Printers as Men of the World

EVELYN HARTER

Printers are usually judged as printers, and there are those who hold that this is as it should be, that the printer should stick to his pica rule and follow copy out the window. But in their spare time printers also eat, vote, marry and go to war. It would therefore be possible to look at them from various points of view, as, for instance, how many were vegetarians, anarchists, bigamists and top sergeants. This could be so of any group of craftsmen. If we look at printers from another viewpoint, as to whether they were men of the world, it is because of the nature of the stuff with which they work.

I should like to begin obliquely by speaking first of an approach to the history of printing. Probably the history of printing is more limited, definite and easy to encompass than that of almost any subject. That is not to say that anyone can ever learn all of it, or that we cannot go on learning something new about it all our lives. But printing started fairly recently in time; it is its own record. Excluding the science of bibliography, the literature is not large compared, for example, with that of art or philosophy or geology. Yet few people know as much of it as they might know with pleasure, and perhaps the reason for that might be a faulty approach. It is customary to send beginners to study Updike, but it is easy for beginners to get bogged down in Printing Types, particularly if they start to read it from the beginning. Updike's magnificent work is, in its writing and its outline, gratifying to the student whose basic knowledge has been fixed and matured. Beginners move more freely in the pages of George Parker Winship, possibly because he related printing events to world events to a greater extent than does Updike. Usually the person who wishes to learn more about printing has already at hand a lot of names and dates and places vaguely relating to world events of the past. To such a person printing history lends itself readily to the method of study by association. It can be a good game to find out what was happening in printing when Napoleon was looking at the Pyramids, or when Charles I was beheaded. If one is interested in art, he can correlate artists and printers, and find that Leonardo was born about the same time that printing was born in Europe, or he can correlate printing with advances in the knowledge of medicine or agriculture. There are small but interesting links between the history of printing and that of music. For instance William Caslon the elder loved music, and it is possible that the composer Handel sometimes played his new pieces at the concerts held in Caslon's organ room, since the two men had mutual friends in the musical world of London.

There have been printers who were interested in other worlds. The Dutch printer Blaeu studied astronomy under Tycho Brahe, and himself produced in 1600 a celestial globe. The Scottish type-founder Alexander Wilson, although educated as a doctor, became interested in type and left a considerable foundry to his sons before he himself moved on to become professor of astronomy at the University of Glasgow.

If you wish to make the most of this method, you must do it yourself. Then it is you who will have the fun, and then what you learn will stick. What follows illustrates the method briefly by looking at a number of printers in the past five hundred years from one angle, judging them not simply as printers but as men of the world.

It would be nice if we could start with a definition of "man of the world" and a definition of "printer" but actually this small investigation is an attempt at definition. We cannot mean "man of the world" in the Chesterfieldian sense, although there have been many printers who knew how to dress and carry themselves in court and salon, notably Aldus, Caxton and members of the Didot family. Chesterfield would be obliged to allow some of our printers in his company, but I doubt if we could allow him in ours, for in one of his letters to his son he says, "Due attention to the inside of books and due contempt for the outside is the proper relation between a man of sense and his books." Perhaps he was thinking of the vanity of fancy bindings, though it is more likely that he was beguiling himself into one of those untruths common to aphorizers. However that may be, our man of the world does not mean gentleman of the world as Chesterfield thought of gentleman, although there are printers who are both—not all dead.

If we were to speak of the printer as a citizen of the world, we would be coming a little closer to it, but citizen implies being at home in the geographical world, whereas we are thinking of him being at home in the world of ideas. When we say "of" the world, we mean that he knows that he belongs to his contemporary world, that the people and events are of interest to him, the politics, art, science and poetry—not only some particular dexterity, professional specialization or money-making device of his own.

It might be argued that the bulk of printing has not now, and never has had, much relation to ideas, that in the early days its chief business was dubious theological disputes and that its chief business now is advertising soap flakes and the like. But printing, in its entirety, is a description of the world, and if a great deal of print is devoted to murder cases, toothpaste ads and income tax blanks—well, that must be the kind of world we have. However, when new ideas have been advanced, they have been advanced in print, so that the printer has never been safe from them. Even now, in the event that they be promulgated by radio, they must be fixed in print in order to stick and sink in. Let us only say then that with regard to gaining knowledge of the world in which we live, the printer is in an exposed position—nothing more.

Although we do not know much about Gutenberg,[22] the first

printer, we doubt that he was a man of the world in our sense. How could he have been? For the preceding four or five hundred years to be a man of the world was to be unworldly; people had been concerned with building cathedrals, making religious paintings, going on crusades. Printing was the chief factor in making the man of the world in our modern sense. Printing enabled him to know what was going on so that he might take part in it, although printers did not realize this during the cradle days of printing. Great events were occurring then; the Turks captured Constantinople; the Hundred Years' War came to an end with the English driven off the continent of Europe; the Portuguese sailed to the Canaries and the Azores; but these events found little mention in early printing. The Nuremberg Chronicle, as Helen Gentry and David Greenhood point out in their Chronology, made no mention of Columbus' discovery of America in the previous year. First came religious books, then school books, law books and classics. It is true that Fust and Schöffer printed proclamations and information for the archbishop, but it was not until Von Olpe at Basle printed The Ship of Fools in 1494 that we have "a book dealing with contemporary people and their exploits instead of with historical accounts of the past."

Although Gutenberg had been involved in the politics of Mainz in his youth, probably he thought of nothing but printing after he began work on his invention. We have an old book of stories for children which describes Gutenberg in a dream: "He thought of the great harm which might be done through the printing of bad books—how they would corrupt the minds of the innocent, how they would stir up the passions of the wicked. Suddenly he seized a heavy hammer and began to break his press in pieces. But then a voice seemed to come from the press itself saying, 'Hold your hand, John Gutenberg. The art of printing will enlighten the world.'" I have no idea where the author could have found source material for this little fantasy, for we can feel quite sure that Gutenberg had little conception of the influence of his invention. He was all craftsman and inventor and carried his world in his head. His financial reverses alone would indicate that.

The word "printer" has been an elastic word from the very beginning, including scholars and artists, businessmen and craftsmen. If we were to consider the term "printer" narrowly in the sense of a typesetter or a pressman or a man who supervises these operations, we should still have to make room in our history for men like Jean Grolier, the patron, and Geoffroy Tory, the artist. We know of many printers who were first and last businessmen. Johann Fust was a banker until he put money in Gutenberg's project. The first English printer, Caxton, was a retired wool merchant who liked to translate French romances for his friends and became tired of writing them out in longhand. Anton Koberger, who was Dürer's godfather, the publisher of The Nuremberg Chronicle and a great entrepreneur in his day, began as a printer; he printed books in various languages, did sub-contracting and printed advertising circulars. Probably if the plain motives of most printers could be discovered, making a living would loom large.

There have been many printers who were also scholars, beginning with Aldus and including the Estiennes and the Didots. And there are the typecutter-printers who combined letter-founding and printing—Nicolas Jenson, Giambattista Bodoni, John Baskerville, as well as the names equally brilliant in printing history of those who devoted themselves to founding—Claude Garamond, William Caslon and the Fourniers. A general haze surrounds the subject of the contribution of less well-known type-cutters to printing. Although the use of a distinguished type may be one of the chief reasons for the printer's success, compare the fame of the printer Aldus with that of his type designer, Francesco da Bologna, of John Bell with that of Richard Austin, of Thomas Bensley with that of Vincent Figgins, of Bulmer with William Martin, of Elzevir with Christoffel van Dyck, of François Ambroise Didot with that of Waflard. On the subject of the share which these printers had in suggesting the nature of the type to the men who cut it, typographical writers are almost consistently inexplicit, although we do know that William Martin brought his types with him when he started work for Bulmer. Even Updike, who gives credit to the type designer and cutter wherever he is known, says, "At first the best printers were often type-founders too, although Garamond merely (sic!) cut and cast type for the use of others." Binders and papermen, ink-makers and machinery manufacturers have always had an affectionate and proprietary air about printing. Rather than try to define "printer" strictly, it may be truer to say that printers are an adjectival lot, and that printing can honorably be a very inclusive term, but that we might have a new printing terminology which would better define the various contributions.

What was happening in the world about the year 1500 when Aldus Manutius[23] had his great printing shop in Venice working at its peak? Columbus had made several voyages, and the Portuguese had been around the tip of Africa although Magellan had not yet sailed around the world. Leonardo da Vinci had left Milan for political reasons, and was working in Venice, as was Giovanni Bellini and his pupils Titian and Giorgione. Northern Italy was the scene of much brawling between rival princes, with Emperor Maximilian I stepping in now and then to make things worse. The battles were nuisances to Aldus, for they interfered with the production and distribution of his books. I do not know how much he knew about the geographical discoveries of his time, but we can be sure that a man of his cultivation knew about the great painting and sculpture being done. Ralph Roeder says of this time that its "triumphs are preserved in art, its reverses in its spiritual story, and both are the result of the same cause—its supreme vitality."

It is one more indication of that vitality that Aldus at the age of forty embarked on a project which was to bring about a tremendous enlargement of the conception of the purpose of books. Many printers in history have drifted into printing or its allied trades by chance, but there seems to be no doubt that Aldus knew exactly what he was doing all the time. He was a man who knew what he wanted. He had been a scholar and tutor to Alberto and Lionello Pio, princes of Carpi, when he first saw printed books and realized what could be done to make classical manuscripts generally available. With the aid of the Pio family he went to Venice, which, since the fall of Constantinople, had been the richest repository of manuscripts and a residence of Greek scholars. In order to have reference books available for his proof-readers and editors, he first printed a Greek dictionary and a Greek grammar and himself prepared a Greek-Latin dictionary. He gave Venice a university when he started the New Academy of Venice. For his press he hired the finest scholars of the day—Bembo and Reuchlin, Musurus and Erasmus. We, in the twentieth century, have a tendency to think of scholars as removed from the affairs of life. Aldus was a scholar who was also in the midst of life, because scholarship was an important affair in the world of Renaissance man. He must have been a true cosmopolitan as well, commanding, as he did, the friendship of men as different as Erasmus of Rotterdam and Jean Grolier of France, from whom he had a commission to print special copies of his books on vellum.

The 1500's were a time of religious bickerings and of religious wars, of Henry the VIII's break with Rome, of the German wars following the death of Martin Luther, and the Inquisition in Spain. In the early part of the century there was working at Lyons, which was then second only to Paris as a printing center in France, a young scholar and printer named Etienne Dolet.[24] There is a story that he was the illegitimate son of Francis I, but at any rate he came of a wealthy family, having been to Venice as secretary to the French Ambassador and to Toulouse to study law. By the time he was twenty-seven he had published a Latin Dictionary which was "one of the most important contributions to classical scholarship in the century" and was given a license by Francis I providing that Dolet might print for ten years any books written or supervised by him. His great range of taste and interests may be judged by the fact that he printed the New Testament in Latin and Rabelais in French.

He had met Rabelais when he first went to Lyons to work under Sebastian Gryphius as proof-reader, and there gained his practical knowledge of printing under the foreman, Jean de Tournes. E. D. Christie, Dolet's biographer, says that Dolet, arriving in Lyons with a fever, may have been taken directly to Rabelais, who was at that time practising medicine, with the position of Physician to the Great Hospital. Christie also thinks it possible that Dolet may have seen Rabelais perform a dissection on a man's body ten years before Vesalius. Everything Dolet did shows him to have been a man with lively fearless intellect and no talent for playing safe and keeping out of trouble. He spent several terms in jail for lack of orthodoxy on religious questions, was pardoned by Francis I for killing a man, and was denounced by Rabelais for printing an unexpurgated edition of Pantagruel after Rabelais had fixed it up to suit the Sorbonne.

At Lyons in the months of April and May, 1539, there occurred the first large organized printers' strike. It was no wonder, for Updike says that it was not unusual for the printers' day to begin at two in the morning and last until eight or nine at night. The workmen said that the masters did not supply sufficient food, that wages had been reduced, that there were too many compulsory holidays. The Seneschal of Lyons was empowered to meet a committee of journeymen and one of masters; at this conference rules were drawn up. But the trouble spread to Paris, and as a result of arbitration there, the working day was set from five in the morning till eight at night. Then there was a flare-up at Lyons again because the master printers threatened to move away; this was some years in settlement.

Of all the master printers of Lyons, the only one who sided with the strikers was Dolet. This was held against him later when he was imprisoned on a charge of atheism, tortured, hanged and finally burned on his thirty-seventh birthday. (See Chronology of Books and Printing.) On his way to his death he made a Latin pun on his name. If we speak of him as a man of the world, the accent is on man.

It is said that it was this event—the burning of Dolet—which decided Christopher Plantin[25] to leave France in 1548 for Antwerp, though Plantin never exhibited the uncompromising attitude of Dolet; rather he showed a business toughness and adaptability which enabled him to survive and stay in this world, which was no small feat for a printer in the sixteenth century. It was a time when empires and ideologies were in tremendous conflict; the period of the German religious wars following the death of Martin Luther; of Spain and England in unrelenting struggle for control of the sea, culminating in the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Antwerp itself was a focal point of disorder after Philip II sent the Duke of Alba to subdue the Netherlanders. Plantin had built up a good printing and publishing business when, in 1562, it was liquidated because of his alleged unorthodoxy. Within a few years he had recovered to the extent that he was made Printer to the King of Spain, from whom he received assurances of help on his Polyglot Bible. Again, in the sack of Antwerp by Spanish soldiers in 1576 his business was all but ruined; he went to Leyden for a few years, but returned to finish his days at Antwerp. To a man living in those times, the issues must have seemed even more confused and difficult than ours do now. Recent investigations indicate that Plantin belonged to a sect of heretics for which he printed books secretly, while also doing books for the church.

Another sixteenth-century printer who could hardly be oblivious to the events of his time—he was so knocked about by them—was Robert Estienne.[26] Even though he was at one time Royal Printer, liked and respected by Francis I, he sometimes had to seek the sanctuary of the King's court to escape the King's censors. Robert must have been a man of stature, for he published his New Testament in defiance of the Sorbonne, and only after Francis I died did he leave Paris for Geneva. He was a believer in one of the springs of Renaissance thought—that through scholarship it is possible to come to the truth, and through printing all men may recognize and know the truth.

It would be possible for a man of the world to be so without ever stirring from the town of his birth, yet oftener than not the man with breadth of interest is a cosmopolitan and a traveller. Such cosmopolitans were fourteen members of the Elzevir[27] family, who, over a period of one hundred and thirty years, engaged in printing and selling small books chiefly intended for poor scholars. This Dutch family of practical internationalists established their bookshops and printing offices in nearly every large city on the continent, from Denmark to Italy, printing their books in Latin and Greek, French and Arabic, on subjects ranging from medicine to political science. All this in spite of the Thirty Years' War, which was to bring about the decline of the artificial internationalism of the Hapsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire, and in spite of similar disturbances before and after.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the geographical boundaries of printing were extended vastly outside of Europe. The colonization of North and South America was going forward. The first press in America had been established at Mexico City in 1539 by agents of Kromberger of Seville. European printing was carried to India in 1561, to China in 1589, and to Japan in 1591. The first printing was done in Russia in 1563.

Credit for doing the first printing in the American colonies, The Freeman's Oath, was once given to Stephen Daye, is sometimes latterly given to his young son, Matthew Daye. Were they more than mechanic, compositor and pressman? Who chose the copy, proofread it, set policies, pushed the work along? Possibly some of the founders of the new Harvard College, or possibly Mrs. Glover, the widow of the man who originated the idea of the press. She was probably a woman of education, since she settled in Cambridge to be near the new college and later married the President, Henry Dunster. She undoubtedly shared her first husband's independent views—he had been suspended from his parsonage in Surrey because of his nonconformity; she might have picked The Freeman's Oath for the first copy. She may have been more of a printer and more of a woman of the world than the fragments of knowledge which we have about her disclose.... Whoever guided the destiny of the first press, it was a person not completely confined by dogma, for the books included almanacs, law books and college thesis lists, as is pointed out by Carl Purington Rollins, himself perhaps our best example of a modern fine printer conscious of what is going on around him.

During the late 1700's the Industrial Revolution began, but its implications were not guessed by artisan or statesman, and the best printers were still in the age of elegance. Baskerville was businessman, eccentric, free-thinker, but his printing, as much as that of Bodoni who was employed by the Duke of Parma, was regal.

Probably Horace Walpole,[28] more than any other printer, felt that the world was his house, in which he could move about freely from room to room, always at ease. He had the wit and manners to be an ornament to French salons, the originality to introduce a new brand of literature in his Castle of Otranto—the forerunner of our mystery novel of today, the personal force to influence the trend of English architecture with his "little Gothic castle" at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham. In one of his letters to the artist Richard Bentley he says that he can't resist going to fires, and there is something of this spirit in his activities. The collector W. S. Lewis says, "He was not only, in his own word, a 'gazetteer' but the historian of English painting and gardening, an essayist, poet, novelist, pamphleteer, dramatist, printer, antiquarian, and arbiter elegantiarum and in the modern sense and phrase a 'debunker' of historical figures.... It was his main purpose in life to be the official historian of his time."

Although he had a seat in Parliament, he paid little attention to the nation's business. He represented those parts of life in the eighteenth century which had natured and were drawing to a close, as Fielding and Goldsmith, the American Revolution and the French Revolution represented things to come. Printing being one of his minor activities, he is of more interest as a human being than as a craftsman.

If Walpole was a man of the world and man of letters, John Bell[29] was man of the world and man of business. During a lifetime of eighty-six years he was, as Stanley Morison pictures him, book-seller, printer, publisher, type-founder and journalist. Like a lesser Franklin—he had not Franklin's scientific interest, integrity, or vision—he was endowed with the ability to grasp the salient facts of a trade or profession, and a wealth of exuberant interest in life around him. At the beginning of his career as a book-seller, he published a sort of early version of Wilson's Cumulative Book Index, a list of current books for the use of the trade. As type-founder (and introducer of the short "s") he employed the talent of the punch cutter Richard Austin to produce the first English "modern" type. In addition to a successful fashion magazine, he published at different times four newspapers. At one time he even made himself a war correspondent, when he visited the British Army then fighting the French Revolutionaries in Flanders. He reported the action at Ypres, made a march with the troops from Courtrai to Tournai and pursued his object of finding "active and well-informed persons in different parts of the continent" who would act as regular correspondents for his paper, The Oracle. The books he published included law books, Shakespeare, a series of the poets of Great Britain; he engaged members of the Royal Academy to illustrate the plays of a series called The British Theatre and hired the best engravers of the day to copy the paintings. He knew the literary men of the day—Sheridan wrote for his World—and even had a balloonist for a friend—Lunardi, who made the first ascent in London. Compared to his contemporary Bulmer, who could be called a printer's printer, Bell was a promoter whose medium was printing.

Of all the Didots, and they seem to have been able men, Firmin Didot[30] is of most interest to us. He taught many of the printers of Greece out of sympathy for the cause of Greek independence, the same for which Byron died. He wrote plays, translated classics, and after he retired from business he entered the Chamber of Deputies; he learned Spanish at the age of sixty-three. Desmond Flower says, in writing of him, "Printing is a curious and perhaps unsatisfactory hybrid between a profession and an art; the men who have caught the sense of it most successfully have been intelligent people who could see it whole—scholar-printer-publishers—for whom some other rivers flowed beyond the simple floods of printing ink." Perhaps when Mr. Flower wrote this he had forgotten how "tacky" printing ink is, but his meaning is a large part of what I am trying to say.

The question of what world one chooses to recognize—that of courts and salons or of slums—arises in connection with the great printer of the nineteenth century, William Morris.[31] He saw what was happening as a result of machinery and large industry, and he did not like it. He must have seen it very plainly in order to revolt against it so strongly. His printing period was the last in his life, following the chintzes, stained glass windows, tapestries, rugs and furniture. He felt that people would be better people if they made and owned beautiful things, and he also saw, like his contemporary, Karl Marx, that the economic structure would have to be changed before the best qualities in people could operate, though he was not willing to follow Marx in his methods. When we think of the William Morris who printed the Kelmscott Chaucer, we do not always remember the William Morris who stood in Hyde Park near the Marble Arch talking to the street crowds about socialism, wondering if the police were coming; who for years travelled about speaking in a thousand stuffy halls in England, Ireland and Scotland. When he was old, tears would come to his eyes when the misery of the poor was mentioned. It is easy to say that his socialism was vague and his desire to return to the methods of the thirteenth century unrealistic, but considering the sincerity of his motives and the breadth of his interests, I think that we must say that he was not so much a man of this world as a man of a better world.

Perhaps we must return to America to find the printer who has made the greatest contribution to political history. We can hardly detail here the cosmopolitan accomplishments of Benjamin Franklin. We might rather examine what right we have to call him a printer, in view of the magnitude of his other accomplishments. He liked to think of himself as a printer, and started his will with the words, "I, Benjamin Franklin, printer." Once when he visited the establishment of the Didots in France he stopped at a hand press and pulled a few proofs. When the workman exclaimed at his dexterity he said, "Do not be surprised. Printing is my real trade." Wherever he went in England or France he corresponded with printers and visited their establishments. We know about his private press at Passy and about his wholesome influence on American printing. Carl Van Doren, in his biography of Franklin, says that when he died the printers of Philadelphia walked in his funeral procession and that the printers of Paris gathered to honor him, listened to a eulogy by one of them while others set it in type as fast as it was delivered and distributed printed copies as souvenirs. If then we can claim him as a printer, we can feel sure that the man who helped draft the Declaration of Independence, who was sent to negotiate the peace and was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention was, more than any other printer, a man of the world.

It could hardly be maintained that being connected with printing makes one a man of the world. It might even be argued and proved by examples past and present that preoccupation with the problems of the craft is a narrowing influence. Since most of the circumstances of our lives are arranged for us when we are born, it is possible to travel through life as on a conveyor belt, having things done to us along the way, and this can be as true of a fine printer as of a bank president. Each can go through life utterly ignorant of the economic and mental processes that bring food to his table and send his son to the wars. It was always a question, now more than ever critical, what part of a man's life must be given to being a citizen against the claims of livelihood, philosophy, family and amusement. The events of the past few years have dramatized the dilemma. Printing has helped bring us to this place in history. And so, although we cannot condemn a good craftsman because he is interested in nothing except shop talk, we might say that printers who are also men of the world realize that they are working in a bigger shop.

WOOD ENGRAVING BY REYNOLDS STONE, 1937.

COMPOSED IN GRANJON TYPES

FOOTNOTES:

[22] Johann Gutenberg (c. 1397-1468). Gutenberg is considered the effective inventor of printing, but his biography is written darkly only in the records of the law courts to which he was constantly summoned on money matters. His was a complex of inventions: he not only cast type in single pieces, but devised a chase to hold it, mixed suitable ink and perfected a technique for register and good impression, with the result that the first printing remains among the best.

[23] Aldus Manutius (1450-1515). Aldus' contributions to printing—small capitals, the first Italic, the popularization of the small type page—centered about his wish to help scholars. He wrote to a friend: "We send these Satires to you, my dear Scipio, that they may through their brevity become once more your intimate friends, as they were formerly during your stay at Rome as a young man, when you possessed them as thoroughly in your memory as your own fingers and fingernails."

[24] Etienne Dolet (1509-1546). Dolet belongs with the great scholar-printers Aldus Manutius and Robert Estienne, although he did not live long enough to compare with them in volume of work. His career of collision with the authority of the church, the state and other printers terminated when he was tortured, hanged and burned on his thirty-seventh birthday.

[25] Christopher Plantin (1514-1589). Plantin, a Frenchman who migrated to Belgium, printed in many languages, using fonts by the best contemporary type-cutters; he undertook work for the King of Spain and the City of Antwerp, which honored him in death by burying him in its cathedral, with the inscription "... king of typography."

[26] Robert Estienne (c. 1503-1559). In Robert Estienne, as in Aldus and Dolet, the scholar and printer combined to produce tools for humanism: dictionaries, lexicons, grammars, editions of the classics. On his death his son Henri Estienne, grandson of the first Henri, augmented the family tradition of scholarly publishing, though he never surpassed the books of his father and grandfather in typographical brilliance.

[27] Louis Elzevir (1540-1617). About one hundred and thirty years after the invention of printing, Louis Elzevir became the first publisher in the modern sense; not primarily a scholar or craftsman, but a businessman who undertook the risk of production and distribution of quantities of books for a variety of readers throughout Europe.

[28] Horace Walpole (1717-1797). Walpole is the great example of the gentleman-amateur in printing. His fame as a printer has been bolstered by his renown in other fields, especially in literature and architecture.

[29] John Bell (1749-1831). Bell was a journalist and impresario in printing whose enterprises ranged from publishing fashion magazines to sets of Shakespeare. If he did not entirely realize the ambition announced when he started his foundry—"... I am not without hopes of raising my fame in this pursuit beyond the reach of competition in any country whatever"—the type which bears his name remains today his best memorial.

[30] Firmin Didot (1764-1836). The Didot family illustrates again that printing ink seems to linger in the blood longer in France than in other countries; of the Didots, Firmin stands out as a man who loved his profession and constantly looked beyond it.

[31] William Morris (1834-1896). William Morris was a man who looked backward in the crafts and forward in human relations, yet had a full life in the world of his own time. As a printer he had great influence, not all good.

ANNE LYON HAIGHT

Are Women the Natural Enemies of Books?

In my search for knowledge about lady bibliophiles I climbed the library ladder and among the books on collecting saw The Library, by Andrew Lang, London, 1881. Confident that I would find some charming and sympathetic essay on the subject, I took it down and turned to the index, but evidently I had forgotten Lang's prejudice, for to my horror the startling lines "Women the natural foes of books" met my eye. They were classed with the other enemies of books: damp, dust, dirt, book-worms, careless readers, borrowers, book stealers, book-ghouls, etc., so I hastily turned to the page and read: "Almost all women are the inveterate foes, not of novels, of course, nor peerages and popular volumes of history, but of books worthy of the name. It is true that Isabelle d'Este and Madame de Pompadour and Madame de Maintenon were collectors; and, doubtless, there are many other brilliant exceptions to a general rule. But broadly speaking, women detest the books which the collector desires and admires. First, they don't understand them; second, they are jealous of their mysterious charms; third, books cost money, and it really is a hard thing for a lady to see money expended on what seems a dingy old binding, or yellow paper scored with crabbed characters. Thus ladies wage a skirmishing war against book-sellers' catalogues, and history speaks of husbands who have had to practise the guile of smugglers when they conveyed a new purchase across their own frontier. Thus many married men are reduced to collecting Elzivers, which go readily into the pocket, for you cannot smuggle a folio volume easily."

Poor man, his experience with the fair sex must have been a very unfortunate one. Perhaps he had been disillusioned by reading of the sixteenth-century abbess of the convent of Rumsey in Hampshire, whom Dibdin tells about. She was bibulously rather than bibliographically inclined and bartered the books of the abbey for strong liquors and consequently was accused of immoderate drinking, especially in the nighttime when she invited the nuns to her chamber to participate in these excesses. But fortunately the women whom Lang describes in his diatribe are really the rare exception to the rule and only lack of space prevents my writing a folio volume about the many famous women collectors who have been friends not foes to books throughout the ages.

It is true though that the female of our species has never been as susceptible to the malady of book madness as the male, possibly because she has not had the same opportunity. Unless a woman is economically independent there are many demands upon her allowance and consequently she must really want a book very much to buy it instead of a new hat or something else that is dear to her heart. She is not as apt to buy for speculation or because a book is one of the conventional collector's items, but is more independent and adventurous in following her personal taste, although the spirit of a true collector of books is the same whether it be possessed by man or woman.

Strange to say, the first bibliophile on record is a woman. She was a Benedictine abbess named Hroswitha. She lived in the Nunnery of Gandersheim in Saxony in the tenth century. She not only read all the parchment rolls and great codices which came into her hands, but caused books to be written for her Convent, wrote plays in Latin and translated Terence. Hroswitha probably knew but little Greek, as certain monks of the period considered the language an invention of the devil. Her example was followed in the next century by the lovely and intelligent Countess Judith of Flanders, who, wherever she followed her warring English husband, caused the most exquisite illuminated manuscripts to be made. She continued her interests on the continent when she later married the Duke of Bavaria. Four of her manuscripts, magnificently bound, are now safely housed in the Pierpont Morgan Library where "though they are books worthy of the name" their beauty may be appreciated by women who are not even "the brilliant exception to the general rule" of collectors.

