Long after 1657, when Joannes Maire ceased to print and sell books, several variants of his well known device - a man spading in a landscape below the motto Fac et spera - continued to be used by other printers and booksellers.
One of these variants, number 223 in the present catalogue, was used by Maire in 1642 and 1652, and, again, in 1654 in a book printed for Lowijs Elzevier. It also adorned, however, the title pages of at least eight editions available from the shop of another printer and bookseller, Pieter van der Aa, in the years between 1686 and 1690. It was furthermore to be found on eight editions published by Frederik Haaring in the period 1688-1698. Moreover, between 1668 and 1697 the same variant would be linked to at least six other names as well: Johannes van Bilderbeeck, Anthony Schouten, Cornelis Driehuysen, Abraham Gogat, Jacobus Moukee, and Leonardus Strick. Although it could perhaps indeed be established who exactly owned this small wood block after 1657, we can safely predict that the history of its ownership will be a complicated one.
From the late sixteenth century onward a device showing a personification of the Christian, more specifically the Calvinist Religion, was used throughout Europe by many different protestant printers and booksellers. The northern Netherlands of the seventeenth century alone produced some twenty variants of this device, ultimately deriving from an illustrated poem and emblem by Theodore de Bèze. On title pages it would become combined with the names of at least twenty different printers and booksellers.
The oldest Dutch variant, our number 742, was used by Bruyn Harmensz Schinckel in 1593. Without its typeset motto, Religio Christiana, it could be found on several of Schinckel's editions dated between 1601 and 1603. After Schinckel, the block would be associated with Jacob Lenaertsz Meyn, Jan Jacobs Palensteyn, and, finally, in 1634, with Volchard Jansz Camerlingh. Another variant of the same device, our number 387, was first used by Gerrit Jansz Arensteyn in 1634. More than half a century later we still come across the same block: in 1697 Jacob Claus had it printed on the title page of his edition of the works of Hans Engelbrecht van Brunswijk. Whatever historiographical issues this chequered pattern of usage may suggest, it alerts us first of all to the editorial problem of arranging the material in the present catalogue. On the more than 16,000 title pages in our photocopy archives we have identified the prints of some 2,000 different blocks and plates. So, on average, every block was printed eight times. On average too, every block has been associated with at least two different printers or booksellers, leaving us with well over 4,000 instances of a block linked to a name or a combination of names. The association of devices with different names naturally poses some problems for a catalogue - like this one - that is arranged alphabetically according to the names of printers and booksellers, most essentially those of redundancy and attribution.
Even though a device may seem to begin its life as a personal invention, appearances can deceive due to lack of information, or due to historical coincidence. In Dordrecht, in 1622, the printer Dirck van Vreeswijck used for the first time the device number 284 which conceals a pun on his last name. The picture shows Joseph fleeing the wife of Potiphar. Its motto Quantum quisque timet, tantum fugit contains Latin words for both halves of Vreeswijck's name: timere can be translated in Dutch as vrezen (to fear), while fugere (to flee) can be translated in Dutch as wijken . However, already in 1621, and also in Dordrecht, this device had been used for van Haemstede's martyrology published by Joris Waters, Zacharias Jochimsz, and François Boels. To be sure, the appearance of the device in this publication could very well indicate that the actual printer was Dirck van Vreeswijck, but our prime source, the book at hand, is silent on this question.
How careful we must be when inferring the ownership of a device from internal evidence like an obvious pun on someone's name can be shown with many examples. An instructive one is that of device 453. If the only print we would have of this block came from a book published by Philippus Bonus in Leiden in 1673, we could be tempted to conclude that this device was originally designed as a pun on his latinized surname. Bonus, then, would not be a translation of the Dutch name 'de Goede', but a rather more trivial latinization of the name 'Boon'. The word boon is a Dutch translation of the Latin faba (bean)...said to have flourished in the motto of 453: Dum stabant pisae sic viguere fabae. Although this could very well be the pun Bonus intended, his device was actually an objet trouvé rather than an inventio , because the block originally was the device of the chamber of rhetoric 'De Jonge Batavieren',
W.M.H. Hummelen, Amsterdams Toneel in het begin van de gouden eeuwy, p. 239, n.119
Jan Philipsz van Steenwegen used it for them on a play by P.Nootmans in 1629. In the same year Jan Pietersz Waelpot printed another piece by Nootmans with the same device, and Abraham Waelpot used it in 1652 and 1659.
