Illustrated books -- Bibliography; Illustration of books; Printing -- History
After 1620 the old architectural and symbolical titlepages began to be
replaced by titles in compartments, in which a central cartouche is
surrounded by little squares, each representing some incident of the
book. Portraits of the author remained much in request, and nearly a
hundred of these were done by William Marshall, who was employed also on
about as many engraved titlepages. As has been noted, his work was
strangely uneven, and he fully deserved the scorn poured on him by
Milton for the wretched caricature of the poet prefixed to the _Poems_
of 1645. Yet Marshall could at times do a good plate, as, for instance,
that in Quarles's _Hieroglyphikes_ already mentioned, a portrait of
Bacon prefixed to the 1640 Oxford edition of his _Advancement of
Learning_ and the charming frontispiece to Brathwait's _Arcadian
Princess_. Marshall at his worst fell only a little below the work of
Thomas Cross; at his best he rivalled or excelled the good work of
Thomas Cecill and George Glover.
After Cromwell's strong hand had given England some kind of settled
government the book market revived, and some ambitiously illustrated
books were soon being published. The too versatile John Ogilby,
dancing-master, poet, and publisher, appeared early in the field, his
version of the Fables of Aesop, "adorned with sculpture," being printed
by T. Warren for A. Crook in 1651. The next year came Benlowe's
_Theophila, or Love's Sacrifice_, a mystical poem, some copies of which
have as many as thirty-six plates by various hands, with much more
etching than engraving in them. In 1654 Ogilby produced his translation
of Virgil, a great folio with plates dedicated to noble patrons by
Pierre Lambart. Ogilby's other important ventures were the large
_Odyssey_ of 1665, and the Aesop's _Fables_ of the same year, with
plates by Hollar, D. Stoop, and F. Barlow, and two portraits of the
translator engraved respectively by Pierre Lambert and W. Faithorne.
Faithorne embellished other books of this period, e.g. the Poems of the
"Matchless Orinda" (1667), with portraits, and publishers who could not
afford to pay Faithorne employed R. White. The presence of a portrait by
White in a copy of the first edition of Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_,
to which it was very far indeed from certain that it really
belonged,[69] has once made the book sell for over L1400, but save for
the sake of completeness his handiwork is not greatly prized by
collectors, nor is there any English illustrated book of this period
after the Restoration which is much sought after for the sake of its
plates, although those of Ogilby's _Virgil_ were sufficiently well
thought of to be used again for Dryden's version in 1697.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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