The Golden Age of women bibliophiles in France from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries must have been a glorious time to have lived. The Queens, the Princesses, the Mistresses of the Kings and all the great ladies had their libraries. They were composed of beautifully illuminated breviaries, missals and manuscripts, and from the presses of the great printers of the day came romances, histories, plays and religious books, veritable works of art. These books and manuscripts were bound in gold and silver and jewels, embroidered velvet, and in some of the most beautiful leather bindings the world has ever seen. Briefly: Marguerite of Navarre was one of the famous scholars of her day and the author of a collection of love stories, The Heptameron. It is said of her "L'amour du livre, chez la fille de Catherine fut une véritable passion." Her books were bound by the famous Clovis and Nicolas Eve and were decorated with daisies. Madame de Pompadour was for many years an inspiring influence in art and letters, although she owned more plays, novels and other "productions légères" than serious works. She had a printing press at Versailles and also etched plates for illustrations and as gifts for her friends. La Countesse de Verrue was a discriminating collector, a patroness of all the arts and a fascinating woman. The Du Barry acquired 1,068 volumes. When she began to form her library she could scarcely read or write. However, with practise, she soon learned to read well, but like many of us never to spell. Anne of Austria was fortunate in having her friend Mazarin, a kindred spirit in bibliomania, to advise her. Marie Antoinette had two libraries. She kept her particular books in her boudoir in the Trianon and the titles in the catalogue are very entertaining. Mary Stuart had a catholic taste in literature and her books were exceptionally well chosen. In deference to the loss of her first husband some were bound in black with black edges. It is comforting to know that when she left France as a young widow to return to her native Scotland where so much tragedy awaited her "qu'elle avait pour les livres un goût profond, et ils etaient pour ainsi dire sa seule consolation loin de ce beau Pays de France." In England, one of the most fortunate of the many ladies who appreciated literature was Queen Elizabeth, for she lived in an age when masterpieces were being written, many of them dedicated to her and many inspired by her. When she was young she embroidered velvets in gold and silver threads to bind her treasures. Among the manuscripts in the Bodleian Library are the Epistles of St. Paul, etc., which was Elizabeth's own book. She has written at the beginning "I walke many times into the pleasant fields of the Holy Scriptures, where I plucke up the goodlie-some herbes of sentences by pruning: chaw them by musing: and laie them up at length in the hie seate of memorie by gathering them together: that so having tasted their sweetness I may the less perceave the bitterness of this miserable life."

One of the most touching and beautiful tributes ever written to a woman is Sir Philip Sidney's dedication of his Arcadia to his "deare ladie and sister," the Countess of Pembroke, to whom he wrote in part: "you desired me to do it, and your desire, to my hart is an absolute commandment. Now it is done onely for you, onely to you." She was his great inspiration and helped him in the editing of the book.

Where there's a will there's a way and women seem able to smuggle folios as well as duodecimos into the library. Catherine de Médici, for instance, had such a passion for books that she got them by fair means or foul. She longed for the library of her cousin Marshal Strozzi and as soon as he died appropriated it for her own. Catherine neglected to pay for it and owed the book-sellers as well, so after her death when her books were about to be seized by her creditors, De Thou raised the money to pay for them and they were saved for the state. The fascinating and glamorous Diane de Poitiers was a practical business executive as well as a bibliophile, for it was she who supposedly advised Henry II to pass an ordinance requiring publishers to present a copy of each book they published to the royal libraries at Blois and Fontainebleau, thereby increasing these collections by more than seven hundred volumes. Thus the present-day copyright law was initiated by a woman. Catherine of Russia was also courageous in her methods of gratifying her literary tastes. She partitioned Poland in 1772 and seized enough books to form the foundation of the Imperial Library at the Hermitage. She used to ask the Ambassadors, particularly the Ambassador from England, to get foreign books for her and if she did not have the money to pay for them at the time she conveniently forgot about it.

In later days there were women in the young colony in America who enjoyed their books in the midst of their primitive surroundings. In 1643 in Emans, New York, the inventory of the Widow Bronck included Danish books. Mrs. Willoughby of Virginia left over one hundred volumes at her death in 1673, and in 1700 Elizabeth Tatham of New Jersey left five hundred and fifty-two volumes, while their New England contemporary, Hannah Sutton, acquired a library of about seventeen hundred volumes.

In the early nineteenth century Miss Richardson Currer of Eshton Hall, Craven, Yorkshire, amassed a large and scholarly collection of books on many subjects. It was housed in a great room with a gallery which must have been the envy of all book-lovers. She was the fond possessor of the rare Book of St. Albans, written and compiled by Juliana Berners, prioress of the nunnery of Sopwith in Hertfordshire. It is said that the ardent book collector Richard Heber, being unable to secure the book in any other way, ardently proposed marriage to Miss Currer. She was firm in her refusal however, preferring to keep this first book about sport to be written by a woman to herself.

One of the most learned lady bibliophiles of this century in America was Miss Amy Lowell of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her books and manuscripts, including her collection of Keats, are being preserved for posterity in the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial at Harvard. She always enjoyed smoking a good cigar while writing or carrying on her sparkling conversations, as she thought it made her thoughts flow more easily.

One could not write of women in connection with books without speaking of two distinguished custodians of famous libraries, scholars, who are as well known abroad as in America: [the late] Miss Belle Da Costa Greene, the brilliant Director of the Pierpont Morgan Library, and Miss Ruth Sheppard Granniss, former Librarian of the Grolier Club and sympathetic friend of all bibliophiles, male or female. They, of course, come under Lang's category of exceptional examples.

But what of the many other exceptions? Would Lang have thought that Miss Lowell could not understand books? Or that Diane de Poitiers could be jealous of their mysterious charms? Or that Catherine of Russia would hesitate to spend what money she could procure to satisfy her passion for them? What could his lady friends have been like to be classed with the enemies of books—and such enemies at that?

It would appear that book collecting is a truly feminine pastime, containing many elements which appeal to their sex; romance, intellectual curiosity, love of the beautiful and the quest of something difficult to obtain. But feminine collectors should beware of pitfalls, for sometimes this mania arouses the baser instincts such as envy, extravagance and self-indulgence. Wives have even been known to spend their marketing money on books instead of daily bread, and to waste hours reading book catalogues instead of attending to their housewifely duties. Book collecting, however, is a common denominator of all ages and a medium through which the minds of both sexes may meet with pleasure, and therefore greatly to be recommended as a delightful occupation.

BEATRICE WARDE

PRINTING SHOULD BE INVISIBLE

Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favorite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in color. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost ten thousand dollars; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.

Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfect wineglass are parallel in typography. There is the long, thin stem that obviates finger-prints on the bowl. Why? Because no cloud must come between your eyes and the fiery heart of the liquid. Are not the margins on book pages similarly meant to obviate the necessity of fingering the type-page? Again: the glass is colorless or at the most only faintly tinged in the bowl, because the connoisseur judges wine partly by its color and is impatient of anything that alters it. There are a thousand mannerisms in typography that are as impudent and arbitrary as putting port in tumblers of red or green glass! When a goblet has a base that looks too small for security, it does not matter how cleverly it is weighted; you feel nervous lest it should tip over. There are ways of setting lines of type which may work well enough, and yet keep the reader subconsciously worried by the fear of "doubling" lines, reading three words as one, and so forth.

Now the man who first chose glass instead of clay or metal to hold his wine was a "modernist" in the sense in which I am going to use that term. That is, the first thing he asked of this particular object was not "How should it look?" but "What must it do?" and to that extent all good typography is modernist.

Wine is so strange and potent a thing that it has been used in the central ritual of religion in one place and time, and attacked by a virago with a hatchet in another. There is only one other thing in the world that is capable of stirring and altering men's minds to the same extent, and that is the coherent expression of thought. That is man's chief miracle, unique to man. There is no "explanation" whatever of the fact that I can make arbitrary sounds which will lead a total stranger to think my own thought. It is sheer magic that I should be able to hold a one-sided conversation by means of black marks on paper with an unknown person half-way across the world. Talking, broadcasting, writing and printing are all quite literally forms of thought transference, and it is this ability and eagerness to transfer and receive the contents of the mind that is almost alone responsible for human civilization.

If you agree with this, you will agree with my one main idea, i.e., that the most important thing about printing is that it conveys thought, ideas, images, from one mind to other minds. This statement is what you might call the front door of the science of typography. Within lie hundreds of rooms; but unless you start by assuming that printing is meant to convey specific and coherent ideas, it is very easy to find yourself in the wrong house altogether.

Before asking what this statement leads to, let us see what it does not necessarily lead to. If books are printed in order to be read, we must distinguish readability from what the optician would call legibility. A page set in 14-point Bold Sans is, according to the laboratory tests, more "legible" than one set in 11-point Baskerville. A public speaker is more "audible" in that sense when he bellows. But a good speaking voice is one which is inaudible as a voice. It is the transparent goblet again! I need not warn you that if you begin listening to the inflections and speaking rhythms of a voice from a platform, you are falling asleep. When you listen to a song in a language you do not understand, part of your mind actually does fall asleep, leaving your quite separate aesthetic sensibilities to enjoy themselves unimpeded by your reasoning faculties. The fine arts do that; but that is not the purpose of printing. Type well used is invisible as type, just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas.

We may say, therefore, that printing may be delightful for many reasons, but that it is important, first and foremost, as a means of doing something. That is why it is mischievous to call any printed piece a work of art, especially fine art: because that would imply that its first purpose was to exist as an expression of beauty for its own sake and for the delectation of the senses. Calligraphy can almost be considered a fine art nowadays, because its primary economic and educational purpose has been taken away; but printing in English will not qualify as an art until the present English language no longer conveys ideas to future generations, and until printing itself hands its usefulness to some yet unimagined successor.

There is no end to the maze of practices in typography, and this idea of printing as a conveyor is, at least in the minds of all the great typographers with whom I have had the privilege of talking, the one clue that can guide you through the maze. Without this essential humility of mind, I have seen ardent designers go more hopelessly wrong, make more ludicrous mistakes out of an excessive enthusiasm, than I could have thought possible. And with this clue, this purposiveness in the back of your mind, it is possible to do the most unheard-of things, and find that they justify you triumphantly. It is not a waste of time to go to the simple fundamentals and reason from them. In the flurry of your individual problems, I think you will not mind spending half an hour on one broad and simple set of ideas involving abstract principles.

I once was talking to a man who designed a very pleasing advertising type which undoubtedly all of you have used. I said something about what artists think about a certain problem, and he replied with a beautiful gesture: "Ah, madame, we artists do not think—we feel!" That same day I quoted that remark to another designer of my acquaintance, and he, being less poetically inclined, murmured: "I'm not feeling very well today, I think!" He was right, he did think; he was the thinking sort; and that is why he is not so good a painter, and to my mind ten times better as a typographer and type designer than the man who instinctively avoided anything as coherent as a reason.

I always suspect the typographic enthusiast who takes a printed page from a book and frames it to hang on the wall, for I believe that in order to gratify a sensory delight, he has mutilated something infinitely more important. I remember that T. M. Cleland, the famous American typographer, once showed me a very beautiful layout for a Cadillac booklet involving decorations in color. He did not have the actual text to work with in drawing up his specimen pages, so he had set the lines in Latin. This was not only for the reason that you will all think of, if you have seen the old typefoundries' famous Quousque Tandem copy [i. e., that Latin has few descenders and thus gives a remarkably even line]. No, he told me that originally he had set up the dullest "wording" that he could find [I dare say it was from the Congressional Record], and yet he discovered that the man to whom he submitted it would start reading and making comments on the text. I made some remark on the mentality of Boards of Directors, but Mr. Cleland said "No: you're wrong; if the reader had not been practically forced to read—if he had not seen those words suddenly imbued with glamor and significance—then the layout would have been a failure. Setting it in Italian or Latin is only an easy way of saying 'This is not the text as it will appear.'"

Let me start my specific conclusions with book typography, because that contains all the fundamentals, and then go on to a few points about advertising.

The book typographer has the job of erecting a window between the reader inside the room and that landscape which is the author's words. He may put up a stained glass window of marvellous beauty, but a failure as a window; that is, he may use some rich superb type like text gothic that is something to be looked at, not through. Or he may work in what I call transparent or invisible typography. I have a book at home, of which I have no visual recollection whatever as far as its typography goes; when I think of it, all I see is the Three Musketeers and their comrades swaggering up and down the streets of Paris. The third type of window is one in which the glass is broken into relatively small leaded panes; and this corresponds to what is called "fine printing" today, in that you are at least conscious that there is a window there, and that someone has enjoyed building it. That is not objectionable, because of a very important fact which has to do with the psychology of the subconscious mind. This is the fact that the mental eye focusses through type and not upon it. The type which, through any arbitrary warping of design or excess of "color," gets in the way of the mental picture to be conveyed, is a bad type. Our subconsciousness is always afraid of blunders [which illogical setting, tight spacing and too-wide unleaded lines can trick us into], of boredom, and of officiousness. The running headline that keeps shouting at us, the line that looks like one long word, the capitals jammed together without hairspaces—these mean subconscious squinting and loss of mental focus.

And if what I have said is true of book printing, even of the most exquisite limited editions, it is fifty times more obvious in advertising, where the one and only justification for the purchase of space is that you are conveying a message—that you are implanting a desire, straight into the mind of the reader. It is tragically easy to throw away half the reader-interest of an advertisement by setting the simple and compelling argument in a face which is uncomfortably alien to the classic reasonableness of the book-face. Get attention as you will by your headline, and make any pretty type pictures you like if you are sure that the copy is useless as a means of selling goods; but if you are happy enough to have really good copy to work with, I beg you to remember that thousands of people pay down hard-earned money for the privilege of reading quietly-set book-pages, and that only your wildest ingenuity can stop people from reading a really interesting text.

Of course every one of you realizes that whatever interesting effects you can produce with displayed advertising, Direct Mail is your paradise. It is here that you approach the august precincts of the designer of books; here you can deal in the fascinating questions of paper, ink, presswork, and all those minute and thrilling technicalities by which the craftsman proves his worth. You also have the satisfaction of knowing that the better and more mannerly Direct Mail advertising looks, the more solid returns it will bring in.

To sum up: printing demands a humility of mind, for the lack of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in self-conscious and maudlin experiments. There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline. When you realize that ugly typography never effaces itself, you will be able to capture beauty as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something else. The "stunt typographer" learns the fickleness of rich men who hate to read. Not for them are long breaths held over serif and kern, they will not appreciate your splitting of hair spaces. Nobody [save the other craftsmen] will appreciate half your skill. But you may spend endless years of happy experiment in devising that crystalline goblet which is worthy to hold the vintage of the human mind.

COMPOSED IN BEMBO TYPES

PORTER GARNETT

The Ideal Book

In adopting a prescribed title for this paper, I must begin by registering my dissent to its validity. There is no such thing nor can there be such a thing as "the ideal book." No single book, no particular style of book can be said to represent in itself an ideal below which all other books and other styles which differ from it fall. A certain book may be ideal for its purpose, but books can no more conform to a fixed ideal than can churches, cocktail-shakers, or hats. The best that one can do is to attempt to enumerate and codify those elements of good book-making that enter into what may be called the "fine" book.

It is difficult to declare oneself an advocate or exponent of fine printing or fine book-design without being misunderstood. Such a declaration, however, is not to arrogate superiority. It merely means that one believes in certain principles of craftsmanship and in upholding certain standards based upon a scrupulous and uncompromising observance of refinements and minutiæ. It is a mistake to assume that the word "fine," as applied to printing and to books, is a comparative term meaning a grade or measure of merit. Consider for a moment its true meaning: delicate, studied, subtly calculated. It represents not a grade of excellence, but a quality, a quality distinguishing those books and pieces of printing which the term properly describes from other books or pieces of printing. It may be allowed, however, that fineness is itself a comparable term; that there are, in other words, degrees of fineness. Thus a book may be fine without being of the first order of fineness. But if we are to seek for a standard of excellence equivalent to what is implied by the word "ideal," it should be obvious that only fineness of the first order can be considered. A fine book of the first order is the end-result of a sedulous effort on the part of designer, printer, and binder to bring to their artifact every care for physical and technical details, every revision in the interest of betterment, of which they are capable, to the end that the finished product shall represent the capacity of each for the fulfilment of his artistic wish, his desire for perfection. To slacken this effort, to compromise wittingly (or wilfully), to surrender to expediency, is to repudiate fineness of the first order.

It is this concern for perfection that Mr. Stanley Morison means when he says "The fine printer begins where the careful printer has left off." It is this concern with perfection that Conrad celebrated when he wrote:

"Now the moral side of an industry, productive or unproductive, the redeeming and ideal aspect of this bread-winning, is the attainment of the highest possible skill on the part of the craftsman. Such skill, the skill of technique, is more than honesty; it is something wider, embracing honesty and grace and rule in an elevated and clear sentiment, not altogether utilitarian, which may be called the honor of labor. It is made up of accumulated tradition, kept alive by individual pride, rendered exact by professional opinion, and, like the higher arts, it is spurred on and sustained by discriminating praise. This is why the attainment of proficiency, the pushing of your skill with attention to the most delicate shades of excellence, is a matter of vital concern. Efficiency of a practically flawless kind may be reached naturally in the struggle for bread. But there is something beyond—a higher point, a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride beyond mere skill; almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art, which is art."

In dealing with the constituents of the fine book I intend no disparagement of seemly, modest, and honestly-made books to which the term "fine" is not strictly applicable. Even the humblest volume, ad pauperum commoditatum, may be, by virtue of its suitability to purpose and its seemliness, wholly admirable. As for the better class of trade books, the productions of university and great commercial presses, they often display qualities of design and workmanship of a high order. Though not of the first order of fineness, they represent, with gratifying frequency, what Conrad called "efficiency of a practically flawless kind." That the best of them belong, however, to a lower stratum than the truly fine book may be, I think, quite easily demonstrated. One does not have to consider the work of the Doves Press or the Bremer Presse or the finer examples of French printing of the sixteenth or eighteenth century the ne plus ultra of book-making in order to recognize in them a quality (mark the word) which the trade edition, however charming, never does and never can attain. By reason of this quality—the quality of fineness—they are different from trade books, whether or not they are superior must remain for each of us a question of personal values. Since that is true, let us now—having cleared the ground and removed perhaps the possibility of a misapprehension with regard to the title of this paper—consider the values and the physical constituents of the fine book.

These constituents fall into three divisions: first, Dimensional (size and proportions); second, Tectonic (plan and construction); and third, Visual (appearance).

It would be absurd to contend that, ideally, a book should be of a certain size. Very large books are, of course, awkward to handle and are unsuitable, let us say, for reading in bed or in a railway train. But it does not follow that, because our habits of life differ so radically from those of the more leisurely and contemplative past, the tall volume is no longer justified. The large book is not an impediment to meditative reading and, although the "handy volume" will, in most circumstances, serve every purpose, there are those who, undeluded by pragmatism and undebased by false ideas of efficiency, may still, in the seclusion of study or library, find pleasure in the leisurely perusal of, let us say, The Golden Legend, in folio, nobly enthroned upon its lectern. Again, there is nothing incongruous or unpractical about the scholar (perhaps I should say, "research-worker") making use of a huge volume, spread before him on a library table. Large volumes are, moreover, frequently justified by the fact that illustrative plates of a large size are often desirable or essential. Who will deny that reproductions of Egyptian papyri, of eighteenth century engraved portraits, of Oriental carpets, in fact, of almost all works of art other than such small objects as miniatures or jewelry, would be better in folio than in octavo or duodecimo? It can be said, I think, that the very large book should be unconditionally condemned only when its size defeats the purpose to which, by reason of its content, it would normally be put. Stateliness of form imparts dignity. It may be argued, therefore, that a great work on engraved gems, imposing in size, with plates, each showing many specimens, comports better with the character of its subject matter quite aside from any advantage it offers for comparative study, than would the same work printed as a book one might slip in one's pocket. Stateliness of form implies stateliness of content, and vice versa. Let a book be, for a generation, of such good report that it may be said to have become a classic, and a large-paper edition is justified. Let those who must cavil do so. If they cannot rise above the utilitarian ideal, they can easily obtain the work in a small format and be happy.

It may not be out of order to say at this point that, while a considerable range in the size of books is not only permissible but desirable, there are limits at both ends of the scale where practicability ceases to exist and we pass into the realm of curiosities and tours de force. Thus the miniature book, for all its charm, lies outside the confines of normal book-design. As to the maximum size that may be legitimately allowed for a book, it should never, I think, exceed the normal folio height (defined approximately by the larger moulds employed for manufacturing hand-made paper) while its bulk and weight should not preclude the possibility of holding it by the spine with one hand while turning the leaves with the other, when such a method of referring to its contents may be necessary. And now a final word as to dimensions. Large or small, the most perfect book will always be one of which the thickness bears a just and agreeable relation to its height and width. Small and slender books are delightful objects which no one could wish to abolish (one cannot say as much for the lamelliform folio, a veritable atrocity), but their inferiority to books of a meet thickness becomes apparent when, with (or, worse yet, without) their vertical, neck-twisting titles they are placed on a shelf.

We must next turn our attention to those aspects of a book which have to do with its plan and construction and which we have called tectonic.

In its physical character a book addresses itself to two of our senses, the sense of sight and the sense of touch. Because the tactile qualities of a book are relatively of less importance than its visual aspects, let us first deal with those elements which are, in part at least, evaluated through the sense of touch.

Our first impression of a book is received from its exterior, its binding. Now the qualities to be looked for in the binding of a book are: (1) the character and quality of the material, (2) suitability, (3) soundness and charm of design, (4) agreeable color (a relative term), (5) workmanship, (6) pleasantness to the touch. Granting adequacy in all of these (and no book can pretend to fineness without such adequacy), there is still another desideratum less easy to specify. It might be called (7) "the evidence of durability." A book when taken in the hand should have a feeling of compactness, almost of solidity. I do not mean by this that it should feel like a block of wood, but it should, when picked up, when opened, or when its hinges are tested, give the impression that leaves and cover are so firmly (and honestly) knit together that they constitute a unit, having in its "feel" the evidence (or the assurance) of durability.

The next characteristic of a book to be noted through the sense of touch is the texture of the paper. By "texture" several things are meant: a surface agreeable to the hand, the degree of crispness, an impression of toughness (again the evidence of durability), and the degree of flexibility. Ideally, the paper in a book should satisfy all these requirements and should possess as well certain qualities of character, style, and color, pleasing to the informed eye. These will be dealt with in their proper place. The paper should be flexible, without the flimsiness characteristic of papers weak in substance. It should bend readily when the leaves are turned and should flow smoothly through the hand when all the leaves are bent at once. Stiffness in the leaves of a book (an all too common defect) is not, it should be observed, always the fault of the paper. It is often due to the choice of a paper too heavy for the size of the leaf. The same paper in a larger leaf might have the desired flexibility.

The final tactile test of a fine book (applicable, alas, to very few books indeed) resides in the character of the impression of the type on the paper. In the best printing, the surface of the page, if rubbed with the palm of the hand, shows a slight and pleasant roughness due to the sinking of the type into the paper. Such printing is rare in modern books because it is difficult of attainment with machines designed for quantity production. To attain the effect described the paper should be dampened before printing, and an ink employed that is adaptable only to the hand press. Dry paper, particularly when heavily sized, resists a deep impression. It can be heavily impressed, but there is not the same difference between the impressed and unimpressed portions, due to the impaction of the substance caused by the pressure of the type, which results when dampened paper is used. In the latter instance, the depth of impression is within the sheet, not an embossment on the reverse side. This incisiveness, without a corresponding relief on the back of the sheet, is shown when an impression without ink is made on a hand press with dampened paper and a hard packing.

In printing on dry paper it is necessary, if adequate color is to be obtained, to use such a quantity of ink, of a consistency suitable to machine-press printing, that a really deep (not merely heavy) impression cannot be imparted to paper without "spreading," which slightly modifies the sharpness of the type. The machine printer must choose therefore between a surfacy quality with sharpness and a heavy (not necessarily deep) impression with a loss of sharpness, neither of which is ideal. There are some that will question the truth of this statement, calling attention to specimens of machine printing on dry paper in which the ink has been driven into the sheet and perfect sharpness maintained. It may be said, however, in support of our contention, that, under the test of hand and eye, this perfectly printed dry sheet will be found, in the last analysis, to lack, in comparison with a sheet perfectly printed by hand on dampened paper, a certain almost-indefinable something that can perhaps be best described as a living quality. This ultimate grace arises, I think, from the fact that in competent hand-press printing the third dimension is not merely suggested but actual; we have, in other words, not merely sharpness but crispness; the effect attained is sculptural. No printing that is lifeless, or to which such terms as "slick" and "dry" may be appropriately applied can be called fine printing.

Turning now from the tactile to the visual elements of the fine book, we shall consider, first of all, that fundamental factor of all books, the text-page, upon the form or "layout" of which all other typographic elements must, to a large extent, depend. The text-page is of primary importance because by its rightness or wrongness a book must stand or fall.

The elements of the text-page that call for consideration may be grouped under three heads: first, Form (the proportions—width to height—of the type-page and the balance of the rectangle of type with the rectangle of paper); second, Space (the ratio between the areas of the type-page and the paper-page); third, Tone (the tonal value of the type mass and the relation between its tone and the white area of the margins). In the perfect text-page all these elements may be observed in nice adjustment, severally and mutually.

There are those who contend that a proper relation of margins to type-page may be arrived at by employing ratios identical with those to be found in the well-proportioned pages of the early printers. Others declare that correct margins can be created by the application of an arithmetical or a geometrical formula. It can be admitted that such procedures are, at least, safe; that is to say, the danger of malproportioned margins will be avoided. But neither the method nor the result can be ideal for the simple reason that, while providing for the factors of form and space, they fail to provide for the factor of tone. It should be obvious that a rectangle of black type, with no space (leading) between lines, and a rectangle of the same shape and size printed from light-face type and generously leaded call for different margining.

All of this may seem to be supervacaneous, but the stubborn fact remains that no one of the factors set forth above can be ignored. It is perfectly true that the accomplished book designer will compass the desired end through a sagacious application of his knowledge and taste, but we are concerned here with presenting the elements of the ideal book and it is therefore essential that all the elements, no matter how much the initiated may take some of them for granted, should be, for the benefit of the layman, categorically enumerated.

It is necessary at this point to allude to the dictum—voiced in high places as well as in low—that a book is primarily something to be read; that every factor which does not contribute to that end is an impertinence. The worthy champions of this faith would be on firmer ground if they heaped their condemnation upon such adjuncts of a book as actually lessen its readability. M. Paul Valéry has disposed of the matter so effectively from the aesthetic point of view in his essay, Les deux vertus d'un livre, that nothing remains to be said on that side of the question. But there are other objections to be raised to this ipse dixit of the mechanists. Their contention that what we all grant is at once the basic and paramount function of a book, its readability, is its only function would, if carried to its logical conclusion, lead to a doctrine in book design equivalent to what is known in present-day architecture as "functionalism." Since functionalism or, as it is sometimes called, the "machine and function" principle, demands that the design of a building must grow out of and be restricted by its predetermined use or purpose, it should follow that, if the sole purpose of a book is that it be something to read, there is no reason, based upon utility, for not using the whole area of the paper-page, with margins of no more, let us say, than a quarter of an inch or so. The uncomely, marginless illustrations of certain recent books represent an application of this principle. If the protagonists of the utilitarian ideal admit that margins are other than a waste of usable space, they make a concession to the aesthetic conception of a book, for the determination of margins, the mise en page, is primarily an element of design. It will be argued no doubt, in contravention of this statement, that margins make for ease of reading (utility), but that this is an untenable defensive assumption should be proved by the perfect readability of newspaper columns separated only by a light rule, or by the two-column book or magazine page with only a pica of white between the columns. Since it cannot be denied that the margins of a book, if well proportioned, promote pleasure, an aesthetic function, the true functionalist should, to be consistent, insist upon doing away with them.

We may turn now from that major fundamental of the fine book—a text-page of perfect seemliness—to a consideration of other elements. But before doing so, it may be proper to explain what some of my readers may deem an omission. I have said nothing about the choice of type. It is axiomatic that good letter is a prime essential of the good book. There are only two kinds of type, good and bad. Good types, whether based upon classical models or the quasi-original forms of contemporary type-designers, are sufficiently numerous to make a suitable selection, provided the printer knows anything whatever about the subject, quite simple. It should be pointed out, however, that, other things being equal, type cast from matrices struck from hand-cut punches is superior to machine-cut type. This superiority is a matter of real importance, chiefly in printing by means of the hand press. Only in such printing is the difference between the hand-cut and machine-cut letter fully apparent.

