The history of the world, commonly called the Naturall historie of C. Plinius Secundus
A 1634 London English translation of Pliny the Elder's natural history, translated by Philemon Holland and published by A. Islip for a learned readership of natural history. The pictures are repeated woodcut decorative initial letters, each a capital framed in a rectangle and surrounded by scrolling foliage, bird heads and curled acanthus-like ornament. A designer could draw on these as ready-made historiated capitals, borders and typographic ornament for period-styled title pages.
