Coronelle Romaine, stamps

These stamps illustrate the forms of individual sorts of the typeface Coronelle Romaine, designed by Hendrik van den Keere in the early 1570s. You can see the matrices for casting these sorts here.

Coronelle Romaine, unjustified matrices

These matrices have not yet been justified: they've been struck with the various letterforms and glyphs, but the resulting pieces of copper haven't been made uniform and ready to use. If you compare these matrices with the finished ones, you can easily see the difference.

Dodoens, Florum, 1568 (A1r)

Christopher Plantin's printer's device illustrates his motto, "Constantia et Labore" ("Perseverance and Work") with a compass, the fixed point of which represents the constancy of perseverance and the outer point representing labor.

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.

Dove, A new almanack, 1631 (A2v-A3r)

This almanac shows a typical combination of information: dates of the month, the dominical number, saints days and other festivals, the positions of various astrological features, and space for the user to write their own notes. But this almanac is atypical in that it survived---huge numbers of almanacs were printed, particularly in the 17th century, but most were discarded at the end of the year and lost to posterity.

Dowland, Songes, 1597 (π1r)

A woodcut title page for John Dowland's collection of songs.

Erasmus, Novum Instrumentum, 1516 (3a1r)

The lengthy title provides the primary decorative element of this page. It's also notable that Froben's printer's device is used in place of his name in the imprint, rather than in addition to it.

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.

Erasmus, Novum Instrumentum, 1516 (Ff8r)

The last leaf of this work includes a colophon and printer's device as well as a register for the order of the book's gatherings. You can see that the preliminaries were printed after the rest of the work by how they're signed (aaa, bbb); you can also note that there are two series of double letters and that AA is not the same as Aa.

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.