Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Reynes, John

658897Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 48 — Reynes, John1896Edward Gordon Duff

REYNES, JOHN (fl. 1530), stationer and bookbinder in London, carried on business at the sign of St. George in St. Paul's Churchyard. His name first appears in the colophon of an edition of Higden's ‘Polycronycon,’ issued in 1527, and he continued to publish books at intervals up to 1544. He is, however, better known as a bookbinder, and numbers of stamped bindings are in existence which bear his device. They have, as a rule, on one side a stamp containing the emblems of the passion, and the inscription ‘Redemptoris mundi arma,’ and on the other a stamp divided into two compartments containing the arms of England and the Tudor rose. His other stamps, about six in number, are of rarer occurrence. John Cawood, the printer, who was master of the Company of Stationers in 1557, was apprenticed to Reynes, and put up a window in his memory in Stationers' Hall.

[Ames's Typogr. Antiq. ed. Herbert, i. 413.]

E. G. D.