Southwell, Nottinghamshire
The Leaves of Southwell When posting about one of the carvings in the chapter house of Southwell Minster the other week, I inevitably got down from my shelves my copy of The Leaves of Southwell , Nikolaus Pevsner’s short book about this building’s extraordinary late-13th century sculptures of the leaves of plants and trees. I did so to look at the excellent photographs of Southwell’s stone leaves – oak, ivy, maple, buttercup, hop, vine, and other species. I ended up rereading the text of the book as well. The Leaves of Southwell is in the King Penguin series, which are short hardback books published by Penguin Books between 1939 and 1959.* The format for the series consists of an essay (usually of about 30 pages, though Pevsner’s is double that length), followed by a series of illustrations. The photographs, by F L Attenborough, then Principal of University College, Leicester, and father of Richard and David Attenborough, are exemplary: detailed, well printed, and with just the right...