English printers' ornaments / by Henry R. Plomer.

  • Henry Plomer
Date:
1924
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: English printers' ornaments / by Henry R. Plomer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    34/312 page 18
    Gouda and Antwerp, and many others, were turning out books that for beauty of typography and artistic decoration have never been surpassed. It might have been supposed that with such examples before them Caxton and his con¬ temporaries in this country would have been spurred to emulation. English printers were in constant intercourse with Continental printers and booksellers, and had the opportunity of attending the great annual fair at Frankfort, where they could see all the latest productions of the Continental presses and where they could buy anything they wanted in the way of type, ornaments or binding tools. Yet so far were they from attempting to produce fine books, whenever such were called for—as Missals, Books of Hours, Psalters or Breviaries—they handed the work over to some foreign printer, with this result, to use the words of Mr E. Gordon Duff: “The poverty of ornamental letters and borders is very noticeable in all the English presses of the fifteenth century.” 1 There are several reasons to account for this. In the first place, in 1471, the year in which it is believed that Caxton began to learn the art of printing in Cologne, the decoration of books was in its infancy, and few of the printers in that city had, up to that time, issued any books in which decorative blocks, other than perhaps an initial or two, were used. But what is of more importance, we know that Caxton’s chief object in, at a late period of his life, working in a Cologne 1 A. W. Pollard, Early Illustrated Books, 1893, p. 228.
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3