CHAPTER III
Friends through Type
III
FRIENDS THROUGH TYPE
In 1903 I again visited Italy to continue my study of the art of printing in the old monasteries and libraries, sailing on the S. S. Canopic from Boston to Naples. Among the passengers on board I met Horace Fletcher, returning to his home in Venice. At that time his volume Menticulture was having a tremendous run. I had enjoyed reading the book, and in its author I discovered a unique and charming personality; in fact, I have never met so perfect an expression of practical optimism. His humor was infectious, his philosophy appealing, his quiet persistency irresistible.
To many people the name of Horace Fletcher has become associated with the Gladstonian doctrine of excessive chewing, but this falls far short of the whole truth. His scheme was the broadest imaginable, and thorough mastication was only the hub into which the other spokes of the wheel of his philosophy of life were to be fitted. The scheme was nothing less than a cultivation of progressive human efficiency. Believing that absolute health is the real basis of human happiness and advancement, and that health depends upon an intelligent treatment of food in the mouth together with knowledge of how best to furnish the fuel that is actually required to run the human engine, Horace Fletcher sought for and found perfect guides among the natural human instincts and physiologic facilities, and demonstrated that his theories were facts.
During the years that followed I served as his typographic mentor. He was eager to try weird and ingenious experiments to bring out the various points of his theories through unique typographical arrangement (see [opp. page]). It required all my skill and diplomacy to convince him that type possessed rigid limitations, and that to gain his emphasis he must adopt less complicated methods. From this association we became the closest of friends, and presuming upon this relation I used to banter him upon being so casual. His copy was never ready when the compositors needed it; he was always late in returning his proofs. The manufacture of a Fletcher book was a hectic experience, yet no one ever seemed to take exceptions. This was characteristic of the man. He moved and acted upon suddenly formed impulses, never planning ahead yet always securing exactly what he wanted, and those inconvenienced the most always seemed to enjoy it.
A Page of Horace Fletcher Manuscript
“I believe,” he used to say, “in hitching one’s wagon to a star, but I always keep my bag packed and close at hand ready to change stars at a moment’s notice. It is only by doing this that you can give things a chance to happen to you.”
Among the volumes Fletcher had with him on board ship was one he had purchased in Italy, printed in a type I did not recognize but which greatly attracted me by its beauty. The book bore the imprint: Parma: Co’tipi Bodoniani. Some weeks later, in a small, second-hand bookstore in Florence, I happened upon a volume printed in the same type, which I purchased and took at once to my friend, Doctor Guido Biagi, at the Laurenziana Library.
“The work of Giambattista Bodoni is not familiar to you?” he inquired in surprise. “It is he who revived in Italy the glory of the Aldi. He and Firmin Didot in Paris were the fathers of modern type design at the beginning of the nineteenth century.”
“Is this type still in use?” I inquired.
“No,” Biagi answered. “When Bodoni died there was no one worthy to continue its use, so his matrices and punches are kept intact, exactly as he left them. They are on exhibition in the library at Parma, just as the old Plantin relics are preserved in the museum at Antwerp.”
GIAMBATTISTA BODONI, 1740–1813
From Engraving at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris
I immediately took steps through our Ambassador at Rome to gain permission from the Italian Government to recut this face for use in America. After considerable difficulty and delay this permission was granted, with a proviso that I should not allow any of the type made from my proposed matrices to get into the hands of Italian printers, as this would detract from the prestige of the city of Parma. It was a condition to which I was quite willing to subscribe! Within a year I have received a prospectus from a revived Bodoni Press at Montagnola di Lugano, Switzerland, announcing that the exclusive use of the original types of Giambattista Bodoni has been given them by the Italian Government. This would seem to indicate that the early governmental objections have disappeared.
While searching around to secure the fullest set of patterns, I stumbled upon the fact that Bodoni and Didot had based their types upon the same model, and that Didot had made use of his font particularly in the wonderful editions published in Paris at the very beginning of the nineteenth century. I then hurried to Paris to see whether these matrices were in existence. There, after a search through the foundries, I discovered the original punches, long discarded, in the foundry of Peignot, to whom I gave an order to cast the different sizes of type, which I had shipped to America.
