Early Illustrated Books A History of the Decoration and Illustration of Books in the 15th and 16th Centuries — A Closer Reading

From Manuscript to Print: The Rubrisher’s Legacy

The opening chapter establishes a key structural tension: the printed book had to compete with the manuscript tradition. Pollard details how rubrishers added red headings and illuminators supplied painted initials, tasks that printers initially outsourced. The survival of these practices into the early press period is shown through specific examples, such as the Sforziada and its illuminated borders. Pollard’s evidence is drawn from colophons, printer’s marks, and surviving copies, not from speculation. He notes that many early printed books were left incomplete, awaiting hand-decoration, which blurs the line between print and manuscript.

German and Italian Workshops: Contrasting Approaches

Pollard contrasts German and Italian illustration styles through careful observation of technique. German woodcuts, he notes, often feature heavy outlines and dense shading, as seen in the Nuremberg Chronicle. Italian work, by contrast, favors black backgrounds with white-line designs, exemplified by the Florentine-influenced cuts in Bergomensis’s De claris mulieribus. The discussion of Milanese printers like Le Signerre reveals a regional preference for coarse, vigorous outlines with minimal shading, as in the Specchio di Anima. Pollard traces how these styles migrated with printers—Le Signerre’s move to Saluzzo, for instance, carried Venetian border motifs northward.

Printer’s Marks as Structural Signatures

A recurring visual element in Pollard’s account is the printer’s device, which he treats as both decoration and identifier. He describes the evolution from simple black-ground marks with circles and crosses—like Bazalerius’s 1489 device—to more elaborate designs incorporating shields and floral sprays, as in Guillireti’s mark. Pollard highlights the mark of Egmont and Barrevelt, printers of the Sarum Missal, as a particularly beautiful example. These devices, he suggests, functioned as structural anchors on the page, often placed at the end of a book or chapter, and their study was advanced by Dr. Paul Kristeller’s collection of nearly four hundred marks before 1525.

The French Book of Hours: A Genre in Itself

Pollard devotes a full chapter to French Books of Hours, a genre that demanded intricate illustration. He notes that these books often reused woodcuts across editions, a practice that complicates attribution. The cuts in the Specchio di Anima, for example, reappear three years later in the Tesauro Spirituale. Pollard’s method is to compare specific images—such as the passion scenes—across printings, tracking changes in border design and shading. He avoids overgeneralizing, instead pointing to the heavy Milanese shading in Gafori’s De Harmonia Instrumentorum as a local characteristic. The chapter underscores how devotional demand shaped both the economics and aesthetics of early illustration.

English Illustrated Books: A Separate Chapter

The chapter on England, contributed by E. Gordon Duff, stands apart in structure and voice. Duff focuses on the scarcity of English illustrated books before 1500, noting that most were imported from the Continent. He examines the few native productions, such as those by Wynkyn de Worde, and their reliance on reused woodcuts. Pollard’s decision to include a separate authorial voice here is itself a structural choice, acknowledging that English illustration followed a different trajectory. The chapter’s brevity compared to the French or Italian sections reflects the historical record: fewer books, fewer printers, and a later start.

Pollard’s study is best read as a series of interconnected case studies rather than a linear narrative. The recurring images—printer’s marks, border designs, reused woodcuts—form a visual vocabulary that Pollard decodes with precision. Readers interested in the material history of the book will find his attention to technique and provenance particularly useful. The second edition’s corrections, acknowledged in the preface, remind us that this is a work of ongoing scholarship, not a final statement.

I keep thinking about how those early printers must have felt, arranging ornament and text, always chasing a harmony that felt just out of reach. It stayed with me long after. There’s a similar quiet pull in leafing through that catalogue of sequels—seeing how stories refuse to end, trailing echoes of themselves across decades. Somehow that lingering feels familiar, like a half-remembered melody between old pages. A List of English & American Sequel Stories — Inside the Classic holds that same tender ache.