Illustrated books -- Bibliography; Illustration of books; Printing -- History
Individually the books from the presses we have been naming, both on the
Romanist and the Puritan side, are unattractive to look at and dull to
read. Collectively they form a very curious and interesting episode in
English bibliography, which deserves more study than it has yet
received, though Mr. Sayle has made an excellent beginning in his lists
of English books printed on the Continent in the third volume of his
_Early English Printed Books in the University Library, Cambridge_.
Since then Mr. Steele and Mr. Dover Wilson have made important
contributions to the subject, but much still remains to be done.
It was doubtless the existence of these foreign safety-valves which
rendered the course of English printing after the grant of a charter to
the Stationers' Company so smooth and uneventful.[60] Two violations of
the terms of the charter were winked at or authorized, in some way not
known to us, by the Crown. The first of these was the printing of a few
books for the use of foreign refugees by Antony de Solempne at Norwich.
Most of these books were in Dutch, but in 1569 Antony Corranus,
previously pastor of the Spanish Protestant congregation at Antwerp,
published through de Solempne certain broadside tables _De Operibus Dei_
in Latin, French, Dutch, and English, of which copies only of the first
and second have been traced. In 1570 another English broadside
commemorated the execution at Norwich of Thomas Brooke. Archbishop
Parker seems to have resented the publication, unexamined, of the _De
Operibus Dei_, but de Solempne placed the royal arms and a loyal motto
(Godt bewaer de Coninginne Elizabeth) on some of his books, and seems in
some way or another to have secured the Queen's protection.
Mr. Allnutt, to whose exhaustive articles on "English Provincial
Printing" in the second volume of _Bibliographica_ all subsequent
writers on the subject must needs be indebted, conscientiously includes
among his notes one on the edition of Archbishop Parker's _De
Antiquitate Ecclesiae Britannicae_ printed for him by John Day, in all
probability at Lambeth Palace, where a small staff of book-fashioners
worked under the archiepiscopal eye. Eton is a good deal farther "out of
bounds" than Lambeth, but the employment of the King's Printer, John
Norton, and a dedication to the King saved Sir Henry Savile from any
interference when he started printing his fine edition of the works of
S. John Chrysostom in the original Greek. The eight folio volumes of
which this consists are dated from 1610 to 1613, and in these and the
two following years five other Greek books were printed under Savile's
supervision. After this his type was presented to the University of
Oxford, where a fairly flourishing press had been at work since 1585.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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