No type is good if some of the characters are marked by eccentricity. Unorthodox peculiarities in the forms of certain letters sometimes lend charm to a type-face, but there is a difference between a peculiarity of shape thoughtfully and discreetly arrived at and freakish variations which do not justify themselves and bespeak only a stupid desire for novelty at any cost.

Given the seemly text-page as the prime requisite of the fine book, our next consideration should be what may be called integration of the parts. Here we must again think in terms of architecture, with which art book-design has so much in common. Let the parts of a book be few or many, simple or complex, it is of the first importance that they be, one to the other and each to all, harmoniously correlated.

In the simple undecorated and unillustrated book it is not only desirable that sunken pages, if any (the first pages of chapters or sections, for example), should show an equal sinkage. But all isolated typographic elements, such as half-titles, elements of the title page, copyright notice, dedication, headings of preliminary and supplementary matter, etc., should fall on levels which, though not necessarily identical, bear a mensural, not an arbitrary, relation one to the other and to the structure of the book as a whole. This requires, perhaps, some elucidation. Suppose we give the first pages of our chapters a uniform sinkage. These pages, let us say, establish three levels for us—(1) the chapter heading, (2) chapter title, and (3) the first line of text. If we adopt the same sinkage for Contents, Illustrations, Appendices, and Index, putting the headings of this group on the same level as the chapter headings (LEVEL 1), the first text lines of this group should be on the same level as the chapter titles (LEVEL 2), or on the level of the first text lines of the chapters (LEVEL 3). If, on the other hand, we adopt a different sinkage (smaller) for the second group, we may still relate it mensurally to the first group by placing the first text lines of Group 2 on the same level as the chapter headings of Group 1. Suppose further that we place our half-titles on one of the three or four levels that have been established. We still have to deal with a copyright notice, perhaps a limit notice, a bibliographical note, and a dedication. It is not essential that all of these should fall on the same level, but it is essential that each be related to some one of the established levels. Finally, it is desirable that such major elements of the title page as a subtitle or the author's name should be placed on one of the established levels.

An observance of this principle makes for homogeneity of design. In reading a book so put together we are spared (without knowing that we are spared) the disturbance of our sense of balance which results, almost without our knowing it, when our eyes fall upon a page some part of which is not "tied in" architecturally with the rest of the book. The effect is similar to that of a many-paneled room with an impost cornice at a certain height in all the panels except two or three where it is either higher or lower. We have, in one case, faulty architecture; in the other, faulty book-making. In judging a book or a building, it should be borne in mind that, however charming its parts, it must be regarded as a whole. If our contemplation of it is to be attended with pleasure and comfort, its parts must be so disposed, so correlated, that they will not produce a "jumpy" effect.

It is not contended that every book in which this refinement of perfectly integrated parts has been ignored should be considered a failure because it is less than perfect. If that were true, few books would pass the test. It would indeed be hypercritical to insist that a failure to observe this principle actually spoils an otherwise well-made book. It is desirable, however, that the principle should be observed as far as the material will permit. It must be recognized, also, that sometimes the elements are so diverse—chapter headings or the internal titles of essays, short stories or poems—that a strict adherence to the principle becomes impossible. In such instances, the designer's task is still to strive for order and integration. Perfect order, symmetry, and balance may be unattainable, but this does not justify him in being haphazard. When order is observed we may not be conscious of it; when it is not observed we are aware of its absence. Movement is of the highest importance as a factor of design—such movement, for example, as is imparted to a book by this very diversity of its elements—but good design demands movement that is ordered, not arbitrary. If liberties are taken (and it is desirable, in the interest of vitality and charm, that they should be taken) they must justify themselves aesthetically; they should not only please us in themselves but as evidence of the designer's intelligence, his insight, subtlety, sensitiveness, discrimination, and tact. However diverse the elements or parts of a book may be, however they may, by reason of such diversity, render perfect order and balance impossible, their arrangement should at least possess a rationale.

This need of a fundamental balance has its basis in its pleasure-giving value. I have adverted to the analogy between book-design and architecture, let me point now to an equally pertinent analogy with the structure of poetry. "Verse," says Poe, "originates in the human enjoyment of equality, fitness. To this enjoyment, also, all the moods of verse—rhythm, meter, stanza, rhyme, alliteration, the refrain, and other analogous effects—are to be referred." Specifically, the parts of a book—half-titles, headings, etc., etc.—should be, severally and collectively, related as are such structural elements in verse as recurrent rhythms, rhymes, and refrains.

We must now consider the decorated or illustrated book. In the first place, it should be understood that no form of decoration or illustration is legitimate in the strictly fine book except such as are printed from wood or metal engraved by hand, preferably in relief which comports with type both in physical character and in the means by which the image is imparted to the paper. Process-engravings are disqualified not only because of the preponderant mechanical factor, but because mechanical engraving in relief cannot produce a line of the delicacy and purity obtained with the engraving tool. As a corollary to the principle of integration set forth above let us take first the type of decorated book to which most obviously it applies. A book carrying on various pages head-bands of varying depth and varying tone—deep, shallow, black and heavy, light and delicate—will produce a disturbing effect. Less obvious but hardly less disturbing is a succession of initial letters differing in size, in tone, or in position on the page. The book with initial letters strewn through the text, sometimes several on a single page, is a challenge to the designer. When thus arbitrarily employed it is important, in order that the initials shall not be obtrusive, that they be so selected as to size (in proportion to the page) and so integrated with the book as a whole that their "accidental" character is either disguised or lost and their recurrence actually contributes to the unity of the volume by virtue of their consistent accentual value.

An arbitrary arrangement of tailpieces is likely to produce a "jumpy" effect. Since the spaces (at the ends of chapters or sections) within which tailpieces may be placed differ in area, such decorative elements cannot always fall on the same level. This irregularity can be compensated for in a measure by adjusting the size of the decoration to the area of the space it occupies. By what may seem to be a negation of the law of balance here insisted upon, such a variation is more productive of architectural harmony than tailpieces of uniform size would be if disposed in spaces of varying area.

Returning for a moment to the undecorated book, it may be remarked in passing that verse, particularly a collection of short lyrics, does not lend itself to good book-design. It should be enough to point out that the disproportion between type mass and white paper caused by short measure and the frequently meager letter-press deprive books of verse of the book's basic structural factor, the rectangle of type. How decoration can be employed to overcome this deficiency is perfectly exemplified in the original edition of Dorat's Les Baisers.

With the principles of balance and unity still in mind, it will hardly, I think, admit of contradiction that the scattering of odd-sized illustrations through the text is incompatible with both of these principles. Such illustrations, particularly those of irregular shape bounded on two or three sides by type, are as destructive of balance and unity as is poor fenestration in a building. It is not enough that something like a balance is effected on facing pages (an elementary principle in layout); the lack of a complete integration of the pictures with the book and the disturbance created by distorting the letter-press into odd shapes preclude the possibility of such a book being regarded as well-planned, much less ideal, however charming it may be in detail.

We have seen, while considering the major aspects of book-design, in what wise paper must be judged with regard to those first or immediate impressions gained from seeing and feeling it. I must now carry the consideration of paper a little farther. Since style and character are essential qualities of the fine book, we must insist upon these qualities in every element of its substance. Now style and character at their utmost are peculiar (for reasons that have to do with the methods of manufacture) to hand-made paper only, laid or wove, and, it may be further insisted, to only the best hand-made paper. Desirable as wove paper is for certain purposes, it cannot be denied that it has less character than the laid sheet. It is also true that no feature of fine laid paper gives more character to a sheet than the so-called "antique" factor, a slight thickening of the pulp and greater opacity along the chain-lines. By an "improved" method of mould-making, introduced by Baskerville, this thickening was eliminated, but, whatever mechanical superiority its absence may represent, there can be no question but that it represents a loss of character. All book papers produced by machinery (particularly the laids in which the effect of laid lines is mechanically faked) are as much imitations of and substitutes for hand-made paper as machine-made lace is a substitute for hand-made lace, and the disparity in quality is as great. We speak of "imitation lace" and "real lace," meaning machine-made and hand-made; we might, with equal propriety, speak of "imitation paper" and "real paper." Ideally, then, the fine book, in the fullest and strictest sense of the term, can be printed on no other than paper that is hand-made and of the best quality.

As to the color of paper for fine books, the whole question may be considerably clarified at once by the statement that everything suggestive of artificiality should be avoided. A paper that is chalky white or bluish white tells us at once that the rags which went into its manufacture were chemically (that is to say, artificially) bleached. A great many toned papers, described as "cream" or "india," are artificially colored and show it. The most desirable tone for fine book paper is the "natural" tone of unbleached (and sorted as such) linen rags. Its slight creamish color is at once pleasant to the eye and holds the promise of that agreeable mellowness which comes, very slowly, with age. A number of very pleasant books have been printed in recent years on gray, blue, green, and brownish papers (the last usually a deliberate simulation of ancient paper), but, despite their charm, they are, I think, open to the charge of affectation, against which, if true, there is of course no defense. If not actually "arty," they come perilously near to it.

It has not been my purpose in this paper to lay down the rules for making a fine book, for, after all, rules are of no use whatever (in an art or in a craft) except to be broken—wisely. Neither has any attempt been made, since this is not a technical treatise, to outline the methods by which the results described may be produced. I have tried merely to set forth the various criteria by which fine books should be judged and the principles (quite different from rules) that underlie them. If the "specifications" seem over-exacting, if they are to be dismissed as trop raffinés, I must ask the caviler if that which purports to be "fine" can be "too refined"? Let those who wish to compromise (with popular taste, with outlay and returns, with honesty, with self-respect, or with machinery) do so, but unless the thing they produce represents, with eloquence and beauty, the full and unconditional employment of every realizable aid to betterment, physical and technical, it is something other than a fine book of the first order. We must discourage ourselves in order that we may be strong.

W. A. DWIGGINS

EXTRACTS FROM AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF BOOKS
AS THEY ARE AT PRESENT PUBLISHED UNDERTAKEN BY THE SOCIETY OF CALLIGRAPHERS, 1919

NOTE: The accompanying extracts from the Transactions of the Society of Calligraphers are published with the approval of the Society. They form a part of the exhaustive and unbiased Report returned by the Committee in charge of the Investigation, which Report will be presented in its entirety in the Annual Bulletin. The report is of so surprising a nature that it was deemed unwise to withhold all notice of the findings until the annual publication. The Society, therefore, has the honour to present certain portions of the Inquiry together with an abstract of the Committee's recommendations.

W. A. DWIGGINS, Secretary

384A Boylston Street, Boston
December 1, 1919

Editor's Note: In commenting on the reception of the now famous Investigation, Watson Gordon pointed out (in Mss. by WAD, a collection of the writings of Dwiggins on various subjects, published by The Typophiles, New York, 1947) that it "received wide attention in publishing circles where some exceptions were taken to the findings. Certain publishers felt sure that some of those replying to the pertinent and impertinent questions of the investigator were members of their organizations who preferred to remain anonymous." The complete report, with its original note and illustration, as well as the sequel of twenty years later, follow.

It may be said in introduction that the Society's Investigation into the Physical Properties of Books was undertaken by a special committee whose personnel insured that its consideration would be thorough and unbiased.

The Committee began its labour by an examination of all books published in America since the year 1910. This examination forced upon the investigators the conclusion that "All Books of the present day are Badly Made." The conclusion was unanimous.

Working out from this basic fact in an effort to arrive at the reasons underlying the evil, the Committee held numerous sittings in consultation with men concerned with various branches of printing and publishing. From these sittings there developed a mass of information of an unusual and stimulating character.

The publishers have chosen from the Record of the examination a few examples, not because they are extraordinary but because they present typical points of view. They are transcribed verbatim. It will be obvious that in certain cases it has been no more than courteous to suppress the names of the persons assisting the investigation. For the sake of uniformity it has been deemed wise to follow this practice throughout.

I. MR. B.

Q: Mr. B——, will you please tell the committee why you printed this book on card-board?

A: To make it the right thickness. It had to be one inch thick.

—Why that thick, particularly?

—Because otherwise it would not sell. If a book isn't one inch thick it won't sell.

—Do you mean to say that people who buy books select them with the help of a foot rule?

—They have to have some standard of selection.

—So that it is your practice to stretch out the text if it is too short by printing it on egg-box stock?

—Not my practice, particularly. All publishers do it. We are obliged to use this and other means to bring the book up to a proper thickness. You must remember that our prices are not based on the contents of a book but on its size.

A chart showing the percentage of excellence in the physical properties of books published since 1910.

—You mention other methods. Would you mind telling us what other method you use?

—We can expand the letter-press judiciously. We limit the matter to seven words on a page, say, and so get a greater number of pages. We can use large type and can lead considerably.

—But does not that practice hurt the appearance of the page? Make a poor-looking page?

—I am afraid I do not get your meaning.

—I mean to say, is not the page ugly and illegible when you expand the matter to that extent?

—You don't consider the look of a page in making a book. That is a thing that doesn't enter into the production of a book. If I understand you correctly, do you mean to say that it matters how a book looks?

—That was the thought in my mind.

—That's a new idea in book publishing!

—You were speaking of the pressure of industrial conditions since the war. Under these conditions what percentage of the traditions of the craft can you preserve, would you say?

—The traditions of what craft?

—The craft of printing, obviously. What I am trying to get at is this:—There are certain precise and matured standards of workmanship in the printing craft; these standards are the results of experiment through nearly five hundred years. How far are these standards effective under your present-day conditions?

—Those standards, so far as I know anything about them, are what you would call academic. In the first place, book-manufacturing is not a craft, it is a business. As for standards of workmanship—I can understand the term in connection with cabinet-making, for example, or tailoring, but I should not apply the expression to books. You do not talk about the "standards of workmanship" in making soap, do you?

—Then in your mind there does not linger any atmosphere of an art about the making of books?

—When you talk about "atmosphere" you have me out of my depth. There isn't any atmosphere of art lingering about making soap, is there?

—You would class soap-making with book-making?

—I can see no reason why not.

—May I ask you why you were selected by —— Company to manage their manufacturing department?

—Really, I must say that you overstep the borders—

—Please do not misinterpret my question. It is really pertinent to the inquiry.

—It should certainly be obvious why a man is chosen for a given position. I am employed to earn a satisfactory return on the shareholders' investment. Is that the information you want?

—I think that is what we want. Would you then consider yourself as happily employed in making soap as in making books?

—Quite as well employed, if making soap paid the dividend.

—While we are on this subject, may I ask you how you choose the artists who make your illustrations?

—My practice is to select an illustrator whose name is well known.

—Is that the only point you consider?

—I should say, yes. I am not aware of any other reason for spending money on this feature. It is always an uncertain detail and this way of making a choice puts the matter on a safe basis.

—It is sometimes assumed that the illustrations should have a sympathetic bearing on the story. Does not that consideration have some weight with you in choosing your artist?

—None, I should say. You see, the pictures are not really a necessary part of the book. They are a kind of frill that the public has got in the way of expecting, and we have to put them in. Illustrations as a rule stand us as a dead loss unless they are made by a well-known artist. Then, of course, they help sell the book.

II. MR. MCG.

A: The gentlemen of the committee must remember that the book-publishing business is a gamble. Each new issue, particularly in the department of fiction, is a highly adventurous risk. Our percentage of blanks would astonish you if we dared to state it. But any book may turn out a best-seller. This hope keeps us going. It is absolutely a gamble, as I say. You can see that under these conditions we cannot spend very much money on non-essentials. We have to strip the books down to the barest necessities.

Personally I should like to see the firm put out nothing that is not well designed and well printed. But as an agent of the firm I have to set aside my personal preferences. The directors are very much down on what they call art.

—Has the firm ever looked into the question of good workmanship as a possible aid to sales?

—Not under the present management. The founder looked at good work as more or less a marketing advantage.

—What do you think caused the present management to change from that opinion?

—They haven't changed. They never had it. They get at the matter from another angle altogether. Their policy is to reduce the production cost to the minimum. The minimum in theory would be reached when the public complained. The public hasn't complained, so you can't tell when to stop cheapening.

You see the directors don't look at a book as a fabricated thing at all. Books are merely something to sell—merchandise. Our management—and all the rest of them, for that matter—come from the selling side of the business and do not have any pride in the product. Old Mr. —— was a publisher because he liked books. That made an entirely different policy in the old firm, of course.

—To get back to the question of good workmanship helping sales:—Here are two books published abroad to be sold at 50 cents and 80 cents. They can very well be called works of art. Do you not think that these well designed paper covers would stand out among other books and invite customers to themselves?

—Undoubtedly they would.

—Have you ever tried the experiment of putting out editions in paper covers of attractive design?

—Never. It couldn't be done. People wouldn't buy them.

—But you said a moment ago—

—Moreover the difference of cost between cheap cloth sides and paper covers of the kind you have there is so slight that it wouldn't pay to try the experiment. People want stiff board covers. It doesn't much matter what is inside, but they insist on board covers.

—How do you arrive at that fact?

—Through our salesmen.

—And you say that paper covers have never been tried?

—Never. None of our travellers would go out on the road with a sample in paper covers.

—A little while ago you said something about your salesmen helping you to an understanding of the public taste. I infer that you get considerable help from this source?

—Most valuable help indeed. We depend entirely on the reports the sales force turns in in these matters. The salesmen are in direct contact with the retailers and are naturally in a position to feel the public pulse, so to speak. Their help is invaluable. They can anticipate the demand very often.

I had reference more particularly to the way books are made.

—Oh, on that point too. We never make a final decision on a cover design, for instance, without showing it to the salesmen. They very often make valuable suggestions as to changes of colour, etc. They run largely to red.

—It would seem, then, that the designing of the books is very much in the hands of the salesmen?

—Quite in their hands.

—Are the office-boys often called into consultation?

—Mr. —— finds his stenographer a very great help in passing upon certain points—illustrations, etc.

—Does it appear to you that the sales department would be the one best qualified to pass on points of design?

—Well, there, you see—the books have to be sold—that is what we make them for—and the sales department is the one in closest touch with the people that buy the books—that knows just what they want.

—The standards of quality, then, are set by the people who buy the books?

—Oh, absolutely so. How else would you move the books? It is a merchandising proposition, you must remember.

—But do you not think that people would buy decently made books as willingly as poorly made books?

At the same price, yes. No question about it. The book-buying public doesn't worry its head about the way books are made. It doesn't know anything about it. And well made books cost more. The trade is committed to a dollar-and-a-half article and can't risk going above it.

—Your opinion is that the price of a well made book would be so high as to prevent its sale?

—In the case of fiction, yes. The price has become almost a fixture.

—We shall have to go outside of fiction, then, to look for well made books?

—It amounts to that.

—You have said that certain unproductive factors prevent you from spending what you otherwise might on good workmanship. What specific factors would you mention?

—Plates—electros. We plate everything on the chance of its running into several printings. 80 per cent of the books are not reprinted. You can see that the money tied up in plates is a very considerable sum, and, as I say, 80 per cent of it is dead loss. We are obliged to take the chance, however.

—Has any remedy occurred to you?

—If stereotyping could be revived as an accurate process it might help us out. It would cost much less to make and to store paper matrices than to make electrotypes. The difficulty here is that no one knows how to make good stereotypes, and the stereotype plates at their best are more trouble to make ready. Trouble with the press-room, you see.

—Is it possible under good conditions to get satisfactory results from stereotype plates?

—Unquestionably. The books printed from this kind of plates in the first days of the invention are entirely satisfactory.

III. MR. L.

Q. Can a trade-edition book be well made and sell for $1.50?

—That depends on how high you set your standard.

—Well, let us not be too rigorous. Can it be made better, say, than this book?

—Beyond question. It will all depend upon whether or not the printer has a few lingering memories of the standards of printing.

—But should not the setting of standards come from the publisher?

—Oh yes, under ideal conditions. Both printer and publisher should have a hand in it.

—How would you make a book of fiction to be sold for $1.50?

—Well, such a book could have a good title-page as cheaply as a bad one—and the whole typographic scheme would cost no more if it were logically done instead of crudely strung together. By logically done I mean with well proportioned, practicable margins and legible headings, etc. The press-work on books is reasonably good but the "layout" or design is entirely neglected. It calls for a little planning, of course, but no more than should be available in any reputable plant. It isn't so much that these books are badly planned as it is that they are not planned at all.

—But most printing firms have a planning department, do they not?

—The planning in most presses is concerned with the handling of material, not with the designing of material. This is no doubt due to the fact that the Taylor System has not yet got around to Aesthetic Efficiency.

—Are not the typographical unions concerned to train their men on these points of design that you mention?

—The unions have only one idea—and it is not concerned with the improvement of printing.

—Are there any trade schools that teach these things? Are not the employers' associations promoting schools to train men in the craft?

—The employers' associations have one idea—a little different from the idea of the unions, perhaps, but not concerned with the improvement of printing. There are trade schools but they teach only the mechanics of the craft.

—Apparently, then, there is no place in this country where one can learn how to design printing?

—You can safely say that there is no such place.

IV. MR. A.

Q: What is your own opinion on the subject of illustrations in books?

—In what particular do you mean?

—I mean, do you think that illustrations help or hinder the quality of a book?

—The question is too general to be answered easily. May I ask you to be more specific?

—For example, here is a "best-seller" with several—five or six—half-tone illustrations. Do you consider that these pictures make the book a more complete thing as a specimen of book-making?

—Most certainly not.

—Then would you say that illustrations in such books were a detraction?

—Illustrations such as these, yes. Though it would be hard to detract from this particular book.

—It is a standard book—a standard type of book.

—I fear that it is.

—What kind of illustrations would you favour?

—For many books, none at all. In these books of current fiction the pictures are either futile or else detrimental to the development of the plot. They give the game away, so to speak, when the author may wish to hold the story in suspense. The effort to avoid this disaster accounts for the multitude of undramatic pictures you see in books.

—Your theory of no pictures should appeal to the publishers but I doubt if the illustrators will stand with you.

—Illustration is a trade as well as an art.

—True. But we are trying to limit the inquiry to the artistic side at present. When, then, according to your deductions, would illustrations be called for?

—When they can make a stage-setting for the story. When they ornament it or suggest it, perhaps, instead of reveal it. Impressions and "atmosphere" instead of literal diagrams with a cross marking the spot where, etc.

—But perhaps people like the cross marking the spot where.

—We are limiting the discussion to the artistic side, are we not?

—What about the half-tone process of engraving?

—The process is a way of doing a thing that cannot be done cheaply by any other means.

—Do you consider it a process that adds to the artistic possibilities of book printing?

—You mean according to the standards that prevailed in the earlier days of the craft?

—I do. Yes.

—According to those standards it seems to me that half-tones will always have to be considered as necessities forced upon the book-printer. They demand a kind of paper that is never a satisfactory book-paper. In the case of the kind of books we are talking about the relief line methods have always given the most artistic results, because they are so closely related to the character of type.

One regrets, however, to give up the chances for tonal designs that the half-tone process provides. Probably the designers and printers will work out a satisfactory relation between half-tones and type when the craze for photographic detail passes a little. As things stand, I should say that the best results are to be had with uncoated book-papers and with line plates. It is true books are rarely illustrated this way—current fiction, I mean—but the method might be used to produce a very attractive and unusual result.

—Then you would condemn the use of half-tones in this kind of book?

—If you mean the usual kind of half-tones printed separately and inserted, I do. But if you are making a book of travel, for example, the half-tones from photographs explain and justify themselves.

But on this whole subject of book illustration it strikes me that if you are to make the design from the start you might as well make it in harmony with the kind of paper and printing you are planning to use, and get all the artistic advantage of fitting your means to your limitations.

Are you familiar with the Christy-Holbein Test?

—Yes. That is to say, I have heard of your applying it, and remember that the percentages were very much against Holbein.

—Ninety-three to seven, on an average. How do you explain such a crudity of taste in these groups of people otherwise well educated?

—By the deduction that they are not educated. That is to say that these people, cultivated in other ways, react precisely like savages when confronted with pictures or drawings. They "go for" the tinsel and glitter and are opaque to the higher and more civilized values. They get the most pleasure from drawings that they think they could make themselves. This is the basis of the Eight-year-old Formula widely applied in the department of newspaper comics: "Make your drawing so that it can be understood by a child eight years old."

All of this is clearly lack of training, because their taste is good in other matters—music, for example, and house furnishings.

—You would deduce, then, that the periodical and book-publishing industry has failed to train the taste of its public in such matters?

—It has done worse: it has depraved that taste. Because there was, not very long ago, a fine tradition in this country in the line of illustration.

—Why should the publishers find any advantage in depraving the taste of the public—as you say they have done?

—Because they turned their backs on the standards of the publishing business and became merchandisers solely. They had to sell the goods and they had to "sell" a big new public. The quickest way to this public—through flash-and-crash tactics—they adopted. And naturally ran themselves and the public down hill.

—May there not be other sides to it, too? May it not be that the art schools are not now producing draughtsmen of a calibre to support the fine tradition you mention?

—That may have something to do with it. But even that is mixed up with the other. I think that the chief difficulty is with the publishers.

—And the public?

—The public will follow if the publishers lead.

V. MR. S.

A. Are you not making the mistake of keeping too close to the publishers? It seems to me that you will not get at all the facts behind the situation until you get in touch with the people we sell the books to. They are the factors that bring about the conditions you object to. The publisher is merely a machine for selling the public what it wants.

—Then the publisher has no selective function?

—Absolutely none.

—How does the public bring about the condition we object to?

—Obviously by buying the books.

—I mean to say, how does the public prevail upon you to sell it trashy books instead of well made books?

—The public is entirely uneducated on the subject of books, in your sense. People know nothing at all about paper or printing or pictures or things of that sort. One book is as good as another to any educated man so long as he can read it. He doesn't know that there is any such thing as good printing or bad printing or good or bad taste in making books. Under these conditions we should be fools to spend money on features that do not have any bearing on sales. It's a simple business proposition.

—Would the public that you are discussing buy well made books as willingly as trashy books?

—Oh, absolutely. It's the books they are interested in—what they contain, not how they are made. They wouldn't know the difference.

VI. MR. G.

A: What's the use of talking about standards in connection with things like these? These are not books. They aren't fit to wad a gun with. I wouldn't have them in the house. Nobody pays any attention to stuff like that.

There isn't what you would call a book on the table, except this one, perhaps. That's printed in England and sent over in sheets and bound on this side. But that one is set in a bastard Caslon. It isn't the original Caslon but a revision with the descenders cut off. See how he's got his O upside down!

Those others—what's the use of talking about them at all? It reminds me of the story about the Chinaman—

—But, Mr. ——, do you not think it possible to get up this class of books in a manner that would suit you better?

—You can't hope to get anything like a decent book until you do away with the damnable cheap paper and the vile types. And then you will have to start in and teach the printer how to print. There aren't more than a half a dozen presses in the country that know how to print. Most printing looks like it had been done with apple-butter on a hay-press—

—What you say is unhappily true. What we are trying to find out are the causes of this state of things.

—The causes are everywhere—all through the rattletrap, cheap-jack, shoddy work that is being done in every kind of trade. Nobody cares for making decent things any more.

The only cure is to get back to decent standards of workmanship in everything again. But the case seems to me to be hopeless. I try to do printing up to a decent standard—and that is about all any of us can do. I don't believe you can hope to do much good through your societies and investigations. I believe in each one doing his own job in the best way he knows how. That's the only way you can raise the standard. It's the work you turn out that counts.

AN ABSTRACT OF THE COMMITTEE'S RECOMMENDATIONS

Two main questions resulting from the Inquiry present themselves to the Committee. The first question is: Is it within the power of the Society of Calligraphers, of any society, or of Society itself, to restore to the printing of books a standard of good work? The second and major question: Are books necessary to the present social state?

I. When the Committee began its work it assumed as a matter of course that the established standards of printing would serve it as guide-posts and criteria. It expected to traverse a country where the highways were in need of repair, perhaps, and the marks of direction dim, but on the whole a negotiable country. It found a very different state of things.

Instead of roads to be followed with some excusable discomfort it found not even trails. Such highways as had once been charted were obliterated. Not only hair-lines but the most elementary blazemarks were overgrown and lost beyond any hope of recovery. Instead of following the planned course of visit and consultation the Committee was forced to reorganize itself into an expedition of discovery. It has been fortunate to return at all.

The collected data of the exploration can lead to but one conclusion: That the whole fabric of Standards of Workmanship will have to be rebuilt from the beginning. Whether this can be done under the present state of society is a matter to be discussed in connection with the second question.

