With the opening of the eighteenth century a marked change is noticeable in the character of the decorative blocks used by English printers. Borders to title-pages are rarely found, and, in place of the single block woodcut head and tail pieces, that had done duty for a century and a half, were substituted metal blocks of a more ornate character, and this was the case also with the initial letters. It would be interesting if one could trace the causes of this change, but one can only surmise. I may be wrong, but I am inclined to attribute it to the influence of the Oxford University Press, and to the work for it of Michael Burghers, who between 1680 and 1725 designed some very remarkable head and tail pieces.
It would be interesting also to know whether the printers employed their own artists to design and engrave these blocks, or whether they obtained them from the type-founders. I offer my own opinion for what it is worth, and it is in favour of the first suggestion. Judging from the type specimen sheets issued before 1780, the type-founders only supplied the smaller ornaments such as the fleuron, with suggestions as to their effective use. On the other hand, we find William Bowyer at one end of the century having a special tail-piece designed for him commemorative of the great fire that destroyed his premises in 1712, and at the other end Thomas Bewick, the engraver, drawing and cutting suitable head and tail pieces to go with his illustrations.
The nineteenth century opens the era of Modern work, which forms the closing chapters of this book.
BORDERS
Chapter III
Borders
The earliest important ornament found in a book printed in England is a woodcut border to a title-page. Borders, then, shall be our first subject of study, but it has been decided that this study shall be confined as far as possible to built-up borders, i.e. those made up of small printers’ ornaments, such as the fleuron, or such as consisted of two or more decorative blocks. It has been considered, and perhaps rightly, that borders of one piece, such as that which surrounds the title-page of the 1561 edition of Chaucer’s Works, whether cut in wood or metal, belong rather to a history of engraving than to a work on printers’ ornaments.
Title-pages did not make their appearance on the Continent until 1476, but once adopted their decoration by the means of ornamental borders quickly followed. The early Venetian printers, who were perhaps the finest artists in the world as regards the decoration of books, began by placing a strapwork ornament that went partly along the bottom and partly up the left-hand side of the first page of text, and this they were in the habit of printing with red ink. From this it was an easy transition to borders round title-pages, or round the colophon and device on the last leaf, and the practice quickly spread over the Continent. For Books of Hours and Missals blocks were cut representing scenes from the life of Christ or other Bible subjects, but more decorative and lighter borders were designed for such books as Ariosto or the Decameron of Boccaccio. Splendid examples of such borders are met with in books from the presses of Aldus, Jenson and Ratdolt in Venice, of Pigouchet, Vostre and du Pré in Paris, and in the books of the printers at Lyons, Basle, Cologne and other Continental cities in which printing had been established.
Nor was it long after Caxton’s settlement in Westminster before borders appeared in England, although, as has already been seen, he cared for none of these things. The printer who introduced them was a foreigner, Theodoric Rood of Cologne, who set up a press in Oxford in the latter part of the year 1478. In 1481 he printed an edition of the Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, made by Alexander of Hales, and this title was surrounded by a woodcut border.
Only some copies of this book have the border, and the Bodleian Library has no copy in which it is found. Mr E. G. Duff, in his English Provincial Printers, etc. (Cambridge, 1912), suggests that its insertion was an afterthought of the printer; but it is a curious circumstance that he used it again in John Lathbury’s Commentary on the Lamentations of Jeremiah, which he printed in 1482, but again only certain copies of the book are found to have it.
Fortunately a leaf of the Jeremiah is in the Bagford collection,[6] and from this I am able to describe it. The border is made up of four blocks, each of a different width. That at the top measures 199 by 34 mm., and it will be seen that the bottom piece is the largest. The design is the same in all four pieces, and consists of spirals of flowers, fruit and foliage amidst which are a number of birds. It makes a handsome border, the drawing and the cutting both being good, but it was probably of foreign origin.