[69] This was an early proof of the portrait which is found in a slightly different state in copies of the third edition, and seemed to be an insertion in the first edition rather than an integral part of it.
CHAPTER XVI
MODERN FINE PRINTING
After the Restoration, printing and the book trade generally in England became definitely modern in their character, and the printer practically disappears from view, his work, with here and there an exception, as in the case of Robert Foulis or John Baskerville, being altogether hidden behind that of the publisher, so that it is of Herringman and Bernard Lintott and Dodsley that we hear, not of Newcomb and Roycroft.
Notwithstanding this decline in the printer’s importance, there was a steady improvement in English printing. As an art it had ceased at this time to exist. If a publisher wished to make a book beautiful he put in plates. If he wanted to make it more beautiful he put in more or larger plates. If he wanted to make it a real triumph of beauty he engraved the whole book, letterpress and all, as in the case of Sturt’s Prayer Books and Pine’s Horace. That a printer by the selection and arrangement of type, by good presswork and the use of pretty capitals and tailpieces, could make a book charming to eye and hand, without any help from an illustrator—such an idea as this had nearly perished. There was little loss in this, since if any artistic work had been attempted it would assuredly have been bad, whereas the craftsmen, when set to do quite plain work, gradually learnt to do it in a more workmanlike way. In this they were helped by certain improvements in printing which rendered the task of the pressman less laborious. In the middle of the seventeenth century William Blaew, of Amsterdam, invented an improved press, “fabricated nine of these new fashioned presses, set them all on a row in his Printing House and called each Press by the name of one of the Muses.” Clearly Blaew was an enthusiast. His chronicler, Joseph Moxon, was a fairly good English printer, and his description of the equipment of a printing house in the second part of his Mechanick Exercises (1683) contains much information still interesting. We gather from Moxon that Blaew’s improvements were slowly copied in England, and we know that the English printers still continued to buy their best founts from Holland. Thus when Bishop Fell, about 1670, was equipping the University Press at Oxford with better type, he employed an agent in Holland to purchase founts for him. English founts of which we have any reason to be proud date from the appearance about 1716 of William Caslon, who established a firm of type founders which has enjoyed a long and deservedly prosperous career.
The next move came from the north. Robert Foulis (the name was originally spelt Faulls), born in 1707, the son of a Glasgow maltster, had been originally apprenticed to a barber. He was, however, a man of bookish tastes, and, when already over thirty years of age, was advised to set up in business as a printer and bookseller. With his brother Andrew, five years younger than himself and educated for the ministry, he went on a book-buying tour on the Continent, and on his return started book-selling in 1741, and printed in that year Dr. William Leechman’s Temper, Character, and Duty of a Minister of the Gospel, and four other books, including a Phaedrus and a volume of Cicero. In March, 1743, he was appointed Printer to the University of Glasgow, and his edition of Demetrius Phalerus de Elocutione in Greek and Latin was the first example of Greek printing produced at Glasgow. A Horace which was hung up in proof in the University, with the offer of a reward for every misprint detected (in spite of which six remained), followed in 1744, an Iliad in 1747, an edition of Hardyknute in 1748, and a Cicero in 1749. In 1750 as many as thirty works were printed at the Foulis press. The next two years were mainly spent in touring on the Continent, and on his return Robert Foulis unhappily started an Academy of Art at Glasgow, which he had neither the knowledge nor the taste to direct successfully, and which sapped his energies without producing any valuable results. An edition of the Greek text of Callimachus in 1755 was rewarded by an Edinburgh society with a gold medal, and other Greek and Latin texts followed, including the Iliad in 1756, Anacreon in 1757, Virgil and the Odyssey in 1758, and Herodotus in 1761. Among the more notable later books of the firm were an edition of Gray’s Poems in 1768, and a Paradise Lost in 1770. The younger brother died in 1775, and Robert, after a mortifying experience in London, where he sold the “old masters” he had bought as models for his Academy for less than a pound over the expenses incurred in the sale, followed him the next year. The two brothers had raised printing at Glasgow from insignificance to an excellence which equalled, and perhaps surpassed, the standard attained at London, Oxford or Cambridge, or, indeed, for the moment, anywhere in Europe. This was no small achievement, and their compatriots and fellow citizens may well show them honour. But they were content to work according to the best standards set by other men without making any positive advance upon them or showing any originality. They avoided the snare of bad ornaments by using none; their Greek types were modelled on the French royal types associated with the name of the Étiennes; their roman types exhibit no special excellence. Historically, their chief importance is that they proved that care and enthusiasm for fine printing was re-awakening, and that printers with high ideals would not lack support.
Meanwhile, in the English Midlands an interesting and creditable, though wrong-headed, attempt to improve on existing founts had been made by John Baskerville, a Worcestershire man, born in 1706, who worked at Birmingham, and in 1757 printed there in his own types a quarto edition of Virgil which attracted considerable notice. The merit of Baskerville’s type is its distinctness; its fault is the reappearance in a slightly different form of the old heresy of Aldus, that what is good, or is thought to be good, in penmanship must necessarily be good in type. In imitation of the Writing-Masters Baskerville delighted in making his upstrokes very thin and his downstrokes thick, and his serifs—that is, all the little finishing strokes of the letters—sharp and fine. It is probable that his ideals were influenced in this direction by books like Pine’s Horace (1733-7), in which, as already noted, the letterpress as well as the illustrations and ornament is engraved throughout. These contrasts of light and heavy lines would naturally please an engraver; but they have no advantage when transferred to type, only making the page appear restless and spotty. Contemporary opinion in England was no more than lukewarm in their favour. The Virgil procured Baskerville a commission from the University of Oxford to cut a Greek fount, but this was generally condemned, though it had the merit of being free from contractions. Editions of Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained (1758), and other classics, were more successful, and Baskerville was appointed printer to the University of Cambridge for ten years; but his profits were small, and when he died in 1775, in default of an adequate English offer, his types were sold to a French society for £3700, and used in printing a famous edition of the works of Voltaire (1785-9).
The most conspicuous exponent of Baskerville’s methods was an Italian, Giovanni Battista Bodoni, born in Piedmont in 1740. Bodoni settled at Parma, and it was at Parma that he did most of his printing. Even more notably than Baskerville, he tried to give to the pages which he printed the brilliancy of a fine engraving. He used good black ink (which is to his credit), exaggerated the differences between his thick strokes and his thin, and left wide spaces between his lines so as to let the elegance of his type stand out as brilliantly as possible against the white paper. The judgment of the best modern printers is against these vivid contrasts and in favour of a more closely set page, the two pages which face each other being regarded as an artistic whole which should not be cut into strips by a series of broad white spaces. Bodoni’s books, which used to be highly esteemed, are now perhaps unduly neglected, for his work in its own way, whether he used roman type, italics, or Greek, is very good, and his editions of Virgil, Homer, and the Imitatio Christi are very striking books, though built on wrong lines. Bodoni died at Padua in 1813.