It will be clear, even from a few examples, that reconstructing the ownership or usage sequence of a device can be a puzzling affair. Internal indications may be misleading, while the consecutive, or even simultaneous association of different names with a device can hide a Gordian knot of historical realities. To cut the knot we decided to include every instance of a device's use known to us, meaning that we create a separate catalogue entry for every owner - or rather user - of a block. We also state for every user in which years he or she actually used it, and how often it was used per year. By thus mirroring the recurrent use of a block the catalogue provides the reader with a better opportunity for critical assessment of our data than if we were to present a more polished state of our attributions . This strategy leads to catalogue entries that will occasionally raise some bibliographer's eyebrows, because we may deliberately ignore what seems so obvious, as with Vreeswijck's device. This will be most evident in those cases where a bookseller's name is joined to a device that is actually that of the printer, without the name of the printer being mentioned anywhere in the book, or where, vice versa, the printer's name is combined with the bookseller's device. In all instances the device has been catalogued under the name found in the book.
Still, even though this approach aims at preventing premature attributions, we cannot altogether avoid attributions. Nor do we want to. Whenever more than one name is found in a book, be it on its title page or in a colophon, we have to choose under which primary name the device is actually presented. Although decisions on this point are sometimes completely arbitrary, the usage of devices and internal evidence about the names of printers, streets and shops can provide information on which to build an attribution. Whenever available, the STCN's data on this are presented with the catalogue entries. Devices in books that are printed anonymously are, as a rule, not attributed. An exception was made for the period 1550-1600. Here our policy has been that of the STCN: we have tried to incorporate the information provided by Valkema Blouw, whose catalogue became available in the very final stages of our data collection.
Ex literarum studiis immortalitatem acquiri ...'To reach immortality through the study of letters.' While some wishful thinking and commercial interest are mixed with this humanistic creed, printers and booksellers throughout Europe sincerely confessed to it and gave vent to their beliefs by means of their devices. In the Northern Netherlands we come across several variants of the device. The motto may be abbreviated to Studiis immortalitatem acquirimus , paraphrased as Literae immortalitatem pariunt or played with as in Vita sine litteris mors est . The main connotations of the imagery accompanying these statements are immortality and fame, visualized either by a phoenix, a personification of Fame, a Triton trumpeting on a shell, or Minerva, alone or with Mercury. Obviously, such a widespread sentiment cannot be traced to a single source. At best we may try to establish which literary and/or visual expressions were comparatively successful in disseminating it. It will hardly come as a surprise that, judging by the number of devices inspired by its motto and its imagery, one of the popular expressions of the theme was an emblem by Andreas Alciatus.
Alciatus's book of emblems certainly was not the only book of moral instructions, proverbial expressions and attractive imagery that printers and booksellers explored in their search for a catching device. Emblems and devices invented by Claude Paradin, Paolo Giovio, Roemer Visscher, Hadrianus Junius, Jacob Cats, to name but a few; adages collected by Erasmus; quotable phrases from classical sources like Vergil and Seneca, and, of course, biblical citations: all could be exploited by book producers who wanted to make a statement about their religious convictions or to demonstrate the quality of their education and their company. Sometimes devices testify to a ready knowledge of these sources and a high level of inventiveness in adapting what was found there to the particular situation of a printer or bookseller. Devices of this type can be found in the catalogue under names like Corverius, van Waesberge, van der Wouw, Wachtendonck, Cloppenburgh, Ravesteyn, and Brandt. Sometimes, however, devices are simply ornamental. They may also be symbolical in the elementary way of a 'Hausmarke', limit themselves to a decorative play with their owner's initials, or use the arms of an academic, cultural or political organization. Devices like this may just as well be associated with the names mentioned above, but we also find them under names like Allardus Gauter, Gheraert Leeu, Marten Gerbrantsz or Pieter van der Slaart. The simple fact that the arms of a city or a university, emblems from a widespread emblem book, images from shop signs, or someone's initials could be turned into a device shows that any effort at defining what a printer's device ' is ', would be irrelevant, because it is the use that makes the device. Therefore, other visual elements - tail-pieces, title vignettes, marginal illustrations, or initials - incidentally used to provide information about a book's origin, were included in the catalogue as well. The criterion of usage proved an acceptable guide to decisions about the inclusion of devices in the present corpus. Perhaps users may find it was applied too liberally, but even then the criterion remains unambiguous and clear.
