CHAPTER XI
THE PRESENT CENTURY
t has been said that printing sprang into the world fully armed. At least this is certain, that for nearly four centuries after its birth the printing-press in use in all printing-houses remained the same in form as that which Caxton's workmen had used in the Red Pale at Westminster. There had been some unimportant alterations made in it by an Amsterdam printer in the seventeenth century; but until the year 1800 no important change in the form or mechanism of the printing-press had ever been introduced. Some such change was sorely needed. The productive powers of the old press were quite unable to keep pace with the ever-increasing demand for books and newspapers that a quickened intelligence and national anxiety had awakened. Up to 1815 England was constantly at war, and men and women alike were eager for news from abroad. In 1800 Charles Mahon, third Earl Stanhope, invented a new printing-press.
The Stanhope press substituted an iron framework for the wooden body of the old press, thus giving greater solidity. The platen was double the size of that previously in use, thus allowing a larger sheet to be printed, and a system of levers was adopted in place of the cumbersome handlebar and screw used in the wooden press. The chief merits of the new invention were increased speed, ease to the workman, evenness of impression, and durability. Further improvements in the mechanism of hand machines were secured in the Columbian press, an American invention, brought to this country in 1818, and later in the Albion press, invented by R. W. Cope of London, and since that time by many others. Yet even with the best of these improved presses no more than 250 or 300 impressions per hour could be worked off, and the daily output of the most important paper only averaged three or four thousand copies. But a great and wonderful change was at hand.
In 1806 Frederick Kœnig, the son of a small farmer at Eisleben in Saxon Prussia, came to England with a project for a steam printing press. The idea was not a new one, for sixteen years before an Englishman, named William Nicholson, took out a patent for a machine for printing, which foreshadowed nearly every fundamental improvement even in the most advanced machines of the present day. But from want of means, or some other cause, Nicholson never actually made a machine. Nor did Kœnig's project meet with much encouragement until he walked into the printing-house of Thomas Bensley of Bolt Court, who encouraged the inventor to proceed, and supplied him with the necessary funds. There is reason to believe that Kœnig made himself acquainted with the details of Nicholson's patent during the time that his machine was building. He also obtained the assistance of Andrew F. Bauer, an ingenious German mechanic. His first patent was taken out on the 29th March 1810, a second in 1812, a third in 1814, and a fourth in 1816. The first machine is said to have taken three years to build, and upon its completion was erected in Bensley's office in Bolt Court. There seems to be considerable uncertainty as to what was the first publication printed on it. Some say it was set to work on the Annual Register, one writer[20] asserting that in April 1811, 3000 sheets of that publication were printed on it; but Mr. Southward, in his monograph Modern Printing, confines himself to the statement that two sheets of a book were printed on the machine in 1812. Curiously enough neither Bensley's publication, the Annual Register, nor the Gentleman's Magazine takes any notice of the new invention, although in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1811 there is a notice of a printing machine invented at Philadelphia, which apparently embodied all the same principles as Kœnig's (Gent. Mag., vol. lxxxi. p. 576).
In 1814 John Walter, the second proprietor of the Times, saw Kœnig's machine, and ordered one to be supplied to the Times office, the first number printed by steam being that of the 28th November 1814. This machine was a double cylinder, which printed simultaneously two copies of a forme of the newspaper on one side only. But it was a cumbersome and complicated affair, and its greatest output 1800 impressions per hour.
In 1818 Edward Cowper, a printer of Nelson Square, patented certain improvements in printing, these improvements consisting of a better distribution of the ink and a better plan for conveying the sheets from the cylinders. Having joined his brother-in-law, Augustus Applegarth, they proceeded to make certain alterations in Kœnig's machine in Bensley's office which at one stroke removed forty wheels, and greatly simplified the inking arrangements. In 1827 they jointly invented a four-cylinder machine, which Applegarth erected for the Times. The distinctive features of this machine were its ability to print both sides of a sheet at once, its admirable inking apparatus, and great acceleration of speed, the new machine being capable of printing five thousand copies per hour.
These machines at once superseded the Kœnig, and were to be found in use in all parts of the country for printing newspapers until quite lately. In 1848 the same firm constructed an eight-cylinder vertical machine, which was one of the sights of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Shortly afterwards Messrs. Hoe, of New York, made further improvements in the mechanism, raising the output to 20,000 per hour. All these machines had to be fed with paper by hand, but in 1869 it occurred to Mr. J. C. Macdonald, the manager of the Times, and Mr. J. C. Calverley, the chief engineer of the same office, that much saving of labour would result if paper could be manufactured in continuous rolls; and the result of their experiments was the rotary press, which was named after Mr. John Walter, the fourth of that name, then at the head of the Times proprietorship. Since then the improvement in printing machines has steadily continued, and may be said to have culminated in the Hoe 'double supplement' press in use at the present day in many newspaper offices, which is capable of printing, cutting, and folding 24,000 copies per hour of a full-sized newspaper.
