Mercury and books

Inside an oval vignette, a slender figure wearing a winged helmet sits cross-legged on a tall, precarious pile of thick books, absorbed in a book held open in his hands. To the left an owl perches on a Gothic bell tower; below and to the right, tiny pedestrians move along a street lined with stepped gable-roofed houses, and a scroll banner with lettering drifts at the upper right beneath a starry night sky.

Fine stippled and hatched linework builds deep blacks in the sky against luminous highlights on the reader's skin and the rooftops, with painstaking architectural detail recalling an old northern European townscape. The stillness of the reading figure against the sleeping town gives the print a quiet, scholarly, dreamlike mood.