The Hand Book of Mediaeval Alphabets and Devices
A pattern book of 36 plates by the antiquary Henry Shaw, published in London by Bernard Quaritch in 1853 and printed at the Chiswick Press.
What it is
A pattern book of 36 plates by the antiquary Henry Shaw, published in London by Bernard Quaritch in 1853 and printed at the Chiswick Press. Its stated aim is to give architects, decorators and students of ornamental design alphabets, numerals and devices from the Middle Ages that they can use. The preface traces illumination from Egyptian rubrication and purple vellum through the Durham Book, the Winchester school and the twelfth century taste for lizards, to Julio Clovio, then the decline that came with cheaper woodcut copies and the Reformation. It then turns to monumental brasses, starting with Sir John D'Aubernoun's of 1277. The plates copy letters from British Museum manuscripts, Westminster Abbey tombs, brasses, an altar cloth at Soest, the Fust and Schoeffer Bible and the Sforziada of 1490, and end with monograms and heraldic badges.
Why read it now
This is a sourcebook, not an argument, and its use today is as a model for building a visual vocabulary from dated sources. Two points still hold. Shaw values the brasses because their letters work where colour is impossible or limited to flat tints. Whether a mark survives one flat colour, embossing and stitching is still the test designers apply to logos. His badges and monograms, such as Anne Boleyn's white falcon on a tree root, show how a small device carries a name, which is close to what brand-asset research calls a distinctive asset. What has dated: the antiquarian tone, some guesses about eastern origins, and the fact that Shaw drew missing letters himself and says so only in a note on two plates. A reader who takes every alphabet as authentic would be misled. Use: for an Arabic heritage mark, build the same kind of dated file from Kufic inscriptions and manuscript headings, label every letter you reconstruct, and test the result in one flat colour.
Passages worth keeping
to offer to the architect, the decorator, and the student of ornamental design, such a series of examples of alphabets, numerals and devices, in use during the middle ages, as may be found practically useful
غاية الكتاب عملية: تقديم نماذج من حروف العصور الوسطى وأرقامها ورموزها يستعملها المعماري والمزخرف وطالب التصميم في عملهم.
these remote examples are usually more remarkable for quaintness than refinement
يوضح شو لماذا أقلّ من النماذج السابقة للقرن الثاني عشر: غرابتها أكثر من إتقانها، فلا يستفيد منها المصمم كثيرًا.
some of the most simple and graceful authorities for inscriptions in every kind of material where colour is either inadmissible, or can only be employed in flat tints.
الألواح النحاسية تقدم نماذج بسيطة للكتابة على أي مادة لا يصلح فيها اللون، أو لا يصلح فيها إلا لون مسطح.
The discovery of engraving on wood having quickly followed that of printing, the drawings of the time were copied and multiplied by this cheaper process.
بعد الطباعة جاء الحفر على الخشب، فصارت الرسوم تُنسخ بطريقة أرخص، وتراجع فن تزيين المخطوطات باليد.
we have taken the liberty of supplying them from our own designs
يعترف شو بأنه رسم بنفسه الحروف التي لم يجدها في المصدر الأصلي، فليست كل الحروف في اللوحات منقولة من الأصل.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
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