The ideal book or book beautiful

by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson

THE IDEAL BOOK OR BOOK BEAUTIFUL A TRACT ON CALLIGRAPHY PRINTING AND ILLUSTRATION & ON THE BOOK BEAUTIFUL AS A WHOLE

THE DOVES PRESS

№ 1 THE TERRACE HAMMERSMITH

MDCCCC

THE IDEAL BOOK OR BOOK BEAUTIFUL is a composite thing made up of many parts & may be made beautiful by the beauty of each of its parts—its literary content, its material or materials, its writing or printing, its illumination or illustration, its binding & decoration—of each of its parts in subordination to the whole which collectively they constitute: or it may be made beautiful by the supreme beauty of one or more of its parts, all the other parts subordinating or even effacing themselves for the sake of this one or more, & each in turn being capable of playing this supreme part and each in its own peculiar and characteristic way. On the other hand each contributory craft may usurp the functions of the rest & of the whole and growing beautiful beyond all bounds ruin for its own the common cause. I propose in this brief essay, putting aside for the moment the material, paper or vellum, the binding & decoration, & the literary content of the Book Beautiful, to say a few words on the artistic treatment of the vehicle of expression—Calligraphy, Printing, & Illustration—and on the Book Beautiful as a whole.

CALLIGRAPHY

HANDWRITING and hand decoration of letter & page are at the root of the Book Beautiful, are at the root of Typography & of woodcut or engraved Decoration, & every printer, & indeed every one having to do with the making of books should ground himself in the practice or knowledge of the Art of Beautiful Writing or Calligraphy, and let both hand and soul luxuriate and rejoice for a while in the art of Illumination. Such practice would keep Type alive under the influence of an ever living & fluent prototype. It would supply a stock of exemplars & suggestions from which the Typographer might cautiously borrow, converting into his own rigid stock such of the new beautiful growths of Calligraphy as commended themselves to him for the purpose.

¶ In the making of the Written Book, moreover, in which various modes of presentment are combined, symbolical and pictorial, the adjustment of letter to letter, of word to word, of picture to text & of text to picture, and of the whole to the subject matter & to the page, admits of great nicety and perfection. The type is fluid, and the letters and words, picture, text, & page are conceived of as one and are all executed by one hand, or by several hands all working together without intermediation on one identical page and with a view to one identical effect. In the Printed Book this adjustment is more difficult. The type is rigid and implacable. The labour is divided and dispersed: the picture or illustration, for example, is too often done quite independently & at a distance, without thought of the printed page, & inserted, a stranger, amid an alien type. Yet in the making of the printed book, as in the making of the written book, this adjustment is essential, & should be specially borne in mind, and Calligraphy and immediate decoration by hand and the unity which should be inseparably associated therewith would serve as an admirable discipline to that end.

¶ Perhaps the most interesting things to note historically in this connexion are (1) that all Calligraphy in Italy, Spain, France, Germany & England would seem to be a development, with many subdivisions, of Roman Calligraphy, itself a development of Greek, and that the beautiful formation of the letters and their orderly placement in sequence upon the rectangular page are but modes of that general delight in the making of order and beauty which is the note of unity throughout all the arts: and (2) that in Calligraphy, as in all the arts, a beauty of decoration once started on its way, proceeds to throw off the conditions of its birth and where it was meant to be only a minister to make itself master. The stages in this usurpation in the case of Calligraphy are singularly well marked & apparent. At the outset, Calligraphy was uniform writing only, a succession of SQUARE CAPITALS all of equal value. Then came the enlargement of the sphere of action, so to speak, of letters in prominent positions, of initial letters & their decorative treatment: then, in consequence of this very enlargement, a further enlargement or emphasis which ended in ceasing to be adjective decoration & becoming a substantive beauty, as of a picture, framed by the adjacent illumination & writing, but superior to them as the flower to the leaf. Each of these stages has a beauty of its own, and each in its turn constitutes a Book in some sense a Beautiful Book. But in the passage from the image created in the mind by abstract symbolism to the image expressed on the page by verisimilitude, the book itself underwent a change & became in the process, not a vehicle for the conveyance of an image, but itself the image, to be appreciated not so much by the imagination, the inner eye, as directly by the outer eye, the sense of sight itself; just as on the stage the scenery created at first imaginatively by the spectators, in obedience to the influence of the actor, is now presented externally by the scene painter & costumier in simulated reality. I apprehend that when the illuminator, passing on from the decoration of significant or initial letters, took to the making of pictures in this fashion within the folds of them, he was pressing his art too far. He was in danger, as the event showed, of subordinating his Text to himself, of sacrificing the thing signified to the mode of its signification, for in the end the written communication became as it were nothing, or but the framework or apology to support a succession of beautiful pictures, beautiful indeed, but beautiful at the expense of the Text which they had set out to magnify.

¶ And we may in this connexion safely moralize & say that when many arts combine, or propose to combine, to the making of one thing, as the process continues, & the several arts develop, each will attempt to assert itself to the destruction of the one thing needful, to the making of which they at first all combined in a common subordination. Thus in our own case the illuminator destroyed by over relative development the purely written text, & the moral is that every artist, in contributing to the Book Beautiful, must keep himself well in hand and strictly subordinate both his art and his ambition to the end in view. He must remember that in such a case his art is a means only & not itself an end.