Fig. 413.—Border taken from the “Livre d’Heures” of Geoffroi Tory (1525).
Paper and ink employed by the earliest printer seem to have required no improvement as the art of printing progressed.
Fig. 414—“Livre d’Heures,” by Guillaume Roville (1551), a composition in the style of the school of Lyons, with Caryatides representing female Saints semi-veiled.
The ink was black, bright, indelible, unalterable, penetrating deeply into the paper, and composed, as already were the colours, of oil-paint. The paper, which was certainly rather grey or yellow, and often coarse and rough, had the advantage of being strong, durable, and was almost fit, in virtue of these qualities, to replace parchment and vellum, both of which materials were scarce and too expensive. Editors contented themselves with having struck off on membrane (a thin and white vellum) a small number of copies of each edition; never exceeding three hundred. These sumptuous copies, rubricated, illuminated, bound with care, resembling in every respect the finest manuscripts, were generally presented to kings, princes, and great personages, whose patronage or assistance the printer sought. Nor was any expense spared to add to typography all the ornaments which wood-engravings could confer upon it; and from the year 1475, numerous illustrated editions, of which an example was found in the first “Specula,” especially those printed in Germany, were enriched with figures, portraits, heraldic escutcheons, and a multitude of ornamented margins ([Figs. 412 to 415]). For more than a century the painters and engravers worked hand in hand with the printers and booksellers.
Fig. 415.—Border employed by John of Tournes, in 1557, ornamented with Antique Masks and Allegorical Personages bearing Baskets containing Laurel Branches.
The taste for books spread over the whole of Europe; the number of buyers and of amateurs was every day increasing. In the libraries of princes, scholars, or monks, printed books were collected as formerly were manuscripts. Henceforth printing found everywhere the same protection, the same encouragements, the same rivalry. Typographers sometimes travelled with their apparatus, opened a printing-office in a small town, and then went on elsewhere after they had sold one edition. Finally, such was the incredible activity of typography, from its origin till 1500, that the number of editions published in Europe in the space of half a century amounted to sixteen thousand. But the most remarkable result of printing was the important part it played in the movement of the sixteenth century, from which resulted the transformation of the arts, of literature, and science; the discoveries of Laurent Coster and of Gutenberg had cast a new light over the world, and the press made its appearance to modify profoundly the conditions of the intellectual life of peoples.
Fig. 416.—Mark of Bonaventure and Abraham Elsevier, Printers at Leyden, 1620.