While the names of Caslon, the brothers Foulis, and Baskerville in Great Britain, and of Bodoni in Italy, stand out from amid their contemporaries, the premier place in French book-production was occupied by members of the Didot family. The first of these was François Didot (1689-1757); his eldest son, François Ambroise (1730-1804), was a fine printer; his younger son, Pierre (1732-95), was also a typefounder and papermaker. In the third generation Pierre’s son Henri (1765-1852) was famous for his microscopic type, while Pierre II (1760-1853), the eldest son of François Ambroise and nephew of Pierre I, printed some fine editions of Latin and French classics at the press at the Louvre; and his brother Firmin Didot (1764-1836) won renown both as a typefounder and engraver, and also as a printer and improver of the art of stereotyping, besides being a deputy and writer of tragedies. In the fourth generation, the two sons of Firmin Didot, Ambroise (1790-1876) and Hyacinthe, carried on the family traditions. Incidentally, Ambroise wrote some valuable treatises on wood-engraving and amassed an enormous library, which, when sold at auction in 1882-4, realized nearly £120,000.
With the names of Bodoni and the Didots we may link that of the German publisher and printer Georg Joachim Goeschen, grandfather of the late Viscount Goschen. He was born in 1752, died in 1828, and worked the greater part of his life at Leipzig. He brought out pretty illustrated editions, made experiments with Greek types, much on the same lines as Bodoni, and devoted his life to the improvement of printing and bookmaking and the spread of good literature, enjoying the friendship of Schiller and other eminent German writers.
Coming back to England, we may note the beginning of the Chiswick Press in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. Charles Whittingham was then only twenty-two (he had been born at Coventry in 1767), and for his first years as his own master he was content to print hand-bills and do any other jobbing work that he could get. He began issuing illustrated books in 1797, and after a time the care he took in making ready wood-blocks (the use of which had been revived by Bewick) for printing gained him a special reputation. From about 1811 to his death in 1840 he left one branch of his business in the city under the charge of a partner, while he himself lived and worked at Chiswick, whence the name the Chiswick Press by which the firm is still best known.
His nephew, Charles Whittingham the younger, was born in 1795, was apprenticed to his uncle in 1810 and worked with him until 1828. Then he set up for himself at Tooks Court off Chancery Lane, and came rapidly to the front, largely from the work which he did for William Pickering, a well-known publisher of those days.
On his uncle’s death in 1840 the younger Whittingham inherited the Chiswick business also. Four years after this, in 1844, he led the way in the revival of old-faced types. The examples of Baskerville at home and of Bodoni and other printers abroad had not been without effect on English printing. Brilliancy had been sought at all costs, and in the attempt to combine economy with it the height of letters had been increased and their breadth diminished so that, while they looked larger, more of them could be crowded into a line. The younger Whittingham had the good taste to see that the rounder, more evenly tinted type, which Caslon had made before these influences had come into play, was much pleasanter to look at and less trying to the eyes. He was already thinking of reviving it when he was commissioned by Longmans to print a work of fiction, So much of the Diary of Lady Willoughby as relates to her Domestic History and to the Eventful Period of the Reign of Charles the First, and it occurred to him that the use of old-faced type would be especially in keeping with such a book. A handsome small quarto was the result, and the revival of old-faced type proved a great success.
Not content with reviving old type, the younger Whittingham revived also the use of ornamental initials, causing numerous copies to be cut for him from the initials used in French books of the sixteenth century. Some of these are good, some almost bad, or while good in themselves, suitable only for use with black-letter founts and too heavy for use with roman letter. Still the attempt was in the right direction, and the books of this period with the imprint of the Chiswick Press are worth the attention of collectors interested in the modern developments of printing. During the succeeding forty years there is little by which they are likely to be attracted save the issues of the private press kept and worked by the Rev. C. H. O. Daniel of Worcester College, Oxford, of which he is now Provost. While he was yet a lad Mr. Daniel had amused himself with printing, and a thin duodecimo is still extant entitled Sir Richard’s Daughter, A Christmas Tale of Olden Times, bearing the imprint “Excudebat H. Daniel: Trinity Parsonage, Frome, 1852.” In 1874 Mr. Daniel resumed his old hobby at Oxford, printing Notes from a catalogue of pamphlets in Worcester College Library, and in 1876 A new Sermon of the newest Fashion by Ananias Snip, of which the original is preserved in the library of Worcester College. It was, however, in 1881, by an edition of thirty-six copies of The Garland of Rachel “by divers kindly hands,” that the Daniel Press won its renown. Rachel was Mr. Daniel’s little daughter, and the eighteen contributors to her “Garland” included Frederick Locker, Robert Bridges, Austin Dobson, Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse, John Addington Symonds, Lewis Carrol, W. Henley, and Margaret Woods. Each poet was rewarded by a copy in which his name was printed on the titlepage, and the “Garland” soon came to be regarded as a very desirable possession. Mr. Daniel subsequently printed numerous little books by interesting writers (Robert Bridges, Walter Pater, Canon Dixon, and others), and while neither his types nor his presswork were exceptionally good, succeeded in investing them all with a charming appropriateness which gives them a special place of their own in the affections of book-lovers.
