“There is a fate about this,” Colvin said, after I had explained my mission. “We have here in the Museum six original drawings of Petrarch’s Triumphs, attributed by some to Fra Filippo Lippi and certainly belonging to his school, which have never been reproduced. They are exactly the right size for the format which you have determined upon, and if you can have the reproductions made here at the Museum the drawings are at your disposal.”
I made arrangements with Emery Walker, the designer of the Doves type and justly famous as an engraver, to etch these plates on steel, and the reproductions of the originals were extraordinarily exact. Those Walker made for the parchment edition looked as if drawn on ivory.
Parchment was required for the specially illuminated copies which were to form a feature of the edition, and before leaving America I had been told that the Roman grade was the best. I naturally assumed that I should find this in Rome, but my research developed the fact that Roman parchment is prepared in Florence. Following this lead, I examined the skins sold by Florentine dealers, but Doctor Biagi assured me that the best grade was not Roman but Florentine, and that Florentine parchment is produced in Issoudun, France. It seemed a far cry to seek out Italian skins in France, but to Issoudun I went. In the meantime I learned that there was a still better grade prepared in Brentford, England—this, in fact, being where William Morris procured the parchment for his Kelmscott publications.
At Brentford I secured my skins; and here I learned something that interested me exceedingly. Owing to the oil which remains in the parchment after it has been prepared for use, the difficulty in printing is almost as great as if on glass. To obviate this, the concern at Brentford, in preparing parchment for the Kelmscott volumes, filled in the pores of the skins with chalk, producing an artificial surface. The process of time must operate adversely upon this extraneous substance, and the question naturally arises as to whether eventually, in the Kelmscott parchment volumes, the chalk surface will flake off in spots, producing blemishes which can never be repaired.
For my own purposes I purchased the skins without the artificial surface, and overcame the difficulty in printing by a treatment of the ink which, after much experiment, enabled me to secure as fine results upon the parchment as if printing upon handmade paper.
The volumes were to be printed in the two humanistic colors, black and blue. In the original manuscript volumes this blue is a most unusual shade, the hand letterer having prepared his own ink by grinding lapis lazuli, in which there is no red. By artificial light the lines written in blue can scarcely be distinguished from the black. To reproduce the same effect in the printed volume I secured in Florence a limited quantity of lapis lazuli, and by special arrangement with the Italian Government had it crushed into powder at the Royal mint. This powder I took home to America, and arranged with a leading manufacturer to produce what I believe to be the first printing ink mixed exactly as the scribes of the fifteenth century used to prepare their pigments.
The months required to produce the Triumphs represented a period alternating in anxiety and satisfaction. The greatest difficulty came in pressing upon the typesetter the fact that the various characters of these letters could not be used with mathematical precision, but that the change should come only when he felt his hand would naturally alter the design if he were writing the line instead of setting the type. The experiments required to perfect an ink that should successfully print on the oily parchment were not completed without disappointments and misgivings; the scrupulous care required in reading proofs and perfecting the spacing, was laborious and monotonous; the scrutinizing of the sheets as they came from the press was made happier when the success of the lapis lazuli ink was assured.
A Page from an Autograph Letter from Charles Eliot Norton
The rewards came when Professor Norton gave the volume his unqualified approval—“so interesting and original in its typography and in its illustrations, so admirable in its presswork, its paper, its binding, and its minor accessories, … a noble and exemplary work of the printers’ art”; when George W. Jones, England’s artist-printer, pronounced the Humanistic type “the most beautiful face in the world,” and promised to use it in what he hopes to be his masterpiece, an edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets; when the jury appointed by the Italian Government to select “the most beautiful and most appropriate type face to perpetuate the divine Dante” chose the Humanistic type, and placed the important commission of producing the definitive edition of the great poet, to commemorate his sexcentenary, in the hands of that splendid printer, Bertieri, at Milan. Such rewards are not compliments, but justification. Such beauty as the Humanistic type possesses lies in the artistic ability and the marvelous skill in execution of the scribes. My part was simply seizing the development of a period apparently overlooked, and undertaking the laborious task of translating a beautiful thing from one medium to another.