Books and Printing; a Treasury for Typophiles

by Unknown

Mr. Chairman and Members of The American Institute of Graphic Arts:

The generosity of your invitation to me to speak on this important occasion leaves me a trifle bewildered. I am so accustomed to being told to keep my opinions to myself that being thus unexpectedly encouraged to express them gives me some cause to wonder if I have, or ever had, any opinions upon the graphic arts worth expressing. But since it is the theory of your Committee that I have, and it may never be anybody's theory again, and they have gone so far as to give me no instructions or suggestions as to the scope or the limitations of what I might say, it would seem as ungracious to decline such an exceptional offer as it would be to abuse it. So if I accept it as wholeheartedly as I believe it was given—if I take you at your word and say things that I have long wanted to hear somebody say—I hope it will not be thought an abuse of this kindly tendered privilege.

I realize that, nominally at least, my subject must be that of printing and typography as exemplified by the selection of the fifty best books of the year which we are here to celebrate; and I suppose, by comparison to deplore the fifty thousand worst books which may be seen elsewhere. But by what may seem a very odd paradox, I don't quite know how to stick to this subject without wandering a good way off it. Or, perhaps I should say that I cannot approach it directly except by a very roundabout way.

If I have a thesis for these remarks, I can only develop it in terms of a tree. This is because I do not believe that invention in the arts can be picked from empty space like objects in a prestidigitator's act. Fruits really grow on trees and trees have roots in the earth. The tree I have in mind is cultural civilization: one of its limbs is art and a branch of this we call the graphic arts, and a twig on this branch is printing and typography. I promise not to dig into the roots of this tree, but I may be found, monkey-wise, climbing all over it before I am through.

I am at some disadvantage in that I do not belong to any organizations for the advancement of typography and the graphic arts—not even to this one—and I am ill-informed and out of touch with what is going on in these fields except by casual observation. But as members of this very useful organization, you are not engaged in printing or other graphic arts, I take it, solely for each other, but for the enjoyment and delectation of the world at large. So there is a partially compensating advantage in my being "at large" myself, and thus able to speak of present trends in the graphic arts as they appear from the outside, looking in. But this advantage may in turn be offset by the fact that I cannot honestly speak of what I see with much enthusiasm. I can bring you no message of hope or light of inspiration. Much as I am filled with admiration and respect for many individual talents and accomplishments that still contrive to exist, they seem to me to stand unhappily isolated in what I can't help viewing as artistic bankruptcy and cultural chaos. Among them are printers making beautiful books and other things about as well as these things have ever been made. But as to the general volume of printing, no one has asked me, to be sure, what I thought was the lowest point of artistic taste in the five hundred years of its existence which we are celebrating this year, but if anyone should ask me, I would be bound to say that we have reached that point just about now. Things may get worse, but it's hard to see how they can. To paraphrase a remark in the concluding chapter of Updike's classic work on printing types, it has taken printers and publishers five hundred years to find out how wretchedly books and other things can be made and still sell.

I am not forgetting that there were some very benighted periods of taste in other centuries that would seem to refute this sweeping assertion. Perhaps it is worth noting here—and the fact is peculiarly ironical—that the design and style of official and governmental things—money, postage stamps, bonds and stock certificates—was created and solidified into a seemingly unalterable convention at that hitherto all time low point of the decorative arts in the mid-nineteenth century. So powerful is this convention that we would be suspicious of a ten dollar bill that was not visually saturated with ugliness. A counterfeiter with aesthetic sensibilities must not only sweat blood but weep tears over the job of imitating one. But in the sadly perverted taste of that epoch there was a kind of innocence: standards were still respected, and proficiency, though overworked and misdirected, was recognized and not condemned.

Today when I look about in the bookstore, and more especially on the newsstands, or open the pages of most of the magazines with the biggest circulations, I want to do what the little boy did in the story which was a favorite of my friend, the late Hal Marchbanks. The little boy had been to his first party, and when he arrived home, his mother said: "Did mama's little boy have a nice time at the party?" "Yep," he replied. "What did mama's little boy do at the party?" "I thow'd up."

Against this steady decline in both taste and workmanship, your fifty books selection and exhibit each year has been a noble effort, and in this country, almost the only concerted one of consequence to uphold some standards. You have inspired both publishers and printers to earnest endeavor to improve their products with frequently admirable results. But these are only fifty books out of how many other books and other printed things. Without this good work of yours, one wonders if any standards at all would survive the flood of cheap and easy mechanization, careless workmanship and bad taste. Not that there is anything wrong with machines. The first hand press, it should be remembered by its sentimental admirers, was also a machine. We have not learned to use the machines at their best, but accepted them like fruits in the Garden of Eden, and thought of nothing but how much we could get out of them in speed and quantity and profit. Because we can do with them easily what formerly demanded time and pains to do at all, we have too easily assumed that they delivered us from the need of any time or pains.

Before I go any farther on or off the track with these random remarks, I should like it to be understood that I am addressing them particularly to any students and beginners in the graphic arts that may be present, rather than to those who are arrived. I am a student and still a beginner myself, and so my interest and my heart are naturally with my own kindred. I speak as an old beginner to younger ones. I am at a great disadvantage with regard to the number of years I have left in which to get started, and if I have any advantage at all, it is only in experience with the bewilderments and illusions that clutter our common way in learning and trying to practice one or more of the graphic arts. The confusions and distraction of this day make the path of the student and beginner rough and tortuous. Having travelled it for more years than I like to admit, when I look backward, I am astonished to discover the number of twists and turns and pitfalls I might just as well have spared myself.

Perhaps the most foolish of these was the fear of not being original—what Romain Rolland calls "the fear of the already said." The notion that I must do something new every day, or I would not be creative—forgetting that God made the planets all the same shape as far as we can see, and that the oak tree does not alter the form of its leaves from year to year. There is no supposition so pathetically misleading as that creative originality is within your own volition—the notion that it can be acquired leads to deplorable results. It distracts the mind and energies of the young student from gaining needful technical competence—from learning his trade, and in more mature stages tempts the would-be artist into vulgar mannerisms and formulas which he will call his "style."