In the summer of 1995, while poking around my grandmother’s stone farmhouse, I found a tattered 1898 Webster’s International Dictionary under my grandfather’s favorite reading chair. The disintegrating sheepskin covers were detached and a number of browned and brittle sections were falling out from the back of the book. The loose pages revealed an eighty-page section devoted entirely to the illustrations of the dictionary: a stunning array of odd and wonderful animals and machines printed by categories. The fantastic variety of subjects was matched only by the detail and variety of engraving techniques.
Shortly before discovering that fateful Webster’s, I had completed a collaborative artist’s book for an exhibit at the Dibner Library at the Smithsonian Institution that grappled with questions of the origin of ideas. I realized a book filled with disparate images, such as those from the Webster’s, could be an artistic experiment to test my hypothesis on the origin of creativity: that new ideas arise from the recombinations of old ideas. It would also be an important and beautiful visual reference. That fall I contacted the Merriam-Webster Company and discovered that the engravings still existed. They had been given to Yale University in 1977. This book is the culmination of a long odyssey to put the engravings back into print and make a book designed to educate, inspire, and entertain.
Nearly all the engravings in this work are culled from the nineteenth-century engravings used in Webster’s dictionaries printed by the G. & C. Merriam Co. (George and Charles Merriam bought the rights to the official “Webster’s” after Noah Webster’s death in 1847.) More than 10,000 engravings and their exact duplicates, called electrotypes, now reside in the Press Room of the Arts of the Book Collection at Yale University. The engravings, or “cuts,” are stored in a long row of dark-green cabinets housing more than 150 cases (drawers) filled to the brim. My first, thrilling look at one of these drawers revealed hundreds upon hundreds of dust-covered cuts strewn in an unintelligible jumble. At that moment I grasped the vastness of the collection, but I still had no idea I was about to devote more than a decade of my life to this endeavor.
It took a year to simply identify and alphabetize the engravings I selected for Pictorial Webster’s. After showing my commitment by reorganizing the collection, the Sterling Library made a unique loan agreement allowing me to borrow the engravings and print an artists’ book with the original cuts at my Quercus Press. It was a tedious, laborious process preparing and printing the century-old cuts by hand, but seeing the old blocks brought back to life as crisp images on good paper kept the project going month by slow month as the years ticked by. The fine press edition of Pictorial Webster’s was printed using a letterpress, the same relief process that was used to print the original dictionaries.
In letterpress printing, ink is rolled onto the letterforms made of metal type and the engravings, which are then printed directly onto the paper. The printed image is the reverse image of the type and engravings, and the engraved blocks are the same size as the images they print. Because they wanted to fit as many words and images in the dictionaries of the late nineteenth century as possible, the images had to be small. Most of the blocks in the fine press edition are smaller than an inch square. Some of the engravings are so small in the original that one needs magnification to appreciate the delicate lines and skill that went into their making. Many of the engravings created for the 1890 International Dictionary (such as Aurochs on page 23) were executed with too much detail for the printing process and paper used, so appear as black silhouettes. But by using a sophisticated reproduction letterpress of the twentieth century, printing on smooth paper from the original blocks, I was able to bring out the best detail of every line of these intricately carved images.
When I began working on Pictorial Webster’s in 1996, it was always with the plan to entice a publisher to bring the work to a wider audience. For this reason I made master proofs of each print run on ultrasmooth paper to make as faithful a reproduction of the engravings as possible. I am thrilled that this book is being published by Chronicle Books, as Chronicle has been a great innovator in using the full possibilities of trade production methods to create unique and original books. As the book is mostly visual and conceptual, it can be mass produced without losing the essential quality of the work.
Since I started this project, reproduction technology has changed completely. One of the improvements in this edition is that the images have been enlarged to a modest 115 percent so readers can better appreciate the engravings themselves. By using the magic of the computer, this edition further restores the original lines intended by the engravers, while keeping the quality of tone that letterpress printing imparts. Digital technology has also allowed this edition to continue to explore and play with the content of the book. In this way this book is not merely a copy of the fine press edition, but has become its own unique version that may even surpass the other in some aspects.
