The Faerie Qveene : Disposed into twelue bookes, Fashioning XII. Morall vertues
The Faerie Qveene is a 1596 London edition of Edmund Spenser's epic poem in twelve books, printed for the bookseller William Ponsonby and later owned by private collectors. The pictures here are not illustrations but printed typographic ornaments: corner blocks, a horizontal frieze, and bands of repeating scrolls and interlaced foliate patterns in woodcut. A designer could take from them the tightly repeating corner-and-border logic of Elizabethan print ornament, usable for frames, borders, and modular pattern work.