Slightly less selfevident is the history of the corpus upon which this catalogue is based. When data collection started, some fifteen years ago, the ambition was almost exclusively bibliographical as the initiative came from the STCN. The assumption was that an informal photocopy archive of printer's devices with access to their iconography should be useful as a tool for the identification of printers and booksellers. And it was. However, the systematic collection of large quantities of pictorial material is somewhat of a terra incognita even for most art historians. It is, therefore, understandable that it took some time for the team of bibliographers to develop criteria for the selection of the imagery found on title pages since, obviously, not every picture found there is a printer's device. Once or twice, during that process, a device may have escaped notice. On the other hand, sometimes a pictures was archived that, on closer inspection, was decided not to be a device. At present (Autumn of 1998) the STCN database contains some 16,800 references to printer's devices. Since this figure includes references to material that has been left out of the present catalogue, for example 18th century editions, it matches very closely our own count of circa 16,500 prints. So, even though a complete comparison of the two lists of references is simply not feasible, we are confident that only very rarely a device will have completely slipped through the mazes. In spite of incidental, or, maybe better, accidental divergencies the devices project is completely dependent on STCN, so all material included in our catalogue was found in the libraries whose collections were indexed by STCN: the Royal Library, the University Library of Amsterdam, and the University Library of Leiden. The devices we have received from Utrecht University Library - which is still uncompletely catalogued - are on principle not included here. Nor were devices included of printers or booksellers who started their business after 1700.
The Utrecht printer Abraham van Herwijck associated himself with his Old Testament namesake and chose a picture of Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac as his device. Another Abraham, namely Abraham van Blancken, used a device showing some moles burrowing a hill. His choice, at first sight surprising, is explained, at least in part, by his address, the Molsteegh - 'Mole Alley' - in Amsterdam. A third one, Abraham Biestkens, also of Amsterdam, referred to the 'church under the cross' by way of his device, which shows a lily surrounded by thorny shrubs. His choice of device is directly related to the name of his shop and the sign with which it was adorned: 'De Lelye onder de doornen'. All kinds of associations, simple ones but sometimes very intricate ones as well, could stimulate the invention of a device. The names of streets and shops can help us to understand the choice of a device. We are grateful for the Royal Library's permission to include the information on this subject that has been gathered over the years to build the STCN's printers thesaurus. Together with the name of the city, and the period of activity they are the core of the header element of each section, preceding the actual entries for the devices used by a particular producer. Sometimes a few notes, usually about some form of cooperation or family relations, are added. After this summary biographical information the entries for each device linked to the printer or bookseller are listed. A number is assigned to them within the section. More importantly though, they are arranged according to the comprehensive numerical listing of all the blocks. These 'device numbers', although randomly assigned, are meaningful since they are the unique indentifiers of blocks and plates. They can be employed to retrieve in a very direct manner all instances of the use of a particular block. This can be done either by consulting the printed concordance or by querying the CD-ROM.
The elements of the catalogue entries are as follows:
For every instance of use of a block a new entry is made and every entry has its own illustration. The reproduction of a block is repeated to reduce the need to browse the catalogue in pursuit of hundreds of cross references. As a consequence some pictures reappear at various places throughout the catalogue, occasionally a dozen times or more. Only when this policy would lead to the repeated printing of the same block within a
single section, a different solution was chosen. This would be the case when the use of a device was registered for a particular printer or bookseller but also for that same individual in combination with others. Whenever this happens, the instances of combined use are mentioned at the end of the main entry, and not entered or illustrated separately. The illustrations are prints of digital images. All scans - partly of photographs, partly of photocopies - were made at the same resolution, 200 dpi. However, as one can see, the width of all printed reproductions is equal, so there is a varying relation between the size of a reproduction and the actual size of the block. Most prints are of reduced size, a few are actually enlargements. The full size images are to be found on the CD-ROM, where the user can compare their dimensions and check them against a ruler.
