BOOKS
AND PRINTING
A TREASURY FOR TYPOPHILES

Copyright 1930 by The Colophon. Reprinted by permission of the author.

The late printer-scholar, Theodore Low De Vinne, was wont to exclaim with regret over a puzzling bookish question, "Alas, bibliography is not an exact science!" Since his day, what with the learned publications of bibliographical societies (first and foremost—that of England), with such scholarly independent productions as Ronald B. McKerrow's Introduction to Bibliography and some of its followers, and with such undertakings as the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke—not to speak of the many masterly library catalogues and bibliographies which these late years have brought us—we are almost tempted to reverse his dictum. We have all these, added to the wealth of pioneer writings of book-lovers like Richard de Bury, Gabriel Naude, Guillaume François De Bure, Gabriel Peignot, Thomas Frognall Dibdin, and the more scientific but no more (nor less) book-loving Panzer, Hain, Brunet, Renouard, Bradshaw, Haebler, Proctor, Claudin, and our own Wilberforce Eames. We pause for breath, but have only picked a few random names from the long roll of those who have loved and worked for the arts that go into the making, and the science that goes into the understanding of a printed book—the vehicle which must continue to preserve and to carry down through the ages the results of men's thoughts and the records of their deeds.

All this is as it should be, but of late, and especially in connection with the present vogue for collecting the works of living authors, a certain quality (shall we call it self-consciousness) has crept in, an undue stressing of small technicalities, and we blush to confess a confused feeling of sympathy for the modern book-hunter, who is having so much of his fun taken away from him by neat little textbooks and articles, bristling with allusions to "points," "right copies," "firsts" and the like (with the inevitable quotation marks) [Pg 32]and filled with weighty questions of dollars and pounds—the seemingly all-important matter of the investment value of our treasures. This surely is not the fine frenzy which possessed Charles Lamb when he wrote: "Do you remember the brown suit which you made to hang upon you, till all your friends cried 'Shame upon you!' It grew so threadbare—and all because of that folio 'Beaumont and Fletcher,' which you dragged home late at night from Barker's in Covent Garden. Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of the Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing you should be too late. And when the old book-seller with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedwards), lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures, and when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as cumbersome, and when you presented it to me, and when we were exploring the perfectness of it (collating you called it), and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be left till daybreak—was there no pleasure in being a poor man!"

Where there is much smoke, however, there is fire, and it is assuredly good that this interest in bibliographical things should have swept the country, and incidentally that the joys of the bibliomaniac and the bibliophile are being experienced today by many more than the elect few of the past, on whom we love to dwell. But if we moderns are doomed to buy our first editions ready labelled and to have our equations worked out in advance, if a fine copy must be termed immaculate and the back of a book must be its spine, etc., etc., ad infinitum, let us start with the right premises, and hold on to the terms which were proverbial before we were born. Which brings us to our point—What is a Colophon?

The question would seem a reflection upon the intelligence of the average book-lover, at this late day, were it not that there seems to be a growing tendency, shared (even instigated) by lexicographers, to mis-define the word, or to use it out of its truly bibliographical and philological meaning. To book-lovers and collectors of even the preceding generation, acquainted as they were with[Pg 33] the niceties of their vocation, or avocation, the suggestion of more than one signification would have seemed well-nigh an insult. Perhaps it is even because we are living in this late day that heresies have crept in. After all, it is nearly a quarter of a century since the Caxton Club of Chicago brought out An Essay on Colophons, by Dr. Alfred W. Pollard, later Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, whose word on all bibliographical matters carries the highest authority—the Club thereby performing one of those great services to students of bibliography for which it and similar institutions are acclaimed by an appreciative, if limited, circle. Perhaps the very limits of the circle are accountable for lack of knowledge, and it may be that a book, printed nearly twenty-five years ago in an edition of some two hundred and fifty copies, may never have come within the ken of a writer on bookish things today—even of an earnest one. But that is just where our quarrel begins—ought anyone to write on colophons, or on anything else, without some knowledge of at least the chief literature of the subject, and should the next man, and the next, be allowed to hand on an error, or perhaps a misconception, without a thought of the original sources of information? For that is just what has been happening in America in this matter, and what it seems must also be occurring in greater ones. There is plenty of thorough scholarship here, scholarship that shrinks from no drudgery—then why is it that so much hasty, slipshod work is allowed to pass?

But we were speaking of colophons—a word which, to many people who trouble with it at all, seems to mean almost anything,—for instance the mark or device of a printer or publishing firm, placed anywhere at random in a book, possibly bearing a motto or a name. Indeed, this is the signification which has frequently been given to it of late in print and in common speech by people who should have known better, and whom a little thought or a little more research would have taught better. For instance, a publisher's assistant suggested that a given place upon the title page is the proper location for the colophon; a librarian wrote to request a copy of the "colophon of the Grolier Club" to add to a collection; a book-trade magazine issued an article on devices or trade-marks of publishers of today, appearing on the title pages of their publi[Pg 34]cations, and dubbed them all colophons; a college professor used the term in like manner; and all this occurred within a period of a few months.

The only protest to be raised in print seems to be that of Leonard L. Mackall, in his dependable "Notes for Bibliophiles," a department of the Herald Tribune's Sunday magazine, Books. In the issue of March 17, 1929, he wrote: "Right here we must call special attention to the fact that, some modern ignorant or careless misuse to the contrary, notwithstanding, a colophon is not really a colophon at all unless it appears at the end of the book. Most certainly the word does not properly mean merely a publisher's device wherever used, as stated in a [recent] anonymous illustrated article."

