ENGLISH
PRINTERS’ ORNAMENTS
_This Edition is limited to 500 copies only_
[Illustration]
ENGLISH
PRINTERS’ ORNAMENTS
BY
HENRY R. PLOMER
AUTHOR OF “A SHORT HISTORY OF
ENGLISH PRINTING,” ETC.
[Illustration]
LONDON, W.C.1
GRAFTON & CO.
COPTIC HOUSE
1924
_Printed in Great Britain
by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh_
PREFACE
The subject of printers’ ornaments can be defined in its stricter
meaning as the decoration of books as apart from book illustration,
the aim of both decoration and ornamentation being to heighten the
attraction of the letterpress, although the one is not in any way
dependent upon the other.
In the following pages an attempt has been made to give an outline
history of the introduction of ornaments into books printed by English
printers and the subsequent growth and development of the art down to
the present day.
Printers’ ornaments include head and tail pieces, initial letters,
borders to title-pages or text, and decorative blocks such as those
which were used freely by the sixteenth century printer, Henry
Bynneman, and others. Printers’ devices, being in the nature of trade
marks, have no place in this volume, as, although decorative in
themselves, they were not used simply for the sake of embellishing the
page.
Although it is generally believed that English printers were on the
whole inartistic, and that many of the best designs were borrowed
from foreign countries, there is no lack of good material for a work
on English printers’ ornaments from the fifteenth onwards to the
nineteenth century. Many famous names of special printers come to
mind in early English books of the sixteenth century, such as Denham,
Bynneman, Wolfe, and John Day.
It only remains to acknowledge the courtesy of those who have helped in
the production of this book by granting permission for the reproduction
of illustrations and for the loan of blocks.
To Mr E. Gordon Duff and the Cambridge University Press for permission
to reproduce the Machlinia border; to Prof. A. W. Pollard, C.B., both
for kindly suggestions and for the loan of illustrations; to Mr C.
Sayle of Cambridge University Library for permission to reproduce
initials; to Mr Ralph Straus for permission to use the block of the
Baskerville ornaments from his book on the well-known printer, and
to the Cambridge University Press for the loan of the block; also to
Messrs Bowes & Bowes for the loan of blocks; to Messrs Maggs Bros. for
two whole-page illustrations, and to the Oxford University Press for
past and present ornaments.
For illustrations to the chapter on Modern Work we have to thank
Messrs Charles Whittingham & Griggs, Ltd.; Messrs H. W. Caslon & Co.,
Ltd.; Messrs R. & R. Clark, Ltd., of Edinburgh; the Trustees of the
Kelmscott Press, and Messrs Emery Walker, Ltd.; The Curwen Press;
The Morland Press, Ltd.; The Pelican Press; Messrs P. M. Shanks &
Sons, Ltd., and Messrs Stephenson, Blake & Co., Ltd. The additional
illustrations in the Edition de Luxe which do not appear in the
ordinary edition are two especially representative lace borders of
the sixteenth century, a beautiful ornamented page reproduced by kind
permission of the Trustees of the Kelmscott Press in red and black, and
one of the rare early coloured decorative titles.
H. R. PLOMER
LONDON
_Xmas 1923_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
_The Genesis of Printers’ Ornaments_ 1
CHAPTER II
_English Printers and their Ornaments_ 15
CHAPTER III
_Borders_ 31
CHAPTER IV
_Head and Tail Pieces--Small Ornaments_ 53
CHAPTER V
_Head and Tail Pieces--Decorative Blocks_ 65
CHAPTER VI
_Miscellaneous Ornaments_ 81
CHAPTER VII
_Initial Letters and Factotums_ 87
CHAPTER VIII
_Modern Work_ 101
ILLUSTRATIONS
_Descriptive Catalogue_ 119
_Borders_ 149
_Head-pieces_ 191
_Tail-pieces_ 211
_Ornaments_ 229
_Initials_ 239
_Modern Work_ 249
INDEX 287
THE GENESIS OF
PRINTERS’ ORNAMENTS
Referring to the books printed in Venice by Erhard Ratdolt in
the years 1476 and 1477, Mr G. R. Redgrave writes: “They are
plentifully enriched with initial letters, sometimes printed
in red ink, and they have all of them the gracefully designed
title-borders for which the books of Ratdolt are so deservedly
famous.”
_Erhard Ratdolt and His Work at Venice_, p. 13
(Bibliographical Society’s Monograph, No. 1).
* * * * *
“The typography and illustrations of Vérard’s books, though
justly celebrated, are distinctly inferior to the best
productions of certain Parisian printers--for instance Jean
Dupré; but in one respect he is without a rival--in the
sumptuous illuminated copies on vellum produced for his royal
and other distinguished patrons.”