These great changes in presses and press-work have occasioned similar changes in type-founding.
At the beginning of the century, the firm of Caslon had been given a new lease of life by the energy of Mrs. Henry Caslon, who in 1799 had purchased the foundry, a third share in which a few years earlier had been worth £3000, for the paltry sum of £520. She at once set to work to have new founts of type cut, and was ably helped by Mr. John Isaac Drury. The pica then produced was an improvement in the style of Bodoni, and quickly raised the foundry to its old position. Mrs. Caslon took into partnership Nathaniel Catherwood, but both died in the course of the year 1809. The business then came into the hands of Henry Caslon II., who was joined by John James Catherwood. Other notable firms were those already noticed in the last chapter—Mrs. Fry, Figgins, Martin, and Jackson. One and all of these suffered severely from the change in the fashion of types at the beginning of the century, the ugly form of type, known as fat-faced letters, then introduced, remaining in vogue until the revival of Caslon's old-faced type by the younger Whittingham.
Upon the advent of machinery and cylinder printing, the use of movable type for printing from was supplemented by quicker and more durable methods, and William Ged's long-despised discovery of stereotyping is now an absolutely necessary adjunct of modern press-work. This, again, was in some measure due to Earl Stanhope, who in 1800 went to Andrew Tilloch, and Foulis, the Glasgow printer, both of whom had taken out a patent for the invention, and learnt from them the process. He afterwards associated himself with Andrew Wilson, a London printer, and in 1802 the plaster process, as it was called, was perfected. This remained in use until 1846, when a system of forming moulds in papier mâché was introduced, and this was succeeded by the adaptation of the stereo-plates to the rotary machines.
It would be foreign to the purpose of this work, which is concerned with printing as applied to books, to attempt to describe the Linotype and its rival processes which have been recently introduced to further facilitate newspaper printing. We must, therefore, return to our book-printers, and note first that the Shakespeare Press of William Bulmer, for which Martin the type-founder was almost exclusively employed, continued to turn out beautiful examples of typographic work during the early years of the nineteenth century. A list of the works issued from this press up to 1817 is given by Dibdin in his notes to the second volume of his Decameron, pp. 384-395. Some of the chief items were The Arabian Nights Entertainments, 5 vols. 1802, 8vo; The Book of Common Prayer, with an introduction by John Reeves, 1802, 8vo; The Itinerary of Archbishop Baldwin through Wales, translated by Sir R. C. Hoare, 2 vols. 1806, 4to; Richardson's Dictionary of the Arabic and Persian Languages, 2 vols. 1806-10, 4to; Hoare's History of Wiltshire, 1812, folio; Dibdin's Typographical Antiquities, 4 vols. 1812, 4to; and the same author's Bibliotheca Spenceriana, 4 vols. 1814-15, 8vo, and Bibliographical Decameron, 3 vols. 1817, 8vo. These three last are considered to be some of the best work of this press, which also turned out many books for private circulation only. William Bulmer died on September 9th, 1830, after a long and active life, and was succeeded by his partner Mr. William Nichol.
Nor had Thomas Bensley slackened anything of his enthusiasm for fine printing. Twice during the first twenty years of the century he suffered severely by fire: the first time in 1807, when a quarto edition of Thomson's Seasons, an edition of the Works of Pope, and many other books were destroyed; the second in 1819, on June 26th, when the premises were totally burnt down. This was followed by the death of his son, and shortly afterwards he retired from business, and died on September 11th, 1835. Not only was he an excellent printer, but he did more than any other man of his time to introduce the improved printing machine into this country.
John Nichols was another of the great printers of his day, and he too was burnt out on the night of February 8th, 1808. No better account of the magnitude of his undertakings at that time could be found than his own description of the disaster, which he contributed to the Gentleman's Magazine in the following March:—
'Amongst the books destroyed are many of very great value, and some that can never be replaced. Not to mention a large quantity of handsome quarto Bibles, the works of Swift, Pope, Young, Thomson, Johnson, etc. etc., the Annals of Commerce, and other works which may still be elsewhere purchased, there are several consumed which cannot now be obtained at any price. The unsold copies of the introduction to the second volume of the Sepulchral Monuments; Hutchins' Dorsetshire; Bigland's Gloucestershire; Hutchinson's Durham; Thorpe's Registrum and Custumale Roffense; the few numbers that remained of the Bibliotheca Topographica; the third volume of Elizabethan Progresses; the Illustrations of Ancient Manners; Mr. Gough's History of Pleshy, and his valuable account of the Coins of the Seleucidæ, engraved by Bartolozzi; Colonel de la Motte's Allusive Arms; Bishop Atterbury's Epistolary Correspondence; and last, not least, the whole of six portions of Mr. Nichols' Leicestershire, and the entire stock of the Gentleman's Magazine from 1782 to 1807, are irrecoverably lost.'
