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The subject of printers’ ornaments can be defined in its stricter meaning as the decoration of books as apart from book illustration, the aim of both decoration and ornamentation being to heighten the attraction of the letterpress, although the one is not in any way dependent upon the other. In the following pages an attempt has been made to give an outline history of the introduction of ornaments into books printed by English printers and the subsequent growth and development of the art down to the present day. Printers’ ornaments include head and tail pieces, initial letters, borders to title-pages or text, and decorative blocks such as those which were used freely by the sixteenth-century printer, Henry Bynneman, and others. Printers’ devices, being in the nature of trade marks, have no place in this volume, as, although decorative in themselves, they were not used simply for the sake of embellishing the page.