| PAGE | ||
| British Types for Printing Books. | By Bernard H. Newdigate | [3] |
| Fine Bookbinding in England. | By Douglas Cockerell | [69] |
| The Art of the Book in Germany. | By L. Deubner | [127] |
| The Art of the Book in France. | By E. A. Taylor | [179] |
| The Art of the Book in Austria. | By A. S. Levetus | [203] |
| The Art of the Book in Hungary. | —— | [231] |
| The Art of the Book in Sweden. | By August Brunius | [243] |
| The Art of the Book in America. | By William Dana Orcutt | [259] |
GREAT BRITAIN
BRITISH TYPES FOR PRINTING BOOKS. BY BERNARD H. NEWDIGATE
TO judge rightly of the good or bad features of types used for printing books, we should have some acquaintance at least with the earlier forms from which our modern types have come. Let us therefore glance at the history of the letter from which English books are printed to-day.
The earliest printed books, such as the Mainz Bible and Psalters, were printed in Gothic letter, which in its general character copied the book-hands used by the scribes in Germany, where these books were printed. In Italy, on the other hand, the Gothic hand did not satisfy the fastidious taste of the scholars of the Renaissance, who had adopted for their own a handwriting of which the majuscule letters were inspired, or at least influenced, by the letter used in classical Rome, of which so many admirable examples had survived in the old monumental inscriptions. For the small letters they went back to the fine hand which by the eleventh and twelfth centuries had gradually been formed out of the Caroline minuscules of the ninth and had become the standard book-hand of the greater part of Latin Europe. When the Germans Sweynheim and Pannartz brought printing into Italy, they first printed books in a very beautiful but somewhat heavy Roman letter of strong Gothic tendency. It seems, indeed, to have been somewhat too Gothic for the refined humanistic taste of that day; and when they moved their press to Rome, it was discarded in favour of a letter more like the fashionable scrittura umanistica of the Renaissance. Other Italian printers had founts both of Gothic and of Roman types. The great Venetian printer Jenson, for instance, and many of his fellows printed books in both characters; but the Roman gradually prevailed, first in Italy, then in Spain and France, and later on in England. In Germany, on the other hand, the cradleland of the craft, Gothic letter of a sadly debased type has held its own down to this day. Even in Germany, however, the use of Roman type has gained ground of late years, nationalist feeling notwithstanding.
The Roman type used by the early Italian printers is, then, the prototype from which all other Roman founts are descended. Its development may be traced through such Roman type as was used by Aldus at Venice, by Froben at Basle, by the Estiennes in Paris, by Berthelet and Day in London, by Plantin at Antwerp, by the Elzevirs at Leyden and Amsterdam, and by printers generally right through the seventeenth century and the greater part of the eighteenth. Through all these years types still kept what modern printers call their “old-face” character, which they had acquired from the scrittura umanistica of the Italian Renaissance. In the seventeenth century the letters of the Roman alphabet began to acquire certain new features at the hands of the copper-plate engravers, who supplied the book illustrations of the period. Working with the burin instead of the pen, they naturally used a sharper and finer line and also modified somewhat the curves of the letters, which tended to become more stilted and less open. The tail of the “R,” for instance, which in Jenson's type is thrust forward at an angle of about forty-five degrees, at the hands of some of the seventeenth-century engravers tends to drop more vertically, as in the “R” of “modern” type, the development of which we are seeking to trace. How far and how soon the lettering of the engravers of illustrations came to modify the letters cast by the type-founders is a question which invites further research. A material piece of evidence is supplied by the “Horace” printed by John Pine in 1733. Instead of being printed from type, the text of this book, together with the ornaments and illustrations, was printed from engraved copperplates. In date it was some sixty years prior to the earliest books printed in “modern-faced” type in this country; yet in the cut of the lines and the actual shape of the letters many distinguishing features of the “modern” face may already be traced. What these features became may be seen best by comparing an alphabet of the “old” with one of the “modern” face printed below it: