Typographorum Emblemata

Preface

Despite the fact that printer’s and publisher’s marks are among the most widely distributed art objects of the Early Modern period, they still form a continent waiting for close investigation by the academic disciplines devoted to the study of Early Modern verbal and pictorial media. Printer’s and publisher’s marks were applied to books by the thousands not only to authenticate their provenance from a particular printer or publisher, but also to say something about the self-image, the beliefs and the cultural affinities of those printers and publishers. The realization that the study of the printer’s mark is still a widely open field is not new, however. Nearly a century ago the eminent German book historian Ludwig Volkmann (1870–1947) ...