No one has heeded him, however, and my own like-minded objections were met with the advice to look in the dictionary, and then the blow fell! It is true that some dictionaries, but by no means all, countenance this usage of colophon as a device upon a title page. Before quoting their definitions, let us look at the Oxford English Dictionary, where we find:

It may be noted that, of the various examples (1774-1874) quoted by the Oxford English Dictionary, not one refers to the colophon as placed elsewhere than at the end of the book.

Our Century Dictionary is sound on the subject, but we have in Funk & Wagnalls' Standard Dictionary:

The phrase "usually on the title page" (not in the Oxford Eng[Pg 35]lish Dictionary) seems to us absolutely wrong, and not to be countenanced for a moment by bookmen who have proper regard for the correct usage of words.

The corresponding definition in late editions of Webster's Dictionary is:

In what subtle way this secondary and inadequate definition has crept into American usage we do not know, and we plead earnestly for its abandonment.

In the encyclopedias consulted, there is nothing disturbing, the definition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, written by Dr. Pollard, being especially clear and concise. It runs in part as follows:

Let us turn from general works to those specifically bibliographical. In his Introduction to Bibliography,[2] Dr. McKerrow writes: "In the early days of printing, the end of the book was the normal place for the printer's name and the place and date of printing to appear. The history of the colophon is merely that of the gradual transference of this information to the title page. When this was [Pg 36]complete the colophon was as a rule of no use and it was abandoned."

Later, among his cataloguing instructions we find: "A colophon should always be noticed, if there is one. It is also, I think, desirable to record the occurrence of a printer's device (even without a verbal imprint) at the end of a book, as this often appears to take the place of a colophon."

Iolo Williams' Elements of Book-Collecting[3] contains this paragraph: "In the earliest printed books the title page's functions were performed by the colophon, a word which is a transliteration of the Greek, a summit or finishing stroke. The colophon is put, not near the beginning of the book, like the title page, but at the end, and it usually takes the form of a statement that here ends such-and-such a book, written by so-and-so, printed by so-and-so at such-and-such a place and date. The use of the colophon has been revived in certain finely-printed modern books, but such modern volumes usually contain both a title page and a colophon."

Though not quite as satisfying, the following allusion in Van Hoesen and Walter's Bibliography[4] should be quoted, as occurring in a modern American treatise on the subject: "The early printers used the colophon at the end of the book instead of a title page, and the colophon is still used to indicate the printing firm in cases where it is not part of the publishing firm given on the title page."

These are the latest printed words that we have noticed. Suffice it to say that we have nowhere found in earlier important manuals anything but the (to us) proper explanation of the term. In other words, we gather from important sources that, while a colophon may include or even take the form of a printer's mark or device, such a mark, placed upon a title page, is not a colophon.

Aroused by the dictionary findings, and discovering those American students of bibliography whom I consulted to be in agreement with me, I wrote to Dr. Pollard, as to a court of final appeal, to inquire if he considered it meticulous to object to the intrusion of [Pg 37]this illogical trade definition which some dictionaries and many people are giving us. His answer, which I am allowed to quote, seems definite and wise enough to carry conviction, coming as it does from the admitted authority on the subject: "If a sufficient number of people misuse a word, Dictionaries have to record the wrong use as well as the right, as in the case of hectic and crowds of other words. But the misuse of the word colophon as a synonym for the printer's mark or device, without regard to position, has not yet gone as far as this and should be strenuously resisted. By standard use as well as by etymology, the word means the crowning stroke, or finishing touch, to a book or part of a book, and it must come at the end of the book, or part of a book, rightly to be given this title.

"In cataloguing early books it would not in my judgment be incorrect to enter the printer's device at the end of a book, under the heading colophon."

And now, the unpleasantly controversial side of the matter having been disposed of (if so large an adjective as controversial may be applied to so small a paper), let us devote our little remaining space to the colophons themselves, first turning our attention to Dr. Pollard's book,[5] with his own rendering into English of the unwieldy fifteenth-century Latin.

In the introduction, Dr. Richard Garnett gives a brief sketch of the derivation and earliest uses of the term. He quotes the Greek word colophon, the head or summit of anything, usually used in a figurative sense, the position on a crest of the City of Colophon (whence its name), the first appearance of the word in the seventeenth century, with its secondary classical sense of a "finishing stroke" or a "crowning touch," and goes on to say: "Of the use of the word colophon in the particular significance elucidated in this essay—the end or ultimate paragraph of a book or manuscript—the earliest example quoted in the New English Dictionary is from Warton's History of English Poetry published in 1774. A quarter of a century before this it is found as a term needing no explanation [Pg 38]in the first edition of the Typographical Antiquities of Joseph Ames, published in 1749. How much older it is than this cannot lightly be determined. The bibliographical use appears to be unknown to the Greek and Latin lexicographers, medieval as well as classical. Pending further investigation, it seems not unlikely that it may have been developed out of the secondary classical sense already mentioned sometime during the seventeenth century, when the interest in bibliography which was then beginning to be felt would naturally call into existence new terms of art."

While acknowledging the great interest that many authors have found in individual colophons, Dr. Pollard states that his task is the more ambitious, if less entertaining one of making a special study of this feature in fifteenth century books with the object of ascertaining what light it throws on the history of printing, and on the habits of the early printers and publishers. His first conclusion being that colophons are the sign and evidence of the printer's pride in his work, he draws attention to the utter lack of such information as they give in the very earliest books of all, as contrasted with the self-glorification of Fust and Schöffer when, printing independently, they affixed the first known printed colophon to their Psalter of 1457 (in at least one copy accompanied by their device):

Of Peter Schöffer's later allusion to the shields of his device Dr. Pollard writes: "Needless discussions have been raised as to what was the use and import of printers' devices, and it has even been attempted to connect them with literary copyright, with which they had nothing whatever to do, literary copyright in this decade depending solely on the precarious courtesy of rival firms, or possibly on the rules of their trade-guilds. But here, on the authority of the printer who first used one, we have a clear indication of the reason which made him put his mark on a book—the simple reason that he was proud of his craftsmanship and wished it to be recognized as his. 'By signing it with his shields Peter Schöffer has brought the book to a happy completion.'"