'Of those in the press, the most important were the concluding portion of Hutchins' Dorsetshire (nearly finished); a second volume of Manning and Bray's Surrey (about half printed); Mr. Bawdwin's translation of Domesday for Yorkshire (nearly finished); a new edition of Dr. Whitaker's History of Craven; Mr. Gough's British Topography (nearly one volume); the sixth volume of Biographia Britannica (ready for publishing); Dr. Kelly's Dictionary of the Manx Language; Mr. Neild's History of Prisons; a genuine unpublished comedy by Sir Richard Steele; Mr. Joseph Reid's unpublished tragedy of Dido; four volumes of the British Essayists; Mr. Taylor Combe's Appendix to Dr. Hunter's Coins; part of Dr. Hawes' annual report for 1808; a part of the Biographical Anecdotes of Hogarth; two entire volumes, and the half of two other volumes of a new edition of the anecdotes of Mr. Bowyer,' etc.
Writing to Bishop Percy in July of that year, Nichols stated that he had lost £10,000 beyond his insurance in this outbreak.
John Nichols died on the 26th November 1826, after a long and laborious life. He was a born antiquary, and a voluminous author, his chief works being The History and Antiquities of the Town and County of Leicester, completed in 1815 in eight folio volumes, and Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 1812-15, an expansion of the Biographical and Literary Anecdotes of William Bowyer, which had been printed in 1782. This work was afterwards supplemented by Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, 6 vols. 1817-31, to which his son afterwards added two additional volumes. John Nichols was Common Councillor for the ward of Farringdon Without from 1784 to 1786, and again from 1787 to 1811. In 1804 he was Master of the Stationers' Company. He was succeeded in business by his son John Bowyer Nichols, and the firm subsequently became J. Nichols, Son, and Bentley. Like his father, John Bowyer Nichols was editor and author of many books, and was appointed Printer to the Society of Antiquaries in 1824. He died at Haling on October 16th, 1863, leaving seven children, of whom the eldest, John Gough Nichols, born on 22nd May 1806, became the head of the printing-house, and editor of the Gentleman's Magazine, as his father and grandfather had been before him. He was one of the founders of the Camden Society (1838), and edited many of its publications. He was the promoter and editor of The Herald and Genealogist, and his researches in this direction were of great importance. The Dictionary of National Biography enumerates thirty-four works from his pen, most of which it would be safe to say were also printed by him. He died on 14th November 1873.
Another press of importance in the first half of the nineteenth century was that of Thomas Davison. He was the printer of most of Byron's works, and many of those of Campbell, Moore and Wordsworth; but his chief claim to notice rests upon the magnificent edition of Whitaker's History of Rickmondshire in two large folio volumes, printed in 1823, and upon that of Dugdale's Monasticon, in eight folio volumes, issued between 1817 and 1830, an undertaking of great magnitude. In Timperley's Encyclopædia it is stated that Davison made important improvements in the manufacture of printing ink, and that few of his competitors could approach him in excellence of work.
The story of the firm of Eyre and Spottiswoode would, if material were available, form an interesting chapter in the history of English printing. It is the direct descendant in the royal line of Pynson, Berthelet, the Barkers, and finally of John and Robert Baskett, the last of whom assigned the patent to John Eyre of Landford House, Wilts, whose son, Charles Eyre, the great-grandfather of the present George Edward Briscoe Eyre, succeeded to the business in 1770. During the seventeenth century, the work of the Government and the sovereign had been divided among several firms, but in the eighteenth century it was again given to one man, John Baskett. In the printing of the Bible and Book of Common Prayer the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge have also a share; but all the other Government work is done by Messrs. Eyre and Spottiswoode.
Charles Eyre, not being a practical printer, obtained the co-operation of William Strahan. On the renewal of the patent in 1798, the name of John Reeves was inserted, but Mr. Strahan purchased his interest. In 1829, the patent was again renewed to George Eyre, the son of Charles, John Reeves, and Andrew Strahan. George Edward Eyre, son of George William Strahan, was born at Edinburgh in April 1715, and, after serving his apprenticeship in Edinburgh, took his way to London, where, it is believed, he found a post in the office of Andrew Miller. In 1770 the printing-house was removed from Blackfriars to New Street, near Gough Square, Fleet Street. William Strahan was intimately associated with the best literature of his time, among those for whom he published being Dr. Johnson, Hume, Adam Smith, Robertson, and many other eminent writers. In 1774 he was Master of the Stationers' Company, Member of Parliament for Malmesbury, and sat for Wootton Bassett in the next Parliament. Among his greatest friends was Benjamin Franklin, who kept up a correspondence with him in spite of the strong political differences between them. Strahan died at New Street on July 9th 1785, leaving three sons and two daughters. The youngest son, Andrew, succeeded his father in the Royal Printing House, and one of the daughters married John Spottiswoode of Spottiswoode, whose son, Andrew, afterwards entered the firm. Andrew Strahan was noted for his benevolence, and on his death in 1831 he left handsome bequests to the Literary Fund and the Company of Stationers.
