Printers’ Marks of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries25
If truth is to be told, I have never as yet met with any amateur who collected books for the sake of the printer’s mark at the beginning or end of them. But it has always seemed to me that it would be an agreeable variety of book-collecting to do this, and one which would lead the collector along many by-paths of curious knowledge. For fear of any possible mistake, I should perhaps emphasise the point that the collection must be one not of printers’ marks cut out from books, but of books in which the marks are printed. Even in the case of book-plates, it has often been noted how much they gain in interest when they are found in situ, though there is always the haunting fear that the conjunction of book and plate may only be due to the ingenuity of the vendor. Book-plates, however, have of right a separate existence apart from books, since they are made separately and must await their owners’ pleasure before they can be set to their proper work. But the printer’s device is an integral part of the book in which it occurs, nor can any limpet torn from its rock look more unhappy than one of these marks cut out from the page on which it was printed, and pasted in a scrap-book. Unhappily, it must be said that, like the book-plate, though more rarely, a device is sometimes found attached to a book to which it does not belong. Thus, in the last Inglis sale an edition of a ‘Defensorium Curatorum’ by an unknown French printer, was catalogued as from the press of Colard Mansion on the score of Mansion’s device, cut out with extraordinary neatness, being pasted on the last leaf. The buyer of it certainly bid with open eyes, but it is annoying to pay even a few shillings more because of such a freak. So, too, a leaf with Caxton’s device bound at the end of Pynson’s edition of the ‘Speculum Vitae Christi’ led the late Mr. Blades to believe that Pynson was Caxton’s apprentice. But these misdeeds or mishaps are exceptional, and it is the collector of scraps, from Bagford downwards, whom the printers’ device has chiefly to fear.
The merits of printers’ devices are twofold—many of them are very pretty, and all of them, when duly studied, are capable of throwing considerable light on the history of printing, more especially on the often important point of the order in which books were issued and the year, or even the month, to which an undated book belongs. The prettiness or beauty of some of the designs will be shown by our illustrations, nor is it difficult to explain how the devices throw light on the careers of their printers.
Always executed in the manner of wood-cuts, that is to say, in relief, some of them were cut with a knife in wood, others with a graver on very soft metal. The lines of the wood block break with use, the lines of the metal block bend, and by careful examination of any two prints a good guess can mostly be made as to which was the earlier. A palmary instance of this is a metal block which Richard Pynson began to use in 1496. Its lower border began to bend almost at once; by 1503 the bend was as much as an eighth of an inch, and year by year it increased, till in 1513 the border broke altogether. Needless to say, that every undated book in which this border appears can be dated almost as easily as if the year of publication were printed in it. When several examples by the same printer are brought together, a little observation, if carefully verified, will give a good clue to the date at which a device first came into use and when it was abandoned for another, and herein lie both the usefulness and the sport which may be obtained from the study of printers’ devices. What the collector should aim at is to obtain the earliest book in which the mark is used, and to make notes of its subsequent history.
Perhaps from the fact that the Anchor and Dolphin which Aldus adopted as his device were counterfeited with evil intent, it has sometimes been said that the devices were used as trade marks to protect the copyright of the books in which they occur. Copyright as such did not exist in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and books could only be protected by their printer obtaining a special ‘privilege’ either for an individual book or for books of a particular kind. With this the devices had nothing to do, and although a pleasing design often begat a whole progeny of similar ones, this copying, when it was not merely lazy, was probably complimentary rather than competitive. We must take it that the devices were purely ornamental, aiming, no doubt, at the glorification of the printers who used them, but not possessing any commercial significance. Hence, perhaps, the variety we find in them. They may be simply personal, containing only the printer’s private arms or in some few cases his portrait. They may join his initials or some motto of his choice to the arms of the city in which he worked, or to some more or less graceful scroll work. They may reproduce the sign of his shop or the figure of his patron saint; or lastly, a kind much in vogue in the sixteenth century, they may be allegorical. As we should expect, there is a fairly steady movement from simplicity to ornateness. The earliest device (the first of our illustrations), that used by Fust and Schöffer at the end of the Latin Bible they printed at Mainz in 1462, consists only of two shields slung from a branch. That of Arnold ther Hoernen, of Cologne (about 1470), is in the same style, but even more modest. A few years later, Günther Zainer, of Augsburg, showed greater ambition in his mark, which represents a wild man holding a shield, on which is a crowned lion rampant. But though Schöffer, ther Hoernen, and Zainer thus led the way, their example was very little followed in Germany during the fifteenth century, and it is in other countries and in the books of native printers rather than of the German teachers of the craft that the development of the ornamental device must be looked for.
