The paper is already much longer than I had intended, and it is therefore, perhaps, as well that of English printing abroad during the first half of the eighteenth century I have found no trace, except in a few devotional books published at Douay. There ought to be some Jacobite tracts, and I need not say that any notes of them will be heartily welcomed. But there is a last phase of the foreign printing of English books of which I may be allowed to quote a few instances. For various reasons during the last hundred years or so, a good many English men and women of letters have lived abroad, and though most of them, like Byron, Beddoes, Landor, and the Brownings, have sent their books to be printed in England, their foreign residence has occasionally left interesting traces in books and booklets with foreign imprints. Thus Sir William Hamilton, while Ambassador at the Court of Naples, had two books printed for him there, one 'Campi Phlegraei' (or) 'Observations on the Volcanoes of the Two Sicilies' in 1776, the other a series of collections of 'Engravings from Ancient Vases' found in Sicily, between 1791 and 1795. Gibbon's long stay in Switzerland doubtless had something to do with the publication at Berne, in 1796-97, of a reprint of his 'Miscellaneous Works' which had then only just appeared in London. Shelley's 'The Cenci' appeared in 1819, with the imprint Italy, and his 'Adonais' was printed 'at Pisa with the types of Didot' in 1821. At Parma, several English works obtained what used to be considered the honour of Bodoni's types, and the English ventures of Galignani at Paris, though far surpassed by the later enterprise of Baron Tauchnitz, deserve a chronicler. The employment of foreign presses by wandering Englishmen has not yet died out. At Davos Platz, Stevenson did better—he set up a toy press of his own. A year or two before the paper was read, Mr. William Sharp gave local colour to his 'Sospiri di Roma' by employing a Roman printer, and in 1895 an important English historical work, 'The Life of Sir Robert Dudley' was printed at Florence.
When the Bibliographical Society takes up the history of English books printed abroad, I hope that, if only in a small print appendix, room may be found for a record of these later books, and that we shall not stop at 1600, or at 1700, or at 1800, but recognise that our own age is as worthy of our attention as any of its predecessors.
[SOME PICTORIAL AND HERALDIC INITIALS][13]
PICTORIAL initials were not greatly in favour during the golden age of printing, and there is much to be said against them on the score of appropriateness and good taste. If capital letters were all either round or oval, one great difficulty would be removed from the artist's path, for a decorative circle or oval, even if a tail or handle has to be added to it, makes no bad frame for a little picture. It is therefore not surprising to find that the German designers, who were the first to attack the problem, adopted a rounded form of the letter T, shortened the shaft of a P to a minimum, and magnified the lower curve of a B or S, while reducing the upper one as much as possible. These accommodations do not make for clearness, and certain letters, such as A, E, H, and M often remained stubbornly outside any such compromises.
This difficulty as to form had been experienced and, as far as was possible, overcome, by the old illuminators, but the printers had a trouble of their own which may have made them think that movable types also were vanity. An illuminator who had to paint the same initial twelve times probably found a pleasure in varying his miniatures, but with the pictures which had not only to be drawn, but to be cut on wood or soft metal, a printer was naturally less inclined to be profuse. We know, of course, from their general practice that the early printers had generous ideas as to the adaptability of any one picture of a town or a battle to the representation of any other town or battle which might be mentioned in the text; but there were only a few subjects capable of this endless repetition, and when Leonard Holl prefixed to his edition of Ptolemy's 'Cosmographia' (Ulm, 1482) the magnificent, if not very easily recognisable, N, which shows the editor, Nicolaus Germanus, presenting his book to Pope Paul II. (fig. 1), he must have known that he would have to wait a long time before he could use it again.
1. FROM PTOLEMY'S 'COSMOGRAPHIA,' PRINTED BY LEONARD HOLL. ULM, 1482
Lucas Brandes of Lubeck, in his splendid editions of 'Josephus' and the 'Rudimentum Noviciorum,' used a fine set of initials, into which various pictures could be inserted at pleasure. Either from economy, however, or from the poverty of invention of his designer, he had recourse to no more than some half dozen subjects. In the 'Josephus' a battle-scene, a cleric at his desk, and a military scribe, who has been identified as a Knight Templar, and whose adjustable reading-desk reminds us of the latest inventions for the comfort of invalids, recur again and again. The scribe appears, conveniently enough, in the fine P here shown (fig. 2), and in a C, but we find him also huddled below the bar of an H, and perched upon that of an A. In the same way the clerk, who is prettily framed in a Q, is shown to much less advantage in an M, of which the middle stem has been broken off to make room for him. One or two of the letters have no picture to fill them in, the blocks being apparently all engaged in other parts of the book. In the 'Rudimentum Noviciorum' we find a David playing his harp within a D, and the same pictures, with the loss of the ceiling and part of the floor, is repeated in a B. The cleric and the battle-scene appear again from the 'Josephus,' and there is also a C with a rather pretty picture of the Virgin adoring the Holy Child.
2. FROM A 'JOSEPHUS' PRINTED BY LUCAS BRANDES AT LUBECK