Printers' marks, in fact, took a multitude of forms during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the late seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they became conventionalized and were used infrequently; but they did not die out altogether. The Oxford and Cambridge University presses, for example, continued to put them on the title pages of their books.
The revival of printing late in the nineteenth century saw an increased use of the printer's mark. This was almost inevitable, for when the craftsmen strove to do fine printing, they desired, just as did the craftsmen of the fifteenth century, to have their work easily recognized. Today, private presses which specialize in fine printing, some university presses, and many publishing firms, frequently use marks which both ornament their title pages and identify for the reader the creator of the volume.
[Illustration: THE GROLIER CLUB. A rendering of the Club's familiar mark by Rudolph Ruzicka.]
From _One Hundred Title Pages_: 1500-1800, selected and arranged with an Introduction and Notes by A. F. Johnson. Copyright 1928 by John Lane, The Bodley Head, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
It is a curious fact that the title page was evolved at a comparatively late date in the history of the book, and is indeed almost unknown before the printed book. There are a few examples among early surviving manuscripts of a separate leaf being used for the title, but they are quite exceptional, and even these give the title on the back of this leaf. The usual practice of the calligrapher was to give any information considered desirable as to the author and the date and place of the making of the manuscript in the colophon. This practice was taken over by the printers, although in the first years of the new art they frequently said nothing as to place of printing, probably with the deliberate intention of concealing the fact that the book was produced by mechanical means. The title page as we know it, giving the title, author's name and an imprint, being, in fact, a kind of advertisement of the book, was not well established until some years after 1500....
The title page owes its origin, according to one theory, to the fact that printers found it necessary to protect the first leaf of the text. Whereas a manuscript would be bound as soon as the calligrapher had finished the text, most of the copies of a printed edition were delivered to a book-seller in sheets, and many might remain unbound for years. Hence arose the practice of beginning the book on the second leaf or on the back of the first leaf. The first page could then be used for the purpose of advertising the book, for the fully-developed title page arose out of a commercial need. A few early examples of the addition of a brief title on the first page are known, the first being that of a Bull of Pope Pius II, printed by Fust and Schöffer at Mainz in 1463. But the blank title leaf is found for many years after that date, and to the end of the fifteenth century a title leaf containing a brief description in a few words is common. As late as 1548 we find the brothers Dorici at Rome printing several volumes of the works of Cardinal Bembo with the title on the back of the first leaf. An edition of the Vulgate printed at Venice in 1487 by Georgius Arrivabene offers an example of the most rudimentary form of a title page, with the single word _Biblia_ on the first leaf.