By their very nature writing manuals encourage viewer participation, as they illustrate how to form lines into letters. In Johann Neudörffer's “Gute Ordnung” (Good order, 1538–50s) this genesis of lines extends beyond pure pedagogy. By displaying etchings in mirror writing alongside true-sided counterproofs, Neudörffer invites viewers to consider methods of mechanical production of seemingly handwritten lines. His text-images share their self-aware attention to linear aesthetics and process with drawings and etchings by Albrecht Altdorfer and Albrecht Dürer. As Neudörffer's manual taught the formation of beautiful written lines, it also trained contemporaries to become sophisticated consumers of linear beauty in figurative art.

The frontispiece of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), added to increase the book’s humanitarian and commercial appeal, is an important “first” of Black portraiture. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the engraved representation of the poet’s dark skin and its contribution to her complicated reception. While engraving’s abstractions had long been used to commemorate idealized (white) individuals, an Enlightenment understanding of corporeal skin as a changeable surface meant that engraving’s linear syntax also lent itself to derogatory characterizations of Black skin as an “immoveable veil” that masks the expressions of Black subjects.

Washi is paper made by hand from the bark of native Japanese shrubs. Washi is a common medium used for printmaking and paper crafts. Artists who have studied nagashi-zuki, a sheet-forming method unique to washi, often import Japanese fibers because alternatives with similar properties have not been identified. We propose Dirca L. (leatherwood), a shrub endemic to North America, as a source of fibers with properties similar to those plants traditionally used to make washi. The thinness and strength of the leatherwood paper allows it to withstand repeated bending, folding and creasing better than paper made from species of Wikstroemia (Japanese fiber), suggesting an alternative for use with various printmaking techniques and paper arts and crafts that involve folding, such as origami. We engaged printmakers and origami artists in creating original pieces using our leatherwood paper and evaluated how the paper responds to various printmaking techniques and complex folding. We identified Dirca mexicana as a source of fibers with similar properties to species of Wikstroemia used to make gampi washi. Handmade D. mexicana bark paper was successfully used as a paper medium for intaglio, lithography, relief, digital, and screenprinting printmaking techniques, as well as, complex folding origami sculptures.

This is an unprecedented, detailed account of the life and career of the Flemish printmaker and publisher Charles de Mallery, who was part of the renowned, extended Galle and Collaert families of print publishers of Antwerp. It reveals not only the often ignored diversity of his production, but also his remarkable and profitable participation in an unexpectedly active international trade in prints in seventeenth-century Europe. This documentation of the extent of his success as a print publisher is all the more potent when compared with his subsequent demise due to significant, unanticipated financial demands following the death of his wife. We consequently demonstrate in riveting detail how prosperous professionals can quickly be reduced to impoverishment, forced to sell their possessions and accept whatever work they could get, ultimately becoming dependent upon the good will of others.

Typically viewed as a curiosity in the artist’s œuvre, the unusual cancellation sheet for Félix Vallotton’s 1898 woodcut series Intimités is here reassessed as an integral part of the series and an artwork in its own right. After situating Vallotton’s sheet among the ethical, commercial and ideological stakes of cancellation as a printmaking practice in nineteenth-century France, this article argues that the sheet functions as a uniquely decorative culmination of the series’ overall resistance to narrative. It concludes by re-examining the status of cancellation as a destructive, final act, proposing that it can instead be interpreted as a creative and generative process.

This article examines caricaturist Paul Gavarni’s lithographic series, Les Lorettes vieillies, and Jules and Edmond de Goncourt’s short text, La Lorette, as two conflicting visions of the lorette, a type of nineteenth-century prostitute celebrated in literary and visual sources. The Goncourts’ text has previously been studied for its explicit aim to break the rules around representing the lorette; however, I propose here that Gavarni’s little-known images were in fact more radical. Exploring the ways in which Les Lorettes vieillies humanizes the experience of the ageing lorette, a taboo topic in other sources, I show how the series challenges society’s norms around age and gender. Finally, I suggest that we should consider Les Lorettes vieillies, published at the same time and in the same newspaper as La Lorette, as an important intertext informing the Goncourts’ own presentation of the lorette as a transgressive figure.