To attempt to identify the designers of even a selection of the best Printers’ Marks would be but to embark on a wild sea of conjecture. The initials of the engravers, which occur much more frequently than those of the artists, are of very little assistance to the identification of the latter. Many of them possess a vigour and an originality which would at once stamp their designers as men of more than ordinary ability. For picturesqueness, and for the care and attention paid to the minutest details, it may be doubted if either B. Picart in France, or J. Pine in this country, has ever been excelled. The examples of the former come perhaps more in the category of vignettes than of Printers’ Marks, although the charming little pictures on the title-pages of Stosch’s “Pierres Antiques Gravées,” 1724, the “Impostures Innocentes,” 1734, and the edition of Cicero’s “Epistolæ,” printed at the Hague by Isaac Vaillant, 1725,--to mention only three of many--may be conveniently regarded as Printers’ Marks. So far as we know, Pine only executed one example,--representing a Lamb within a cleverly designed cartouche--and this appears on the title-page of Dale’s Translation of Freind’s “Emmenologia,” printed for T. Cox, “at the Lamb under the Royal Exchange,” 1729: in its way it is unquestionably the most perfect Mark that has ever been employed in this country. Any rule differentiating the Printer’s Mark proper from a vignette is not likely to give general satisfaction; for a writer on the subject of vignettes will unfailingly appropriate many that are Marks, and _vice versa_. The present writer has found it a fairly safe rule, to accept as a Mark a pictorial embellishment (on a title-page) to which is appended a motto or quotation. The temptation to persuade oneself that several of these vignettes are Printers’ Marks needs a good deal of resisting, especially when such an exquisite example as that of Daniel Bartholomæus and Son, of Ulm, is in question. The same holds good with several of the dozen used by J. Reinhold Dulssecker, Strassburg, about the latter part of the seventeenth and earlier part of the eighteenth century; and very many others that might be named. [Illustration: CRATANDER’S MARK. (Attributed to Holbein.)] [Illustration: T. COX. I Pine Sculpt] [Illustration: J. R. DULSSECKER. DOMINUS PROVIDEBIT.]