From Fifty Printers' Marks by Edwin E. Willoughby. Copyright 1947 by the author and reprinted by his permission. Published by the University of California Press.

A printer's mark is a trade-mark. Printers used them in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for the same purpose that printers employ them today—to ornament their books and to make each volume readily recognizable as the product of the printing establishment which produced it.

The printer's mark was but one of the many types of marks which, largely because of the widespread illiteracy of the people, were used throughout all phases of medieval life. The ownership of objects, for example, was often shown by means of a regularly used mark. Two examples of this type of mark, the seal and the cattle brand, go back to the dawn of history and have continued in use to the present time. Merchants in the Middle Ages often identified their property by placing on it their merchants' marks.

The mark of a merchant was legally recognized as his by his guild or by the town government. Often it was a representation of the tools of the man's trade or a replica of his house sign. Sometimes it was an animal or object which formed a pun on the merchant's name. Frequently, simple geometric designs were used. Toward the latter part of the Middle Ages, as merchants grew richer and more powerful, they aped the upper class by making their marks resemble, as closely as they dared, the heraldic devices of the knights and nobles. These marks enabled employees or hired porters to recognize at a glance a merchant's property.

Places, as well as objects, were identified by means of marks. Inns, shops and similar public places in those days before houses were numbered were designated by house signs. The Tabard, the inn from which Chaucer's pilgrims started for Canterbury under [Pg 46]the leadership of its host, Harry Baillie, took its name from its sign—a representation of a short outer jacket. An equally famous tavern, patronized by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and other "sirenical gentlemen," bore the "Sign of the Mermaid." And over the door of the Globe, Shakespeare's theater, hung a picture of Atlas bearing the world on his shoulders.

Printing houses, like other business establishments, were known by house signs. The printer's mark of Adrien van Berghen supplies an illustration. [Page 48.]

Not only were objects and places designated by marks in the Middle Ages, but under certain conditions people were recognized by them also. A knight, his face obscured by his helmet, made his identity known by wearing on his helmet, shield and tabard simple pictures or symbols by which he could be recognized. As it was usual for members of the same family to wear the same emblems, these simple pictures, many of which became conventionalized, descended from father to son, indicated relationships, and finally developed under the control of officers of the king into the elaborate system of heraldry.

Marks, then, were widely used in the Middle Ages. It was inevitable that they should be used to identify the makers of manufactured goods. Craftsmen with pride in their work naturally desired others to recognize their products. As a result, the use of trade-marks became common. Craftsmen of every trade were frequently compelled either by law or by guild regulations, to affix a mark to their products as a guarantee of their honesty and good workmanship. Such marks were required especially of goldsmiths, silversmiths and other artisans who were under unusual temptation to misrepresent the quality of their goods. In England, to take another example, arrowheads, the quality of which might determine the issue of a battle, were ordered, by a statute of Henry IV, to be "marked with the mark of him who made the same."

These trade-marks performed much the same function as the house mark or the merchant's mark; indeed, the three were often the same. They enabled a purchaser, literate or illiterate, to identify the maker of a product and to buy thereafter according as he had been satisfied or displeased with the first article purchased.

GUY MARCHANT printed his first book at Paris in 1483. His motto, Sola fides sufficit (Faith alone suffices) appears above the clasped hands, with the first word represented by the musical notation, sol and la.

JACQUES MAILLET began publishing at Lyons in 1482, and probably began printing at the same time. His mark represents a shield, supported by two dogs, which bears his initials and a mallet (maillet in French), hanging from a tree.

[Pg 48]

The printer, to be sure, was under few of the compulsions to use a trade-mark that beset his fellow craftsmen. His patrons were literate; they could read his name and address—when he chose to set them down—either in the colophon at the end of the book or on the title page. But the example of other craftsmen was not to be resisted. Besides, a well-made printer's mark, or a publisher's device, could be both useful and ornamental. Put at the end of the book, it could give it a fitting close. Used in the middle of a book, it could set off chapters and parts. Above all, especially when it was printed in red, it could give life and balance to a title page.

ADRIEN VAN BERGHEN in his mark pictures his printing house "at the Sign of the Great Golden Mortar in the market place" at Antwerp, where he started in 1500.

By the printer's mark, also, a prospective purchaser could recognize at a glance the product of a press. It could prevent a careful purchaser from being deceived by a false imprint. "Look at my sign," warns Benedictus Hector of Bologna, "which is represented on the title page and you can never be mistaken." It was harder to counterfeit a printer's mark than to filch his name.

Even a mark, however, was not infallible protection. The "prince of printers," Aldus Manutius, complains that his Florentine competitors "have affixed our well known sign of the dolphin wound around an anchor. But," he adds, "they have so man[Pg 49]aged that any person who is in the least acquainted with the books of our production cannot fail to observe that this is an impudent fraud; for the head of the dolphin is turned to the left, whereas that of ours is well known to be turned toward the right."

WILLIAM CAXTON, the first English printer, printed his own translation of a French romance, Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, in 1474. At his press at Westminster he completed nearly eighty books between 1477 and 1491, many of which he also translated from the French.

In one country only, and there for but a brief period, was the use of a mark made compulsory. In 1539, François I, in an act intended to suppress both the piracy of copyrighted works and the printing of heretical books, ordered every printer and book-seller in France to have his own device so that purchasers might easily ascertain where books were printed and sold.

