End grain wood for wood engravings

From Walter Chamberlains book "Wood Engraving":

Palm wood is ideally suited for wood engraving; it was used by Thomas Bewick, Blake, Calvert and countless engravers in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is also widely used today, but it is quite expensive and very difficult in larger sizes "Lemonwood" is a reasonable alternative, although it is somewhat softer and slightly less dense in structure than palm wood. There are also a number of types of wood (especially from fruit trees) that are reasonably useful, but only palm wood has that special combination of hardness and a dense, uniform structure, which is necessary to create very fine, sharp details. This certainly applies to engraving curved lines, where a slightly coarser wood structure makes engraving more difficult. Palm wood is also the most durable and therefore suitable for very large print runs (up to 1 million prints).
As alternatives to palm wood, in addition to "lemonwood" there are; holly, maple, cherry wood, pear wood and sandalwood. These types of wood are also used for woodcuts; they are hard types of wood with a fairly fine structure, suitable for working with wood carving tools, such as chisels and knives. However, when it comes to working with engraving tools such as burins, they are all inferior to boxwood and also to lemonwood. Maple qualifies as a reasonable substitute, but is less dense than boxwood. Maple is therefore often used as a "color block" in multi-color wood engravings. "
End grain wood should not be stored in an environment that is too dry, as this increases the risk of splitting. It is therefore preferable not to store in a room that is heated with central heating; the humidity can therefore become too low.

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