Discover Top Posts Tagged with #woodcuts

Deutsche Gedichte : mit Schattenbildern - Hans Fraungruber & Ferdinand Staeger - 1908 - via Internet Archive

Peter Flötner Germany, 16th century A gaming board woodcut The Cleveland Museum of Art

#Peter Flötner #game board #design #games #woodcuts

'the rabbits,' woodcut, henri charles guérard c. 1893.

#woodcuts #archive.org #1800s #rabbits #animals #art #henri charles guerard

Georg Rueter (1875-1966), ''Noorweegsche Brieven'' by Valborg Isaachsen-Dudok van Heel, 1902

#Georg Rueter #dutch artists #vintage illustration #vintage art #black and white art #black and white illustration #woodcuts

What in the World?

Everything is terrible, but for those attempting to compartmentalize, here is a beautiful 16th century map of Asia in the form of a pegasus.

The map appears in the Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae of Heinrich Bünting (1545-1606) which describes the travels of biblical figures and Church Fathers. It includes several particularly unusual maps. The book was first published in 1581, and the image above is from a Swedish translation of 1591.

Link to catalog record below:

Bünting, Heinrich. Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae. Stockholm: Andrea Gutterwitz, 1595.

#maps #pegasus #bookhistory #rare books #16th century #woodcuts

Pulled a bunch of prints from the Kpop Demon Hunters blocks I carved last weekend! I'm looking forward to playing around with framing options. The Mira block was the most fun to carve, and I also think it's my favorite print!

#kpop demon hunters #kpdh #polytrix #my art #woodcuts #linocut #printmaking #rumi kpdh #mira kpdh #zoey kpdh #huntrix

✨🧜🏽‍♀️Fairytale Friday🧜🏽‍♀️✨

Where Love Meets the Deep

This week, we're wading into Undine, written by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, translated by Edmund Gosse, and illustrated with woodcuts by Allen Lewis. Published in New York by The Limited Editions Club in 1930, this edition feels as carefully crafted as the story itself, delicate, precise, and a little haunting.

At its center is Undine, a water spirit who longs for a human soul. She finds love with a knight, and for a time, everything feels almost impossibly luminous, like sunlight catching on water, like something you know you can’t hold but reach for anyway. The story draws on older European folklore of elemental water spirits, beings said to inhabit rivers and streams, who could gain a soul through love, but never without conditions. And Undine never lets you forget that. This is Romantic-era love, intense, a little ominous, and very aware that nature does not always bend to human desires.

Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777-1843), a Prussian nobleman and one of the key figures of German Romanticism, saw nature as alive, expressive, and full of meaning. A veteran of the Napoleonic Wars turned writer, Fouqué drew heavily on medieval chivalry, folklore, and elemental myth. Undine (first published around 1811) became his most enduring work, influencing later water-spirit lore, including, arguably, the stories that would eventually give us mermaids with much softer edges.

Known for his work in fine press books, Allen Lewis (1873-1957) was trained as both a painter and printmaker and helped revive wood engraving in early 20th-century America. His style is meticulous, shadowed, and restrained, perfect for a story where so much happens beneath the surface. His images don’t interrupt the text so much as linger within it, like reflections caught in moving water.

This is one of those fairy tales that doesn’t sparkle so much as shimmer…beautiful, a little unsettling, and impossible to hold onto for long.

--Melissa (who fully supports a dramatic, water-soaked love story when it looks this good), Distinctive Collections Library Assistant