Illustrated books -- Bibliography; Illustration of books; Printing -- History
He appears, moreover, to have possessed a
bookbinding business, or at least to have had binders in his employment
who invented a very striking and dignified style of binding. Altogether,
Day is a man of whom English bookmen may well be proud. He died in 1584.
Richard Tottell was another printer of some importance. The son of an
Exeter man, he began printing about 1553, and early in his career
received a patent which gave him a monopoly of the publication of law
books. These, to do him justice, he printed very well, and he also
published a number of works of literary interest. Chief among these, and
always associated with his name, is the famous _Songs and Sonnets_ of
Wyatt and Surrey and other Tudor poets, edited by Nicholas Grimald, but
often quoted, for no very good reason, as _Tottell's Miscellany_. To his
credit must also be placed editions of Lydgate's _Falles of Princes_,
Hawes's _Pastime of Pleasure_, Tusser's _Five Hundreth Points of Good
Husbandry_, the works of Sir Thomas More in 1458 folio pages, Gerard
Legh's _Accedens of Armoury_, numerous editions of Guevara's _Diall of
Princes_, as translated by Sir Thomas North, and a version of Cicero's
_De Officiis_, by Nicholas Grimald. In 1573 Tottell petitioned
unsuccessfully for a monopoly of paper-making in England for thirty
years, in order to encourage him to start a paper-mill. He lived till
1593.
Henry Denham (1564-89), Henry Bynneman (1566-83), and Thomas Vautrollier
(1566-88), and the latter's successor, Richard Field, were the best
printers of the rest of the century. Denham was an old apprentice of
Tottell's, who gave him some important books to print for him. Herbert
remarks of him: "He was an exceeding neat printer, and the first who
used the semicolon with propriety." Among his more notable books were
Grafton's _Chronicle_ (for Tottell and Toy, 1569), editions of the
Olynthiac orations of Demosthenes in English (1570) and Latin (1571),
_An Alvearie or quadruple dictionarie containing foure sundrie tongues,
namelie, English, Latine, Greeke, and French_, with a pleasing titlepage
showing the royal arms and a beehive (1580), Thomas Bentley's _The
Monument of Matrons: containing seuen seuerall Lamps of Virginitie_, a
work in praise of piety and Queen Elizabeth (1582), Hunnis's _Seuen Sobs
of a Sorrowfull Soule for Sinne_, a metrical version of the penitential
psalms (1585), and the second edition of Holinshed's _Chronicles_
(1587).
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