That said, the book remains (on the surface) a book of fascinating little images originally made as wood engravings. Wood engravings are created through a reduction process on the end-grain of boxwood using sharp little tools called burins. Boxwood is soft, but has incredibly dense grain, which allows for great detail. The images in the book span two distinctive eras in American wood engraving. Black line engravings, also called American style, are made by making or transferring a line drawing directly onto the face of the boxwood. Then, using variously shaped burins, the engraver carves away all the wood except for the lines of the drawing. One can imagine the great skill and confidence it took to engrave a block down to the merest thin lines to print as a line drawing. Well-known engraver John Andrew was hired to make all of the engravings for the 1859 Webster’s (the first illustrated dictionary in America), and his shop continued engraving black line engravings for the 1864 Webster’s. What is forgotten today is that each individual line in black line engravings was imbued with meaning. As Hiram Merrill, an apprentice in John Andrew’s shop, explained:
[W]ood engraving was held within limits established by tradition: a certain kind of line for skies, another for flesh, hair, foliage, drapery, water, rocks, foreground, background, etc., all with meaning and beauty in themselves. Once a line was cut it must not be modified in any way, and such a thing as cutting across the lines was regarded with horror.
John Andrew was also known for something called the “Andrew Wiggle,” which one can look for in the engravings. (A description is in the Notes and Commentary section at the end of this book.) Andrew’s death in 1870 marked the turning point away from the expressive black line engravings.
By the time the International Dictionary was printed in 1890, the New School of engraving was ubiquitous in America. Notable for its use of photographic methods to transfer images, the new school engravings tended to have a more scientific and clinical feel to them. The old horror of cutting across the line is gone, as the emphasis of the new school was not line but tone.
William Fowler Hopson was a young man when he was hired to update the Webster’s. Hopson, trained in new school technique, engraved some 2,500 illustrations for the 1890 International Dictionary. It was on this project that he honed his skills as an engraver. The Hippopotami on the bottom of page 176 are a good example of the change in style. The Hippopotamus on the left is engraved in the old American style. Notice the black lines within the belly area and legs, the cross-hatching in front of the hind legs, and the quality of the lines used to depict the background foliage. This Hippopotamus contrasts sharply with the new school Hippopotami on the right. Notice the dark part of the animal is not made up of lines, but stippled marks that work up a dark tone. Also, the lines of the belly area are crosscut, creating a stronger sense of reflected light.
After the Second International Dictionary was published in 1909, the engraving process was abandoned. Images that were new to the 1934 Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition and the 1961 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary were printed from mounted copper plates made from line drawings. These later cuts make an interesting contrast to the wood engravings, not only for their content but also for their style and execution. Other images that make an interesting contrast to the majority are a few random engravings that happened to be mixed into the cases at Yale that made their way into the Pictorial Webster’s. The Cow on page 84 and Wolf on page 403 are two examples of historic engravings not from dictionaries.
The engravings I made to include in the book are a combination of black line and new school. I created these engravings to enhance (or subvert) the “text,” or because I felt an image was missing and should be included in the collection. The careful reader might notice an improvement in my engraving technique toward the end of the book. After using maple for my first few engravings, I switched to boxwood collected at my grandmother’s farm, the same farm where I found the Webster’s Dictionary that precipitated this whole quest. The better material allowed me to engrave more finely than I had ever imagined I could.
The attentive reader may also discover some errors in spelling and identification. As the editor of the fourth edition of the Imperial Dictionary wrote in 1882, “[Errors] might reasonably be expected to occur in an undertaking of such extent, and so difficult and so laborious in execution.” Even the makers of Webster’s made mistakes: The fishes “Roach” and “Rudd” swapped places between the 1864 edition and the 1879 reprint of the same book. And although we may have been taught otherwise, many of the Latin names for flora and fauna used in the old dictionaries and copied here have been changed.
The Pictorial Webster’s is more than a collection of dictionary engravings. It is a treasure chest of the nineteenth-century universe. What editors chose to depict indicates what nineteenth-century American society valued of their world. It was a compelling time to take a snapshot of what was. America was becoming the chief innovator and producer of goods; at the same time colonialism or curiosity was spurring great discoveries in the exploration of the natural world.
Our world has changed immeasurably in the hundred or so years since that time. Subspecialization has made it practically impossible to showcase or understand the gizmos of different trades, while many of the species we discovered are gone or soon will be because of the same great advances the nineteenth century brought about. The engravings in the “&” section are filled with images from the early twentieth century, the world many of us now remember with nostalgia from our youth. Because it was produced in Massachusetts, the Webster’s all have a distinctly Yankee perspective. This explains, for example, why there are so many images of mollusks, fishes, and ships, as whaling, shipping, and fishing were critical to the economy of New England in the middle part of the nineteenth century. One might note that the Standard on page 340 is that of Massachusetts and the Cipher on page 71 is that of Noah Webster. As Pictorial Webster’s becomes a time capsule for what the natural world was, it is ironic that the most plentiful fishes found in the book are also one of the first major groups of animals predicted to disappear from our planet in the next fifty years.
