Books and Printing; a Treasury for Typophiles - Unknown

EDINBURGH, MAY 29TH, 1713

Printers as Men of the World

EVELYN HARTER

Printers are usually judged as printers, and there are those who hold that this is as it should be, that the printer should stick to his pica rule and follow copy out the window. But in their spare time printers also eat, vote, marry and go to war. It would therefore be possible to look at them from various points of view, as, for instance, how many were vegetarians, anarchists, bigamists and top sergeants. This could be so of any group of craftsmen. If we look at printers from another viewpoint, as to whether they were men of the world, it is because of the nature of the stuff with which they work.

I should like to begin obliquely by speaking first of an approach to the history of printing. Probably the history of printing is more limited, definite and easy to encompass than that of almost any subject. That is not to say that anyone can ever learn all of it, or that we cannot go on learning something new about it all our lives. But printing started fairly recently in time; it is its own record. Excluding the science of bibliography, the literature is not large compared, for example, with that of art or philosophy or geology. Yet few people know as much of it as they might know with pleasure, and perhaps the reason for that might be a faulty approach. It is customary to send beginners to study Updike, but it is easy for beginners to get bogged down in Printing Types, particularly if they start to read it from the beginning. Updike's magnificent work is, in its writing and its outline, gratifying to the student whose basic knowledge has been fixed and matured. Beginners move more freely in the pages of George Parker Winship, possibly because he related printing events to world events to a greater extent than does Updike. Usually the person who wishes to learn more about printing has already at hand a lot of names and dates and places vaguely relating to world events of the past. To such a person printing history lends itself readily to the method of study by association. It can be a good game to find out what was happening in printing when Napoleon was looking at the Pyramids, or when Charles I was beheaded. If one is interested in art, he can correlate artists and printers, and find that Leonardo was born about the same time that printing was born in Europe, or he can correlate printing with advances in the knowledge of medicine or agriculture. There are small but interesting links between the history of printing and that of music. For instance William Caslon the elder loved music, and it is possible that the composer Handel sometimes played his new pieces at the concerts held in Caslon's organ room, since the two men had mutual friends in the musical world of London.

There have been printers who were interested in other worlds. The Dutch printer Blaeu studied astronomy under Tycho Brahe, and himself produced in 1600 a celestial globe. The Scottish type-founder Alexander Wilson, although educated as a doctor, became interested in type and left a considerable foundry to his sons before he himself moved on to become professor of astronomy at the University of Glasgow.

If you wish to make the most of this method, you must do it yourself. Then it is you who will have the fun, and then what you learn will stick. What follows illustrates the method briefly by looking at a number of printers in the past five hundred years from one angle, judging them not simply as printers but as men of the world.