This was the first type based on this model ever to come into this country. The Bodoni face has since been recut by typefounders as well as for the typesetting machines, and is today one of the most popular faces in common use. Personally I prefer the Bodoni letter to that of Didot (see [opp. page]). The Frenchman succumbed to the elegance of his period, and by lightening the thin lines robbed the design of the virility that Bodoni retained. I am not in sympathy with the excessive height of the ascending letters, which frequently extend beyond the capitals; but when one considers how radical a departure from precedent this type was, he must admire the skill and courage of the designers. William Morris cared little for it,—“The sweltering hideousness of the Bodoni letter,” he exclaimed; “the most illegible type that was ever cut, with its preposterous thicks and thins”; while Theodore L. De Vinne, in his Practice of Typography, writes:
The beauty of the Bodoni letters consists in their regularity, in their clearness, and in their conformity to the taste of the race, nation, and age in which the work was first written, and finally in the grace of the characters, independent of time or place.
When authorities differ to such a wide extent, the student of type design must draw his own conclusions!
The Bodoni Letter (bottom) compared with the Didot Letter (top)
Fletcher’s idea of an appointment was something to be kept if or when convenient, yet he never seemed to offend any one. He did nothing he did not wish to do, and his methods of extricating himself from unwelcome responsibilities always amused rather than annoyed. “If you don’t want to do a thing very badly,” he confided to me on one such occasion, “do it very badly.”
HORACE FLETCHER IN 1915
On board the Canopic Fletcher was surrounded by an admiring and interested group. General Leonard Wood was on his way to study colonial government abroad before taking up his first administration as Governor of the Philippines. On his staff was General Hugh Lennox Scott, who later succeeded General Wood as Chief of Staff of the United States Army. The conversations and discussions in the smokeroom each evening after dinner were illuminating and fascinating. General Wood had but recently completed his work as Governor of Cuba, and he talked freely of his experiences there, while General Scott was full of reminiscences of his extraordinary adventures with the Indians. He later played an important part in bringing peace to the Philippines.
It was at one of these four-cornered sessions in the smokeroom that we first learned of Fletcher’s ambition to revolutionize the world in its methods of eating. That he would actually accomplish this no one of us believed, but the fact remains. The smokeroom steward was serving the coffee, inquiring of each one how many lumps of sugar he required. Fletcher, to our amazement, called for five! It was a grand-stand play in a way, but he secured his audience as completely as do the tambourines and the singing of the Salvation Army.
“Why are you surprised?” he demanded with seeming innocence. “I am simply taking a coffee liqueur, in which there is less sugar now than there is in your chartreuse or benedictine. But I am mixing it with the saliva, which is more than you are doing. The sugar, as you take it, becomes acid in the stomach and retards digestion; by my method, it is changed into grape sugar, which is easily assimilated.”
“To insalivate one’s liquor,” he explained to us, “gives one the most exquisite pleasure imaginable, but it is a terrific test of quality. It brings out the richness of flavor, which is lost when one gulps the wine down. Did you ever notice the way a tea-taster sips his tea?”
As he talked he exposed the ignorance of the entire group on physiological matters to an embarrassing extent, clinching his remarks by asking General Wood the question,
“Would you engage as chauffeur for your automobile a man who knew as little about his motor as you know about your own human engine?”
No one ever loved a practical joke better than Horace Fletcher. I was a guest at a dinner he once gave at the Graduates’ Club in New Haven. Among the others present were President Hadley of Yale, John Hays Hammond, Walter Camp, and Professor Lounsbury. There was considerable curiosity and some speculation concerning what would constitute a Fletcher dinner. At the proper time we were shown into a private room, where the table was set with the severest simplicity. Instead of china, white crockery was used, and the chief table decorations were three large crockery pitchers filled with ice water. At each plate was a crockery saucer, containing a shredded-wheat biscuit. It was amusing to glance around and note the expressions of dismay upon the faces of the guests. Their worst apprehensions were being confirmed! Just as we were well seated, the headwaiter came to the door and announced that by mistake we had been shown into the wrong room, whereupon Fletcher, with an inimitable twinkle in his eye, led the way into another private dining room, where we sat down to one of the most sumptuous repasts I have ever enjoyed.
