The Printed Book

Among the publications opposed to the Government of the time, the two associates James Tortorel and John Perrissin, of Lyons, had published a celebrated collection of plates on the religious wars that stained the reign of Charles IX. with blood. At first engraved on metal, these plates were worn out, and were gradually replaced by others engraved on wood, on which several artists worked, among them James le Challeux and also John de Gourmont, one of the most celebrated wood-cutters of the sixteenth century. This was a work composed of single leaves in folio size, which had an extraordinary sale among the religious people of the time.

At the same time, illustration on wood did not stand still. The portraits of authors diffused by the pencil of Clouet and his school were commonly put at the head of their works. We cannot say whether Clouet himself designed the portraits of Tiraqueau and of Taillemont in 1553; of Du Billon, the author of the Fort Inexpugnable, in 1555; Papon and Ambroise Paré in 1561; Grevin, Ramus, and others; but the precision of these physiognomies recalls the peculiar manner of the French artists of the sixteenth century. The "Poems" of Ronsard in 1586 contains a series of very clever portraits, among them that of Muret, his commentator, one of the most perfect of its kind. Christopher de Savigny, author of the Tableaux Accomplis de Tous les Arts Liberaux, published by John and Francis de Gourmont in 1587, is represented at full length in the frontispiece of his work, offering the book to the Duc de Nevers, to whom it is dedicated. This plate in folio, probably engraved by John de Gourmont, is the best finished that we have seen. The work of Savigny, forgotten as it may be now, had a great reputation in its own time; and Bacon took from it the idea of his "Advancement of Learning."

Speaking of the Duc de Nevers, it will not be without interest to our readers to mention here a manuscript found by us in the Bibliothèque Nationale, which enables us to give an account of the work then necessary for the publication of an illustrated book. In 1577 the Duke arranged for the impression of an apologetic book, of which no trace remains; and his intendant writes a long letter to him on the subject of composition and bindings. It was necessary that the work should be produced quickly, bound and gilt, for presents. The intendant thinks calf will be the most expeditious covering. "It would be much the best to use black or red calf, … well gilt above, and not vellum, which is a thin parchment that quickly shrinks." The statements of this man of business show that five proofs of each sheet were taken for typographical correction, and that twelve full days were wanted for the binding. The most interesting part of this memoir is that which treats of the engraving on wood of the portrait. The plate was designed by an artist who had afterwards gone away; it was not satisfactory, but the ornaments would pass. The intendant proposes to "fix a little piece of wood in the block that could be drawn upon." Here we see correction by elimination. The pear-wood on which the original figure was engraved was to be cut out, and a square of boxwood substituted, "forasmuch as in this task the pear-wood, which is the successful, well-cut block, is the wood that is harder."

The portrait of the Duchesse de Nevers was better, yet the pear-wood had given way under the work. "That of Madame is more passable. Nevertheless, there is still something to say to one eye. The wood cannot carry the subtlety of the line." Here, in a few clear and explicit lines by a man of the time, we see the economy of a publication of the sixteenth century, at a time when wood engraving was declining, to give place to engraving on metal, which was soon to reign supreme, through the most important book house of the century: the Plantins of Antwerp.

Christopher Plantin, like Jenson, came originally from Tours. After having learned his art with Macé at Caen, he went to Paris, from which the wars soon drove him. He left for the Low Countries, and there Philip II. nominated him as chief printer – "architypographus." Established at Antwerp in 1555, he surrounded himself, as had the Estiennes and Alduses, with most of the learned and literary men of his time, among them Justus Lipsius, to whom Balzac attributed the Latin prefaces signed by Plantin. It is certain that he was neither an Estienne nor an Aldus. His artistic probity caused him to submit the proofs of his works to strangers, with promise of recompense for faults indicated; the Estiennes employed the same system. Plantin, not to be behind any of his contemporaries in typographical perfection, brought from France the celebrated type-founder William Lebé, and charged him to furnish a special fount.5 Under the orders of Philip II., he printed the celebrated Polyglot Bible, in eight folio volumes, absolutely perfect in its execution; unfortunately the Spanish Government, having advanced funds in the course of publication, prosecuted him with the utmost rigour to obtain repayment. This very nearly shut up his printing house, but he took courage and overcame his difficulties, until he became, in 1589, the year of his death, the principal publisher of Flanders. His mark was a hand holding a compass, with the motto "Labore et constantia."

