The seven volumes of the Planches Gravées de l’Imprimerie Royale [Plates of the Royal Printing House], held by the British Library at shelfmark 1750.c.7., are essentially a series of scrapbooks. They house over 2300 prints, dating from the Imprimerie Royale’s inception in 1640 to 1789, just before its name change in 1790 to reflect revolutionary sentiment. Some are stand-alone prints, but most are illustrations taken from books published in this (nearly) 150-year period by the printing house.

Cut out of their works, these prints are stuck onto the leaves of the volumes and numbered in accordance with their original placement. Organising the works chronologically (broadly speaking), the scrapbookers also sought to index each individual work, listing all the plates that were printed, whether or not they are present in the scrapbook. A skim through these seven volumes will bring up the frequent use of ‘manque’ [missing] next to a number of the prints as well as a series of blank pages. In this attempt at bibliographic scrapbooking, we see a very human tendency: the desire to preserve.

The engraver's index on f. 36 of volume 1.1, detailing the prints included with Les Principaux poincts de la Foi Catholique (1642). Of the fifteen prints listed, four are marked as ‘manque’ [missing].

I say ‘broadly’ and ‘sought’ when describing this process because parallel to the human tendency to collect is the human tendency for error. Across the volumes, we find prints are stuck in the wrong place, some that come from the same work (but a different volume) are separated and placed under a totally different (and, sometimes, unsearchable) title, and others appear with no contextualisation at all. Such issues similarly puzzled the indexer, tasked with accounting for – what was meant to be – over 3000 prints upon acquisition. In the frequent use of square brackets and English in nominally French volumes, the indexer tried to correct the scrapbookers’ mistakes.

The sixth volume showcases the convergence of human error from two centuries. Housing ‘[p]lanches appartenantes à des ouvrages encore inconnus’ [plates belonging to works still unknown], this volume contains a secondary index, about halfway through, created by the original scrapbooker that details the prints still unknown but, in a brief moment of celebration, crosses out those whose works they have found. On pages of ‘vignettes’ [headpieces], ‘fleurons’ [cul-de-lampes], and ‘lettres grises’ [initial letters] are ‘[l]es trous’ that, a note tells us gleefully, ‘désignent que les sujets ont été reconnus’ [the gaps mark that the subjects are now known].

The secondary index in volume 6, ‘Planches appartenantes à des ouvrages encore inconnus’. Several prints are crossed out on this index, indicating that they have been reunited with their original work.

A collection of initial letters taken from volume 6 (f. 653). The gaps mark the prints that have been removed and returned to their original work.

This volume is further subject to human error from the 20th century. The volumes have been held in the British Museum Library since approximately 1853, suffering fire and water damage, probably from the Second World War. As a result, the volumes were rebound in 1949. With the help of the handy indexes at the beginning of the volumes, prints have often gone to their rightful place and the leaves are in order. The sixth volume is an exception: adding to its confusion with its unknown prints, several of its leaves were placed incorrectly in the rebinding process.

Despite such errors, the Planches Gravées de l’Imprimerie Royale prove, no matter the century, that a love of scrapbooking is eternal.

Caitlin Sturrock, PhD student at the University of Bristol and PhD placement student in Western Heritage Prints and Drawings

Further Reading:

BNF Gallica has several ‘notices historiques’ of the Imprimerie Nationale (previously the Imprimerie Royale); see for example, Auguste Bernard, Notice historique sur l’Imprimerie Nationale (Paris, 1848) BL copy at 822.a.8. 

E. C. Bigmore and C. W. H. Wyman, Bibliography of Printing, 3 vols (London, 1880-1886). 2703.a.50. Volume 1 (1880) references ‘Épreuves de Planches gravéés. Table chronologique des Planches’ (p. 358).

This weekend is your last chance to see our exhibition ‘Unearthed: the Power of Gardening’. On our homepage there is an image of someone looking at a display about tulips.