Today, twenty years after his campaign, it is almost forgotten that the American breakfast was at that time a heavy meal. Horace Fletcher revolutionized the practice of eating, and interjected the word fletcherize into the English language. As a disciple of Fletcher Sir Thomas Barlow, physician-in-chief to King Edward VII, persuaded royalty to set the style by cutting down the formal dinner from three hours to an hour and a half, with a corresponding relief to the digestive apparatus of the guests. In Belgium, during the World War, working with Herbert Hoover, Fletcher taught the impoverished people how to sustain themselves upon meager rations. Among his admirers and devoted friends were such profound thinkers as William James who, in response to a letter from him, wrote, “Your excessive reaction to the stimulus of my grateful approval makes you remind me of those rich soils which, when you tickle them with a straw, smile with a harvest”; and Henry James, who closes a letter: “Come and bring with you plenary absolution to the thankless subject who yet dares light the lamp of gratitude to you at each day’s end of his life.”
My acquaintance with Henry James came through my close association with the late Sir Sidney Lee, the Shakesperian authority, and Horace Fletcher.
“Don’t be surprised if he is brusque or uncivil,” Sir Sidney whispered to me just before I met him at dinner; “one can never tell how he is going to act.”
As a matter of fact, I found Henry James a most genial and enjoyable dinner companion, and never, during the few later occasions when I had the pleasure of being with him, did he display those characteristics of ill humor and brusqueness which have been attributed to him. It may not be generally known that all his life—until he met Horace Fletcher—he suffered torments from chronic indigestion, or that it was in Fletcherism that he found his first relief. In a typically involved Jamesian letter to his brother William he writes (February, 1909):
It is impossible save in a long talk to make you understand how the blessed Fletcherism—so extra blessed—lulled me, charmed me, beguiled me, from the first into the convenience of not having to drag myself out into eternal walking. One must have been through what it relieved me from to know how not suffering from one’s food all the while, after having suffered all one’s life, and at last having it cease and vanish, could make one joyously and extravagantly relegate all out-of-door motion to a more and more casual and negligible importance. To live without the hell goad of needing to walk, with time for reading and indoor pursuits,—a delicious, insidious bribe! So, more and more, I gave up locomotion, and at last almost completely. A year and a half ago the thoracic worry began. Walking seemed to make it worse, tested by short spurts. So I thought non-walking more and more the remedy, and applied it more and more, and ate less and less, naturally. My heart was really disgusted all the while at my having ceased to call upon it. I have begun to do so again, and with the most luminous response. I am better the second half hour of my walk than the first, and better the third than the second.… I am, in short, returning, after an interval deplorably long and fallacious, to a due amount of reasonable exercise and a due amount of food for the same.
A Page from an Autograph Letter from Henry James to Horace Fletcher
My one visit to Lamb House was in company with Horace Fletcher. The meeting with Henry James at dinner had corrected several preconceived ideas and confirmed others. Some writers are revealed by their books, others conceal themselves in their fictional prototypes. It had always been a question in my mind whether Henry James gave to his stories his own personality or received his personality from his stories. This visit settled my doubts.
The home was a perfect expression of the host, and possessed an individuality no less unique. I think it was Coventry Patmore who christened it “a jewel set in the plain,”—located as it was at the rising end of one of those meandering streets of Rye, in Sussex, England, Georgian in line and perfect in appointment.
In receiving us, Henry James gave one the impression of performing a long-established ritual. He had been reading in the garden, and when we arrived he came out into the hall with hand extended, expressing a massive cordiality.
“Welcome to my beloved Fletcher,” he cried; and as he grasped my hand he said, as if by way of explanation,
“He saved my life, you know, and what is more, he improved my disposition. By rights he should receive all my future royalties,—but I doubt if he does!”
His conversation was much more intelligible than his books. It was ponderous, but every now and then a subtle humor relieved the impression that he felt himself on exhibition. One could see that he was accustomed to play the lion; but with Fletcher present, toward whom he evidently felt a deep obligation, he talked intimately of himself and of the handicap his stomach infelicities had proved in his work. The joy with which he proclaimed his emancipation showed the real man,—a Henry James unknown to his characters or to his public.
