Article Author: Mei-Ying Sung

This paper traces the transnational history of the Armstrong Woodblock Collection (around 3000 items) at the Huntington Library in California, USA, highlighting its dual role as both industrial relic and cultural palimpsest. Collected in England by James Tarbotton Armstrong (1849–1933) during the late Victorian print era, the collection—purchased by Henry E. Huntington in 1917 alongside his renowned British art collection—represents a significant yet often overlooked chapter in Anglo-American heritage development. Through a decade of cataloguing these matrices from the 17th to 20th centuries, this study demonstrates how 19th-century British collectors turned outdated printing tools into historical documents, a preservation approach later adopted by American institutions as tangible evidence of pre-industrial craftsmanship. The interdisciplinary study investigates the woodblock collection, highlighting historical print matrices as important cultural artefacts that connect material culture and social history. Using technical analysis, provenance research (including network mapping of collectors' correspondence), and visual verification (matching blocks with archival prints), the study reveals the social hierarchy of woodblock collectors, the connections between blocks’ wear patterns and their printing history, and reconstructs transatlantic knowledge networks. It advances the concept of technological biographies for artefact lifecycles, explores industrial mnemonics in relation to craft nostalgia, and proposes a collective model of heritage creation. Supporting data—3D scans and detailed metadata—are available through the Huntington Digital Library (internal), providing new approaches for analysing the sociomaterial aspects of pre-digital print culture.

Keywords: Woodblock; Printing History; Huntington Library; James Tarbotton Armstrong; Henry Edward Huntington; Collecting History

Article Review Status: Published

Pages: 45 - 62

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