Preface to the Image Gallery

Summary

The unusual conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic have thrown ‘normal’ authorial and publishing practice into sharp relief. Lockdown in its various forms and degrees has suddenly interrupted normal service. Perhaps a print or manuscript can no longer be photographed, or the curator cannot even enter the building where it is kept. Curators on furlough or working from home cannot easily fulfil an author’s demands, even if those only involve processing permissions to reproduce images. Questions of image supply and reproduction of images suddenly loom larger for author and publisher than previously anticipated. This is certainly the case for this book. Chapter 2, for instance, explains how a seventeenth-century English surgeon copied his own designs for instruments by hand into an interleaved fifteenth-century manuscript of the work of a medieval surgeon. It has proved impossible to get a photograph of the surgeon Walter Hamond’s new instrument designs, although by good luck the fifteenth-century model was available to the author as a TIFF image.