If William James had not taken up science as a profession and thus become a philosopher, he would have been a printer. No other commercial pursuit so invited him as “the honorable, honored, and productive business of printing,” as he expressed it in a letter to his mother in 1863. Naturally, with such a conception of the practice of book manufacture, he was always particularly concerned with the physical format of his volumes. He once told me that my ability to translate his “fool ideas” into type showed the benefit of a Harvard education! He had no patience with any lapse on the part of the proofreader, and when the galleys of his books reached this point in the manufacture even my most experienced readers were on the anxious seat. On the other hand, he was generous in his appreciation when a proofreader called his attention to some slip in his copy that he had overlooked.
After his volume Pragmatism appeared and created such universal attention, a series of “popular” lectures on the subject was announced at Cambridge. The Harpers had just published a novel of mine entitled The Spell, in connection with which I had devoted much time to the study of humanism and the humanists of the fifteenth century. Because of my familiarity with a kindred subject, I must confess to a sense of mortification that in reading Pragmatism I found myself beyond my depth. A “popular” presentation appealed to me as an opportunity for intellectual development, so I attended the first lecture, armed with pencil and notebook. Afterwards it so happened that Professor James was on the trolley car when I boarded it at Harvard Square, and I sat down beside him.
“I was surprised to see you at my lecture,” he remarked. “Don’t you get enough of me at your office?”
I told him of my excursions into other philosophic pastures, and of my chagrin to find so little in pragmatic fields upon which my hungry mind could feed. He smiled at my language, and entered heartily into the spirit.
“And today?” he inquired mischievously.—“I hope that today I guided you successfully.”
“You did,” I declared, opening my notebook, and showing him the entry: “Nothing is the only resultant of the one thing which is not.”
“That led me home,” I said soberly, with an intentional double meaning.
Professor James laughed heartily.
“Did I really say that? I have no doubt I did. It simply proves my contention that philosophers too frequently exercise their prerogative of concealing themselves behind meaningless expressions.”
Two of Professor James’ typographic hobbies were paper labels and as few words as possible on the title page. In the matter of supplying scant copy for the title, he won my eternal gratitude, for many a book, otherwise typographically attractive, is ruined by overloading the title with too much matter. This is the first page that catches the eye, and its relation to the book is the same as the door of a house. Only recently I opened a volume to a beautiful title page. The type was perfectly arranged in proportion and margin, the decoration was charming and in complete harmony with the type. It was set by an artist-printer and did him credit; but turning a few more pages I found myself face to face with a red-blooded story of western life, when the title had prepared me for something as delicate as Milton’s L’Allegro. A renaissance door on a New England farmhouse would have been equally appropriate!
I commend to those who love books the fascinating study of title pages. I entered upon it from curiosity, and quickly found in it an abiding hobby. The early manuscripts and first printed volumes possessed no title pages, due probably to the fact that the handmade paper and parchment were so costly that the saving of a seemingly unnecessary page was a consideration. The incipit at the top of the first page, reading “Here beginneth” and then adding the name of the author and the subject, answered every purpose; and on the last page the explicit marked the conclusion of the work, and offered the printer an excellent opportunity to record his name and the date of the printing. Most of the early printers were modest in recording their achievements, but in the famous volume De Veritate Catholicæ Fidei the printer says of himself:
This new edition was furnished us to print in Venice by Nicolas Jenson of France.… Kind toward all, beneficent, generous, truthful and steadfast in the beauty, dignity, and accuracy of his printing, let me (with the indulgence of all) name him the first in the whole world; first likewise in his marvelous speed. He exists in this, our time, as a special gift from Heaven to men. June thirteen, in the year of Redemption 1489. Farewell
Bibliographers contend that the first title page was used in a book printed by Arnold Ther Hoernen of Cologne in 1470. In this volume an extra leaf is employed containing simply an introduction at the top. It has always seemed to me that this leaf is more likely to have been added by the printer to correct a careless omission of the introduction on his first page of text. Occasionally, in the humanistic manuscript volumes in the Laurenziana Library, at Florence, there occurs a “mirror” title (see [opp. page]), which consists of an illuminated page made up of a large circle in the center containing the name of the book, sometimes surrounded by smaller circles, in which are recorded the titles of the various sections. This seems far more likely to have been suggestive of what came to be the formal title page.