Plantin died at the age of seventy-four, leaving a prosperous business to be divided between his three daughters. His first house at Antwerp employed seventeen presses even at the time when he was in trouble, and he had branches at Paris and Leyden, of less consequence. His second daughter married Moretus, and to him descended the Antwerp workshop; he and his descendants continued the printing house until recently; the house of the great printer and publisher is now a typographical museum. The Plantin printing office – "Officina Plantiniana" – was as well managed by its descendants as by himself. The fashion of engraving in metal spread itself before the death of the head of the house, and his successors continued it. The principal engravers with the burin of the Low Countries were employed by them: Wierix, Galle, Pass, Mallery, Van Sichern; it was a real school of illustration, that created by degrees a precious and sustained style, not without influence on the artists of that epoch. It was from this particular manner that came Thomas de Leu and Leonard Gaultier in France; and from Antwerp came those small religious figures that have lasted to our time in their incomprehensible mysticism.

The title-pages of the Plantin printing office inaugurated the passe-partout engraved by the burin, overloaded and complicated, of which the seventeenth century took advantage. To tell the truth, these elaborate displays, blackened by ink, do not accord well with the titles; and there is a long distance between this decadence and the books ornamented with wood blocks by the Italians and French of the commencement of the century. Exception must be made in favour of Rubens, who designed many of these titles. The heavy and squat architecture of the time was least of all appropriate to these decorations, which wanted grace. It passed from Plantin into France through the engravers; it went to Rome with Martin de Vos and John Sadeler; it imposed itself everywhere; and from that day to this it has not ceased. At the time of which we write it had taken its flight in France, and spread itself in Europe with extraordinary success. Engraving in relief, holding its own until then, gave way little by little before this invasion. When Henri IV. mounted the throne wood engraving had finished its upward movement, it still remained in the canards, or popular pieces sold at low prices, but it is easy to see what these hasty vignettes are worth.

We have now seen the history of the Book and its decoration in the sixteenth century in France: at first French epics in Italy, books of hours, romances of chivalry; then about 1550, with the reign of Henri II., the religious pamphlets commenced, bookselling spread itself; the strife between illustrations on metal plates and those in relief assumed shape, it continued under Henri III., and terminated abruptly by the victory of the first at the extreme end of the century. With political passions, printing had become a weapon of warfare, which it will never cease to be. They knew in the sixteenth century what perfidious accusations or excessive praises were worth. The Book followed the fate of its author. If the writer was burned, so was his book. Witness the Christianismi Restitutio of the Catholic Servetus, printed at Vienne, in Dauphiné, and consigned to the flames with its author at Geneva in 1553. A single copy was saved from the fire, and is now preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale; it is the identical copy annotated by Colladon, the accuser of the unhappy Servetus, and still bears traces of fire on its leaves.

Typography and the illustration of the Book in England in the sixteenth century did not make the same progress as in France and Italy. Much good work was done, but it was mostly with foreign material. Type was obtained from French and Dutch founders, and most of the woodcuts had the same origin. In the early part of the century most of the publications were translations of popular foreign books, such as Voragine's "Golden Legend," Caxton's translations of Cicero, Boetius, etc. Too many restrictions and privileges obtained to encourage or allow of the establishment of an English school, which was to come later with the spread of wealth and education. Books were mostly printed in Gothic type, or "black letter," and the woodcuts were of the coarsest kind. An exception was the beautiful Prayer-book of John Day, 1578, known as Queen Elizabeth's Prayer-book, from the fine portrait of the Queen, which we reproduce, on the previous page; but in this the woodcuts were designed by Albert Dürer and Hans Holbein. Pynson was the first to use Roman type in England, in the Oratio in pace nuperrimâ, 1518, quarto; and the first English Bible in Roman type was printed at Edinburgh in 1576. It is thought that until about 1600 printers were their own type-founders, as no record exists of founding as a separate trade until that time.

