With their overwhelming wealth of forms, prints of designs of historic ornaments are a source of boundless inspiration for graphic artists and designers. They also allow collectors and art historians to reliably date works and classify styles. This cornucopia of design, published here for the first time in English, contains the finest images from the famous, hitherto out-of-print, and seminal work by Rudolf Berliner. Prints of designs have always been of utmost importance in architecture, arts and crafts, and interior decoration in European countries. Indispensable to studios, they contributed to the rapid dissemination of ornamental innovations and helped to assert the newest styles. This special edition of Berliners seminal work uses sumptuous illustrations and informative texts to present the development of engravings of ornament designs and the numerous variations on particular types of motifs. This compendium of the most beautiful, important and unusual ornaments from the fifteenth to the twentieth century offers an inexhaustible source of inspiration for artists and those who are passionate about the genre.