In Italy, despite what has just been said, the earliest device known is that of a German printer, Sixtus Riessinger, who worked at Naples, 1471-80. It represents a woman holding a shield, while behind her is a scroll bearing the letters ‘S.R.D.A., Sixtus Riessinger de Argentina,’ i.e. of Cologne. This device stands by itself, the real sequence of Italian designs beginning with that used at Venice by Nicolas Jenson and John of Cologne in 1481. This consists of a circle and of a straight line, crossed by two bars, rising at right angles to the base of a segment of it. It was imitated by one Italian printer after another at Venice, Pavia, Brescia, and elsewhere, and with various ornamental modifications re-appears in quite three out of four of the fifteenth century Italian devices. From Italy it passed to France, and from France to England, where it was used by Julian Notary. The design, by dividing the circle into three parts, allows the printer to place his initials in them, and this was frequently done. Jenson was also a very famous printer, and his example would naturally be imitated. But how it came to be imitated so widely, and whether any meaning, symbolical or otherwise, can be extracted from the design, are problems to which no satisfactory answer has been returned. Among the prettier modifications of this too popular design are those used by Franciscus de Mazaliis, of Reggio, and by Egmont and Barrevelt, the printers of the Venice edition of the Sarum Missal. The latter is shown on page 229.
Among designs of other patterns, mention may be made of the crown used by Mazochius, of Ferrara; the ‘putti’ of Filippo Giunta, and the crowned dolphin of Piero Pacini, both of Florence; the fourteen varieties of angels which appear on as many devices used by the brothers De Legnano, of Milan; the shielded warrior of Bernardinus de Garaldis, of Milan; the S. Jerome of Bernardinus Benalius; the fleur-de-lys of Lucantonio Giunta; the S. Antony of Philippus Pintius; the S. George and the Dragon of Giorgio Rusconi; and the mouse-eating cat of J. B. Sessa, reproduced on page 231. The last five printers all worked at Venice, and almost all of those we have named belonged not only to the fifteenth century, but to the sixteenth, in which the vogue of the Jenson model at last came to an end.
It has already been said that for variety and artistic treatment among printers’ devices, the first place must be given to those found in French books. Yet their beginning was poor enough, the representation of the ship, taken from the arms of the city of Paris, which was used by Louis Martineau about 1484, being badly cut and quite insignificant. Jean Du Pré (for his first device), Pierre Levet, Jean Lambert, and one or two other French printers at Paris, used some of the features of the normal Italian design, though in a far more elaborate and decorative form; while at Lyons, where Italian influence was always strong, simple copying was thought good enough.
But the typical French device is much more pictorial than any of these. The arms of France and of the city of Paris are prominent in many of them, and in that of André Bocard both are used at once; but the printer used often to take a suggestion from his Christian name, from the sign by which his shop was known, or from the motto with which most early French devices are encircled. The second device of Antoine Caillaut (reproduced on p. 241) is a beautiful and early example of the appearance of a patron saint in a device; while that of the two swans used by Du Pré, whose printing house had the ‘Deux Cygnes’ for its sign, is a good example of the second class. The device here chosen for our second French illustration I take to be an example of the pictorial expansion of a motto, Regnault’s expression of trust in God being well represented by this quiet little pastoral scene (see page 234).
Though far inferior to the best French examples, the printers’ marks used in the Low Countries are also numerous, varied and good. They range from the twin shields of Veldener and Gerard Leeu to such imposing devices as the elephant and howdah used, with punning intent, by an unknown printer (‘G.D.’) at Gouda, and the bannered castle, the arms of the city of Antwerp, adopted by Thierry Martens. Among the earliest are the small portraits of the printers themselves found in some of the books of John and Conrad, of Paderborn, in Westphalia. That of the former, here reproduced, is sometimes found in red ink as well as black, and is referred to in one of his colophons as ‘meum solitum signum.’ The bird-cage used by Godfrid Back at Antwerp has no parallel among devices that I know of, but as a specimen of the larger Dutch marks we will take that of his fellow-citizen, Matthias van der Goes, which represents a very vigorous ‘wild man’ with club and shield (see page 228).
