Emblem book

[1] In fact, writers often drew inspiration from Greek and Roman sources such as Aesop's Fables and Plutarch's Lives.

[3] This is understandable, given that first emblem book, the Emblemata of Andrea Alciato, was first issued in an unauthorized edition in which the woodcuts were chosen by the printer without any input from the author, who had circulated the texts in unillustrated manuscript form.

Many of the symbolic images present in emblem books were used in other contexts, on clothes, furniture, street signs, and the façades of buildings.

[1] Emblem books, both secular and religious, attained enormous popularity throughout continental Europe, though in Britain they did not capture the imagination of readers to quite the same extent.

[1] Many emblematic works borrowed plates or texts (or both) from earlier exemplars, as was the case with Geoffrey Whitney's Choice of Emblemes, a compilation which chiefly used the resources of the Plantin Press in Leyden.