_Antoine Vérard_, by John Macfarlane, 1900
(Bibliographical Society’s Monograph, No. 7).
* * * * *
On a certain day in the year 1530 or thereabouts, the following
dialogue took place between Robert Copland, a printer in London
at the sign of the Rose Garland in Fleet Street, and a customer
of his, who desired him to print a quaint conceit which he
called the _Seven Sorrows that Women have when their Husbands
be Deade_.
The printer naturally wanted to see the manuscript, but the
author replied that it was in his brain and not in his pocket.
_Quidam._
“I have no boke, but yet I can you shewe
The matter by herte and that by wordes fewe,
Take your penne, and wryte as I do say
But yet of one thyng, hertely I you praye.
Amende the Englysh somewhat if ye can
And spel it true, for I shal tel the[e] man
By my soule ye prynters make such englyshe
So yll spelled, so yll poynted, and so pevyshe
That scantly one can rede lynes tow
But to fynde sentence, he hath ynoughte to do.”
To which the printer replies thus:
“Well, brother, I can not it amende,
I wyl no man ther of dyscommende,
I care no[t] greatly, so that I now and than
May get a peny as wel as I can.”
This confession of Copland’s, coupled with the fact that the
author had a moment before expressed the opinion that a ‘penny’
was enough to spend on books, shows how great was the gap that
separated the Continental from the English printer in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and accounts for the paucity
of borders and ornaments found in English books up to 1500,
noted by Mr E. G. Duff in the chapter which he added to Mr A. W.
Pollard’s work on _Early Illustrated Books_.
Chapter I
_The Genesis of Printers’ Ornaments_
The decoration of books had reached the summit of excellence a century
before the art of cutting letters and printing with movable type was
discovered. By the middle of the fifteenth century Europe had a store
of books in all its great cities that for beauty of design, richness of
colouring, and excellence of craftsmanship have never been surpassed,
while in this country the meanest parish church could show one or more
service books of this character, the gift of pious benefactors, some
of which had been produced in the scriptoriums of Canterbury, York, or
Durham.
The first printers naturally turned to these manuscripts, not only for
the models of their types, but for other hints--and what did they find?
They found that the scribes generally began on the second leaf of the
vellum or paper, and that sometimes the vellum or paper was ruled with
faint red lines for margins and for evenness of line. They found that
the title of the work was put at the head of the text, and that the
first page of the text was enclosed within a richly illuminated border,
sometimes merely decorative or conventional, but more often consisting
of exquisitely drawn and coloured pictures, illustrating, if it were
a service book, scenes in the life of Our Lord or fragments of sacred
history.
They further found that at the commencement of the text was a richly
illuminated initial letter. The blank spaces at the ends of paragraphs
were sometimes filled with decorative ornament.
The scribe, moreover, placed no dividing line between the various parts
of the text. If he was beginning a new chapter he started at the top of
a new page, leaving a blank space at the bottom of the preceding one,
although, very rarely, illuminated head-pieces are found. Again, at
the end he simply put the colophon, often a most illuminating little
paragraph, not only notifying when and where he finished his task,
even to the hour, but very often giving the name of the person who
had commissioned the book, and returning thanks to God for giving the
writer health and strength to finish it.
The only other ‘ornaments’ they found were the paragraph marks, the
reversed [symbol] or ¶ still in use at this day, which can be traced
back to the fourteenth century and perhaps earlier, and the cross or
Maltese cross, generally met with in manuscript Books of Hours, and
probably quite as old as the paragraph mark.
All this the first printers followed as closely as they could. Their
books had no title-pages; they put the title above the first page of
text, which they began as high up on the paper as they could.
They sometimes put a border partially round this first page, and they
tried as far as possible to imitate the richly illuminated initial
letters--but with poor results at first. They left the spaces between
the divisions of the work blank, but they generally put on the last
leaf below the colophon or on a leaf by itself a woodcut embodying
their name or initials or the sign of the house in which they carried
on their trade. They also adopted the paragraph mark and the Maltese
cross, which for many years remained the only small ornaments they
possessed, unless indeed we can claim for the asterisk, or, as Luckombe
called it, the ‘asterism,’ an equal antiquity with the other two, which
is quite possible.
This was in the infancy of the art; but as it gradually emerged from
its swaddling clothes, printers discovered various ways of increasing
the beauty of the printed book. First they adopted a title-page,
quite a modest thing at first, which for its brevity has been called
a ‘Label’ title. Next they conceived that the appearance of the
title-page would be improved if it had a border like the first pages
of the old manuscripts. Then it occurred to them that it would look
better if the printed matter were begun lower down on the page, leaving
a blank space above. In course of time these blank spaces, and those
which generally followed at the end of dedicatory epistles and such
like, were ornamented, whatever was used for that purpose being called
by the names of head or tail piece. Occasionally the printers even went
so far as to fill up the spaces at the ends of paragraphs with small
ornaments, a wholly unnecessary labour which was soon dropped.
