Pictorial Webster’s: A Visual Dictionary of Curiosities
Fans and students of engraving, traditional printing processes, art history, and 19th-century ephemera alike should, like I did, fall instantly in love with Pictorial Webster’s: A Visual Dictionary of Curiosities.
Bookmaker John M. Carrera meticulously restored thousands of engravings from the pages of 19th-century Webster’s dictionaries, and has compiled an extraordinary visual account of Victorian history.
In his introduction to the book, Carrrera suggests that the very juxtapositions of the illustrations tell a story:
The conceptual underpinning is that this book can act as a springboard for individual creativity. It was printed with a belief that the human compulsion to find meaning would lead readers to create stories that explain whole pages and perhaps even inspire some to derive unifying threads that might, in a Joycean fashion, enable a narration of the entire book.
It is a creative and romantic way to look at what amounts to a collection of images very purposefully arranged in alphabetical order, but he continues to admit the book is invaluable even just as pure reference:
The surface function of the book as a visual reference needs little explanation. The book contains many great examples of how to solve problems of illustration. … By virtue of the magnitude of engravings, their varying density and size, the book also becomes a study in design.
In this video I found on Vimeo, John Carrera gives us a detailed tour of the process, tools, and machinery used to print and bind the hand-made jaw-dropping deluxe edition of the book. It is nothing short of book-making porn:
The pricetag of this lovingly crafted tome? $4600.00.
But not to worry. The trade edition of Pictorial Webster’s is an affordable $35.
