55. Pierced Initial. London, circa 1700.
out to admit of any letter—came into use. The great letter-founders of the revival, Caslon, Baskerville, and their immediate successors, confined their attention to the large plain initials, uniform in shape and design with their Roman letters; and it was not till a taste for fancy type arose, early in the present century, that founders cut punches for and cast ornamental initials. {82}
TYPE ORNAMENTS AND FLOWERS.
These began, like the initials, with the illuminators, and were afterwards cut on wood. The first printed ornament or vignette is supposed to be that in the Lactantius, at Subiaco, in 1465. Caxton, in 1490, used ornamental pieces to form the border for his Fifteen O’s. The Paris printers at the same time engraved still more elaborate border pieces. At Venice we find the entire frame engraved in one piece; while Aldus, as early as 1495, used tasteful head-pieces, cut in artistic harmony with his lettres grises. Of the elaborate woodcut borders and vignettes of succeeding printers we need not here speak. As a rule, they kept pace with the initial letters, and degenerated with them. Early in the sixteenth century we observe detached ornaments and flourishes, which have evidently been cast from a matrix, and the idea of combining these pieces into a continuous border or head-piece was probably early conceived.[152] Mores states that ornaments of this kind were common before wood-engraved borders were adopted, and Moxon speaks of them in his day as old-fashioned. In Holland, France, Germany and England, however, these “type-flowers” were in very common use during the eighteenth century, and almost every foundry was supplied with a considerable number of designs cast on the regular bodies. Some of the type-specimens exhibit most elaborate figures constructed out of these flowers, and as late as 1820 these ornaments continued to engross a considerable space in the specimen of every English founder.
CHAPTER III.
THE PRINTER LETTER-FOUNDERS, FROM CAXTON TO DAY.
