The merits of printers' devices are twofold—many of them are very pretty, and all of them, when duly studied, are capable of throwing considerable light on the history of printing, more especially on the often important point of the order in which books were issued and the year, or even the month, to which an undated book belongs. The prettiness or beauty of some of the designs will be shown by our illustrations, nor is it difficult to explain how the devices throw light on the careers of their printers.
Always executed in the manner of wood-cuts, that is to say, in relief, some of them were cut with a knife in wood, others with a graver on very soft metal. The lines of the wood block break with use, the lines of the metal block bend, and by careful examination of any two prints a good guess can mostly be made as to which was the earlier. A palmary instance of this is a metal block which Richard Pynson began to use in 1496. Its lower border began to bend almost at once; by 1503 the bend was as much as an eighth of an inch, and year by year it increased, till in 1513 the border broke altogether. Needless to say, that every undated book in which this border appears can be dated almost as easily as if the year of publication were printed in it. When several examples by the same printer are brought together, a little observation, if carefully verified, will give a good clue to the date at which a device first came into use and when it was abandoned for another, and herein lie both the usefulness and the sport which may be obtained from the study of printers' devices. What the collector should aim at is to obtain the earliest book in which the mark is used, and to make notes of its subsequent history.
DEVICE OF ARNOLD GUILLEM DE BROCAR
DEVICE OF J. B. SESSA,
FIFTEENTH-SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Perhaps from the fact that the Anchor and Dolphin which Aldus adopted as his device were counterfeited with evil intent, it has sometimes been said that the devices were used as trade marks to protect the copyright of the books in which they occur. Copyright as such did not exist in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and books could only be protected by their printer obtaining a special 'privilege' either for an individual book or for books of a particular kind. With this the devices had nothing to do, and although a pleasing design often begat a whole progeny of similar ones, this copying, when it was not merely lazy, was probably complimentary rather than competitive. We must take it that the devices were purely ornamental, aiming, no doubt, at the glorification of the printers who used them, but not possessing any commercial significance. Hence, perhaps, the variety we find in them. They may be simply personal, containing only the printer's private arms or in some few cases his portrait. They may join his initials or some motto of his choice to the arms of the city in which he worked, or to some more or less graceful scroll work. They may reproduce the sign of his shop or the figure of his patron saint; or lastly, a kind much in vogue in the sixteenth century, they may be allegorical. As we should expect, there is a fairly steady movement from simplicity to ornateness. The earliest device (the first of our illustrations), that used by Fust and Schöffer at the end of the Latin Bible they printed at Mainz in 1462, consists only of two shields slung from a branch. That of Arnold ther Hoernen, of Cologne (about 1470), is in the same style, but even more modest. A few years later, Günther Zainer, of Augsburg, showed greater ambition in his mark, which represents a wild man holding a shield, on which is a crowned lion rampant. But though Schöffer, ther Hoernen, and Zainer thus led the way, their example was very little followed in Germany during the fifteenth century, and it is in other countries and in the books of native printers rather than of the German teachers of the craft that the development of the ornamental device must be looked for.
DEVICE USED BY PYNSON IN 'FROISSART'S CHRONICLES,' 1525 (reduced)
