Early Illustrated Books A History of the Decoration and Illustration of Books in the 15th and 16th Centuries

The art of the wood-engraver may almost be said to have had no existence in England before the introduction of printing, for there are not probably more than half a dozen cuts n...

The earliest productions of the French press will not bear comparison with those of either the German or the Italian: they have neither the massive dignity of the one, nor the a...

We must now return from Venice to Florence, where, after the experiments with engravings on copper in 1477 and 1481, no illustrated books had been published until on March 27, 1...

Surrounded by pictures and frescoes, and accustomed to the utmost beauty in their manuscripts, the Italians did not feel the need of the cheaper arts, and for the first quarter...

No point in the history of printing has been more rightly insisted on than that the early printers were compelled to make the very utmost of their new art in order to justify it...

The second period of book-illustration in Germany dates from the publication at Mainz in 1486 of Bernhard von Breydenbach's celebrated account of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Tw...

In the course of the fourteenth century the Hours of the Blessed Virgin superseded the Psalter as the popular book of devotions for lay use. Throughout the fifteenth century mag...

In the fifteenth century Augsburg was one of the chief centres in Germany for card-making and woodcut pictures. The cutters were jealous of their privileges, and when, in 1471,...

As we have seen, the typical book during the first quarter of a century of the history of printing is one in which the printer supplied the place of the scribe and of the scribe...

Thirty years ago, under the title _The Woodcutters of the Netherlands_ (a little suggestive of a story for boys on life in a Dutch forest) Sir Martin Conway wrote a treatise on...

Since the first edition of this book appeared knowledge both of Spanish incunabula and the types in which they are printed has been greatly increased, thanks to the researches o...