Woodcut precedes printing: the block-books and devotional images of the early fifteenth century are pulled from planks engraved in relief, and the earliest printers found in it an illustration that could be set alongside type and printed under the same press. Wood cut along the grain with a knife, in a plank of pear or walnut, reigned from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, before being supplanted by copperplate engraving. At the end of the eighteenth century, the Englishman Thomas Bewick engraved end-grain wood with a burin, cut across the fibres: the line became fine, the block withstood large print runs, and wood engraving became the process of the Romantic illustrated book, interpreted by professional engravers after the drawings of Johannot, Gavarni or Grandville. At the end of the nineteenth century, Auguste Lepère gave the tool back to artists, and in the twentieth Masereel, Alexeïeff and the engravers of the livre d'artiste engraved their own blocks.
For the bookseller, a book illustrated with woodcuts is described by the number, format and placement of the engravings, by the quality of the printing and, for modern books, by the state of the proofs and the paper: Romantic plates printed on China paper and mounted are worth more than those printed on the text paper. The wear of a block, its breaks and cracks, allow one to distinguish a first printing from a later one.
Woodcut is often confused with metal engraving: wood is in relief and prints flush with the paper, whereas copperplate engraving, being incised, leaves a plate mark. The « engraved » blocks of the luxury editions of the nineteenth century are often end-grain blocks interpreted by an engraver, not by the artist himself, and many of the « woodcuts » in late-century books are in fact zinc blocks or half-tone reproductions: the catalogue note should make the distinction.
