Section 3

Incipt and explicit (for incunabula)

The Herball does not contain either an incipit or an explicit.

Colophon Size and Format (folio, quaro, octavo, etc)

            The Herball does not contain a Colophon. All information about the publication is included on the title page. Carter and Barker (2006) note that this is quite common for books produced after the early sixteenth century.  The binding of the book measures 34cm x 25cm, just slightly larger than the pages. While it is not possible to determine the number of folds in the sheets, the size and shape of the book mark it as a folio rather than a quaro or an octavo.

Page layout

            The design and construction of the pages is very clean, with the text closely spaced, using a small but easily readable font. Each plant is afforded its own chapter, with the majority being around 1 ½ – 2 pages in length. Each chapter contained a similar collection of information about its plant. Information included the name of the plant; a general description of it appearance; the places in which it grows (mud, loam, etc.); the time of year at which it grows; any different varieties (e.g.: red, yellow, and white roses); and the medical vertues of the plant. The vertues, or the medicinal properties of the plant, were so important to the text that a standalone reference section was included to assist the reader in cross referencing plants with similar uses.

Pages 616 and 617 from 1633 edition

Occasionally there is a page containing only pictures. These pages show between two and six related plants which were described on the previous pages. However, as most chapters contained at least one illustration placed within the text, these pages are the exception rather than the rule.

The margins left by the printers are small.  With the pages measuring 33cm x 24cm the margins are 2cm on the head and tail, 3cm at the fore-edge, and 2cm at the hinge.

Foliation/pagination

While pagination had become the standard practice of printers in the years preceding the production of the Herball (Carter and Barker, 2006) the book contains both foliated and paginated sections. In a style that would be familiar to modern readers, both the introductions at the beginning and reference sections found at the end of the book are foliated, albeit rather inconsistently. Sections are described using a ¶ symbol. The first section is labeled with a single ¶, the second with ¶¶ and so forth. Where there are multiple folios in a section the folios are marked ¶1, ¶2…

The text of the Herball is broken into three unequal books. These sections were consistently paginated. The heading was printed as follows:

LIB. 2.                                                  Of the History of Plants                                            463

[Book number]                                                 [Title]                                                      [Page number]

Printer’s device – type (i.e. Roman, Italic, Gothic, etc.)

While the dominant font used for the publication was Roman (Arber, 1938) there were a number of different typefaces used throughout the book. The Herball, being a book concerned with the description of plants from around the world, provided the names of plants in numerous languages. This often led to prose based lists that contained a number of different languages, often times in the same sentence. The printer, in order to aid the reader, developed a system by which each language was printed in its own font consistently throughout the book. It appears that the choice of type was developed based on common type faces used at the time by printers in the languages’ nation of origin. Examples of this would be the use of a Gothic font for names in German, or an Italic font for Italian names. This device is clearly visible in the discussion of the Cat Tail plant on page 46 (Gerard and Johnson, 1633).

Color printing / Rubication

There is no color printing or rubication found anywhere in the book.

Decoration (MS or Printed)

Page 1616 and 1617 describing forms of coral

 

As the Herball is an edited edition of an older book, it is relevant to discuss the origins of the decorations of the first edition. While expanded, the scheme of decoration for the 1633 edition is principally the same.

All of the illustrations in the Herball were produced by means of woodblock printing, this being standard practice at the time (Harkins, 2007). The first edition contained just over 1800 illustrations, of which 16 were original to the volume. The remaining images were created using the same block used in the production of renowned German botanist Jakob Theodor’s Taberneamontanus (Anderson, 1977).  These blocks, of much higher quality than those produced by Gerard himself, were procured via a loan through the printer. Of the 16 original woodblocks, the most noted is the potato found on page 158 (Gerard, 1597); its inclusion marks a first for English language texts (Pavord, 2005).

Most, of the 1631 pages of plant text found in the 1633 edition of the Herball include at least one illustration. The majority of the woodcuts used in Johnson’s updated edition came from a stock used in the production of herbals by the published Plantin (Arber, 1938). Just as the 1597 edition had broken new ground by being the first to include an illustration of a potato, the 1633 edition was the first introduction to the banana (Pavord, 2005). Johnson had received the plant as a gift and displayed the fruit in front of his shop, “where they caused a sensation (p. 346)” among the London public.

There are other forms of decoration found in the 1633 Herball aside from images of plants. Decorative headers can be found at the beginning of all introductory information as well as each of the indexes at the end of the book. These headers are comparable to those used in the production of the first folios of Shakespeare (as reprinted in Daiches, 1974) produced 10 years earlier. Additionally, each of the 816 chapters is begun with a stylized capitol also made using woodblock printing.