Early Woodcut Initials

Author : Oscar Jennings
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781331895220
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (952 download)

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Download or read book Early Woodcut Initials written by Oscar Jennings and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-20 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Early Woodcut Initials: Containing Over Thirteen Hundred Reproductions of Ornamental Letters of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries From the number of works that have been published within the last few decades on early printing and the decoration of early books, it is evident that an increasing interest is taken in these subjects, not only by those whose studies have specially fitted them to appreciate such researches, but also by the general educated public. There is, however, one variety of engraving that has hitherto attracted but little attention, and the importance of which, both from artistic and documentary points of view, is still unrecognised, and it may even be said unsuspected by the great majority of students. Whilst every engraving that may technically be termed a cut or an illustration is catalogued and recorded in the different monographs on special printers, those which take the form of initial letters, often of equal, if not superior merit, are represented much more sparsely, and as having a secondary importance only. In a monograph on fifteenth-century printing in a certain German town, for instance, the writer, a professional bibliographer, gives about ten or twelve initial letters, whereas the extent of the material upon which he might have drawn may be judged from the fact that a more recent authority, in his history of one printer only of this town, has been able to reproduce more than fifty specimens, many of which are quite equal in interest to illustrations proper, some of them having been recently pointed out by a London expert as constituting the chief attraction of a volume with both initials and illustrations which came under his hammer. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.