In England, also, a patron's coat was sometimes printed as one of the decorations of a book. Thus on the third leaf of the first edition of the Golden Legend there is a large woodcut of a horse galloping past a tree, the device of the Earl of Arundel, the patron to whom Caxton owed his yearly fee of a buck in summer and a doe in winter. So, too, in the Morton Missal, printed by Pynson in 1500, the Morton arms occupy a full page at the beginning of the book. Under Elizabeth and James I. the practice became
fairly common. In some cases where the leaf thus decorated has become detached, the arms have all the appearance of an early book-plate, and the Bagford example of Sir Nicholas Bacon's plate has endured suspicions on this account. In this instance, however, the fortunate existence of a slight flaw in the block, which occurs also in the undoubtedly genuine gift-plate of 1574, offers a strong argument in favour of its having been in the possession of Sir Nicholas himself, and therefore presumably used by him as a mark of possession.
[1] In a copy of the edition of Suetonius, printed by Sweynheym and Pannartz at Rome in 1470, which belonged to William Morris, and is now in the Morgan collection at New York, there are nine excellent woodcut capitals used with a handsome border-piece, which do not appear in other examples. Dr. Lippmann found similar decorations in the 1465 edition of Lactantius, printed at Subiaco by the same firm. In this case the blocks probably belonged to the printers, but were used to decorate only a few copies.
[2] A full description of this copy will be found in Dr. Sommer's introduction to the facsimile and reprint of the English translations of Paris, 1503, and London, 1506 (Kegan Paul, 1892).
CHAPTER II
THE COMPLETION OF THE PRINTED BOOK
As we have seen, the typical book during the first quarter of a century of the history of printing is one in which the printer supplied the place of the scribe and of the scribe alone. An appreciable, though not a very large, percentage of early books have come down to us in the exact state in which they issued from the press, with a blank space at their beginning for an illumination, blanks for the initial letters, blanks for the chapter headings, no head-lines, no title-page, no pagination, and no signatures to guide the binder in arranging the sheets in the different gatherings. Our task in the present chapter is to trace briefly the history of the emancipation of the printer from his dependence on handwork for the completion of his books. We shall not expect to find this emancipation effected step by step in any orderly progression. Innovations, the utility of which seems to us obvious and striking, occur as if by hazard in an isolated book, are then abandoned even by the printer who started them, and subsequently reappear in a number of books printed about the same time at different places, so that it is impossible to fix the chronology of the revived fashion.