Books and Printing; a Treasury for Typophiles - Unknown

The development of trade book-making since 1920 has been an extraordinary phenomenon in the conservative business of publishing. At that time most publishers looked upon "manufacturing" as a necessary but routine activity, ranking with accounting, shipping and such, and on a far lower intellectual plane than the cultivation of authors and reviewers, or the writing of good blurbs. The production of books was usually entrusted to an uninspired saint who was expected to be hard on his printer's back and soft under his boss's feet. The idea of the publisher himself taking any interest in the aesthetics of book-making was thought to be a trifle queer.

There was, to be sure, a small traffic in books printed for collectors, and the term "fine printing" had already come to mean "not printed to be read." Typography, as usual, was less than twenty years behind current architecture, and American type founders had already cleaned up the Renaissance and were well on their way into the eighteenth century, while American typographers, like interior decorators, were learning to hop nimbly from period to period. Everyone was learning to blame the machine for the things we were too greedy or too lazy to do properly; fortunately small power presses could be made to imitate hand-press printing, so it was not really necessary to do business at hand-press rates.

In the field of general publishing, however, the hand-press page was out of the question, period styles were incongruous, and the real problem of designing the trade book had never been attempted, because it had never been seen with any clarity. There were many experiments with new binding materials and designs, and with printers' flowers and other typographic embellishment, but these were all attempts to "dress up" the old formats, and arose from no real understanding of the problem.

Today [1935], thanks to the leadership of a very few publishers, the educational work of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and perhaps to the enthusiasm of the designers themselves, there is a steadily widening appreciation of good trade book-making, and a better perception of the problem among book-makers. We are learning to plan books in three dimensions, considering proportion and weight and the texture of materials—designing for the hand as well as for the eyes. We are getting free of "period" styles and "period" motifs, and developing a new idiom to suit new methods of production. We are finally trying to make the physical aspect of our books bear some relation to the culture of our own time.

Everyone has come to recognize certain aesthetic values in cheap machine-made glass and metal-ware, if it be designed for the machine and does not attempt to imitate the hand-made, and we find in it a quality different from, but not necessarily inferior to, that of the more elegant article. Thus in printing we are coming to realize that electrotyped plates, made from machine-set type and printed on wood-pulp paper on a perfecting cylinder press can produce a page quite as satisfactory, aesthetically, as the product of the hand-press. It is this new sense of values, born of respect for the machine and for what it can do if used with character, that must be the basis of the designer's attitude. If he is working with his fingers crossed, his work will show it.

The problem of suiting type to subject is the cause of much confusion. We give too little study to the characteristics of type-faces, and the announcements of the foundries and composing-machine people frequently attribute the most fantastic qualities to their new types.

Furthermore, most of the faces available on the composing machines have been cut to reproduce some earlier design, and few to meet the contemporary technical or literary requirements, so that we have several great gaps in the line of type resources that need to be filled. Recent books examined, and a great part of all current book-making, show that we have largely thrown off the reactionary hand-press ideal, and that we are learning to construct instead of decorate. We have finally obtained a supply of modern book cloth; Europe has given us a supply of modern display types; and we are anxiously awaiting the composing-machine companies' arrival in the Twentieth Century.

Two years later: