Impressions of nature: a history of nature printing.

New York: Mark Batty Publisher, 2010.
Quarto, dustwrapper, 192 pp. colour illustrations.

Dating back to the 13th century, the print-making technique of nature printing has an illustrious and informative history. The process, which uses the surfaces of natural objects like leaves to make prints of the actual objects, is how early books of medicinal plants were compiled. Through the centuries, nature printing evolved into a scientific process favored by botanists and biologists to reproduce plants and assemble catalogues of flora and fauna. The advent of photography also furthered the developments of how a natural object could be used to make a print. With luscious full-color reproductions of prints from the Middle Ages through today, author and printing history expert Roderick Cave tracks the developments of this process over time, while also focusing on the historical details of the more than 200 illustrations, where they first appeared and the people responsible for them.