Читать книгу Thomas Berthelet, Royal Printer and Bookbinder to Henry VIII., King of England онлайн

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Judging from the use of the greyhound as one of the royal supporters, none of these stamps were cut after 1528, and Mr. Weale considers they may have been first used as early as 1485. I described and figured all of them in “The Queen” of June 20, 1891.

Although books bearing these designs are now generally considered non-royal, they are nevertheless frequently put forward as having belonged to Henry VII. and his successors, and in many places and catalogues they will be found so described. They are fine and well-cut stamps, and are impressed sometimes on sheep, but usually on fine calf leather; and no doubt if it were not for the existence upon them of trade-marks, private monograms, and city emblems, there would be much in favour of such a supposition. It may be that they were allowed to be used by members of the Stationers Company, at that time of much importance.

Immediately after the general discontinuance of large panel stamps with royal heraldic designs, Thomas Berthelet became royal printer and binder to Henry VIII., and the earliest of his large stamps bears some resemblance to the stamp just described as having two portcullises dependent from the lower part of the shield. It is possible that Berthelet took his design from this stamp. But whatever Berthelet’s early bindings may have been like, the distinguishing characteristic of his work is the gold-tooling, properly so called, which he was, so far as is yet known, the first Englishman to use. A large portion of the printing he did was in the form of proclamations, single sheets, and other official matters, which were never bound; but as time went on, and the king, with his Tudor love of magnificence, perhaps to some extent regretting his own destruction of the beautiful and valuable Mediæval bindings, feeling that something more ornamental than the sombre panel stamps was wanted, Berthelet, being already royal printer, was no doubt further commissioned to make decorative royal bindings. This he did on both velvet and satin, materials already royal favourites, as well as using his new art of leather gilding in as decorative a manner as possible.