Spanish devices are in some cases adapted from the French or Italian, in others rather dull and uninteresting. Of those which belong to neither of these classes, by far the finest as a piece of decorative work is that of Diego de Gumiel, of Valladolid (see page 236), the effect of which is as rich as that of the best of William Morris’s initial letters.
Next in interest to this we may perhaps rank the rather elaborate device (see page 230) of Arnold Guillem de Brocar, the printer of the Complutensian Polyglot, who at different times in his career had presses also at four other places. The motto upon it, ‘Inimici hominis domestici ejus,’ though it has been made the basis of some theories as to Brocar’s career, is still unexplained. If the ‘domestici,’ the ‘those of his own household,’ could be extended to Brocar’s workpeople, we should have here a fine example of an early grumble by a master printer, but the suggestion is perhaps more pleasing than probable. Cryptic mottoes seem to have run in Brocar’s family. His son Juan adopted an extraordinary device of a knight seizing a lady by the hair, with an inscription ‘Legitime certanti,’ which must be taken as sarcastic.
The history of printers’ marks in England begins with that used by Caxton for the first time as late in his career as 1487. Out of respect for his master, Wynkyn de Worde adopted the essential parts of this, i.e. the initials ‘W.C.’ and the interlacement between them in all his fifteen different devices, thus conferring on them a rather painful monotony. English printers, indeed, seem to have set little store on originality in these matters, the earliest device of Pynson being adapted from that of Le Talleur, of Rouen, that of Richard Faques from Thielmann Kerver’s, the ‘wild men’ of Peter Treveris from those of Pigouchet, and John Byddell’s unprepossessing figure of Virtue from that used by Jacques Sacon, of Lyons. Nevertheless, English devices at once interesting and original are not lacking. That used by Pynson at the end of Lord Berner’s translation of ‘Froissart’ (see page 232) is one of the largest and not the least fine of armorial marks, the interlaced triangles of William Faques make a singularly neat device, and John Day’s picture of two men gazing on a skeleton, with the motto, ‘Etsi mors indies accelerat vivet tamen post funera virtus,’ has its own merits. England also contributes two of the very small number of portrait marks, a large one of Day and a smaller one (here reproduced) of John Wight,26 a bookseller of St. Paul’s Churchyard, who published a few books between 1551 and 1589. It seemed permissible to come down as late as this in the case of our own country, but to speak of the French and German devices of the middle of the sixteenth century would open up too large a field. All that has been attempted here is to give a few characteristic examples of comparatively early date, so as to exhibit the different styles of printers’ marks, used in different countries by one generation of printers. I hope that any of my readers who had not hitherto made the acquaintance of these little designs will have been convinced that they are worthy of further study.
Any one who desires to take up the subject more or less seriously will find a considerable literature ready to his hand. To Messrs. Bell and Co.’s ‘Ex Libris’ series Mr. William Roberts has contributed a pleasant volume, which offers an easy introduction for beginners. More serious students will find an almost exhaustive series of woodcut copies of French devices in Silvestre’s ‘Marques typographiques,’ and much prettier facsimiles abound in M. Claudin’s great ‘Histoire de l’Imprimerie en France,’ though this as yet treats only of Paris printers of the fifteenth century. For Italy, Dr. Kristeller’s ‘Die Italienischen Buchdrucker und Verlegerzeichen bis 1525’ is excellent, and its publishers (Heitz and Mündel) have brought out similar monographs on the marks used at Strasburg, Basel, Frankfort, and Cologne, and also in Spain and Portugal. The earlier Low Country marks will be found in Holtrop’s ‘Monumens typographiques des Pays-Bas’; the earlier English ones in the ‘Handlists of English Printers’ issued by the Bibliographical Society.
As to collecting, it is certainly a little alarming to have to buy a whole book for the sake of a single device in it, or at most two. On the other hand, the books are pleasant things in themselves, and there is an alleviation in the fact that the devices only begin to abound a little before 1490, and that books of this date can be acquired, even now, at prices which seem reasonable compared with those fetched by the real first-fruits of the press. Many very pretty devices will be found in the thin volumes of Latin verse published at Paris in the early parts of the sixteenth century, and a bookman who meets a ‘tract-volume’ containing several of these bound together, will probably find sufficient devices among them to start his collection.