Although (with this exception) the use of marks was voluntary with printers, they were early adopted. In 1457 Fust and Schöffer, the successors of Gutenberg, first employed one in the Mainz Psalter, the first book to contain the name of the printer and the place and date of printing. [Page 39.] The device con[Pg 50]sisted of two shields resembling coats of arms. Other printers quickly followed their example. As the fifteenth century saw the rise of the mercantile class, it is not surprising that printers used in their marks heraldic devices, if they had the right to bear arms, or shields displaying their merchant's marks in a manner often resembling armorial bearings.

Frequently, printers used as the central part of their marks the signs which served to designate their places of business. Pierre LeRouge, for example, used a red rosebush for his sign and in his device. The London printer, Berthelet, used in like manner the figure of Lucrece.

WILLIAM FAQUES began printing in London about 1503. His mark represents a hexagram of interlocking triangles bearing biblical quotations, which enclose his monogram pierced by an arrow. The initials "GF" are those of the French form of his name.

If the printer's name could be punned on, it was common to use for a mark an object the name of which sounded like the printer's own. Jacques Maillet's surname means mallet. He made it easy to remember by displaying a mallet in his device. [Page 47.] A few printers, among them Aldus Manutius, John Day, John Wight and Willem Vorsterman, even used their own portraits in their marks.

Many other signs and emblems were employed. In an age fond of symbolism it is not surprising to find that many marks had[Pg 51] symbolic and mystical meanings—not only in the earlier period, when ecclesiastical symbols were often used, but in the later period also, when devices were frequently copied from emblem books. Sometimes a printer would use a woodcut to illustrate a book and then, because it struck his fancy, adopt it as his mark. Thomas Gardiner and Thomas Dawson, partners, on the other hand, had a block which contained, around a central open square, figures forming a rebus of their names: a gardener, a daw and the sun. With their initials in the open square, it served as a mark; with the appropriate display letter, it was a factotum bearing the initial letter of the first word of a chapter.

Printers' marks, in fact, took a multitude of forms during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the late seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they became conventionalized and were used infrequently; but they did not die out altogether. The Oxford and Cambridge University presses, for example, continued to put them on the title pages of their books.

The revival of printing late in the nineteenth century saw an increased use of the printer's mark. This was almost inevitable, for when the craftsmen strove to do fine printing, they desired, just as did the craftsmen of the fifteenth century, to have their work easily recognized. Today, private presses which specialize in fine printing, some university presses, and many publishing firms, frequently use marks which both ornament their title pages and identify for the reader the creator of the volume.

THE GROLIER CLUB. A rendering of the Club's familiar mark by Rudolph Ruzicka.

From One Hundred Title Pages: 1500-1800, selected and arranged with an Introduction and Notes by A. F. Johnson. Copyright 1928 by John Lane, The Bodley Head, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

It is a curious fact that the title page was evolved at a comparatively late date in the history of the book, and is indeed almost unknown before the printed book. There are a few examples among early surviving manuscripts of a separate leaf being used for the title, but they are quite exceptional, and even these give the title on the back of this leaf. The usual practice of the calligrapher was to give any information considered desirable as to the author and the date and place of the making of the manuscript in the colophon. This practice was taken over by the printers, although in the first years of the new art they frequently said nothing as to place of printing, probably with the deliberate intention of concealing the fact that the book was produced by mechanical means. The title page as we know it, giving the title, author's name and an imprint, being, in fact, a kind of advertisement of the book, was not well established until some years after 1500....

The title page owes its origin, according to one theory, to the fact that printers found it necessary to protect the first leaf of the text. Whereas a manuscript would be bound as soon as the calligrapher had finished the text, most of the copies of a printed edition were delivered to a book-seller in sheets, and many might remain unbound for years. Hence arose the practice of beginning the book on the second leaf or on the back of the first leaf. The first page could then be used for the purpose of advertising the book, for the fully-developed title page arose out of a commercial need. A few early examples of the addition of a brief title on [Pg 53]the first page are known, the first being that of a Bull of Pope Pius II, printed by Fust and Schöffer at Mainz in 1463. But the blank title leaf is found for many years after that date, and to the end of the fifteenth century a title leaf containing a brief description in a few words is common. As late as 1548 we find the brothers Dorici at Rome printing several volumes of the works of Cardinal Bembo with the title on the back of the first leaf. An edition of the Vulgate printed at Venice in 1487 by Georgius Arrivabene offers an example of the most rudimentary form of a title page, with the single word Biblia on the first leaf.

The example of Ratdolt at Venice, who in 1476 printed a Calendar of Regiomontanus with woodcut borders and an imprint on the first leaf, was not followed by contemporary printers. Even this solitary case hardly presents a title page in the form in which we know it, since the leaf, in place of a title, has a poem in praise of the book. Of the fully developed title page, giving title, author and full imprint, Dr. Haebler, the German authority on incunabula, knows of only one instance in the fifteenth century, a book by Johannes Glogoviensis printed by Wolfgang Stöckel at Leipzig in 1500; the title itself, however, is cut on wood.

The lettering of the simple fifteenth-century title page was often that of the text of the book, or sometimes a larger, heading type was used. Very frequently the words were cut on wood, and since for the printer it was as easy to print from a block containing a design in addition to a brief title, the woodcut illustration on the first leaf soon followed. The examples of the John Lydgate, printed by Pynson, c. 1515, and of the Deceyte of Women, printed by Abraham Vele about 1550, are typical title pages of popular books of the earlier printers. In Spain especially this combination of title and illustration, in that country often an heraldic cut, both cut on wood, became the fashion and persisted for many years in the next century. Scenes from school life often illustrated educational texts, while a school of woodcutters at Florence designed a famous series of illustrations which decorated the title pages of devotional tracts by Savonarola and other works. The first printers' devices, the two shields of Fust and Schöffer and the double cross rising out of a circle at Venice, were added to the colophons, and it was only when the French printers began to use large devices surrounded by borders, for which there was no room on the last leaf, that the printer's name, or at least mark, began to appear on the title page. Thus one further step was taken towards the title page as we know it.