Display case on the tulip at the exhibition ‘Unearthed’

One of the labels mentions the ‘Austrian Ambassador to the Ottoman court’ as the person who brought the tulip to Western Europe. It does not state who this person was. In this blog post, I will tell you a bit about him and his closest associates.

In fact, there were three men from Flanders who were instrumental in the cultivation and research of the tulip in the Low Countries. All three were employed as plant experts by three generations of Austrian emperors: Ferdinand I, Maximilian II and Rudolf II.

First, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq. Apart from being a herbalist, he was sent by Emperor Ferdinand I as a diplomat to the Ottoman Court of Süleyman I. He wrote an account of his travels around the Ottoman Empire, mainly the areas of modern-day Turkey, and republished it as ‘Turkish Letters’ in 1595.

Portrait of Ogier Gheselin de Busbecq by Melchior Lorck (1557). Image from Wikipedia

Title page of Avgerii Gislenii Bvs Beqvii Legationis tvrcicae: Epistolae quatuor (Francofvrti, 1595) 280.c.24

In his first letter, De Busbecq mentions the tulip growing wild (in winter!). He notes that it is not as strong-smelling as the narcissi and hyacinths, which would give one a pounding headache. Instead, the tulip barely has a scent but makes up for this with its vibrant colours. This is why the Turks loved it so much and, from a very early time, used elegant tulip designs as decorations on tiles and ceramics.

Page from Avgerii Gislenii Bvs Beqvii, Legationis tvrcicae: Epistolae quatuor (Francofvrti, 1595) 280.c.24.

Detail from a 16th-century Turkish tile. Image from Museum With No Frontiers

The second key figure was Carolus Clusius, a botanist and associate of De Busbecq, who helped Clusius secure a post at the Austrian court. When Rudolf II came to power, he was dismissed from the court. Following this, he was appointed a professor in Leiden and became the first Director of the Hortus Botanicus of Leiden University. 

Clusius maintained a large network of academics and plant collectors and sent them tulip seeds and bulbs, thus initiating the trade in tulip bulbs. He published his Rariorum Plantarum Historia, where he documented 22 tulip varieties. He also described the phenomenon of the ‘breaking’ of tulip petals, which resulted in wonderful patterns and fringed petal edges. Clusius noted that a plant that displayed these characteristics would die soon after. He couldn't have known that the 'breaking' was caused by a virus. Nonetheless, tulips with these patterns became so popular that they led to the infamous Tulipmania of 1633 –1637.

Images of tulips in Rariorum plantarum historia by Caroli Clusii (Antverpiæ, 1601) 441.i.8.(1.)

The third person connected to both De Busbecq and Clusius was Rembert Dodoens, who served the Austrian Emperor Maximilian II in the 1580s. Whilst editing the second Latin edition of his herbal using a copy of the first edition of 1583 (442.i.6), he made a note about De Busbecq, Clusius and Maximilian II. Dodoens had included the tulip with an illustration in his other plant book Frvmentorvm Legvminvm... etc. (1569). He does not play a central role in this story, but if you would like to learn more about his work, please check my previous blog post.

Portraits of Rembert Dodoens and Carolus Clusius on yellow silk (after 1609), from Sylvia van Zanen, Planten op papier (Zutphen, 2019) YF.2020.a.4313

Leaf with manuscript notes in R. Dodoens Stirpium historiae pemptades sex, ... (Antwerp, 1583) 442.i.6

Pages from Frvmentorvm Legvminvm (Antverpiae, 1569) 968.g.11(2)

TULIPMANIA

There are many different estimates regarding the cost of a single tulip bulb at the height of Tulipmania. Best estimates range from fl. 3,000 to fl. 4,200 —a very substantial sum and about ten times the annual earnings of a skilled craftsman. However, it is not true that one tulip bulb could buy you multiple properties.

Tulipmania still captures the imagination of many, and understandably so. It is a great story, first spread by the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay in his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds published in 1841. Several later editions have been released, with some as recent as the 21st century. We now know that he based most of his observations on contemporary parodies rather than hard facts. It was not until the 1980s that historians and economists debunked most of his account. By then, the received wisdom was that large parts of the Dutch population had collectively gone mad and were involved in the trade and speculation in futures—a tool apparently invented during the Tulipmania.