Andrew Spottiswoode, who died in 1866 at the ripe age of seventy-nine, had a large printing business apart from the office of Queen's Printer, and his imprint will be found in much of the lighter literature of the period. His son, William Spottiswoode, after a distinguished career at Oxford, ultimately attained high rank as a mathematician, and in 1865 became President of the Mathematical Section of the British Association. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1853, and became its President on 30th November 1878. He died on 27th June 1883.
Equally renowned is the firm of Gilbert and Rivington. Early in the second half of the eighteenth century (the exact date is not known) John Rivington, the fourth son of John Rivington the publisher, and direct descendant of Charles Rivington of the Bible and Crown in Paternoster Row, succeeded to the business of James Emonson, printer, of St. John's Square, Clerkenwell. John Rivington died in 1785, and was succeeded by his widow, who in 1786 took as partner John Marshall. A series of classical works, of which they were the printers, was very favourably received. These included the Greek Testament, Livy, and Sophocles, as well as a series of Latin poets and authors, edited by Michael Maittaire. The business next passed into the hands of Deodatus Bye. He in turn admitted Henry Law as partner, and the firm became successively Law and Gilbert and Robert and Richard Gilbert. The partnership being dissolved early in the present century by the death of Robert Gilbert, Richard carried on the business alone until 1830, when he took into partnership Mr. William Rivington, a great-grandson of the first Charles Rivington, and from that day the firm has gone by the name of Gilbert and Rivington. Richard Gilbert died in 1852, and for eleven years after his death the printing business was carried on by Mr. William Rivington, who issued many valuable and standard works on subjects of classical and ecclesiological interest.
William Rivington retired from business in 1868, being succeeded by his son, William John Rivington, and his nephew, Alexander. The business increased largely in their hands; one of their first undertakings being the purchase in 1870 of the plant of the late Mr. William Mavor Watts, by which they secured a large addition to their collection of Oriental types. In 1875 Mr. E. Mosley entered the firm, and Mr. William John Rivington left it to join the publishing house of Sampson Low, Marston and Searle. Mr. Alexander Rivington retired from the firm in 1878, being thus the last Rivington connected with the house, which shortly afterwards was turned into a limited liability company.
Messrs. Gilbert and Rivington's collection of Oriental and other foreign types enables them to print in every known language, their specimen books embracing 267 distinct tongues. They are Oriental printers to the British Museum, India Office, British and Foreign Bible Society. Speaking of the Oriental work, the most striking feature in the firm's business, a correspondent to the British Printer (March-April 1895), says:
'Most of the type faces noticed were on English bodies, and the composition is somewhat similar. Arabic is composed just as with English. Sanskrit possesses some little features of accents and kerned sections, which render justification quite a fine art, accents on varying bodies needing to be utilised.... The firm does much Hindustani work, and possesses seven sizes of type in this language. Amongst the curiosities are the cuneiform types, the wedge-like series of faces in which old Persian, Median, and Assyrian inscriptions are written; and last, but by no means least in interest, the odd-looking hieroglyphic type faces, which are on bodies ranging from half nonpareil to three nonpareils, and some idea of their extent may be derived by noting that this type occupies fourteen cases of one hundred boxes each.'
To the firm of Messrs. Clowes of Stamford Street belongs the credit of being the first to print cheap periodical literature. William Clowes the elder, a native of Chichester, born in 1779, was apprenticed to a printer of that town, and coming to London in 1802 commenced business on his own account in the following year 1803. By marriage with the daughter of Mr. Winchester of the Strand, he obtained a share of the Government printing work. On moving to Stamford Street, Blackfriars Road, he was chosen to print the Penny Magazine, edited by Charles Knight, the first attempt to provide the public with good literature in a cheap periodical form. The work was illustrated with woodcuts, and so great was its success that from No. 1 to No. 106 there were sold twenty million copies; but the undertaking was heavily handicapped by the paper tax of threepence per pound (see The Struggles of a Book, C. Knight, 1850, 8vo). In 1840 an article appeared in the Quarterly Review, written, it is said, by Sir F. B. Head, but which is more in the style of T. F. Dibdin, on the Clowes printing-office. Even at that time there were no less than nineteen of Applegarth and Cowper's machines at work there, with a daily average of one thousand per hour each. Besides these there were twenty-three hand presses and five hydraulic presses. The foundry employed thirty hands, and the compositors numbered one hundred and sixty.
