[25] From the 'Connoisseur,' by leave of the editor.
[Illustration: DEVICE OF FUST AND SCHÖFFER, 1462]
[Illustration: DEVICE OF MATTHIAS VAN DER GOES]
If truth is to be told, I have never as yet met with any amateur who
collected books for the sake of the printer's mark at the beginning or
end of them. But it has always seemed to me that it would be an
agreeable variety of book-collecting to do this, and one which would
lead the collector along many by-paths of curious knowledge. For fear of
any possible mistake, I should perhaps emphasise the point that the
collection must be one not of printers' marks cut out from books, but of
books in which the marks are printed. Even in the case of book-plates,
it has often been noted how much they gain in interest when they are
found _in situ_, though there is always the haunting fear that the
conjunction of book and plate may only be due to the ingenuity of the
vendor. Book-plates, however, have of right a separate existence apart
from books, since they are made separately and must await their owners'
pleasure before they can be set to their proper work. But the printer's
device is an integral part of the book in which it occurs, nor can any
limpet torn from its rock look more unhappy than one of these marks
cut out from the page on which it was printed, and pasted in a
scrap-book. Unhappily, it must be said that, like the book-plate, though
more rarely, a device is sometimes found attached to a book to which it
does not belong. Thus, in the last Inglis sale an edition of a
'Defensorium Curatorum' by an unknown French printer, was catalogued as
from the press of Colard Mansion on the score of Mansion's device, cut
out with extraordinary neatness, being pasted on the last leaf. The
buyer of it certainly bid with open eyes, but it is annoying to pay even
a few shillings more because of such a freak. So, too, a leaf with
Caxton's device bound at the end of Pynson's edition of the 'Speculum
Vitae Christi' led the late Mr. Blades to believe that Pynson was
Caxton's apprentice. But these misdeeds or mishaps are exceptional, and
it is the collector of scraps, from Bagford downwards, whom the
printers' device has chiefly to fear.
[Illustration: DEVICE OF EGMONT AND BARREVELT]
[Illustration: DEVICE OF ARNOLD GUILLEM DE BROCAR]
The merits of printers' devices are twofold--many of them are very
pretty, and all of them, when duly studied, are capable of throwing
considerable light on the history of printing, more especially on the
often important point of the order in which books were issued and the
year, or even the month, to which an undated book belongs. The
prettiness or beauty of some of the designs will be shown by our
illustrations, nor is it difficult to explain how the devices throw
light on the careers of their printers.
[Illustration: DEVICE OF J. B. SESSA, FIFTEENTH-SIXTEENTH CENTURY]
[Illustration: DEVICE USED BY PYNSON IN 'FROISSART'S CHRONICLES,' 1525
(_reduced_)]
Always executed in the manner of wood-cuts, that is to say, in relief,
some of them were cut with a knife in wood, others with a graver on very
soft metal. The lines of the wood block break with use, the lines of the
metal block bend, and by careful examination of any two prints a good
guess can mostly be made as to which was the earlier. A palmary instance
of this is a metal block which Richard Pynson began to use in 1496. Its
lower border began to bend almost at once; by 1503 the bend was as much
as an eighth of an inch, and year by year it increased, till in 1513 the
border broke altogether. Needless to say, that every undated book in
which this border appears can be dated almost as easily as if the year
of publication were printed in it. When several examples by the same
printer are brought together, a little observation, if carefully
verified, will give a good clue to the date at which a device first came
into use and when it was abandoned for another, and herein lie both the
usefulness and the sport which may be obtained from the study of
printers' devices. What the collector should aim at is to obtain the
earliest book in which the mark is used, and to make notes of its
subsequent history.
Perhaps from the fact that the Anchor and Dolphin which Aldus adopted as
his device were counterfeited with evil intent, it has sometimes been
said that the devices were used as trade marks to protect the copyright
of the books in which they occur. Copyright as such did not exist in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and books could only be protected by
their printer obtaining a special 'privilege' either for an individual
book or for books of a particular kind. With this the devices had
nothing to do, and although a pleasing design often begat a whole
progeny of similar ones, this copying, when it was not merely lazy, was
probably complimentary rather than competitive. We must take it that the
devices were purely ornamental, aiming, no doubt, at the glorification
of the printers who used them, but not possessing any commercial
significance. Hence, perhaps, the variety we find in them. They may be
simply personal, containing only the printer's private arms or in some
few cases his portrait. They may join his initials or some motto of his
choice to the arms of the city in which he worked, or to some more or
less graceful scroll work. They may reproduce the sign of his shop or
the figure of his patron saint; or lastly, a kind much in vogue in the
sixteenth century, they may be allegorical. As we should expect, there
is a fairly steady movement from simplicity to ornateness. The earliest
device (the first of our illustrations), that used by Fust and Schöffer
at the end of the Latin Bible they printed at Mainz in 1462, consists
only of two shields slung from a branch. That of Arnold ther Hoernen, of
Cologne (about 1470), is in the same style, but even more modest. A few
years later, Günther Zainer, of Augsburg, showed greater ambition in
his mark, which represents a wild man holding a shield, on which is a
crowned lion rampant. But though Schöffer, ther Hoernen, and Zainer thus
led the way, their example was very little followed in Germany during
the fifteenth century, and it is in other countries and in the books of
native printers rather than of the German teachers of the craft that the
development of the ornamental device must be looked for.
