#henry bynneman

[duardius]

a london ornament

the first illustration displays digital reissue of monotype’s recutting [english monotype 218] of an arabesque unit, which d.l. vervliet attributes to robert granjon¹. vervliet found its first display in the office of london printer henry bynneman in 1569 [2nd illustration²], & notes: granjon founts had arrived around this time in london; exiled antwerp punchcutter françois guyot was residing in london & «is known to have provided types to printer john day»³. vervliet gets his dates from oastler⁴, but oastler only mentions that day was among the first london printers to use guyot types, & françois’ son, gabriel guyot, «may have been instrumental» in bringing to london the guyot double pica italic. oastler does give evidence that guyot, his family, & servants resided in john day’s house in 1568 (françois returned to antwerp in 1570, where he died shortly thereafter). vervliet dismisses guyot as the ornament’s designer on aesthetic grounds.⁵  as evidenced by his italics guyot was an admirer of granjon; indeed, harry carter views guyot’s types as «revolutionary in effect, bringing an archaic regional typography almost into line with Paris» ⁶. the oldest know type specimen by a founder who was not also a printer⁷ is confirmed by carter to show the types of françois guyot; the sheet survived for having been bound in with a set of elizabethan proclamations—arguably, guyot prepared the sheet as advertisement of his types to london printers⁸: on it appears a solitary ornament, a vine leaf [3rd illustration⁹]. granjon cut many vine leaves—no surprise to find guyot’s version. however, i must disagree with vervliet on one point: bynneman’s ornament i do not find particularly granjonesque, & the engraving of guyot’s vine leaf seems consistent with the hand that cut bynneman’s ornament.  it is conceivable that day held strikes of guyot ornaments—his property or that of guyot—to cast sorts for use in his office or to sell to other london printers, such as bynneman.

¹ hendrik d.l. vervliet, Granjon’s Flowers, oak knoll press, new castle (de), 2016, p99. ² section from the border on the title-page of: st anselm, Epistolæ duæ ... ad Nicholaum Papam primum de cęlibatu cleri., henry bynneman, london, 1569. with thanks to the british library for permitting my examination of their copy [G.11998. 1360.a.16.]. ³ ibid. p95. ⁴ c.l. oastler, John Day | the Elizabethan Printer, oxford bibliographical society, ocaasional publication no. 10, oxford, 1975, pp. 34–5. reprint of oastler’s 1965 oxford thesis [based upon archival records].  ⁵ op. cit., p95. ⁶ harry carter, «The Types of Christopher Plantin», The Library, volume s5-XI, issue 3, 1956, p177. ⁷ specimen of 1565—only known copy, folger shakespeare library. ⁸ op. cit., carter. a tentative attribution was given by a.f. johnson in t.b. reed, A History of the Old English Letter Foundries, ed. a.f. johnson, faber&faber, london, 1952, pp. 91–2. ⁹ section of no. 1 in john dreyfus, Type Specimen Facsimiles, bowes & bowes and putnam, london, 1963.

[punkcardiganlife]

In London 1577, Henry Bynneman printed a book titled "The Gardeners Labyrinth: Containing a discourse of the gardeners life, in the yearly trauels to be bestovved on his plot of earth, for the vse of a garden : with instructions for the choise of seedes, apte times for sowing, setting, planting, & watering, and the vessels and instruments seruing to that vse and purpose : wherein are set forth diuers herbers, knottes and mazes, cunningly handled for the beautifying of gardens : also the physike benefit of eche herbe, plant, and floure, with the vertues of the distilled waters of euery of them, as by the sequele may further appeare. Gathered ovt of the best approved writers of gardening, husbandrie, and physicke." and written by Dydymus Mountaine [aka Thomas Hill]. As the title suggests, the book is about gardening, with extra notes about uses of medicinal plants, and compiles the work of nearly 30 authors of antiquity, including Cicero and Galene.

The title page has the signature "John Edwards of Stanstie" on it, but it is difficult to know which John Edwards the signature belongs to, since there are far too many persons in the area with that name and most of them are related. Stanstie (today spelled Stansty) is a town near Wrexham in the county of Debingenshire in the northern part of Wales.

In the same year the book was published, John Edwards of Stanstie (d. 1635) built an estate house called Plas Issa, and it’s possible that this book was bought for a library there or to facilitate the creation of a garden. His second-eldest son, also called John Edwards (b. 1612), was a court physician to King Charles I of England, and may have made the majority of the annotations in the book, since they primarily appear next to the parts about the medicinal uses of plants. There was a prominent family in the same area of Wales with the name Middleton, and Edward Howell Middleton could have gotten ownership of the book through this connection.

It is not clear how this book made its way to the National Agricultural Library or even the United States in general. The NAL doesn't have any information on the provenance of the book beyond that it was acquired sometime in the 1900s.

One of the most interesting parts of the book (in my opinion) are the "knottes" or knotted gardens, which were gardens planted in complicated and intricate designs. Below is an example of a few of these designs, which I am telling myself would not be something that I would be able to maintain in my yard, no matter how pretty it looks.

[une-sanz-pluis]

Alexander Neville, Norvicus: The City of Norwich (Text and Translation), published and issued from the press of Henry Bynneman, in the year of Humankind's Salvation 1575, in I. Walton, C. Wilkins-Jones, & P. Wilson (Eds.), The Histories of Alexander Neville (1544–1614): A New Translation of Kett's Rebellion and The City of Norwich (Boydell & Brewer, 2019)

[rhianna]

English printers' ornaments by Henry R. Plomer

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/70528

In the following pages an attempt has been made to give an outline history of the introduction of ornaments into books printed by English printers and the subsequent growth and development of the art down to the present day.

Printers’ ornaments include head and tail pieces, initial letters, borders to title-pages or text, and decorative blocks such as those which were used freely by the sixteenth century printer, Henry Bynneman, and others. Printers’ devices, being in the nature of trade marks, have no place in this volume, as, although decorative in themselves, they were not used simply for the sake of embellishing the page.

Although it is generally believed that English printers were on the whole inartistic, and that many of the best[viii] designs were borrowed from foreign countries, there is no lack of good material for a work on English printers’ ornaments from the fifteenth onwards to the nineteenth century. Many famous names of special printers come to mind in early English books of the sixteenth century, such as Denham, Bynneman, Wolfe, and John Day.