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| photo: Vera Witte | |
Kristin Bluemel is an American academic who has been reading and writing about adults' and children's books with wood engravings by modern British women artists for more than a decade. Enchanted Wood: Engraving a Place for Women Artists in Rural Britain (University of Minnesota Press, December 23, 2025) is one expression of her passion for black-and-white paper expressions of a wooden art. Her collection of books by British wood engravers, including early 19th-century editions by the wood engraver Thomas Bewick, is another. These books she keeps on the wooden shelves of her 100-year-old fairy tale house, the locally legendary Pumpkin House of Branchville, N.J., which she visits when she is not teaching at Monmouth University on the Jersey Shore.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
A richly illustrated book that tells the story of women wood engravers who helped reshape the visual and literary landscape of modern Britain.
On your nightstand now:
From bottom (finished) to top (good intentions): Beaverland by Leila Philip, The Rising Down: Lives in a Sussex Landscape by Alexandra Harris, Kiddar's Luck by Jack Common, The Peregrine by J.A. Baker, and Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry by Jonathan P. Eburne. The last is not necessarily bedtime reading, but it's brilliant and funny and like all my favorite books, has pictures.
Favorite book when you were a child:
My favorite book as a child was the Depression-era novel Calico Bush, written by the American Rachel Field. This is a tale about a French girl who is orphaned while crossing the Atlantic in the years before the French and Indian War. She finds herself indentured to an English family that leaves a settled life outside of Boston to seek better fortune on a small farmstead carved into the woods on the coast of Maine. It's a dramatic, wonderful story with dramatic, wonderful wood engravings by Allen Lewis. I reread it last summer, and enjoyed it just as much as I did as a 10 year old.
Your top five authors:
I do most of my extracurricular reading in audio form at night, when insomnia strikes. Beloved authors of the wee hours whom I literally could not live without include Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, and Mary Russell Mitford.
Book you've faked reading:
For a very long time, well after I had graduated from college with an English major, I pretended I had read Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Wood engraver Gwen Raverat's memoir Period Piece. The book recalls her childhood growing up in late 19th-century Cambridge as a granddaughter of Charles Darwin. It is illustrated with her pen and ink doodles that are sheer comic genius. I give a paperback copy of Period Piece to every young artist I know.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Jenny Uglow's Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense. I'm partial to bird art and this book jacket ingeniously combines Lear's colorful parrot painting with his black ink script, drawing us into an illustrated biography of the Victorian sage of misfits and limericks.
Book you hid from your parents:
My parents were atheists, so I hid in my bedside table a text of the Lord's Prayer that my evangelical Christian babysitter had given to me.
Book that changed your life:
Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, a 13-volume stream-of-consciousness feminist autobiographical novel that was the subject of my dissertation. Richardson's heroine, Miriam Henderson, got me through grad school and convinced me I could be a feminist professor of modern British literature.
Favorite line from a book:
Grandmother's last words in the last paragraph of the last chapter of The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, the Swedish-Finnish artist who invented the Moomintrolls: "It's only my heart, it's not a herring boat at all."
Five books you'll never part with:
When I am not listening to them being read aloud, I love books as weighty objects that we are compelled to look at, feel, and sniff. I will never part with my musty, nearly 100-year-old first editions of books with wood engravings. Favorites among them include Joan Hassall's Portrait of a Village, Gwen Raverat's The Runaway, Agnes Miller Parker's Through the Woods, and Clare Leighton's Four Hedges. My 200-year-old edition of Thomas Bewick's A History of British Birds, with the signature of Percy Lubbock on the endpapers, is also a treasure (though with two volumes, he really brings me up to six books, so I'm cheating).
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I teach courses on literature of the sea, and every time we dip into Moby-Dick, reading a few sample chapters, I want to go back and read the whole extraordinary, impossible novel from cover to cover.