[Illustration: DEVICE OF FRANÇOYS REGNAULT]
In Italy, despite what has just been said, the earliest device known is
that of a German printer, Sixtus Riessinger, who worked at Naples,
1471-80. It represents a woman holding a shield, while behind her is a
scroll bearing the letters 'S.R.D.A., Sixtus Riessinger de Argentina,'
_i.e._ of Cologne. This device stands by itself, the real sequence of
Italian designs beginning with that used at Venice by Nicolas Jenson and
John of Cologne in 1481. This consists of a circle and of a straight
line, crossed by two bars, rising at right angles to the base of a
segment of it. It was imitated by one Italian printer after another at
Venice, Pavia, Brescia, and elsewhere, and with various ornamental
modifications re-appears in quite three out of four of the fifteenth
century Italian devices. From Italy it passed to France, and from France
to England, where it was used by Julian Notary. The design, by dividing
the circle into three parts, allows the printer to place his initials in
them, and this was frequently done. Jenson was also a very famous
printer, and his example would naturally be imitated. But how it came to
be imitated so widely, and whether any meaning, symbolical or otherwise,
can be extracted from the design, are problems to which no satisfactory
answer has been returned. Among the prettier modifications of this too
popular design are those used by Franciscus de Mazaliis, of Reggio, and
by Egmont and Barrevelt, the printers of the Venice edition of the Sarum
Missal. The latter is shown on page 229.
Among designs of other patterns, mention may be made of the crown used
by Mazochius, of Ferrara; the 'putti' of Filippo Giunta, and the crowned
dolphin of Piero Pacini, both of Florence; the fourteen varieties of
angels which appear on as many devices used by the brothers De Legnano,
of Milan; the shielded warrior of Bernardinus de Garaldis, of Milan; the
S. Jerome of Bernardinus Benalius; the fleur-de-lys of Lucantonio
Giunta; the S. Antony of Philippus Pintius; the S. George and the Dragon
of Giorgio Rusconi; and the mouse-eating cat of J. B. Sessa, reproduced
on page 231. The last five printers all worked at Venice, and almost all
of those we have named belonged not only to the fifteenth century, but
to the sixteenth, in which the vogue of the Jenson model at last came to
an end.
It has already been said that for variety and artistic treatment among
printers' devices, the first place must be given to those found in
French books. Yet their beginning was poor enough, the representation of
the ship, taken from the arms of the city of Paris, which was used by
Louis Martineau about 1484, being badly cut and quite insignificant.
Jean Du Pré (for his first device), Pierre Levet, Jean Lambert, and one
or two other French printers at Paris, used some of the features of the
normal Italian design, though in a far more elaborate and decorative
form; while at Lyons, where Italian influence was always strong, simple
copying was thought good enough.
[Illustration: DEVICE OF DIEGO DE GUMIEL]
But the typical French device is much more pictorial than any of these.
The arms of France and of the city of Paris are prominent in many of
them, and in that of André Bocard both are used at once; but the printer
used often to take a suggestion from his Christian name, from the sign
by which his shop was known, or from the motto with which most early
French devices are encircled. The second device of Antoine Caillaut
(reproduced on p. 241) is a beautiful and early example of the
appearance of a patron saint in a device; while that of the two swans
used by Du Pré, whose printing house had the 'Deux Cygnes' for its
sign, is a good example of the second class. The device here chosen for
our second French illustration I take to be an example of the pictorial
expansion of a motto, Regnault's expression of trust in God being well
represented by this quiet little pastoral scene (see page 234).
Though far inferior to the best French examples, the printers' marks
used in the Low Countries are also numerous, varied and good. They range
from the twin shields of Veldener and Gerard Leeu to such imposing
devices as the elephant and howdah used, with punning intent, by an
unknown printer ('G.D.') at Gouda, and the bannered castle, the arms of
the city of Antwerp, adopted by Thierry Martens. Among the earliest are
the small portraits of the printers themselves found in some of the
books of John and Conrad, of Paderborn, in Westphalia. That of the
former, here reproduced, is sometimes found in red ink as well as black,
and is referred to in one of his colophons as 'meum solitum signum.' The
bird-cage used by Godfrid Back at Antwerp has no parallel among devices
that I know of, but as a specimen of the larger Dutch marks we will take
that of his fellow-citizen, Matthias van der Goes, which represents a
very vigorous 'wild man' with club and shield (see page 228).