In 1851 Messrs. Clowes printed the official catalogues of the Great Exhibition, for which they specially cast 58,520 lbs. of type. They subsequently printed the catalogues of the Exhibitions of 1883-1886, and the Royal Academy catalogues, and have been connected from their inception with two works of a very different character, Hymns Ancient and Modern—the circulation of which has to be reckoned in millions—and the great General Catalogue of the Library of the British Museum, for their excellent printing of which all 'readers' are indebted to them. William Clowes the elder died in 1847. He was succeeded by his son, William, who died in 1883; and a third William, a grandson, is one of the managing directors of the firm which in 1881 was turned into a limited liability company.
But the chief honours of book production in London during the present century have been rightly awarded to the Chiswick Press.
Charles Whittingham the elder was born at Calledon, near Coventry, in 1767, and was apprenticed to a printer of that city. As soon as his time was out he came to London, and set up a press in Fetter Lane, his chief customers being Willis, a bookseller of Stationers' Court, Jordan of Fleet Street, and Symonds of Paternoster Row. His beginning was humble enough, his chief work lying in the direction of stationery, cards, and small bills. His first important publisher was a certain Heptinstall, who set him to print new editions of Boswell's Johnson, Robertson's America, and other important works. This was enough to set him going, and in 1797 he moved to larger premises in Dean Street, Fetter Lane, and then began to issue illustrated books. In 1803 he took a second workshop at 10 Union Buildings, Leather Lane, and again in 1807 he moved to Goswell Street. In 1811 he took his foreman Robert Rowland into partnership, and shortly afterwards left him to manage the city business, while he himself set up a press at Chiswick and took up his abode at College House. Here he continued to work until his death in 1840. For a short time, from 1824 to 1828, he was joined with his nephew Charles, to whom at his death he left the Chiswick business.
There is not much to be said of the work of the elder Whittingham. He confined his attention to the issue of small books, such as the British Classics, which he began to print in 1803. His books are chiefly notable for the printing of the woodcuts, which by the process known as overlaying, he brought to great perfection. His relations with the publishers were, however, none of the best. They accused him of piracy, and considered it to be against the best interests of the trade to issue small and cheap books. The productions of the elder Whittingham's press have, moreover, been largely overshadowed by those of his nephew.
Charles Whittingham the younger was a genuine artist in printing. He loved books to begin with, and thought no pains too great to bestow upon their production. Born at Mitcham, on October 30th, 1795, he was apprenticed to his uncle in 1810. In 1824 he was taken into partnership, but this lasted only four years, and he then set up for himself at 21 Took's Court, Chancery Lane. A near neighbour of his at that time was the publisher William Pickering, who since 1820 had been putting in the hands of the public some excellently printed and dainty volumes. It is stated in the Dictionary of National Biography that the series known as the Diamond Classics was printed for Pickering at the Chiswick Press. But this was not the case. He had no dealings whatever with the Whittinghams or the Chiswick Press before his introduction to Charles Whittingham the younger in 1829. The Diamond Classics, which he began to issue while he was living in Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1822, were printed by C. Corrall of Charing Cross, and the Oxford English Classics, in large octavo, chiefly by Talboys and Wheeler of Oxford, while most of his other work, amongst it the first eleven volumes of the works of Bacon, was done by Thomas White, who is first found at Bear Alley, and subsequently at Johnson Court and Crane Court in Fleet Street.
Fig. 35.—Old-faced Type.
Few of these early books of Pickering's had any kind of decoration beyond a device on the title-page. Simplicity, combined with what was best in type and paper, seem to have been the publisher's chief aim at that time; but in some of the Diamond Classics will be found the small and artistic border-pieces which he afterwards used frequently.
The first of Pickering's books in which anything of a very ornamental character occurs is The Bijou, or Annual of Literature, a publication which fixes very clearly his association with Whittingham. The Bijou first appeared in 1828, printed by Thomas White, with one or two charming head-pieces designed by Stothard. The volume for 1829 was also printed by White, and is noticeable as having the publisher's Aldine device, showing that this came into use during the year 1828. The volume for 1830 was printed by C. Whittingham of Took's Court. The meeting between the two men had been brought about by Basil Montagu in the summer of 1829. They found themselves kindred spirits on the subject of the artistic treatment of books, and a friendship sprang up between them, that ceased only with Pickering's death in 1854, and was productive of some of the most beautiful books that had ever come from an English press. Mr. Arthur Warren in his book, The Charles Whittinghams, Printers (p. 203), tells us: 'The two men met frequently for consultation, and whenever the bookseller visited the press, which he often did, there were brave experiments toward. The printer would produce something new in title-pages, or in colour work, or ornament, and the bookseller would propound some new venture in the reproduction of an ancient volume.... They made it a point, moreover, to pass their Sundays together, either at the printer's house or at Pickering's.'
Fig. 36.—Early Chiswick Press Initials.
