Illustrated books -- Bibliography; Illustration of books; Printing -- History
Meanwhile, other printers and publishers had produced a few more
illustrated books in the 'seventies. Thus in 1575 Henry Bynneman had
printed Turberville's _Booke of Faulconrie_ for Christopher Barker. The
numerous excellent illustrations of hawks (and probably those of dogs
also) are taken from French books, but there is a fairly vigorous
picture of Queen Elizabeth hawking attended by her suite, badged, back
and front, with large Tudor roses, and this (see Plate XXXIII) looks
like English work. In a much later edition--that of 1611--it is curious
to note that the portrait of the Queen was cut out and one of James I
substituted.
In 1576 a rather forbidding woodcut portrait of George Gascoigne was
printed (by R. Smith) in that worthy's _Steele Glas_. In 1577 came a
very important work, the famous _Chronicle_, begun on a vast scale by
Reyner Wolfe and completed for England, Scotland, and Ireland by Raphael
Holinshed, now published by John Harrison the elder. This has the
appearance of being much more profusely illustrated than the _Book of
Martyrs_ or any other English folio, but as the cuts of battles, riots,
executions, etc., which form the staple illustrations, are freely
repeated, the profusion is far less than it seems. The cuts, moreover,
are much smaller than those in Foxe's _Martyrs_. As a rule they are
vigorously designed and fairly well cut, and if it had come fifty years
earlier the book would have been full of promise. But, as far as
pictorial cuts in important books are concerned, we are nearing the end.
In 1579 H. Singleton published Spenser's _Shepheardes Calender_ with a
small cut of no great merit at the head of each "aeglogue," and in the
same year Vautrollier illustrated North's _Plutarch_ with insignificant
little busts which derive importance only from the large ornamental
frames, stretching across the folio page, in which they are set.
Woodcuts did not cease to be used after this date. They will be found in
herbals (but these were mainly foreign blocks), military works, and all
books for which diagrams were needed. They continued fashionable for
some time for the architectural or other forms of borders to titlepages,
some of them very graceful, as, for instance, that to the early folio
editions of Sidney's _Arcadia_; also for the coats of arms of the great
men to whom books were dedicated. They are found also at haphazard in
the sixpenny and fourpenny quartos of plays and romances, and many of
the old blocks gradually drifted into the hands of the printers of
ballads and chapbooks, and appear in incongruous surroundings after a
century of service. But I cannot myself call to mind any important
English book after 1580 for which a publisher thought it worth his while
to commission a new set of imaginative pictures cut on wood, and that
means that woodcut illustration as a vital force in the making of books
had ceased to exist. They needed good paper and careful presswork, and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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