After Paris, the next most important town in France, so far as printers and their Marks are concerned, is Lyons. The first book printed in this city is presumed to be “Cardinalis Lotharii Tractatus quinque,” “Lugduni, Bartholomæus Buyerius,” 1473 (in quarto). The same printer also published the first French translation of the Bible, by Julian Macho and Pierre Ferget, which was executed between 1473 and 1474, from which date the art of printing in Lyons increased by leaps and bounds. Panzer notices over 250 works executed (by nearly forty printers) here during the quarter of a century which followed. The most notable among these is perhaps Josse Bade, to whom we have already referred. The former of the two “honestes homes Michelet topie de pymont: & Iaques heremberck dalemaigne,” possessed a Mark which may be regarded as one of the earliest, if not actually the first, employed at Lyons. Topie and Heremberk printed the first edition of the “Chronique Scandaleuse,” about 1488, and Breydenbach’s “Voyage à Jerusalem,” of about the same period—the latter of which contains the first examples of copper-plate engraving in France, the panorama of Venice alone being sixty-four inches in length. Contemporary with these, Johannes or Jehan Treschel deserves notice not only as an eminent printer, but also as the father-in-law of one still more eminent—Bade. Treschel’s illustrated edition of Terence, 1493, is described as forming “the most striking and artistic work of illustration produced by the early French school.” The most generally known of all the Lyonese printers is Etienne Dolet, who, born at Orleans in 1509, distinguished himself not only as a printer, but as a Latin scholar, a poet, and an orator; he was burnt as an atheist in August, 1546. Dolet, as Mr. Chancellor Christie tells us in his exhaustive monograph, adopted a Mark and motto which are to be found in all or nearly all the productions of his press. The Mark and the motto are equally allusive: the former is an axe of the kind known as doloire, held in a hand which is issuing out of a cloud. Below is a portion of a trunk of a tree; it is usually surrounded by the motto, “Scabra et impolita ad amussim dolo atque perfolia”; it is often also surrounded by an ornamental woodcut border, as in the accompanying illustration; and in some cases the words “scabra dolo” are printed on the axe.
MERLIN, DESBOYS AND NIVELLE.
| M. TOPIE. | E. DOLET. |
Two contemporary Lyonese firms of printers, the De Tournes and De la Portes, appear to have rivalled one another in the number of their Marks. Jean De Tournes, 1542–50, himself had no less than eleven Marks, several of which are exceedingly graceful, one of the largest and best of which represents a sower, and serves as an excellent pendant to the reaper of Jacques Roffet, both of which appear in our first chapter. The seven or eight members of the De la Porte family used at least half a score Marks between them. The family, beginning with Aymé De la Porte in the last decade of the fifteenth century, and ending with Sibylle De la Porte, were in business first as printers, then as booksellers, for just a century; and the punning device apparently originated, not with the first member of the family, but with Jehan, who started a business in Paris about 1508, and in his Mark the shield bears a castellated doorway; the picture of the biblical Samson carrying off the gates was apparently first used by Hugues De la Porte, who was a bookseller at Lyons from 1530; this was superseded for the more pictorial and considerably smaller example, here given, when he entered into partnership with Antoine Vincent about 1559. Although the Du Prés were Parisian printers, Jehan of that family issued several books at Lyons during the last few years of the fifteenth century, and one of his three Marks is given on [p. 108]. Sébastien Gryphe, or Gryphius, who printed and published a large number of works during the second quarter of the sixteenth century, was also extravagant in the way of Marks, of which there are at least eight, all, however, of one common type—the Griffin, sometimes quite without any sort of decorative attributes or motto, and sometimes as in the example here given.
HUGUES DE LA PORTE AND A. VINCENT.
| SÉBASTIEN GRYPHE. | JACQUES COLOMIES. |