Woodengraving a manual Author:William James Linton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. OF THE HISTORY OF WOOD-ENGRAVING. jjUR Manual of Wood Engraving may be not unacceptably prefaced with some brief account of the history of the ... more »art in its early days. It must be utterly impossible even to conjecture when letters or characters were first cut into wood, or when they were first cut in relief for the purpose of stamping. Some blocks in relief seem to have been used for stamping bricks in old Babylon,—bricks baked or hardened in the sun having beenindented with characters in their previous soft state. These bricks, about twelve inches square, can be seen in the British Museum. In the Museum also may be seen some ancient Egyptian stamps, brought from Thebes, with incised characters ; and also a brass stamp of Roman time, engraved in relief, with the word LAR upon it, reversed as for printing. These specimens may be sufficient to prove antiquity. It has also been claimed that the Chinese employed the art of wood-engraving for books so early as the reign of We-Wing, 1120 years before the Christian era; and engraving in metal (copper, brass, silver, and gold) was certainly practised from a very remote period. We find it mentioned in the Bible, Aholiab and Bezaleel ornamenting the dress of Aaron: " They made the plate of the holy crown of pure gold, and wrote npon it a writing, like the engraving of a signet,—Holiness to the Lord." (Exodus xxxix. 30.) Engraved metal plates have been found in the coffins of Egyptian mummies. In India, long before our era, records of the transfer of lands were engraved in copper. Homer and Hesiod seem to have known of engraving. In the Imperial Library at Vienna is an engraved plate, some Eoman police ordinance of 200 years A.c. ; and Dr. Will- shire gives, from Fabretti, an inscription from a bronze plate used (u...« less