Books and Printing; a Treasury for Typophiles

by Unknown

The marvels of color photography have revealed to us hitherto unsuspected depths of aesthetic sordidness. This factual reproduction of what we are told are "Nature's colors," I am given to understand, is not yet wholly perfected. Only when it is will we know the worst—only then will we know what the things that through our eyes have stirred us by their beauty, really are! Perhaps another super instrument of disillusionment will be invented to reveal us, not in form and color alone, but in spirit, to each other as we really are. Good-by then to human love, respect and friendship!

I have strayed a good way from my subject, as I warned you that I might; and these remarks must appear by now to be not only ramblings but the ravings of an old reactionary who is blind to anything that is new. That deduction will be almost literally correct, ladies and gentlemen. There is no denying that I am old, and toward much that I see around me, I am reactionary; and I have learned nothing in all my years of striving for knowledge, more convincing than that statement in the Book of Ecclesiastes to the effect that there is nothing new under the sun. I plead guilty to this hideous indictment and throw myself on the mercy of this court. I am even happy to have learned that much, and wish, in the manner of the camp meeting revivalist, that I might pass on something of this blessed revelation to the "brethern and sistern" present.

While I thus brazenly deny the existence of anything really new, and fail to recognize what is called "progress" and deplore the waste of talent and energy that is dissipated in striving for these things, I am far from blind to the value of revolt. Our creative sense is all too prone to doze off into dreams of past glories. From these, and the sterile copying of them, we may be awakened and rescued by even the crudest of revolutions. We may benefit from them provided we do not let them tear up our roots—provided we still can recognize an illusion when we meet it. The squirrel in his revolving cage must have some illusion of progress, else he would not take any exercise, and without exercise he would fatten and sicken and die.

And, remember, there is always progress to be made within yourselves, no matter if it is the same progress in the same direction that has been made by countless other souls. And there will, I hope, always be things new to you, as there are every day things new to me, even if the sun has seen them all before. I don't want to live a day longer than I can learn.

There is no reason to suppose that there is not today as much latent talent for the arts in existence, as at any time in their history. But talent for art is not talent for being an artist—one may have much of the one, without much of the other. It seems to me that there are more temptations and distractions working against the talent to be an artist today than ever before. More alluring short cuts and seductive philosophies—a disturbing babel of undigested ideas and indigestible objectives. If in this riot you can keep your heads and not lose sight of the important difference between "a grain of truth" and the whole truth, if you can grow in understanding of what it is you want to do, you may, even now, have a good chance of doing it.

But what has all this to do with printing and typography and their related graphic arts? I seem by now to be so far off the track that it will take a derrick and wrecking crew to get me back on again. As a matter of fact I have not forgotten the subject altogether and have, in my lumbering way, been working toward it. But because I can't think of typography as an art in itself, unrelated to all the other arts, I could not approach it except by the way I have.

All of these things that I have been complaining about in the other arts, have their counterparts in present-day typography and printing. The same restless craving for something "new," the same preoccupation with isms, the same monotonous sameness. But this poison is aggravated in the case of printing and typography, by the fact that of all the arts, it is, by its very nature and purpose, the most conventional. If it is an art at all, it is an art to serve another art. It is good only in so far as it serves well and not on any account good for any other reason. It is not the business of type and printing to show off, and when, as it now so frequently does, it engages in exhibitionistic antics of its own, it is just a bad servant.

For this reason the embarrassing ineptitude of the current efforts toward a "new typography" are even more distressing than similar contortions in other fields. Typography, I repeat, is a servant—the servant of thought and language to which it gives visible existence. When there are new ways of thinking and a new language, it will be time enough for a new typography. When we have altered all of our manners and social customs, only then will it be time to radically alter the well grounded conventions of this very minor art. Within them there is now ample room, as there always has been, for the exercise of ingenuity, skill and individual taste. I suggest that those who cannot abide the conventions of typography are mostly those who have never tried them.

In what does the newness of this new typography consist? It seems to be new as the neu in neurosis from which it largely derives. It is new as it would be new for a man to enter the dining room on his hands instead of his feet, and instead of eating his soup, to pour it into his hostess's lap. It is as new and agreeable and pleasing to look at as delirium tremens which it closely resembles. The new typography engages in such side-splitting pranks as putting the margins of a book page in just the opposite arrangement to that which practical utility and well founded tradition have always placed them. It might with equal reason and originality, turn the type page upside down. In advertising display it makes use of that highly original and refreshing device of printing what is to be read at a cockeyed angle. The make-up expert indulges that other fresh and original dodge of bleeding pictures off the edge of the page so that a flat two dimensional photograph is viewed without a frame on two of its sides and must compete with a background of all the three dimensional things in the room.

I refuse to bore you or myself by enumerating all the tiresome stock-in-trade eccentricities of the typographic expert in search of something new—the epileptic fits he throws to attract attention to himself at the expense of the words he is printing. You see enough of them every day to know what I mean. Nearly every magazine and newspaper page, not to mention a good many books, present the same revolting spectacle—the order of the day, it seems, is disorder.