II. Are books necessary to the present social state? The Committee's finding is, unanimously and conclusively, No.

During the past twenty years many influences have been at work to wean mankind from the use of books. Automobiles, the motion-picture drama, professional athletics, the Saturday Evening Post—these operated even before the Great War to discourage the habit of reading. Since the war the progress of society—culminating, in America, in the dictatorship of the proletariat—has effectually completed the process. Books as an element vital to the welfare of the race have been eliminated.

The Society of Calligraphers is thus freed at one stroke from the obligations implied in the first question. But there are still books in existence, and for these the Committee feels a professional concern. For the Investigation, if it has done nothing else, has disclosed the most cogent and ineluctable fact: that wherever there is contact between books and the public, the effect upon the books is deleterious.

So far as the immediate situation is concerned, the public, by discontinuing the contact, has obviated the danger. But in a period of revolution no condition can be taken for granted as fixed. It is quite within the range of possibility that the public, under compulsion, may turn again to books and reading; and this, the Committee believes, is a contingency the Society should be prepared to meet.

Publishers as a group promise, for the immediate future, to be a harassed and unimpressionable body. Influence upon them can be brought to bear only through public demand. Should a public demand for books revive, it will be imperative for the Society either to quench it altogether—a project which the Committee has discarded as visionary—or to take it in hand at its inception and give it constructive shape by forcing upon public attention such knowledge of the more elementary points of good taste as shall make impossible the further prostitution of standards. As the most direct means to this end it is urgently recommended by the Committee that the Society take up at once the study of advertising.

W. A. DWIGGINS

TWENTY YEARS AFTER: MR. MCG., MR. A., MR. L. and
THE SOCIETY OF CALLIGRAPHERS

From Publishers' Weekly, Sept. 2, 1939. Copyright 1939 by R. R. Bowker Co.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

NOTE: In 1919 the Society of Calligraphers published a pamphlet: Extracts From An Investigation Into the Physical Properties of Books. In the summer of 1939, three of the people who reported in the investigation were visited again and their opinions solicited as to what had happened in the interval of twenty years to change the physical characteristics of books. Transcriptions of parts of the three interviews follow.

MR. MCG.

Q: Twenty years ago you were kind enough to discuss book-manufacturing with us.

—Twenty years. Remarkable memory!

—It meant a great deal to us—your help. It was in 1919. We were conducting an inquiry—perhaps you remember—into the physical qualities of books.

—Oh, yes! How you could improve them, and so on. Yes.

—Now we are back again—to see what you think now.

—Good. Interesting idea. Ask me questions.

—For instance ... Does it strike you that trade books have improved in the twenty years?—as physical objects,—packages?

—Packages. Very neat. Sums up the situation.

—We mean, both as implements, tools, for getting a job done; and as pleasant things to look at, handle, use ... or the contrary.

—Well. Let's see. Yes. I think trade books have improved decidedly in twenty years. Decided improvement.

—What points of improvement, would you say?

—Well. More care taken with the get-up, margins, format as you call it, title pages. Real design coming into it. And much more careful about the type—legibility and all that—paper, suitability for reading, good surface for the eye, etc., etc.

—You said, twenty years ago, that your directors' lack of interest in the product hampered you. Since you have been in charge here have you been able to bring your books up to a level that suits you better?

—Yes ... and no.... Costs have climbed in twenty years, materials, labor. We've pushed up retail prices, but the manufacturing costs eat up all we gain. More than eat it up. Less margin now for design or style or whatever than twenty years ago, I'd say.

—That looks like faulty adjustment somewhere, doesn't it?

—Situation needs adjusting, certainly!

—I mean, maybe you are paying out money for quite unnecessary features.

—Possibly.

—Not a strictly factual meeting of the conditions, perhaps?—not "realistic," as the dictators say. Have you ever thought how you might study the market-product relations from an entirely new and fresh angle?

—Now there! ... that's interesting ... I have. I've thought a lot about it. When I get off into the Maine woods and look back at it there's one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb. We've got into a rut. The whole trade has. Not a shadow of a doubt about it. We let ourselves be ruled by a whole catalog of standards and values and "musts" that are as dead as the dodo. Standards inherited from an entirely different state of society. A thousand years different, you might say. It is amazing how conservative a tribe we are, we book people.... Take the cover of a book, for example. Take this cover here, for instance. We spent a lot of trouble and money dickering it up—worry about the colors and the design—cost of dies, cost of stamping, cost of foil ... and not a soul will ever see it! It's all hidden away under the jacket, and it'll stay hidden under the jacket! All this book-cover stuff is ... what's the word? ... vestigial—like your appendix—something no longer used—something useless left over from an earlier stage of evolution. Did you ever see anybody in a book store turn the jacket back and look at the cover? Did you ever hear of a cover that helped sell a book?—to the slightest extent? No. And when they get 'em home and read 'em and lend them to their friends the jacket stays on. Never comes off. Book-covers are just expense—useless expense—the decoration and things, I mean.

—You would do away with covers, then?

—No. It's got to be in boards—people want them that way—it's one of your "realistic" details.

—In your "new angle" volume would you have the insides as you do them now?

—No. There again I'd let the demand shape the product. Your market doesn't give a hang about the type and printing so long as they can read it.

—That sounds like twenty years ago!

—I know. Very likely it does.

—Haven't things changed?

—Not much. It's as true now as it was then.

—But all this talking and writing and lecturing....

—Two or three thousand persons, perhaps—two or three thousand have become "book conscious" as they say—the limited edition crowd. I'm dealing with the ten million.... There's a lot of whoosh in all that book beautiful stuff, you know.

—Mr. —— thinks it helps to tell them about type and paper, etc.

—I know. It doesn't. They don't understand his little notices—it's all shop talk. He likes 'em. He thinks they give the books tone, I daresay. I think it doesn't matter a damn one way or the other. All that shop detail is zero. They don't care to know and they don't need to know. Just make your book so it will read handily and let it go at that.

—Have you got this "new angle" idea to a point where you could describe a book made that way?

—Well. I might. Take the cover—I'd have board covers and cloth. But I wouldn't stamp them. Bright color. Gay. Patterned cloth sometimes. I'd have the simplest kind of paper label on the backbone. Printed from type—standard affair—library label that you could read. No embroidery, just plain function. On the least expensive terms possible. Make it a kind of house-trademark feature.... Inside I'd forget all I knew about fine printing—the art—it's a great art—forget all I knew—start fresh with the use.

—You like fine printing.

—That's right. I do. In its place. The place isn't trade books. You can't have fine printing in trade books. All you can have along that line is cheap imitation—celluloid collar and no shirt. If you go out with your imitation fine printing as a mark to shoot at you come back with what we turn out now, all of us—shabby genteel, to the limit. My book won't try to get by with a paper collar. My book won't have any collar. It will get down to the basis of realism—a handy, efficient, cheap tool for temporary use. Read it—throw it away. Who saves a book now? If you save it, where are you going to put it? In the car?

—That suggests question of size—what do you think about size?

—Oh, small, by all means. For the usual job not larger than the 5-1/2x7-3/4 range. Smaller than that when you can.

—You think people do not want a big package for their money?

—Not when they want a book to read. If we can get the price down they'll flock to small size, I'm sure. When they pay two-fifty, three, perhaps they want their poundage. Books for gifts too, possibly—want 'em impressive. But on my basis of a good workable tool they'll like them small and handy.

—Your point in general, then, is that modern books should be looked at as temporary affairs.

—Absolutely. Temporary affairs. Like magazines. And they ought to be produced as temporary affairs. Paper a little better than newsprint, but not much better—better color, on the warmish side instead of blue-grey. "Guaranteed by the Bureau of Standards to last three hundred years." Bosh. Presswork: set your standard at the level of legibility. That's low—look at the newspapers. Get it so you can read it easily and let the fine points ride. Give up points of paper and make-ready to get a cheaper package. You are making a tool, remember, not a bijou—you're making a sound, efficient, easy-working tool—tools don't need paper lace and fake-leather upholstery to make them sound—when a tool is efficient it has a style of its own, inevitably.

—Your dictum is, "books as tools."

—Books as tools. Right. But here's a point. All this is on the technical side. Treat a book as a temporary affair. But while it lasts I'd take considerable pains to have it be a lively affair. Not freakish—you can't play tricks with the reading process—but lively, like a good, interesting talker. Little fresh twists, but hardly noticeable in detail. A lot of ways to do it in an inconspicuous way. Mustn't be conspicuous—mustn't interfere with the reading job. Little touches of ornament in the right places. Pictorial bits—pictures are coming back into trade books again, in a new form—easy, swift, simple illustrations that fit in with the "temporary affair" style. Some of the money saved by a strategic retreat from impossible printing standards I'd put into things like that—to keep the pages gay and interesting.

—In this connection, do you think that modern books ought to be "modernistic" in design?

—Absolutely not. As I said a minute ago, you can't play tricks with the process of reading.... One of the necessities of the modernistic stuff is the necessity to shock you—to make people jump. You can't set off firecrackers on a book page every few paragraphs without taking the reader's mind off the text. You simply can't read in the neighborhood of modernistic design. It isn't because you are not used to it. It's in the very nature of the style.... I'm talking about books, of course. For advertising, it's prime. Have all the modernistic design you want on your jacket. The more the better.

—And that brings us....

—Yes. I've been waiting for it. That brings us to book-jackets!

—Yes. What do you think....

—Now there you are in another country entirely. Now's the time to beat the drums and run up the flags and drape the bunting.... All the money you can't afford to spend on covers you can afford to spend on jackets. Because, first, the jacket is the cover; and second, the jacket helps directly in selling the book. Jackets are advertising—posters—billboards—so make 'em shout.

—Attractive?

—If you mean pretty, not so important. If you mean oomph, by all means. Feminine charm, in the prevailing mode.... But sock-'em-in-the-eye. Make them strong. Make them so people can't miss seeing them.

—What is your own formula?

—Formula? I haven't any formula.... If I had I think it would be contrast. Contrast with all the other books on the table. Don't follow anybody's style. Get away from the prevalent "successful" style of the moment. Take a look at the tables—what would stick out now more than plain white paper with plain black type? I'd probably varnish it. Contrast.

—Do jackets sell books?

—Oh ... no. Jackets don't sell books. They help. What sells a book is the stuff inside—story—text. But books need to be seen. Jackets help make them visible.

—You save on covers and spend on jackets. You save on paper and printing, and put some of the saving into pictorial and design features. Would you come out with enough saving to get the retail price down from two fifty?

—I think so. I think if the thing were studied out on our "new angle" basis you'd find that you not only liked my books a lot better—as "packages"—but that you'd be able to buy more of them.

MR. A.

Q: One thing I wanted to ask ... you have had a considerable part in shaping your juvenile department.

—Yes. I have.

—My question may seem a little ... cool.... Do you prepare your juvenile titles with the children themselves in view—the ultimate consumers?

—The question's quite proper. I am glad you asked it—it goes straight to the heart of a big trouble about children's books.... The children themselves in view, eh? The ultimate consumers.... No. I am sorry to say, we do not. We can't. Because children do not buy books.... You see, a juvenile, like any other book on our list, has to please the person that's likely to buy it. And that means, a book to please adults—a book that a grown-up will mark down as something a child ought to like. Ought to, you see—the adult's judgment, not the child's. We can't get past it. We can't find out what the child really does like. When children rally to an author, or a style of book, then we get a glimpse of the children's state of mind. But that is our only contact.... All our new ventures have to be baited and primed to catch the fancy of the mothers and the cousins and the aunts—against the interests of the ultimate consumer, you might say, when that is necessary. Sometimes a juvenile runs to large sales purely on the strength of adult appreciation alone, like Ferdinand, for instance.... If it were possible, there is nothing I should like better than to deal with the children direct. I have children of my own. I think I understand them ... to a certain extent. I think I could please them. Once or twice—this is a confession—I did take a direct hand—made a couple the way I thought they ought to be. My judgment against the child's, eh?... Complete failures—drugs.... I couldn't move them—couldn't get past the censor—couldn't sell the grown-ups.

—Have you ever thought of ways for getting into direct touch with the children?

—I can see no practicable way. As the case stands you can't penetrate the Adult Front Line.

MR. L.

Q: This scheme of Mr. McG.'s for a different kind of book—what do you think of it?

—If he can control his "decline from a high estate" I am with him, emphatically. Books need to be cheaper. Books vis-à-vis market certainly need to be studied all over again—from a new base line. I agree with his findings about shabby-genteel. And I'm sure that I'd like his "cheap" books much better than the kind I buy now, if he can liven them up as he suggests. The question is, can he stop his "strategic retreat" at the right point? It's like inflation: easy to start, but...! He drops the standard of material and process—will his proofreading go down hill too?... Many French books in paper wrappers—made at the lowest cost-level, badly printed on cheap paper—have an air and a style that our own more expensive affairs can't quite achieve. Somebody laid a finger on them. Who, in Mr. McG.'s scheme, is to be this somebody whose touch creates liveliness and interest? A highly important factor in the product!... If we can get the liveliness and interest, we will be glad to trade more expensive paper and printing to get it. Our books are pretty dull.... But, just inferior printing on cheap paper, without the lively touch and style, is going to bore us worse yet!

—You mean dull in content?

—I mean dull optically, visually.... Like—to put it into terms of sound—like a long, droning recital of a tedious story—no inflection—no climax—no motion. ... I like Mr. McG.'s figure of a "good, interesting talker."

—You'd spice it up with "modernist" feeling?

—No. He's right, there. No fireworks. Keep the explosions outside the book.

—You have used "contemporary" design.

—Yes, but you'll notice, not in places where reading is going on.... Another point: letting the market set the tone is not good merchandising. The market needs to be led, by a tone a little higher than its average taste.... And Mr. McG.'s good tool isn't made by majority vote in Congressional committee—it's made by somebody who knows, expertly and practically, just what the tool is intended to do and how it works.

—You are for "books as tools."

—I am for books as tools—and that means cheaper books.... I think, too, that a lot of the things that make books expensive are false value—brummagem.... But the trade is so firmly established in the tradition of false-front and bustle-rear that I'm afraid it's going to take an awful tussle to get it back to real values again—to the tool basis—to the simplicity and directness and general fitness-for-its-job, for example, that makes a carpenter's plane a masterpiece of appropriate design.

COMPOSED IN ELECTRA TYPES

DESMOND FLOWER

The Publisher and the Typographer

We live in an unhappy age. I suppose that it must be the most wretched known in history since the hordes of Genghis Khan swept across the face of the eastern world. Yet it is not the physical losses—though these are bad enough—which are responsible for the malaise, but a spiritual shortcoming: a lack of direction and a lack of faith. Ours is an age in which there is no single thing, not great or small, which can escape our petty probing, our questioning and our doubts. Nothing is because it is: a shadowy reason must be sought behind.

In the course of man's desire to examine and explain away everything, one of the multitudinous minutiæ which have come in for worried attention is the position of printers, particularly in relation to the publishers they serve. The first four centuries of printing produced ninety-nine per cent of all the books which are worth looking at: yet, at what time during that period did anyone worry about the division of responsibility in a book's production? Then, it was a matter which somehow got done; now, unfortunately, it is a subject for discussion.

When Sweynheim and Pannertz started work at Subiaco in 1465 they were at the same time both printers and publishers, and this represents a dual personality. But when Fichet, the Rector of the Sorbonne, decided to set up the first French press five years later within the precincts of the University, he imported three printers from Germany, and possibly the first printer-publisher relationship was born. That this relationship was a living thing is shown by the fact that Fichet had the books which the press produced printed in Roman type. Soon after the great Rector had gone into voluntary exile for his political opinions, the press moved out of the University precincts to become a normal commercial printing shop, and Gering and Krantz reverted to the use of gothic type! Since the use of Roman lay within the high road of French classical development—France being the only country in Europe which did not begin its printing history in gothic—this stands as the first instance of the views of a publisher, as a man ordering the print, being in advance of the more timorous craftsmen, who were glad to revert to their old, safe and conventional ways as soon as the refining influence was removed.

French printing as a whole in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is full of printer-publisher problems for our questing minds. Simon le Vostre, the great ecclesiastical publisher of his age, used Pigouchet mostly for his printing; the Hardouyn brothers commissioned several lovely books from Anabat: why, and who dictated the terms? The balance of power may then well have lain with the printer, since in the Hardouyn's 1500 Book of Hours the first page is filled with Anabat's superb device. But what shall we say of the Hours printed in 1527 by Simon du Bois, but which bears on every page the unmistakable stamp and signature of its publisher, Geoffroy Tory? Now, they say, too, that Tory was not a binder: yet from him we have two gilt panels done to his order and to his design, matching exactly the work which he hired his printers to do for him.

I feel we are too certain in our minds that in the past printers were ipso facto publishers, or that those "for" whom they printed were merely agents. Like a fatal crack hidden for many years in the foundations of an outwardly sound edifice, the split between printer and publisher had occurred at the Sorbonne in 1470, but was patched, mended and ignored from time to time for long thereafter. Yet like that neglected flaw which, having widened until it defies repair, will in the end bring the whole building down, the printer-publisher relationship has now some time ago irrevocably divided.

Today the publisher and the printer are two separate men: there are few exceptions to this rule. Mr. Oliver Simon recently began one of his all too rare essays with the words "Printing is a way of life"; and later he remarked that "if he (the printer) is not something of an artist, he cannot hope to evolve and maintain a typographic style." But these words must be read in conjunction with one of Holbrook Jackson's many wise remarks: "whether it (printing) is an art or not is a secondary affair, so long as it is good printing. 'Art happens' says Whistler, and the printer who sets out to be an artist is liable to make a mess of both art and print." One further quotation will show how readily Holbrook Jackson's wisdom can be thrown out of the window; in these pages last year Mr. Herbert Read criticised the English and American editions of his own book, The Grass Roots of Art. He wrote "On balance, I do not find much to choose between these two designs from a functional point of view, but discounting a poverty due to material restrictions imposed on the English publisher, there is a certain liveliness in the American production, which, were I a purchaser faced with a choice, would induce me to buy the American edition, even if it cost me rather more. But if the English edition had been printed on better paper, it would have been the easier of the two editions to read...." With the exception of the last sentence, the whole of this passage seems misleading and irrelevant. The use of the word "functional" is one of the crosses which we in the twentieth century have to bear, but, since it has occurred, we must presume the function of printing to be that of presenting the written word to the reader in its most easily assimilated form; if the English edition in question is, apart from its paper, more easily readable, how can both editions be equally functional? The implication that a piece of printing—particularly when the text is a work of serious criticism—is to be purchased (even at a higher price) for its liveliness at the expense of its readability is particularly unfortunate. If for "liveliness" we read "speciousness" or "pretention" we have found a ready definition of the one quality which should be excluded from book printing at almost any cost. For this reason I am frightened of Mr. Simon's statement that "printing is a way of life"; good printing implies a philosophy, it is true, but I fear that printers who are far from good may assume airs above their station and, when they produce a perfect horror, state "that is my way of life—take it or leave it." If they do, they may be astonished at how fast any decent publisher will embrace the latter course. I disagree with a great deal more which Mr. Read wrote in his article, but there is room here for comment only upon his remarks about Baskerville type. Baskerville is not an easy type, nor a safe one (though printers may find that it satisfies their customers). The "gentlemanly sort of type which passes unnoticed, unquestioned" is undoubtedly Caslon and all its derivatives. Baskerville with its broad face and flourishing Italic is hard to handle, and in consequence is employed in a higher percentage of bad printing than any other type face.

It is generally agreed that when an irresistible force meets an immovable body, the result is a stalemate; equally obviously, whichever power wanes first will suffer an immediate eclipse. From this we may proceed by a process of elimination. A publisher who knows what he wants employs a printer who is an artist, and the result should be a masterpiece of give and take. A publisher who does not know what he wants employs a printer who is an artist, and the result should be a piece of fine printing. A publisher who knows what he wants employs a printer who is not an artist, and the result will depend on the degree of taste of the publisher. A publisher who either does not know what he wants or does not care, and employs a printer who is not an artist, will both get and deserve a shambles. From these simple equations one constant factor emerges—the publisher; and this fact is not at all at variance with the traditional saw that he who pays the piper calls the tune.

There have been a number of eminent publisher-printer relationships in the past. I have mentioned the French of 1500-1550, where there seems already to be evidence of a publisher's taste exerting an influence. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries offer no examples which are worthy of study: the works undertaken by one printer on behalf of a syndicate of publishers produce no evidence of the book's appearance being dictated by any taste other than that of the printer himself.

The nineteenth century saw the publisher come into his own. One of the greatest publisher-printer partnerships in the history of British book-production is that of Pickering and Whittingham. It would be reasonable to suppose that Pickering was the moving force in this partnership, since the ideas are publishing ideas mainly exemplified by the Aldine poets and the Diamond classics, and their starting point is Pickering's choice of the anchor and dolphin with the motto grouped about it: Aldi Discip. Anglus. To the same taste of Pickering and his delight in the printing of Aldus and his contemporaries may be attributed the gracious and restrained use of sixteenth-century fleurons which in the eighteen-thirties are not readily to be found elsewhere, and the curiously appropriate renaissance borders occasionally introduced. Another partnership in which I suspect that the publisher had a considerable say was that of Edward Moxon and Bradbury & Evans. In 1850 Moxon issued the first edition of two most important works, Wordsworth's Prelude and Tennyson's In Memoriam; both were printed by the same printer. But eight years later we may point to John Murray's edition of Coleridge's Table Talk; this, too, was printed by Bradbury & Evans with more than a glance over the shoulder at Pickering's publications, but without the guiding hand of Moxon. It is an interesting book, for it just fails before every problem which the text sets. Pickering would have set the solid prose at least a point smaller and increased the margins; in the same way he would have managed to get more space between each specimen of Table Talk. Instead of a page of grace and readability, there is in consequence a slightly crowded air and the eye skips disconcertingly from line to line.

Little more than thirty years later British book production was influenced by the most powerful small group of publishers which had ever turned printing upside down: it was indeed a small group—it consisted of three men: John Lane, Elkin Mathews and Leonard Smithers. The splendid series of publications for which each of these extraordinary individuals was responsible need no enumeration here ... but it is worth pointing out that they were the pioneers of the asymmetry which Mr. Read praises as an unusual and notable feature in the American edition of his book already mentioned. Holbrook Jackson said the last word on the publisher-printer relationship: "it was publishers like Pickering, Moxon, Field and Tuer, Elkin Mathews, John Lane and J. M. Dent who by their example in the nineteenth century helped to defend [my italics] printing from printers who were content to do as they were told, and, if no one told them, to follow rule-of-thumb methods which tended always to become worse rather than better."[32]

To quote again from Holbrook Jackson: "It was long before the average printer took advantage of the awakening of typographical taste which began in the eighteen-nineties. The men who extended and consolidated that taste came from anywhere but the printing offices. The majority of modern typographers are intellectuals or scholars who have forced themselves on the trade, often through the publishing houses." In almost every age there have been a few commercial printers of first-class standing, but perhaps it is no coincidence that it would be difficult to name one who was at work in the eighteen-nineties—the most lively age of the publisher's influence. The situation has not materially changed by the middle of the twentieth century, except that in our own age we are fortunate in having among us a few printers who bow to no man, and have left their mark upon this country's production. First among them stands Mr. Oliver Simon, whose steady output of fine printing must command unqualified admiration. Both the Cambridge and the Oxford University Presses have evolved styles of their own, and there are a few others who are fine printers in their own right. But on the other side of the ledger there is Sir Francis Meynell, who, despite the criticism that much of his work is pastiche, showed with exquisite taste [in the first hundred Nonesuch Press books] what could be made of the types and ornaments which Mr. Stanley Morison had made available through the Monotype Corporation, and all this with a multitude of printers who were set to work and produced but one result—pure Meynell. There is also the more recent example of Mr. Jan Tschichold at work in the Penguin pool.

This lamentable lack of taste among the generality of printers led publishers to give instructions as to their wishes, and this in turn has created a new position in publishing offices: the typographer. Once this person made his appearance on the payroll, the initiative passed from the printer for ever. In the first place, if the publisher employs a typographer he is going to be sure he gets his money's worth; in the second, human nature being what it is, most printers will willingly accept a publisher's design because it is the line of least resistance, and because, according to the best principles of business, the customer is always right.

I cannot see why the initiative in design should ever pass back to the printer. The problem was admirably expressed by D. B. Updike in his little book of essays on the craft, In the Day's Work: "If printers had more of a standard and a stiffer one, both about the types they employ and the way in which they use them, printing would be better. The printer, if he has no standard, must allow the customer to dictate his own wishes about types." I hope that there will always be the handful of printers who are great enough to say "you will do it my way—or else," but the rest will do as they are told by publishers' typographers, which amounts to the substitution of house styles for printers' styles. Printing, like so many arts, has fallen into the hands of the middleman—for such indeed the publisher is. There I am sure it will remain, and it is now for the middleman to justify himself. If he will take his responsibilities seriously he can do nothing but good. The good printer's compositor who is "something of an artist" will go on setting the target; but the publisher's typographer can, if he will, go far towards dragging the mediocre printers up towards the same high standard. If this is done, design in British printing will show a welcome overall improvement.

FOOTNOTES:

[32] The Printing of Books.

WILLIAM DANA ORCUTT

The Anatomy of the Book

The experienced designer is familiar with the successive parts of a complete book. All less formal embodiments of the book idea have some of these parts, and their position in the whole scheme should be governed by the traditions of the book proper.

In order to leave complete freedom as to number of pages, the favorite custom is to number the text pages in arabic folio numbers, beginning with 1. The front pages are then numbered with Roman folios, and thus it makes no difference with the body how many or few front pages are finally found necessary.

The typographical treatment of front matter and chapter pages throughout the book should be in perfect harmony, whether the treatment is simple typography or calls for elaborate embellishment. The character of the book is largely decided by what is done in this respect, and the intelligent designer fully realizes its importance and the chance thus given him for distinguished work.

The following summary gives these parts in proper sequence, and the nature of each.

BASTARD TITLE (always a right-hand page)

Nowadays this page (often miscalled "Half Title") is used merely because custom demands the familiar resting place for the eye in advance of the Title Page. It should never be omitted in work of any pretension to style and quality, and it should never be made unduly prominent by decoration or other treatment. Conventional dignity is the safe note for this page in the book.

ADVERTISING CARD (always a left-hand page)

If an Advertising Card or other similar announcement is required, it should be typographically a part of the book, no matter what the client's style in his advertising typography may be. If a customer has a special or unique form of advertising, and insists on its use, the printer should inform him that it conflicts with the harmony of the book to do so.

THE TITLE PAGE (always a right-hand page)

The Title Page gives the reader his sense of the whole book's quality. It should, therefore, be as nearly perfect as may be. Its first essential is that the eye shall read instantly the three important facts that it has to tell: the title of the book, the name of the author, and the imprint. In the case of a business volume this means the merchandise or business subject, the name of the business house, and the address or addresses. The typography should make these three divisions clear at a glance. There should be as little else on the title page as possible. Everything that can be left out is an aid to quality. The principle of the page is that it is an announcement of the book's contents and that it should not go beyond a very few display lines. It is the door to the house. White space is of the greatest value in this part of the book. If decoration is used, it should never be made more important than the type lines. The use of different faces of type is almost always bad, and success is obtained only occasionally by a genius. So important is harmony that it is not safe even to combine lines of capitals and lower case letters, except after careful planning and with assured understanding and talent.

The Copyright of the volume should be placed a little above the center of the page. The best taste calls for caps and small caps, or small caps alone. It is customary to use the bottom of this page for the printer's imprint or the international requirement, "Printed in the United States of America," or both, but the size of page should be considered.

DEDICATION (always a right-hand page)

The character and purpose of the Dedication dictate that its treatment should always be formal. The "monumental" style is appropriate and correct. Small caps are the best. The Dedication should always be a right-hand page. Its reverse must be left blank.

PREFACE [OR FOREWORD] (always a right-hand page)

A Preface that has simply the ordinary character usual to most prefaces should be set in the same size of type as the body of the book, and in the same face. For any preface of unusual importance, the page may be double-leaded, or set in a type one size larger than the body. If the book has both Preface and Introduction, the Preface may be set in italics to mark the distinction. Italics may also be employed if the Preface has been written by a person other than the author. In this case, however, the Preface is preferably placed after the Contents and the List of Illustrations.

CONTENTS (always a right-hand page)

The Contents or Table of Contents, filling as many pages as necessary, follows the Preface. The quality of this part of the book-job depends on the little niceties of spacing, margin, and proportion of white space to type which are too often ignored, even in otherwise pretentious books. The Contents pages are almost as important as the Title Page in establishing a sense of quality.