MACHIAVELLI, SOPRA LA PRIMA DECA DI TITO LIVIO, ANTONIO BLADO, ROME, 1531. The formal Italic below the device, designed by Lodovico Vincentino, the calligrapher, was used in many of Blado's books. It has been revived and is known as Blado Italic. (Size, 5-1/2x8-1/4 inches.)

The sixteenth century is especially the age of the woodcut title-border (or metal-cut, for the material used for blocks was frequently metal). The practice of decorating the first leaf of the text with a woodcut border had been started by Ratdolt at Venice, and after 1490 was common among the printers of that city. In fact, several of the borders originally used for an opening were actually converted into title-borders after 1500. During the following century the variety of borders used in all the countries where printing was practised is remarkable. In Germany especially, during the years of the Reformation, when the printing press was unusually active, a very large number of decorative borders were cut, many of them by artists of the first rank, including even Dürer and Holbein. The work of the Holbeins and Urs Graf at Basle is well known to English book collectors. Perhaps less familiar is the work of Hans Baldung Grien, Hans Weiditz and Daniel Hopfer at Strasbourg and Augsburg, and that extraordinary series of designs which appear on the Luther tracts printed at Wittenberg and on similar works produced in Saxony. Many of these borders are highly successful as decorative pieces. The fact that they are less familiar to us may be accounted for by two circumstances. In the first place the earlier book collectors were almost all collectors of the classics, and the first writers on the history of printing, except in the matter of the invention of printing, approached the subject from the point of view of the student of the Greek and Roman classical writers. In the second place the German printers cut themselves off from Western Europe by clinging to the gothic letter after Italy, France and finally England had adopted Roman and Italic, even for books in the vernacular....

There is one point about the early woodcut borders which must seem strange to the printer of today, and that is the suitability of the decoration to the subject matter of the book. The sixteenth-century printer naturally found it economical to ignore the fact that a border originally intended for a Bible was not suitable for a medical work. He did not regard it as incongruous to use a border depicting scenes from Greek mythology on a French medieval romance. Even a printer of the class of Jean de Tournes uses the same piece on the title page of a Xenophon and of a book of French verse. Nor was the average printer very particular about the state of a block. Especially in England, where the general standard was lower than on the Continent, a damaged block would be used as long as it held together.

O. FINE, QUADRANS ASTROLABICUS, S. DE COLINES, PARIS, 1534. The border was probably designed by the author. His mathematical diagrams are generally decorated with leaf forms like the "petits fers" of this title. (Size, 7-5/8x11-5/8 inches.)

In the second half of the century two rival fashions of decoration were developed which finally banished the woodcut border, first the method of decoration by type ornaments or printers' flowers, and secondly the engraved title page. There is one example of type ornament known even in the fifteenth century, in an Aesop printed at Parma in 1483. After 1500, examples of borders made up of separate cast pieces are fairly frequent and are especially common in England in the books of Wynkyn de Worde and his contemporaries. But it is not until about 1560 that we find borders built up of type ornaments worked into arabesque patterns. It seems to have been Robert Granjon, the engraver of types at Paris and Lyons, who cut arabesque fleurons, divided them up and built up fresh patterns out of their component parts. The use of printers' flowers in borders is found at most centers of printing towards the end of the century and obtained its greatest popularity in the Netherlands and in England. Many fine examples are found in English books from about 1570 for the next fifty years. Joseph Moxon, who wrote on English letter-founding in 1683, tells us that they were considered old-fashioned in his day. They were revived again in the eighteenth century by P. S. Fournier at Paris, who cut many new designs which were copied all over Europe. Fournier's flowers could be built up to form all manner of ornaments and were more adaptable than the arabesques of the sixteenth century, when the original unit always resulted in the same pattern. Just as Granjon had devised a method of decorating without the use of the woodcut block, so Fournier designed his new flowers in order that printers might dispense with engraved vignettes. However, the vogue of the Fournier designs had a shorter life, and may be said to have been killed by the classical school of printing of the end of the century.

J. LONGLOND, A SERMON, LONDON, 1536. Wynkyn de Worde and his contemporaries used cast pieces as ornaments, at least from 1504. Although their use was frequent, the arrangement of this title page is uncommon. (Size 5-1/4x7-1/4 inches.)

Engraving on copper was practised in the fifteenth century, but the engraved title page originates about 1550. Curiously enough, the earliest known engraved border occurs in an English book, the Anatomy of Thomas Geminus, printed in London in 1545. In the following year we find a second example, cut by

Corneille de La Haye for Balthazar Arnoullet at Lyons, where there was a remarkable group of engravers at work about this time. From 1548 the books of Enea Vico printed at Venice begin the fashion in Italy, where, after 1550, examples are fairly numerous. In the Netherlands also, beginning with the work of Hubert Goltzius at Bruges, they are met with almost as frequently as in Italy. It was, perhaps, Christopher Plantin at Antwerp who, more than any other printer, made the engraved title-border the fashion for all larger and more important publications. But it is with the seventeenth century especially that engraved borders are associated. The Elzevirs used them even on their pocket editions, while at the other extreme the massive volumes issued at Amsterdam and at Paris in the reign of Louis XIV are almost invariably introduced by an elaborate engraved frontispiece....

DUGUÉ, ARIETTE, FOURNIER, PARIS, 1765. This rather ornate border shows what could be done with Fournier's new type ornaments. (Size, 7-1/4x10-1/4 inches).

One other form of decoration may be mentioned, that of metal rules. Rules have been used occasionally at almost all periods, by Geofroy Tory, for example, among others. But as far as title pages are concerned they are found most often in the seventeenth century.

