The Recursive Muffin

Close-up of Booth’s Valley of Silence, showing the technique.

Franklin Booth (1874-1948) was probably the most influential American pen-and-ink illustrator.  His technique had a bizarre origin.  He grew up on a farm in Indiana, and he copied pictures from magazines.  Unbeknownst to him, those pictures were engravings and scratchboard prints.  Booth developed a pen-and-ink style that looked like engravings: in the image above, for instance, he’s using a fine black pen on white paper, not a scratchboard.

This reminds me of the recurring stories about the kid who hears a guitar riff on a record and learns to play it, only to find out that the original was two guitars…