Chapter VII
Initial Letters and Factotums
Nothing tends to heighten the artistic beauty of a book so much as the initial letters. This fact was recognized by the monastic scribes, who lavished all their skill in the production of beautifully illuminated letters in the Missals and Books of Hours upon which they spent their time in the scriptorium.
For some time after the introduction of printing, with certain rare exceptions, the early printers left the space to be filled by the initial letter blank for the illuminator to fill in. But before long they began to cut the initials for their books in wood, and they went to the manuscript books for their earliest model, hence the ecclesiastical character of the first woodcut initials; and although they could never hope to obtain the beauty of the illuminated letter, which was due as much to the colouring as the design, the printers soon learnt to produce very striking and effective decorative initials. For an illustration we need go no further than Paris, where in the fifteenth century the books of Antoine Verard were decorated with a grand series of woodcut L’s, copied from the decorative script of that period, while it is only necessary to glance through Mons. A. Claudin’s magnificent history of printing in France to see many other examples; while M. Butsch’s Bücher-Ornamentik and Castellani’s Early Venetian Printing show that the presses of other countries were equally prolific in this field of book decoration.
The early English printers in this, as in every other, branch of their work were content to copy or to borrow from foreign sources rather than to create, consequently the initials found in their books before 1500 show little originality. They borrowed chiefly from France, or perhaps it would be more correct to say that they bought chiefly from France. There was so much material in the market, and it saved so much time and trouble to buy from others. Or was it that there was no man in England sufficiently skilled to draw or design initial letters, and no craftsman skilled enough in woodcutting to produce them? Whatever the reason, this foreign trade in initials continued throughout the sixteenth century, as blocks that had come from Paris, Lyons, Basle, Venice, Florence, the Low Countries, and even Spain are frequently met with in books of that time. Matters improved as time went on, and English gravers began to turn out some very creditable work, so that, regarded as printers’ ornaments, whether their origin be native or foreign, the initial letters found in English books from the fifteenth to the twentieth century are of sufficient artistic merit, as well as sufficiently numerous, to deserve a book or books to themselves. The publication of such a book is long overdue. Too much good material has already been wasted in the piecemeal treatment of the subject and in the needless repetition of the same illustrations. What is needed is a comprehensive study of the whole subject, tracing as far as possible the birthplace of various alphabets, and what is no less interesting, pointing out the variations in certain alphabets due to the copyist.
In the hope that such a work may not be much longer delayed, I think it as well to say as little as possible on this branch of English printers’ ornaments, and in this section merely to whet the appetite of the reader for that full study of the subject that is bound to come.
Fortunately there is no lack of material. The studies of Mr Charles Sayle, of Cambridge University Library, which have extended over several years, supplemented by those of Mr A. W. Pollard, Dr Oscar Jennings, and recently of Mr Percy Smith, make the task a light one as far as the initials of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are concerned. With Mr Sayle’s kind permission two or three examples have been chosen from his paper on the subject read before the Bibliographical Society in November 1902. To these I have added a few others of that period that, so far as is known, have not hitherto been reproduced, and I have further supplemented them with some examples from my recent paper on the Eliots Court Press and other sources to illustrate the work of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
For the purposes of this section I have divided the letters into groups, according to their subjects, such as ecclesiastical, biblical, classical, grotesque, heraldic, and finally miscellaneous, embracing designs not otherwise groupable.
An early example of the ecclesiastical initial is the letter T found on the verso of the title-page of the Legend Aurea. Those seen in the Morton Missal of 1500, some of which embody Cardinal Morton’s rebus, also belong to this class, and have the additional merit of being, it is believed, English workmanship.
The highly decorative L found in some of the books of R. Faques about 1530 is another good example, while the F used in 1540 by William Middleton in the Year Books of Henry VI., showing a bishop with a mitre, is also worth notice.
The Reformation and the printing of Bibles and Common Prayer called for large numbers of initial letters of all sizes, and it is not surprising that Biblical scenes should have formed the subject of many of these. Here again the English printer had no need to create. The large number of service books, printed by the various printers on the Continent ever since the first establishment of the art in Europe, had flooded the market with a quantity of such blocks, of which he was not slow to avail himself. As Mr Sayle remarks, the Great Bibles of 1540 and 1541 are a mine in themselves. The magnificent letter I, illustrating the Creation, is sufficiently well known. The H, representing Samuel and Eli, first used by Herford in 1544, is another familiar example.