Initial Capitals Found at the State Library

A whaling cruise to Baffin’s Bay and the Gulf of Boothia

There are many beautiful books in the State Library’s collections. Covers and spines are the flashiest, catching your eye as you walk by the shelf, but it is always a welcome surprise to open a plain-looking book and find detailed illustrations. My favorite genre of these illustrations are initial capitals. During a recent project I kept finding more and more of these initial capitals and thought it would be fun to highlight them for our patrons.

An initial capital refers to when the first letter of a section of text is larger than the rest for emphasis. The history of initials goes way back, all the way to before the invention of lowercase letters. People used to write in all capitals, and to differentiate the start of a new section people began to use a larger initial letter. Eventually, people began incorporating decorations and illustrations to those initial letters. Thus was born a long and beautiful history of “initials.”

Voyages of Samuel de Champlain (left) The Great Centennial Exhibition (center) and
Whale hunt: The narrative of a voyage by Nelson Cole Haley (right)

Some of the most famous and most intricate initials come from the Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript from around 800 A.D. These initials sometimes took up an entire page. If you’re interested in seeing some of this stunning artistry, this website has collected and organized them all.

With the invention of the printing press, people less often illustrated initials by hand and instead carved them out of wood blocks. Though this style is quite different from a hand illustration, it is still just as striking. These carved initials often were done without magnification and in natural light—an impressive feat for a work of art that is often no larger than a postage stamp! In the 19th century, people grew so enamored with initials that it was a trend to cut them out of books and trade them as though they were baseball cards. Modern readers are likely to be more accustomed to simpler initials. Often a text will just increase the font size of the first letter without any embellishment-- for example, this blog post! 

The Pictorial Field Book of the Revolution

Whether an initial is a full page of gilded color or a square inch of black ink, an initial elevates the reader’s sense of the text’s content. Though initials are not confined to any one genre or style of writing, their beauty and artistry indicate a care for the design of the text. In this post, I’ve included some of my favorite examples of initials in the State Library's collection. Enjoy!

Emily Colson

Government Documents Intern

Sources:

(2018, August 21). An illuminating workshop and exhibit with Bill Moran. Hamilton Wood Type &    Printing Museum. https://woodtype.org/blogs/news/an-illuminating-workshop-and-exhibit-with-bill-moran

(2020, August 20). Make the letter bigger. I Love Typography. https://ilovetypography.com/2020/08/20/history-of-illuminated-initials/

Haley, N. C. (1948). Whale hunt: The narrative of a voyage by Nelson Cole Haley, harpooner in the ship Charles W. Morgan 1849-1853. Ives Washburn, Inc.

Heller, S. (2018, July 31). Initial caps: The birth of illustrated typography. Design Observer. https://designobserver.com/initial-caps-the-birth-of-illustrated-typography/

Lossing, B. J. (1860). The pictorial field-book of the revolution. Harper & Brothers, Publishers. 

Markham, A. H. (1874). A whaling cruise to Baffin’s Bay and the Gulf of Boothia. Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle. (image one)

Otis, C. P. (1880). Voyages of Samuel de Champlain. Prince Society.

Sandhurst, P. T. and others. The great centennial exhibition. P. W. Ziegler & Co. Publishers.