The greatest achievement of the sixteenth century in England was the printing of the first English Bible, in Coverdale's translation, in 1535, folio, but even this was printed abroad, the latest investigation giving it to Van Meteren at Antwerp. The woodcuts in it are by Hans Sebald Beham; we reproduce one representing Cain killing Abel. Tyndall had previously printed abroad an English New Testament. Another importation was Brandt's "Shyp of Folys," printed by Pynson, 1509, and John Cawood, 1570, the woodcuts in both being copied from the originals before referred to.

Folio was the size usually adopted, and in this size the series of chronicles appeared: Arnold, printed abroad in 1502; Fabian, in 1516; Froissart, by Pynson, in two volumes, 1523-5; Harding, by Grafton, 1543; Hall, by the same, 1548; Holinshed, in two volumes, 1577. In the same size Chaucer was first given to the world entire by T. Godfrey in 1532, and many times reprinted, and Sir Thomas More in 1557. Polemical and religious treatises were mostly printed in quarto, as were the poets: Spenser's Faerie Queene, in 1590; Langland's Pierce Plowman, in 1550; and Sidney's Arcadia, in 1590. Plays were also printed in quarto, in which shape at the end of the century some of Shakespeare's single plays were issued.

From the great perfection to which the liturgies, or books of hours, had been brought by Vostre, Verard, and others in France, it is not perhaps extraordinary that the service books for English use should have been mostly printed abroad. Those for Salisbury and York were produced at Paris, Rouen, and Antwerp. A Salisbury Primer in English was printed by John Kyngston and Henry Sutton in 1557, and Wynken de Worde printed a York Manual in 1509. The first English Common Prayer Book, known as Edward VI.'s, was printed by Grafton in 1549, who also printed in 1545 Henry VIII.'s Primer in Latin and English. Edward's book is curious as having on the last page a royal order as to the price at which it was to be sold: "No maner of persone shall sell the present Booke vnbounde aboue the price of two shillynges and two pence. And bound in Forell for iis. xd., and not aboue. And the same bound in Shepes Lether for iiis. iiid., and not aboue. And the same bounde in paste or in boordes, in Calues Lether, not aboue the price of iiiis. the pece." Cranmer's Catechism was printed by Nicholas Hill in 1548, with twenty-nine woodcuts by Hans Holbein, one of which we reproduce, representing Christ casting out devils.

Translations from the classics were popular, and in the second half of the century arose that passion for voyage and travel which has so largely contributed to the wealth and extension of England. This was begun by Eden's translation of Peter Martyr's "Decades of the New World; or, West India," London, 1555, quarto, followed by Hakluyt's "Principall Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries," 1589, folio. Many accounts of single voyages and discoveries were issued, and the taste thus created culminated in the establishment of the East India Company in the last year of the century.

The first specimen of copper plate engraving for books in England is a frontispiece to Galen's De Temperamentis, printed at Cambridge 1521, and the number of books containing copper plates engraved before 1600 is extremely limited, the most notable being portraits of Queen Elizabeth, Lord Leicester, and Lord Burleigh in Archbishop Parker's Bible of 1568; Saxton's Atlas, 1579, the first atlas in England; Harrington's translation of Ariosto, 1591, with forty-seven engraved plates.

The first printer at Cambridge was John Siberch, 1521. Peter of Treves established himself at Southwark in 1514. Among his productions is a Higden's Polychronicon, 1527, folio. John Oswen printed at Ipswich 1538, and among the English towns in which printers established themselves in the century were York, Canterbury, Tavistock, Norwich, and Worcester.

The establishment of the Reformed Church, and the diffusion of education among the people which followed, created an original English school of literature in the sixteenth century, and this gave employment and great impetus to typography in England, so that by the time we reach the end of the century we find a great improvement in the art of the Book, to be carried to still greater perfection in the next.

CHAPTER IV

1600 TO 1700

Tendencies of the regency of Marie de Medicis – Thomas de Leu and Leonard Gaultier – J. Picart and Claude Mellan – Lyons and J. de Fornazeris – The Book at the beginning of the seventeenth century in Germany, Italy, and Holland – Crispin Pass in France – The Elzevirs and their work in Holland – Sebastian Cramoisy and the Imprimerie Royale – Illustration with Callot, Della Bella, and Abraham Bosse – The publishers and the Hotel de Rambouillet – The reign of Louis XIV., Antoine Vitré syndic at his accession – His works and mortifications; the polyglot Bible of Le Jay – Art and illustrators of the grand century – Sébastien Leclerc, Lepautre, and Chauveau – Leclerc preparing the illustration and decoration of the Book for the eighteenth century – The Book in England in the seventeenth century.

