The English provincial printers, stationers and bookbinders to 1557Duff, E. Gordon (Edward Gordon)
History
The English provincial printers, stationers and bookbinders to 1557
Duff, E. Gordon (Edward Gordon)
Book industries and trade -- Great Britain; Printing -- Great Britain -- History
The book is a folio of 290 leaves, and, though at least twelve copies
are known, only one, that in the library of the Marquis of Bath at
Longleat, is perfect. One copy is known printed upon vellum. It
belonged at an early date to the old family library of the Richardsons
of Brierly Hall in Yorkshire, and passed by inheritance to Miss Currer
of Eshton Hall in the same county, herself a collector of some note
in the early part of the nineteenth century. It wanted a leaf and a
half, and four leaves, though original, were printed on paper. On the
advice, I believe, of Dibdin, these four genuine leaves were replaced
by facsimiles on vellum, and the two missing leaves also similarly
supplied. At the Currer sale in 1862 the volume was sold for £365, and
passed later into a private collection.
For the first time at this press we find red printing used for the
initials and paragraph marks; there are also a few diagrams and
one small rough woodcut depicting a jumble of towers, spires, and
turrets, and equally suitable for the two cities which it professes to
represent, London and Rome. At the end is the printer’s device, Italian
in style, a double cross rising from a circle. In the circle is a
shield bearing a saltire cross, the arms alike of the town and abbey of
St Alban’s.
The last book from this press was the famous _Book of St Alban’s_, “the
book of hawking and hunting and also of coat armours.” It is a small
folio of ninety leaves. As might be supposed from its popular nature
copies are now excessively scarce, and out of some dozen which are
known, not one is absolutely perfect. This book marks another advance
in printing, for it contains the earliest known examples of colour
printing in England, the shields of arms being printed in red, blue,
and yellow inks. About the authorship of this book there has been much
controversy. The middle portion, on hunting, which is in verse, ends
with the words, “Explicit Dam Julyans Barnes in her book of hunting.”
The authoress has been variously identified with ladies of very varying
degrees, from the high born if somewhat mythical Juliana Berners,
prioress of the nunnery of Sopwell, down to the lowly dame who wrote it
to instruct the infants who attended St Julian’s school at St Alban’s,
that is St Julian’s bairns!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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