[Illustration: DEVICE OF JOHN OF PADERBORN]
Spanish devices are in some cases adapted from the French or Italian, in
others rather dull and uninteresting. Of those which belong to neither
of these classes, by far the finest as a piece of decorative work is
that of Diego de Gumiel, of Valladolid (see page 236), the effect of
which is as rich as that of the best of William Morris's initial
letters.
Next in interest to this we may perhaps rank the rather elaborate device
(see page 230) of Arnold Guillem de Brocar, the printer of the
Complutensian Polyglot, who at different times in his career had presses
also at four other places. The motto upon it, 'Inimici hominis domestici
ejus,' though it has been made the basis of some theories as to Brocar's
career, is still unexplained. If the 'domestici,' the 'those of his own
household,' could be extended to Brocar's workpeople, we should have
here a fine example of an early grumble by a master printer, but the
suggestion is perhaps more pleasing than probable. Cryptic mottoes seem
to have run in Brocar's family. His son Juan adopted an extraordinary
device of a knight seizing a lady by the hair, with an inscription
'Legitime certanti,' which must be taken as sarcastic.
[Illustration: DEVICE OF JOHN WIGHT]
The history of printers' marks in England begins with that used by
Caxton for the first time as late in his career as 1487. Out of respect
for his master, Wynkyn de Worde adopted the essential parts of this,
_i.e._ the initials 'W.C.' and the interlacement between them in all his
fifteen different devices, thus conferring on them a rather painful
monotony. English printers, indeed, seem to have set little store on
originality in these matters, the earliest device of Pynson being
adapted from that of Le Talleur, of Rouen, that of Richard Faques from
Thielmann Kerver's, the 'wild men' of Peter Treveris from those of
Pigouchet, and John Byddell's unprepossessing figure of Virtue from that
used by Jacques Sacon, of Lyons. Nevertheless, English devices at once
interesting and original are not lacking. That used by Pynson at the
end of Lord Berner's translation of 'Froissart' (see page 232) is one of
the largest and not the least fine of armorial marks, the interlaced
triangles of William Faques make a singularly neat device, and John
Day's picture of two men gazing on a skeleton, with the motto, 'Etsi
mors indies accelerat vivet tamen post funera virtus,' has its own
merits. England also contributes two of the very small number of
portrait marks, a large one of Day and a smaller one (here reproduced)
of John Wight,[26] a bookseller of St. Paul's Churchyard, who published
a few books between 1551 and 1589. It seemed permissible to come down as
late as this in the case of our own country, but to speak of the French
and German devices of the middle of the sixteenth century would open up
too large a field. All that has been attempted here is to give a few
characteristic examples of comparatively early date, so as to exhibit
the different styles of printers' marks, used in different countries by
one generation of printers. I hope that any of my readers who had not
hitherto made the acquaintance of these little designs will have been
convinced that they are worthy of further study.
[26] Our illustration shows the cut in an interesting state, when
the original I. of the first initial had been altered to an R. to
suit John's descendant Robert. The change is one of a kind with
which collectors of book-plates are familiar.
Any one who desires to take up the subject more or less seriously will
find a considerable literature ready to his hand. To Messrs. Bell and
Co.'s 'Ex Libris' series Mr. William Roberts has contributed a pleasant
volume, which offers an easy introduction for beginners. More serious
students will find an almost exhaustive series of woodcut copies of
French devices in Silvestre's 'Marques typographiques,' and much
prettier facsimiles abound in M. Claudin's great 'Histoire de
l'Imprimerie en France,' though this as yet treats only of Paris
printers of the fifteenth century. For Italy, Dr. Kristeller's 'Die
Italienischen Buchdrucker und Verlegerzeichen bis 1525' is excellent,
and its publishers (Heitz and Mündel) have brought out similar
monographs on the marks used at Strasburg, Basel, Frankfort, and
Cologne, and also in Spain and Portugal. The earlier Low Country marks
will be found in Holtrop's 'Monumens typographiques des Pays-Bas'; the
earlier English ones in the 'Handlists of English Printers' issued by
the Bibliographical Society.
As to collecting, it is certainly a little alarming to have to buy a
whole book for the sake of a single device in it, or at most two. On the
other hand, the books are pleasant things in themselves, and there is
an alleviation in the fact that the devices only begin to abound a
little before 1490, and that books of this date can be acquired, even
now, at prices which seem reasonable compared with those fetched by the
real first-fruits of the press. Many very pretty devices will be found
in the thin volumes of Latin verse published at Paris in the early parts
of the sixteenth century, and a bookman who meets a 'tract-volume'
containing several of these bound together, will probably find
sufficient devices among them to start his collection.
[Illustration: DEVICE OF ANTOINE CAILLAUT]