Steel-Engraved Book Illustration in England

Scolar Press London, first edition, 1980. Cloth, 8vo, 26 cm,. xvi, 263 pp, 66 plates, ills. The first detailed and comprehensive survey of steel-engravings for book illustration. This well-illustrated work moves from the identification problems and early history of steel engravings through the production and printing of the plates to a study of several of the engravers and artists as well as the books themselves. "Although examples of steel engraving date from the fifteenth century, the nineteenth century was the great age for this type of illustration. It stood between the cheap woodcut for the masses and the handcolored aquatints for the rich. Steel engraving persisted through the 1800s, but its heyday was 1825-1845. Hunnisett notes that the steel engraving (often actually steel etching because of the hardness of the metal) made possible the illustrated literary annual. By the 1880s steel engraving was in decline, and photography provided the last blow. With sixty-six facsimiles. An appendix reprints an article from All the Year Round of October 27, 1866 that explains the process of steel engraving. Ibbin A. Sparling of the Yale Center for British Art wrote in The American Book Collector 2 (March/April, 1981): 78-79, "In Steel-Engraved Book Illustration in England Basil Hunnisett provides a comprehensive study of steel-engraving which ranks as a significant addition to the literature of British book illustration. . . . A pioneering work of high scholarship, [it] is destined to become a standard in its field." - Rosenblum. Lightly agetoned at page edges, otherwise Very Good in somewhat yellowed dustwrapper.