English printers' ornaments

by Henry R. Plomer

Their work was much as other men’s and their printing material was no better. This partnership was dissolved in 1548, Day moving to Aldersgate, and in the following year he printed an edition of the Bible which contained some good initials.

But it was not until after the accession of Queen Elizabeth, and the appointment of Archbishop Parker as Primate, that Day’s work attained its best. For Parker he cut a fount of Saxon types in metal which Mr Talbot Reed, in his Old English Letter Foundries, says was cast with such accuracy and regularity as was highly creditable to his excellence as a founder. So that John Day had a foundry at which he could have cast any small ornaments he required. Some of the blocks found in his books bear the initials I.D., but it has never been satisfactorily established that he cut them; but there is no doubt that he obtained the aid of the best artists and woodcutters available.

After Day’s death there was a marked falling-off in the decoration of English books, and the work was only redeemed from mediocrity by such men as Henry Bynneman and Henry Denham, both of whom, as we shall see, used the fleuron with effect, and introduced some light and graceful head and tail pieces. Henry Denham also used a set of initials which Mr C. Sayle,[5] of Cambridge University Library, who has made this branch of ornaments his own, has declared to be “quite unlike any other work in England, and as high as the work of Sylvius, if not, indeed, in some respects still higher.” Henry Denham was succeeded by Peter Short, and he in turn by Humphrey Lownes, and thus furnished one of the links between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and carrying the traditions of one century into the other.

Another notable link between these two centuries was formed by the establishment of the Eliots Court Press. This was a syndicate of young printers, who upon the death of Henry Bynneman, the London printer, acquired most of his stock of letter and ornaments, and set up for themselves in premises in Eliots Court, near the Old Bailey. The most important members of this syndicate were Edmund Bollifant, Arnold Hatfield and Ninian Newton, all of whom had served their apprenticeship with Henry Denham. Later members of the firm were Melchisidec Bradwood, who printed the Eton Chrysostum, Edward Griffin the first and second, George Purslowe and John Haviland, who carried on the work of the firm until late in the seventeenth century.

The only presses outside London in the sixteenth century were those of the two Universities. Oxford’s second press was short-lived, and though two printers were connected with it—John Scolar from 1517–18, and C. Kyrforth in 1519—its output was very small, and the printers seem to have obtained their material from Wynkyn de Worde in London. The third Oxford press was set up by Joseph Barnes in 1585. Very little is known about this printer’s history, but from what we do know he does not appear to have been a man who would concern himself about the ornamentation of his books. He opened his career with a disgraceful act of piracy and did his best to ruin a young London printer. We are not surprised to find that his ornaments show no originality, and were either copies from those of London printers or were bought from them.

The first printer in Cambridge was a foreigner, John Lair of Siberch or Siegburg, near Cologne, who called himself John Siberch. His first book, a speech of Doctor Henry Bullock’s printed in the early part of 1521, has no ornaments; but in Cujusdam fidelis Christiani epistola, printed a month or two later, a couple of border-pieces, evidently from a Book of Hours, are seen on the title-page. Siberch also possessed some good initials and a border which will be dealt with in their proper places. His successors, Thomas and John Legat, would appear to have obtained their ornaments, excepting, of course, the block of the University arms, from London. At any rate they were all quite common in London books of the sixteenth century.

The seventeenth century was a period of decline in the art of printing in England. During the first forty years woodcut ornaments are found in almost all books, and though woodcut borders to title-pages are sometimes met with, they gave place in the early part of the century to engraved title-pages of very elaborate character. The fleuron, worked up into borders, etc., retained its popularity. The Civil War, while it stimulated the printing of controversial tracts and news-sheets, killed all artistic effort. Some notable books, it is true, appeared during the Commonwealth, such as Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum, a handsome folio with engravings by Wenceslaus Hollar, the same author’s Antiquities of Warwickshire, while between 1654 and 1657 the six folio volumes of Walton’s Polyglot Bible were printed, and it is said that the types for this last were supplied by the four licensed type-founders in London.

But the ornaments found in these books consisted of a few initials and tail-pieces of no special merit or originality of design. The four type-founders in question could not make a living. Either for want of training, lack of capital or lack of encouragement, they could not compete with the type-founders of Holland, from whence came most of the type, and presumably the ornaments, found in English books for the next seventy years. Joseph Moxon, who in 1659 added type-founding to his other professions, had spent some years in Holland, and his foundry was stocked with a large assortment of letters, mostly Dutch. James Grover was another type-founder at work in the second half of the seventeenth century, and he cast the types for the folio editions of Cicero and Herodotus, printed in 1679, for a syndicate of London booksellers. Both these works were amongst the best specimens of typography of that period, but the only ornaments used in the first were initial letters. In the Herodotus there is a tail-piece, to which I shall return when dealing with those ornaments.

Before passing away from the work of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a word or two must be said of the ‘copyist,’ who played a very large part in the production of printers’ ornaments. Whether the printers were their own copyists, or whether they employed some one else to do this part of the work, we cannot say, but quite early in the sixteenth century, and from thence onwards to the close of the seventeenth, almost every head and tail piece and initial letter was copied and copied again without limit, and it must not be assumed, without the most careful examination and comparison, that any blocks, found in books having no printer’s name, show them to have been published by a certain printer. For example, Richard Jugge used some large initials in the various editions of the Bible that he printed, and no less than six varieties of those letters can be traced in the hands of other men, the resemblance between them being so close that only by putting them side by side and examining them with great care can the points of difference be distinguished. Another instance is furnished by a set of initials used by the Eliots Court Press in the seventeenth century. These were probably copies of a set in the hands of Henry Middleton, while several other printers had letters like them, and the only way to distinguish between them is by counting the number of beads or circles in the framework.

In the same way other ornaments were closely copied, and it is frequently very hard to distinguish between them.