FOOTNOTES:
[38] Plain Printing Types, Theodore L. De Vinne, New York, 1902.
James Shand
AUTHOR AND PRINTER: G.B.S. AND R. & R. C.: 1898-1948
From Alphabet and Image: 8, Winter, 1948. Copyright by Art and Technics, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the author and publisher.
Topolski's drawing from
the illustrated Penguin Pygmalion.
Author and printer, publisher and book-seller; these conjunctions flow too easily from the pen. They cover an immeasurable sum of human experience, both melancholy and magnificent, in the long history of the book trade; they should be used with more reserve.
Fortunately for the reader, the writer is no doctor in bibliography expounding the perils and diseases of textual transmission, but a typographical reporter, with an interim case-history of a particular author, a particular printer and a healthy body of work in progress.
Our author is George Bernard Shaw, sometime of Dublin: our printer, R. & R. Clark, now, as always, of Edinburgh. The association is unique in more than a geographical sense; in time it covers fifty years; in space it defies quantitative analysis. Bernard Shaw's quota, if consigned to the Society of Authors, would probably make that body independent of the publishing trade for years to come.