Another venture in which a high literary standard was combined with much care for typography was The Hobby-Horse, a quarterly magazine edited by Herbert P. Horne and Selwyn Image between 1886 and 1892, after which it appeared fitfully and flickered out. The change in the type, the setting it close instead of spaced, and the new initials and tailpieces which may be noted at the beginning of Vol. III (1888), constituted a landmark in the history of modern printing of an importance similar to that of the return to old-faced type in Lady Willoughby’s Diary. The progress of the movement can be followed (i) in the catalogue of the Exhibition of Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, held at the New Gallery in the autumn of 1888, with an article on printing by Mr. Emery Walker; (ii) in three books by William Morris, viz. The House of the Wolfings, The Roots of the Mountains, and the Gunnlaug Saga, printed under the superintendence of the author and Mr. Walker at the Chiswick Press in 1889 and 1890. In 1891 William Morris gave an immense impetus to the revival of fine printing by setting up a press at No. 16 Upper Mall, Hammersmith, close to his own residence, Kelmscott House. “It was the essence of my undertaking,” he wrote subsequently, “to produce books which it would be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing and arrangement of type,” and no one will be inclined to deny that the Kelmscott Press books fulfil this aim. The gothic type, whether in its larger or smaller size (the Troy type designed for the reprint of Caxton’s Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, and the Chaucer type designed for the great Chaucer), will hold its own against any gothic type of the fifteenth century. The Golden type (designed for the reprint of Caxton’s Golden Legend) cannot be praised as highly as this. “By instinct rather than by conscious thinking it over,” Morris confessed, “I began by getting myself a fount of Roman type,” and it is no unfair criticism of it to say that it betrays the hand of a man whose natural expression was in gothic letter forcing roman into yielding some of the characteristic gothic charm. The Golden Legend would have been a far finer book if it had been printed in the Chaucer type, and the Shelley, Keats, Herrick and other books which Morris printed in it to please F. S. Ellis or other friends cannot stand the test of comparison with The Wood Beyond the World and the other romances which he printed entirely to please himself. But whether he used his roman or his gothic type the exquisite craftsmanship which he put into all his books enabled Morris to attain his aim, and his wonderful borders and capitals crown them with the delight which this king of designers took in his work. No other printer since printing began has ever produced such a series of books as the fifty-three which poured from the Kelmscott Press during those wonderful seven years, and no book that has ever been printed can be compared for richness of effect with the Chaucer which was the crowning achievement of the Press.
Morris’s example brought into the field a host of competitors and plagiarists and a few workers in the same spirit. By his side throughout his venture had stood Mr. Emery Walker, who had no small part in starting the whole movement, whose help and advice for more than twenty years have been freely at the service of any one who has shown any inclination to do good work, and who, whenever good work has been achieved, will almost always be found to have lent a hand in it. After Morris’s death Mr. Walker joined with Mr. Cobden Sanderson in producing the Doves Press books, printed, all of them, in a single type, but that type a fine adaptation of Jenson’s and handled with a skill to which Jenson not only never attained but never aspired. The first book printed in it was the Agricola of Tacitus, and this and Mr. Mackail’s lecture on Morris and other early books are entirely without decoration. Woodcut capitals and borders, it was thought, had reached their highest possible excellence under the hand of William Morris, and since not progress but retrogression would be the certain result of any fresh experiments, decoration of this sort must be abandoned. The reasoning was perhaps not entirely cogent, since the decoration appropriate to the Doves type would hardly enter into any direct competition with Morris’s gothic designs. Later on, however, it was more than justified by the use in the Paradise Lost, the Bible, and most subsequent books (these later ones issued by Mr. Sanderson alone) of very simple red capitals, which light up the pages on which they occur with charming effect.
Similar capitals on a less bold scale, some in gold, others in red, others in blue, are a conspicuous feature in the masterpieces of the Ashendene Press belonging to Mr. St. John Hornby. This was started by Mr. Hornby at his house in Ashendene, Herts, in 1894, and was for some time worked by Mr. Hornby himself and his sisters, with, as at least one colophon gratefully acknowledges, “some little help of Cicely Barclay,” who subsequently, under a different surname, appears as a joint proprietor. The early books—the Journals of Joseph Hornby, Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, etc.—are not conspicuously good, but in 1902, in a type founded on that used by Sweynheym and Pannartz at Subiaco, Mr. and Mrs. Hornby produced the first volume of an illustrated Divina Commedia which cannot be too highly praised. Its story is told in the red-printed colophon, the wording of which is very prettily turned:
Fine della prima Cantica appellata Inferno della Commedia di Dante poeta eccellentissimo. Impressa nella Stamperia Privata di Ashendene a Shelley House, Chelsea, per opera e spesa di St. John & Cicely Hornby coll’ aiuto del loro cugino Meysey Turton. Le lettere iniziali sono l’opera di Graily Hewitt, le incisioni in legno di C. Keates secondo disegni fatti da R. Catterson Smith sopra gli originali dell’ edizione di 1491. Finita nel mese di Dicembre dell’ anno del Signore MCMII, nel quale dopo dieci secoli di bellezza cadde il gran Campanile di San Marco dei Veneziani.