Fanciful Victorian Initials: 1,142 Decorative Letters from "Punch"

Publisher’s Note

Punch, or the London Charivari, the venerable British humor magazine, has from its inception employed decorative initials in its pages. The use of large, embellished letters to open a manuscript or typeset composition has a long history in the West. The Victorians delighted in all manner of book decoration—the more elaborate the better—and their eclectic borrowing from all periods made the graphic styles of previous ages familiar to readers.

For this volume, Carol Belanger Grafton has selected over 1,000 initial letters from the first 73 years of Punch, spanning all but the first few years of Victoria’s reign and extending to the beginning of World War One. Grafton has chosen the illustrations on the basis of their draftsmanship and visual interest rather than on art-historical grounds. (Dover has previously published an anthology entitled Great Drawings and Illustrations from Punch,