SECTION III. MARKS OF BOOKSELLERS AND PRINTERS SIGNED WITH THE LORRAINE CROSS.
The inventor of the Pot Cassé was chosen by his confrères, in preference to all other engravers, to engrave their private marks. They had realized the force of his 'kindly exhortation to practice and employ themselves in goodly inventions,'[448] and had been impressed by the perfection with which he executed that species of engraving, which he had completely transformed. For, in lieu of the coarse vignettes with a black background, on which the design stood out in white, as if cut with a die, Tory had gradually introduced into these woodcuts all the delicacy of the Italian engravings. The earliest ones of his of which we have any knowledge are in the criblé style, which the Middle Ages had handed down to him; but he soon rejected that style and not only adopted a new manner of engraving, but altered the arrangement of the designs that were entrusted to him. This fact is especially manifest if we compare the original mark of the de Marnefs (Silvestre, 'Marques Typographiques' no. 151) with the one that bears the motto, 'Principivm ex fide, finis in charitate' (Silvestre, no. 1043). Instead of the roughly drawn Pelican nourishing from its vitals its still more roughly drawn young, in a nest perched on a tree of which the leaves are larger than the trunk, we have, in the second engraving [given above], an entirely new composition, of which both design and execution are irreproachable. In the face of such results, we should not be surprised by the predilection of the printer-booksellers for Tory; they deemed it a duty to employ a confrère who poetized their profession: to them it was a question of esprit de corps and of patriotism alike.
That is why we have so many typographical marks signed with the Lorraine cross. We propose to enumerate all of those which we have actually had before us. As it was impossible to arrange them chronologically, we have adopted the alphabetical order.