MIRROR TITLE
From Augustinus: Opera, 1485. Laurenziana Library, Florence
By the end of the fifteenth century the title page was in universal use, and printers showed great ingenuity in arranging the type in the form of wine cups, drinking glasses, funnels, inverted cones, and half-diamonds. During the sixteenth century great artists like Dürer, Holbein, Rubens, and Mantegna executed superbly engraved titles entirely out of keeping with the poor typography of the books themselves. In many of the volumes the title page served the double purpose of title and full-page illustration (see pages [228] and [241]). What splendid examples would have resulted if the age of engraved titles had coincided with the high-water mark in the art of printing!
As the art of printing declined, the engraved title was discarded, and the printer of the seventeenth century seemed to feel it incumbent upon him to cover the entire page with type. If you recall the early examples of American Colonial printing, which were based upon the English models of the time, you will gain an excellent idea of the grotesque tendency of that period. The Elzevirs were the only ones who retained the engraved title (page [241]). The Baskerville volumes (page [247]), in the middle of the eighteenth century, showed a return to good taste and harmonious co-ordination with the text; but there was no beauty in the title until Didot in Paris and Bodoni in Parma, Italy, introduced the so-called “modern” face, which is peculiarly well adapted to display (page [253]). William Morris, in the late nineteenth century, successfully combined decoration with type,—over-decorated, in the minds of many, but in perfect keeping with the type pages of the volumes themselves. Cobden-Sanderson, at the Doves Press, returned to the extreme in simplicity and good taste (page [265]), excelling all other printers in securing from the blank space on the leaf the fullest possible value. One of Cobden-Sanderson’s classic remarks is, “I always give greater attention, in the typography of a book, to what I leave out than to what I put in.”
The name of William Morris today may be more familiar to booklovers than that of Cobden-Sanderson, but I venture to predict that within a single decade the latter’s work as printer and binder at the Doves Press at Hammersmith, London, will prove to have been a more determining factor in printing as an art than that of William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, and that the general verdict will be that Cobden-Sanderson carried out the splendid principles laid down by Morris more consistently than did that great artist-craftsman himself.
T. J. COBDEN-SANDERSON, 1841–1922
From Etching by Alphonse Legros, 1893
The story of Cobden-Sanderson’s life is an interesting human document. He told it to me one evening, its significance being heightened by the simplicity of the recital. At seventeen he was apprenticed to an engineer, but he worked less than a year in the draft room. He disliked business as business, and began to read for Cambridge, with the idea of entering the Church. While at Trinity College he read for mathematical honors, but three years later, having given up all idea of going into the Church, he left Cambridge, refusing honors and a degree, which he might have had, as a protest against the competitive system and the “warp” it gave to all university teaching. Then, for seven or eight years, he devoted himself to Carlyle and the study of literature, “Chiefly German philosophy,” he said, “which is perhaps not literature,” supporting himself by desultory writing and practicing medicine. When he was thirty years old he was admitted to the Bar, which profession he abandoned thirteen years later to become a manual laborer. The following is quoted from notes which I made after this conversation:
I despaired of knowledge in a philosophical sense, yet I yearned to do or to make something. This was the basic idea of my life. At this time it was gradually revealed to me that the arts and crafts of life might be employed to make society itself a work of art, sound and beautiful as a whole, and in all its parts.
It is difficult to associate Cobden-Sanderson’s really tremendous contributions to bookmaking as an art with his self-effacing personality. If I had met the man before I had become intimately acquainted with his work, I should have been disappointed; having had him interpreted to me by his books before I met him, his unique personality proved a definite inspiration and gave me an entirely new viewpoint on many phases of the art of typography in its application to human life.
In person, Cobden-Sanderson was of slight build, with sloping shoulders, his most noticeable feature being his reddish beard tinged with gray. He was nervous and shy, and while talking seldom looked one squarely in the eye, yet at no time could one doubt the absolute sincerity of his every word and act. He was hopelessly absent-minded. Invited to dine with me in London, he appeared the evening before the date set, retiring overwhelmed with embarrassment when he discovered his mistake. On the following evening he forgot the appointment altogether! Later, when in Boston, he accepted an invitation to dine with a literary society, but failed to appear because he could not remember where the dinner was to be held. He had mislaid his note of invitation and could not recall the name of the man who sent it. On that evening he dashed madly around the city in a taxicab for over an hour, finally ending up at his hotel in absolute exhaustion while the members of the literary society dined without their lion!
