Heritage et AL

When Aucklanders opened their copy of the New Zealand Herald at their breakfast tables on Monday 30 April 1894 they would have found a colourful addition. That morning’s newspaper included a supplement containing four views of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland printed at Wilson and Horton’s Lithographic and Colour Printery. The chromolithographic posters feature views taken from four different elevated spots around the central isthmus, and are surrounded by vignettes of local businesses who had paid to be included in the posters. In the months leading up to publication the Weekly News and Herald had been advertising this issue and the posters as a “Special Extraordinary Chromolithographic pictorial supplements” and pitching them as of interest to tourists, potential migrants and as a memento for those who had spent time in the city and moved on. The posters would “give people at a distance an idea of the character and capabilities of our city.”  Auckland Libraries have recently acquired,...

Image: Field notes – Manawa by Toni Hartill. The Hand-printed Books exhibition celebrates text/image collaborations between Aotearoa artists, poets, printers and binders. These pukapuka range from traditionally bound, to unfolding and concertina structures, to unbound artists’ books – one example, housed in a clamshell box, is Twelve poems by Hone Tuwhare interpreted by seven Dunedin printmakers (2007). The printmakers responded to a poem from Tuwhare’s Come rain hail (1970) including Inge Doesburg, Simon Kaan, Mary McFarlane, Kathryn Madill, Olav Nielsen, Jenna Packer and Marilynn Webb. Interpreting a poem as an image was a new experience for some. Doesburg said: “Psychologically, it is a different way of dealing with a visual image. You don’t want the image to be a picture of the text – you aren’t regurgitating what has been said already … instead you are interpreting your feeling about the text and it is possibly quite different from what the text is actually telling you … i...