On Book Illustration And Hope

‘Pentiment’ and the so-called lost art of illustration

Recently I’ve been playing Pentiment. It’s a video game in which you play as artist Andreas Maler, who works as an illustrator in a monastery’s scriptorium in 1518 — a time when, almost 70 years after the invention of the printing press, his trade is dying out. The monastery is almost a living anachronism and its inhabitants know it: they are the only ones left, a community of a dozen where they had once been a hundred or more, fearful every day that they will run out of money and have to…