Rerum Scoticarum historia
A Latin history of Scotland by the humanist George Buchanan, printed in Edinburgh in 1643 and aimed at scholars and readers of Latin. The pictures are decorative woodcut initial letters, a large R repeated three times and a C, set in foliate borders of scrolls, leaves and flowers. A designer could take from them the dense, hand-cut ornament of seventeenth-century letterforms for drop caps, borders and historical display type.
