Chapter VI
Miscellaneous Ornaments
In addition to the forms treated of in the foregoing chapter, the early English printers sometimes filled up the space at the end of a paragraph with small printers’ ornaments. In his edition of Johannes de Garlandía, Multorum Vocabulorum, printed in 1514, Pynson placed at the end of the last line of the colophon two units of a fleuron reversed. This is not shown by Messrs Meynell and Morison in their article in the Fleuron, and nothing exactly like it is shown by Mr D. B. Updike in his numerous illustrations of specimen sheets English and Foreign. It consisted of a spiral with two leaves, and measures about 10 mm. in length. It also proves that the fleuron or ‘petit fer’ was known in this country in 1514, and probably earlier. He used these again in the Year Books of Edw. III. But on what system, if any, he worked it is not easy to understand. In the first five sheets of this book, although there were many vacant spaces that could have been filled, no ornaments were used, but on signature F iiij they begin to appear; but still there seems no uniformity. At the end of one paragraph three such ornaments are placed: in the next nothing, although the space at the end of the paragraph was just as large. Then we find one with five; but the average number was three. Nor were they all of the same kind. One arrangement was ribbon, fleuron, ribbon; another, one plait and two ribbon; a third, three ribbon and one fleuron, and so on; but why the compositor should have wasted his time putting in these ornaments here and there only, is inexplicable.
Robert Redman was equally arbitrary in his use of them, the only difference he made being to place a colon between each unit. This custom very soon died out.
But the miscellaneous ornaments I have in mind are usually found on the title-pages of books, and even there they are only occasionally met with in the sixteenth century, when it was usual for the printer to place his own device above the imprint. As these devices were often very artistic, they served their purpose of decoration very well. Vautrollier’s fine series of the Anchora Spei may be cited as an instance.
But there was at least one printer in the sixteenth century who did not follow this custom, and that was Henry Bynneman. It was not that he had no small block of the Mermaid to put on his title-pages, because we know that he used such a block at the end of one of his books. From the care he took in the printing of his books we may suppose him to have taken a pride in their appearance, and this probably arose from his chief patron being Sir Christopher Hatton, who at that time was the most powerful of Elizabeth’s favourites, and was the friend and helper of literary men. At any rate Bynneman frequently placed the crest of that nobleman, a hart surrounded by the motto, “Cerva charissima et gratissimus hinnulus,” with a very elaborate frame, on his title-pages. It is seen in the fourth part of Gabriel Harvey’s Gratulationis Valdinensis, the other three parts of which have on the title-page: the first, the royal arms; the second, the crest of the Leicester family—the bear and ragged staff; and the third, the crest of the Burleighs—a sheaf of corn with two lions rampant as supporters, and the motto, “Cor unvm via una,” within a border of fleurons.
Several of the blocks reproduced by Mr McKerrow in his Printers’ and Publishers’ Devices were not devices at all, but merely ornaments. Such a one is No. 248, which he describes as a “two-tailed mermaid blowing two horns. A fringe of tassels below.” In fact, he admits that it is an ornament. Another was No. 244, which he describes as a wreath enclosing armorial bearings found in A. Broke’s Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, printed by R. Robinson in 1578. A third that was certainly not a device, though it was associated with the Eliots Court Press, was the “Veritas felix temporis” block, a copy from a foreign source, which, in spite of the bad workmanship, retains much of its original grace and beauty.
John Windet placed on the title-page of H. Swinburne’s Briefe Treatise of Testaments and Wills, 1590, a curious little decorative block, in which two happy-looking cherubs sitting under overhanging sprays of foliage that are part of the contents of an urn or basket of fruit and flowers are busily playing, one a guitar and the other a viol or violin, but whether they are serenading the lady whose head forms part of the design one is left to guess. This block was perhaps in reality a tail-piece.
The title-page of the first edition of King Lear, published by Simon Stafford in 1605, had as an ornament a block that was used on occasion both as head and tail piece, and came afterwards into the possession of George Purslowe and so to the Eliots Court Press. That seen on the title-page of Cyril Tourneur’s Atheist’s Tragedie, published for John Stepneth and Richard Redmer in 1611, also belongs to the same category, as does also the one placed on the title-page of A Description of New England, printed by Humfrey Lownes in 1616. The fleur-de-lys placed above his imprint by William Jones in Gerard Malynes’ Center of the Circle of Commerce is familiar in several seventeenth century books, while that seen on the title-page of Euphues, his Censure to Philautus, printed by Elizabeth Allde in 1634, had a counterpart amongst the blocks of Felix Kingston, and is frequently found as a head-piece.
Indeed, one can never be sure whether they are dealing with the original or only a copy, as most of these blocks were copied over and over again.
INITIAL LETTERS AND FACTOTUMS