THE LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (always a right-hand page)

The List of Illustrations follows the Contents pages, but no matter where the Contents finishes, the List of Illustrations should begin on a right-hand page. Obviously its typographical style should be the same as the Contents.

INTRODUCTION (always a right-hand page)

The Introduction follows the List of Illustrations, and its composition should be in the same size and face as the body of the book. Any typographical distinction between Preface and Introduction should be limited to the former, as stated under "Preface." Authors are not always clear in their understanding of the difference between a Preface and an Introduction. Their Introduction often is really a Preface, and should be so entitled and placed in the book accordingly. The Preface is the author's personal remarks to the reader, and these may be of any character, treating of any subject. The Introduction, on the other hand, should treat specifically of the subject of the book, and should contain only statements of direct bearing and importance.

HALF TITLE (always a right-hand page)

As the Bastard Title always precedes the Title Page, so the Half Title always precedes the first page of the text—the page which carries the title of the book at its top. The Half Title must always be on the right-hand page immediately preceding this page, and it should consist of not more than the title of the volume. Half Titles may run through a book before various divisions.

Those sections of a book which follow the text must be treated with the same typographic care as the pages which precede the text. These sections are usually as follows:

APPENDIX (always a right-hand page)

This should be set in the same face as the text, but in one size smaller type. If the text ends on the left-hand page, a Half Title may be thrown between the text and the Appendix.

GLOSSARY (preferably a right-hand page)

The size of type used for the Glossary depends wholly upon its nature, but it usually is two full sizes smaller than that used in the text of the volume. A Half Title may be thrown in before the Glossary, if the text ends on the left-hand page.

BIBLIOGRAPHY (preferably a right-hand page)

The comments made under "Glossary" apply equally to the Bibliography. The combination of titles of books and the names of authors offers an attractive opportunity for artistic treatment.

INDEX (always a right-hand page)

If the text ends on the left-hand page, a Half Title may be thrown in before the Index. The type used for the Index is usually 8 point size set in double column. There is so much difference in the way the index entries read that great care should be exercised to select a model which will fit the particular case in hand.

A SYMPOSIUM: By Bruce Rogers, Carl Purington Rollins, Joseph Blumenthal, P. J. Conkwright, Arthur W. Rushmore, Milton Glick, Morris Colman, Evelyn Harter, Peter Beilenson and Ernst Reichl.

Have there been any material changes in the anatomy of the book in the past quarter century? Should there be, to have the contemporary book reflect the times in which it is designed, set and printed?

As these and other questions occurred, we re-appraised the Anatomy of the Book summation in The Manual of Linotype Typography, reprinted in the foregoing pages. That text seemed to stand up pretty well. It was written originally by William Dana Orcutt for the Manual, whose typographical plan and critical comment was prepared with the co-operation of the late Edward E. Bartlett, then Director of Linotype Typography.

What revisions or additions would Mr. Orcutt suggest for a reprinting? What would other prominent designers and book-makers suggest?

The idea of a symposium appealed. The counsel of Bruce Rogers, Carl Purington Rollins and Joseph Blumenthal, in the field of fine and privately printed books, was invited, with that of P. J. Conkwright in the university press field.

Trade book-makers would also have opinions and suggestions, in all probability. Counsel was sought from Milton Glick, who heads the Viking Press design and production activity; Morris Colman, former chairman of the A.I.G.A. Trade Book Clinic and one of Viking's top designers; Arthur W. Rushmore, former Harper vice-president in charge of design and production, now retired to the delights of his Golden Hind Press, at Madison, N. J.; and Ernst Reichl, one of our ranking modern designers, whose long association in book manufacturing with H. Wolff and as a free-lance brought an unmatched experience in working with many publishers. Mr. Reichl also has been prominent in A.I.G.A. Book and Magazine Clinic activities.

The comment of an author and a publisher also seemed in order, and happily one in each field with a considerable appreciation of the graphic arts was obtained: Evelyn Harter, whose novel, Dr. Katherine Bell, was recently published by Doubleday, and who formerly headed design and production activity for Random House, Smith and Haas and other firms before retiring to private life as Mrs. Milton Glick. As publisher-designer-printer all in one, Peter Beilenson was invited to comment. He, with Mrs. Edna Beilenson, directs the Peter Pauper Press in Mt. Vernon, and is consistently represented in the A.I.G.A. "Fifty Books of the Year" selections.

"So far as I know," Mr. Orcutt wrote, "the Anatomy remains the same today and I can think of no changes I would want to make. I may be wrong, but I am still hoping that it is one thing that doesn't change."

To Joseph Blumenthal, who directs the Spiral Press in New York, and whose books are famed for their simplicity of design and excellence of typography and presswork, the statements of the Anatomy are sane and safe. "In the hands of a sufficiently experienced and versatile designer," he added, "no rule is absolute to the point where it cannot be broken, at least in part, where occasion requires."

To Bruce Rogers, most distinguished of designers of books, the Anatomy "is an excellent short treatise that covers all the points of a well-designed volume.... I recommend it for the perusal of anyone engaged in book-making. Following it literally would result in a decided advance in that art."

Several minor suggestions that B.R. made have been incorporated in the text of the Anatomy as here reprinted. These concerned the substitution of "should" for "must" in several instances, "in order not to be too dogmatic." His other points were: 1, "that it is frequently preferable to place the preface before the contents"; and 2, "that there seem to be too many half-titles recommended for anything else than a de luxe book—especially at the end, for the index and vocabulary."

To Carl Purington Rollins, Printer Emeritus to Yale University, lecturer and writer on the graphic arts and one of the foremost American masters of the book, the Anatomy "is a very sound and sensible guide for young book makers—and, to judge from the queer books coming out of New York, older ones could profit from it. I have no disagreement with it in any particular," he continued, "and if it will not make a genius, it will at least prevent a diligent reader from going astray."

P. J. Conkwright found the text clear and concise. "Any extensive elaboration would defeat its usefulness, I think, to those approaching the subject for the first time.

"My only quarrel," he added, "is with the paragraph concerning Copyright. If there is no Dedication I like the Copyright statement and printer's imprint grouped together a little above the center of the page. If there is a Dedication, I like the Copyright statement at the top of the page lining with the top line of the title page, and the printer's imprint at the bottom of the page, lining with the bottom line of the title page.

"This is a good example, however, of how an elaboration of the text can get too involved for a beginner."

To several experienced trade-book designers with considerable production and manufacturing experience, the Anatomy text was less satisfactory.

Both Evelyn Harter and Milton Glick found the text too dogmatic in its dicta. They were bothered most by the first two sentences under Copyright, the last sentence under title page and "references to 'genius.'" They both liked best the remarks regarding Contents, Preface and Introduction.

"Ought not the topics of chapter openings be included," Mr. Glick inquired, "also illustrations, captions, running page heads, folios and such?"

As an ex-designer turned author, Miss Harter has "come to appreciate more than ever the values of legibility and simplicity, with no extraneous tricks."

Morris Colman concurred in feeling the Anatomy text is pretty arbitrary for today, and that chapter openings, running page heads and all other normal elements of a book should be included.

"In particular," he added, "I would like to see the various arguments presented both in terms of tradition and also in terms of the particular function which each element of a book performs.

"For example, the title page is not only the 'main entrance' but it also is the source of the bibliographic information which appears in hundreds of library cards, catalogs, etc., and its contents and arrangement determines whether it will be listed in all these places in such form that you or I could find it if we wanted it.

"There are certain legal requirements which influence the form and content of copyright pages. Dedications, while formal in a technical sense, may need to be treated quite informally to express the spirit of the particular dedicator.

"And with many kinds of contemporary books," he continued, "the contents page is made to precede any other preliminary matter, despite tradition, for the greater convenience of the reader. I am sure that this is always why the Index is invariably the last element in back matter."

To Arthur Rushmore, the Anatomy "is darn good copy, clearly stated. There are a couple of amplifications that might help give more clarity:

"Advertising Card seems a little vague. This is more likely to be a 'List of Author's Books' or 'Series Title and Titles of Books already issued' if the book is in a historical or other series.

"Copyright: Relatively few books carry the Printer's name on copyright and the line 'Printed in the United States of America' looks better and obviates a printing problem if run as a line directly under the copyright notice. A single line at the foot of the page, after the first 500 impressions of 1951 printing, is either bold face or completely unreadable.

"Dedication: To me, 'small caps are the best' is doubtful. Small caps are the worst printing of all characters in a font, and unless small caps of a larger size than text will look too weak and small. I'd say 'should be planned with the utmost care for balance and position on page.'

"Half Title: First paragraph too dogmatic. If book is a novel, or book without 'Parts' then half title should be 'book title' backed blank and folioed in Roman front matter. If book has 'Parts,' the half title should not bear book title, but should carry the Part or Section Title and folio arabic 1, backed blank 2 and first page of text folio 3. Similar half title for all other Parts or Sections folioed in."

Peter Beilenson, whose comment on the pleasures and duties of the amateur printer is well worth reading (page 313), thinks the Anatomy "perfectly all right, so far as it goes. If it wavers from the perfect, it is in being too strict—vide the remarks about the title page, the "it should never" of the bastard title, etc.

"But," he asks in suggesting the text be extended, "what about additions to the coverage? Footnotes, running heads, chapter titles, initials, etc., are not the limbs of the anatomy, but they are organs. What about the binding? The jacket? The direction of the stamping of the title on the spine?"

To Ernst Reichl, the Anatomy comprises "what might be called the basic minimum. Any designer worth his salt should not only start with this standard but also allow his imagination to roam far beyond it.

"An 'anatomy,' however precise and objective, necessarily breaks down a living entity into component parts. These parts in reality show much more cohesion than is apparent in their piece-by-piece description.

"In the modern book, in particular, we tend to treat the volume as a whole and to submerge the importance of the single page in it. The bastard title, for instance, might be left entirely blank; the title page may be spread over two pages and the advertising card incorporated into it; the copyright page and the dedication page might be treated as a double-page spread, etc.

"The tendency today," he summarized, "is altogether to handle the double-page spread as the unit of the layout, rather than the single page. This may help to break down in some degree the rigidity and formality which awes ordinary human beings, and makes them as reluctant to touch a book as to put on a dress suit. It may also help to make our books a little more ordinary and lively."

ROBERT JOSEPHY

Trade Bookmaking:
COMPLAINT IN THREE DIMENSIONS

The development of trade book-making since 1920 has been an extraordinary phenomenon in the conservative business of publishing. At that time most publishers looked upon "manufacturing" as a necessary but routine activity, ranking with accounting, shipping and such, and on a far lower intellectual plane than the cultivation of authors and reviewers, or the writing of good blurbs. The production of books was usually entrusted to an uninspired saint who was expected to be hard on his printer's back and soft under his boss's feet. The idea of the publisher himself taking any interest in the aesthetics of book-making was thought to be a trifle queer.

There was, to be sure, a small traffic in books printed for collectors, and the term "fine printing" had already come to mean "not printed to be read." Typography, as usual, was less than twenty years behind current architecture, and American type founders had already cleaned up the Renaissance and were well on their way into the eighteenth century, while American typographers, like interior decorators, were learning to hop nimbly from period to period. Everyone was learning to blame the machine for the things we were too greedy or too lazy to do properly; fortunately small power presses could be made to imitate hand-press printing, so it was not really necessary to do business at hand-press rates.

In the field of general publishing, however, the hand-press page was out of the question, period styles were incongruous, and the real problem of designing the trade book had never been attempted, because it had never been seen with any clarity. There were many experiments with new binding materials and designs, and with printers' flowers and other typographic embellishment, but these were all attempts to "dress up" the old formats, and arose from no real understanding of the problem.

Today [1935], thanks to the leadership of a very few publishers, the educational work of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and perhaps to the enthusiasm of the designers themselves, there is a steadily widening appreciation of good trade book-making, and a better perception of the problem among book-makers. We are learning to plan books in three dimensions, considering proportion and weight and the texture of materials—designing for the hand as well as for the eyes. We are getting free of "period" styles and "period" motifs, and developing a new idiom to suit new methods of production. We are finally trying to make the physical aspect of our books bear some relation to the culture of our own time.

Everyone has come to recognize certain aesthetic values in cheap machine-made glass and metal-ware, if it be designed for the machine and does not attempt to imitate the hand-made, and we find in it a quality different from, but not necessarily inferior to, that of the more elegant article. Thus in printing we are coming to realize that electrotyped plates, made from machine-set type and printed on wood-pulp paper on a perfecting cylinder press can produce a page quite as satisfactory, aesthetically, as the product of the hand-press. It is this new sense of values, born of respect for the machine and for what it can do if used with character, that must be the basis of the designer's attitude. If he is working with his fingers crossed, his work will show it.

The problem of suiting type to subject is the cause of much confusion. We give too little study to the characteristics of type-faces, and the announcements of the foundries and composing-machine people frequently attribute the most fantastic qualities to their new types.

Furthermore, most of the faces available on the composing machines have been cut to reproduce some earlier design, and few to meet the contemporary technical or literary requirements, so that we have several great gaps in the line of type resources that need to be filled. Recent books examined, and a great part of all current book-making, show that we have largely thrown off the reactionary hand-press ideal, and that we are learning to construct instead of decorate. We have finally obtained a supply of modern book cloth; Europe has given us a supply of modern display types; and we are anxiously awaiting the composing-machine companies' arrival in the Twentieth Century.

Two years later:

The end of a three-hour period spent examining a month's output of American trade books leaves one thinking much more about the book making situation in general than about the four books one has chosen. What impresses one is not that four books, or forty, are decently made, but that all the rest are so badly made.

After my last experience in inspecting a collection of this kind, I wrote, with some satisfaction and much optimism: "We are learning to plan books in three dimensions ... designing for the hand as well as for the eye.... We are finally trying to make the physical aspect of our books bear some relation to the culture of our own time." Well, I still think we are only trying.

Designing a book is a problem in three dimensions. The first essential is good and suitable materials, the second good proportions, the third a good type, and the last good typographic arrangement. Good decoration (or any decoration) is not essential at all. If the materials are poor in quality and unsuitable to the idea of a book; if the proportions detract from the aesthetic effect, or from the book's practical usefulness, typography can do very little to save it.

In the last two years the publishers have been increasing trim sizes without increasing list prices, and at the same time increasing bulks, instead of reducing them to compensate. What that means in simple arithmetic is that when a novel is increased from a 7-1/2 inch 12mo to an 8-1/8 inch large 12mo, and the bulk from 1 inch to 1-1/8 inches, it requires a third more cubic inches of paper, a seventh more square inches of cloth, a sixth more board, etc.—all for the same money. It means even softer, less printable, less bindable paper; cheaper binding materials throughout; sewing in 32's and other skimping in workmanship. And it means clumsier, uglier, more perishable books.

While other industries are seeking to make the implements of living more convenient and more durable and more beautiful, we are deliberately making books less convenient and less durable and less beautiful. While other industries are helping to develop popular taste and anticipating changes in it, we are waiting for our customers to get mad at us. While we see the masses getting wise to other frauds of branding and packaging, we still hand our "intelligent minority" the old fraud of inflated books.

The digest magazines can get millions of readers, though magazines have always had large pages, but "that's not the book business." A few of the publishers can sell small books, but "that's all right for their lists." Booksellers can tell us the public is on to us, but "their customers aren't typical book buyers." Our friends can tell us they like to carry books in their pockets, and that they have no more room on their shelves, or under their beds, but they're only our crazy friends. Our salesman can tell us he got a bad order because the book was too thin—and ah! there we have the real and only truth.

Publishers of new books blame this practice on the reprints, but they themselves control much of the offending reprint output. We allow the cheapest and shoddiest goods to set our styles; as if Fourteenth Street were to lead our dress industry, and jerry-built Queens our builders. Publishing is indeed, as we are so often told, a "different" kind of business!

Most of the books I examined suffered from this inflation. In most cases the money spent on them would have produced a sound, handsome, and durable book in a smaller size, and without small type or crowding. Books printed on proper paper were so rare that I found myself reluctant to discard the few I found, however undistinguished in other respects some of them were. (I felt the same way about the few books with trimmed edges—but that is a delicate subject better discussed face to face, and with weapons, than in a family journal.)

Most of the books suffered also from too much typography. I think we are all trying desperately to overcome typographically the handicap of paper and materials. Some of us find that if we don't do stunts the publisher will think we're not trying. Some of us are still suffering a little from Rogers-complaint. And some of us are perhaps just too anxious to express ourselves.

Whatever the reason, we seldom have the courage to let a simple book stay simple. We are very particular about the type we select, and then we are afraid to use it boldly, and to depend on the design of the letter for our effects. Books with illustrations, diagrams, complicated heads, or other special matter, we are apt to handle well; but when the copy is simple we do insist on using rules and/or ornament. When we use ornament we are inclined to have meaningless little units repeated endlessly throughout the book, instead of a few positive, significant elements, used with proper restraint.

In many of the books I saw, the design bore no relation to the subject matter, either in materials, format, or typography, and these were by no means all from the hands of inexperienced designers. Many suffered, of course, because good types are not available for certain problems. None of the composing machines has a really suitable type for books on contemporary subjects: the natural and social sciences, architecture and technology, etc. There should be several such types, comparable to the old numbered "moderns" and "old styles" but better in design, traditional in general form but impersonal and mechanized in drawing; and cut in several weights for different papers. If I may conclude by quoting again from my last effort in this medium, we are still "anxiously awaiting the composing-machine companies' arrival in the Twentieth Century."

Postscript, 1951:

Re-reading the above complaints, I am saddened to find how many of them I would repeat today. Many of them, but not all. The inflated book is becoming rare, but it took a world war to finish it off. With it we are losing the sloppy rough-cut fore-edge. "Period" typography is quite dead, but its belated and tortured passing is no credit to any of us.

We still have too much typography, however; too many self-conscious tricks, too much un-discipline. And we still lack many of the types we need. The war may fairly be blamed for disrupting the programs of the machine people, for a book face takes years of labor and trial to produce. But where are the new hand-types?

A healthy printing industry needs a prolific type design program. Creative type-founding stimulates the typographer, and paves the way for the machine cutting. We need ignore competition in the foundry field, and all we have is one tired monopoly. Perhaps most of us are too polite to point, but let us not think that we can ignore the foundry situation, and supply the lack of types with calligraphy. Every creative period in printing history has produced its own new types. The present period can make no important contribution without doing the same.

WILL RANSOM
WHAT IS A PRIVATE PRESS?

Whenever private presses are mentioned, one of two questions is certain to be heard. The layman asks, "What do you mean, a private press?" while a collector smiles quizzically and inquires, with gentle malice, "How do you define a private press?" There have been many answers and much discussion, but common agreement has not yet fixed upon a single definite phrase. Perhaps one fascinating element of the subject is this very uncertainty.

There is really little question about the meaning of "private" in any connection, with its connotation of complete personal freedom in thought and expression and exemption from exterior influence or compulsion. So it is a simple matter to define a private press in those terms. The usual argument, however, is less concerned with a fundamental definition than with its interpretation. The uncertainty is about which of the many presses of past and present shall be considered, from the collector's viewpoint, private enterprises as distinguished from commercial ventures. Actually the line of demarcation is so broad and nebulous that decision must always remain a matter of personal opinion. For a working basis, the following statements provide the best available material.

John Martin, in his Bibliographical Catalogue of Books Privately Printed (1834), included certain presses whose productions "were not intended by the writers for sale, and the circulation of which has been confined entirely to their friends and connexions or to those who took an interest in the matter contained in them." The intent is apparent, but it applies equally to privately printed and private press printing, which are different matters. The restriction to "writers" is unfortunate, and Martin contradicts himself by including at least one press, Strawberry Hill, many of whose books were offered for public sale. On the other hand, he omitted many which were clearly within his own terms.

M. Claudin, the French bibliographer, explains at greater length that a private press is "one set up in a monastery, a palace, a residence, or a private house, not the office of a printer. In fact it is a press reserved for personal and not for public use, patronized, held, owned, or hired for the occasion by a private person at his own house, or by a congregation in, or close to, their buildings. Whether the copies issued were merely intended for the use of an ecclesiastical order or to be presented to high personages, whether they were exposed for sale or reserved for exchange ... makes no essential difference." That seems to cover the ground pretty thoroughly.

Alfred W. Pollard, one of the foremost English authorities, says: "For a press to be private a double qualification seems to be necessary: the books it prints must not be obtainable by any chance purchaser who offers a price for them and the owner must print for his own pleasure and not work for hire for other people." And Falconer Madan, another noted English bibliographer, condenses his decision into "a press carried on unofficially by a person or group of persons for his or their private purposes."

The following paragraph, as originally written, erroneously ascribed the quotation to John T. Winterich. It should have read: Still another neatly phrased version occurs in English Books 1475-1900, by Sawyer and Darton: "Perhaps, in the end, the best definition of a private press is that it is an enterprise conceived, and masterfully and thoroughly carried out, by a creative artist who (whether or not he likes to cover some of his expenses by sales) does his work from a sincere conviction that he is so expressing his own personality."

Except that any book offered for sale may easily come into the hands of "any chance purchaser" who learns of it, and that "creative artist" is a severe limitation, the common factor of independent expression is apparent in all these.

Granting the connotation of "privacy" as an imperative factor, a survey of impulses and characteristics provides a better understanding of the matter. Actually, the principal differences of opinion and the major argument derive from the question of whether or not the productions of a press are sold or given away. But what difference does that make if the fundamental impulse and continued purpose prove monetary return to be a minor consideration, a casual effect rather than a desired result? It is true that many private presses, even some of the greater ones, continued for longer and more prolifically than they would have without patronage, but that was because their subscribers liked the result of what was done in free personal expression. Even the Kelmscott Press produced an edition for Way and Williams with a Chicago imprint, but it should be noted that the publishers bought the book and the book-making of Morris' choice instead of engaging him to carry out their wishes. So there seems to be sufficient justification for disregarding the financial element, so long as it is clearly secondary, except to note that a private press must be free from the necessity of considering that phase of the matter.

As individual expression chooses many avenues, each with its particular attraction, the reasons for establishing private presses are numerous and varied. They have sprung from the dreams and desires of craftsmen, authors and artists, prophets and dilettantes. Broadly, they divide into two general classes, one being concerned with literary content and the other with typographic form, with perhaps a third division concerned only with enjoying something to play with. The typographic viewpoint seems to attract popular interest to the greatest extent.

The simplest and perhaps the truest type of private press is that maintained by one who is, at least by desire, a craftsman and finds a peculiar joy in handling type, ink, and paper, with sufficient means and leisure to warrant such an avocation. His literary selection may leave something to be desired and art may be disregarded or amazingly interpreted, but he has a good time. As a correspondent recently wrote: "This small effort shows the difficulties of an amateur both with ink and with type. But as it is a matter of the mere fun of the thing, rather than business, I am in that singularly fortunate position of being able to tell anyone who doesn't like it to go jump in the lake." Another version of the same spirit was happily expressed by Edwin Roffe (Rochester Press) in 1861:

I must confess,
I love my Press;
For when I print,
I know no stint,
Of joy.

At the other extreme is the author who is entirely or largely concerned with producing his own writings. He may turn printer by choice or for economy, or may hire a workman, but he must, to qualify as a private press, maintain the equipment in his own ownership or control. In this group the personal element is usually the one point of interest, as the typography is generally a mere means to an end. Somewhere in this rating may be included the secret presses devoted to political and religious propaganda in the days when free speech was a hazardous adventure; also those which, like Middle Hill, were established to preserve and distribute rare or unique items of information and record.

Then there is the dilettante who dabbles a little in both phases but performs few of the functions in his own person. His viewpoint is more nearly that of a publisher, yet insofar as he maintains a press and follows an individual program he is a member of this goodly company. Horace Walpole was an excellent example. "Present amusement is all my object," he said at the start, and no doubt he accomplished that purpose not only for himself but for many of his friends.

Another distinct approach to private press activity, most familiar because its results have been more significant and have affected typography as a whole more emphatically, is from the standpoint of aesthetic or artistic vision. Men with a fine feeling for beauty have done marvels with available materials, but the impulse usually includes type design. "Let's make a new fount of type" voiced the conception of the Kelmscott Press and the next ten or twelve years saw almost as many types designed, not all successful but certainly bearing the impress of individual expression. Even Dr. Daniel, with no assumption of creative ability, served the cause well by searching out and reviving the Fell types.

Finally, there is a kind of press which may or may not be considered private but is certainly not commercial, a press maintained by a school for educational purposes of one form or another. Rarely do these reach a collector's attention, since their products are distinctly localized, but there are instances of significant accomplishment. The notable example is the Laboratory Press where, under the direction of Porter Garnett, students of printing learn something of typography in terms of the ideal, not to mention other cultural by-products. Mr. Garnett's statement may well be added to the definitions already quoted. "Issuing publications (for such, in spite of their slenderness, our students' specimens are), and having no commercial function, the Laboratory Press is, in the purest sense of the term, a private press; and its purpose being solely educational, it may be said to be the first private press to be dedicated exclusively to educational ends." On the sole point of priority the Whitnash and School Presses might be offered in evidence, but no comparison of purpose can fairly be suggested.

Somewhat in the same spirit is the use of a private press for experimental work, as proposed by James Guthrie, who has said: "The artist at the press is, before everything, an explorer. His true mission is to suggest and demonstrate, not ideas thirty years old, but new ideas, which may take our friend the fine printer (by easy methods) another thirty years to see the drift of!" That approach, as well as another stated intention towards "a gesture of protest and criticism," is of a part with the purpose animated by vision of new and finer achievement. That there was feeling of experiment in the first Kelmscott type and book is a matter of record, as is the fact that subsequent experience and development have changed the result in some important details.

While these groups serve to distinguish the main differences between various kinds of private presses, very few individual instances lie within one classification. Craftsmen have turned to writing, authors to printing, and dilettantes to both. Some have achieved simultaneous distinction in type design, writing, and book-making. Such versatility is rare, yet it is illuminating to note that the outstanding figures, those who have contributed most of permanent worth to subsequent culture, of which William Morris is the chief example, are the ones who have combined the greatest number of elements in their activities.

Out of all these has come something more than individual purpose and personal endeavor. Though the poorest of them have earned nothing more than pity or at best a genial tolerance, the significant presses have contributed richly to the program of typography and to aesthetic progress in general. Although the story of private presses is no more than a tiny chapter in the annals of graphic art, although all of them are but an infinitesimal part of the deluge of printers and printing since the middle of the fifteenth century, their influence, particularly upon book design, is strikingly impressive out of all proportion to their size and number. Verily, they are "the little leaven that leaveneth the whole lump."

After all is said, the distinguishing quality of a private press is no less than a matter of spirit, indefinable except by inference. Whatever decision is made concerning the status of a press, with regard to its being private or not, must be based upon a recognition of the ideal apparent in its works, with due consideration for the human elements of its activities. Freed from the confining strictures of details, a private press may be defined as the typographic expression of a personal ideal, conceived in freedom and maintained in independence.

PRESS MARK, ITS SECOND, BY FREDERIC W. GOUDY. Mr. Ransom was associated with the Village Press during its beginning months at Park Ridge, Ill., in the Summer of 1903.

POSTSCRIPT, 1951:

Twenty-four years later the question is still academic. Instead of a few distinguished private presses there is now a spate of "press books," some of which are produced in home privacy, others designed or printed or published by an outstanding personality, and a few, regrettably, on the border line of the commercial limited editions racket. But the meaning of "privacy" remains unchanged and a private press is what it has always been, a personal activity. I cannot improve on my original statement.

To fill out the record with some definitions that were unknown or omitted in the earlier chapter, and to get all of the statements into one place, we may begin with William Morris's Note on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press (1898): "I began printing books with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty, while at the same time they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye, or trouble the intellect of the reader by eccentricity of form in the letters."

C. R. Ashbee, of the Essex House Press, stated in The Private Press: A Study in Idealism (1909): "A private press as we understand it at the present day in England and America is a Press whose objective is first of all an aesthetic one, a press that if it is to have real worth challenges support on a basis of Standard, caters for a limited market and is not concerned with the question of the Commercial development of printing by machinery." In 1933 (also twenty-four years later) he repeated that definition in The Book-Collector's Quarterly (No. XI, p. 72) and added: "That, I think, is as near as we shall get."

For the Doves Press, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson explained his purpose in the three Catalogues Raisonné of 1908, 1911, and 1916, shortened in the last: "... to attack the problem of Typography as presented by ordinary books in the various forms of Verse, Prose, and Dialogue and, keeping always in mind the principles laid down in the Book Beautiful, to attempt its solution by the simple arrangement of the whole Book, as a whole, with due regard to its parts and to the emphasis of its capital divisions rather than by the addition & splendour of applied ornament."

