate results in this blog as they come up.
I started out with the first block I proofed, a large engraving of a mouse [...]

Kilburn & company

Work progresses on what I have been calling the ‘Kilburn Portfolio’. More proofs of the blocks have yielded more signatures, proving that the collection of blocks really is a mixed bag of work by different hands. The engravers that I have identified, or at least assigned attribution, seem to be from Boston or New England. [...]

Monthly update

My, how the time does fly! In the intervening month since my last blog, I have done a number of printing related tasks. I completed my submission to the Grimsby Wayzgoose anthology. The Grimsby Wayzgoose is the venerable book arts show held in Grimsby, Ontario every year in April. ‘Waysgoose’ is an old word to [...]

Finding Mr. Kilburn

There hasn’t been a lot of time in the last week to do much on printing or planning, but I did spent a while squeezing more from the internet on the elusive Mr. Kilburn. An intensive web search did indeed yield more leads, and one exciting find. The lead comes in the form of a [...]

Kilburn proofs

Here is the first of several proofs from the wood engraving case of the mysterious Samuel Smith Kilburn. The blocks probably date from the third quarter of the 19th century, if indeed they are all his work.
The only reason I can make an attribution at all is thanks to this block:

The inclusion of Kilburn’s change [...]