THE DECEYTE OF WOMEN, A. VELE, LONDON, C. 1550. The combination of black-letter and a woodcut is a usual title page in an early English book. This undated example is probably mid-century, as the printer, Vele, is not heard of before 1548. The cut seems to date much earlier. (Size, 5-1/4x7-1/2 inches.)

The purely typographic title page is naturally of greater interest to the modern producer of books. At all periods the title page which was effective mainly by the arrangement of type has been common, and at most periods there have been printers who preferred to dispense with ornament of any kind. In the sixteenth century the books of the Paris printer, Michel de Vascosan, illustrate this severer manner, and the classical style of the great printers at the close of the eighteenth century was likewise independent of decoration. Some sort of arrangement of the letters displayed on the title page suggested itself from the first, and very soon various shapes were tried. Perhaps the commonest arrangement was the conical one, or the so-called hour-glass shape, in which the lines of type begin by being long, to become short at the center, lengthening again in the imprint at the foot. Others have preferred a natural arrangement, printing the matter exactly as if on a page of the text. Geofroy Tory, a book producer whose work was of great importance in the history of the book, seems to have been against the fashion of his day in his choice of the natural layout. It has certainly been the usual custom to aim at some sort of pattern in the division of the lines of type. In this respect the earlier printers had one advantage which was not enjoyed by their successors. They felt no difficulty about dividing a word in a title, even when the second part of the word was to be set in a different size or even a different kind of type. Frequently we find examples of such breaks in words as custom has made impossible for the modern printer. The simplification of the task for whoever was responsible for the layout is obvious. One rule which seems to have been almost universally observed is that the mass of the type must be in the top half of the page and not evenly distributed. [Page 69.]

Equally important with the distribution of the matter is the question of the kind of type to be used, the sizes of type, upper- or lower-case, and the number of different fonts. The simplest manner of using the letter employed in the text met with little favour and was soon displaced by the use of larger types and especially by the use of capitals. The heavy, square Roman capitals, like those of Froben at Basle, for the first line, with smaller capitals for succeeding lines, were more or less customary in Northern Europe in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. In some countries a mixture of a "lettre de forme" and Roman capitals was not unusual at the same period. With the introduction of the new Garamond romans at Paris about 1530 began the fashion of using the Canon and Double Canon sizes of the lower-case letters for titles. In the seventeenth century we find large and heavy Roman capitals again in favour, often balanced by a woodcut ornament or a basket of flowers. This century, undoubtedly the worst in the history of typography, notwithstanding the Elzevirs, is especially remarkable for its crowded title pages. It had [Pg 63] become the custom to give as much information as possible about the contents of the book and the qualifications of author, editor, etc., and the printer took the opportunity of displaying as large a variety of his types as possible. No doubt the use of title pages as posters for advertising is partly responsible for the custom. It has been established by documentary evidence that such methods of advertising books were usual in England and in Germany, and probably this was so in other countries also. Incidentally it may be pointed out that the posting up of title pages accounts for some of the early collections, such as that of Bagford, now in the British Museum. Bagford has been attacked for his vandalism in mutilating books for the sake of his hobby, but it now appears that he may have been quite innocent of the charge. In any case the result on the title page as a specimen of typographical arrangement was deplorable....

ISAIAH THOMAS, A SPECIMEN OF PRINTING TYPES, WORCESTER, 1785. As with most type specimens, this early American title page displays many different types and flowers. (Size, 5-3/8x7-5/8 inches.)

With the eighteenth century title pages became simpler and letters became lighter, and the result is again work as good in its different style as that of the sixteenth century. The eighteenth century is certainly a great period in the history of book production, with its center in Paris. In England the influence of Caslon and Baskerville at length raised our typography to a level with Continental work. For one innovation P. S. Fournier is mainly responsible, the introduction of outline and other decorative capitals which were so successfully used at Paris. At the end of the century we have the work of the Didots and Bodoni, the classical school, whose technical achievement has hardly been surpassed at any period. One may cavil at their conception of the ideal shape of letters, one may dislike their excessive use of hair lines and their flat serifs, but it must be admitted that as practical printers and type-cutters their work was of first rate quality. These classical printers were proud of their types and wished them to stand alone. Bodoni, who at the beginning of his career used ornaments copied from Fournier and engraved vignettes, in his later years more and more abandoned decoration and outline letters. The classical title page is composed in Roman capitals of varying size, but without the admixture of lower-case letters or italics and without the aid of decoration. Like Baskerville, these printers considered that type is itself sufficiently interesting to stand alone.

From Typographic Heritage. Copyright 1949 by The Typophiles.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

On 7 April 1775 there appeared in Philadelphia the initial issue of Story & Humphrey's Pennsylvania Mercury. This newspaper was referred to by a contemporary diarist as "The first Work with Amer. Types" and with certain qualifications, later to be made, it seems to be entitled to the distinction of priority implied in this descriptive phrase. Type founding in the colonies went through those phases of tentative effort, complete failure, and partial achievement which are normal to the beginnings of great industries, and before going on with the story of the font of type from which the Pennsylvania Mercury was printed, it is proposed to give briefly an account of earlier attempts at the establishment of letter founding in English America. By doing this it will be possible to secure correctness of sequence and of relationship among the several elements of this study in origins.

The first font of types cast in English America was that which resulted from the painful efforts of Abel Buell, a silversmith and lapidary of Killingworth, Connecticut. Shortly before 1 April 1769 Buell cast a small font of letters, crude in design and in execution, from which proofs were taken for the examination and the criticism of his friends. In October of the same year, using a different and much better type of his own making, he presented to the Connecticut Assembly a printed petition in which he asked that body for financial assistance in his proposed establishment of a letter foundry. In reply to this memorial he received a loan from the colony for the purposes of his venture, and soon afterwards he [Pg 66]removed to New Haven and prepared to manufacture type for the printers of a continent. The story of his failure at this time, and of his success on a much smaller scale twelve years later, is a part of the present study only in the sense which has been indicated in the introductory sentences.

