For some time now we’ve had our hands on some old woodcuts which we originally made available directly through our catalog. A while back, though, we moved them over to a third party solution, Imagekind by CafePress.

I wanted to mention this because I was prompted by someone recently to send a link to our Imagekind account so they could get one of these pieces, only to discover that for some reason our account didn’t work. Well, I went back and forth with Imagekind, and they got the problem cleared up.

So, I don’t know how long this has been going on or how many of you it affected, but I wanted to highlight these art pieces again now that all is running smoothly. (The art pieces I’m talking about are highlighted in the right side column of this blog, and we’ve had that link up for months.)

Just to give you an idea of the history behind how we acquired these woodcuts, they were gifts from a friend. A friend of ours was studying for his doctorate out in Oxford, England, and had a habit of getting himself in situations where he could pick up old art like these woodcuts. These two were a couple of them and they were created in the late 19th century and printed at around the turn of the 20th century.

As we were working to get NRP up and running on the platform we’re now using for our store, our friend was kind enough to let us scan these prints and make them available to our customers. So we found some folks who were able to scan them at full size at a high resolution. The size and detail of the originals is astounding and we wanted to offer them for sale only if we could maintain the quality of the originals. (I am posting a couple images here in this post from the “Geneva” piece to give you an idea of the level of detail contained in each woodcut.)

The first piece is called “Geneva” for the depicted location. It is a fictional gathering featuring a who’s who from the theological and philosophical circles of the Reformation which began in the 16th century with Martin Luther. We’ve tried to make clear to people that the original we scanned to make this available is big! It measures almost three and a half feet wide. But one of the benefits of Imagekind is that you can now get a smaller version of it as well.

Secondly, we have the “Diet of Spires” piece. This piece depicts the German nobles gathered at Spires in order to protest the edict under which they had been placed prohibiting the dissemination of the rediscovered Gospel of justification in St. Paul. Featured in the piece you will find both Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon.

We’re looking forward to making more artwork available, both old treasures as we find them, as well as some of our own new photography. We will update you when we add more to our Imagekind account.

In the mean time, please visit the pages for these two fine art works where you will find more historical information for each one than I’ve mentioned here. I hope you like them. We can’t say enough good things about them and we know you’ll be pleased when you have one on your desk or wall.

By Ted R

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