¶ It is worthy of remark that the Church fought against the idolatry of its Scribes, & sought to curtail the too exuberant beauty of their illuminators, & a similar attempt was made to keep down the idolatry of the Binder. The Church has perhaps lost all pretension even to influence in this respect. But artists should not need the guidance of anything outside themselves as artists. They should, as artists, realise that the world of art is a commonweal, and that the most beautiful art is a composite work, higher than the art of each, and that the art of each is contributory, only to be exercised in due subordination to the ideal which is the creation of all.
TYPOGRAPHY
THE PASSAGE from the Written Book to the Printed Book was sudden & complete. Nor is it wonderful that the earliest productions of the printing press are the most beautiful & that the history of its subsequent career is but the history of its decadence. The Printer carried on into Type the tradition of the Calligrapher & of the Calligrapher at his best. As this tradition died out in the distance, the craft of the Printer declined. It is the function of the Calligrapher to revive & restore the craft of the Printer to its original purity of intention & accomplishment. The Printer must at the same time be a Calligrapher, or in touch with him, & there must be in association with the Printing Press a Scriptorium where beautiful writing may be practised and the art of letter-designing kept alive. And there is this further evidence of the dependence of printing upon writing: the great revival in printing which is taking place under our own eyes, is the work of a Printer who before he was a Printer was a Calligrapher & an Illuminator, WILLIAM MORRIS.
¶ The whole duty of Typography, as of Calligraphy, is to communicate to the imagination, without loss by the way, the thought or image intended to be communicated by the Author. And the whole duty of beautiful typography is not to substitute for the beauty or interest of the thing thought and intended to be conveyed by the symbol, a beauty or interest of its own, but, on the one hand, to win access for that communication by the clearness & beauty of the vehicle, and on the other hand, to take advantage of every pause or stage in that communication to interpose some characteristic & restful beauty in its own art. We thus have a reason for the clearness and beauty of the text as a whole, for the especial beauty of the first or introductory page and of the title, and for the especial beauty of the headings of chapters, capital or initial letters, & so on, and an opening for the illustrator as we shall see by and by.
¶ Further, in the case of Poetry, verse, in my opinion, appeals by its form to the eye, as well as to the ear, & should be placed on the page so that its structure may be taken in at a glance and distinctively appreciated, and anything which interferes with this swiftness of apprehension and appreciation, however beautiful in itself, is in relation to the book as a whole a typographical impertinence.
ILLUSTRATION
ILLUSTRATION, the other expressive constituent of the Book Beautiful, is a part of the whole subject matter, in process of symbolical communication, picked out, isolated, & presented pictorially. Besides its relation in the field of the imagination to the rest of the subject matter, the thought of the book, it has a relation & a most important relation, in the field of the senses, to the vehicle of communication, the immediate typographical environment, amid which it appears. And here comes in the question, which has sometimes been confused with the question of relationship, the question of the mode in which the pictorial illustration may be produced & transferred to the page, by woodcut, by steel or copper engraving, or by process. But this seems to me to be an entirely subordinate though important question. The main question is the aspect which the illustration shall be made to take in order to fit it into and amid a page of Typography. And I submit that its aspect must be essentially formal and of the same texture, so to speak, as the letterpress. It should have a set frame or margin to itself, demarcating it distinctly from the text, and the shape & character of the frame, if decorative, should have relation to the page as well as to the illustrative content; and the illustrative content itself should be formal and kept under so as literally to illustrate, and not to dim by over brilliancy the rest of the subject matter left to be communicated to the imagination by the letterpress alone.
THE BOOK BEAUTIFUL AS A WHOLE
FINALLY, if the Book Beautiful may be beautiful by virtue of its writing or printing or illustration, it may also be beautiful, be even more beautiful, by the union of all to the production of one composite whole, the consummate Book Beautiful. Here the idea to be communicated by the book comes first, as the thing of supreme importance. Then comes in attendance upon it, striving for the love of the idea to be itself beautiful, the written or printed page, the decorated or decorative letters, the pictures, set amid the text, and finally the binding, holding the whole in its strong grip and for very love again itself becoming beautiful because in company with the idea.