Iconography 1: free text description
Of every block a free text description has been written. Although it may seem redundant to classify the pictorial elements of iconographical interest with Iconclass as well as describe them in prose, these two components of an entry are actually complementary. A reproduction needs to be accompanied by a description of its subject. The systematic classification of subject matter is a prerequisite for building a systematic index on the iconography of the devices. Wherever necessary, the description explains the relationship between the distinct iconographic elements to which an Iconclass notation is assigned. A feature of the textual descriptions intended to serve those who do not read Dutch, is the inclusion of the Dutch translations of those words that hint at the name of a printer, or his address or shop sign. Often these puns are pretty obvious, because the keywords are present in the motto, e.g. Cloppenburgh's 'Siet ick sta aen die deure ende cloppe ' illustrated with a man knocking on the door of a castle ('burcht'). Sometimes it is helpful to know the Dutch translation of an English word. When a printer named Bot uses a picture of a flounder for his device it is useful to know that 'bot' is a Dutch word for flounder.
Iconography 2: Iconclass notations
This introduction is not a suitable place to explain at length what Iconclass is. An extensive explanation of the Iconclass system is to be found in the Iconclass topic of the CD-ROM's helpfile. Information is also made available online, on the Iconclass website. Moreover, a substantial number of catalogues using Iconclass, both on paper and on CD-ROM, has been published during the last decade or so, exposing a wide audience to the system.
However, since vocabularies are generally used according to rules that are specific to a project, a few remarks are in place about the way we have applied Iconclass to the printer's devices. This holds even more strongly as the research of the Image & Word project has considerably affected our views on their iconography. In this project several types of sources - selected emblem books, printer's devices, occasional engravings, title pages, Erasmian texts - are digitized; their texts are transcribed and SGML-tagged; their iconography is indexed with Iconclass. As a result of this project, which has embedded our research on printer's devices for a decade now, we have gained a better grip on the contents of a number of important emblem books and of texts like Erasmus's Adagiorum Chiliades .
Being better informed about what we like to call 'the emblematic game', we have included much more detail in our iconographic encoding of the devices. Many notations were also added on the basis of an interpretation of the mottoes. A few examples should clarify this approach and thus give you an idea about the kind of iconographic data that have been recorded. The first device mentioned in this introduction was number 223, originally used by Joannes Maire. In spite of its apparent simplicity, any description of its subject matter will of course depend on the purpose and the frame of mind of the indexer. However, there won't be much debate about the fact that it shows a man spading in a hilly landscape. Over his head we read Fac et spera as well as the name of God in the shape of a Jahweh tetragram. Spading men occur in more than fifty different printer's devices, while the Latin roots "spe.." and "labor..." are to be found in more than seventy of them. Whatever the implications of these numbers may be, they make it unlikely that a spading man in a landscape with a text like "work and hope" above him, is just a realistic depiction of the hard labour of a seventeenth century peasant. Without speculating about wider context or deeper meaning, we do feel justified in assuming that anyone researching the imagery of Labour or Hope could be interested in a picture such as this. Therefore we include those more abstract concepts in our description.
Thus you will find this device of Maire with the following Iconclass notations:
46A170 Labour
5(+12) Abstract Ideas and Concepts (+ abstract concept represented by male figure)
56D1(+3) Hope; 'Speranza', 'Speranza delle fatiche' (Ripa) (+ symbolical representation of concept)
Of course it is also to be found with those notations that describe the spading man, the landscape with hills, the olive-and palm-branch framing the scene, or the tetragram from which a radiance emanates.
