On 20 February 1763, only days after the formal conclusion of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), the London engraver and geographer Thomas Jefferys published a large advertisement in Lloyd’s Evening Post. Although Jefferys typically published several advertisements every year, in many different papers, this one was special: unusually long, it declared that he had published a series of ‘American Views neatly engraved from Drawings taken on the Spot by several officers of the British [sic] Navy and Army’, and in addition, it listed over two dozen maps and plans which represented sites in North America and the West Indies.

Following Napoleon’s short-lived 1798 campaign in Egypt, a large number of illustrated books exploring Muslim civilization in general, and Islamic Cairo in particular, appeared to cater to the growing European fascination with the Muslim world. These publications were especially popular in France and Great Britain, countries that had strong political interests in Egypt during the nineteenth century. More recently, they have attracted the attention of art historians and scholars of Orientalism and the nineteenth-century culture of travel.

This article focuses on one of these books, namely the widely cited three-volume illustrated book on Islamic Cairo, L’Art arabe d’après les monuments du Caire depuis le VIIème siècle jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIème siècle (Arab Art: As Seen Through the Monuments of Cairo from the Seventh to the Eighteenth Century), by the French Egyptologist Émile Prisse d’Avennes (1807–79). L’Art arabe was published between 1869 and 1877 in Paris by the prestigious private press Veuve A. Morel et Cie. Well known among scholars, designers, and collectors of Islamic art, Prisse d’Avennes’s book has been widely disseminated and reprinted since the nineteenth century. This multi-volume work is important on its own terms, but its historical importance can be further augmented by an exploration of various archival sources—information that is rarely available for books published during the nineteenth century—which can help us to understand the circumstances surrounding its production.

This article looks closely at these primary documents, in particular, personal letters that Prisse d’Avennes sent to his friend and collaborator on L’Art arabe, the French artist Charles Cournault (1815–1904), which are held in a private collection but were published in the 2013 volume on Prisse d’Avennes. This study will also focus on documents related to the publisher August-Jean Morel: letters exchanged between Prisse d’Avennes and the French ministry sponsoring his travel to Egypt, in addition to relevant materials stored in Prisse d’Avennes’s archive at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. This latter collection encompasses manuscript notes and approximately 2,000 visual documents, including drawings, photographs, and prints authored by Prisse and other known or anonymous artists.

Looking at these various primary sources will shed light on the decision-making process of Prisse d’Avennes and his publishers that determined their choice of images for the publication. In examining the process of conceptualization of L’Art arabe, this study seeks to decenter Prisse d’Avennes as the sole defining authorial voice behind the publication; rather, it establishes that the multi-volume work that bears his name was a collaborative venture. L’Art arabe served as a forum for multiple and sometimes discordant viewpoints on how to represent Islamic architecture. Most importantly, Prisse d’Avennes’s relationships with the book’s sponsor and publisher, as well as the various printmakers with whom he worked, largely impacted the final product of the volume, which instigated a shift in focus away from the contextualized representations of Cairene architecture that Prisse d’Avennes favored toward the abstract images of Islamic ornament that were fashionable at the time.

The present paper discusses woodcuts representing King Sigismund I of Poland against contemporary views on literary and picture portraits. Following classical sources, the local men of letters appreciated the depiction of moral qualities in such works more than a physical likeness. Thus literary descriptions were usually believed to outdo painted or printed pictures, but a few authors admitted that a deft visual artist could render the virtues of the sitter adequately. Consequently, royal woodcuts were usually accompanied by a few verses of text which made up for their shortcomings. Two such works, so far unknown in the literature, have been introduced here to art historical studies and several others have been interpreted anew.

