One of the little-known treasures of the Linnean Society is a collection of seventeenth-century botanical woodblocks, made for Olof Rudbeck’s ambitious encyclopedia of all known plants, Campii Elysii (Upsala, 1701-2). The book itself is also not widely known as only a few copies of the first two of 12 projected volumes survived the great fire in Upsala in 1702. In this presentation, Roger Gaskell (bio below) will briefly discuss the use of woodcut for botanical illustration from the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth centuries and how woodblocks are made and printed. Looking at the blocks themselves will allow us to see at first hand the skills of the block-cutters and the technical issues faced by printers. Of particular fascination is the rare survival of unfinished blocks, giving a unique insight into the actual process of cutting the images with a small knife on the pearwood blocks.
Roger Gaskell is a retired antiquarian bookseller having specialised in early scientific and medical books and working mostly with national and academic libraries. He teaches regular classes on book illustration processes and scientific and natural history illustration at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia in Virginia, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Virginia, and at London Rare Book School.
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