“Yes,” I replied; “I met him last summer in London through Cobden-Sanderson, and I should be glad to undertake the manufacture of the book for Mr. Shaw.”
“All right,” came the answer. “Have your boy call for the manuscript.”
This manuscript was Man and Superman.
From that day and for many years, Shaw and I carried on a desultory correspondence, his letters proving most original and diverting. On one occasion he took me severely to task for having used two sizes of type upon a title page. He wrote four pages to prove what poor taste and workmanship this represented, and then ended the letter with these words, “But, after all, any other printer would have used sixteen instead of two, so I bless you for your restraint!”
We had another lengthy discussion on the use of apostrophes in printing. “I have made no attempt to deal with the apostrophes you introduce,” he wrote; “but my own usage is carefully considered and the inconsistencies are only apparent. For instance, Ive, youve, lets, thats, are quite unmistakable, but Ill, hell, shell, for I’ll, he’ll, she’ll, are impossible without a phonetic alphabet to distinguish between long and short e. In such cases I retain the apostrophe, in all others I discard it. Now you may ask me why I discard it. Solely because it spoils the printing. If you print a Bible you can make a handsome job of it because there are no apostrophes or inverted commas to break up the letterpress with holes and dots. Until people are forced to have some consideration for a book as something to look at as well as something to read, we shall never get rid of these senseless disfigurements that have destroyed all the old sense of beauty in printing.”
“Ninety-nine per cent. of the secret of good printing,” Shaw continued, “is not to have patches of white or trickling rivers of it trailing down a page, like rain-drops on a window. Horrible! White is the enemy of the printer. Black, rich, fat, even black, without gray patches, is, or should be, his pride. Leads and quads and displays of different kinds of type should be reserved for insurance prospectuses and advertisements of lost dogs.…”
His enthusiasm for William Morris’ leaf ornaments is not shared by all booklovers. Glance at any of the Kelmscott volumes, and you will find these glorified oak leaves scattered over the type page in absolutely unrelated fashion,—a greater blemish, to some eyes, than occasional variation in spacing. Shaw writes:
If you look at one of the books printed by William Morris, the greatest printer of the XIX century, and one of the greatest printers of all the centuries, you will see that he occasionally puts in a little leaf ornament, or something of the kind. The idiots in America who tried to imitate Morris, not understanding this, peppered such things all over their “art” books, and generally managed to stick in an extra large quad before each to show how little they understood about the business. Morris doesn’t do this in his own books. He rewrites the sentence so as to make it justify, without bringing one gap underneath another in the line above. But in printing other people’s books, which he had no right to alter, he sometimes found it impossible to avoid this. Then, sooner than spoil the rich, even color of his block of letterpress by a big white hole, he filled it up with a leaf.
Do not dismiss this as not being “business.” I assure you, I have a book which Morris gave me, a single copy, by selling which I could cover the entire cost of printing my books, and its value is due solely to its having been manufactured in the way I advocate; there’s absolutely no other secret about it; and there is no reason why you should not make yourself famous through all the ages by turning out editions of standard works on these lines whilst other printers are exhausting themselves in dirty felt end papers, sham Kelmscott capitals, leaf ornaments in quad sauce, and then wondering why nobody in Europe will pay twopence for them, whilst Kelmscott books and Doves Press books of Morris’ friends, Emery Walker and Cobden-Sanderson, fetch fancy prices before the ink is thoroughly dry.… After this I shall have to get you to print all my future books, so please have this treatise printed in letters of gold and preserved for future reference