11C13 tetragram (in Roman or Hebrew script) ~ symbol of God the Father
22C31 radiance emanating from persons or things
25G3(OLIVE-TREE)(+22) trees: olive-tree (+ branch, stick)
25G3(PALM-TREE)(+22) trees: palm-tree (+ branch, stick)
25H11 mountains
47I122 spading ~ soil cultivation
It is explained - and demonstrated in action - that the hierarchical organization of Iconclass also ensures retrieval of this picture through keywords such as God, Christian religion, symbol, supernatural light, ray of light, soil, farmer, cultivation, agriculture, and many more. A small detail of the picture that could easily go unnoticed is the bird on a branch facing the man. While this could be seen as a naturalistic addition - e.g. a small bird waiting for the seeds that will be sown shortly - it can also be read as the visual counterpart of the motto's exhortation to hope. A small exploration of the emblem books we have indexed in much the same way as these devices, informs us that the crow can be the attribute of Hope - 'corvix, avis tributa spei '. As such it is included in the various picturae of Alciatus's emblem In simulacrum Spei , 'the imagery of Hope', and commented on by humanists such as Claude Mignault. It is the bird's call - cras, cras - that triggers the association, because in Latin this call means 'tomorrow, tomorrow'... Needless to say that it remains to be seen whether the inventor of the device or contemporary observers of it, would connect it to this little piece of ornithological lore, dating back to antiquity. These reservations, however, do not diminish the potential usefulness of our encoding of the picture with the aforementioned notation 56D1(+3) and with the concept: 25F32(CROW)(+1) song-birds (with NAME) - animals used symbolically We may be wrong in interpreting the bird's presence, which occurs in 25 out of 28 versions of the device found to date. Still, given the modest position of our description in the historiographical argument about the picture's meaning - it is nothing but a first step - no harm is done. In much the same manner the picture of a turtle with wings Our number 1312 , accompanied by the motto Festina lente (Make haste slowly) is encoded with the notations for the opposing speeds of motion - slowness and haste - which are at the heart of the device's meaning: 51M1(+3) Fast Motion - symbolical representation of concept 51MM1(+3) Slow Motion - symbolical representation of concept Moreover, we include references to emblem books, the Adages of Erasmus, and to other literature as well, wherever we think this would constitute a helpful hint to the user. Thus the following concepts are added to the description of the winged turtle:
83(ERASMUS, Adagiorum chiliades II i 1) specific works of literature (with AUTHOR, Title)
86(FESTINA LENTE) proverbs, sayings, etc. (with TEXT)
Two things should be clearly understood about this enrichment of the iconographic description. These references to literature do not imply that we think we have identified ' the ' source of a device. In some cases devices are indeed straightforward copies of emblems. More often, however, the ideas expressed by an emblem, and the visual and literary means used in the process, are adapted to the situation of a new user and to the message he or she wants to communicate. The cultural substratum on which the emblematic game is played, is far too complex and the information about the genesis of specific devices too sparse to tolerate a reductionist approach. As a matter of fact, of the possible relations between devices and emblems, the straightforward 'model-copy' relation is not the most instructive. In much the same vein, a word of warning is in place about the symbolic interpretations of which the identification of a crow as the attribute of Hope is an example. The potential for conveying meaning, even of 'simple' iconographic elements like crows and turtles, is by no means exhausted once we have identified one of their aspects. The corpus of printer's devices itself provides the means to falsify such simplistic assumptions, as it shows that turtles could also be used to express independence: carrying their house on their back, they are self-sufficient animals that are ' overal thuys ' (Anywhere at home). Furthermore, their Dutch name 'schildpad' could stimulate the imagination in a direct way, as is illustrated by the device of Amelis Jansz van Paddenburgh which shows a turtle in the foreground with a castle (burcht) in the distance. As lack of speed also characterizes snails, it's not surprising that they too could advertise a printer's claim that his work did not suffer from error-producing haste.
