Reduce, reuse, recycle

No, those are not words referring to the modern environmental movement, they are about Chambers’s publications and the reuse and recycling of some of their woodblocks. (Reduce has to do with the firms low prices.)

I'm in London at British Library again today. Yesterday I was in Reading presenting at the last doctoral seminar series. Tomorrow I will be presenting again at the London 19th Century Studies Seminar: https://londonc19studiesseminargradconference.wordpress.com a 10 minute version of my doctoral seminar paper, Visualising Progress.

One of the questions that came up after my presentation had do do with reuse of images, because I mentioned that the W & R Chambers collection of 20,000 woodblocks isn’t completely catalogued. And that its possible some woodengraving may have been reused in other publications.

One of the questions was if I personally knew for sure, of any images that Chambers firm reused. I said I could think of a few images I’d seen in Information for the People that was reused for Chambers’ s Illustrated Encyclopaedia.

Today, I discovered these three images that are in the first edition of Chambers’s Encyclopaedias have been been reused in another publication, Astronomy (part of the Educational Course series) also edited by Andrew Findletter, who edited the first encyclopaedia. I know that one of the images appears upside down, because this is how it appears in Astronomy.