The flower is one of the typical passions of the human spirit. One of the wheels of its contrivance. One of its routine metaphors . . .
To liberate ourselves, let’s liberate the flower. Let’s change our minds about it . . .
By some devolative revolution, Let us return it, safe from all definition, to what it is. – But what, then? – Quite obviously, a conceptacle.
(Francis Ponge, ‘Changed Opinion as to Flowers’).Printers’ flowers are the designs produced in printed books through the use of type-ornament. That is, they result from the pressure on paper of individual pieces of inked type that bear decorative designs rather than letter symbols. Used individually, printers’ flowers, which are also called fleurons, are as old as moveable type itself, but, in the middle of the sixteenth century, designs were developed that were intended to be used not as single units, but as composed into serial patterns. So combined, printers’ flowers could be used to make ornaments and borders of any size and shape: and within a few years of their first appearance, in Venice in 1552, they were being used by printers across Europe. Henry Denham may have been the first English printer to use flowers in combination, which he did for the first time in 1564; by 1566 their use in England was widespread. But there is, to date, no comprehensive index of English printers’ flowers; and in this chapter I refer to individual designs using the numbers assigned to them by Francis Meynell and Stanley Morison in their foundational article of 1923, ‘Printers’ Flowers and Arabesques’.