While president of the Society of Printers in Boston, I arranged for Cobden-Sanderson to come to America to deliver some lectures on The Ideal Book. Among these were four given at Harvard University. At the conclusion of the last lecture he came to my library, thoroughly tired out and completely discouraged. Seated in a great easy chair he remained for several moments in absolute silence, resting his face upon his hands. Suddenly, without a moment’s warning, he straightened up and said with all the vehemence at his command,
“I am the veriest impostor who ever came to your shores!”
Seeing my surprise and incredulity, he added,
“I have come to America to tell you people how to make books. In New York they took me to see the great Morgan Library and other collections. They showed me rare incunabula. They expected me to know all about them, and to be enthusiastic over them. As a matter of fact, I know nothing about the work of the great master-printers, and care less!”
My face must have disclosed my thoughts, for he held up a restraining hand.
“Don’t think me such an egotist as my words imply. It isn’t that at all. It is true that I am interested only in my own work, but that is because my work means something more to me than the books I produce. When I print a book or bind one it is because I have a message in my soul which I am impelled to give mankind, and it comes out through my fingers. Other men express their messages in different media,—in stone or on canvas. I have discovered that the book is my medium. When I bind and decorate a volume I seem to be setting myself, like a magnetized needle, or like an ancient temple, in line and all square, not alone with my own ideal of society, but with that orderly and rhythmical whole which is the revelation of science and the normal of developed humanity. You asked me a while ago to explain certain inconsistencies in my work, and I told you that there was no explanation. That is because each piece of work represents me at the time I do it. Sometimes it is good and sometimes poor, but, in any case, it stands as the expression of myself at the time I did it.”
As he spoke I wondered if Cobden-Sanderson had not explained why, in the various arts, the work of those master-spirits of the past had not been surpassed or even equaled during the intervening centuries. It is a matter for consideration, when the world has shown such spectacular advance along material lines, that in painting, in sculpture, in architecture, in printing, the work of the old masters still stands supreme. In their time, when men had messages in their souls to give the world, the interpretation came out through their fingers, expressed in the medium with which each was familiar. Before the invention of printing, the masses received those messages directly from the marble or the canvas, or from the design of some great building. The printed book opened to the world a storehouse of wisdom hitherto unavailable, and made individual effort less conspicuous and therefore less demanded. The few outstanding figures in every art have been those who, like Cobden-Sanderson, have set themselves “in line and all square, not alone with their own ideals of society, but with that orderly and rhythmical whole which is the revelation of science and the normal of developed humanity.” It is what Cobden-Sanderson has done rather than his written words, that conveys the greatest message.
While Theodore Roosevelt was President of the United States, and on the occasion of one of his several visits to Boston, his secretary wrote that the President would like to examine with me some of the special volumes I had built. I knew him to be an omnivorous reader, but until then did not realize his deep interest in the physical side of books.
He came to the University Press one bitterly cold day in January, and entered my office wrapped in a huge fur coat. After greeting him I asked if he wouldn’t lay the coat aside.
“Of course I will,” he replied briskly; “it is just as easy to catch hot as it is to catch cold.”
We devoted ourselves for an hour to an examination and discussion of certain volumes I had produced. One of these was a small twelve-mo entitled Trophies of Heredia containing poems by José-Maria de Heredia, brought out in artistic format for a Boston publishing house, which had proved a complete failure from a commercial standpoint. Probably not over two hundred copies of the book were ever sold. Evidently one of these had fallen into the President’s hands, for he seized my copy eagerly, saying,
“Hello! I didn’t remember that you made this. Extraordinary volume, isn’t it? I want to show you something.”
Quickly turning to one of the pages he pointed to the line, The hidden warmth of the Polar Sea.
“What do you think of that?” he demanded. “Did you ever think of the Polar Sea as being warm? And by Jove he’s right,—it is warm!”