Among the commentators and bibliographers, Robert Steele, in The Revival of Printing (1912) makes no attempt at definition, and G. S. Tomkinson, in his Select Bibliography of Modern Presses (1928) "still seeks the right answers." In the latter book, Bernard H. Newdigate's introduction contains two statements which indicate the spirit that informs private presses and in recent years has expanded into more public book-making: "... a zeal in the pursuit of their art which has been inspired by something more than mere money-making, and in many cases by the attainment of a degree of excellence which invests their work with a peculiar interest for all those who study printing..." and specifically about operators of private presses who "have printed their books because they have judged the books worth printing for their own sakes, or worth printing in some particular way; and it is the particular way in which each of these printers has sought to give expression to his conception of how his books should be printed and the way in which he has overcome the limitations of his type and plant and solved the several problems which beset the studious printer in every detail of his work, that give them so much individual interest...."

In later years, we have had noble bibliographies of the Nonesuch, Grabhorn, and Ashendene Presses, Bruce Rogers' Paragraphs on Printing, and Daniel Berkeley Updike's Notes on the Merrymount Press and Some Aspects of Printing, Old and New. All of these are required reading for collectors of press books, and each represents a personal viewpoint, but only one defines a private press.

That is the Ashendene Bibliography, but one who seeks for a formal declaration will not find it. The few phrases that can be isolated—" ... the absorbing interest of an otherwise busy life...."—"The Press was started solely for the sake of the interest and amusement I expected to derive from it...."—"... the striving after an ideal...."—these casual comments are slender evidence. If, however, the entire Foreword is read, one discovers just why and how a private press is operated—"the letter killeth, but the spirit maketh alive."

COMPOSED IN ELDORADO TYPES

ALFRED W. POLLARD

The Trained Printer and the Amateur:
and The Pleasure of Small Books

From the Centaur announcement booklet, Lanston Monotype Corporation, Ltd., London, 1929.

Printers, as a class, like all other craftsmen, can only thrive by supplying their customers with what they want at prices which they are willing to pay. Here and there an exceptionally gifted and courageous craftsman may rely on being able to obtain a better price for better work, and be rewarded for his confidence, but success will always depend not only on himself but also on two external factors over which he has very little control; the existence of enough customers, or potential customers, able to recognise better work than that which they have been getting, and the ability and willingness of these customers to pay a higher price for it as long as a higher price is necessary for its production. But occasionally the discriminating customer (or potential customer) may not find a master-craftsman able and willing to do for him what he wants, and if so, if he cares enough about it to be an enterprising amateur, he starts a press of his own to print the books he wants as he thinks they ought to be printed. Very often he fails; almost always he finds that he must engage at least one skilled journeyman to help him through. But occasionally he succeeds, and when he succeeds he brings new life into the craft of printing.

Definitions of what constitutes an "amateur" have always proved difficult. The two characteristics of the class of which I am thinking are that they have been readers and lovers of books before they have become printers and that they will not knowingly print any book badly for the sake of making a profit off it. As a rule they will only print the books they like, and they will print them according to their own standards. That some of them have made a good living by their work, does not alter their status.

In the early days of printing amateurs abounded, but not at the very first. When printing was invented it was applied first of all to multiplying a few much-used Latin grammars and calendars for which there was a large and steady sale, because the production of manuscript copies had been too slow and too expensive. These early efforts, which have come down to us mainly in fragments found in binding, are rude and ugly enough. There is no evidence of any effort to make them beautiful for the sake of making them beautiful, and there was no need to do so. Fifteenth-century schoolmasters did not cosset their pupils with pretty school-books; they beat them. Their standard in printing was strictly utilitarian. But when the adventure was once undertaken, whether it was by Gutenberg, or by Fust and Schöffer, of printing large Bibles for use in church, there was at once admitted a standard of dignity, and this the Church for centuries did more than any other body to maintain. Furthermore when the goldsmith Fust and the scribe Peter Schöffer, greatly daring, set themselves to produce psalters for use in choir which, by red printing and by large and small capitals in red and blue, should rival the beauty of the hand-written and hand-painted psalters then in use, to the dignity of the first Bibles there was added beauty and charm, and in a few years bookmen all over Europe were eager to apply the new craft to multiplying the books in which they were specially interested. A few secular highbrows stood aloof. As some old ladies still drive out in their carriage and pair (a very pleasant and dignified way of getting about) and abjure motor-cars, so there were a few great bookmen who clung to manuscripts and would not have a printed book in their libraries. In the same way for some twenty years bishops looked askance at presses and types, and it was not until 1474 that a printed missal was placed upon an altar, and not until 1479 that more than two editions were printed in any year, or anywhere outside Italy. But when Milan and Rome had continued to set the example, German bishops were content to follow it, and when they decided to print they found a vigorous way of maintaining a high standard. They commissioned the best printer they could get to do the work; they allowed him to charge an agreed price for it, and they obliged every Church in their province or diocese to provide itself with a copy before a specified date.[33]

In France in several instances a Bishop, or the Canons of a Cathedral, arranged with a printer to come to the Cathedral town and print a missal or breviary under their supervision. These good men were perhaps rather amateur publishers than amateur printers working private presses with a hired man to do the heavy work. But if we choose to think of them only as customers, they were customers who knew what they wanted and brought the printer under their roof as the best means of seeing that they got it.

As regards the printing of secular books in the fifteenth century, since the craft was a new one, it was necessarily run in the first instance by men who had been brought up in other occupations. In this sense nearly every native printer outside Germany was an amateur. At the outset the newcomers were largely clerks in minor orders and professional scribes; but merchants, professors and men of letters generally were attracted to the new craft, many of them doubtless only to make money, others to print books in which they were specially interested. Even more than in the case of the bishops or canons who commissioned missals and breviaries, we must think of this motley crowd of recruits rather as amateur publishers than amateur printers. It may be doubted whether even Caxton (who was by trade a mercer) in all his fifteen years in the business, set up the equivalent of one of his small folios with his own hands. He started his press because he wanted to get his books into print as the easiest way of circulating them; but there are no signs that he took any special interest in fine printing for its own sake, or took any joy in producing a handsome book. His standards were those of a competent but unenterprising scribe, who only wanted to set his words down accurately on the page so that they could be easily read. The master printers all over the Continent of Europe, when they had the courage to stand out against the pressure to cut prices or increase profits by using cheaper and cheaper paper, and crowding more on to it, were doing much better work than Caxton, and when they found customers who encouraged them to do their best, their work altogether outclassed his.

When we turn to the scholar-printers of the sixteenth century I think it would be hard to deny the claim of Aldus and the Estiennes to a disinterested love of good printing, as well as a desire to get the books in which they were interested into print. It is true that the rich scholars of Italy and France were used to a high standard of excellence in the books, manuscript or printed, which they put on their shelves, but it is to the credit of Aldus and the Estiennes and Simon Colines and Geoffroy Tory that they catered also for the needs of less wealthy scholars, not by cheapening paper or crowding more old types on a page, but by designing, or causing to be designed, new fonts, with which they could print more economically without loss of beauty. Moreover, more especially at Lyons, the new ideals of compact printing, of the small book beautiful, were applied to printing not only in Greek and Latin, but in the vernacular, and these sixteenth century models can still be imitated without archaism or ostentation, which, when fifteenth century masterpieces are followed, are often difficult to avoid.

"A penny, I trow, is enough for books," said one of Robert Copland's customers to him, somewhere about 1530, and the spirit of that remark haunted the vernacular English book trade for nearly a century and a half. Amid all the outpouring of the wonderful Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, though no printing was allowed in the provinces except at Oxford and Cambridge, there was not a sufficient demand for books in all England to provide work for more than about five and twenty master printers many of whom had only a single press, with a couple of journeymen and an apprentice. The Privy Council was always trying to keep down the number, both of printers and presses, and its action in so doing is usually represented as solely dictated by the fear of their being employed in producing seditious or schismatic pamphlets. No doubt this fear was the main cause of the Council's action. But if there had been enough lawful work for twice as many printers and presses, the number might have been doubled with no increase of risk. The risk lay solely in the fact that a man who owned and could use a press, if he could not get enough lawful work to give him a living, might be tempted to take secret work. Unless they were desperate, men would not risk hanging to earn a few shillings, or a few pounds, but there is ample evidence that in Shakespeare's day some of the small master printers really were desperate, and it was only natural that they should do bad work—as indeed they did. All over Europe printing at the beginning of the seventeenth century was bad; in England it was very bad indeed.

During the second half of the seventeenth century and the whole of the eighteenth, the wealth of England steadily increased, and with its wealth the standard of education. There was a much greater demand for books, and though printing was permitted after 1693 in the provinces without restrictions, there was clearly more work to do in London. Printing became neat, and on occasion elaborate, and throughout the eighteenth century, both in England and Scotland, there were constant experiments and efforts to improve it, to which full justice has not yet been done. Among these efforts to improve it there is no reason to include Horace Walpole's private press at Strawberry Hill, or any of the other private presses which, possibly in imitation of his example, subsequently sprang up, except perhaps that at Lee Priory. The Strawberry Hill books were handsomely printed according to the taste of the day, but they showed no originality, such as was displayed by Baskerville or even the Foulises, and they certainly started no style. The other private presses of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were purely literary in their aims, and many of the books produced at them are below the average good commercial work of the day.

In the middle of the nineteenth century the great spread of education caused a demand for very cheap books, both for amusement and instruction, which led to some lowering of standard. More dangerous still were the very gaudy ideals of decorative work which found favour during the era inaugurated by the Great Exhibition of 1851. There was an epidemic of bad taste among book buyers and publishers, and therefore printers responded to it, as they always will, whether gladly or reluctantly, respond to any popular demand which brings grist to their mill. Meanwhile much quite good work was being done by the Chiswick Press and other firms, but the influence of the amateur on the professional printing of that period is not much in evidence, either for good or for evil.

The Daniel Press, worked as an amusement by the Rev. C. H. O. Daniel, Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, for a good many years, beginning about 1874, seems to me one of the best examples of a really amateur press that can be adduced. The interest of its books is mainly literary, but it is also typographical, and though the performance is usually slight, and even thin, Dr. Daniel showed real flair in his revival of the old Fell types, his uses of italics, and the happy knack with which the work was put on the page. I think that Dr. Daniel's influence may possibly be traced, though only quite slightly, in some of the pretty books (often a little spoilt by the weakness of the ink) published by Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., in the eighties, most of them printed by Messrs. Ballantyne. If this is true, it is so much more to Dr. Daniel's credit.

We come now to the movement of which William Morris was the leader, which placed to the credit of English typography some of the finest books the world has ever seen. Morris must be classed as an amateur, and his press as a private press, because he printed to please himself, and no offer of money, however great, would have induced him to print anything he really disliked. We must not, however, allow the private income which enabled Morris to carry out his ideas without worrying over cash-returns, or the fact that he sold most of his books by means of circulars from a private house instead of over a counter, or any other consideration, to blind us to the fact that he was one of the world's greatest craftsmen, and certainly, if we consider his versatility, his sureness of touch and his imagination, the finest that the British Isles have ever produced. If he had had the largest printing house in London, and had printed the Kelmscott books in a special department of it to advertise the rest, it could not have made him more of a craftsman than he was. He stands in a very real sense alone by virtue of his unique and splendid personality.

Admiration for Morris led to the setting up of several private or amateur presses, which did excellent work in his spirit: notably the Doves Press, conducted at first by Mr. Cobden-Sanderson, an ex-barrister, who had produced some real masterpieces as a bookbinder, and Mr. Emery Walker, the photo-engraver, who had ever been ready to help anyone trying to promote good printing; afterwards by Mr. Cobden-Sanderson alone. There was also the Ashendene Press of Mr. St. John Hornby, one of the partners in Messrs. W. H. Smith & Son, who, I fancy, has done rather more of the work with his own hands than most other private printers. Robert Proctor's Greek type, again, was brought into existence by love of Morris, but Proctor, like Messrs. Ricketts and Shannon, who were responsible for the Vale Press books, had no press of his own.

The beauty of all these books reinforced the influence of the Kelmscott Press ones, by proving that what Morris had done on his own lines could be done by lesser men with the variations suggested by their individual tastes. They reinforced also the proof which Morris had given, that so long as it is regarded as a hobby (or in a commercial house as an advertisement) the production of really fine specimens of printing is not an impossibly expensive one. Morris made no profit from the Kelmscott books as a publisher; could allot himself no payment for all the magnificent decorative work which he put into them with his own hands. He got nothing from his venture save the joy of achievement and pleasure of giving copies to his friends. But he proved the existence of a public willing to pay for the cost of print and paper, even when both print and paper were the best which money could buy; and I believe that most venturers in the same field have been supported to about the same extent. From our present point of view, this is one of the most important results which Morris achieved. The direct influence of his work on men like Mr. Updike and Mr. Bruce Rogers can only be reckoned very slight. But if the Kelmscott books had not made the success they did, neither Mr. Updike nor Mr. Bruce Rogers would have been given his chance, and to make it possible for younger men to get their chance is one of the finest things a master craftsman can do.

Private presses have multiplied greatly in the last thirty years, and some of them have done fine work. But the influence which they are exercising on the commercial printing of the present day is not in any way comparable to that which the Kelmscott and Doves books exercised a generation ago. There is no virtue in a book being printed in a small edition or in a private house, and no virtue in producing endless specimens of printing rather than books. Mr. Meynell and the Nonesuch Press (whose achievements I should admire much more joyously if it had not been called a "press") have shown what a diversity of interesting work can be obtained from commercial printers by a man who has good taste and knows how to get what he wants. When fine work can be obtained in this way private presses seem of little use save as an amusement to their owners. But no one is as yet making full use of the revolution (a much greater revolution than that inaugurated by the Aldine italics) which the "Monotype" machine has effected in modern printing just at the moment when (owing to the economic conditions, compositors having at last secured a fair wage) it was most needed. Thanks to the wonderful facility with which small types can now be cut and the greater quickness of machine-setting there is now only one obstacle to a new triumph of the Small Book Beautiful; and that is the obsession of the paymaster, the Customer, that it is unreasonable to expect him to pay anything approaching the same price for compact books in small clear type with no needless expanse of blank paper around the type page, as for the same number of words printed in larger type and with much more blank paper. The obsession is fostered by the fact that the reprints of popular books which have passed out of copyright and which often are produced in very pretty forms, are sold in large quantities at small prices, because no author has to make a livelihood out of them. But if a book does not appeal to a large public and yet has to earn money for its author it cannot be sold at a low price, and it is childish for the customer to insist that this fact should be concealed from him by books being made needlessly large in order that he may persuade himself that he is still getting plenty for his money. Publishers and Printers and Authors should unite to educate their paymaster the Customer on this point, and it is much to their interest to do so, for the book space which is now occupied by a couple of hundred volumes might easily hold two or three times as many if all books were printed with pleasant compactness. If an Amateur would arise who would help to train Customers to pay high prices for beautiful compact books he would be doing good service. At present most of the finely printed books are needlessly and inconveniently large.

FOOTNOTES:

[33] The story of Bible-printing in England runs on very much the same lines. As soon as it was decided that English Bibles were to be placed in all churches, the printers were chosen, the price was fixed and every Parish was ordered to supply itself with a copy. From that day to this, with only a very partial exception for a few years under Queen Elizabeth, the printing of the plain text of the Bible has been a monopoly in England. Since the seventeenth century it has been kept absolutely in the hands of the King's Printers and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. From about 1770 onwards various provincial printers tried to circumvent this monopoly by printing Bibles with only a nominal amount of commentary, but hardly any of them found it worth while to issue a second edition. The monopolists knew that to maintain their rights in the nineteenth century, which made unrestricted competition into a fetish, they must give good value to buyers, ensure good workmanship, and give their workmen no ground for complaint. They have fulfilled all three conditions, and as a result we still have a Bible Trust in England, which is a Trust in the true meaning of the word, because it is worked in the interest of everyone concerned.

FRANCIS MEYNELL

SOME COLLECTORS READ

This essay appeared originally in The Colophon, Part IV, 1930. It was revised and retitled The Personal Element for inclusion in The Nonesuch Century, 1936, from which it is here reprinted.

It wouldn't be easy to imagine an idea, a policy and a business more "personal" than our Nonesuch has been. This is my excuse for the personal (worse, the first-personal) character of these ensuing notes.

Nonesuch was started by three of us in the close quarters of a basement room (two of the three became husband and wife); at our busiest and most successful we have never had an office staff of more than three, usually our friends as well as our associates; we later lived above and in our office; we have been responsible ourselves not only for every decision of policy of what to publish and not to publish but also for every piece of printing, of make-up, of advertising; for jackets, catalogues, specimen pages and a vast deal of miscellaneous editing. And, more than anything else, it is our own taste which has determined our choice of books and choice of styles. In short everything (except typing and account-adding in later days) has been done by Vera Meynell or David Garnett or me.

When I set myself to the making of these notes I thought I should only have to remember, not to reconstruct. I had by heart all that was worth knowing about the beginnings of the Nonesuch in itself. But for its remoter beginnings in myself I found that I had in fact to go back to my childhood.

What induced this revision of my opinion was a phrase (quoted in my brother Everard's "Life" of Francis Thompson) from a letter of my mother's. "Please return" she had written to Thompson, "the revise proofs sixteen pages at a time."

First of all (said I to myself) I am the son of a mother who was not only a poet but who knew also that page proofs have to be dealt with in units of sixteen. Yes, and that was only a trifle of the family's knowledge. I have often seen my mother unflinchingly cut a treasurable phrase in one of her essays so that it should end to the line or paragraph of the printer's prescription; and correct a proof so that a word deleted here would be promptly balanced by an added word there to save the over-running of the corrected lines. Where did she learn this tenderness towards my craft? But from my father, of course.

And then I realised that, if he likes it or not, the Nonesuch Press is really my father's grand-son. In establishing it I was doing no more than reverting to type.

There was of course the literary background, the great names and exciting personalities of the writers who were my parents' friends. There was George Meredith whose limping descent of the staircase I can just, and whose yearly tip of a pound at Christmas I can very easily, remember. There was the silver teapot which I never carried to be replenished without remembering my father's solemn sanctification of it: "Robert Browning has taken his tea from this." There was W. B. Yeats standing owl-like at the door blinking to discover my mother through the smoke emitted from the Egyptian cigarettes which I had lately been sent at top speed to buy, my father sometimes going twice through his pockets before he assembled the necessary tenpence halfpenny. (Tenpence halfpenny was also the price of a box of soldiers, and once I thought of buying soldiers instead of cigarettes and running away from home.) There was Francis Thompson, "The Poet" as we children always called him, fragile, mannered, and complaining of the weather or of the quality of our food. Much later I remember Jack Squire discussing the plans for the first London Mercury; and Hilaire Belloc brought by Wilfrid Blunt because of my father's "discovery" of his first writing in the Morning Post. I don't remember Stevenson or Patmore; but framed holographs of In the Highlands and The Toys were set between the gold Japanese embroideries which surrounded the sitting room. This literary "atmosphere" was more continuously and intensively itself than anything I know today—even in psycho-analytic or Communist circles. "Does he write? Then do bring him." "Is he a Thompsonian? Of course he must come."

Every Sunday afternoon and evening my parents were "at home." There was endless poetry-reading, endless "literary talk" by my mother's devoted admirers. No, not endless. There were two signals for their departure. The first gong, so to speak, was the arrival of the hot blackcurrant jam drink. The second was my father unbuttoning, almost unostentatiously, the top button of his boots.

But all this was literature, not letters, and letters was after all the chief occupation of the house. A literary hot-house should have produced in me, very nearly did produce, an over-sensitive literary plant. And sure enough I wrote poetry, with three of my sisters and one of my brothers. (George Moore in one of the "Hail and Farewell" volumes has a disconcerting fancy of the young Meynells assembling for their verse-writing hour once a week.) But letters made me into a printer.

In a play about Francis Thompson which was lately produced my father had necessarily to be represented. He objected to his portrayal under his own name, and he was therefore made to appear as John Oldcastle, his writing-name before I was born. In one scene he was shown sitting in the office of the paper which he edited, Merry England. He struck the bell twice for his sub-editor, once for his office boy, three times for his secretary. There was indeed such a magazine. But there was never an office, never a secretary, never a sub-editor, never an office boy. The whole work was done by my mother and father and amateur helpers on and about the library table. If I was allowed in the room on press-days the bargain was that I was to sit under the table. Mostly this was fun. I learned a lot about the leg-fidgets of writers. And "under the table" became my own kingdom, from which I could at the age of seven declaim without embarrassment Gray's "Elegy" to the Sunday night supper guests. But one memory survives which still carries horror with it—the memory of my mother suddenly going down on her knees, down to my level, and burying her face in her hands. She had just been told, in the midst of proof-correcting, of the death of Coventry Patmore.

"The Poet" was one of the helpers—a feared helper. He would wish to engage all the rest in argument as to the desirability of this or that paragraph. On one occasion, J. L. Garvin, who could disturb by his brilliant relevance almost as much as Thompson by his dull irrelevance, made an unexpected call. Proofs were already overdue. By a masterly manoeuvre "the poet" was sent to entertain him. Garvin, the liveliest talker of our day, was overwhelmed by Thompson's discussion of the relative merits of Lyons and A.B.C. tea shops. He sat mumchance an afternoon through. Thompson reported: "Never have I known Garvin so brilliant."

Merry England was a monthly, but its crises were not less acute for that. You can put off so easily until too late what has to be done only once a month. But The Weekly Register, which was also my father's property, and which was written almost wholly by himself and my mother, was a weekly. The correction of proofs was a diurnal occupation with Thursdays as the grand climax. It was printed by the Westminster Press; and here, too, my father was the begetter of my trade. For he was part-owner of the Westminster Press and helped to establish with it a style of typography and a care for detail in printing which were far ahead of the run of commercial presses.

When he was over fifty my father added the last segment to the circle. Magazine proprietor, editor, writer, printer, he now became book publisher, as managing director of Burn & Oates. He transferred from John Lane Francis Thompson's books and my mother's, and he gave me my first job. He gave me also my first lesson in detail. The Collected Works of Francis Thompson were issued by Burns & Oates a few months after I had joined the firm, and I was allowed to have a hand in designing the edition. When it was printed my father discovered that several commas had broken away from the ends of lines and that a number of the kerns or top loops of the letter "f" had been broken. Day after day piles of the imperfect volumes were massed in his flat, which was immediately above the office. We had a sort of fire-bucket drill. One of my sisters would find the page, my father would dab in the comma, I would do the blotting and another sister would restack the books. Some scores of thousands of pen corrections were thus made. I don't think my father would have trusted any one of us to do the actual pen work. He leant back, he quizzed, he admired after every stroke.

The title page of Bunyan's classic, composed in Caslon and Deutsche Zeitschrift, printed by the Kynoch Press, edition, 1600 copies.

In 1913, pursuing a common typographical errand, I chanced to meet Stanley Morison, who had just emerged from a bank and was anxious to concern himself with book-production, and he joined forces with me at Burns & Oates. A year later as a personal venture I purchased a hand press, which I kept in my dining room; and my next step was to persuade the delegates of the Oxford University Press to let me use some of their seventeenth century Fell types. They were very obliging, and they let me have what I wanted, charged me for it as if it were sold, but very properly kept the legal title to it, so that if I were to misuse this cherished type they could at any time call upon me to surrender it. I still have these Fell types in my possession. "The Romney Street Press," since I lived in that street, was my new "style," and I issued a prospectus, which I regard now with mixed feelings of shame and admiration at my audacity; for if ever there was a gold-brick prospectus this was one! Here it is:

"The Romney Street Press at 67 Romney Street, Westminster, has been set up for the better and unaffected production of Books, & Pamphlets, & single sheets of poetry. The type of the Press (used for this prospectus) is the finest of the series imported from Holland in about 1660 by Bishop Fell for the Oxford University Press, by whose courtesy it is now used. The editions of the Romney Street Press will be limited to a maximum of fifty copies. The preliminary costs of equipment amount to £40, & Francis Meynell, the Director of the Press, invites subscriptions to cover this amount. Subscribers will have first call upon the publications of the Press at cost price, upon the amount of their subscription. The first publications will be Seven Poems by Alice Meynell, written since the issue of the Collected Poems. There will follow Mary Cary, the meditations, occasional poems and spiritual diary of the wife of a Cromwellian captain, now first published, from her MS. note-book; & Love in Dian's Lap, by Francis Thompson. But the process of production will be slow. Suggestions for other books, particularly of 17th century reference, will be welcome. APRIL 1915."

I may say at once that the only two books which I issued (Ten Poems by Alice Meynell, and The Diary of Mary Cary) were, with a good deal of difficulty, disposed of—yes, the whole of the fifty copies; but there were no general subscriptions to the Press, not one, and the cost of equipment, forty pounds, bore heavily upon me. Perhaps because of this, perhaps because my dining room was my workshop, and printer's ink was apt to get into the soup, I discontinued the venture—which in any case (since I had no technical assistance and very little competence myself) was decidedly irksome.

Meantime decisive things had happened to me. I had met George Lansbury, inspiration of my politics, and I had met Bruce Rogers, inspiration of all eager typographers. For the next five years I worked in close association with George Lansbury. (I suppose that he has lately become one of the most generally loved men in England. To anyone who has known him in times of deep stress as intimately as I have that cannot be surprising. There is no qualification in my admiration and affection.[34]) In him I found a most ready support for my "propaganda" view of good printing and good craftsmanship of any kind. Lansbury secured the financial support which made it possible for me to start the Pelican Press. I think the Pelican was a pioneer in the policy of having very few types but all of them of good design. We set advertisements for commerce, which was in those days something of an innovation; and we printed political pamphlets in the Minority Labour interest. These pamphlets are odd to look at now. The slogan of "fitness for purpose" had not yet informed us. A report of the great meetings which we held at the Albert Hall after the first Russian revolution was designed with the mannered elegance which would have suited better an essay by Walter Pater. And I remember myself writing a double-page political manifesto for the Weekly Herald, calling upon the proletariat to rise and end the war, which was set in Cloister Old Face with a seventeenth century flower border and sixteenth century initials.... I set up with elegance what must be the rarest of Siegfried Sassoon first editions. I myself have no copy. Bertrand Russell brought him to see me when Sassoon had decided to refuse to go back to the war, and I made into a leaflet his letter of explanation to his Commanding Officer. I am now astonished at what we published without prosecution. Now it would be "seditious propaganda." I can only put it down to the innocent elegance of typography!

Soon after the war I began making proposals from the Pelican Press to various publishers. Would they allow me to print for them this that and the other book in a "really nice" edition? I pointed out that if they were in fact wrecked upon the conventional desert island and wished to take with them the conventional choice of two books, Shakespeare and the Bible, they would not find a current edition of either fit for a tasteful shipwreck. But my arguments were fruitless—except of a plan for myself. Why shouldn't I do what I wanted them to do? Why wait on them? So I began to hanker after the as yet unnamed, unmanned and unfinanced Nonesuch Press. The next step was to bind David Garnett and Vera Mendel to the adventure.

David Garnett's family history, like my own, is full of literature. He is the son of two writers and the grandson of a third. He too, after a brief excursion into the Natural Sciences, reverted to type, opened a book-shop (with Francis Birrell), wrote his first novel and, in the same year, lent both the cellar of his book-shop and the assistance of his critical and book-learned mind to our new venture. He too "liked" books. He could, I mean, enjoy the feel of a book, its weight, shape, edges, the synthesis of sensitive things which is represented by that most insensitive word "format."

Vera Mendel was the useful necessary incubator for our schemes. She provided our small capital and she did the routine work. She was also our fearless critic-in-chief. The things she stopped us doing! She, too, developed in me the sense which David Garnett already shared with her—the sense of responsibility about texts. And she put sobriety whenever she could into my lush "blurbs." Her flexibility of mind made our work, too, flexible. She translated Toller's first play, which was among our earliest books; and shared with me the editing of The Week-End Book. For the first eighteen months, while I was working full time at the Pelican Press and David Garnett at his book-shop, and before we felt justified in employing as much as an office girl, she did everything, from editing to stamp-licking, that I could not steal time to do.

