A printer should show an educated taste in his {201} designs. Few people know this, and your fight will be continually against this ignorance, both in yourself

First page of Larousse’s New Dictionary, showing a scholarly style of decoration. This can be best studied under a magnifying glass. [see larger]

and your customers. You will think that anything you like is artistic and appropriate and you will be tempted {202} to undertake it. Your customers will say that they “know nothing about art” but they “know what they like”; so they will pick out some ill-executed and inappropriate job and insist upon your following it. But my business is simply with that which is established as standard, and not with what people like or dislike. Now, historic association plays an important part in designing for printers. The first page of the Larousse dictionary is a superb example of historic association introduced into a design. Here, to illustrate the letter A we have letters from many different periods, but they are all harmonious because of their ornament and their execution. And they are appropriate because they are historical. So if you are designing an announcement of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a prospectus of a genealogical society, a book of early English poetry (earlier than the tenth century) you could use the sixth or seventh century A because that belongs to the very best Irish-English lettering used between the sixth and tenth centuries. The other letters that go with the Larousse sixth century ornamented A specimen you will find in an example from the “Book of Kells,” given in Strange’s “Alphabets,” and perhaps in the “Durham Book.” This identical A is probably from “The Rule of St. Benedict.” Now, if you should obtain an Anglo-Saxon alphabet and master its style and apply it as we have suggested, it would be properly associated with these historic subjects; so you, as an educated printer, would know that you were right, and any criticism would not deter you from using it.

I take it for granted, however, that you use such letters as this A only as initials, or in designing a title {203} of a line or two; and that you would not let it occupy too much of the page: for it is not only necessary that a letter should be associated historically with a subject and that it be well designed, but it must also be associated with printing or bookmaking. It is true that some introductory pages in the sixth and seventh century Irish-English manuscripts were sometimes very ornamental, but the reading pages were, as a rule, quite

This is a design by Eugene Grasset for the heading of a department in “La Revue Encyclopédique.” It represents French designing art at its best. It is free from conventionality, and yet orderly and well balanced. The Auriol design for “La Revue Encyclopédique” is bold and striking, but not as perfect as this.

simple. The good bookmaker never forgets his pages are for reading. So, a Gothic ornamental letter that might be appropriate in a stained glass window or on a hand-painted testimonial might be offensive throughout a printed book. I know of nothing more inartistic, more nauseating to critics, than the millions of lithographed mottoes, Christmas cards, etc., that the English lithographic publishers have put out for the last decade—overburdened with ornament that should be painted and not printed. And so the whites in this sixth century A, and the dotted outline around it, make {204} it in a way less appropriate for general printing than the solid black, twelfth century A.

The middle A is in the style of the wood-cut Venetian letter of the sixteenth century; and while on general principles a gray background like this is not so satisfactory as a black one, yet this is not a bad specimen of designing, for the stipple could be punched into the wood very deeply, and is so near together that if one hole did fill up it would not be missed. However, it, too, must not be used for general printing, but only as rich ornament. It is well balanced, mind you, and therefore the detail is not so worrying as would be as much detail put in freehand, aimlessly and unbalanced.

If you will now turn to the cover design of the Larousse given in the August number, you will find it a beautiful production by Grasset, wherein we see also some decorative elements that may be studied in conjunction with what we have written in this and preceding chapters about letters. For example, the use of line with silhouette—we find a dandelion leaf reduced to silhouette, and another laurel wreath like the one pictured on the head of Goethe’s mother. But the lettering of the title is the most interesting part of it. Grasset has studied the Caroline letter, and reproduces it with very scholarly fidelity. Only when you have studied an example like the Caroline alphabet we give from Strange’s book can you appreciate the workmanship and good taste in the Grasset. A companion piece to this is the heading by Auriol where we see a modification of the monumental letter and the uncial as in the d and the r. Here the initials J J and the initial L are Gothic in principle, and you will not fail to see how {205}