Henry R. Plomer

“ We have seen the small printers’ ornaments grow, not only in variety of design, but also in regularity of face and clearness in reproduction. The ugly ornament, like the old-fashioned, fat-faced type, has given place to artistic and tasteful designs, coupled with growing knowledge on the part of the printers of the present day as to how they should be used, and it is a notable thing how one printer is vying with another, not only in reproducing ‘old face’ type, but in seeking their ornaments in the best productions of the fifteenth and sixteenth century presses. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They are not only spirited; but they are worthy of the great work in which they appeared. No. 234 in Bagford’s volume is a head-piece, the design of which is classical in treatment—spirals of flowers and foliage of a highly ornate character springing from a central stem, which consists of the body of a child emerging from foliage with his hands uplifted in terror of the two lions who are apparently coming for him on either side. ”

“ Among the books that appeared within the last five years of the century was an edition of Lucretius in three volumes large quarto, which certainly ranks for beauty of type and regularity of printing with any book of that period. Like most of the works of Baskerville, this book was quite free from ornament, and claims admiration only from the excellence of the press-work. The notes were printed in double columns in small pica, the text itself in double pica. In the whole three volumes not a dozen printer's errors have been found. This work came from the press of Archibald Hamilton. ”

“ In America the progress of printing was very slow throughout the seventeenth century. Until 1660, Samuel Green, at Cambridge, Massachusetts, remained the only printer in the colony. But in that year the Corporation for the propagation of the Gospel in New England among the Indians sent over from London another press, a large supply of good letter, and a printer named Marmaduke Johnson, for the purpose of printing an edition of the Bible in the Indian tongue. ”

“ John Windet placed on the title-page of H. Swinburne’s Briefe Treatise of Testaments and Wills, 1590, a curious little decorative block, in which two happy-looking cherubs [86] sitting under overhanging sprays of foliage that are part of the contents of an urn or basket of fruit and flowers are busily playing, one a guitar and the other a viol or violin, but whether they are serenading the lady whose head forms part of the design one is left to guess. This block was perhaps in reality a tail-piece. ”

“ CHAPTER XI THE PRESENT CENTURY
t has been said that printing sprang into the world fully armed. At least this is certain, that for nearly four centuries after its birth the printing-press in use in all printing-houses remained the same in form as that which Caxton's workmen had used in the Red Pale at Westminster. There had been some unimportant alterations made in it by an Amsterdam printer in the seventeenth century; but until the year 1800 no important change in the form or mechanism of the printing-press had ever been introduced. ”

“ 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 [12] of the fifteenth century. ”

“ When an ancient printer died, and his copies were exposed to sale, few or none of the young ones were of ability to deal for them, nor indeed for any other, so that the Booksellers have engross'd almost all.' The petitioners show also that the Company of Stationers was grown so large that none could be Master or Warden until he was well advanced in life, and therefore unable to keep a vigilant eye on the trade, while a printer did not become Master once in ten or twenty years. ”

“ Borders, then, shall be our first subject of study, but it has been decided that this study shall be confined as far as possible to built-up borders, i.e. those made up of small printers’ ornaments, such as the fleuron, or such as consisted of two or more decorative blocks. It has been considered, and perhaps rightly, that borders of one piece, such as that which surrounds the title-page of the 1561 edition of Chaucer’s Works, whether cut in wood or metal, belong rather to a history of engraving than to a work on printers’ ornaments. ”

“ In fact, so far as printing with English types was concerned, the first twenty years of the eighteenth century was the worst period in the history of printing in this country. With the exception of the University of Oxford, which, owing to the generous bequests of Bishop Fell and others, was well supplied with good founts, the printers of this country were compelled to obtain their type [Pg 229] from Holland, and all the best and most important books published in Queen Anne's days were printed with Dutch letter, as it was called. ”

“ Whether the printers were their own copyists, or whether they employed some one else to do this part of the work, we cannot say, but quite early in the sixteenth century, and from thence onwards to the close of the seventeenth, almost every head and tail piece and initial letter was copied and copied again without limit, and it must not be assumed, without the most careful examination and comparison, that any blocks, found in books having no printer’s name, show them to have been published by a certain printer. ”

“ Nicholls was the founder of the Greek type used in the new office of Blackfriars, and his experience was certainly not likely to encourage other men to set up in the same trade. At the time when he was appointed one of the four founders under the decree, he could not make a living by his trade, and though he does not expressly state the fact, his evidence seems to imply that English printers at that time obtained most of their type from abroad, and it is beyond question that they had long since ceased to cast their own letter. ”

“ Where a printer had but a small stock of decorative initial letters he frequently made use of an ornamental frame, in the centre of which he placed an ordinary capital. This practice seems to have arisen about the middle of the sixteenth century, and it probably had its origin on the Continent.
These borders for initials have come to be known as ‘factotums,’ because they were called to do duty on all occasions, and they have been heartily condemned as destructive of all artistic feeling. When, as they often do, they occur throughout a book, they become monotonous. ”

“ As far as permanent influence is concerned Mr. Morris's Roman letter, the 'Golden type,' as it was dubbed, from its use in the Golden Legend, is the most important of the three founts which he employed. His own sympathies, however, were too pronouncedly mediæval for him to be satisfied with it, and for the next large book which he took in hand, a reprint of Caxton's Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, the first work printed in the English tongue, he designed a much larger and bolder type, an improvement on one of the 'Gothic' founts used by Anton Koberger at Nuremberg in the fifteenth century. ”

“ No account of Modern Printers’ Ornaments would be complete without a record of the work done by the University Presses. Marching with the times the Oxford University Press, still familiarly known as the Clarendon Press, has long since relegated the once famous Fell and Junius types to the vaults as curiosities, and has availed itself of the best founts that a modern foundry can produce. In 1766 the University had an account with William Caslon, from whom it bought both English and Foreign sorts, and at the present day no firm in England can show better craftsmanship. ”

“ In 1844 Pickering and Whittingham were in consultation as to the production of an edition of Juvenal to be printed in old-face great primer, and the foundry of the latest descendant of the Caslons was ransacked to supply the fount. The edition was to be rubricated and otherwise decorated, and this, or the printer's stock trouble, 'lack of paper,' occasioning some delay, the revived type first appeared in a fiction entitled Lady Willoughby's Diary, to which it gave a pleasantly old-world look in keeping with the period of which the story treats. ”

“ As regards type, there is very little to choose between Caslon's Roman and that of Baskerville, while the italic of Baskerville was unquestionably the most beautiful type that had ever been seen in England; and the ridiculous criticism passed on it that its very fineness was injurious to the eyesight, was shown to be utterly worthless by Franklin's letter to the printer, which is printed in Reed's Old English Letter Foundries. But there are also other features of excellence about these books of Baskerville's. They are simplicity itself. ”

“ There was so much material in the market, and it saved so much time and trouble to buy from others. Or was it that there was no man in England sufficiently skilled to draw or design initial letters, and no craftsman skilled enough in woodcutting to produce them? Whatever the reason, this foreign trade in initials continued throughout the sixteenth century, as blocks that had come from Paris, Lyons, Basle, Venice, Florence, the Low Countries, and even Spain are frequently met with in books of that time. ”

“ At the same time, the privileges of Robert Barker, son and successor to Christopher Barker, and king's printer by reversion, were increased by grants for printing all statutes, hitherto the monopoly of other printers. On the other hand, Robert Barker did not retain the sole possession of the royal business as men like Berthelet and [Pg 155] Pynson had been wont to do, but had joined with him in the patent John Norton, who had a special grant for printing all books in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and John Bill, who probably obtained his share by purchase. ”