The Bizzarie di Varie Figure is a little known, enigmatic album of etchings that display countless performative bodies, transformed and reimagined to resist definitions and escape categorisations. Human, mechanical, even abstract forms and forces intersect, startling the viewer and opening infinite possibilities of interpretation. These images manipulate their own medium to produce new, unprecedented notions of movement and animation on the printed page, challenging, in this process, traditional concepts of imagination and representation. The first section of this article aims to provide a framework through which the Bizzarie album can be understood not only as a site of experimentation on the production of figures and forms, but also as one where performativity and animation encounter notions of knowledge of nature and production of meaning. The subsequent section focuses on an individual image from the album, an etching depicting the biblical figures of Adam and Eve in the form of trees. In this print, the article argues, the interconnection of nature and humanity complicates early modern ideas on human reproduction, and echoes the potential for infinite generation and creativity in image making.

Computational analysis of the potential historical professional networks inferred from surviving print impressions offers novel insight into the evolution of early modern artistic printmaking in Europe. This analysis traces a longue durée print production history that examines the changing ways in which different regional printmaking communities interacted between 1550 and 1750, highlighting the powerful impact of demographic forces and calling in to question narratives based on single key individuals or the emergence of specific national schools.

James Cook’s expeditions to the Pacific were unprecedented in late eighteenth-century Britain, and in the years following the expeditions, extraordinary images of the region were presented to the public. The drawings and paintings made by the artists during the expeditions became the basis for dozens of artworks, which brought to life areas of the world that had previously been little known to Europeans. While these were available to a limited public, tens of thousands of British consumers encountered images of the Pacific through magazine illustrations that were subsequently based on those art works. Published in several leading British magazines in the 1770s and 1780s, these illustrations circulated widely and reached people across Britain and in the American colonies, integrating the Pacific into consumer culture in a way that no other product could. They constituted a rich discourse about the Pacific which was informed by the written accounts and ambitious post-voyage art works, but ultimately separated from them: they were a unique set of representations, the production of which was determined above all by the magazine industry. The magazines presented their readers with the most exotic and spectacular glimpses of the Pacific that they could possibly offer, and they achieved this primarily through a focus on indigenous peoples’ bodies and dress; accuracy, context, and nuance were often diminished as images were adapted and edited for magazine production. Ultimately, these engravings played a critical role in the construction of the idea of the Pacific, at a time when British colonial activity in that region was just beginning.

This article argues that in Tristram Shandy Sterne expresses his desire to be the sole owner of his literary work through images of the hand and handwriting. It explores his experimentation with the typographic manicule and his innovation in representing script in print. I suggest that Sterne represents the hand and handwriting as ambiguous markers of authenticity in order to illustrate and lament the complexities of assigning literary property in this period.

Commemorating the death of Parson Yorick, Laurence Sterne’s black page in Tristram Shandy (1759) is often perceived as the preeminent symbol of his experimentation. But Sterne’s device may be less innovative than previously supposed, descending instead from two distinct traditions of depicting death in print: funeral literature and the typographic epitaph in the mid-century novel. In tracing inventive examples of memento mori iconography and identifying a profusion of novelistic epitaphs appearing during the 1740s and 1750s, this article situates the black page and Yorick’s epitaph in Sterne’s immediate literary context. In so doing, it demonstrates that his innovation in commemorating Yorick’s death lies in his deployment of a typesetting trend in the mid-century novel while simultaneously referencing a longstanding tradition of funeral publications. Through the mourning borders around Yorick’s epitaph and the black page’s double-sided covering of black ink, Sterne engages with the clichés of mourning iconography while playing on—and pushing to its limits—the novelistic epitaph’s self-conscious manipulation of the printed page.

In the early modern period Europeans were fascinated by the dark colour of African skin. Although this does not show in sixteenth-century prints where skin colour was not usually indicated, this would change in the first decade of the seventeenth century in the wall maps of Willem Jansz. Blaeu. Drawing on developments in printing techniques, changes in artistic fashion, contemporary ideas about scientific illustrations, developments in map making, and the business of book publishing, this article traces the origin of the convention to depict blacks without reference to their skin colour and examines the reasons for its success and demise. It also charts and explains the new model and addresses the different pace in which this convention changed in travel books and wall maps.