Portfolio
Silversmiths in Elizabethan and Stuart London: Their Lives and Their Marks
The Boydell Press/The Goldsmiths’ Company (2017)
A4, 724pp
Work carried out: proofreading, copy-editing, page design and make-up
This is very much a book of two distinct sections. The first comprises a 200pp monograph study of the silversmiths’ trade in the Elizabethan and Stuart periods, and features over a hundred full-colour photographs of plate, cutlery and other wares. We were asked to follow our previous design for The Wonder of the North, but we did end up adjusting the scholar’s margin and changing the font to Caslon.
Part two of the book presents some 400 individual biographies of makers, describing their marks and how they’ve been attributed (many for the first time as a result of the author’s research), and listing known pieces displaying each mark. At 500 pages, with another hundred photos and nearly 700 marker’s marks to keep track of, this was by far the more involved (and involving) part of the book to produce, but a two-column layout in a slightly smaller type size than part one, and some flexibility in the tabular layout of the occurrences, kept the project well within the publisher’s target extent.
