For special letters or ornaments, woodcuts are best (see p. [364]). The early printers generally had little, simple blocks of ornamental devices which might be used separately, or be built up into a frame border for a whole page—a simple method and effective, if used reasonably. [p372]
The judicious use of colour, especially of red (see pp. [127], [144]), is very effective. The extra printings required for additional colours may make it worth while (in the case of limited editions) to put in simple initials, paragraph marks, notes, &c., by hand (see pp. [194], [113]). The earliest printed books, being modelled on the MS. books, employed such rubrication freely, in spaces specially left in the text or in the margins. There are still great possibilities in the hand decoration of printed books.
• • •
The following note on printing, reproduced here by the permission of Mr. Emery Walker, appeared in the Introductory Notes of the Catalogue of the first exhibition of The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, in 1888.
“PRINTING
“Printing, in the only sense with which we are at present concerned, differs from most if not from all the arts and crafts represented in the Exhibition in being comparatively modern. For although the Chinese took impressions from wood blocks engraved in relief for centuries before the wood-cutters of the Netherlands, by a similar process, produced the block books, which were the immediate predecessors of the true printed book, the invention of movable metal letters in the middle of the fifteenth century may justly be considered as the invention of the art of printing. And it is worth mention in passing that, as an example of fine typography, the earliest dated[115] book, the Gutenberg Bible of 1455, has never [p373] been surpassed. Printing, then, for our purpose, may be considered as the art of making books by means of movable types. Now, as all books not primarily intended as picture-books consist principally of types composed to form letterpress, it is of the first importance that the letter used should be fine in form; especially, as no more time is occupied, or cost incurred, in casting, setting, or printing beautiful letters, than in the same operations with ugly ones. So we find the fifteenth and early sixteenth century printers, who were generally their own type-founders, gave great attention to the forms of their types. The designers of the letters used in the earliest books were probably the scribes whose manuscripts the fifteenth-century printed books so much resemble. Aldus of Venice employed Francesco Francia of Bologna, goldsmith and painter, to cut the punches for his celebrated italic letter. Froben, the great Basle printer, got Holbein to design ornaments for his press, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the painter may have drawn the models for the noble Roman types we find in Froben’s books. With the decadence in handwriting which became marked in the sixteenth century, a corresponding change took place in the types; the designers, no longer having beautiful writing as a model and reference, introduced variations arbitrarily. The types of the Elzevirs are regular and neat, and in this respect modern, but they altogether lack the spirit and originality that distinguish the early Roman founts of Italy and Germany: Gothic characteristics inherited from their mediæval predecessors. In the seventeenth century type-founding began to be carried on as a craft apart from that of the printer, and although in this and the succeeding century many attempts were made to improve the “face” (as the printing surface of type is called), such examples as a rule reflect only too clearly the growing debasement of the crafts of design. Notable among these attempts were the founts cut by William Caslon, who started in business in London as a letter-founder in 1720, taking for his models the Elzevir [p374]
“In 1844 the Chiswick Press printed for Messrs. Longmans ‘The Diary of Lady Willoughby,’ and revived for this purpose one of Caslon’s founts. This was an important step in the right direction, and its success induced Messrs. Miller & Richard of Edinburgh to engrave a series of ‘old style’ founts, with one of which this catalogue is printed. Most other type-founders now cast similar type, and without doubt if their customers, the printers, demanded it, they would expend some of the energy and talent which now goes in cutting Japanese-American and sham seventeenth-century monstrosities in endeavouring to produce once more the restrained and beautiful forms of the early printers, until the day when the current handwriting may be elegant enough to be again used as a model for the type-punch engraver.
“Next in importance to the type are the ornaments, initial letters, and other decorations which can be printed along with it. These, it is obvious, should always be designed and engraved so as to harmonise with the printed page regarded as a whole. Hence, illustrations drawn only with reference to purely pictorial effects are entirely out of place in a book, that is, if we desire seriously to make it beautiful.
EMERY WALKER.”