Illustrated books -- Bibliography; Illustration of books; Printing -- History
A few books printed or published by less prolific firms remain to be
noticed before we speak of the Horae which form so important a section
among Paris illustrated books as to require separate treatment. One of
Verard's printers was Pierre Le Rouge, a member of a family which worked
also at Chablis and at Troyes. In July, 1488, and February, 1488-9, Le
Rouge printed "pour Vincent Commin Marchand libraire" _La mer des
histoires_ in two great folios with large cuts of the kind Verard
subsequently used in his _Chroniques de France_, and on the titlepage a
particularly fine capital L. Philippe Pigouchet, mainly a printer of
Horae, produced in 1499 for his usual publisher, Simon Vostre, a
charmingly illustrated edition of a dull poem, _Le Chasteau de Labeur_,
attributed to the playwright of Victor Hugo's _Notre Dame de Paris_,
Pierre Gringore. Wolfgang Hopyl printed some fine Missals, mostly after
1500; Le Petit Laurens, besides working for Verard, printed for G.
Marnef _La nef des folles_, with a few cuts by one of the most skilled
of Paris craftsmen, and these were rivalled by Jean Treperel in an
undated _Paris et Vienne_; Gillet Couteau and Jean Menard printed a
_Danse Macabre_ in 1492 (not so good as Gui Marchant's) and a new
version of the _Biblia Pauperum_ entitled _Les figures du vieil
testament et du nouveau;_ Jean Lambert, in 1497, produced _La nef des
folz du monde_, with cuts imitating those in the Basel editions. It
would be easy to mention other books, but not without turning our pages
into a catalogue.
We must turn now to the Paris Horae. As already noted, among the
pictures in Jean Du Pre's Verdun Missal of November, 1481, there are a
set of cuts which seem to have been designed for a Horae, though if they
were even put to this use no copy of the edition in which they appeared
has been recorded. The earliest illustrated Horae of which copies exist
are three editions published by Verard, in February 1485-6, August 1486,
and July 1487, all of them small and with insignificant cuts, and all
known only from single copies, of which that of the earliest edition (in
private hands) is imperfect, while the woodcuts in the other two, both
at the Bibliotheque Nationale, are heavily coloured.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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