#little bird press

Wood Engraving Wednesday

LINDA LEATHERBARROW

This week we present a few small wood engravings by the Scottish-born author and illustrator Linda Leatherbarrow from her chapbook A Floating Diary: A Collection of Words and Wood Engravings Following a Week Afloat on a Narrow Boat, handprinted in London by Leatherbarrow in an edition of 100 copies at her own Little Bird Press in 1980. 

An award-wining short story writer, Leatherbarrow also trained as an artist at Hornsey College of ArtandWalthamstow School of Art, and in the late 1970s started Little Bird Press for her own writing and that of her friends, illustrated with original prints in wood engraving, linocuts, and silk screen. “I began,” she writes, “with an Adana hand press on a table in a corner of my bedroom then progressed to my own workshop above a car showroom on Tottenham High Street,” and would well her books “at Covent Garden Market, craft fairs and bookshops throughout the UK.” She continued illustrating and handprinting until the mid-1980s, when she began writing short stories to great success.

Leatherbarrow has also worked as a librarian, a literary festival organizer, and a university lecturer. In 2010, she retired from lecturing, but continues to write from her home in southwest Scotland.

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