This confession of Copland’s, coupled with the fact that the author had a moment before expressed the opinion that a ‘penny’ was enough to spend on books, shows how great was the gap that separated the Continental from the English printer in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and accounts for the paucity of borders and ornaments found in English books up to 1500, noted by Mr E. G. Duff in the chapter which he added to Mr A. W. Pollard’s work on Early Illustrated Books.
Chapter I
The Genesis of Printers’ Ornaments
The decoration of books had reached the summit of excellence a century before the art of cutting letters and printing with movable type was discovered. By the middle of the fifteenth century Europe had a store of books in all its great cities that for beauty of design, richness of colouring, and excellence of craftsmanship have never been surpassed, while in this country the meanest parish church could show one or more service books of this character, the gift of pious benefactors, some of which had been produced in the scriptoriums of Canterbury, York, or Durham.
The first printers naturally turned to these manuscripts, not only for the models of their types, but for other hints—and what did they find? They found that the scribes generally began on the second leaf of the vellum or paper, and that sometimes the vellum or paper was ruled with faint red lines for margins and for evenness of line. They found that the title of the work was put at the head of the text, and that the first page of the text was enclosed within a richly illuminated border, sometimes merely decorative or conventional, but more often consisting of exquisitely drawn and coloured pictures, illustrating, if it were a service book, scenes in the life of Our Lord or fragments of sacred history.
They further found that at the commencement of the text was a richly illuminated initial letter. The blank spaces at the ends of paragraphs were sometimes filled with decorative ornament.
The scribe, moreover, placed no dividing line between the various parts of the text. If he was beginning a new chapter he started at the top of a new page, leaving a blank space at the bottom of the preceding one, although, very rarely, illuminated head-pieces are found. Again, at the end he simply put the colophon, often a most illuminating little paragraph, not only notifying when and where he finished his task, even to the hour, but very often giving the name of the person who had commissioned the book, and returning thanks to God for giving the writer health and strength to finish it.
The only other ‘ornaments’ they found were the paragraph marks, the reversed
or ¶ still in use at this day, which can be traced back to the fourteenth century and perhaps earlier, and the cross or Maltese cross, generally met with in manuscript Books of Hours, and probably quite as old as the paragraph mark.
All this the first printers followed as closely as they could. Their books had no title-pages; they put the title above the first page of text, which they began as high up on the paper as they could.