Imagine Writing Forty Books By Hand

Meet Alfred Wainwright, artist-in-residence of the Lake District

In Wainwright’s guides, he always included a drawing of himself in the landscape.

I’m getting ready for a trip that will include a week of walking in England’s Lake District. I wrote here about the deep dive I’ve taken into the famous authors who lived there and the history of travel writing itself as it relates to this part of the world.

That led me, eventually, to Alfred Wainwright.

Wainwright’s guides to the Lake District are well known to British nature lovers and outdoorsy types, but I’d never heard of them. When I realized that he’d written every page, made every map, and drawn every illustration by hand, and that the books were exact reproductions of his handwritten pages, I was immediately obsessed.

You could absolutely say that Alfred Wainwright was the self-appointed artist-in-residence of the Lake District.

Wainwright was an accountant working for the town of Kendal. On the weekends he walked the fells, which is the local word for the high, treeless mountains around the lakes. Fell-walking was a decidedly non-technical thing to do back then: he set out in the only clothes he owned, meaning the oldest of his four suits, with nothing like modern raingear or fancy hiking boots.

He had always been an artist. As a young man working at town hall, he’d draw cartoons and write and illustrate his own newspapers poking fun at office life and his co-workers. And like anyone else working in accounting at that time, he wrote his ledgers by hand, in ink, using precise, careful lettering.

So when he decided to write a series of guides to the Lake District fells as a kind of near-retirement project, he already had the art, lettering, and drafting skills to do it. He divided the district into seven parts, worked out a plan that involved fell-walking on weekends and writing and illustrating every night after work, and decided it would take thirteen years to complete the books. I think he finished one week before the thirteen-year deadline.

A modern reproduction of a Wainwright guide, with pen for scale. Apparently his original pages were this exact size, which is even more remarkable! Most illustrators would work at a larger, more comfortable size and let the publisher shrink them down.

Here’s how precise he was with the lettering and design of these books: After 100 pages or so, he realized that the text should be full-justified, which is to say that both the left and right margins would be straight as a ruler—and that he never wanted to hyphenate a word, because he didn’t like the way that looked. So he threw away the first 100 pages he’d done and started over, meticulously working out the spacing of each letter and word so that the margins would be tidy, and changing words here and there to make it fit.

He assumed from the beginning that he’d need to self-publish these books, because no publisher would want to publish the handwritten pages of an unknown author. He also knew that he’d be unwilling to accept the slightest change from an editor. So he did self-publish them, in partnership with a local printer of newspapers and magazines.

Do you see the full-justified text? And notice the different HANDWRITTEN TYPEFACES he used!

His guides became wildly popular and are very much still beloved today. “Walking the Wainwrights” is a thing that walkers aspire to do, and it’s a badge of honor to have completed all of them.

Wainwright went on to do SO MUCH MORE. He published his own sketchbooks, he wrote walking guides to other nearby areas, and he did some more autobiographical writing. He wrote over fifty books and contributed illustrations or introductions to dozens more.

So many drawings! So many diagrams!

There’s a lot I could say about Wainwright—he was a difficult person in some ways, he was a bit of a recluse, and he had what would VERY charitably be called old-fashioned ideas about women. But he was generous and funny in other ways: in his book on walking the Penine Way, he offered walkers who completed it a free beer at a hotel at the end of the trail, and he honored it: the management sent him a bill periodically to settle up the bar tab.

If you find this as fascinating as I do, please go read Hunter Davies’ excellent Wainwright: The Biography, or listen to episode 4 or episode 49 of the wonderful Countrystride podcast. Also, please enjoy Chris Butterfield’s remarkably collection of Wainwright books, archives, and memorabilia.

Here’s a BBC documentary on Wainwright and his landscape that is somewhat strange in itself—there’s an actor playing the part of Wainwright, for instance—but it’s also remarkably soothing if you just want to chill on the couch and imagine yourself as a 1950s-era British fell-walker with a passion for art and writing.

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Supporters are tryout out a new watercolor technique

It’s very easy, when you have a pen in your hand, to want to outline every shape and then fill those shapes in with watercolor, like a coloring book. But what if you only used the pen to draw the darkest parts of the scene—the shadows, the dark values—and left the lighter shapes open, to define with watercolor? I filmed myself doing this very quick sketch in Minnesota a few weeks ago, and I’ll walk you through the idea.

Next week, I’m going to send out a show-and-tell of all the travel sketching supplies I’m taking with me on my trip to the Lake District. For all this and access to a substantial archive of art lessons, tips, and tricks, join us!

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