Seeing my surprise and incredulity, he added,
“I have come to America to tell you people how to make books. In New York they took me to see the great Morgan Library and other collections. They showed me rare incunabula. They expected me to know all about them, and to be enthusiastic over them. As a matter of fact, I know nothing about the work of the great master-printers, and care less!”
My face must have disclosed my thoughts, for he held up a restraining hand.
“Don’t think me such an egotist as my words imply. It isn’t that at all. It is true that I am interested only in my own work, but that is because my work means something more to me than the books I produce. When I print a book or bind one it is because I have a message in my soul which I am impelled to give mankind, and it comes out through my fingers. Other men express their messages in different media,—in stone or on canvas. I have discovered that the book is my medium. When I bind and decorate a volume I seem to be setting myself, like a magnetized needle, or like an ancient temple, in line and all square, not alone with my own ideal of society, but with that orderly and rhythmical whole which is the revelation of science and the normal of developed humanity. You asked me a while ago to explain certain inconsistencies in my work, and I told you that there was no explanation. That is because each piece of work represents me at the time I do it. Sometimes it is good and sometimes poor, but, in any case, it stands as the expression of myself at the time I did it.”
As he spoke I wondered if Cobden-Sanderson had not explained why, in the various arts, the work of those master-spirits of the past had not been surpassed or even equaled during the intervening centuries. It is a matter for consideration, when the world has shown such spectacular advance along material lines, that in painting, in sculpture, in architecture, in printing, the work of the old masters still stands supreme. In their time, when men had messages in their souls to give the world, the interpretation came out through their fingers, expressed in the medium with which each was familiar. Before the invention of printing, the masses received those messages directly from the marble or the canvas, or from the design of some great building. The printed book opened to the world a storehouse of wisdom hitherto unavailable, and made individual effort less conspicuous and therefore less demanded. The few outstanding figures in every art have been those who, like Cobden-Sanderson, have set themselves “in line and all square, not alone with their own ideals of society, but with that orderly and rhythmical whole which is the revelation of science and the normal of developed humanity.” It is what Cobden-Sanderson has done rather than his written words, that conveys the greatest message.
While Theodore Roosevelt was President of the United States, and on the occasion of one of his several visits to Boston, his secretary wrote that the President would like to examine with me some of the special volumes I had built. I knew him to be an omnivorous reader, but until then did not realize his deep interest in the physical side of books.
He came to the University Press one bitterly cold day in January, and entered my office wrapped in a huge fur coat. After greeting him I asked if he wouldn’t lay the coat aside.
“Of course I will,” he replied briskly; “it is just as easy to catch hot as it is to catch cold.”
We devoted ourselves for an hour to an examination and discussion of certain volumes I had produced. One of these was a small twelve-mo entitled Trophies of Heredia containing poems by José-Maria de Heredia, brought out in artistic format for a Boston publishing house, which had proved a complete failure from a commercial standpoint. Probably not over two hundred copies of the book were ever sold. Evidently one of these had fallen into the President’s hands, for he seized my copy eagerly, saying,
“Hello! I didn’t remember that you made this. Extraordinary volume, isn’t it? I want to show you something.”