"Symbols, Signs & Signets: A Pictorial Treasury With Over 1350 Illustrations" by Ernst Lehner (published 1950)

“Symbols, Signs, & Signets: A Pictorial Treasury With Over 1350 Illustrations” by Ernst Lehner (1950) is a book as impressive as its title. Lehner’s categorization system of these phenomena does not tend toward geography, which gives the text as a whole a holistic feel. Rather, the book is organized by subjects of universal value, i.e. “Symbolic Gods & Deities”, “Astronomy & Astrology”, “Alchemy”, and the “Magic & Mystic”, to name just the first few subject matters out of thirteen. The phenomena themselves, the “Signs, Symbols, & Signets” of his title, are simplified reproductions of the images, made to be viewed in their most basic and simple form: black and white, and without embellishments of any kind save for whatever was provided by the print press.

What may be understood at first glance as an encyclopedic and thus exhaustive account is incredibly softened by Lehner’s introductions, one might call them editorials, which begin each chapter. He is sentimental about his work, and rightfully so:

“The focus of interest in this study is more special: to trace man’s evolution as an artist and designer and to do this through the signs, seals and symbols he has left as his record. Unfortunately man is a destroyer as well as a creator; and the 60,000 or more prints and the elaborate reference library it has taken the author the better part of a lifetime to assemble were destroyed in a split second by the dynamite charge of a retreating army in the last war.” (from Lehner’s note ‘To The Reader’)

Also, the Introduction to this body of work seems to instruct that this book must be *read*. The introduction, written not by Lehner but by another man by the name of Ervine Metzl, notes that symbols such as these are essential to the idea of humankind. Metzl’s ideas concerning these symbols, it is clear, is vastly different – than marks of an animal (even one of our own species) relieving himself on a piece of land to communicate what is their own territory and not another’s.

“Behind the Veil of Time, primitive man has left a record of himself in symbols created ages before he learned to write. Just as a child piles up sticks and stones to represent concepts for which he has not yet learned words, mankind in its childhood built cairns and marked trees in its first efforts of self-expression.”

What Metzl hints at, and what is later confirmed in the book, is that many of these signs, symbols, and signets rose out of a desire beyond survival and from a new kind of necessity. To interpret the foundations of this book, that necessity appears to have come from two different origins:

1.  To represent experiences within the psyche and from the outside world which were (then or even now) unexplainable (for example, to whom do we pray about love, for love? Aphrodite from Roman mythology, perhaps, whose name, image, and story/mythos became a visual symbol that has lasted throughout centuries)

2.    To have a *record* that would remain after death, as some kind of remembrance. Of *what* kind of remembrance requires a close study of a particular symbol: it may be to commemorate civilization (the Arms of Great Britain or the Seal of the United States, for example), it might be to signify authorship (watermarks, for example – which has a particularly interesting origin story as they were accidental occurrences at first), or ownership (branding cattle, for example). But also, the more ephemeral and transient elements: love, evil, power. To visualize these inherently *non*-visual inner worlds of humankind is what the majority of this text is about.

To go through every single page of this book is to merely *glance* at the awe-inspiring qualities of life itself. That a person would think to represent the fine line between a protective and stoic nature and the element of fierce brutality and savagery lying under the surface of that by visualizing a Griffon, an imagined animal with the body of a lion and the head of an eagle, is fascinating, to say the least. What an excellent representation of that which has only been felt, and then talked about in stories. It’s final culmination an image, an inner world now seen in plain sight, with the ability to signify power, wariness, and even comradery.

There are endless questions and analyses to be drawn out (no pun intended) from this treasury – bringing limitless potential to the minds of its readers. It is important to note that Lehner does mention, quite directly in his introduction to Printers’ Marks, that the condition and character of signs, symbols, and signets has been degraded as we enter and progress into modernity and now post-modernity:

“Printers were their own publishers. They belonged to the intellectual and upper class of their time… with the dawn of the 17^th century, commercial publishers, who were not skilled printers, took over… with that unprofessional attitude on the part of this new generation of publishers one of the most artistic periods in the history of signets came to an early and inglorious end.”