Sleuthing in the Stacks

Jenny Uglow is one of the finest, most feted biographers of British artistic and literary figures from the 18th and 19th centuries. She has written about William Hogarth, Edward Lear, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Thomas Bewick, most of which are available in Devon Libraries (although you might have to be a bit formal in your search, asking for Jennifer Uglow). We also have a fine 5 volume edition of the complete Thomas Bewick engravings in our special collections, published by renowned Victorian bookseller Bernard Quaritch (who we may return to in a future post, since he is an interesting fellow and there are more stack stories to tell about him). Uglow's latest book takes her into the twentieth century, however, and was inspired by a lino-cut print which had hung on the family wall for years, and which she was finally drawn to investigate. Her book reveals the intimately intertwined stories of two artists who used a cheap and readily available material associated with the i