London printers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
accumulated
large, and often ill-sorted, ornament stocks by a variety of ways, some of
them puzzlingly devious. They could always purchase new decorations or acquire
them at second-hand; but in addition they lent blocks which they never saw
again, or borrowed others which they neglected to return; they bequeathed or
inherited whole stocks, and commissioned imitations or recuttings of
decorations that caught their fancy. Their storage shelves or drawers were
evidently spacious enough to hold both the old and the new; hence only on
occasion and apparently with reluctance did they discard permanently portions
of their ornament collections. Mostly it appears that decorations which fell
into disuse were shoved back into oblivion rather than thrown away. Yet one
can never predict when the long reach of a compositor, the exigencies of an
elaborately ornamented volume, or the reshuffling of the blocks in transfer
from one printing house to another will cause the startling reappearance of a
forgotten decoration, as in this study the 'pear' A that flourished in the
years before the defeat of the Spanish Armada and reappeared in print finally
in the year of the Restoration, or the John Harrison rebus, first seen in
1590, and still in use, badly scarred and cracked, 103 years later.
For the bibliographer this practice among early London printers of
holding
on to most of the decorative blocks that came into their possession and of
mingling at random the old with the new in their printing is of more than
passing interest. The study of a long-term accumulation of ornaments
frequently affords him a sure means of tracing the relationships between
printers and of identifying the printers of unsigned books exhibiting
blocks not normally associated with them. By just such a study I have been
able to follow through the shops of a dozen printers an ornament stock kept
largely intact over a span of about ninety years, and therefore can offer a
somewhat fuller sampling of those decorations and recording of their use
than
one is likely to achieve by the intensive study of the books of an individual
printer.
The general line of succession of the early printers involved in this
study-Judson through John Okes-was first set down by Arber in 1887.[1]
McKerrow[2] and Plomer[3] have since contributed substantially to our
knowledge of the
lives and careers of these men. Recent scholars have dealt with specific
printers: Professor H. R. Hoppe, extensively with John Wolfe,[4] Professor R.
C. Bald, briefly with Robert White,[5]
and Mr. Harold Jenkins, with John
Norton.[6] My particular tasks in
preparing a commentary to accompany the
ornament plates were these: (1) to bring together the facts bearing on the
careers of the printers who once owned this ornament stock; (2) to use that
information to study the transfer of decorations from printer to printer, and
(3) to fix as definitely as possible the terminal dates of the use of the
stock by each printer in order that bibliographers may by means of the
ornaments identify unsigned books issuing from the presses of these
printers.
