In his lecture Christian Volbracht will give an overview of the history of illustration of fungi in printed books. He will present numerous examples of printed drawings and paintings of mushrooms from Europe America and Asia covering five centuries from 1491 to the present. He will explain the various printing techniques from woodcuts to colored copper engravings to colored lithography and modern printing describing the progress of the different illustration methods. Of particular interest are the colored copper engravings of fungi in the 18th century by Bulliard Sowerby and Schaeffer which are still important today as first diagnoses of new species. Volbracht will also go over problems which can arise when using the old figures of mushrooms. Christian Volbracht is a German journalist amateur mycologist and author and specialist in old mushroom literature. He has worked as a news journalist for the German Press Agency dpa for more than 40 years including ten years as head of the agency’s Paris office. Parallel to his career as a journalist he collected mushroom books compiled an important private library and built an online shop for antiquarian mushroom books. Eventually he published MykoLibri a comprehensive illustrated bibliography of his collection covering works from the 15th to the 20th centuries. The two volumes of MykoLibri are now recognized as the standard bibliography for mycological literature – for collectors dealers researchers and librarians. Recently Volbracht wrote a book on the scientific and cultural history of truffles. He lives in Hamburg Germany.
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