Early Woodcut Initials Containing over Thirteen Hundred Reproductions of Ornamental Letters of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

With very few exceptions the decorative and pictorial initials reproduced from foreign books on the preceding pages have been chosen from works printed before 1525, and in most...

Printing was introduced into Basle before 1468, having been preceded, as in most other towns of the upper Rhine, by xylographic publications. No Basle book bears a printed date...

With Knoblochtzer, Schott, and Prusz, the first commencing in 1477, Grüninger and Hupfuff at the end of the fifteenth century, we have printers who made a liberal use of initial...

By its geographical situation, by its proximity to Basle, by its condition as a free town, and through the fairs that attracted within its walls the merchants from other parts o...

We have alluded in the preceding chapter to the paucity of woodcut initials in early works printed at Rome, and it is well known that the opinions of the clergy were divided wit...

It was at Subiaco, not far from Rome, that printing was first introduced by the Germans, Conrad Sweynheim and Arnold Pannartz, who commenced operations most probably in 1464, th...

As with Lyons, the material upon which one could draw for Paris is almost inexhaustible. Dibdin considers the initials of this town to be the finest that can be found, and gives...

Printing, with the discovery or invention of which the name of Gutenberg is intimately associated, goes back to the year 1454, or, if we accept the recent discovery of an almana...

From what has been already said, it seems evident that the aim of the first printers was to produce by the new art as perfect as possible an imitation of the manuscript.

Most writers on early bibliography, amongst others Bodemann and Muther, who both give reproductions of the initial border at the beginning of the Latin Boccaccio, quote J. Zaine...

Hitherto we have devoted each chapter to special towns and their printers. In this, the final one, we shall deal with German initials that have not found a place elsewhere. Befo...

Of provincial French towns after Lyons the most important as regards the history of printing are Troyes and Rouen. In the former the chief printers using initial letters were th...

‘Spanish books,’ says Mr. Pollard, ‘are distinguished by the excellence of their initial letters, which are always as plentiful as they are good, the great majority of books aft...

The early printers at Cologne do not appear to have made much use of woodcut initials, the first known to us being the R of a missal by H. Quentell of 1494. This, although cut s...

Lübeck is represented here by two printers, Lucas Brandis and Bartholomew Ghotan. In one of his recent catalogues J. Rosenthal has given the reproduction of an alphabet from a H...

The early typography of the Low Countries has been made the subject of a most interesting monograph by J. W. Holtrop, chief librarian at the Hague, _Monuments Typographiques des...