Geek-Out Book Blogging

The Penn Museum Archives is the proud new owner of How to Identify Prints: A Complete Guide to Manual and Mechanical Processes from Woodcut to Inkjet by Bamber Gascoigne.

Time for a big ol' geek-out.

What I love most about this book is that it offers the what they call “Sherlock Holmes” and what we call “Choose Your Own Adventure” approach to identifying prints — a series of questions about the print that will usually help one realize the disambiguating characteristic. Constantly mistaking your etchings and engravings? This text explains how each is made, and how to tell the difference between them. We’re looking forward to more fun with prints and much better catalog records.