“What makes you think this is a fine book?” I inquired, deliberately changing the approach.
He laughed consciously. “It cost me nine guineas—and I like the looks of it.”
Restraint was required not to say something that might have affected our friendship unpleasantly, and friendship is a precious thing.
“Do something for me,” I asked quietly. “That is a short book. Read it through, even though it is rare, and then let us continue this conversation we have just begun.”
A few days later he invited me to dine with him at his club. “I asked you here,” he said, “because I don’t want any one, even my family, to hear what I am going to admit to you. I have read that book, and I’d rather not know what you thought of my consummate ignorance of what really enters into the building of a well-made volume—the choice of type, the use of decoration, the arrangement of margins. Why, bookmaking is an art! Perhaps I should have known that, but I never stopped to think about it.”
One does have to stop and think about a well-made book in order to comprehend the difference between printing that is merely printing and that which is based upon art in its broadest sense and upon centuries of precedent. It does require more than a gleam of intelligence to grasp the idea that the basis of every volume ought to be the thought expressed by the writer; that the type, the illustrations, the decorations, the paper, the binding, simply combine to form the vehicle to convey that expression to the reader. When, however, this fact is once absorbed, one cannot fail to understand that if these various parts, which compositely comprise the whole, fail to harmonize with the subject and with each other, then the vehicle does not perform its full and proper function.
I wondered afterward if I had not been a bit too superior in my attitude toward my friend. As a matter of fact, printing as an art has returned to its own only within the last quarter-century. Looking back to 1891, when I began to serve my apprenticeship under John Wilson at the old University Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the broadness of the profession that I was adopting as my life’s work had not as yet unfolded its unlimited possibilities. At that time the three great American printers were John Wilson, Theodore L. De Vinne, and Henry O. Houghton. The volumes produced under their supervision were perfect examples of the best bookmaking of the period, yet no one of these three men looked upon printing as an art. It was William Morris who in modern times first joined these two words together by the publication of his magnificent Kelmscott volumes. Such type, such decorations, such presswork, such sheer, composite beauty!
This was in 1895. Morris, in one leap, became the most famous printer in the world. Every one tried to produce similar volumes, and the resulting productions, made without appreciating the significance of decoration combined with type, were about as bad as they could be. I doubt if, at the present moment, there exists a single one of these sham Kelmscotts made in America that the printer or the publisher cares to have recalled to him.
When the first flair of Morris’ popularity passed away, and his volumes were judged on the basis of real bookmaking, they were classified as marvelously beautiful objets d’art rather than books—composites of Burne-Jones, the designer, and William Morris, the decorator-printer, co-workers in sister arts; but from the very beginning Morris’ innovations showed the world that printing still belonged among the fine arts. The Kelmscott books awoke in me an overwhelming desire to put myself into the volumes I produced. I realized that no man can give of himself beyond what he possesses, and that to make my ambition worth accomplishing I must absorb and make a part of myself the beauty of the ancient manuscripts and the early printed books. This led me to take up an exhaustive study of the history of printing.