In the artistic production of books they were ably assisted by Whittingham's eldest daughter Charlotte, and Mary Byfield. The former designed the blocks, many of which were copied from the best French and Italian work of the sixteenth century, and the latter engraved them.
Among the notable books produced by these means were the Aldine Poets, editions of Milton, Bacon, Isaak Walton's Complete Angler, the works of George Peele, reprints of Caxton's books, and many Prayer-books. In 1844 Pickering and Whittingham were in consultation as to the production of an edition of Juvenal to be printed in old-face great primer, and the foundry of the latest descendant of the Caslons was ransacked to supply the fount. The edition was to be rubricated and otherwise decorated, and this, or the printer's stock trouble, 'lack of paper,' occasioning some delay, the revived type first appeared in a fiction entitled Lady Willoughby's Diary, to which it gave a pleasantly old-world look in keeping with the period of which the story treats. By the kindness of Mr. Jacobi, the present manager of the Chiswick Press, an exact copy of the title-page of this book is here given, and with it, examples of the decorative initials and devices, in the revival of which also the Chiswick Press led the way.
Fig. 37.—Early Chiswick Press Devices.
Pickering died in 1854, and though Charles Whittingham the younger lived to the age of eighty-one, his death not taking place till 1876, he had retired from business in 1860. The business was afterwards acquired by Mr. George Bell.
In the English provinces Messrs. Clay, of Bungay, in Suffolk, have made for themselves a reputation both as general printers and more particularly for the careful production of old English texts; and Messrs. Austin, of Hertford, are well known for their Oriental work. But the pre-eminence certainly rests with the Clarendon Press at Oxford, whose work, whether in its innumerable editions of the Bible and Prayer-book, its classical books, or its great dictionaries, is probably, alike in accuracy of composition, in excellence of spacing and press-work, and in clearness of type, the most flawless that has ever been produced. Book-lovers have been known to complain of it as so good as to be uninteresting, but it certainly possesses all the distinctive virtues of a University Press.
If England has no lack of good printers at the present day, in Scotland they are, at least, equally plentiful.
The Ballantyne Press was founded by James Ballantyne, a solicitor in Kelso, with the aid of Sir Walter Scott. Ballantyne and Scott had been school-fellows and chums, and an incident in their school life recorded by Ballantyne aptly illustrates the characters of the two men. Ballantyne was studious but not quick, and often when he was bothered with his lessons, Scott would whisper to him, 'Come, slink over beside me, Jamie, and I'll tell you a story.' Although their roads lay apart for some years, while Scott was studying in Edinburgh and Ballantyne was carrying on the Kelso Mail, they met and renewed their friendship in the stage coach that ran between Kelso and Glasgow. Shortly afterwards, Ballantyne called on Scott, and begged him to supply a few paragraphs on legal questions of the day to the Kelso Mail. This Scott readily undertook to do, and when the manuscript was ready he took it himself to the printing-office, and with it some of the ballads destined for Lewis's collection then publishing in Edinburgh. Before he left he suggested that Ballantyne should print a few copies of the ballads, so that he might show his friends in Edinburgh what Ballantyne could do. Twelve copies were accordingly printed, with the title of Apologies for Tales of Terror. These were published in 1799, and Scott was so pleased with their appearance that he promised Ballantyne that he should be the printer of a selection of Border ballads that he was then making. This selection was given the title of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and formed two small octavo volumes, with the imprint, 'Kelso, 1802.'
Ballantyne's work, as shown in these volumes, was equal in every way to the best work done by Bensley and Bulmer at this time. Good type and good paper, combined with accuracy and clearness, at once raised Ballantyne's reputation. Longman and Rees, the publishers, declared themselves delighted with the printing, and Scott urged his friend to remove his press to Edinburgh, where he assured him he would find enough work to repay him for the removal. After some hesitation Ballantyne acquiesced in the proposal, and having found suitable premises in the neighbourhood of Holyrood House, set up 'two presses and a proof one,' and shortly afterwards, in April 1803, printed there the third volume of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. From this time forward Scott made it a point that whatever he wrote or edited should be printed at the Ballantyne Press. The first quarto, the Lay of the Last Minstrel, was published in January 1805. The poem was printed in a somewhat heavy-faced type; but in other respects the typography left nothing to be desired. In the same year Ballantyne and Scott entered into partnership, Scott taking a third of the profits of the printing-office. So rapidly did James Ballantyne extend his business that in 1819 Scott, in a letter to Constable, says that the Ballantyne Press 'has sixteen presses, of which only twelve are at present employed.' In 1826 the firm became involved in the bankruptcy of the publishers Messrs. Constable. After this Ballantyne was employed as editor of the Weekly Journal, and the literary management of the printing-house. He died on the 17th January 1833. The firm is now known as Ballantyne, Hanson and Co., and admirably sustains its old traditions.
