In 1576 a rather forbidding woodcut portrait of George Gascoigne was printed (by R. Smith) in that worthy’s Steele Glas. In 1577 came a very important work, the famous Chronicle, begun on a vast scale by Reyner Wolfe and completed for England, Scotland, and Ireland by Raphael Holinshed, now published by John Harrison the elder. This has the appearance of being much more profusely illustrated than the Book of Martyrs or any other English folio, but as the cuts of battles, riots, executions, etc., which form the staple illustrations, are freely repeated, the profusion is far less than it seems. The cuts, moreover, are much smaller than those in Foxe’s Martyrs. As a rule they are vigorously designed and fairly well cut, and if it had come fifty years earlier the book would have been full of promise. But, as far as pictorial cuts in important books are concerned, we are nearing the end. In 1579 H. Singleton published Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender with a small cut of no great merit at the head of each “æglogue,” and in the same year Vautrollier illustrated North’s Plutarch with insignificant little busts which derive importance only from the large ornamental frames, stretching across the folio page, in which they are set. Woodcuts did not cease to be used after this date. They will be found in herbals (but these were mainly foreign blocks), military works, and all books for which diagrams were needed. They continued fashionable for some time for the architectural or other forms of borders to titlepages, some of them very graceful, as, for instance, that to the early folio editions of Sidney’s Arcadia; also for the coats of arms of the great men to whom books were dedicated. They are found also at haphazard in the sixpenny and fourpenny quartos of plays and romances, and many of the old blocks gradually drifted into the hands of the printers of ballads and chapbooks, and appear in incongruous surroundings after a century of service. But I cannot myself call to mind any important English book after 1580 for which a publisher thought it worth his while to commission a new set of imaginative pictures cut on wood, and that means that woodcut illustration as a vital force in the making of books had ceased to exist. They needed good paper and careful presswork, and all over Europe paper and presswork were rapidly deteriorating. They cost money, and book-buyers apparently did not care enough for them to make them a good investment. The rising popularity of copper engravings for book-illustration on the Continent probably influenced the judgment of English book-lovers, and although, as we shall see, copper engraving was for many years very sparingly used in England save for portraits, frontispieces, and titlepages, woodcuts went clean out of fashion for some two centuries.
[63] He had apparently returned the blocks borrowed from Du Pré for the Falles of Princes, as none of them is used in 1527, although one or two are copied. I have not met with all the Chaucer illustrations, and it is possible that a few of these are new.
[64] Used again the same year in a treatise by Richard Bonner.
CHAPTER XV
ENGRAVED ILLUSTRATIONS
The good bookman should have no love for “plates,” and to do them justice bookmen have shown commendable fortitude in resisting their attractions, great as these often are. As a form of book-decoration the plate reached its highest development in the French livres-à-vignettes of the eighteenth century, the charm of the best bookwork of Moreau, Eisen, and their fellows being incontestable. It would, indeed, have argued some lack of patriotism if French book-lovers had not yielded themselves to the fascination of a method of book-illustration which had thus reached its perfection in their own country, and they have done so. But as he reads the enthusiastic descriptions of these eighteenth century books by M. Henri Béraldi, a foreign book-lover may well feel (to borrow the phrase which Jonson and Herrick used of the over-dressed ladies of their day) that the book itself has become its “own least part.” A book which requires as an appendix an album of original designs, or of proofs of the illustrations, or (worse still) which has been mounted on larger paper and guarded so that these proofs or designs can be brought into connection with the text, is on its way to that worst of all fates, the Avernus of extra illustration or Graingerism. When it has reached this, it ceases to be a book at all and becomes a scrap-album of unharmonized pictures.
Lack of means may make it easy for a bookman to resist the temptation to supplement the illustrations in a book with duplicates in proof or any like extravagances, but even then few books which have plates in them fail to bring trouble. If the plates are protected with “flimsies,” the owner’s conscience may be perturbed with doubts as to whether these may lawfully be torn out. If there are no flimsies, the leaf opposite a plate often shows a set-off from it and is sometimes specially badly foxed. Moreover, not being an integral part of the book, the plate presents problems to publishers and binders which are too often left unsolved. It ought to be printed on paper sufficiently wide to allow of a flap or turn-over, so that the leaf can be placed in the quire and properly sewn. But the flap thus left is not pretty, and unless very thin may cause the book to gape. Thus too often the plate is only glued or pasted into its place, with the result that it easily comes loose. Hence misplacements, imperfections, and consequent woe.