After no less than seven months of work I’ve completed my first book. This one’s a luxury item, no doubt. 28 woodcuts, all texts and titles set by hand, all printed and bound manually – taking the edition of 24 and adding the usual spoilage that’s just a tiny bit more or less than 1000 pages having gone through my hands.

I knew from the beginning it would be a lot of work, but in the end fell victim to Hofstadter’s Law nevertheless, which goes: “It always takes longer, even if you take into account Hofstadter’s Law”. Lots of work still proved to be doable. So without much further ado, treat yourself to the pictures! All of these woodcuts are based on sketches made during a class trip in June 2019, camping and drawing in Mecklenburg for a good week. Half of the sketches are mine, half are by my colleagues – the woodcuts are all mine, though.
In the book they’re organised in six sections and that’s how I’ll show them here. Titles are indicated, as are the kind providers of the original drawings.
— I —





— II —




— III —





— IV —





— V —




— VI —





And what about the name, finally? The two nouns in “Himmel & Erde” each have at least two equivalents in English suitable here, resulting in “Heaven/Sky & Earth/Ground”. I have to be a nitpicker here because while the obvious reading would of course by all means be “Heaven & Earth”, with “Sky and Earth” as a distant runner-up alluding to the landscape theme, there’s a third meaning, which is in fact described in the impressum. “Himmel & Erde” also describes a dish popular all across Northern Germany, and sure we had it on that trip to Mecklenburg, too. Essentially it’s mashed potatoes mixed with likewise mashed apples – Erdäpfel und Himmeläpfel, “ground apples” and “sky apples”.