The decoration of books had reached the summit of excellence a century before the art of cutting letters and printing with movable type was discovered. By the middle of the fifteenth century Europe had a store of books in all its great cities that for beauty of design, richness of colouring, and excellence of craftsmanship have never been surpassed, while in this country the meanest parish church could show one or more service books of this character, the gift of pious benefactors, some of which had been produced in the scriptoriums of Canterbury, York, or Durham.
The first printers naturally turned to these manuscripts, not only for the models of their types, but for other hints—and what did they find? They found that the scribes generally began on the second leaf of the vellum or paper, and that sometimes the vellum or paper was ruled with faint red lines for margins and for evenness of line. They found that the title of the work was put at the head of the text, and that the first page of the text was enclosed within a richly illuminated border, sometimes merely decorative or conventional, but more often consisting of exquisitely drawn and coloured pictures, illustrating, if it were a service book, scenes in the life of Our Lord or fragments of sacred history.
They further found that at the commencement of the text was a richly illuminated initial letter. The blank spaces at the ends of paragraphs were sometimes filled with decorative ornament.
The scribe, moreover, placed no dividing line between the various parts of the text. If he was beginning a new chapter he started at the top of a new page, leaving a blank space at the bottom of the preceding one, although, very rarely, illuminated head-pieces are found. Again, at the end he simply put the colophon, often a most illuminating little paragraph, not only notifying when and where he finished his task, even to the hour, but very often giving the name of the person who had commissioned the book, and returning thanks to God for giving the writer health and strength to finish it.
The only other ‘ornaments’ they found were the paragraph marks, the reversed or ¶ still in use at this day, which can be traced back to the fourteenth century and perhaps earlier, and the cross or Maltese cross, generally met with in manuscript Books of Hours, and probably quite as old as the paragraph mark.
All this the first printers followed as closely as they could. Their books had no title-pages; they put the title above the first page of text, which they began as high up on the paper as they could.
They sometimes put a border partially round this first page, and they tried as far as possible to imitate the richly illuminated initial letters—but with poor results at first. They left the spaces between the divisions of the work blank, but they generally put on the last leaf below the colophon or on a leaf by itself a woodcut embodying their name or initials or the sign of the house in which they carried on their trade. They also adopted the paragraph mark and the Maltese cross, which for many years remained the only small ornaments they possessed, unless indeed we can claim for the asterisk, or, as Luckombe called it, the ‘asterism,’ an equal antiquity with the other two, which is quite possible.
This was in the infancy of the art; but as it gradually emerged from its swaddling clothes, printers discovered various ways of increasing the beauty of the printed book. First they adopted a title-page, quite a modest thing at first, which for its brevity has been called a ‘Label’ title. Next they conceived that the appearance of the title-page would be improved if it had a border like the first pages of the old manuscripts. Then it occurred to them that it would look better if the printed matter were begun lower down on the page, leaving a blank space above. In course of time these blank spaces, and those which generally followed at the end of dedicatory epistles and such like, were ornamented, whatever was used for that purpose being called by the names of head or tail piece. Occasionally the printers even went so far as to fill up the spaces at the ends of paragraphs with small ornaments, a wholly unnecessary labour which was soon dropped.
For these and other purposes new designs had to be found, and amongst them, early in the sixteenth century, appeared the fleuron. Nature was the mother of this very beautiful little ornament—a common object of the roadway—a leaf torn by a rough wind from some tree, possibly a willow. Centuries before printing was ever dreamt of, such a leaf fell at the feet of one with a soul for the beautiful, who took it home and drew it and drew it again and again, placing it in various positions and finding a hundred different treatments of the subject, and so discovered its possibilities for artistic decorations. In this way it became the basis of most of the designs in Greek and Arabesque pattern books. The architect sculptured it in stone, the lace-worker turned it into a dream of delicate beauty, the bookbinder fashioned it into a tool to stamp his bindings, and in due time the printers cut it in wood and cast it in metal, and it became a stock ornament in every printing office. In a happily inspired moment the fleuron has been used as the title of a recently published magazine dealing with typographical matters, and in an admirable article contributed to its first number by Messrs F. Meynell and S. Morrison, which I trust they will forgive me for quoting,[1] they say: “What is common to them (i.e. fleurons), what makes the system, is the fact that the unit of decoration is itself an ordinary metal type, of the varying type sizes, cast by the type-printer, set as type, and bearing, instead of a letter symbol, a formal design.... This simple tool was originally used on an Aldine binding as early as 1499, but not until 1515 have the writers discovered its first usage as a printing surface. This occurs in the title-page of Tornandes’ de Rebus Gothorum, printed by Miller of Augsburg in 1516.... Variations of the stalk developed at Augsburg (1517), Strasbourg (1519), Antwerp (1532), Paris (1537).”
