The beauty of all these books reinforced the influence of the Kelmscott Press ones, by proving that what Morris had done on his own lines could be done by lesser men with the variations suggested by their individual tastes. They reinforced also the proof which Morris had given, that so long as it is regarded as a hobby (or in a commercial house as an advertisement) the production of really fine specimens of printing is not an impossibly expensive one. Morris made no profit from the Kelmscott books as a publisher; could allot himself no payment for all the magnificent decorative work which he put into them with his own hands. He got nothing from his venture save the joy of achievement and pleasure of giving copies to his friends. But he proved the existence of a public willing to pay for the cost of print and paper, even when both print and paper were the best which money could buy; and I believe that most venturers in the same field have been supported to about the same extent. From our present point of view, this is one of the most important results which Morris achieved. The direct influence of his work on men like Mr. Updike and Mr. Bruce Rogers can only be reckoned very slight. But if the Kelmscott books had not made the success they did, neither Mr. Updike nor Mr. Bruce Rogers would have been given his chance, and to make it possible for younger men to get their chance is one of the finest things a master craftsman can do.
Private presses have multiplied greatly in the last thirty years, and some of them have done fine work. But the influence which they are exercising on the commercial printing of the present day is not in any way comparable to that which the Kelmscott and Doves books exercised a generation ago. There is no virtue in a book being printed in a small edition or in a private house, and no virtue in producing endless specimens of printing rather than books. Mr. Meynell and the Nonesuch Press (whose achievements I should admire much more joyously if it had not been called a "press") have shown what a diversity of interesting work can be obtained from commercial printers by a man who has good taste and knows how to get what he wants. When fine work can be obtained in this way private presses seem of little use save as an amusement to their owners. But no one is as yet making full use of the revolution (a much greater revolution than that inaugurated by the Aldine italics) which the "Monotype" machine has effected in modern printing just at the moment when (owing to the economic conditions, compositors having at last secured a fair wage) it was most needed. Thanks to the wonderful facility with which small types can now be cut and the greater quickness of machine-setting there is now only one obstacle to a new triumph of the Small Book Beautiful; and that is the obsession of the paymaster, the Customer, that it is unreasonable to expect him to pay anything approaching the same price for compact books in small clear type with no needless expanse of blank paper around the type page, as for the same number of words printed in larger type and with much more blank paper. The obsession is fostered by the fact that the reprints of popular books which have passed out of copyright and which often are produced in very pretty forms, are sold in large quantities at small prices, because no author has to make a livelihood out of them. But if a book does not appeal to a large public and yet has to earn money for its author it cannot be sold at a low price, and it is childish for the customer to insist that this fact should be concealed from him by books being made needlessly large in order that he may persuade himself that he is still getting plenty for his money. Publishers and Printers and Authors should unite to educate their paymaster the Customer on this point, and it is much to their interest to do so, for the book space which is now occupied by a couple of hundred volumes might easily hold two or three times as many if all books were printed with pleasant compactness. If an Amateur would arise who would help to train Customers to pay high prices for beautiful compact books he would be doing good service. At present most of the finely printed books are needlessly and inconveniently large.
FOOTNOTES:
[33] The story of Bible-printing in England runs on very much the same lines. As soon as it was decided that English Bibles were to be placed in all churches, the printers were chosen, the price was fixed and every Parish was ordered to supply itself with a copy. From that day to this, with only a very partial exception for a few years under Queen Elizabeth, the printing of the plain text of the Bible has been a monopoly in England. Since the seventeenth century it has been kept absolutely in the hands of the King's Printers and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. From about 1770 onwards various provincial printers tried to circumvent this monopoly by printing Bibles with only a nominal amount of commentary, but hardly any of them found it worth while to issue a second edition. The monopolists knew that to maintain their rights in the nineteenth century, which made unrestricted competition into a fetish, they must give good value to buyers, ensure good workmanship, and give their workmen no ground for complaint. They have fulfilled all three conditions, and as a result we still have a Bible Trust in England, which is a Trust in the true meaning of the word, because it is worked in the interest of everyone concerned.