Old French Title-pages

Nothing can be plainer, as a rule, than a modern English title-page. Its only beauty (if beauty it possesses) consists in the arrangement and 'massing' of lines of type in various sizes. We have returned almost to the primitive simplicity of the oldest printed books, which had no title-pages, properly speaking, at all, or merely gave, with extreme brevity, the name of the work, without printer's mark, or date, or place. These were reserved for the colophon, if it was thought desirable to mention them at all. Thus, in the black-letter example of Guido de Columna's 'History of Troy,' written about 1283, and printed at Strasburg in 1489, the title-page is blank, except for the words,

Hystoria Troiana Guidonis,

standing alone at the top of the leaf. The colophon contains all the rest of the information, 'happily completed in the City of Strasburg, in the year of Grace Mcccclxxxix, about the Feast of St. Urban.' The printer and publisher give no name at all.

This early simplicity is succeeded, in French books, from, say, 1510, and afterwards, by the insertion either of the printer's trademark, or, in black-letter books, of a rough woodcut, illustrative of the nature of the volume. The woodcuts have occasionally a rude kind of grace, with a touch of the classical taste of the early Renaissance surviving in extreme decay.

An excellent example is the title-page of 'Les Demandes d'amours, avec les responses joyeuses,' published by Jacques Moderne, at Lyon, 1540. There is a certain Pagan breadth and joyousness in the figure of Amor, and the man in the hood resembles traditional portraits of Dante.

There is more humour, and a good deal of skill, in the title-page of a book on late marriages and their discomforts, 'Les dictz et complainctes de trop Tard marie' (Jacques Moderne, Lyon, 1540), where we see the elderly and comfortable couple sitting gravely under their own fig-tree.

Jacques Moderne was a printer curious in these quaint devices, and used them in most of his books: for example, in 'How Satan and the God Bacchus accuse the Publicans that spoil the wine,' Bacchus and Satan (exactly like each other, as Sir Wilfrid Lawson will not be surprised to hear) are encouraging dishonest tavern-keepers to stew in their own juice in a caldron over a huge fire. From the same popular publisher came a little tract on various modes of sport, if the name of sport can be applied to the netting of fish and birds. The work is styled 'Livret nouveau auquel sont contenuz xxv receptes de prendre poissons et oiseaulx avec les mains.' A countryman clad in a goat's skin with the head and horns drawn over his head as a hood, is dragging ashore a net full of fishes. There is no more characteristic frontispiece of this black-letter sort than the woodcut representing a gallows with three men hanging on it, which illustrates Villon's 'Ballade des Pendus,' and is reproduced in Mr. John Payne's 'Poems of Master Francis