1590: John Day

Click here to enlarge the image. [Source].

Source:

Title: ‘A booke of Christian prayers collected out of the ancient writers, and best learned in our time, worthy to be read with an earnest mind of all Christians, in these dangerous and troublesome daies, that God for Christes sake will yet still be mercifull unto us.’
Author: Richard Daye
Publisher: -
Printer: Richard Yardley and Peter Short
Illustrator: -
Engraver: -
Location: -
Year: 1590
Links: [USTC], [Scan], [Scan].

Comments:

The 1578 edition does not contain these illustrations.

Nigel Roche (2000, page 47): ‘John Day issued the second edition of A book of Christian prayers, (Queen Elizabeth’s Prayerbook) in 1578, and in this - as in the editions of 1581 and 1590 - are to be found amongst the borders, two small engravings of a compositor and of a printer at work, part of a set on the theme of a Dance of Death, with appropriate mottoes. The pair appear on the versos of f.90, 108 and 128. These are the only sixteenth-century English representations that cannot be traced back to and earlier continental source.’ ... ‘The mottoes are: ‘Leaue setting thy page: spent is thine age’; ‘Pressman goe play: printing must stay.’. At the foot of the page is a figure on a tomb, with an inscription ‘We Printers wrote with wisedomes pen: She liues for aie, we die as men’.

Technique:

Woodcut

Publications

Falconer Madan (1895) ‘Early representations of the printing-Press with especial reference to that by Stradanus.’, Bibliographica. Volume 1, page 499-502. (Illustration 22).

Nigel Roche (2000) The iconography of the printing office to 1700. Unpublished MA thesis. Library and Information Studies, University College London. (Illustration #Q).

Samuel C. Chew (1945) ‘The Iconography of “A Book of Christian Prayers” (1578) Illustrated.’, Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 3 (May, 1945), pp. 293-305.