The gist of what has been said here about the status of our references to abstract ideas and emblem literature through Iconclass codes also applies to part of the codes identifying biblical sources. There too, mottoes play an important role when we have to decide the usefulness and accurateness of a reference to a particular text. One example should suffice to illustrate this: a device that exists in more than a dozen variants shows an open book encircled by a quotation from Joshua 1:8 ' Laet het Boeck deser Wet van uwen monde niet comen ' (This book of the law must ever be on your lips). Whether or not the open book of the device should be identified with "this book of the law" is not the main issue here. Important is that applying the most approriate Iconclass concept '71E51 Joshua communicating with God (in general)' could suggest that the biblical hero himself is depicted rather than the content of his communication with God... The reason we decided to assign possibly confusing notations to a device like this is that, properly warned in this introduction, users may still benefit from these references. It may seem an odd thing to say, after having assigned more than 20,000 Iconclass notations to the corpus, but given our limited systematic access to the iconographic and textual details of sources like emblem books, there still is much room for improvement and expansion. Our descriptions, it cannot be emphasized enough, may suffice to awaken the historical opponent, but not to put him to rest.
Mottoes
Interesting in their own right as they may be, the mottoes of printer's devices are important for additional reasons as well. Obviously, they help us understand the iconography of a device. A motto, however, may also clarify why a particular theme would be chosen by a particular person. When Cleopas and Peter realise they have been talking to Jesus on the way to Emmaus, they say, according to Luke: ' nonne cor nostrum ardens erat in nobis dum loqueretur in via ' (' did we not feel our hearts on fire as he talked with us on the road '). The Dutch translation of the phrase ' ardens erat ' contains the root 'brand', which gave Marten Jansz Brandt a reason to choose this theme for his device. This is confirmed by the fact that Jacob de Meester, who used the same subject a few years before Brandt, quoted Matthew 18:20 - ' waerder twee of drie in miin naem vergadert ziin ' - instead of Luke. Mottoes may, furthermore, help us to distinguish variants of a device, for example because of a variation in the way they are spelled. Whenever it was considered appropriate or useful, the motto of a device would be exploited to improve or expand the iconographic description, as has been explained above. To help the identification of blocks a literal transcription of the mottoes, preserving orthographical variations and upper and lower case, was included. Normalized versions of the mottoes were included too to make sure that texts that are basically identical would be easily retrieved.
Initials and monograms
Under this heading we have gathered the initials of printers, booksellers, draughtsmen and woodcutters. Whenever it seemed possible to assign initials or a monogram to a bookseller or printer, we have done so, taking into account that our chances of correctly identifying the letters hidden in an ornate monogram depend the number of times it is used by the same printer. Systematic research to identify the artists' signatures was beyond the scope of this catalogue. Suggestions of that nature are mostly traditional and intended to allow the easy retrieval of pictures with identical initials or monograms. Notwithstanding the moderate status of devices they can supplement what is known about the oeuvre of artists such as the van Sichems and the Serwouters.
Years and frequency of use
An important addition to the types of information brought together in the pilot study is the survey of a device's use by a particular printer or bookseller. For every user of a device we have recorded in which years he or she employed it and how often it was used per year.
In the past century important repertories have been composed of the printer's devices of France, England, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, and, most recently, Belgium. So it was about time a similar effort was devoted to the printer's devices of the Netherlands, after all one of Europe's major centres of book production. Although its predecessors differ among themselves in scope, method and ambition, our survey, a latecomer in the field, is characterised by a few features that set it apart from all of them.
It will be immediately noted that it is published on two different media, paper and plastic. Publishing the repertory both as a book and in an electronic form is symptomatic of the central role computerization has played in most stages of the research and of the editorial process. We do think this role would warrant a detailed comment, but here we must limit ourselves to those aspects that have immediately affected the contents of the catalogue. Most fundamentally, our selection of material is determined by the progress of the retrospective national bibliography of the Netherlands, a computerized catalogue from its inception. Eventually, this Short Title Catalogue of books printed in the Netherlands (STCN) will include 'all' books published before 1800 in the (present) Netherlands and books in Dutch that were published elsewhere, with the obvious exception of (present) Belgium. Since our project follows in the wake of this STCN project we include the devices dated before 1700, and now found in the collections of the Royal Library and the university libraries of Amsterdam and Leiden. At present the books printed before 1700 of university library of Utrecht are being catalogued, as are those of the Royal Library that were printed between 1700 and 1800.