People ask, on the rare occasion anyone asks anything, why a man collects five centuries of other men’s drawings of a creature none of them had seen.
I could say scholarship. I could say the woodcuts are simply well made, which is true of some and not others. Neither answer would satisfy anyone who genuinely wanted to know, and the honest one isn’t for cataloguing here.
So: scholarship. The linework is fine. Come back for the next plate.
