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Wood engravings in “Home Waters” by W. Wesley Bates
“‘Home Waters’ began as a fish story, but as it developed into a book it wound up dealing with many of the same people, places and events as ‘A River Runs Through It.’ One element of ‘Home Waters’ that consciously imitated ‘A River’, however, is the set of wood engravings that mark each section, just as wood engravings appear ‘A River.’ By chance, at the same time I was working on ‘Home Waters’ I located Robert Williams, who created the illustrations for ‘A River’ back in the 1970s. I was digging up information for another writer, Henry Hughes, who was researching the illustrations for my dad’s book.
Nearly a half century had passed, but I found Williams, who had retired from the University of Chicago Press, where he’d been a designer and illustrator, living in retirement in Hyde Park, the U of C neighborhood. He was able to answer a lot of questions, including confirming that the image on the cover of the first edition of ‘A River,’ of a river running up against a high bluff, came from his imagination, and is not an actual location. Williams’s engravings are wonderfully evocative, and I suggested to my editor, Peter Hubbard, that we do the same thing for ‘Home Waters.’ Peter agreed and found Wesley W. Bates, who gave it the right touch.”