main printed feature: printer's ornament

Printers used a variety of ornaments to decorate and as an integral part of setting pages. Headpieces and tailpieces could be made of wood or metal relief cuts that could be swapped in and out of different books, or they could be composed of small pieces of decorative type known as fleurons or flowers. Those fleurons could be used as single pieces of type or combined to form borders of varying sizes and combined into different patterns.

Cato, Moral distichs, 1735 (A1v-A2r)

On the blank page shown here, you can see the raised letters from the impression of the type used for the title page.

Dove, A new almanack, 1631 (A1r)

Since almanacs featured the location of astrological bodies, they were most accurate for specific geographical locations. This title page for Dove specifies that it is calculated for Cambridge. The use of red ink was typical for almanacs, both on the title page and in the content.

Dowland, Songes, 1597 (π2r)

The dedication begins with a large, historiated initial "T", a woodcut depicting a sailboat.

Erasmus, Novum Instrumentum, 1516 (A1r)

Erasmus's translation of the Bible from Greek into Latin is appropriately presented in two parallel columns. Here, the initial page of his New Testament is set off with woodcut borders; the following pages are plain columns of text.

Febrés, Arte de lengua de Chile, 1765 (2A4r)

This page is from a textbook teaching Spanish speakers the Mapuche language, spoken by the Mapuche people of present-day Chile and Argentina. It showcases how type works to transliterate phonemes from a non-Romance language into a Latin alphabet. It is interesting to compare the tildes on the Ñs in the text to the contemporary variety. The book seems to be tightly bound, based on the close cropping on the left side of the image.

James I, By the King, 1611

This broadside uses gothic type (or black letter as the English often called it) for the main text of its announcement, as is typical for official English documents, with roman type setting off the names of the escapees.

Kats, Ma’aseh Toviyah, 1708 (8.4r)

This decorative chapter title showcases several sizes and weights of Hebrew type. The use of both elongated and regular forms of several letters, including ה (he), ת (tav), and ם (final mem), is particularly visible in the triangle of text at the top of the page. Stretching letters with horizontal lines was a common convention in Hebrew printing used to justify lines.

Keimer, Elegy, 1723 (1r)

Because broadsides weren't typically bound into books but rather distributed as single sheets, they often have very high loss rates. This is the only known copy of Keimer's Elegy, which Benjamin Franklin describes in his Autobiography as having unusually been composed as Keimer set the type. This was the first work that Keimer published in America, and Franklin's first known printing job in Philadelphia.

Patousas, Aesop, 1644 (sig. L5r)

A modern Greek translation of Aesop's fable of the fox and the crow; there is an accompanying illustration on the facing page

Prouisiones cedulas, 1563 (a1r)

The title of this collection of Spanish colonial laws is surrounded by four separate woodcuts used as borders, as well as a cut of the Spanish coat of arms.