Hæc eft Præfatio(oftendens) quemadmodum Elfredus Rex optat falutem Wulf- 256. Roman Type used by Day, London, 1574 Elfredi regis amplifsimi lector) exhibemus : à Io- preffam. Que quidem historia non mediocrem menti tuæ voluptatem infundet, neq minorem adferet cum voluptate vtilitatem, fi in præclariffimarum rerum contemplatione defixus, tead earum imitationem,& quafi imaginem totum effinxeris. Etenim quæ delectatio maior 257. Italic used by Day, London, 1574 presses on the Continent-either in workmanship, beauty, or correctness. The decline of typography from 1550 to 1650, as McKerrow points out, was also due (1) to the fact that printing fell into the hands of a class of masters and men less able, enterprising, and socially important, who looked at it solely from the commercial side; (2) that English presses printed books chiefly in the vernacular, and that more scholarly volumes, like the classics, were largely brought from abroad; (3) and chiefly, to the beginning of a burdensome censorship of the press, which became increasingly restrictive. Separately and collectively, all these contributed to the decline in England of printing as an art.' "Some explanation," says Reed, "of the marked superiority of our national typography at the close of the fifteenth century over that of half a century later, is to be found in the fact that, whereas many of the first printers used types wholly cut and cast for them by expert foreign artists, their successors began first to cast for themselves from hired or purchased matrices, and finally to cut their own punches and justify their own matrices. Printing entered on a gloomy stage of its career in England after Day's time, and as State restrictions gradually hemmed it in, crushing by its monopolies healthy competition, and by its jealousy foreign succour, every printer became his own letterfounder, not because he would, but because he must, and the art suffered in consequence." The first man recorded as a 'For the state of the sixteenth century English press (its relations to the government, etc.), see the chapter by R. B. McKerrow on the "Booksellers', Printers', and Stationers' Trade," in Shakespeare's England, Oxford, 1916, Vol. II, chapter xxiii. For an account of earlier English legislation in reference to printing, publishing, and bookselling, see the Introductions to Mr. E. Gordon Duff's Century of the English Book Trade, 1457-1557; to McKerrow's Dictionary of Printers, 1557-1640; and to Plomer's Dictionary of Booksellers and Printers, 1641-1667. |