This about ourselves. Whence our corporate name? We began by looking not for a name, but for a device; and we found in a tapestry surviving from Nonesuch Palace the elements which Stephen Gooden made into our first "mark." In adapting the device, we took also the name; and I silenced an early objection that it was too boastful by pointing out that Nonesuch means "nonpareil" and so had an esoteric meaning. For nonpareil is the name of a very small and very humble size of type. Nonesuch was chosen, then, in a spirit of mixed hope and humility. Ralph Hodgson, the poet, who was interested in my enterprise, was most anxious that I should call it the Pound Press. (He had lately seen and admired my father's seventeenth-century farmhouse, which has in front of it a delightful yard or "pound.") Every book, he urged, warming to his subject, should weigh a pound and cost a pound! After some intensive correspondence his enthusiasm was routed, and the Nonesuch Press came into being.

Page from Montaigne's Essays, composed in Poliphilus and Koch Antiqua, printed by R. & R. Clark. Published 1931; edition, 1375 sets of two volumes.

So there we were, in 1923, in our cellar under Birrell & Garnett's book-shop, book-enthusiasts, amateurs in the literal, though not, I hope, the derogatory sense of the word, tackling the donkey work of book production and the mule work of book distribution.

For nearly two years we continued in the half light of our limited premises, producing illuminating works in limited editions, and varying the daily task with such occasional diversions as "invoice bees"—parties to which our friends were bidden in order to help us between drinks with the task of writing our invoices, "statements," et caetera.

It is scarcely worth recording the vicissitudes of those underground activities. Only when we tried to stop an ever-rising tide of Congreves—which, as with breaking back I eagerly unloaded the volumes from the lorries, narrowly escaping immuring V.M. in that unhistoric cellar for good—only then did we wonder whether, for purposes of self-preservation, the Press might not have to expand. (Indeed, one wall did bulge alarmingly.) Happily, part of the edition of Congreve got lost in Devonshire.... The lorries which were carrying the bound books from the printers at Plymouth broke down before we did.

I myself travelled the first books, being received with varying degrees of courtesy by the book-sellers. Of those who were civil some were encouraging, some politely discouraging. When, very soon, we were obliged to "ration" orders, these were rewarded and persuaded, and the discourteous received no more than their small deserts.

We meant to have fun with our business and fun we have had. Even when it had outgrown its puppyhood we continued to button-hole our customers and sell them not only our goods but our tastes and our views. Let me anticipate for a moment and quote a sample from the opening paragraph of our 1929 catalogue.

"In these days of literary censorship exercised by Sir Archibald Bodkin (of Savidge case fame), Sir William Joynson-Hicks and a Detective-Inspector of Scotland Yard, no publisher can be positive in his announcement that he will issue such and such a book. Chaucer? Fie, his language is coarse. Plato? The less said about Socrates and his young friends, if you please, the better. Shakespeare? He will perhaps pass unchallenged, for Lamb's Tales doubtless exhausted the censors' interest in this prurient author. Farquhar, Don Quixote even—these too may corrupt the corrupt, which is the current legal test of obscenity. With a propitiatory bow to Sir Archibald and to the potent and anonymous Detective-Inspector (the unlamented Home Secretary gets no more than a distant nod), we therefore give to this list of announcements the precautionary title, 'Bodkin Permitting.'"

But this jape, and others, were part of a serious and deliberate policy. From the beginning we had a plan and hoped to have a public. In the words of our first (1923) catalogue, we intended to make books "for those among collectors who also use books for reading." We intended to choose our books to suit our tastes, not the imputed taste of a hypothetical public.

Not that we felt ego-centric and exclusive about it, like the Californian millionaire who, I am told, caused a Shakespeare to be printed to suit his own taste and his own library—an edition of one copy. We have made now over a hundred editions to suit our own personal requirements—the author we wanted, the text we wanted, the format we wanted, the decorations we wanted. And if there had been no other profit from the Press, this shelf of my library would have seemed in itself a sufficient recompense for my share of the work. But fortunately, many other people also wanted these books. For our taste proved to be a normal contemporary taste. We did not create the vogue for Donne, for instance—we were ourselves part of that general tendency which has in these days found him afresh.

My previous experience in printing had shown me quite clearly that, in order to avoid monotony and to produce desirable editions at a reasonable cost, one must intelligently exploit the best mechanical equipment and the highest technical skill available. Today there is more fine typographical material to be had than even the largest printing house in the country could possess; and the various commercial presses have developed technical skill and variety along various lines. There was therefore no good reason, we thought, for a new "private press" in the old style, arrogantly self-contained, and with but one type and obsolete "hand" machinery.

Our stock-in-trade has been the theory that mechanical means could be made to serve fine ends; that the machine in printing was a controllable tool. Therefore we set out to be mobilisers of other people's resources; to be designers, specifiers, rather than manufacturers; architects of books rather than builders.

The propriety of our use of the word "Press" was called in question by Arnold Bennett and others. Pedantically it may be wrong; by the spirit it is nearly right. There is no exact word for our function, which was new. Nor for my own part in that function. When I have wanted to "sign" a book, at first I wrote "Typography by." But typography is only a quarter of my battle, and that phrase puts undue emphasis on one department, one only, of a job the essence of which is that it is manifold. A number of books I signed F. M. Finx. But "finxit" means "fashioned," and so "made," rather than "designed." I also used the phrase "under the care of," but this is vague and inaccurate, suggesting merely the oversight of someone else's designs. Perhaps "This book was planned by" is the least inaccurate formula, though this again leaves out the whole business of overseeing. Overseeing is no purely typographical matter. It means the planning and coordinating of the whole book—text, editor, and artist, as well as paper-maker, printer and binder. In fact, it involves an editorial as well as a typographical attitude.

Opening page from Voltaire's Princess of Babylon with line drawing by Thomas Lowinsky. Composed in Caslon, printed by the Westminister Press. Published 1928; edition, 1500 copies.

Foulk Grevill writing of the posthumous edition of Sidney's Arcadia said "This requyres the care of his friends, not to amend (for I think that falls within the reach of no man living) but only to see to the paper, and other common errors of mercenary printing." My own interest and ambition in founding the Nonesuch was to see to the paper and other common errors of mercenary printing; but D. G. and V. M. aspired to tackle the question of amendments as well. From our fourth book onwards that policy has governed all our major publications. When, as sometimes happens, a text needs no more editing: when it is adequately and accurately "established," there is still the quasi-editorial function of the illustrator. He may, he should, become in his designs more than a decorator; he should, I believe, become a significant commentator. "Kauffer on Burton" is, for example, how I would describe the drawings for our edition of The Anatomy.

Our books were published in "limited editions" because we had to rope in the collector as well as the reader and student. We have found that it was necessary to impose another sort of limit on our output—a limit to the number of titles we could conveniently and properly publish in a given time. We came to the conclusion that eight books a year was about as much as we could manage if every detail was to be our personal concern and if all were to be freshly designed. The making of our books in a great variety of styles was an early principle, firmly held to. I did not want people to be able to say at the first sight of our books, "Oh yes, that must be a Nonesuch book." I wanted them to say, "That's not a bad looking book," and then to find that it was ours. My calculation—it was a calculation, not a programme—proved surprisingly right. Our first hundred books have taken us twelve years to make.

Our friends have been our editors; and our editors have been our friends. We have had the most valuable suggestions for books, and the most valuable criticism of details of production even, from them. I have seldom "passed" a binding, for example, without asking Geoffrey Keynes's opinion of it. His well-wishing has been of extraordinary value to us, apart from the many editions which he has himself admirably edited for the Nonesuch. It was he who introduced us to those other excellent editors of our texts, John Hayward and John Sparrow—the former a keen critic and helpful adviser. E. McKnight Kauffer, Stephen Gooden and T. L. Poulton have also done for us much more than illustrate a number of our books.

E. McKnight Kauffer (who drew us from the life for the last of his illustrations to The Anatomy of Melancholy) at one time had office-room with us. The hours I spent in discussing aesthetics with him were stimulating—over-stimulating, we found, when there was work to do. So, in the end, we nailed up a list of "red-herring words" ("functional," "the Artist" and so forth) which were not to be used during office hours on pain of a fine of sixpence for each use. But there was no sixpenny escape from George Moore. While Ulick and Soracha was at the printers, he came almost daily, hung up his square bowler hat and settled down to read aloud to us the revisions he had made in his last batch of proofs. Each time it was an entirely new text. The first version was almost illiterate. The second grammatical but undistinguished. The third a transfiguration. It was fascinating to see the process of his composition at close quarters: and our feelings were undisturbed by anxieties about the printer's bill, for he had proposed at the outset that he should pay for his own corrections. They exceeded the original cost of the setting. In any event, who am I to be critical? For one book I had 37 different varieties of title-page set up. My friend William Maxwell, who printed this book, said that he did not mind "losing" (printers are like farmers) on the text of a Nonesuch book because he always made up his loss on the title-page....

In 1925 we moved from our cellar to Great James Street and we decided (with some misgivings) to incorporate the firm. It seemed better to our auditors although we had suspicions that our subscribers might be discouraged from collecting when they saw first the formula "Ltd." on our letter-paper. We did them an injustice. The partners became directors and shareholders. Vera Meynell bought a little book entitled "The Secretary and His Directors" and, impressed by the legal penalties that hedge about these offices, occasionally wound up one of our long triangular discussions by taking down the minutes book and saying: "Well, I suppose that this might as well have been a board meeting." Once a year, for the benefit of Somerset House we (the directors) presented to ourselves (the shareholders) with all due formalities, a report on the year's accounts and progress. Otherwise it made no difference.

The Antigone Greek type used in Homer's Iliad, decorated by Rudolph Koch. Printed by Joh. Enschedé en Zonen. Published 1931; edition, 1450 copies.

Even the "mundial bad-time" (to quote the phrase of an Indian friend) of 1930 did not seem to affect us or our customers much. But the second year of the great depression brought onto the market many hoarded copies of our books from the pickle-shelves of profiteers and deflated some of their more astronomical prices. Our survival-value (as luxury trades go) is perhaps due to the fact that even in boom-time we tried to be honest traders, not using our success with collectors to put prices as high as the traffic would bear, but giving a constant ratio of good value in the sheer materials of book-making, so that our paper, printing, binding were as good as any to be had at the price.

No book-producing of our kind can subsist without sales in America. It was our good fortune to ally ourselves in 1927 with Random House of New York. No collaboration could be more satisfactory from a technical or a personal point of view. It survived the get-rich-quick temptations of 1929; it has survived the difficulties of the depression. New blood and money entered the Press two years ago when Cecil Harmsworth, Desmond Harmsworth and Eric Harmsworth joined our board. But they belong to our Second Century, not to our first.

We have avoided antagonisms, even avoided competition. My friend Osbert Sitwell suggested that we should publish a satire on Noel Coward; Coward that we should publish his satire on the Sitwells. To both we said "no." How pleasant it would have been to issue them together in a single book! When I found that Peter Davies and the Nonesuch were both planning to reissue Cobbett's Rural Rides, we met and tossed for it. He won; and our editorial work was made over to him.

Of all Nonesuch books that by which I should best like the venture to be judged is our Shakespeare, edited by Herbert Farjeon. It brought us, among other things, a characteristic contact with T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence had written a letter of fervent praise of the Shakespeare to David Garnett; and I sought permission to use it. David Garnett was himself our ambassador. Lawrence appealed to the group of friends with whom he happened to be. "I don't want my letter to be reprinted. I hate the advertising of my name and opinions," he protested. To his obvious chagrin (for Lawrence had a passion for publicity as great as his passion against it) his friends supported his view. "After all," said they "you are not a Shakespeare expert." That decided Lawrence. "I think it is my duty to give permission," he said. This was his letter:

"We turn over to the Nonesuch Shakespeare. There you have created a most marvellous pleasure. I have handled it ever so many times, and read THE TEMPEST right through. It satisfies. It is final, like the Kelmscot Chaucer or the Ashendene Virgil. And it is a book which charms one to read slowly, an art which is almost gone from us in these times. Every word which Shakespeare uses stands out glowing. A really great edition. The tact and grace of your editor have been surpassing. I think I like the size and shape and binding almost as much as the text. The paper, too, is just right. Altogether a triumph. One of the best things is that it can be done again. Nobody will ever dare to produce the old type of edition now, while your text stands there to reproach them. It means a permanent improvement in Shakespeares."

"There they are, my fifty men and women." They must speak for themselves, and I have almost silenced them with my chatter. For their successors I can say only this: that it remains the ambition of the Press to make a worthy edition, textually and typographically, of every major English writer who has not already been appropriately served. It will make these books for money, and has no shame in that. We are not "Gentlemen Farmers" but workers at our trade. But we are enthusiasts also, even in our middle years; and still propagandists. Every well-designed book or advertisement or prospectus is the begetter of others; and good printing is one of the graces of life even where life is ungracious.

Title page for small book edited by Francis Meynell, composed in Janson and "printed on the premises" at the Press on Van Gelder mould-made paper. Edition, 1250 copies.

In a letter from Vienna in 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writes of Prince Eugene's library that it is "though not very ample, well chosen; but as the Prince would admit into it no editions but what are beautiful and pleasing to the eye and there are nevertheless numbers of excellent books that are but indifferently printed, this finikin and foppish taste makes many disagreeable chasms in this collection!"

I should like to make Prince Eugene patron saint of the Nonesuch. And dear Lady Mary as well; for it remains the object of the Nonesuch Press to meet tastes finikin and foppish like his, studious like hers.

COMPOSED IN POLIPHILUS AND BLADO TYPES

FOOTNOTES:

[34] When we published the Compendious William Morris I sent copies to G. L., to Ramsay MacDonald and to Mr. Baldwin—the last a stranger to me. Their replies make almost a résumé of their political characters. G. L. saw in the social essays a conscience-pricking reproach about things left long undone. J. R. M. saw in them a cause for self-congratulation. Mr. Baldwin did not answer for nearly two years: the book had been mislaid. But when he did answer he covered two pages with his close hand-writing to apologise and explain. The Perfect Gentleman!

CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD

Printing for Love

From Cockalorum: A Bibliography of the Golden Cockerel Press, June 1943-December 1948. (An address to the Art Society, University of the South West of England in Exeter, June, 1947.) Copyright 1950 by the Golden Cockerel Press. Reprinted by permission of author and publisher.

I have called this talk "Printing for Love." I have not come to preach a gospel to you, but, as I proceed to discuss printing and publishing and book-illustration, it will be apparent to you that one of the tenets of my religion is that we workers should do our job, whether it be farming, or gardening, book-keeping or building, hewing coal or engineering, with a will. In Ecclesiastes the Preacher advises us: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." (Ch. 9, v. 10.) You may say that my job is a nice job; that it is all very well for me to talk. I can assure you that book-manufacture is a most intricate process. Things tend to go wrong at every stage of production. Of worries we printers have no end.

I often feel like an Irish farmer driving his pig to market. In one hand he holds a stick to prod the pig. In the other a string tied to the pig's leg. The pig goes to the right and then to the left and the countryman wonders will he ever get that pig to the market. Many of my books are like that pig. They drive me to despair. And yet I love my printing like a mountaineer loves his mountains, which he climbs arduously with sweat and aching limbs. He has his reward when he reaches the summit and enjoys a fine view, much as I enjoy the appearance of a book which I have made with infinite pains. For both of us there is the joy of achievement—of something attempted, something done.

"Oh, but," you may expostulate, "supposing you were a sewer-man, could you bring love into your work?" I am sure I would. In fact this case in point was quoted recently on the wireless. If I remember rightly, a speaker had referred with commiseration to the lot of the sewer-man working underground among the rats in the muck and stench of drains. He was called to task by a most insulted sewer-man, who explained that his was a good job—as good as any other. All the artists and the craftsmen who co-operate with me—the paper-makers, the cloth-makers, the tanners, the brass-cutters, the illustrators, the compositors, the pressmen, the binders—aye, and the authors too, who write and rewrite their text until it seems to me just right for the Golden Cockerel—all of them have their worries and their toil, but their work for me is done with love.

This is a question you might ask yourselves: can a beautiful thing be made cynically? The dice is loaded against the unwanted child of a loveless marriage. You cannot divorce your work from your life. The two are parts of a whole. My religion is that love should be the basis of all one's living and all one's work. In so far as my books have been successful as works of art, it is because they have been made with love.

Only with great self-restraint can I refrain from reading you again that beautiful thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians on Faith, Hope and Love—you remember "Love suffereth long and is kind, love envieth not, love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up." Please read it now and then. It is so important.

Perhaps, when you heard my talk was to be called "Printing for Love," you thought, "Oh, he means printing without financial reward." Believe me, love, too, hath its reward. Make what you have to make, and do what you have to do, the way I advocate, and you will have your reward. You must have faith in this. We have got to fight our battles against obstructions, but, if we fight well, and do what we are intended to do, everything is made possible for us: the most miraculous things happen in their due time.

At the Golden Cockerel I never choose a book because I think it a good seller. Publishing friends are astonished when I admit that quite recently I refused books offered to me by Evelyn Waugh—one of the best selling novelists of today—and Sir Osbert Sitwell. Of course I do not disapprove of the authors. I admire them greatly. But in each case the manuscript submitted was not one I wanted for the Cockerel.

I choose those books which I believe are right for this gay, mirthful, versatile bird. At times he likes to play, at times to be serious. He is interested in genuine old tales of adventure written by explorers and missionaries, who may have travelled in birch-bark canoes or quaint unwieldy ships. He is interested in old peoples and their poetry. At present he is printing a translation of the epic of Gilgamesh preserved on stone tablets. It is at least six thousand years old and refers to a flood—like Noah's Flood—which was recent history to people then. They were either more or less civilized then than we are now, according to your view of what constitutes civilization. They appear to have had more to eat than we have now; they spent more time in making life beautiful, and in thoughtful enquiry into spiritual things, such as survival after death. They had libraries of books, not printed like Golden Cockerels, but inscribed on series of stone tablets. There were several "copies" of the epic of Gilgamesh in the library at Nineveh.

To return to the Golden Cockerel, he also loves the masterpieces of English and French literature and classical literature. He is really a very human bird, kind and sometimes very amorous, never spiteful, never morbid, never cruel. I personally pretend to run this Press, but you know this chimeric cockerel really rules the roost. When I and two friends took over the Press in 1933, I had quite different ideas for it from those I had accepted a few months later. This Cockerel had his own personality and traditions. I have rather enjoyed following his gaudy plumage along the aerial avenues in which he seems to want to fly.

This has not always been easy for me. From time to time I had partners to help me. Their ideas and mine naturally did not always coincide. They gave in to me so often that just occasionally I had, in common charity, to print and publish some book favoured by one of them and which I did not myself like. Usually on such occasions the finished book was to me abortive—a baby cuckoo among my own fledglings. And they usually did not sell well. Try as you may, you cannot do quite as well for someone else's offspring.

It has always been of paramount importance that my books should sell. As a husband and a father of three children, I have had to make the Cockerel pay. Otherwise I should have had to work at something else. Obviously you cannot make a large income from the sale of, say, half a dozen books a year in small limited editions. But the Cockerel has never let me down and always made it possible for me to keep on with this work. The late St. John Hornby, who used to publish those monumental Ashendene Press books at prices in the neighbourhood of 100 gns. has said that, taken all over, he would just approximately cover his costs. No profit! He was in a financial position to ignore costs and the necessity to make his books pay. In theory that is good. In practice I think it is wholesome that the products of your labour should be commercially right. The absolute necessity for you to sell what you produce makes you take notice of the reactions of your patrons, keeps you from being too personal, too idiosyncratic, too precious, shall I say too amateurish? Here I am on difficult ground. It depends what you mean by amateurish. I think of myself as a professional, but, to the trade publishers (who would not dream of rejecting a manuscript from Evelyn Waugh), I, and others like me, are looked on as amateurs, because we do what we like.

This type of amateur, who does what he likes, scientifically, is, I believe, very important. Into this category would fall research students, and poets, and scholars, and inventors, and all sorts of people. Has a scientific study ever been made of the amateur throughout the ages and his influence on our life? If not, there is a noble thesis for a research student, and he could make of it a most interesting and I think saleable book. Perhaps one of you will do it!

Now you may be thinking, "here's this chap and they tell me he has a certain reputation as a printer. We get him down here to talk to us about printing, and off he goes gassing about love, and Noah's flood, and how to make money without trying to."

Please forgive me! You see I started as a printer and taught myself how to dress a book according to my tastes. Then I became a publisher. Let us make no mistake: the important thing is the literary content of the book. How it is dressed is only of secondary importance. It can be dressed any old how. Obviously it is better when it is suitably dressed. But the dress, that is, the printing and binding, must not be accorded too great importance—it must not vaunt itself. If you ask a book-seller who has built up a circle of people who collect "cockerels" why they like cockerels, he will answer "because they are cockerels." By this he does not, I hope, mean "because they wear cockerel dress"—or, shall I say, "plumage"?—but rather that they are, in their literary content, in their dress, and in their illustration, examples of the cockerel idea of what a book should be.

Of course it is no good the author thinking he has done everything—it is the composite whole which is so engaging. I have known some illustrators who think the author doesn't count. And authors tend to think the artist a hack who should do what he is told. Both may think that my own small contribution, as the architect of the whole structure, is unimportant. Quite the greatest joy for me in publishing is being in constant delightful intercourse with these beautiful authors and artists. Beautiful is the right word. I don't mean physically, of course, but in their natures. Compare them if you like, to the most sensitive instruments designed by man and you behold these God-made beings a hundred-fold more sensitive. Go to the races and delight in the controlled nervousness and the pent-up fire of enthusiasm in those beautiful thoroughbred horses, and yet these dreamers of dreams, these passionate romancers, these scholars, in all the controlled exuberance of their knowledge and their zeal for research, these drawers of pictures, who "see the light that never was on sea or land": the horses are as nothing beside them!

Now, who are these authors and scholars and artists? Well, some are, of course, professionals, in the sense that they live by their art, and others, a lot of them, are civil servants, or architects, or even prime ministers, who make their art a hobby. But can we end there? Is not every roadman tidying his road, every thatcher on the roof, or every good accountant neatly writing his accounts, and every worker planting his allotment of a summer's evening, an artist to a greater or less degree? He seems to me, watching him, to be working for love. And so with those of us who make seemly books.

Normally you have the publisher who chooses what books he will publish, and contracts with the author to produce and sell his work in book form. You have also the paper-maker, the ink-maker, the type-founder, the maker of printing machinery and plant. You have the printer, with his compositors who prepare the type for press, his proof-readers, his pressmen who print the corrected type on the paper, and his warehousemen, who deal out the paper, and pack the printed sheets. You have the binders and manufacturers of material and machinery used in binding. Normally a host of people have taken their part, however small, in processes which go to the making of the finished book.

In a "private press" a very great deal of the work is concentrated in the hands of its owner. In certain cases the owner himself has set the type and printed it on a hand-press. His output has thus been severely limited to the productivity of one single pair of hands. This is not practical politics today—one's turnover is too small to cover overheads. An alternative is to employ skilled help with the type-setting and presswork. This was the method employed by the Golden Cockerel up to 1933. For reasons I need not go into, this method does not now pay.

The survival of the Golden Cockerel, since I and my friends took it over in the midst of the great depression, has been due in large measure to the method of production which we adopted. By working in with the Chiswick Press, a famous old firm of trade printers, we arranged that the Cockerel should have the use of their plant and their skilled labour precisely as and when we wanted it, without the necessity for capital expenditure on plant or of providing the wages of skilled craftsmen, week in week out, whether or not fully employed. Those were terrible times, and our solution was the only one practicable. It was a great experiment, but it worked. Of all the important private presses in this country, the Cockerel alone has carried on—and right through the war. In the books of the Golden Cockerel a great tradition survives.

But the survival of the Golden Cockerel, and of the tradition which it holds dear, is not achieved solely by its method of production. On the contrary, there are other prime factors. I have said that in my view the literary content of the book is more important than its dress. We must not print for the sake of printing. Firstly then I only print what I greatly desire to publish—something that is really good. I think I have been successful in finding a lot of new literary material which a sophisticated section of the community does enjoy to read. Of course some of my book-seller friends often beg me to print the old favourites, for which there is such a great demand. Occasionally I oblige. I have a Gray's Elegy at the binders now and a Keats' Endymion in the press. But generally the Cockerel prefers to be more enterprising. Look at all the literature we unearthed and published on the subject of the Mutiny on the Bounty—book after book. And then those volumes of Shelley's letters to Hogg. We found and published the journal kept by the Pilgrim Fathers when they went to America. Then there were the four previously unpublished books by that legendary character, Lawrence of Arabia, and so on. These are typical of the sort of thing we've found and published for the first time. Not the old favorites, but, because they add to literature and knowledge, so well worth making known.

The second important feature of Cockerels is their illustration with engravings. More than any other process, engraving harmonizes with type. Engraved wood-blocks and copper-plates are very difficult to print as they should be printed, especially on a durable rag-paper. They are therefore little used in these days of mass-production. In the hands of the team of artists who work for the Golden Cockerel, engraving as an artistic medium is flowering as never before. By the enthusiasm and love which these artists bring to their work, they advance their techniques year by year, always improving on their own previous best, or the previous best of their competitors, till there sometimes seems to be no limit to the new effects they will obtain in their illustrations. It is an undying satisfaction to the Golden Cockerel to be able to encourage and advise talented engravers, and, by displaying their work to the best advantage, to build up for them the reputations they deserve. In the twenties it was Eric Gill, Robert Gibbings, Eric Ravilious, David Jones, Blair Hughes-Stanton, Agnes Miller-Parker and John Nash. In the thirties, and more recently, other engravers like Clifford Webb, John Buckland-Wright, Reynolds Stone, Gwenda Morgan, Peter Barker-Mill, and John O'Connor have come to the fore. You have seen a few examples of my own wife's work among the books I have brought along. And now we have others too, of an astonishing brilliance, like Dorothea Braby, coming on. It is impossible for me to be sufficiently grateful for the privilege of being able in my small way to nurture this flowering and progressive art.

After their literary content and their illustration, the third feature of Cockerels which has sustained the Press, when other presses have fallen out, is my policy of co-operating with the buying public—of producing books which they can afford to buy. Obviously the very rich men who can pay 100 gns. for a book are now very few and far between. I have resisted the temptation to compete with the 100 gn. books—the "museum pieces." I have resisted the temptation to spend so much on the production of my books that they are inaccessible. With the levelling of incomes there is now a considerable public, which, if it appreciates them, can buy Cockerels at the 2 guineas or 4 guineas which their production necessitates.

Those, then are the particular features of Cockerels which have maintained the Press through difficult years. That they are works of art—the conceptions of a book-architect—would not have sufficed, but, since they are expressions of the art of the book, let us consider them architecturally for a few minutes. The subject is vast: I must try to epitomise it....

COCKEREL DEVICES BY MARK SEVERIN

ARTHUR W. RUSHMORE
THE FUN AND FURY OF A PRIVATE PRESS.
Some Voyages of The Golden Hind

"It's fun, isn't it?" said my wife. "I've gotten so that I can recall whole sonnets just by reading these first lines." We were sitting in a patch of warm September sunshine under the walnut, trimmed high like a giant umbrella, over the terrace back of the press. Proof and copy of the long Contents of Edna Millay's new volume of collected sonnets lay on the table between us as we idled, savoring the first signs of Fall in the yellow leaves that the breeze scattered about the gray flagstones. The air was spicy and the ageratum and marigolds in the border matched the autumn colors of the goldenrod and wild asters by the roadside. "I love gardening, too," she said loyally. "I must pot those double begonias before the frost gets them." I lit my pipe again and we went on with the proofs. One hundred ninety-two pages set in Bruce Rogers' beautiful Centaur, corrected, tied and wrapped, lay in neat piles waiting to be taken to Camden for printing. We had worked at it off and on all summer—painstaking work, but as rewarding, in our eyes at least, as any labor we could think of—interesting copy, lots of problems to argue over, the excitement of watching the author's mind at work as proofs came back with alterations, changes that in some miraculous way always added clarity or cadence to the lines; reading and re-reading proof until the sonnets became part of us. Now it was finished, and we had added one more book to the world's store and to our little shelf of Golden Hind Press imprints. This book will be published by Harper & Brothers in an edition which would take us the rest of our lives to print by hand. The design, the whole format and all the composition is ours. The printing and binding will be done elsewhere. Thousands of people will share our pleasure (or brand us failures). We feel that books of this type offer golden opportunities for the private press. We are not selling them, we are making them our way for someone else to sell. However, most of our books are printed on an old hand press, and given to our friends. So far we still have our friends.

As a hobby, a private press may be as extravagant, or as inexpensive, as one chooses to make it. It's fun and hard work and a challenge to all the intelligence one possesses.

