Gems of Art on Paper: Illustrated American Fiction and Poetry, 1785–1885 by Georgia Brady Barnhill (review)

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• Gems of Art on Paper: Illustrated American Fiction and Poetry, 1785–1885 by Georgia Brady Barnhill
• Amy L. Sopcak-Joseph (bio)

Gems of Art on Paper: Illustrated American Fiction and Poetry, 1785–1885
georgia brady barnhill
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
332 pp.

In his memoir Recollections of a Lifetime (1856), author and editor Samuel Griswold Goodrich reflected on how nineteenth-century literary annuals brought more than reading material into American homes: "These charming works scattered the very gems of art far and wide, making the reading mass familiar with the finest specimens of engravings, and not only cultivating an appetite for this species of luxury, but in fact exulting the general standard of taste all over the civilized world" (75). Georgia Brady Barnhill's Gems of Art on Paper sketches the longer history of how illustration techniques developed and merged with literary publishing [End Page 215] from the late eighteenth century through the late nineteenth. As Goodrich indicated, this is not just a story of adding pictures for the sake of breaking up long blocks of type; rather, these "gems" made the careers of artists and increasingly brought art into middle-class American parlors.

Barnhill's study covers a veritable "age of revolutions" in publishing and artistic production made possible by tools like lithographic stones, grease pencils, woodblocks, and chemical washes. Her project begins in the late eighteenth century when readers' access to images was limited. The chapbooks, almanacs, and newspapers that made up the reading material of many Americans contained small images made from woodcuts. Barnhill's focus is on literary publications, but even those contained few images by the 1780s. Americans with greater means purchased illustrated books from England or sometimes domestically published books with carefully engraved reproductions of art. Throughout the nineteenth century, a number of conditions changed: innovators developed new techniques to reproduce images, publishers looked to provide a growing audience of middle-class consumers with illustrated literature, and an increasing number of skilled American artists took up the work. By the time Goodrich penned his reflections, consumers found images to be cheaper and more plentiful. This scholarship is "long overdue," writes Barnhill, because until recently "scholarly interest in historical literary illustration was minimal" (2). Both historians of the book and of literature have largely bypassed the subject; even Gerard Genette set aside illustrations in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge UP, 1997) because the subject is so vast.

The thing is, nineteenth-century American reviewers and readers thought about books as material objects. As Barnhill shows throughout, reviewers of American literature often evaluated a book's physical attributes (clearly printed engravings, high-quality paper, good type, etc.) in addition to the perceived quality of the ideas and prose. There are few people better positioned to intervene in the conversation than Barnhill. Many scholars have encountered her behind the circulation desk at the American Antiquarian Society or at the various programs and conference panels produced during her tenure as the director of the Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC). She has long been generous with her time and knowledge of illustration processes, and Gems of Art captures so much of that knowledge in one volume for future reference. This book lies at the intersection of scholarship on literature, art and artists, and history [End Page 216] (or really, various histories: the history of the book but also that of labor and technology).

Gems of Art consists of four lengthy chapters that follow the introduction. They are generally organized chronologically, but there is some overlap as the chapters shift focus from poetry to fiction. The first chapter addresses the development of illustrated poetry from the 1780s through the 1810s to "serve as a baseline against which later [examples] can be compared. … for the most part these books and their illustrations were first steps" (74). Barnhill catalogs a number of volumes of illustrated poetry, providing key information about particularly well-known authors and notable artists. Through these examples, the chapter provides foundational book history knowledge for readers to understand the business environment in which early American printers, authors, and illustrators functioned. A section on engravers reminds us of the multiple layers of skilled labor involved...