I have always thought that the illustrations in Floran i Färg, looked clear and crisp. I can see that this, in part, says something about my expectations for print quality. I'm evidently used to cheap print - and so have made my judgements with a perception calibrated according to this. What I have seen here must be Hahnewald's use of a quite sensitive contour in his drawings. The lines are thin, possibly tinted rather than black in the original, and they present leaves with individually flared edges. The single row of fine hairs on the stem is accurately indicated, alternating sides with each node. Choosing to draw a single small sprig is an adequate strategy for producing accurate and visible detail in spite of constrained space. Compared to Ursing or Eigener less is more. As a contrast: it doesn't give the mass effect of a tuft of Chickweed such as the one I picked (without thinking much) for my first S-weed presentation of the Stellaria media: 
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Hahnewald's Stellaria mediaFloran i Färg, was first published in 1950 as an easy-to-use field handbook for schools and popular education. An inscription in my copy tells me that I was awarded this book from the PTA of Tallkrogen in 1959. It's a very lightweight little book: only 212 pages, an illustrated alternative without a key. (Presumably to complement the hard-core key of Krok & Almqvist.) In the foreword the authors, Lorentz Bolin and Lennart von Post, express their regrets that due to limited space the descriptive texts are not as full as originally planned. The illustrations were commissioned to the artist Edgar Hahnewald (I wonder who he was?)Like the other individually featured versions of the Stellaria media Hahnewald's rendering here to the left was scanned at a resolution of 300 dpi, using unsharp mask and descreening to eliminate the effects from the printing raster. This magnified view of Hahnewald's Stellaria has been extracted from the surrounding images, and reduced to 75% of its size, without further image processing (no manipulation of the colours recorded by the scanner). The detail below was scanned at a resolution of 1200 dpi to show the raster. The magnification reveals a printing mismatch between cyan and yellow. Stellaria multimedia.  There are five different Caryophyllaceae on the page where the Common Chickweed appears in Floran i Färg - and another six on the opposing page. This doesn't provide for some of the finer distinctions within this group of smallish plants with little white, "starshaped" flowers - but if you are at the stage of learning-by-browsing it will be quite easy to find these pages, get an inkling of the characteristic differences between these relatively common species, and make your choice of identification: good enough for that stage between beginner and really advanced. I've been there - but if you are really interested in flowers, there will be a time when you need to move on. And, of course, there must be learning strategies that don't pass by this particular route at all.  Illustration (4,5 X 6 cm) by Edgar Hahnewald in Bolin & von Post, Floran i Färg, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell (Seventh edition, second printing, 1958) |