Mimpish Squinnies: Reginald Farrer's Short Guide to Worthless Plants

Two stalks of flowers. The centers of the flowers look like elderly faces.

Woman dressed like a flower is among the grass. She is looking into the pond and the animals there.

Brown textured book cover to Mimpish Squinnies. It sits on top of its green case.

Abigail Rorer (b. 1949)
Design and text printed by Michael Russem
Petersham, MA: Lone Oak Press, 2008
Wood engraving on paper
Edition: 30 regular with 10 deluxe
Fairchild Endowment Fund purchase
2009.19.1.0

Compared with J. J. Grandville, Narcisse, from Les Fleurs Animées, 1867
Anonymous loan

Abigail Rorer purchased a wood engraving by Leonard Baskin in high school and soon became enchanted with the medium. Through a meeting with the prominent wood engraver Barry Moser, she was encouraged to practice and continue looking at the works of other practitioners of the medium. Rorer completed a bachelor’s degree in printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design and in 1989 founded the Lone Oak Press to produce her fine book editions.

Mimpish Squinnies is a humorous response to the writings of Reginald Farrer (1880-1920), a prolific British naturalist who wrote about rock gardening and alpine plants. The title borrows from Farrer’s vocabulary of invented words to describe plants that he felt less than enthusiastic about. The suite of 15 relief engravings accompanying Rorer’s text bear similarities with the anthropomorphic flowers of Les Fleurs Animées (Animated Flowers, or Flowers Personified), by the influential French satirist and illustrator Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, known as Grandville. The first edition was published a year after his death in 1846.