HEAD AND TAIL PIECES—SMALL ORNAMENTS
Chapter IV
Head and Tail Pieces—Small Ornaments
This part of our subject is almost wholly unexplored. In dealing with borders we not only had the large collections of title-pages made by Bagford and Ames to draw upon for illustration, but also the studies of such able writers as Mr E. G. Duff and Mr A. W. Pollard. When we come to deal with initial letters we shall also find the writings of Mr C. Sayle and Mr Pollard and others of great value to us; but in dealing with the ornaments known as head-pieces and tail-pieces we have no guidance. No collections of them are known, and no bibliographer has ever made them a special subject of study.
Under these circumstances it will be best to deal with these two classes of printers’ ornaments together, because although there were special blocks designed and cut as head-pieces and tail-pieces which were never used except in their rightful places, on the other hand the early English printers frequently used the same block without distinction.
As their name implies, the object of these blocks or ornaments was to fill blank spaces at the beginning and end of divisions in the text, such as Dedicatory Epistles, Prefaces, Sections of a work, or Chapters. They were also frequently placed above and below a colophon.
Whatever may have been the custom amongst Continental printers with regard to the use of such ornaments, the sixteenth century was well advanced before they began to make their appearance in English books.
So far as I know, no book of Caxton’s exhibits any ornament of this kind. He followed the habit of the scribes and began his letterpress high up the page and did not leave a space that required filling up, and was content to leave other spaces unfilled. Both Wynkyn de Worde and Pynson had a varied assortment of blocks, which, as we have seen, they used as borders to title-pages or to their devices, but neither of them during the fifteenth century placed any ornaments at the head of the text or at the end of any of their books, and even as late as 1525 Pynson’s folio edition of Froissart was entirely devoid of head-or tail-pieces, and so was the folio Bible of 1539.
This at least we may say, with confidence, that the use of some kind of ornament at the bottom of a chapter, or the end of a book, preceded the use of head ornaments, and we may go even further and say that the earliest form of tail-piece used by any English printer was a single fleuron of especially large size, and perhaps cut in wood and not metal, three of which arranged as a reversed triangle is frequently seen in books at an early date in the sixteenth century. We may date the adaptation of the fleuron for the decoration of blank spaces as between 1560 and 1570, and an exceedingly good specimen of its adaptability for this purpose is here reproduced. Bound up with a copy of the Book of Common Prayer, printed by Richard Jugge in 1573, is, A Treatise made by Athanasius ... in what manner ye may use the Psalmes. This consisted of four leaves only, the first of which is missing, signed A [1]—A iiij, and on the verso of A iiij is this elaborate tail-piece. The centre, as will be seen, is formed of a fleuron ornament surrounded by a ‘lace border’ of other fleurons, and flanked at each of the four corners by two pieces of the same ornament. Below this again is a block of a semi-architectural character, with a human head in the middle and a lion’s head at either end, with bunches of fruit in between—the whole design measuring 135 × 122 mm. The ornament in the centre of this tail-piece is a single block and not formed of separate units like the frame; but it is none the less the fleuron worked into an arabesque design. These blocks had been in use some years and became very popular, and a few more that have been met with may be mentioned. Three found in Sophocles’ Antigone, printed in 1581, illustrate the manifold ways in which the fleuron could be treated. The first is triangular in form, while the other two are square but set cornerwise. John Day used several in the Cosmographical Glasse, 1559. Another fine example is to be seen on the title-page of John Bodenham’s Garden of the Muses, printed in 1610 by E. A.—that is, Edward Allde—for John Tap. Both in shape and design this differs altogether from the others. In this instance it becomes an ornament, but it was no doubt used elsewhere as a tail-piece.
Equally when built up to form head and tail pieces the individual fleuron was worked into bewildering variations: to attempt to mention or illustrate them all would be impossible; but an example or two from the sixteenth century books are illustrated. The first is a single row of a single unit, set as a pair back to back. It is taken from sig. F 6 of Vautrollier’s De Rep. Anglorum of 1579. It will be noticed that the original form of the fleuron—the single leaf and stalk—has undergone considerable variation, particularly by the introduction of a heavy cross-piece, perhaps intended as a development of the second piece of stalk, which was a feature of the early unit, but introduced with a purpose, as this example shows. The second and third of our illustrations are taken from the title-page of the first edition of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, printed in London in 1598, and from Waldegrave’s edition of the Basilicon Doron, printed in Edinburgh in 1599. The contrast between the two is worth noting. The units in the Shakespeare measure 9 × 6 mm. each; portions of the stem are shaded, and they are arranged in sets of four and two. Waldegrave’s fleurons were a shade larger, i.e. 9 × 7 mm. The arrangement is the same, but the stem, being entirely black, imparts a totally different appearance to the ornament. In another instance in this book the same units are used, but in this case they are placed horizontally, thus giving a complete alteration in appearance.
A fourth example is built up of two units only—arranged as seven central groups of four, with a border top and bottom consisting of seven pairs; and by leaving out the bottom row yet another change was wrought. Indeed, the possible combinations were endless. No wonder that the fleuron ornament has kept its place in the compositor’s box until the present day.