Sir!

One of my son Tom's excellent linocuts

I subscribe to the TLS (the Times Literary Supplement), a weekly review of what books are appearing at the heavyweight end of publishing, and "winner of the 2024 Niche Market Newspaper of the Year Award and proudly niche since 1902" (no, really). When it comes to "niche", nobody does it better than the TLS.

Somewhere around 1980 my weekly reading matter shifted from the NME (the New Musical Express) to the TLS, coinciding with the years when my accidental but somehow predestined career in university libraries seemed to be taking off at the same time as my interest in what was hip and happening in the world of pop and rock was declining: a process that used to be called "growing up", I suppose. Other serious-minded review papers have survived into the present day, and I've been a reader of most of them at one time or another, but I enjoy the breadth and depth of coverage in the TLS – much broader than just "literature", in the narrow sense – and find its mix of political stances more stimulating than reading a weekly like, say, The New Statesman that acts more as an echo-chamber for my own views.

One of the highlights of reading the TLS is following the slow-form spats that break out on the Letters to the Editor page, generally of the form "your review of my / that book is stupid" vs. "oh, no it's not", repeated and refined over many weekly issues. When former editor Stig Abell had the paper redesigned in 2019, one of his innovations was to drop the long-standing newspaper tradition of addressing the recipient of a letter to the editor as "Sir" (not "Dear Sir", just "Sir", which seems always to read as an exclamatory, lapel-grabbing "Sir!" from the Grub-Street era). These changes provoked a number of letters, for and against, including this one:

November 29 2019 (issue 6087) 

One change in the redesign which must be applauded, but may well go unnoticed by many, is the decision to put photo credits where they belong: on the same page as the photo, rather than in an up-front car crash at the bottom of page 2. Thank you, this was long overdue! But would it be too much to ask to have them horizontally under the actual photograph in question, rather than dropped vertically into the bottom of the margin? Clean design is one thing, a recurring twist of the neck another.

I see you’ve also finally done away with the stuffy address, “Sir” on the Letters page. Again, long overdue.

Mike Chisholm, Southampton.

Evidently, the calibre of the letter-writers matches that of the TLS's contributors. This is not the Daily Mail or the comments section of some online rag: no green-ink rantings, posturings, or trollings here!

However...

As anyone who has subscribed to a journal or newspaper will know, sometimes you can get seriously behind in your reading, and the oppressive stack of unwrapped, unread issues starts to accumulate. Until this week I was about a dozen issues of the TLS behind, but a few nights of binge-reading and article-skipping and I was within sight of the latest issue. Did I really want to know about the rise of Chinese tech firm Huawei, or the lives of scientist Roger Penrose or that Bill Gates bloke? (Actually, yes...). But then I read this contribution in the Letters to the Editor:

February 21 2025 (issue 6360)

In her appreciation of an exhibition of Tirzah Garwood’s work (Arts, February 14), Francesca Wade more than once calls the prints on display woodcuts. Actually these are wood engravings, and a very different matter. Woodcuts are relief prints, in which the raised areas of the block are inked to form the printed image. The more precise wood engraving uses the intaglio method, in which the incised lines hold the ink and form the image, while the raised or untouched areas, having been wiped before printing, remain white. Wood engraving was quite a craze among British artists in the early twentieth century, and many well-known figures,including Eric Gill, Graham Sutherland and Garwood’s husband, Eric Ravilious, were wood engravers of note.

Robin Blake, London N1

What the effing fuck? This is utter bollocks. I was outraged! Yes, wood engraving is a different technique to the woodcut, but the rest of that letter is complete nonsense on wobbly stilts. Wood engravings are absolutely not printed like metal intaglio plates: they are relief prints, simply a more refined and durable version of the cruder woodcut. Why on earth had the TLS published a letter from some know-all pontificating on a matter about which they clearly knew nothing? I could feel a letter to the editor coming on, even though it would have to arrive quite a few issues too late to deliver a truly effective slap of my rhetorical glove across this Besserwisser's infuriating Backpfeifengesicht. Sorry, but sometimes recourse to German is necessary.

I was spared the trouble, though, when I came to the Letters page a couple of issues on:

March 7 2025 (issue 6362)

Woodcuts involve different tools and techniques from wood engravings, as Robin Blake points out in his letter (February 21), in response to the review of the exhibition of work by Tirzah Garwood. He is, however, incorrect about how wood engravings are made and printed. Unlike woodcuts, they are engraved on the end-grain of box or other dense wood. Ink is then rolled over the block, as Blake says. The block is not then wiped, as he states: the reverse is true. The block is printed so that the incised lines and cleared areas appear white, while the uncut areas retain the black ink, or whatever colour the engraver chooses. The technique was perfected by Thomas Bewick in the late eighteenth century, was used for commercial illustration in the nineteenth century, and then was revived in the twentieth century for prints and book illustrations. The eighty-seventh annual exhibition of the Society of Wood Engravers is currently touring the country.

Merlin Waterson, Saxthorpe, Norfolk

Well, that was a lot gentler than my letter would have been. But should I find that Robin Blake or anyone else continues to peddle this disinformation in later issues when I get around to reading them – some people can't bear to be wrong – battle will have been joined, with however many exchanges of weekly rhetorical blows it may take for Truth to prevail. After all, some of us do actually know what we're talking about, when it comes to printmaking, and have the inky fingers to prove it.

Three wood engravings by Clare Leighton in our dining room

(rescued from a dismembered copy of 'The Farmer's Year')