For these and other purposes new designs had to be found, and amongst
them, early in the sixteenth century, appeared the fleuron. Nature was
the mother of this very beautiful little ornament--a common object
of the roadway--a leaf torn by a rough wind from some tree, possibly
a willow. Centuries before printing was ever dreamt of, such a leaf
fell at the feet of one with a soul for the beautiful, who took it
home and drew it and drew it again and again, placing it in various
positions and finding a hundred different treatments of the subject,
and so discovered its possibilities for artistic decorations. In this
way it became the basis of most of the designs in Greek and Arabesque
pattern books. The architect sculptured it in stone, the lace-worker
turned it into a dream of delicate beauty, the bookbinder fashioned
it into a tool to stamp his bindings, and in due time the printers
cut it in wood and cast it in metal, and it became a stock ornament
in every printing office. In a happily inspired moment the fleuron
has been used as the title of a recently published magazine dealing
with typographical matters, and in an admirable article contributed to
its first number by Messrs F. Meynell and S. Morrison, which I trust
they will forgive me for quoting,[1] they say: “What is common to them
(i.e. fleurons), what makes the system, is the fact that the unit of
decoration is itself an ordinary metal type, of the varying type
sizes, cast by the type-printer, set as type, and bearing, instead of
a letter symbol, a formal design.... This simple tool was originally
used on an Aldine binding as early as 1499, but not until 1515 have the
writers discovered its first usage as a printing surface. This occurs
in the title-page of Tornandes’ de Rebus Gothorum, printed by Miller
of Augsburg in 1516.... Variations of the stalk developed at Augsburg
(1517), Strasbourg (1519), Antwerp (1532), Paris (1537).”
In the course of the following pages it will be seen in all sections
how infinite is the variety of design and treatment that this single
ornament is capable of.
It is interesting to find an 18th-century view of the origin and use of
flower ornaments, and therefore I am quoting a passage from Luckombe’s
_History of the Origin and Progress of Printing_, 1770. “Metal
flowers,” says the author, “are cast to all the regular bodies of
letter, from great primer to nonpareil included; besides several sorts
that are to the size of small pica.
“Flowers were the first ornaments which were used at the head of such
pages that either began the main work, or else a separate part of it.
“Though they formerly had no great variety of flowers; yet were the few
of them contrived to look neat and ornamental; being deep in body, and
cast so that no bearings-off could be discovered, but looked as one
solid row.
“But with the growth of printing, and when letter-cutters strove to
excel each other, they introduced also flowers of several shapes and
sizes, which were received, and variously employed, till cutting in
wood was come to perfection; when that art was eagerly encouraged, and
flowers not regarded. From that time till very lately, nothing has been
thought to grace the first page of a work so well as head-pieces cut in
wood; of which some have such a coarse look, that even mourning rules
would look neater, were they put in the room of them.
“The invention of cutting in wood, is claimed by the Germans, though
the Italians seem to have a prior right to stile themselves the
authors. Nevertheless, though the former may have had their worthies of
the said art, it is apparent that they have taken their knowledge with
them to the grave. And this has also been the case in France, where the
masters of the art of cutting in wood made a secret of their method of
working and left no disciples of their abilities. Hence it was, that
while Mr Jackson, an Englishman, was at Paris, he was wholly employed
in furnishing printers there with head-pieces and other ornaments of
his drawing and cutting. But it being above thirty years since he went
to Rome, it must be supposed that his work in France is worn down
before this time, which may be the reason that flowers are come into
fashion again in France. But this, perhaps, would not have been so
readily effected, had it not been for the particular genius and fancy
of a compositor at the King’s printing-house in Paris, who restored
the credit of flowers, by making them yield to every turn which is
required to represent a figure answerable to the rules of drawing.
Hence it may be guessed what great variety of florid sorts were used to
exhibit cyphers of names, forms of crowns, figures of winged and other
creatures, and whatever else fancy presented to this typographical
florist. But it must be observed, that the King of France paid for this
whim; the compositor having a salary and free access to the King’s
founding-house, to order the cutting and casting every thing that could
conduce to make his conceptions mature and the performance of them
admirable.
“Thus has the use of flowers been revived in France, and has stimulated
the Germans to improve their fusil ornaments, whereby they have been
instrumental to the considerable augmentation made here in flowers,
by all which we shall be enabled to make flower-pieces of oval,
circularly, and angularly turns, instead of having hitherto been
confined either to square or to circular flowers. But it is feared,
that head-pieces, fats, and tail-pieces of flowers will not long
continue, either in England, France or Germany, considering that the
contriving and making them up, is attended with considerable trouble
and loss of time; and as no allowance is made for this, it will not be
strange, if but few shall be found who will give instances of their
fancy. But this might be remedied, were printers to recompense the
compositor for his painful application; and then to preserve the
substance of his invention intire, for occasional use.
