The Art Exemplar: A Guide to Distinguish One Species of Print from Another With Pictorial Examples and Written Descriptions of Every Known Style of Illustration ... 

William John Stannard

The Art Exemplar: A Guide to Distinguish One Species of Print from Another With Pictorial Examples and Written Descriptions of Every Known Style of Illustration ... 

[London]

[Stannard and Rae]

[1859?]

When the Grolier Club was offered this extremely rare mid-nineteenth-century encyclopedia of illustration processes, it jumped at the opportunity to acquire a copy. Of the eleven copies produced (formerly thought to be ten), all but one is in an institutional library. Each copy includes over forty original prints from the author’s private collection, which illustrate his lengthy technical descriptions of various reproduction processes.

In spite of its research value, The Art Exemplar has been fairly inaccessible to scholars due to its scarcity. The Grolier Club thus committed to digitize it through a generous 2019 Digitization Funding Award from METRO (Metropolitan New York Library Council). The project was released in the fall of 2020.

Purchased in 2016 with Grolier Club Library Harper Funds.