Histoire naturelle...
A 1631 French natural history printed in Paris by Antoine de Sommaville and Andre Soubron, a medical-literature text aimed at readers of French. The pictures are almost entirely typeset pages of dense black-letter-style roman text, each opening with a decorated woodcut initial letter. A designer could take the ornate foliate capitals, with their leafy vine scrolls and interlaced stems, as reference for historical letter ornament.