In the course of the following pages it will be seen in all sections how infinite is the variety of design and treatment that this single ornament is capable of.
It is interesting to find an 18th-century view of the origin and use of flower ornaments, and therefore I am quoting a passage from Luckombe’s History of the Origin and Progress of Printing, 1770. “Metal flowers,” says the author, “are cast to all the regular bodies of letter, from great primer to nonpareil included; besides several sorts that are to the size of small pica.
“Flowers were the first ornaments which were used at the head of such pages that either began the main work, or else a separate part of it.
“Though they formerly had no great variety of flowers; yet were the few of them contrived to look neat and ornamental; being deep in body, and cast so that no bearings-off could be discovered, but looked as one solid row.
“But with the growth of printing, and when letter-cutters strove to excel each other, they introduced also flowers of several shapes and sizes, which were received, and variously employed, till cutting in wood was come to perfection; when that art was eagerly encouraged, and flowers not regarded. From that time till very lately, nothing has been thought to grace the first page of a work so well as head-pieces cut in wood; of which some have such a coarse look, that even mourning rules would look neater, were they put in the room of them.
“The invention of cutting in wood, is claimed by the Germans, though the Italians seem to have a prior right to stile themselves the authors. Nevertheless, though the former may have had their worthies of the said art, it is apparent that they have taken their knowledge with them to the grave. And this has also been the case in France, where the masters of the art of cutting in wood made a secret of their method of working and left no disciples of their abilities. Hence it was, that while Mr Jackson, an Englishman, was at Paris, he was wholly employed in furnishing printers there with head-pieces and other ornaments of his drawing and cutting. But it being above thirty years since he went to Rome, it must be supposed that his work in France is worn down before this time, which may be the reason that flowers are come into fashion again in France. But this, perhaps, would not have been so readily effected, had it not been for the particular genius and fancy of a compositor at the King’s printing-house in Paris, who restored the credit of flowers, by making them yield to every turn which is required to represent a figure answerable to the rules of drawing. Hence it may be guessed what great variety of florid sorts were used to exhibit cyphers of names, forms of crowns, figures of winged and other creatures, and whatever else fancy presented to this typographical florist. But it must be observed, that the King of France paid for this whim; the compositor having a salary and free access to the King’s founding-house, to order the cutting and casting every thing that could conduce to make his conceptions mature and the performance of them admirable.
“Thus has the use of flowers been revived in France, and has stimulated the Germans to improve their fusil ornaments, whereby they have been instrumental to the considerable augmentation made here in flowers, by all which we shall be enabled to make flower-pieces of oval, circularly, and angularly turns, instead of having hitherto been confined either to square or to circular flowers. But it is feared, that head-pieces, fats, and tail-pieces of flowers will not long continue, either in England, France or Germany, considering that the contriving and making them up, is attended with considerable trouble and loss of time; and as no allowance is made for this, it will not be strange, if but few shall be found who will give instances of their fancy. But this might be remedied, were printers to recompense the compositor for his painful application; and then to preserve the substance of his invention intire, for occasional use.
