the prints
Briony Morrow-Cribbs created eight intaglio prints for The Dunwich Horror. They are aquatints, an advanced form of etching that adds a wide tonal range to the image (similar to a watercolor wash in painting). To help illustrate the difference between etching and aquatint, the images of the prints below are composites: one half shows the plate printed at the interim etching stage, the other half shows the finished print with aquatint. The printed images range in size from 3.5-x-5 to 5-x-7 inches.
For several practical reasons, the number of aquatint prints to be included was initially set at five. Briony, however, ended up with ideas for eight prints. Rather than making the difficult decisions of which three to cut, we struck upon a plan that will make future cataloguers’ lives a nightmare…
All copies include a frontispiece and an introductory print opposite the story’s epigraph:
The first 20 copies contain all six of the interior aquatints Briony sketched for the project. These are lettered A – F in the plates.
The edition’s remaining 30 copies each contain, in addition to the frontispiece and introductory print, three of the interior aquatints. But which combination of three varies from copy to copy (e.g. A, B & C, or B, D & F, etc.), and thus no more than two copies from the 30 have the same combination.
The book’s colophon states the aquatints were printed on kitikata paper, because it was printed before the aquatints. A decision was subsequently made to print them on Arches wove paper, because it better showed the aquatints’ tonal qualities. Laid into every copy of The Dunwich Horror is a folded sheet of kitikata explaining this change, accompanied by a copy of the introductory aquatint, so that readers can compare the same image on the two papers and see the difference.