Abel Buell's First Font. From a proof of May 1769.
Courtesy of the Yale University Library.

Buell was not without a rival in his ambitious plans. David Mitchelson of Boston, possibly acting under the direction of John Mein, a printer of that city, is reported by a contemporary newspaper writer to have attained as great a degree of success as the Connecticut silversmith in the difficult art of letter casting. In the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-Letter for 7 September 1769 there appeared among the local news items a report on recent developments in American manufacturing activities in which are certain sentences of interest in the story of colonial type founding. "We are assured by a Gentleman from the Westward," said the writer, "that Mr. Abel Buell, of Killingworth in Connecticut, Jeweller and Lapidary, has lately, his own Genius, made himself Master of the Art of Founding Types for Printing. Printing Types are also made by Mr. Mitchelson of this Town [Boston] equal to any imported from Great-Britain; and might, by proper Encouragement soon be able to furnish all the Printers in America at the same price they are sold in England." The absence of a[Pg 67] known specimen of Mitchelson's letters or of any specific information as to his operations is enough, however, to require a verdict of "not proven" on any claim to priority in American type casting that has yet been made on his behalf.

Because of the unfruitful nature of the enterprises which have been spoken of, the year 1770 found the American printer still dependent upon European importation for his printing type, and at the moment there existed little prospect of relief from a situation which in the years of the Revolution was to become a hardship rather than the simple inconvenience of the earlier period. The policy of non-importation, however, was stirring the colonies to the establishment of local manufactures, and under the whip of necessity, type founding, among other essential industries, was to take its rise in the United States. The carrying to success of this manufacture in Pennsylvania in the year 1775 was undoubtedly assured by the political and economic situation of the country, but its beginning, which must first be described, had its cause in a set of circumstances of a more general character.

"The secular history of the Holy Scriptures," wrote Henry Stevens, "is the sacred history of printing." In these words the Vermonter gave sententious expression to the truth that the printing of the Bible has been in all ages an appreciable factor in the development of typography. The successful beginnings of type founding in English America, it is believed, may be traced to the desire of Christopher Sower Jr. of Germantown, Pennsylvania, to issue a third edition of that German Bible which first had made its appearance at the pains and expense of his father in the year 1743. It is said that the younger Sower's dissatisfaction with the conditions of type importation from Germany led him to conceive the idea of importing thence matrices and moulds instead of finished type, and with these placed in the cunning hands of Justus Fox, his journeyman, of casting his own letters for use in the proposed edition of Die Heilige Schrift. An enterprising man, a religious zealot, and the proprietor of one of the most extensive printing offices in America, he was able, partly at least, to carry out his intention.

Abel Buell's Second Font, October 1769.
Courtesy of the Connecticut State Archives.

The exact date of the first use by Sower of locally cast German letters evades determination. Sometime in the year 1770, he began the publication of the "second part" of a periodical known as Ein Geistliches Magazien. The title page of No. I, Part II, of this early religious magazine tells us that it was printed by Christopher Sower [Pg 68][Pg 69]at Germantown in the year 1770, and the undated colophon of No. XII of the series contains information of singular interest in the words, "Gedruckt mit der ersten Schrift die jemals in America gegossen worden." The probability is that this issue of Ein Geistliches Magazien was published late in 1771 or early in the ensuing year. Upon the basis of this quoted statement and in view of the knowledge that when his estate was sold in 1778 there were disposed of to Jacob Bay and others certain lots of letter moulds, crucibles and a large quantity of antimony[10] it becomes clear that Sower's interest in type making developed well beyond the stage of thinking it would be a nice thing to do.

The initiatory efforts of Sower have a particular significance in the story of American type founding; for the tradition is that while engaged in the casting process of type making in the Germantown foundry, Justus Fox and Jacob Bay learned the more difficult mysteries of an art in which later they attained proficiency. Because of the link of continuous effort thus formed between Sower's initiation of the business in 1770 and the later cutting and casting of Roman letter by these artisans, there must be conceded to him the distinction of having begun in English America the industry of type manufacturing, regardless of whether or not his casting of German letter from imported matrices was as extensive as has been supposed.

Our knowledge of Fox and of Bay is derived largely from the Additions to Thomas's History of Printing, a body of tradition of uneven reliability transmitted to Isaiah Thomas by William McCulloch, a Philadelphia printer active in the early years of the century. Selections from the six communications of the period 1812-1814 in which this information was transmitted were incorporated by Thomas in the revision of his book upon which was based the second edition brought out by the American Antiquarian Society in 1874. Long afterward the series of letters was published as a whole in the Proceedings of the Society for April 1921 under the title, William McCulloch's Additions to Thomas's History of Printing.

In these letters to Isaiah Thomas, McCulloch was recording his own memories and the accepted Philadelphia tradition. Because he [Pg 70]was well advanced in years at the time of writing, one is not surprised to find that now and then he trips over the barrier that separates documented fact from hearsay and personal recollection. It is much to our comfort in the present instance, however, to learn that he possessed and made use of unusual opportunities to obtain correct information as to the craftsmen who are the subject of our interest. These facts which he records of Justus Fox, for example, he obtained from Emmanuel, the son and partner in type founding of that artisan, and in Justus Fox, a German Printer of the Eighteenth Century, Dr. Charles L. Nichols accepts his testimony as of general reliability. He was indebted to various relatives of Bay, among them a sister, "a plump lady of 68," for the account of him which is found in the pages of the Additions. It is possible to compare various items in McCulloch's sketches of these men with records unknown to him, but available to us, with results so little at variance that one is inclined to accord a high degree of credence to all that he wrote concerning their activities.

