Printers' Marks: A Chapter in the History of Typography - W. Roberts


HUGH SINGLETON.	JOHN WIGHT.

The employment of the Geneva arms as a Printer’s Mark is confined, in this country, to Rowland Hall, who, at the death of Edward VI., accompanied several refugees to Geneva, where he printed the Psalms, Bible, and other works of a more or less religious character; his books range from 1559 to 1563, and about two dozen are known to bibliographers, and half of this number are in the British Museum. His Mark has a double interest; first, from his residence in Geneva, and secondly from the fact that the sign of his shop, “The Half Eagle and Key,” was a still further acknowledgment of the protection which he enjoyed in Geneva. This was not his only Mark, but it is the only one to which we need refer. The name of Richard Tottell, 1553–97, is much better remembered in connection with the epoch-making little book, “Songes and Sonettes,” 1557, the first miscellany of English verse, than either of the other seventy or eighty publications which bear his imprint. His shop was in Fleet Street at the sign of the Hand and Star, the same idea serving him as a Mark: the hand and star in a circle, with a scroll on either side having the words “cum privilegio,” the whole being placed under an arch supported by columns ornamented in the Etruscan style. One of the most curious of the large number of books which came from the press of Henry Bynneman, 1567–87, is “The Mariners boke, containing godly and necessary orders and prayers, to be observed in every ship, both for mariners and all other whatsoever they be that shall travaile on the sea, for their voyage,” 1575; a still more curious production of his press has the following title, “Of ghostes and spirites walkyng by night, and strange noyes, crackes and sundry fore warnynges, which commonly happen before the death of men, great slaughters, and alterations of kyngdomes,” 1572. Bynneman had served with Reynold Wolfe, and when he started in business on his own account met with much encouragement from Archbishop Parker, who allowed him to have a shop or shed at the north-west door of St. Paul’s. He appears to have had two Marks, one of which was derived from the sign of his shop, “The Mermaid,” with the motto, “Omnia tempus habent,” and the other (here reproduced) of a doe passant, and the motto, “Cerva charissima et gratissimus hinnulus pro.” Thomas Woodcock, 1576–94, who dwelt at the sign of the Black Bear, in St. Paul’s Churchyard, was a bookseller rather than a printer; his Mark is an evident double pun on his surname.


ROWLAND HALL.	HENRY BYNNEMAN.

THOMAS WOODCOCK.

During the last years of the sixteenth century, and the first three decades of the seventeenth, there were two Jaggards among the London printers; by far the better known is Isaac, who, with Edward Blount, issued the first folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays; he seems to have had no Mark, but William, 1595–1624, used the rather striking device (page 88), which is thus described: Serpent biting his tail, coiled twice round the wrist of a hand issuing from the clouds and holding a wand from which springs two laurel branches, and which is surmounted by a portcullis (the Westminster Arms); in the last coil of the serpent the word “Prudentia.” Equally distinct is the mark of Felix Kingston, or Kyngston, who printed a very large number of books from 1597 to 1640; in this device we have the sun shining on the Parnassus, and a laurel tree between the two conical hills, with a sunflower and a pansy on either side.