We started our press in 1927, named it The Golden Hind after Drake's flagship that went on adventures no more hazardous than ours. Elmer Adler called it "A Busman's Holiday" for a publisher's production man. Perhaps he was right. At that time we knew little about the problems—about as much as parents do about the first baby. We don't know much yet, but we've had a swell time and through it have made a jolly lot of friends which in itself is reward enough.

We started with an ancient hand press of unknown vintage that had been in use in the cut-room at the old Harper plant in Pearl Street since before the knowledge of any man now living. I've an idea that it may have come from England when Harpers started in 1817. Until the 1830's all their books were printed on hand presses—so close are we to the beginnings of the art of printing.

Later, in Philadelphia, we found a big Washington hand press in perfect condition that was going out as old metal. The bed was smooth though the edges showed the nicks of hard wear from the endless up-ending of the forms of some country newspaper. With decent treatment it will be just as good a hundred years from now.

We made up in enthusiasm what we lacked in knowledge. It's not always wise to know too much—it's a great damper on ambition. Shortly after we started, a chance came to do a proposed definitive edition of a well-known poet's works. It was to be in seven folio volumes on handmade paper and no effort was to be spared to make it right. Six hundred pounds of 18 point Lutetia and weight fonts of the smaller sizes were ordered cast at the Enschedé Foundry in Haarlem, Holland, for the job. The type duly came, pages were set, and sample forms printed and bound—and then the project was withdrawn! In the light of accumulated experience I still break out in a cold sweat at the thought of our colossal nerve to have taken on such a task. Anyhow we had the type, and have used it many times. With it we have set the limited editions of each new book of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poems as they have come along, since 1928.

The status of a private press is difficult to define. As far as we are concerned it is to make as well as we can only those books that we want to do and to turn down all else; to have no "help," no payroll, keep no books; to care not a hoot about a balance sheet which has no column for satisfaction; and to take all the time we want to do the job the way we want it. From the standpoint of factory speed we are nothing to write home about—but we are not a factory and have no ambitions in that direction. Ours is a private press and we work as we please: that is where the fun comes in. We can work hard if need arises; then hours have no meaning, and we work till we get exhausted, fed up, and solemnly vow that we'll never do another book. But we have been at it nearly fifteen years and we still think, even though composition is exacting work, that such congenial labor is the best fun in the world. Sometimes we have furious arguments over punctuation, as though life depended on it. It is surprising how much warmth can be generated over the position of a comma. When we set Shakespeare's Sonnets we had at least six different sources to work from, including a facsimile of the first edition. A single punctuation mark will completely change the meaning of a sonnet, so condensed is the wording to fit the mould. No two sources agreed throughout—who were we to put in Shakespeare's points for him—so the smoke got pretty thick sometimes, and the result was still another reading of the sonnets embodying those details we preferred from each: that's the fury of it.

The dream of every private press is to own its own private face. We had our chance but didn't know what to use for money so we let it go. One of the best presses in the United States now owns that type—alas! We have many, too many, faces and borders and florets collected from Europe when the world was sane, yet every new volume seems to need something we do not have. Fred Goudy cast for us at his shop at Marlboro two sizes of Mediaeval. We did Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese in it. That type is precious now since the matrices were lost in the fire that destroyed all his equipment at Deepdene. Long before the Monotype cut the Deepdene face, Fred cast it for us. We used it for Dr. North's Hymns. Then along came a book my wife wanted to do. Two hundred and eighty-eight pages of 14 pt. A.T.F. Garamond all standing in galleys made a lot of type for us to store. We used it again for Frederic Prokosch's The Assassins and later for The Carnival. Gradually the metal has crept into the house until scarcely a room is spared. We sleep with 60 cases of type in stands on our sleeping porch. We should be safe in a tornado—we have plenty of ballast.

A couple of years ago we did a group of Edmund Spenser's Amoretti for Christmas. The lines breathe the spirit of another day and we wanted to preserve, if we could, the romantic atmosphere. I remembered that for the titles of the poems in The Queen's Garland, printed for R. H. Russell in 1898, D. B. Updike had used an odd Italic which he told me was Original Old Style cast by the old Farmer foundry in 1854. Some one had had fun with the 18 point size—it had a swell set of oversized vowels and all the long ſſ ligatures. The resulting effect looked much like very early printing. The mats were in the possession of the A.T.F. though they seemed never to have heard of them and were a bit annoyed by my insisting on seeing their file copy of the Farmer type book. There it was, and eventually they dug them out and cast them for us. We printed the book on our old Hoe hand press on Arak Ash white paper. For a frontispiece we used Virtue's beautiful engraving of Spenser. It was bound in tan boards with dusty rose cloth spine and a bright yellow label. In many ways it is our favorite book.

Last year we had fun (perhaps I should say I did as my wife did not give her fullest sympathy). 1940 was celebrated, and how! as the 500th Anniversary of the Invention of Printing. The whole country broke out in a rash of exhibitions, lectures, special articles and such like, on poor old Gutenberg about whom practically nothing is known to begin with, not even that he invented movable type. If he did, he was only trying to fake manuscript writing and should have been hung as a forger. I got pretty fed up on the tosh that was being handed out. So, to even the score, I "discovered" in a garret in Mainz, Germany, the private diary of Gutenberg's wife (no one but I knew he had one). By quoting from her diary I showed conclusively that all the credit was really hers. I had cuts made of the old leather-bound volumes of the diary (four old volumes from the Harper Medical Library) and a page of the manuscript (translated into German and written in the lovely hand of Dr. Otto Fuhrmann). Dr. Herman Püterschein, that infallible authority on things typographic, wrote a Foreword. It was titled The Mainz Diary: New Light on the Invention of Printing and 200 copies went out for Christmas. Then the unexpected happened. Letters began pouring in showing it was being taken as gospel. Pundits, librarians, experts in the graphic arts, fell for it hard. My wife threatened to disown me. Of course the tale hadn't a word of truth in it. I had been in Mainz and Frankfort a few years before so that the thing started off with some element of reality. A friend in London gobbled it whole—I had to send a letter by Clipper to keep him from showing it proudly to his friends. After all, my yarn had about as much truth in it as most of the hash that I'd been forced to listen to during the year and I'd gotten quite fond of Frau Gutenberg. I felt, too, that I'd done my bit for the cause. Many of the biggest libraries, including the Library of Congress, had requested and received copies. Ten years from now it will pop up in some bibliography of a Ph.D. thesis.

I had my fun all right.

But the boys got even with me. A year later, the editor of a well-known art magazine and his wife, with careful deliberation and much ingenuity, sold me down the river with a hoax that I gobbled whole. So we are even and everybody is happy.

Why are we so cracked about a private press? I often wonder myself. The house smells of printer's ink and type wash. Right now there are eleven metal-strapped type boxes on the sunporch where the expressman left them a week ago; and my wife is to have a luncheon tomorrow. Fine looking mess. I'll get around to them soon. There are piles of printed signatures of our Christmas book all over the place. The composing room is crawling with undistributed type. Can hardly work without spilling it. My pet Vandercook brayer has fallen arches—it was left in the sun yesterday and its insides turned to soup.

Next morning on my desk I found the proof of our new broadside Emmer Jane with the drawing at the top beautifully colored by the artist. It's swell. Presently the messenger brought in the advance copies of the new Sonnets bound in blue natural-finished cloth stamped in gold, just as I wanted it. I can hardly wait to get home to show them to my wife. We must get that new type to use for The Ghost Ship. We'll start it this week-end. How slow the days go. Isn't a private press fun!

Postscript 1951:

Still hard at it. We are older but no wiser. Nowadays the grand-children come in the back door and call up the composing-room stairs, "Arthur, may we play type and picture cuts?" They spend hours at it and I spend hours putting things to rights.

The check-list has grown to 186 books and pamphlets. The work is still as exciting as ever, though we try to check the fury a bit. The skipper of the Golden Hind retired in January 1950, which released more time for the press; being in business always was a nuisance.

We spent the summer doing a first edition of a Mark Twain book for Harpers—mixed with a lot of farming. For a retirement occupation we can commend a private press. It keeps up the interest in life.

Offers of work flow in, much more than we care to accept. We are not in business and we have more projects of our own than we shall ever complete.

It's fun to get up with the chickens and work together all morning, spend the afternoon puttering about outdoors, and retire at night dog tired—what my wife calls "nice tired," no nervous tension.

The Golden Hind is twenty-four years old but her seams are tight and she manages nicely—who knows, maybe the voyage is only nicely begun.

COMPOSED IN FAIRFIELD TYPES

EDWIN GRABHORN

The Fine Art of Printing

An address before the Roxburghe Club of San Francisco at its meeting in the Allied Arts Guild, Menlo Park, California, May 15, 1933. Fifty copies printed by Edwin and Robert Grabhorn for members of the Roxburghe Club, May 15, 1933. Reprinted by permission of the author.

I know of no better way of beginning this talk to you tonight on PAPER, INK and TYPE than by first sketching a brief outline of the Art of Printing.

Printing in its childhood was an art. The highest period of any art is its childhood, because childhood moves by spontaneous inner urge, not by rules and intellectual bondage that runs all into fixed moulds. It is an accepted truth that as skill and elaboration creep into development of an art, simplicity, feeling and beauty decline. The early printers were not weighed down with rules, formulas and theories which have smothered us today. With but one font of type, a wooden frame with a screw attachment and a crude inking device, they have given us books of strength and beauty that we have never equalled.

We all like to think of the invention of printing as springing Minerva-like from the brain of man. Printing is, of course, the combination of paper, type, ink and the press; and these various elements were some three hundred years in the process of springing. Paper was the cheap substitute for vellum, and type the substitute for hand-writing.

All of us are more or less familiar with the invention of printing and with its God-like first-born, the Gutenberg Bible. Those who have had the thrill of examining the great 42-line Bible have told us that it is the most beautiful book ever printed. This is a magnificent tribute—one that I have never heard contradicted. Just how much of the beauty of this Bible is due to the art of the illuminator and how much to the skill of the printer has never been told by those who represent it to be the most perfect specimen of printing.

A few years ago a book speculator dissected an incomplete copy, selling the leaves with beautifully hand-illumined initials at twice the price of those pages without decoration. I hope this speculator lost his ill-gotten gains in the stock market.

A thing of beauty stands alone, and I know of no fixed law by which we can judge beauty except through the emotions; and emotions are rather difficult to tabulate. I, myself, can only contemplate the childhood of printing with amazement and admiration. In its youth it exhausted every possibility of type arrangement.

An estimate of the activity of those first wooden frames can only be guessed at. In Venice alone, as early as 1472, over two million separate volumes were printed. By the opening of the sixteenth century the art of printing had spread to every civilized country and the supply of its raw materials became so great that the process of cheapening set in.

The first printers had selected as models for their types the beautiful hand-written books of their day. The second generation of printers modelled their types from those of the first printers. The illuminator gave way to the wood-cutter and the fine art of printing became a science, then a craft, and when William Morris tried to stop its downward slide, in 1891, it was a trade.

During this downward trip through four centuries, weak attempts to restore the art of printing to its first high place in the life of man were made. Benjamin Franklin wrote on the "Improvement of Printing Backwards," protesting the discontinuance of the tall "f." But man was not interested in the intangible influence of art as much as he was in the perfection of the machine.

The ink was hardly dry on the effusions of our modern printing critics, when the collapse of over-production set in and silenced them, I hope, permanently.

Writing about modern books in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Francis Meynell of the Nonesuch Press says: "The type-setting machines used with as much skill as hand-set type will give a better result, and in alliance with fast but very perfect cylinder printing presses, will give this result not to a few, but to a multitude. It has taken us from the day of 'the book beautiful,' and given us the day of the beautiful book."

The fast moving cylinder presses of the Nonesuch Press have slowed up since this was written. And we can thank God that we have some opportunity for reflection.

One of the modern criticisms of William Morris and the private presses that he inspired is that too much stress was placed on method. Method means how a thing is done and how a thing is done is of very vital importance if we want to give our work durability.

I have said before that it was William Morris who attempted to stop the downward slide of printing. He was the leader in the revival of what is known as "modern fine printing." It has been said that Morris was inspired by a lecture of Emery Walker's on the Golden Age of Printing. While not denying Walker's position in this revival, we must admit that there is a vast gulf between talking and doing. Morris's was a very simple yet positive personality. There were no tints in his make-up. When asked if he liked colors, his answer: "blue and red," tells us whole volumes in folio. He had no tolerance for the effeminate printing of his day. He even scorned the sunny pages of the Italian Renaissance printers. It is no wonder that his Gothic books, in violent contrast to the weak old styles and modern type faces of his time—and our time, too—were startling. I have no doubt that some antiquarian hundreds of years hence, delving among musty tomes, will find Morris's books still giants in a land of dwarfs.

Whether you like or dislike Morris's books is of little concern to me. But what is of vital importance to me as a printer, and should be to all printers who are endeavoring to print books that will last, is the honesty of William Morris. Morris knew, because he was a collector of the earliest printed books, that those early printed books could not have descended to him, looking as sparkling and vital as the day they left their makers' hands, without honesty of craftsmanship. It was this craftsmanship that Morris revived, and that we today will have to revive again before our books can have any claims to a long life.

Let me briefly describe to you the various processes used in the making of books, beginning with the paper on which the book is printed. Morris found no paper being manufactured that was suitable for his use. It was only after months of experiment and failure, during which he worked at the paper mill himself, that a satisfactory sheet was made for him. With the closing of the Kelmscott Press after Morris's death, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker used his specifications for this paper at their Doves Press. This mill still manufactures this paper, and it can be obtained easily enough. But it is not popular with the printers of today because its texture is so tough, its resistance to type so great, that we rather choose the short cut to the Royal Road to Fine Bookmaking, using the many counterfeits with their imitation deckle edges and their artificial ageing at the mill. We also like opaqueness in our paper, although transparency is usually a guarantee of its quality. All-linen-rag quality paper can easily enough be printed on if dampened first. By lessening the resistance of the paper through dampening, the type can penetrate its tough fiber, and the ink thus becomes a part of the paper itself. But by taking the short cut and not dampening the paper, at least four times the quantity of pressure and ink must be used. This over-abundance of pressure and ink still does not penetrate the paper but leaves the ink upon the paper's surface so that it looks to me as if printed from an etcher's plate. The excessive amount of ink, because of the heavy varnish used in its manufacture, has a tendency to shine when dry, producing a luster that is hard on the eyes. In time a film of oil will encircle each individual letter, discoloring the paper, and the page will look like those cheaply printed eighteenth-century books do to us today.

I know of no process in the making of a fine book more difficult of perfecting than getting the right amount of pressure and ink into the paper. In hand-made paper there is only an approximate uniformity in the thickness of the sheets, and these variations can be overcome by using a hand-press. The sense of touch must be developed until you can feel the right amount of pressure through the lever. The mechanical press is so regulated that it cannot control the variations of the paper's thickness. The right pressure can, of course, be applied to the average sheet—the heavier and lighter sheets can be sorted out before printing. However, this is seldom done. The paper is usually sorted when the finished book is being collated.

I can speak with some authority on the importance of dampening a sheet of fine paper. Such a process takes lots of time, but if you think the time not well spent compare a book from the Kelmscott Press with any of the books of our best machine printers of today. You will see that decay is already beginning to set in in the machine book. The edges of the paper will soon turn yellow and the ink begin to spread.

I hesitate to turn from the processes of making a fine book endure without impressing upon you the importance of using the finest quality of paper. The paper, and the ink that becomes a part of that paper, determines the life of the book, just as stones and mortar do in architecture. No matter how fine the type or how beautiful the decorations, the book must die if quality be lacking in both paper and ink.

And now just a few remarks about the binding of a book. Bindings are the protection for the body of a book. Here permanency decreases as use increases. Only those books that have escaped usage have come down to us with their original bindings, except those bound in limp vellum. Heavy boards encased in leather were the protection of many early books. The swinging of the heavy covers breaks the hinges of the book, and this leads to destruction. William Morris revived the use of limp vellum as a book covering.

Of far more importance than the cover in the making of a fine book is the gathering and sewing. When the printed sheets are folded a trained eye should put them together so that pages either under- or over-inked may be taken out. If there are no extras, then all the light pages can be put into one book, and the dark in another. If this is done, the critic will say that the press work is even.

After the book is assembled the sheets are sewn together by hand, using a strong linen thread. Of course, they can be sewn on a machine, but you might just as well save that expense by gluing the sheets together. If you don't believe me, take a machine-sewn book, before it is glued, pull off the first section, hold it up by the last page and watch the book fall to pieces. Hand-sewn books are sewn on either cords or tapes. Of course, you can have cords and tapes on a machine-sewn book, but they will be false ones, pasted on after the book has been stabbed to death.

I do not want to give you the impression that I am some sort of John the Baptist crying in a wilderness of machines. Machines are designed for special purposes and when we try to use them for a different purpose from that for which they were intended we fail. You would think a carpenter who used a machine that was made to drive nails in an orange box unbalanced if he tried to adjust that machine to build a house. The delicately adjusted printing press that Francis Meynell idealizes was designed for producing our ephemeral printing.

A machine cannot create—it can only assist, directed by the mind and imagination. The more that is left to the machine, the worse the work. The machine can arrive at perfection, perfection that is cold and dead and mechanical. And it is this cold and dead perfection that brings me to the beauty of the book of today.

I would say that "Post-Modern" Fine Printing began in America with Bruce Rogers, at the plant of William Rudge. It was Bruce Rogers' books that have influenced American and English printers more than any other recent single force. It was the "charm" and finish of this man's work that none of us escaped. During the years that Bruce Rogers was designing special editions at the Riverside Press there were few collectors of his books. As late as 1920, I bought some of these books from the publishers. They had been in stock nearly twenty years! Among them was "The Song of Roland" at the publisher's price. When I first started printing I was already an admirer and collector of these Riverside Press limited editions.

Now William Rudge was a better business man than a printer. He recognized the ability of Rogers and engaged him. Then things began to happen to our Fine Art of Printing. The typographical designer came into fashion, the machine was glorified and we all became theorists. Printing was aimed at suitability. The scholar and critic displaced the master craftsman and the advertising artist was added by way of variety.

Each new type face, faithfully re-cut by the aid of the pantograph and resurrected from our admittedly worst periods of printing, was eagerly bought by our typographical experts. The printers who had been quietly producing books, trying to make them a little better than necessary, fell into the hands of the publisher and the publicity agent. And the publisher announced that the next limited edition of 1600 copies was completely over-subscribed—the poor printer got one-third of what you had to pay. It was a Wonderland, indeed, until Alice woke up, and the printer was left with all the cards, and they were all blank.

I am very glad it all happened. I would go through any form of hysteria again, if we could produce another Leaves of Grass. Since I am going to talk about type, I know of nothing better than to relate our experience in printing Walt Whitman's masterpiece, for it has shown me the folly of theory and intellect in art.

We accepted this undertaking with enthusiasm. Here was an opportunity to prove that we could print a book. The first deposit had no more than been spent when the publishers announced it as the finest book to be printed in America, and off we started on the wrong track.

Well, the finest book had to have the finest type and the finest type was the latest type. And it had to be a folio in size, because for One Hundred Dollars you had to get a folio. We bought one thousand pounds of the finest type; 18 point Lutetia, fresh from a new designer in Holland. And we hired two printers to set this bright new type and when it was all set, we pulled a proof and started to put grass into it—pale green grass, and it looked like grass and we pulled it out and tried again. Well, every time we tried that bright new type it didn't look right. So we dug up some of the latest theories about suitability, tried again, but it was no use. The brain told us one thing and our eyes another.

Meanwhile, one thousand pounds of bright new type and months of labor were tied up with strings and the Master Craftsman was getting worried. He went to specialists for advice. They said: "Try this new initial or this new picture," and the Master Craftsman went back to his shop and bowed his head.

Then his tired eyes lighted on a dusty case of type, designed by the artist Goudy but the critics had condemned it to the graveyard. Wearily the Craftsman dug it up and set a page of Whitman in it. Then he pulled a proof and Lo! He saw something that the machine had discarded; he saw strength: he saw the strong, vigorous lines of Whitman, born of the soil, without grass. He saw what he had heard whispered before. He saw strong, vigorous, simple printing—printing like mountains, rocks and trees, but not like pansies, lilacs and valentines; printing that came from the soil and was not refined in the class-room.

And the printer knew that the limited edition was not a racket as long as he had honesty and sincerity, and reverence for the best traditions of his craft.

HOLBROOK JACKSON

THE TYPOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM MORRIS

From The Printing of Books by Holbrook Jackson. Copyright 1938 by Cassell & Company, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. First read as a paper, at the William Morris Centenary Dinner of the Double Crown Club, London, May 2, 1934.

William Morris is an ironic figure. His achievements not only missed their mark, but hit marks he was not aiming at. His printing is no exception. The masterpieces of the Kelmscott Press which he aimed at making "useful pieces of goods" were typographical curiosities from birth, and so far removed from the common way of readers that they have become models of what a book should not be.

He was a Bibliophile, or more exactly, a typophile whose affections became unruly in the presence of decorated incunabula, and, although he was outwardly correct towards pure printing, his heart was not there. According to Sir Sydney Cockerell he flirted with the idea of a folio edition of The Earthly Paradise, "profusely illustrated by Sir Edward Burne-Jones," a quarter of a century before the inception of the Kelmscott Press. His personal taste was much the same then as later, although he continued to pay homage to good as distinct from fine printing. It was the "essence of my undertaking," he said, "to produce books which it would be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing and arrangement of type." Thus inspired by the example of "the calligraphy of the Middle Ages, and the earlier printing which took its place," and in spite of his passion for decorated books he observed that the early printed books "were always beautiful by force of the mere typography, even without the added ornament with which many of them are so lavishly supplied."

Much has been made of the emphasis he laid upon the book as an organic assembly of paper, type, and binding. But although few printers or publishers in the nineteenth century had insisted upon the excellence of these ingredients, as he did, the architectonic principle had never been wholly ignored. But in the main it was unconsciously observed. Deliberation is evident in the construction of the Pickering books, in the Keepsakes and Table Books of the thirties and forties, in the illustrated books of the sixties, and the later productions of the Daniel Press; and, if we may leave England for a moment, in such convenient publications as those of Bernhard Tauchnitz, where there is rectitude to satisfy the demands of the most austere of functionalists.

It was not, then, the architectonics of the Kelmscott books which evoked a typographical revolution. Nor was it the pursuit of beauty which always haunted Morris's intentions. "I began printing books," he said, "in the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty." Many printers and publishers of the time would have claimed as much. Bad taste in the arts and crafts is invariably the result of beauty-mongering, and the more costly books of the nineteenth century are littered with beauty from cover to cover.

Neither was it originality. Morris never sought to be original. He was a revivalist, and all his work is derivative. There is nothing new even in that, for all the arts and crafts are derivative, and originality is apt to be a myth and often a nuisance. Morris was even less original than many other earnest innovators, and the Kelmscott books are derivatives twice removed. They are modern variations of the early printed books of northern Europe, as they in turn were but mechanical imitations of the manuscripts which preceded the invention of movable types.

Nor again was there anything peculiar even in that, for all mechanical evolution seems to proceed in the same manner. The earliest railway carriages followed the lines of the stage-coach; the earliest steamships were schooners and brigantines with funnels and paddle-boxes; and the earliest motor-car was a horseless-carriage complete with tail-board. It is not surprising to learn that the earliest printed books were imitations of manuscripts, but it is surprising to find a nineteenth-century printer of genius imitating the imitations.

A page from Poems By The Way, written by Morris and set in the Kelmscott Golden type. This small quarto was the first book printed at the Press in two colors, black and red. Issued in October, 1891, in an edition of 300 copies on paper and 13 on vellum.

There is, however, more than one difference between these mechanical devices and the Kelmscott books. The engineers copied because they could not think of anything better. Now and then they even made concessions to beauty, in the form of superadded decorations, much as Morris did. But there was a marked difference between them, for Morris knew better. Although to him beauty meant decoration or ornament, yet in the first edition of The Roots of the Mountains he actually produced an undecorated book of great distinction. The book is not only admirable in itself, but it has had a better influence on recent typography than all the Kelmscott books together. Morris himself was delighted with the book. He declared it to be "the best-looking book issued since the seventeenth century," and added: "I am so pleased with my book, typography, binding, and must I say it, literary matter, that I am any day to be seen huggling it up, and am become a spectacle to Gods and men because of it." His enthusiasm rings true, but this was a passing fancy, for even then he was in hot pursuit of more opulent beauties.

It was the magnificence of the Kelmscott adventure which impressed and influenced printers, professional and amateur, and resuscitated the curious vogue for so-called "Private Press" books artificially rarefied and deliberately beautified. But, in spite of many extravagances and some few absurdities, the Kelmscott influence has been beneficial. Morris reasserted sound principles, and the richness of his books helped to secure their acceptance. "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." The style of the books themselves, because of their massive individuality, must always provoke differences of opinion, but in the house of books there are many mansions, and room for all tastes, whims, and even fads.

I prefer my books pocketable, flexible, and legible. In the Kelmscott books these qualities are not sufficiently balanced. Each is there in some measure, but something is invariably added to weaken proportion. William Morris (or worse, Burne-Jones) is always getting between reader and author. I like my Chaucer neat. Morris produced Chaucer as Henry Irving and Beerbohm Tree produced Shakespeare. I suspect that enthusiasts for such productions are not readers. The idea is supported by the fact that the majority of Kelmscotts are still in mint state; it is not easy to meet a copy bearing the honourable and endearing scars of use.

A page from the first book printed in the Kelmscott Troy type, The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye, a large quarto printed in black and red and published by Bernard Quaritch in 1892. The edition: Two volumes, 300 copies on paper and 5 on vellum. "As to the matter of the book," wrote Morris, "it makes a thoroughly amusing story, instinct with medieval thought and manners."

Legibility is relative, as I am reminded by my own experience, for myself when young did eagerly frequent Pickering's Diamond Classics—a practice I should probably have defended with conviction based upon sight rather than insight. I take a different view today, not only of miniature types, but of rules and spacings generally. Morris granted the necessity of legibility. In this he differed from another poet and amateur of printing, Robert Bridges, who used Gothic characters for the Daniel Press edition of his poems to induce slow ingestion. Morris believed that solidity of type and setting made for easy reading. By solid type he meant "without needless excrescences" or "the thickening or thinning of the line," which, with reservations, can be defended. Density of type area is a different matter and, if I admit charm, I reserve the right to question even aesthetical propriety in favour of legibility. The solid page is impressive: solidity inspires confidence, but confidence, as we know, is often illusion and not always guiltless of trickery. The first edition of The Roots of the Mountains would probably have been more readable with than without rules.

But although legibility must always be the first rule of printing, there are other important principles. Morris summed them up in the word "beauty" with impressive but dubious results, because of his predilection for ornamentation. Any plain space for him was an opportunity for decoration, or, in Ruskin's words, for "the expression of man's joy in his work." He would go out of his way to make books bigger than they need be so that he might have more space to fill with his and Burne-Jones's illustrations. His type-faces became picturesque, his margins inclined to pomposity, and his paper was pretentious. The Kelmscott books are overdressed. They ask you to look at them rather than to read them. You can't get away from their overwhelming typography, and, even if you could, you might still be cheated of your author by their high-minded purpose, for in addition to being the creations of an impressive genius the Kelmscott books were protests against the logical conclusions of mechanical book-production.

All these things are hindrances to reading, and I still believe that to be read is the destiny of a book, and that reading is best when you are least conscious of print or paper or binding. Since the Kelmscott books are not likely to induce that condition they must remain museum pieces, typographical monuments—beautiful and ineffectual angels beating in the void their luminous wings in vain.

COMPOSED IN EMERSON TYPES

Stanley Morison
FIRST PRINCIPLES OF TYPOGRAPHY

Published 1951 by the syndics of the Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

NOTE: This essay towards a rationale of book-typography was first attempted as an article, s.v. "Typography," in the twelfth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (Chicago and London, 1929). It was reconsidered and entirely rewritten for No. 7 of The Fleuron (Cambridge, 1930) when it also went out of print.... Although several reprints have been brought out and extracts have been made, demands continue for the whole text from printers as well as from those outside the trade for whom the article was originally written.... As the brevity of the essay seems to be one of its most approved qualities, no expansion, and only slight revision, was made.... The present reprint is that of the Amsterdam edition published in 1947, in which the first paragraph was interpolated.... It may be added that while the principles here set forth apply to the typography of books, the sections dealing with composition may be adapted to the design of newspapers and publicity....

S.M.