PRESS MARK, ITS SECOND, BY FREDERIC W. GOUDY. Mr. Ransom was associated with the Village Press during its beginning months at Park Ridge, Ill., in the Summer of 1903.
POSTSCRIPT, 1951:
Twenty-four years later the question is still academic. Instead of a few distinguished private presses there is now a spate of "press books," some of which are produced in home privacy, others designed or printed or published by an outstanding personality, and a few, regrettably, on the border line of the commercial limited editions racket. But the meaning of "privacy" remains unchanged and a private press is what it has always been, a personal activity. I cannot improve on my original statement.
To fill out the record with some definitions that were unknown or omitted in the earlier chapter, and to get all of the statements into one place, we may begin with William Morris's Note on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press (1898): "I began printing books with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty, while at the same time they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye, or trouble the intellect of the reader by eccentricity of form in the letters."
C. R. Ashbee, of the Essex House Press, stated in The Private Press: A Study in Idealism (1909): "A private press as we understand it at the present day in England and America is a Press whose objective is first of all an aesthetic one, a press that if it is to have real worth challenges support on a basis of Standard, caters for a limited market and is not concerned with the question of the Commercial development of printing by machinery." In 1933 (also twenty-four years later) he repeated that definition in The Book-Collector's Quarterly (No. XI, p. 72) and added: "That, I think, is as near as we shall get."
For the Doves Press, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson explained his purpose in the three Catalogues Raisonné of 1908, 1911, and 1916, shortened in the last: "... to attack the problem of Typography as presented by ordinary books in the various forms of Verse, Prose, and Dialogue and, keeping always in mind the principles laid down in the Book Beautiful, to attempt its solution by the simple arrangement of the whole Book, as a whole, with due regard to its parts and to the emphasis of its capital divisions rather than by the addition & splendour of applied ornament."
Among the commentators and bibliographers, Robert Steele, in The Revival of Printing (1912) makes no attempt at definition, and G. S. Tomkinson, in his Select Bibliography of Modern Presses (1928) "still seeks the right answers." In the latter book, Bernard H. Newdigate's introduction contains two statements which indicate the spirit that informs private presses and in recent years has expanded into more public book-making: "... a zeal in the pursuit of their art which has been inspired by something more than mere money-making, and in many cases by the attainment of a degree of excellence which invests their work with a peculiar interest for all those who study printing..." and specifically about operators of private presses who "have printed their books because they have judged the books worth printing for their own sakes, or worth printing in some particular way; and it is the particular way in which each of these printers has sought to give expression to his conception of how his books should be printed and the way in which he has overcome the limitations of his type and plant and solved the several problems which beset the studious printer in every detail of his work, that give them so much individual interest...."
In later years, we have had noble bibliographies of the Nonesuch, Grabhorn, and Ashendene Presses, Bruce Rogers' Paragraphs on Printing, and Daniel Berkeley Updike's Notes on the Merrymount Press and Some Aspects of Printing, Old and New. All of these are required reading for collectors of press books, and each represents a personal viewpoint, but only one defines a private press.
That is the Ashendene Bibliography, but one who seeks for a formal declaration will not find it. The few phrases that can be isolated—" ... the absorbing interest of an otherwise busy life...."—"The Press was started solely for the sake of the interest and amusement I expected to derive from it...."—"... the striving after an ideal...."—these casual comments are slender evidence. If, however, the entire Foreword is read, one discovers just why and how a private press is operated—"the letter killeth, but the spirit maketh alive."