A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898

by Henry R. Plomer

Sir William Dugdale followed this up in 1656 by publishing, through the press of Thomas Warren, his Antiquities of Warwickshire, a folio of 826 pages. On the title-page is seen the device of old John Wolfe, the City printer. The dedication of this book was printed in great primer; but the look of the text was marred by a bad fount of black letter which did not print well. Like the Monasticon, this work was illustrated with maps and portraits by Hollar and Vaughan.

Another considerable undertaking was the Historical Collections of John Rushworth, in eight folio volumes, of which the first was printed by Newcomb in 1659, the others between 1680 and 1701.

But the great typographical achievement of the century was the Polyglott Bible, edited by Brian Walton. It was the fourth great Bible of the kind which had been published. The earliest was the Complutensian, printed at Alcala in 1517, with Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and Chaldean texts. Next came the Antwerp Polyglott, printed at the Plantin Press in 1572, which, in addition to the texts above mentioned, gave the Syriac version. This was followed in 1645 by the Paris Polyglott, which added Arabic and Samaritan, was in ten folio volumes, and took seventeen years to complete.

The London Polyglott of 1657, which exceeded all these in the number of texts, was mainly due to the enterprise and industry of Brian Walton, Bishop of Chester. This famous scholar and divine was born at Cleveland, in Yorkshire, in 1600. He was educated at Cambridge, and after serving as curate in All Hallows, in Bread Street, became rector of St. Martin's Orgar and of St. Giles in the Fields. He was sequestered from his living at St. Martin's during the troubles of the Revolution, and fled to Oxford, and it was while there that he is said to have formed the idea of the Polyglott Bible.

The first announcement of the great undertaking was made in 1652, when a type specimen sheet, believed to be still in existence, was printed by James Flesher or Fletcher of Little Britain, and issued with the prospectus, which was printed by Roger Norton of Blackfriars for Timothy Garthwaite. Walton's Polyglott was the second book printed by subscription in England, Minsheu's Dictionary in Eleven Languages having been published in this manner in 1617. The terms were £10 per copy, or £50 for six copies. The estimated cost of the first volume was £1500, and of succeeding volumes £1200, and such was the spirit with which the work was taken up that £9000 was subscribed before the first volume was put to press.

To the texts which had appeared in previous Polyglotts, Persian and Ethiopic were added, so that in all nine languages were included in the work—that is, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Chaldean, Syriac, Arabic, Samaritan, Persian, and Ethiopic—besides much additional matter in the form of tables, lexicons, and grammars. No single book was printed in all of these, only the Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Arabic running throughout the work, while the Hebrew appears in the Old Testament, the Psalms in Ethiopic, and the New Testament has, in addition to the four principal texts, the Ethiopic and Persian.

The whole work occupied six folio volumes, measuring 16 x 10-3/4, and was printed by Thomas Roycroft from types supplied by the four recognised typefounders. At the commencement of the first volume is a portrait of Walton by Bombert, followed by an elaborately engraved title-page, the work of Wenceslaus Hollar, an architectural design adorned with scenes from Scripture history. The second title-page was printed in red ink, and the text was so arranged that each double page, when open, showed all the versions of the same passage. The types used in this work have been described in detail by Rowe Mores in his Dissertations upon English Founders, and by Talbot Baines Reed in his work upon the Old English Letter Foundries (Chap. vii. pp. 164, et seqq.). Speaking of the English founts, the last-named writer points out that the double pica, Roman and italic, seen in the Dedication, is the same fount that was cut by the sixteenth-century printer, John Day, and used by him to print the Life of Alfred the Great. Mr. Reed adds that, in spite of a certain want of uniformity in the bodies, the Ethiopic and Samaritan were especially good, and the Syriac and Arabic boldly cut.

But it was not only for its typographic excellence that the book was remarkable. The rapidity with which this great undertaking passed through the press is no less astonishing. All six volumes were printed within four years, the first appearing in September 1654, the second in 1655, the third in 1656, and the last three in 1657. Looking at the labour involved by such an undertaking, it has been rightly described by Mr. T. B. Reed as a lasting glory to the typography of the seventeenth century.

Oliver Cromwell, under whose government this noble work was accomplished, had assisted, as far as lay in his power, by permitting the importation of the paper free of duty; and in the first editions this assistance was gracefully acknowledged by the editor, but on the Restoration those passages were altered or omitted to make room for compliments to Charles II.

Amongst those who ably assisted Walton in his labours was Dr. Edmund Castell, who prepared a Heptaglott Lexicon for the better study of the various languages used in the Polyglott. This work received the support of all the learned men of the time, but the undertaking was the ruin of its author, and a great part of the impression perished in the destruction of Roycroft's premises in the Great Fire of 1666.