Scholars such as Anne Goldgar delved into the archives and studied the original contracts between tulip bulb traders, including futures on bulbs yet to be grown. Goldgar argues that only a small group of traders were involved and that most contracts were not fulfilled, so no money had actually changed hands. At its height, from 1636 to early February 1637, tulip bulbs reached prices that were simply too high for anyone to afford. On 5 February 1637, a trader tried to sell a bulb for fl. 1,250, but had to lower his price to fl. 1,000, one of the events that would lead to the collapse of the market. 

Semper August tulip with ‘breaking’ and a satire on tulipmania by Jan Brueghel II, from Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania (Chicago, London, 2007) YC.2008.a.8160

Since then, more booms and busts have occurred in the flower bulb trade. In recent years, the flower and bulb trade has faced some challenges. This is partly because of changing weather, with droughts affecting the bulb harvest.

However, earnings have remained strong.

In 2024, Royal-Flora Holland, the world’s largest co-operative based in Aalsmeer, auctioned 2.8 billion roses, 1.8 billion chrysanthemums and 1.8 billion tulips, with a turnover of €4.7 billion. The Centraal Bureau voor Statistiek reports that the 1.8 billion tulip bulbs were produced by approximately 896 growers across an area of 15,120 ha, from a total of 1,600 flower growers cultivating 27,000 hectares in total. The tulip has become a national symbol of the Netherlands, serving as an economic asset and a tourist attraction. The tulip is a subject in art, literature, and culture. It is also sold as a cut flower all over the world. This is all thanks to the Turks, the Flemish... and the Dutch who ran with it, cultivating the flower into a worldwide phenomenon.

Marja Kingma, Curator of Germanic Collections

References and further reading:

Area used to grow flower bulbs has increased in 10 years, decreased in 2024 | CBS 28-3-2025

Tulip Festival Amsterdam - Flower Events in Holland

Frans Willemse and Marja Smolenaars (transl.), The Mystery of the Tulip Painter (Hilversum,1994) YD.2006.b.1048

Arie Dwarswaard and Maarten Timmer, Van Windhandel tot Wereldhandel (Houten, 2010) YF.2012.b.560

Reviewers in the Sunday papers commonly praise newly appeared translations of novels for masterfully capturing the colourful/pithy/zesty style of the Basque/Chinese/Māori original.

Counterwise, people as often say that “poetry is what gets lost in translation”. Or as the Marquis of Santillana wrote around 1452, “if we cannot have the forms, let us be content with the matter”.

Flora Ross Amos points out that early translators didn’t attempt to capture the style of their original:

While it may be that both Caxton and Lydgate were trying to reproduce in English the peculiar style of their originals, it is more probable that they beautified their own versions as best they could, without feeling it incumbent upon them to make their rhetorical devices correspond with those of their predecessors.

Translations also tended to incorporate explanatory glosses which blurred the lines of the original.

But the time came when translators became aware of what Cicero said in the De optimo genere oratorum (‘On the best sort of orators’). This was the prologue to his lost translation of the Greek orators Demosthenes and Aeschines, and there he claimed to have translated not like an interpreter but an orator, capturing the style and rhetorical figures of the original.

I’d like to point to an example of a book which (like many others) lost nothing in translation, the Reloj de príncipes (Dial of princes) of Antonio de Guevara, a fictionalised life of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Guevara was famous for his amplificatory style, was an undoubted best-seller in various languages, and used to be thought a big influence on Euphuism, a mannered English prose style which took its name from John Lyly’s romance Euphues and his England (London, 1580; C.56.d.16.).

Title page of Antonio de Guevara, Libro del emperador Marco aurelio cō relox de principe (Valladolid, 1529) C.38.h.8

The English translation by Thomas North does I think match the style of the original, and this despite the fact that he worked from the French version of Nicolas de Herberay.

