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.

    50/312 page 34
    round the colophon and device on the last leaf, and the practice quickly spread over the Continent. For Books of Hours and Missals blocks were cut representing scenes from the life of Christ or other Bible subjects, but more decora¬ tive and lighter borders were designed for such books as Ariosto or the Decameron of Boccaccio. Splendid examples of such borders are met with in books from the presses of Aldus, Jenson and Ratdolt in Venice, of Pigouchet, Vostre and du Pre in Paris, and in the books of the printers at Lyons, Basle, Cologne and other Continental cities in which printing had been established. Nor was it long after Caxton’s settlement in Westminster before borders appeared in England, although, as has already been seen, he cared for none of these things. The printer who introduced them was a foreigner, Theodoric Rood of Cologne, who set up a press in Oxford in the latter part of the year 1478. In 1481 he printed an edition of the Com¬ mentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, made by Alexander of Hales, and this title was surrounded by a woodcut border. Only some copies of this book have the border, and the Bodleian Library has no copy in which it is found. Mr E. G. Duff, in his English Provincial Printers, etc. (Cam¬ bridge, 1912), suggests that its insertion was an afterthought of the printer; but it is a curious circumstance that he used it again in John Lathbury’s Commentary on the Lamentations of Jeremiah, which he printed in 1482, but again only certain copies of the book are found to have it.
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3