Thanks to Canver for sponsoring the illusionist. Want to make your presentations look nice rather than like the menu screen from 1997 DVDs.

You want your logos to be better than clip art? Me too, but I didn't go to design school.

And my visual imagination deserted me somewhere along the side of a not very exciting looking road. Are you there too?

Well, lucky for us there's Canver with its libraries of fonts and graphics, even audio and video you can use.

You can also design for lots of different things, not just presentations and documents and Instagram and YouTube and posters and photo collages, although that is a lot to be getting on with.

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Right now you can get a free 45 day extended trial when you go to Canver.me slash illusionist. That's c-a-n-v-a.me slash illusionist for a free 45 day extended trial. Canver.me slash illusionist.

This is the illusionist in which I Helen Salzman draw language in the secret center and re-gift the bath bombs it gave me last year.

This is the second half of the pair of episodes about engravings. The first was about epitaphs on gravestones. And this episode similarly is about words engraved onto a very durable substance, whether it will be read by generations to come.

The episode was reported by producer Arlee Adlington on with the show.

I like how this is typical of war and teach or re-in-away. It's just completely unsymmetrical and totally imperfect.

In a world of perceived perfection now, it's just far more interesting. You can really see that somebody has done that by hand. The a is lower than the z and the e, the horizontal arms of the e are too short by modern standards. Certainly not perfect.

There are bits and pieces of the letter that you can really put yourself in the position of the person doing it. Obviously it was not able to achieve this perceived perfection because they're human.

People definitely still want to have things engraved. But being engraved is not a highly paid aspect of our trade. And the nature of London and modern life is that how can you afford to go into that profession if it doesn't allow you to live?

Luckily for us, they still work out there for us. But it's a dying trade. We're probably the youngest people that still do it in London.

As engravers retire and less come through, they just either don't have it engraved or they'll just move across to machine.

No, you can't do everything by machine. There's probably 50% of what we do. You couldn't do by machine. But if you can't get it done, you don't advertise it.

Stephen Yardley is the Yardley half of Milne and Yardley. Based in Mayfair in London, they specialize in handing engraving.

We're in a workshop, second floor, above Brown's restaurant. And basically there's two benches and two of us do an handing engraving. The old traditional way.

It's as simple as that really. This is where we originally started, both us when we were 16, 17 years old.

So yeah, not really been in only been in about two rooms in our life working.

And nothing really changes. Really, we just use the same tools as we did when we were apprentices.

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