Excerpt from The Bookplate Annual: For 1922 When Hilprand Brandenburg of Biberach hit upon the happy device of marking those books which he presented to the Carthusian monastery of Buxheim with a hand-colored, woodcut printed label bearing his arms he originated, or at least gave impetus to a fashion which has held the interest of booklovers for more than four hundred and fifty years, and it is quite unlikely that the time will ever come when the bookplate will lose its hold on the affections of those to whom books are precious things, or when it will ever cease to command the interest of printlovers as well. Quite aside from their association interest, bookplates form an index to the progress of graphic art from the Sixteenth century to the present day, and because this is so, it seems curious that so few bookplates should have been engraved in chiaroscuro, a genre so admirably fitted to their purpose. One turns, therefore, with especial interest to the woodcut bookplates designed, engraved and printed by an American artist, Allen Lewis, wherein chiaroscuro has been employed so successfully. For the moment let us take note of this particular style of engraving. Not long after Erhard Ratdolt of Augsburg set up his printing shop in Venice in 1476 and took into partnership 'Bernardus pictor, ' also of Augsburg, and 'Petrus loslein' of Langenzenn, he produced some of the most beautiful woodcut books to be found in extant specimens of the early Italian press. Among these books was John of Holywood's Sphaera Mundi (edition of 1485) with diagrams printed in color, - black, red and olive, which appear to be the earliest examples we have of book illustrations printed in color. This work led to the development of colorprinting; establishing, as it did, the possibility of accurate registry necessary for the desired color effects in printing. Ratdolt returned to Augsburg and there printed the Brixen Missal in 1496, a work which marked a further step in color-printing. In Wittenberg Lucas Cranach the Elder was experimenting with color woodcuts as early as 1507, as we may see in his Saint George on Horseback, in the British Museum Print Room collection, a print in black and gold on paper tinted blue. Such prints by Lucas Cranach were quickly followed by the still more ingenious ones by Hans Burgkmair of Augsburg; for in his Saint George and in his Portrait of the Emperor Maximilian, Burgkmair dispensed with the block which Cranach employed to print white, obtaining the white of his high lights by cutting away parts of the tint block to permit the white paper to show through, thus rendering white ink unnecessary. Also Burgkmair's use of tint blocks did away with the necessity of tinting the paper by hand, as in Lucas Cranach's first method. These innovations, however, may have been due to Jost de Negker, Burgkmair's block engraver, instead of to Burgkmair himself. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.