NOW we have arrived at a critical epoch, in which the science of the old printers transformed itself gradually into commerce, in which taste lost itself under the influence of religious architecture. The title of the Book represents the portico of a cathedral, with columns, mitred saints, and crosses, of little decorative aspect. Figures on copper plates replaced the foliage and arabesques of the older booksellers. Through the Plantins and their imitators, the architectural passion was far spread. It inundated France, ran through Germany and Italy, and reigned pre-eminent in Holland. Literary taste also underwent change; manners were no longer those of the sixteenth century: bold, free, and gay; from the religious wars a certain hypocrisy arose; bombast replaced the natural; the gods were preparing, as a contemporary said, to receive Louis and his spirit.

It is not that artists were wanting at the opening of the seventeenth century who could, in giving scope to their talent, show themselves worthy successors of those who went before them. Unhappily the booksellers no longer had a loose rein; they had the rope, for they were hung or burned at the least infraction of political or religious propriety. Yet the reign of Henri IV. was relatively an easier period for the artisans of the Book, in which they were less confined to the strict terms of excessive regulations; but after this prince severity increased, and during the year 1626 a new law was promulgated punishing with death the printers or distributers of prohibited books. Doubtless the books that were thus secretly sold, and prohibited in defence of good manners, were neither chefs-d'œuvre of typography nor art. The author threw off the indecencies by which he hoped to make profit and fame, regardless of type or illustration. But during the regency of Marie de Medicis, it was not only the authors of a bad standard that were in danger of being hung; the printer or seller of the pamphlet or book of a reputed heterodox author was also hung, and it became difficult to steer safely among the prohibitions. Enormous numbers of works were made with frontispieces decorated with colonnades and mitred saints, and bearing high-sounding titles of sound orthodoxy. A somewhat gross mysticism, from the office of Plantin, formed the most solid stock of every respectable dealer.

Under Henri IV. and the minority of Louis XIII., two French illustrators received from the school of Antwerp their inspiration for the ornament of the Book. Thomas de Leu, probably from Flanders, was allied with the old Parisian painter and engraver of celebrated portraits, Antoine Caron, in furnishing the engraved plates for the Images de Plate Peinture des Deux Philostrates, Sophistes Grecs, Paris, Claude Cramoisy, 1609, folio; and Leonard Gaultier, his contemporary, collaborated with Jaspar Isaac and other artists in the Book. Leonard Gaultier contributed most to spread in France the Plantinian style, and his somewhat cold but characteristic talent suited this art more than that of any one else then could. He was an engraver of portraits, now rare and valuable, in the style of Wierix or Thomas de Leu; but, at the demand of publishers and booksellers, he composed other plates, at first historical figures representing the royal family and the nobles for the publisher Leclerc, in a simple and true manner; he also designed pious figures, recording a miracle or representing the ceremonies of a jubilee and other devotional things. But he made his great success in the composition of frontispieces to theological and pious works, printed for nearly all the booksellers. Leonard Gaultier had a fashion of his own with pilasters and Grecian columns, under which he boldly placed entire councils of cardinals and bishops; witness the heading of the Bibliotheca Veterum Patrum, into which he crowded nearly forty figures. He united also with a certain grace the sacred and the profane, placing among ideal saints the sinning fine ladies of the time, with their large collarettes and jewels falling on naked breasts. The work of Andrew Valladier, chaplain of the King, entitled Métanéalogie Sacrée, published by Peter Chevallier in 1609, was adorned with a title of this particular kind, in which Gaultier had no rival, and which preserves the precision of Flemish masters in the detail of ornaments of the toilet.

He was one of the first to work for Sebastian Cramoisy, printer and publisher, who had established his shop in the Rue St. Jacques at the sign of the "Stork." We shall have occasion to speak of him later in connection with the Royal Printing House, of which he was the first director; he is mentioned now because in 1611 Leonard Gaultier engraved for him the frontispiece of L'Aigle Français, a collection of sermons by Thomas Girault. The publisher used the same plate in 1618 for the sermons of Raymond de Hézèque.