One of the important compulsions of the nineteenth century was to make sense of the world through categorization. This extended beyond flora and fauna to human beings. So what a member of today’s society interprets as racist depictions of categories of people was then believed to be useful scientific information. The problem with portraying a race with an image of one individual is that it instantaneously marginalizes millions of other members of that same race. However, this problem of correctly portraying what a thing looks like extends to everything. Once one depicts something more complex than images of geometry, the decisions of the artist become crucial to our understanding of what is being illustrated. This problem of properly portraying a term can be stated in philosophical terms as an American attempt to illustrate pure forms. Because many of the images in the Webster’s dictionaries were copied widely by other dictionaries, Webster’s images of things such as an anchor, an anvil, or Atlas have become iconic to our culture. Lacking consensus on what the Platonic ideal of any individual thing would look like, artists were entrusted with the responsibility of rendering acceptable representatives of an entry.
By endeavoring to visually define specific terms and concepts, dictionary illustration is a distillation of what it means to illustrate things. The images in the 1859 dictionary are all put into a visual context, which could make it difficult at times to know exactly what was being illustrated. But because there was intentionality given even to lines during the John Andrew era of Webster’s, the subject is evident and the engravings seem to be imbued with personality. The shadows cast by the Compasses on page 78 make them appear to march across a plain, and the Weeping Willow on page 403 truly seems to weep. Although Hopson’s engravings appear less Victorian than those of Andrew, they also capture personality. An example is the image of a Bloodhound. A note an editor wrote to another while assembling the 1961 third edition pleads “Please put him in—if not, perhaps, a modern show specimen; he’s still the very essence of bloodhound.” And leave it in they did (see page 46; the note referred to the front-facing bloodhound). Recently, dictionary makers have continued this debate by arguing whether an illustration or a photograph best serves to elucidate an entry.
Alphabetization is another key element to this book. It is, simply, my artistic choice. It is worth noting that dictionaries were not always alphabetized. For hundreds of years conventional wisdom was that words should be organized by category, such as winemaking, horse terminology, law, philosophy, etc. Visual information continued to be organized by categories following this same tradition. Perhaps the most famous illustrated reference book, Diderot’s Encyclopédie of eighteenth-century France, may have insured adherence to this principal. Diderot’s massive work portrays vignettes of a papermaker’s studio, a bookbindery, a tannery, and so on to show the various tools, but also illustrate how each process works.
In nineteenth-century America, this type of pictorial book was also popular. (Dover makes a reproduction of one of these books, Heck’s Pictorial Archive of Nature and Science.) Full pages may depict dozens of birds or a dramatic landscape illustrating many geologic processes. Because the images were made with page-size engraved metal plates, they could never be rearranged like the Webster’s wood engravings.
The “Illustrated Webster’s” sections of the old dictionaries were also grouped according to categories. You can see this thematic organization of images used today from children’s books by Richard Scarry to illustrated books for adults like David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work. I chose to use the alphabet for organizing the engravings because I wanted to let the engravings escape being pigeonholed into categories. Alphabetization allows them to assume an organization that is more random and dynamic.
So, where can meaning be found in this book? How do we find meaning anywhere in our lives? We cannot make sense of raw facts and data unless they are put into some kind of context. We continually triangulate our perception of reality through shifting sets of metaphor. The book that follows might be seen as an outdated wooden card catalog of what were once factual images, a visual reference book of the nineteenth century, or a graphic novel that takes place in that era. The astute reader will notice many of the characters reappear as themselves, or slightly changed as the book progresses. They masquerade, as if transformed, but, like heroes throughout literature, they retain the same flaws and cunning in either state. The book might be a nation, each letter being a state, and each engraving having a home according to an alphabetical address. Or, perhaps, it is an even plane where each image stands its own ground amid the disparate images on a page.
My hope is that readers will become acquainted with individual images and pages and discover a personal resonance with the images before reading the introduction that follows. For those who are interested in more discussion of topics mentioned in this preface, there is a great deal in the Pancreas at the back of this book about the history of illustrated dictionaries, engraving, the making of this book, etc. Pictorial Webster’s does not need to be “read from cover to cover” as much as opened and meditated upon for short—or long—intervals, as time and interest dictate. I hope you find much pleasure and inspiration exploring and studying the images, the pages, and the universe they create.
J. M. C.
WALTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS, 2008