The President was particularly interested in the subject of illustration, and he showed me several examples, asking for a description of the various processes. From that we passed on to a discussion of the varying demand from the time when I first began to make books. I explained that the development of the halftone plate and of the four-color process plates had been practically within this period,—that prior to 1890 the excessive cost of woodcuts, steel engravings, or lithography confined illustration to expensive volumes. The halftone opened the way for profuse illustration at minimum expense.
The President showed me an impression from one of Timothy Cole’s marvelous woodcuts, and we agreed that the halftone had never taken the place of any process that depends upon the hand for execution. The very perfection to which the art of halftone reproduction has been carried is a danger point in considering the permanence of its popularity. This does not apply to its use in newspapers, but in reproducing with such slavish fidelity photographs of objects perpetuated in books of permanent value. It seemed paradoxical to say that the nearer perfection an art attains the less interesting it becomes, because the very variation incidental to hand work in any art is what relieves the monotony of that perfection attained through mechanical means. Since then, a few leading engravers have demonstrated how the halftone may be improved by hand work. This combination has opened up new possibilities that guarantee its continued popularity.
With the tremendous increase in the cost of manufacturing books during and since the World War, publishers found that by omitting illustrations from their volumes they could come nearer to keeping the cost within the required limits, so for a period illustrated volumes became limited in number
There is no question that the public loves pictures, and the development during recent years of so-called newspapers from which the public gleans the daily news by means of halftone illustrations, is, in a way, a reversion to the time before the printing press, when the masses received their education wholly through pictorial design. The popularity of moving pictures is another evidence. I have always wished that this phase had developed at the time of our discussion, for I am sure Mr. Roosevelt would have had some interesting comments to make on its significance. I like to believe that this tendency will correct itself, for, after all, the pictures which are most worth while are those which we ourselves draw subconsciously from impressions made through intellectual exploits
CHAPTER IV
The Lure of Illumination
IV
THE LURE OF ILLUMINATION
Sitting one day in the librarian’s office in the Laurenziana Library, in Florence, the conversation turned upon the subject of illumination. Taking a key from his pocket, my friend Guido Biagi unlocked one of the drawers in the ancient wooden desk in front of him, and lifted from it a small, purple vellum case, inlaid with jewels. Opening it carefully, he exposed a volume similarly bound and similarly adorned. Then, as he turned the leaves, and the full splendor of the masterpiece was spread out before me,—the marvelous delicacy of design, the gorgeousness of color, the magnificence of decoration and miniature,—I drew in my breath excitedly, and bent nearer to the magnifying glass which was required in tracing the intricacy of the work.
This was a Book of Hours illuminated by Francesco d’Antonio del Cherico, which had once belonged to Lorenzo de’ Medici, and was representative of the best of the fifteenth-century Italian work (page [146]). The hand letters were written by Antonio Sinibaldi in humanistic characters upon the finest and rarest parchment; the illumination, with its beaten gold and gorgeous colors, was so close a representation of the jewels themselves as to make one almost believe that the gems were inlaid upon the page! And it was the very volume that had many times rested in the hands of Lorenzo the Magnificent, as it was at that moment resting in mine!