In the first place the old wood block was superseded by metal ones, and no doubt the change gave greater clearness of impression and longer life. Then with Caslon’s advent as a type-founder native talent began to assert itself; but the alteration went even further than this, and heralded a change in taste on the part of printers, who seem to have been captured by a different school of designers altogether. We suspect that this was largely due to the influence of the Oxford engraver, M. Burghers. Whether the blocks produced during this century were or were not more artistic than those they supplanted must be left to experts to decide. My work is to record the change and show its development.
In 1712 William Bowyer printed a great folio, Atkyn’s Ancient and Present State of Gloucestershire, in which we find a large head-piece signed I. L., which is a good example of the head-piece that had come into fashion.
The centre shows a basket piled with fruit, with some kind of drapery hanging from it and the letters I. L. f. below this. On either side of the basket the ornament takes the form of sprays or spirals of flowers or foliage, somewhat resembling the designs of M. Burghers at Oxford. Indeed, baskets of fruit and flowers became a feature in nearly all head and tail pieces of the eighteenth century. In the same volume is a tail-piece which is equally typical of eighteenth century work.
Some very beautiful examples of the decorative head and tail pieces of the early eighteenth century are found in the octavo edition of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, printed by J. Tonson and J. Watts in 1713. While some of these head-pieces are pictorial, they are in some measure called forth by the text, and perhaps more in the nature of illustrations; the tail-pieces have a character of their own, especially the one at the end of the fourth book and that at the end of the sixth book, and the final one.
Another fine head-piece is seen in the first volume of the Works of Sir William Temple (sig. B ij), printed in folio in 1720, and is matched by the tail-piece on the verso of B 3 in the second volume. Another example of a signed head-piece occurs on a block found in the octavo edition of the Works of George Farquhar, published by Knapton and other booksellers in London in 1728. Whether it is meant to be emblematical or not it is hard to say, but in the foreground is seen a lion pointing with his right foreleg to a plant in front of him, two of the leaves of which bear the initials F. H. and M. M. Round about are several trees. The work of F. H. was evidently a favourite as late as 1738, when we meet with another example of it in a sermon printed for J. Roberts in Warwick Lane. In this case not only is the block larger, but the design consists of vegetable growths, ornately treated with a vase of flowers in the middle and a bird with outstretched wings at the top.
The various parts of James Thomson’s poem on Liberty, printed in 1735, have head-pieces, none of them of great merit, of which one is here shown as a contrast with that just noticed, while, as an example of how thoroughly bad some eighteenth century work could be, we show a tail-piece representing a fountain, found in a volume of translations of the Odes of Horace, printed in 1743. [B.M. 11375, c. 17.]
The provincial printers probably stocked themselves from the London foundries, and consequently their ornaments followed the prevailing fashion. We have already seen specimens of the work of M. Burghers at Oxford, and while the sister University cannot show anything quite so gorgeous, the printers in Cambridge had a good selection, many of which are shown in R. Bowes’ Catalogue of Books printed at Cambridge from 1521 to 1893. From these has been chosen a head-piece used by Cornelius Crownfield between 1698 and 1743 as being typical of the period, and two tail-pieces used by the same printer [Nos. 81, 82 in that Catalogue], while a tail-piece from a work by an unknown printer illustrates once again the innumerable ways in which the fleuron could be treated. In this case twenty-eight units are arranged so as to form an inverted triangle.
Moving further northwards we find John White, the printer at Newcastle-on-Tyne, with a good stock of ornaments, which he used with effect in Bourne’s History of Newcastle, which he printed in 1736. The head-piece here shown is a characteristic example of eighteenth century work (note the baskets of flowers and fruit, the birds and the cherubs), and Mr Welford, in his Early Newcastle Topography, describes the larger of the two tail-pieces as ‘gorgeous.’
Coming south again, the printer at Truro, from whose press came the unfinished work called the Compleat History of Cornwal, used the head-and tail-piece here reproduced.
MISCELLANEOUS ORNAMENTS