Franklin Booth (1874-1948) was probably the most influential American pen-and-ink illustrator. His technique had a bizarre origin. He grew up on a farm in Indiana, and he copied pictures from magazines. Unbeknownst to him, those pictures were engravings and scratchboard prints. Booth developed a pen-and-ink style that looked like engravings: in the image above, for instance, he’s using a fine black pen on white paper, not a scratchboard.
This reminds me of the recurring stories about the kid who hears a guitar riff on a record and learns to play it, only to find out that the original was two guitars…
Illustration by Franklin Booth, for The Flying Islands of the Night by James Whitcomb Riley, 1913 (via Golden Age Comic Book Stories)