Books and Printing; a Treasury for Typophiles

by Unknown

We have, then, the three alphabets, and these are the printer's main outfit; all other sorts of letters are in the nature of fancy letters, useful in inverse proportion to the importance and quantity of his output. The more serious the class of book he prints, the wider the public to whom he appeals, so much the more solemn and impersonal and normal will be and should be his typography. But he will not call that book serious which is merely widely bought, and he will not call that a wide appeal which is made simply to a mob of forcibly educated proletarians. A serious book is one which is good in itself according to standards of goodness set by infallible authority, and a wide appeal is one made to intelligent people of all times and nations.

The invention of printing and the breakdown of the medieval world happened at the same time; and that breakdown, tho' hastened by corruption in the Church, was chiefly caused by the recrudescence of a commercialism which had not had a proper chance since the time of the Romans. The invention of double-entry book-keeping also happened about the same time, and though, as with modern mechanical invention, the work was done by men of brains rather than men of business, it was the latter who gained the chief advantage.

Printing, a cheaper method of reproducing books than hand-writing, came therefore just at the right moment. Since its first fine careless rapture, and in spite of the genuinely disinterested efforts of ecclesiastical presses, University presses and the work of many notable individual printers and type-founders, the history of printing has been the history of its commercial exploitation. As is natural with men of business, the worse appears the better reason. Financial success is, rightly, their only aim, and technical perfection the only criterion they know how to apply to their works.

TYPOGRAPHY (the reproduction of lettering by means of movable letter types) was originally done by pressing the inked surface or "face" of a letter made of wood or metal against a surface of paper or vellum. The unevenness and hardness of paper, the irregularities of types (both in respect of their printing faces and the dimensions of their "bodies") and the mechanical imperfections of presses and printing methods made the work of early printers notable for corresponding unevennesses, irregularities and mechanical imperfections. To ensure that every letter left its mark more or less completely and evenly, considerable and noticeable impression was made in the paper. The printed letter was a coloured letter at the bottom of a ditch.

The subsequent development of typography was chiefly die development of technical improvements, more accurately cast types, smoother paper, mechanically perfect presses. Apart from the history of its commercial exploitation, the history of printing has been the history of the abolition of the impression. A print is properly a dent made by pressing; the history of letter-press printing has been the history of the abolition of that dent.

But the very smooth paper and the mechanically very perfect presses required for printing which shall show no "impression" can only be produced in a world which cares for such things, and such a world is of its nature inhuman. The industrial world of today is such, and it has the printing it desires and deserves. In the industrial world Typography, like house building and sanitary engineering, is one of the necessary arts—a thing to be done in working hours, those during which one is buoyed up by the knowledge that one is serving one's fellow men and neither enjoying oneself like an artist nor praising God like a man of prudence. In such a world the only excuse for anything is that it is of service.

Printing which makes any claim on its own account, printers who give themselves the status of poets or painters, are to be condemned; they are not serving; they are shirking. Such is the tone of the more romantic among men of commerce; and the consequence is a pseudo-asceticism and a bastard aesthetics. The asceticism is only a sham because the test of service is the profits shown in the accounts; and the aesthetics is bastard because it is not founded upon the reasonable pleasure of the mind of the workman and of his customer, but upon the snobbery of museum students employed by men of commerce to give a saleable appearance to articles too dull otherwise to please even the readers of The Daily Mail.

Nevertheless, as we have already shown, commercial printing, machine printing, industrial printing would have its own proper goodness if it were studiously plain and starkly efficient. Our quarrel is not with such a thing but only with the thing that is neither one nor the other—neither really mechanically perfect and physically serviceable nor really a work of art, i.e., a thing made by a man who, however laughable it may seem to men of business, loves God and does what he likes, who serves his fellow men because he is wrapped up in serving God—to whom the service of God is so commonplace that it is as much bad form to mention it as among men of business it is bad form to mention profits.

There are, then, two typographies, as there are two worlds; and, apart from God or profits, the test of one is mechanical perfection, and of the other sanctity—the commercial article at its best is simply physically serviceable and, per accidens, beautiful in its efficiency; the work of art at its best is beautiful in its very substance and, per accidens, as serviceable as an article of commerce.

The typography of Industrialism, when it is not deliberately diabolical and designed to deceive, will be plain; and in spite of the wealth of its resources—a thousand varieties of inks, papers, presses and mechanical processes for the reproduction of the designs of tame designers—it will be entirely free from exuberance and fancy. Every sort of ornament will be omitted; for printers' flowers will not spring in such a soil, and fancy lettering is nauseating when it is not the fancy of type-founders and printers but simply of those who desire to make something appear better than it is. Paradoxical though it be, the greater the wealth of appliances, the less is the power of using it. All the while that the technical and mechanical good quality is increasing, the de-humanizing of the workmen is also increasing. As we become more and more able to print finer and more elaborate and delicate types of letter it becomes more and more intellectually imperative to standardize all forms and obliterate all elaborations and fancifulness. It becomes easier and easier to print any kind of thing, but more and more imperative to print only one kind.