Book History

Abstract:

This article offers a close reading of a seventeenth-century trademark deployed by the Rotterdam-based printers Henry (1633-1684) and Johanna Goddæus (fl. 1660-1690). As part of this analysis, I show that that the central motif in the Goddæuses' trademark, which depicts the Gospel event known as the noli me tangere, is in an intertextual relationship with an earlier devotional woodcut by the German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). This acknowledgement, I argue, enlivens a reading of the Goddæuses' trademark as a multimodal paratextual form, which: 1) visually foregrounds the three-dimensional and tactile qualities of the material text; 2) helps to advertise the empirical and experiential dimensions of the books that it brands; and 3) promotes the artisanal efficacy underpinning its owners' book-making practices.