To go back to nature and become an amateur printer in such an industrialized book world is like working in the garden when you are bored with salad. You really get back to the roots of words. If you are a genuine amateur printer, and set the type and print the pages yourself, you actually can share in the creative agonies and satisfactions of the author. For you put down his words, letter for letter in your type-stick, just as he did with his quill or his battered Remington. The best way on earth to appreciate an author and his creative spirit (or for that matter to realize more quickly the faults in him) is to pick him up letter by letter from a California case. An even more acid test is to distribute the type after printing him. In such a case you pick up half a dozen lines of type at once and work backwards, distributing the last word of the last line first. It is a revelation how the hollowness of an author can show up under this treatment. It is especially cruel to poets, for every word which is not really necessary, which is there just for padding or for a rhythm or a rhyme, becomes as noticeable as the well-known sore thumb. But the genuine, sincere author with a pure style stands up beautifully under such treatment, and has his reward in your pleasure at this discovery.
After you have set your author's type you must make up his pages, choose his decorations or illustrations, and set his headings. You must decide whether to stretch him to twenty-four pages or condense him to sixteen. You must buy his paper, lock up his pages in your chase, make him ready, curse your press which is printing him, apply your ink to his words, and impress him for posterity. Perhaps you will thereafter fold him, sew him, and encase him in boards.
In so doing, you become, to the extent of sixteen or twenty-four pages, in an edition of one hundred or three hundred copies, God. You have created something which did not exist before, and which would not have existed save for your thinking brain and tired back and dirty hands. True, you have not created Heaven and Earth, and you have undoubtedly worked at your creation for more than the original quota of six days. But anyway you have given the world something which was at first only words you loved, and is now a whole, real book, which you love all the more because it is your book, your child, your embodiment of those words. That is the fun and satisfaction of being an amateur. In our printing world there is no other satisfaction equal to it.
Good old Ralph Waldo Emerson was mortally right when he wrote down his doctrine of Compensation. His doctrine of Compensation says that every pleasure carries some penalty, every gain some kind of loss. Every duty accepted gives you a satisfaction, and every satisfaction received involves you in a duty. Thus far I have written of the satisfaction of your being an amateur printer. Now I wish to write of your duty and obligation.
The amateur book printer has a duty which, if he will accept it, will in the long run return to him the greatest satisfaction. This duty is to teach the professional, by example, about the outer cultural world, and to experiment for him in matters of printing style. Now this is directly contrary to what ninety out of one hundred current amateurs would seem to think, and I must therefore beg their ninety pardons if I disturb their habits of mind.
Most amateurs either don't trouble their minds about problems of printing style at all, or else they fall too easily into the habit of working in the Colonial style, or Venetian style, or some other historical style, rather than in a contemporary one. Maybe they do so for psychological reasons. And maybe not. I am too set in my diction to learn the trick of talking in psychological terms. I would express their case like this: Amateurs who work in historical styles do so because they are romantics, romantics who turn away from the impersonal machine world of the present for a breath of the more human and glamorous-seeming past. I sympathize with such an instinct, and hold myself ready to defend any man who seeks to re-inject a human element into the printing craft.
The trouble is, such amateurs think that because printing in the past was done by hand, and because there is something more satisfying and human about printing by hand, they must therefore work in an antique printing style and make Colonial and Venetian books in order to enjoy themselves. This is a false syllogism. I strongly recommend printing by hand to amateurs because it will give them greater satisfaction, not because it will make their books look like antiques. It is too easy to fabricate such antiques, and to do so will in the long run give you less enjoyment than making something which in style is original and new.
As a matter of fact it is already too late to think in terms of revivals and reproductions. In printing, the revival habit started over a hundred years ago with Whittingham and Pickering, when they dusted off the forgotten Caslon types and the eighteenth-century style. It has been going on ever since, and reached a climax of understanding and skill in our century at the hands of Updike, Rogers, Rollins, Goudy, and others. This revivalism was a kind of search for humanism, and a kind of rebellion against commercialism. These men were not unique. In every generation since 1800, in every art and craft, every field of thought, the Industrial Revolution has prompted men to make the same search backward for satisfactions which the modern world did not seem to offer.
Too many of our amateurs are still making the same search, although the Industrial Revolution is well over one hundred years old, all the necessary backward searching has been done, and all the historical styles have been reworked. Our predecessors have made it unnecessary for us to go through the process once again. We can see now that their work was an escape perhaps for them, but that it can never be a durable way of creative realization for us. From now on, we must join up with the forward-looking crowd who think they can build a new world.