London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1519

Similarly printed bicolour printers’ ornaments are found in books printed in England around the same time, including this Book of Hours for the use of Salisbury printed by Wynkyn de Worde (before 1479–1534/35). He is known as a great innovator in the early English book market because he shifted early English book production to the ‘mass’ market by focussing on affordable commercial publications, but he was also skilled at printing visual elements in colour.

Here, the intricacy of the colour printing of the printers’ ornaments (type with decorative motifs) indicates great skill in the registration (alignment of the impressions of matrices or formes), which would also have been necessary for printing text in red and black. It shows printers based in England were also conceiving of visual elements as being necessarily multi-colour. It is unsurprising that the woodcut illustration was printed in only one colour: because the printers’ ornaments would have been set in the forme with type printing the illustration in two colours would have required either a second woodcut for the areas of red or a different approach to colour printing. Type in a composing stick, in which pieces of type are set (i.e., composed) into lines before being transferred to the forme, suggests how the ornaments might have looked and been used in the press.

SSS.29.10, fol. 32v