Later, in Washington, I accepted his invitation for luncheon at the White House and for an afternoon in his library, where we continued our discussion of books. Before we turned to the volumes, he showed me some of the unusual presents which various potentates had given him, such as a jade bear from the Tzar of Russia, a revolver from Admiral Togo, and line drawings made personally by the Kaiser, showing in detail every ship in our Navy. When I expressed surprise that such exact knowledge should be in the possession of another country, my host became serious.
“The Kaiser is a most extraordinary fellow,” he said deliberately,—“not every one realizes how extraordinary. He and I have corresponded ever since I became President, and I tell you that if his letters were ever published they would bring on a world war. Thank God I don’t have to leave them behind when I retire. That’s one prerogative the President has, at any rate.”
I often thought of these comments after the World War broke out. An echo of them came while the desperate struggle was in full force. Ernest Harold Baynes, nature-lover and expert on birds, was visiting at my house, having dined with the ex-President at Oyster Bay the week before. In speaking of the dinner, Baynes said that Roosevelt declared that had he been President, Germany would never have forced the war at the time she did. When pressed to explain, Roosevelt said:
“The Kaiser would have remembered what he outlined to me in some letters he wrote while I was President. Bill knows me, and I know Bill!”
From the library we extended our examination to the family living-room, where there were other volumes of interest on the tables or in the bookcases. From these, the President picked up a hand-lettered, illuminated manuscript which he had just received as a present from King Menelik of Abyssinia. Some one had told him that it was a manuscript of the twelfth or thirteenth century, but to a student of the art of illumination it was clearly a modern copy of an old manuscript. The hand lettering was excellent, but the decoration included colors impossible to secure with the ancient pigments, and the parchment was distinctly of modern origin.
“You are just the one to tell me about this,” Mr. Roosevelt exclaimed. “Is it an original manuscript?”
He so obviously wished to receive an affirmative reply that I temporized by asking if some letter of description had not come with it.
“Oh, yes,” he replied, immediately divining the occasion of my question and showing his disappointment; “there was a missive, which is now in the archives of the State Department. I saw a translation of it, but it is only one of those banal expressions similar to any one of my own utterances, when I cable, for instance, to my imperial brother, the Emperor of Austria, how touched and moved I am to learn that his cousin, the lady with the ten names, has been safely delivered of a child!”
The President was particularly interested in the subject of illustration, and he showed me several examples, asking for a description of the various processes. From that we passed on to a discussion of the varying demand from the time when I first began to make books. I explained that the development of the halftone plate and of the four-color process plates had been practically within this period,—that prior to 1890 the excessive cost of woodcuts, steel engravings, or lithography confined illustration to expensive volumes. The halftone opened the way for profuse illustration at minimum expense.
The President showed me an impression from one of Timothy Cole’s marvelous woodcuts, and we agreed that the halftone had never taken the place of any process that depends upon the hand for execution. The very perfection to which the art of halftone reproduction has been carried is a danger point in considering the permanence of its popularity. This does not apply to its use in newspapers, but in reproducing with such slavish fidelity photographs of objects perpetuated in books of permanent value. It seemed paradoxical to say that the nearer perfection an art attains the less interesting it becomes, because the very variation incidental to hand work in any art is what relieves the monotony of that perfection attained through mechanical means. Since then, a few leading engravers have demonstrated how the halftone may be improved by hand work. This combination has opened up new possibilities that guarantee its continued popularity.
With the tremendous increase in the cost of manufacturing books during and since the World War, publishers found that by omitting illustrations from their volumes they could come nearer to keeping the cost within the required limits, so for a period illustrated volumes became limited in number
There is no question that the public loves pictures, and the development during recent years of so-called newspapers from which the public gleans the daily news by means of halftone illustrations, is, in a way, a reversion to the time before the printing press, when the masses received their education wholly through pictorial design. The popularity of moving pictures is another evidence. I have always wished that this phase had developed at the time of our discussion, for I am sure Mr. Roosevelt would have had some interesting comments to make on its significance. I like to believe that this tendency will correct itself, for, after all, the pictures which are most worth while are those which we ourselves draw subconsciously from impressions made through intellectual exploits