A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898Plomer, Henry R. (Henry Robert)
History
A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898
Plomer, Henry R. (Henry Robert)
England -- Imprints; Printing -- England -- History
Sir William Dugdale followed this up in 1656 by publishing, through the
press of Thomas Warren, his _Antiquities of Warwickshire_, a folio of
826 pages. On the title-page is seen the device of old John Wolfe, the
City printer. The dedication of this book was printed in great primer;
but the look of the text was marred by a bad fount of black letter which
did not print well. Like the _Monasticon_, this work was illustrated
with maps and portraits by Hollar and Vaughan.
Another considerable undertaking was the _Historical Collections_ of
John Rushworth, in eight folio volumes, of which the first was printed
by Newcomb in 1659, the others between 1680 and 1701.
But the great typographical achievement of the century was the Polyglott
Bible, edited by Brian Walton. It was the fourth great Bible of the kind
which had been published. The earliest was the Complutensian, printed at
Alcala in 1517, with Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and Chaldean texts. Next came
the Antwerp Polyglott, printed at the Plantin Press in 1572, which, in
addition to the texts above mentioned, gave the Syriac version. This was
followed in 1645 by the Paris Polyglott, which added Arabic and
Samaritan, was in ten folio volumes, and took seventeen years to
complete.
The London Polyglott of 1657, which exceeded all these in the number of
texts, was mainly due to the enterprise and industry of Brian Walton,
Bishop of Chester. This famous scholar and divine was born at Cleveland,
in Yorkshire, in 1600. He was educated at Cambridge, and after serving
as curate in All Hallows, in Bread Street, became rector of St. Martin's
Orgar and of St. Giles in the Fields. He was sequestered from his
living at St. Martin's during the troubles of the Revolution, and fled
to Oxford, and it was while there that he is said to have formed the
idea of the Polyglott Bible.
The first announcement of the great undertaking was made in 1652, when a
type specimen sheet, believed to be still in existence, was printed by
James Flesher or Fletcher of Little Britain, and issued with the
prospectus, which was printed by Roger Norton of Blackfriars for Timothy
Garthwaite. Walton's Polyglott was the second book printed by
subscription in England, Minsheu's _Dictionary in Eleven Languages_
having been published in this manner in 1617. The terms were £10 per
copy, or £50 for six copies. The estimated cost of the first volume was
£1500, and of succeeding volumes £1200, and such was the spirit with
which the work was taken up that £9000 was subscribed before the first
volume was put to press.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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