Besides the publications of Sebastian Cramoisy and Chevallier, Leonard Gaultier adorned also those of Nicholas Buon and many other publishers of the time in Paris and Lyons. With such a profusion of works emanating from a single artist, without reckoning those which were produced in great quantity by men of less note, wood engraving was dead. At most it dared to put a wood block of a printer's mark on a title; more ordinarily this mark was not alone sufficient, and showed the disdain in which taste then held wood-cutting. Thus goes fashion, heedless of the most elementary rules of art. To put type within an engraved title, or to ornament a printed text with engravings, is a heresy of principle that was established in the eighteenth century, by the strength of its cleverness and talent. But at the beginning of the seventeenth, in spite of Leonard Gaultier or Thomas de Leu, these overloaded titles, overpowering the opening of the Book, offend the eye by their excessive blackness, and incontestably make us regret the admirable frontispiece on wood of the preceding century.

This is all the ornament, properly so called, of the reign of Louis XIII. Leonard Gaultier composed also small vignettes for an edition of Homer, but they are mediocre and unskilful, and it must be said that there were others following the same path. John Picart made a frontispiece with architecture and figures for the Histoire de la Maison de Châtillon-sur-Marne for account of Sebastian Cramoisy. A cold and hard artist he was, the rival of Gaultier, and one of the most employed of the vignette engravers of Paris. There was also Jaspar Isaac, a mediocre craftsman, but who could design clever titles, among them that of the continuation of the Annales of Baronius for the publisher Denis de la Noue. Then Claude Mellan, whose great and clever talent did not disdain second-rate works, in which he gave free play to his burin. It must be said, however, that his bold touch did not well accommodate itself to reduced spaces, and that he was not working in the field necessary to his inventive powers. We mention his portrait of Louis XIV. at the head of the Code Louis XIV.; the title of the Perfection du Chrestien, in which is included a portrait of Cardinal Richelieu, A. Vitré, 1647, folio; that of the Instruction du Dauphin for Cramoisy, 1640; that of the works of St. Bernard for the Royal Printing House; and, perhaps the best of all, the Poésies of Pope Urban VIII., of which we here give a copy.

Lyons did not remain far behind in the movement, but how changed from its great reputation of the sixteenth century! J. de Fornazeris engraved the frontispieces to Justus Lipsius, published by Horace Cardon in 1613. Peter Favre and Audran imitated them. C. Audran designed for Claude Landry the Theologia Naturalis of Theophilus Reynaud, and the bookseller Picquet ordered from him the title for the Annales Minorum in 1628. Everywhere taste was modelled on the works of the capital, to name only the principal centres, Rouen, Rheims, Sens, down to Venes, a small town of Tarn, where William de Nautonnier published in 1603 his curious book Mécométrie, whose frontispiece was bordered by views of cities, with an equestrian portrait of King Henry.

And if we pass to Germany, we find Mayence with mediocre engravings for titles according to the formula and process used elsewhere, the title of the Droit Civil of Aymar Vailius, that of the works of St. Bonaventura in 1609 for the bookseller Antoine Hiérat, and that of the Viridarium Virtutûm, rather cleverly treated by the burin in 1610. What a period had passed since Gutenberg, Fust, and Schoeffer! There was still one Yves Schoeffer at Mayence, but only the name lived; nothing more remained of the old printers of the other century. It was the same at Bamberg, Cologne, Nuremberg, and Basle, in all the cities that made the honour of typography and the Book in former times. Cologne was neither better nor worse favoured than others. The booksellers Boetzer, Kinck, and De Binghy had passable engravings for their titles; and the Commentaries of Salmeron may be mentioned, with portraits from the German originals of the fifteenth century. At Nuremberg there was a curious specimen treating of natural history by Basil Besler, in which the artist gives the interior of a zoological cabinet of the time; but the blocks and the typography of the city of Koburger are wanting. Basle held its own later in relief engraving. Meantime there was a mediocre set of the Dance of Death on copper, published by Miegen, 1621.