Another great Scottish printing-house, that of T. and A. Constable, was founded by Thomas Constable, the fourth son of Archibald Constable the publisher. He learned his art in London under Mr. Charles Richards, and on returning to Edinburgh, in 1833, he founded the present printing-house in Thistle Street. Shortly afterwards he was appointed Queen's Printer for Scotland, and the patent was afterwards extended to his son Archibald, the present titular head of the house. Some years later he received the appointment of Printer to the University of Edinburgh. Thomas Constable inherited and incorporated with his own firm the printing business of his maternal grandfather, David Willison, a business founded in the eighteenth century. The firm has always been noted for its scholarly reading and the beauty of its workmanship; and only the fact that this volume is being printed by it prevents a longer eulogy.
Among other Scottish firms who are doing excellent work mention may be made also of Messrs. R. and R. Clark of Edinburgh, who tread very closely on the heels of the Clarendon Press, and Messrs. Maclehose, the printers to the University of Glasgow. In America also there is much good work being done, that of Mr. De Vinne and of the Riverside Press, Cambridge, being of the very highest excellence.
In the history of English printing, the close of the nineteenth century will always be memorable for the brilliant but short-lived career of the Kelmscott Press.
In May 1891 Mr. William Morris, whose poems and romances had delighted many readers, issued a small quarto book entitled The Story of the Glittering Plain, which had been printed at a press that he had set up in the Upper Mall, Hammersmith.
Lovers of old books could recognise at once that in its arrangement, and, to some extent, in its types, this first-fruit of the Kelmscott Press went straight back to the fifteenth century, resembling most nearly the quartos printed at Venice about 1490. Until within a few years of that date printed books, like the old manuscripts, had dispensed altogether with a title-page. Their first few pages might be occupied with a prologue or a table of contents, and though, when the text was reached, it was usual to herald it with an Incipit or Incomincia, followed by the title of the work, the information as to date of issue, printer or publisher, and place of imprint or sale, which we look to find in the title-page, was only given in a crowning paragraph or colophon at the end of the book, save for one or two accidental instances. The full title-page, as we know it, is not found before about 1520, and did not come into general use, so as to supersede the colophon, until many years after that date. But about 1480 the advantage of getting the short title of the book clearly stated at its outset was becoming pretty generally recognised, and from this date onwards what may be called the label title-page—that is, a first page containing the title and nothing else—is very frequently found. Ten years later a practice occasionally adopted elsewhere became common at Venice, and the first page of the text of a book was decorated with an ornamental border, and occasionally with a little picture as well. It was this temporary fashion which commended itself to Mr. Morris, and The Story of the Glittering Plain was issued with one of these label title-pages and with the first page of the story surrounded by a very beautiful border cut on wood from a design by Mr. Morris himself, here reproduced by the kind permission of his executors. It contained also a number of decorative initial letters, to use the clumsy phrase which the misappropriation of the word capitals to stand for ordinary majuscules, or 'upper case' letters, makes inevitable. Mr. Morris's initials were, of course, true capitals—i.e. they were used to mark the beginnings of chapters, and the only fault that could be found with them was that they were a little too large for the quarto page. These also were from Mr. Morris's own designs, ideas in one or two cases having been borrowed from a set used by Sweynheym and Pannartz, the Germans who introduced printing into Italy; but the borrowing, as always with Mr. Morris, being absolutely free. As for the type, it was clear that it bore some resemblance to that used by Nicolas Jenson, the Frenchman who began printing in Venice in 1470, and whose finer books, especially those on vellum, are generally recognised as the supreme examples of that perfection to which the art of printing attained in its earliest infancy. Mr. Morris's type was as rich as Jenson's at its best, and showed its authorship by not being quite rigidly Roman, some of the letters betraying a leaning to the 'Gothic' or 'black-letter' forms, which had found favour with the majority of the mediæval scribes. At the end of the book came the colophon in due fifteenth-century style, with information as to when and where it was printed. The ornamental design bearing the word 'Kelmscott,' by way of the device or trade-mark without which no fifteenth-century printer thought his office properly equipped, was not used in this book, but speedily made its appearance.
Fig. 38.—The first page of The Story of the Glittering Plain.
