“The use of flowers is not confined to ornaments over head pages only, but they serve also, each sort by itself, upon several other occasions. Thus they are used in miscellaneous work, where a single row of flowers is put over the head of each fresh subject, but not where two or more are comprehended under the same title, which commonly have, another, by the same, &c., for their head. As therefore flowers appertain to heads, it ought to be a rule, that a single row of them should be put over a head that begins a page, be it part, chapter, article or any other division, in work that has its divisions separated by flowers.
“Flowers being cast to the usual bodies of letter, their size should be proportionable to the face of the characters; since it would be as wrong to use great primer flowers with long primer letter, as it is improper to embolden the look of great primer by long primer flowers.
“Flowers being either of a rectilinear, angular, circular, or square shape, they are used accordingly in making them up for head-pages, of whom we have in this work introduced a few specimens.
“But as the construction of flower head pieces entirely depends upon the fancy of a compositor, it would be presumption in us to direct him in this point: we therefore leave the displaying of flowers to his own judgment, and to the variety of materials for this purpose.
“For want of flowers, references and other sorts belonging to a fount, are sometimes made use of to serve as well at the beginning as conclusion of work of a small size.”[2]
Printers’ ornaments then consist of two broad groups—(1) Small ornaments such as those mentioned by Luckombe, which we may suppose the compositor to have had close at hand in his case, and (2) ornamental or decorative blocks, either cut in wood or metal, of all sizes, which, as we know from the inventory of the printing office known as the Sun in Fleet Street in 1553, were described as pictures, and kept on a shelf in the printing-house.
With regard to the first of these an interesting question arises: Did the early printer cast his own ornaments, or did he obtain them from a letter foundry?—a question that involves the genesis of letter foundries.
It is self-evident that, until there were enough printers at work in Europe to keep them going, letter foundries, as such, did not exist. Besides, we know from early descriptions and drawings of printing offices that they each contained a ‘casting-house,’ probably a small ante-room in which type could be recast, and therefore in which on emergency small ornaments could be cast.
This is what Mr T. B. Reed says on the question[3]: “Respecting the developement of letter-founding as an industry there is little that can be gathered in the history of the fifteenth century. At first the art of the inventor was a mystery divulged to none. But the Sack of Mentz in 1462 and the consequent dispersion of Gutenbergh’s disciples, spread the secret broadcast over Europe.... For the most part printers were their own founders.... But type depots and markets, and the wanderings of the itinerant typographers, as the demands of printing yearly increased, brought the founts of various nations and presses to various centres and thus gave the first impulse to that gradual divorce between printing and type founding which in the following century left the latter the distinct industry it still remains.” This is not very helpful to us. Taking the fleuron as an example, what seems to have happened was this. Without speculating as to when it made its first appearance in a book, we may safely say that its earliest form was large, and that this large form was as often as not cut in wood. But whether it was wood or metal, it was made by the printers themselves. In its smaller form it made its appearance as a metal type early in the sixteenth century, where unity of design and uniformity in size and general adoption point to a common source.
As regards the second group of printers’ ornaments—viz., engraved blocks—there is a conflict of opinion as to whether such blocks are legitimate printers’ ornaments. There are those who contend that they are ‘engravings’ and not ‘ornaments’; but however feasible such an argument may be in the case of one-piece borders or title-pages engraved in wood or metal, all modern writers on printing include them as ‘ornaments.’ The German writer, Butsch, reproduces many of them in his great work. Arthur Warren included them in his history of the Chiswick Press. To take a more modern instance, Dr W. W. Greg, in his article on Berthelet ‘Ornaments’ in the Library, mentions several which were one-piece borders. Again, Mr McKerrow, in his work on Printers’ and Publishers’ Devices, refers (p. xlv.) to ‘ornament devices,’ and instances three, the largest of which measured 37 × 37 mm., and represented a two-tailed mermaid (259), and refers to it again as a common ornament bought from a type-founder. Other blocks reproduced in that book were assuredly not devices. If, then, these were ‘printers’ ornaments,’ the borders and head and tail pieces composed of engraved blocks, whether of merely conventional designs or pictorial, or whether cut on wood or metal, are legitimate ‘ornaments,’ especially when they were actually designed and cut for that purpose.