North also translated Plutarch’s Lives and in the prologue himself advocated the Ciceronian style: “The office of a fit translator consisteth not only in the faithful expressing of his author’s meaning, but also in a certain resembling and shadowing out of the form of his style and the manner of his speaking”. Ironically, the prologue was translated from Jacques Amyot’s French Plutarch.

Judge the effect for yourself:

Guevara, book III, ch. Vi

Aplicando a lo que emos dicho a lo que queremos dezir, digo que no queremos de los principes y grandes señores que se maten con los leones en la caça, ni aventuren sus personas en la guerra, ni pongan sus vidas en peligro por la republica, sino que solamente les rogamos tengan cuydado de proveer las cosas de justicia; porque mas natural oficio es de los principes andar a caça de viciosos en su republica, que no andar a caça de puercos en la montaña … No consiste la governacion de la republica en que trabajen hasta sudar las carnes, fatiguen sus personas, derramen su sangre, menosprecien sus vidas y pierdan los passatiempos, sino que toda su buena governacion esta en que con atencion miren los daños de sus republicas y conforme a ellos provean los ministros de Guerra

Herberay, L’Orloge des princes

Appliquant ce que nous auons dit à ce que nous voulons dire, ie dy que nous ne desirons, ny voulons que les princes & grands seigneurs se tuent auec les lions à la chasse, ny aduenturent leurs personnes en guerre, ny mettent leurs vies en peril pour la Republique, ains que nous les prions seulement qu’ilz ayent aucun soucy de pouruoir aux choses de la iustice car plus naturel office des princes est aller à la chasse des vicieux en leurs republiques, que non à la chasse des sangliers es montaignes … Le gouuernement de la Republique ne consiste en ce qu’ilz trauaillent iusques à suer & molester leurs corps, espandent leur sang, mesprisent leurs vies, & perdent leurs passetemps, ains tout leur bon gouuernement consiste à ce qu’ilz soyent attentifs à regarder les dommages de leur Republique, & conformant à eux pouruoyent de bons maistres de iustice

North, Dial of princes

Applying that we have spoken to that we will speak, I say, that we do not desire, nor we will not, that princes and great lords do destroy them selves with lions in the chase, neither adventure their persons in the wars, nor that they put their lives in peril for the common weal but we only require them that they take some pains and care to provide for things belonging to justice, for it is a more natural hunting for princes to hunt out the vicious of their common weals then for to hunt the wild boars, in the thick woods … The government of the common weal consisteth not in that they should travail until they sweat and molest their bodies, shed their blood, shorten their lives and lose their pastimes but all consisteth in that they should be diligent to foresee the domages of their common wealth and likewise to provide for good ministers of justice

How can we explain this accuracy? I wonder if it’s because at this period everybody followed the same classical norms in their writing, so that it was easy for the translator to recognise in his original the rhetorical figures which he had been trained at school to use.

Guevara’s style is copious. Copia (‘abundance’) is most closely associated with Erasmus, although it wasn’t his invention. His De copia (1512) might have been his most influential work. He argued that a writer’s skill derived from a rich vocabulary, which he demonstrated by saying the same thing in a variety of ways. Every schoolboy (on boys, see Ong) knew this as the smart way to write, whether he was Spanish, French or English.

Barry Taylor, Curator Romance Collections

References/Further Reading

Flora Ross Amos, Early Theories of Translation, Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature, 29 (New York, 1920) Ac.2688/16.(29.)

Walter J. Ong, ‘Latin Language study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite’, Studies in Philology, 51 (1959), 103-123 Ac.2685.k/2.

Iñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de Santillana, Obras completas, ed. Ángel Gómez Moreno and Maximilian P. A. M. Kerkhof (Barcelona, 1988) YA.1990.a.16843

Barry Taylor, ‘Learning Style from the Spaniards in Sixteenth-Century England’, in Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation, Print and Culture in Britain, 1473-1640, ed. S. K. Barker and Brenda M. Hosington (Leiden, 2013), pp. 63-78. YD.2013.a.758