Pretty as was this edition of the The Story of the Glittering Plain, it yet raised a doubt—the doubt as to whether there was any real life in this effort to start afresh from old models, or whether it was a mere antiquarian revival and nothing more. The history of printing—or rather of the handwriting which the first printers took as their models—recorded, at least, one instance in which an antiquarian revival had been of permanent service; for the Roman letter, which the printers have used now for four centuries, was itself a happy reversion on the part of the fifteenth-century scribes to the Caroline minuscules of 600 years earlier, which had gradually been debased past recognition. There was no room for a second such sweeping reform as this, but those who compared the best modern printing with the masterpieces of the craft in its early days knew that the modern books by the side of the old ones looked flat and grey; and the new Glittering Plain, though not entirely satisfactory, was certainly free from these faults. A few months later the appearance of the three-volume reprint of Caxton's version of the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, sufficed to show that the Kelmscott Press was capable of turning out a book large enough to tax the resources of a printing-office, and the new book was not only larger but better than its predecessor. It became known that this, but for an accident, should have been the first book issued from the new press; and it was evident that the initial letters were exactly right for this larger page, while the splendid woodcuts from the designs of Sir Edward Burne-Jones revived the old glories of book-illustration. In the Golden Legend also appeared the first of those woodcut frontispiece titles which formed, as far as we know, an entirely new departure, and confer on the Kelmscott books one of their chief distinctions. Printed sometimes in white letters on a background of dark scrollery, sometimes in black letters on a lighter ground, these titles are always surrounded by a border harmonising with that on the first page of text, which they face. They thus carry out Mr. Morris's cardinal principle, that the unit, both for arrangement of type and for decoration, is always the double page. How persistently even the best printers in the trade ignore this principle is known to any one who has asked for a specimen of how a book is to be printed, it being almost impossible to get more than a single page set up. If a double page is insisted on, the craftsman, ingenious in avoiding trouble, will print the same page twice over, thus confusing the eye by the exact parallelism of line with line and paragraph with paragraph. But Mr. Morris, who had all the capacity of genius for taking pains, understood that, when a book lies open before us, though we only read one page at a time, we see two, and in the selection of the type, the adjustment of letterpress and margins, and finally in the pursuit of a decorative beginning, either to the book itself, or to its sections, he never arranged a single page except in relation to the one which it was to face.
As far as permanent influence is concerned Mr. Morris's Roman letter, the 'Golden type,' as it was dubbed, from its use in the Golden Legend, is the most important of the three founts which he employed. His own sympathies, however, were too pronouncedly mediæval for him to be satisfied with it, and for the next large book which he took in hand, a reprint of Caxton's Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, the first work printed in the English tongue, he designed a much larger and bolder type, an improvement on one of the 'Gothic' founts used by Anton Koberger at Nuremberg in the fifteenth century. This 'Troy' type was subsequently recut in a smaller size for the double-columned Chaucer, and in both its forms is a very handsome fount, while the characters are so clearly and legibly shaped that, despite its antique origin, any child who knows his letters can learn to read it in a few minutes. With these three founts the Kelmscott Press was thoroughly equipped with type; but until his final illness took firm hold on him Mr. Morris was never tired of designing new initials, border-pieces, and decorative titles with a profusion which the old printers, who were parsimonious in these matters, would have thought extravagantly lavish. Including those completed by his executors after his death, he printed in all fifty-three books in sixty-five volumes, and this annual output of nine or ten volumes of all sizes, save the duodecimo, which he refused to recognise, gave his work a cumulative force which greatly increased its influence. Had he printed only a few books his press might have been regarded as a rich man's toy, an outbreak of æstheticism in a new place, of no more permanent interest than the cult of the sunflower and the lily in the 'eighties. Even the great Chaucer by itself might not have sufficed to take his press out of the category of experiments. But when folio, quarto, octavo, and sexto-decimo appeared in quick succession, each with its appropriate decorations, and challenging and defying comparison with the best work of the best printers of the past, the experimental stage was left far behind, and publishers and printers awoke to the fact that a model had been set them which they would do well to imitate.
Fig. 39.—The Kelmscott 'Troy' Type.
As to what will be the permanent result of Mr. Morris's efforts to reform modern printing it is too soon as yet to speak, but signs of their influence are already abundantly visible. The books issued from the 'Vale Press' of Messrs. Ricketts and Shannon have their admirers; but they have that rather irritating degree of likeness which makes every difference—and the differences are numerous—appear a wilful and regrettable divergence.
Fig. 40.—The Macmillan Greek Type.
The 'Macmillan Greek type,' designed by Mr. Selwyn Image, which has now been in use for some time, may be regarded as another offshoot of Mr. Morris's theories, and deserves all the praise due to a brave experiment. By permission of the Messrs. Macmillan a page of it, taken from their 'Parnassus' Homer, is here shown, and few modern types will bear comparison with it. That it is not wholly and entirely successful is due to the fact that for so many centuries Greek types have been dominated by the models set by Aldus and the other printers of the early sixteenth century, who tried to imitate the rapid cursive hand of the Greek scholars of their day. Had the introduction of printing been preceded by a revival of the beautiful Greek book-hand of the eleventh century, similar to the revival of the Caroline minuscules, all would have been well. But in going back himself to the eleventh century Mr. Image was obliged perpetually to conciliate eyes used to the later cursive forms, and the result is too obviously eclectic. The mere fact, however, that such an effort has been made is full of promise for the future, for it is only by new effort, joined with constant reference to old models, that types can be improved.