Myco-Consortium talk April 30: Christian Volbracht
As part of the MST's membership in the Myco-Consortium series of Zoom talks, MST members are invited to join the presentation on Sunday, April 30th at 11am ET:
Mycological Illustration: History, Techniques, Problems
A talk by Christian Volbracht
Sunday April 30th, 11am ET
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
About Christian Volbracht
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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