“The use of flowers is not confined to ornaments over head pages only, but they serve also, each sort by itself, upon several other occasions. Thus they are used in miscellaneous work, where a single row of flowers is put over the head of each fresh subject, but not where two or more are comprehended under the same title, which commonly have, another, by the same, &c., for their head. As therefore flowers appertain to heads, it ought to be a rule, that a single row of them should be put over a head that begins a page, be it part, chapter, article or any other division, in work that has its divisions separated by flowers.
“Flowers being cast to the usual bodies of letter, their size should be proportionable to the face of the characters; since it would be as wrong to use great primer flowers with long primer letter, as it is improper to embolden the look of great primer by long primer flowers.
“Flowers being either of a rectilinear, angular, circular, or square shape, they are used accordingly in making them up for head-pages, of whom we have in this work introduced a few specimens.
“But as the construction of flower head pieces entirely depends upon the fancy of a compositor, it would be presumption in us to direct him in this point: we therefore leave the displaying of flowers to his own judgment, and to the variety of materials for this purpose.
“For want of flowers, references and other sorts belonging to a fount, are sometimes made use of to serve as well at the beginning as conclusion of work of a small size.”[2]
Printers’ ornaments then consist of two broad groups—(1) Small ornaments such as those mentioned by Luckombe, which we may suppose the compositor to have had close at hand in his case, and (2) ornamental or decorative blocks, either cut in wood or metal, of all sizes, which, as we know from the inventory of the printing office known as the Sun in Fleet Street in 1553, were described as pictures, and kept on a shelf in the printing-house.
With regard to the first of these an interesting question arises: Did the early printer cast his own ornaments, or did he obtain them from a letter foundry?—a question that involves the genesis of letter foundries.
It is self-evident that, until there were enough printers at work in Europe to keep them going, letter foundries, as such, did not exist. Besides, we know from early descriptions and drawings of printing offices that they each contained a ‘casting-house,’ probably a small ante-room in which type could be recast, and therefore in which on emergency small ornaments could be cast.
This is what Mr T. B. Reed says on the question[3]: “Respecting the developement of letter-founding as an industry there is little that can be gathered in the history of the fifteenth century. At first the art of the inventor was a mystery divulged to none. But the Sack of Mentz in 1462 and the consequent dispersion of Gutenbergh’s disciples, spread the secret broadcast over Europe.... For the most part printers were their own founders.... But type depots and markets, and the wanderings of the itinerant typographers, as the demands of printing yearly increased, brought the founts of various nations and presses to various centres and thus gave the first impulse to that gradual divorce between printing and type founding which in the following century left the latter the distinct industry it still remains.” This is not very helpful to us. Taking the fleuron as an example, what seems to have happened was this. Without speculating as to when it made its first appearance in a book, we may safely say that its earliest form was large, and that this large form was as often as not cut in wood. But whether it was wood or metal, it was made by the printers themselves. In its smaller form it made its appearance as a metal type early in the sixteenth century, where unity of design and uniformity in size and general adoption point to a common source.
As regards the second group of printers’ ornaments—viz., engraved blocks—there is a conflict of opinion as to whether such blocks are legitimate printers’ ornaments. There are those who contend that they are ‘engravings’ and not ‘ornaments’; but however feasible such an argument may be in the case of one-piece borders or title-pages engraved in wood or metal, all modern writers on printing include them as ‘ornaments.’ The German writer, Butsch, reproduces many of them in his great work. Arthur Warren included them in his history of the Chiswick Press. To take a more modern instance, Dr W. W. Greg, in his article on Berthelet ‘Ornaments’ in the Library, mentions several which were one-piece borders. Again, Mr McKerrow, in his work on Printers’ and Publishers’ Devices, refers (p. xlv.) to ‘ornament devices,’ and instances three, the largest of which measured 37 × 37 mm., and represented a two-tailed mermaid (259), and refers to it again as a common ornament bought from a type-founder. Other blocks reproduced in that book were assuredly not devices. If, then, these were ‘printers’ ornaments,’ the borders and head and tail pieces composed of engraved blocks, whether of merely conventional designs or pictorial, or whether cut on wood or metal, are legitimate ‘ornaments,’ especially when they were actually designed and cut for that purpose.