“The use of flowers is not confined to ornaments over head pages only,
but they serve also, each sort by itself, upon several other occasions.
Thus they are used in miscellaneous work, where a single row of flowers
is put over the head of each fresh subject, but not where two or more
are comprehended under the same title, which commonly have, another, by
the same, &c., for their head. As therefore flowers appertain to heads,
it ought to be a rule, that a single row of them should be put over
a head that begins a page, be it part, chapter, article or any other
division, in work that has its divisions separated by flowers.
“Flowers being cast to the usual bodies of letter, their size should
be proportionable to the face of the characters; since it would be as
wrong to use great primer flowers with long primer letter, as it is
improper to embolden the look of great primer by long primer flowers.
“Flowers being either of a rectilinear, angular, circular, or square
shape, they are used accordingly in making them up for head-pages, of
whom we have in this work introduced a few specimens.
“But as the construction of flower head pieces entirely depends upon
the fancy of a compositor, it would be presumption in us to direct him
in this point: we therefore leave the displaying of flowers to his own
judgment, and to the variety of materials for this purpose.
“For want of flowers, references and other sorts belonging to a
fount, are sometimes made use of to serve as well at the beginning as
conclusion of work of a small size.”[2]
Printers’ ornaments then consist of two broad groups--(1) Small
ornaments such as those mentioned by Luckombe, which we may suppose the
compositor to have had close at hand in his case, and (2) ornamental or
decorative blocks, either cut in wood or metal, of all sizes, which, as
we know from the inventory of the printing office known as the Sun in
Fleet Street in 1553, were described as pictures, and kept on a shelf
in the printing-house.
With regard to the first of these an interesting question arises: Did
the early printer cast his own ornaments, or did he obtain them from
a letter foundry?--a question that involves the genesis of letter
foundries.
It is self-evident that, until there were enough printers at work in
Europe to keep them going, letter foundries, as such, did not exist.
Besides, we know from early descriptions and drawings of printing
offices that they each contained a ‘casting-house,’ probably a small
ante-room in which type could be recast, and therefore in which on
emergency small ornaments could be cast.
This is what Mr T. B. Reed says on the question[3]: “Respecting the
developement of letter-founding as an industry there is little that
can be gathered in the history of the fifteenth century. At first the
art of the inventor was a mystery divulged to none. But the Sack of
Mentz in 1462 and the consequent dispersion of Gutenbergh’s disciples,
spread the secret broadcast over Europe.... For the most part printers
were their own founders.... But type depots and markets, and the
wanderings of the itinerant typographers, as the demands of printing
yearly increased, brought the founts of various nations and presses to
various centres and thus gave the first impulse to that gradual divorce
between printing and type founding which in the following century left
the latter the distinct industry it still remains.” This is not very
helpful to us. Taking the fleuron as an example, what seems to have
happened was this. Without speculating as to when it made its first
appearance in a book, we may safely say that its earliest form was
large, and that this large form was as often as not cut in wood. But
whether it was wood or metal, it was made by the printers themselves.
In its smaller form it made its appearance as a metal type early in the
sixteenth century, where unity of design and uniformity in size and
general adoption point to a common source.
As regards the second group of printers’ ornaments--viz., engraved
blocks--there is a conflict of opinion as to whether such blocks are
legitimate printers’ ornaments. There are those who contend that
they are ‘engravings’ and not ‘ornaments’; but however feasible such
an argument may be in the case of one-piece borders or title-pages
engraved in wood or metal, all modern writers on printing include
them as ‘ornaments.’ The German writer, Butsch, reproduces many of
them in his great work. Arthur Warren included them in his history of
the Chiswick Press. To take a more modern instance, Dr W. W. Greg, in
his article on Berthelet ‘Ornaments’ in the _Library_, mentions
several which were one-piece borders. Again, Mr McKerrow, in his work
on _Printers’ and Publishers’ Devices_, refers (p. xlv.) to
‘ornament devices,’ and instances three, the largest of which measured
37 × 37 mm., and represented a two-tailed mermaid (259), and refers
to it again as a common ornament bought from a type-founder. Other
blocks reproduced in that book were assuredly not devices. If, then,
these were ‘printers’ ornaments,’ the borders and head and tail pieces
composed of engraved blocks, whether of merely conventional designs or
pictorial, or whether cut on wood or metal, are legitimate ‘ornaments,’
especially when they were actually designed and cut for that purpose.
ENGLISH PRINTERS AND
THEIR ORNAMENTS