At the time of Sower's importation of German equipment, McCulloch informed Isaiah Thomas, he had among his journeymen an ingenious general mechanic, Justus Fox, whom he charged with the responsibility for casting the letters to be used in the great Bible. In April 1772 he employed a newly arrived Swiss silk weaver, Jacob Bay,[11] to assist Fox. Two years later Bay left Sower's service and set up a foundry on his own account in a near-by house in Germantown. Fox remained in Sower's establishment, presumably engaged in casting the large quantity of type required to keep standing an edition of the Bible. In addition to this routine work he is said to have cut and cast an unspecified amount of Roman letter before 1774, the year of Bay's separation from the Sower establishment. Working in his separate foundry, it is recorded by our volunteer historian, Bay "cast a number of fonts, cutting all the punches, and making all the apparatus pertaining thereto, himself, for Roman Bourgeois, Long Primer, etc."

That this reported activity in type casting in Germantown about [Pg 71]the year 1774 was not a play of the imagination on the part of its historian is made certain by the definite statement that occurs in one of the non-importation resolutions of the Pennsylvania Convention. On 23 January 1775 the Convention "Resolved unanimously, That as printing types are now made to a considerable degree of perfection by an ingenious artist in Germantown; it is recommended to the printers to use such types in preference to any which may be hereafter imported."[12] Referring somewhat vaguely to this resolution, both as to content and as to origin, McCulloch tells us that even at the time of its passage Fox and Bay each claimed the honor implied in its terms. To this day the identity of the "ingenious artist" remains uncertain.

It is not clear by what evidence it was known to the Convention that "a considerable degree of perfection" had been attained in the making of type in Germantown. The only known specimen of printing type cast at that place before the meeting of the Convention in January 1775 is the German letter employed in Sower's periodical, Ein Geistliches Magazien, and it is not likely that this or any other specimen of German type would have led the Convention to a recommendation as sweeping as that which has been quoted from its journal. It could only have been a Roman letter that the delegates had in mind for a usage so general as was indicated in their resolution, and we must remain in doubt as to what specimen or specimens they had seen of locally cast type in this character. It is certain, however, that at the time of their action a font of Roman letter had been completed, or at any rate, that it was then in the process of casting. It is quite possible that a trial specimen of this font had been submitted to the Convention for its examination and approval.

It is a satisfaction to be able to introduce the new font through the medium of a contemporary reference to its use. We are indebted to the correspondence and to the diary of the Rev. Ezra Stiles of Newport, later President of Yale College, for some important information on early American type founding. Excited by Buell's efforts to make type in the year 1769, his interest in the manufacture seems to have remained in being, for on 9 May 1775 he appended the following comment to an entry in his Diary: "Extracted from the Pennsylv^a Mercury, whose first N^o was pub. the [Pg 72]7th of April last: printed with types of American Manufacture. The first Work with Amer. Types: tho' Types were made at N. Haven years ago."[13] The fact that Ezra Stiles was one of the earliest patrons of Abel Buell's venture in letter casting, supported as this fact is by his interest in American manufactures generally, lends a certain amount of weight to any observation that he might make on the subject of American type founding, although it is probable that he was ignorant of Sower's partial achievement of the art, just as Sower some years earlier in his claim to priority had seemed to be unaware of Buell's technically successful effort. If we may interpret Dr. Stiles's words as meaning that Story & Humphreys's Pennsylvania Mercury[14] of 7 April 1775, Vol. I, No. I, was the first published work printed in Roman letter which had been cut and cast in English America, we may unhesitatingly repeat his description of it as "The first Work with Amer. Types."

The Philadelphia newspaper which has been referred to is one of the rarest of American journals of the period. Complete files, comprising issues from 7 April to 27 December 1775, are found only in the Library of Congress and in the Harvard College Library. From the first page of its first issue, the publisher's announcement is here reproduced.

A glance at the pages of the newspaper in which the new Roman letter was first used makes us feel that in his commendable willingness to admit imperfection the publisher paid small tribute to the skill of his "ingenious artist." The letters of "rustic manufacture" were far from perfect, it is true, and in later issues of the newspaper it is observable that they had not worn especially well, but nonetheless they composed agreeably and they were sufficiently well executed to entitle them to something more than the half apology with which they were offered to the public. Their interest, however, as the first American-made Roman type to be used in a publication intended for circulation transcends considerations of worth and appearance.

Extract from The Pennsylvania Mercury of 7 April 1775.
Courtesy of the Harvard College Library.

Rejoicing in their encouragement of native manufactures, the practical support they were giving to the Pennsylvania non-importation resolutions of six months earlier, the publishers of the Mercury advertised on 23 June 1775 The Impenetrable Secret as a work "Just Published and Printed with Types, Paper and Ink, Manufactured in this Province." If they had added, as possibly they might have done with truth, "on a press of Philadelphia make," we could regard this statement as the declaration of independence of the American printer from the English manufacturer.[15]

Isaiah Thomas says that the Pennsylvania Mercury was established with the backing of Joseph Galloway as a substitute for the Pennsylvania Chronicle, that disastrous earlier venture in journalism in which the Quaker politician had engaged with William Goddard. If this was the case, certain features of the new publication must have been displeasing to the silent partner, for Galloway the Tory could hardly have rejoiced with the publishers in their virtuous encouragement of native type founding, with all its patriotic implications. Furthermore, from an advertisement of John Willis and Henry Vogt in the first issue of the paper one learns that the publishers were making use of other articles of printing equipment made by these general craftsmen, who here announced their ability to make presses and any and all of the mechanical appurtenances required in a printing shop. This well-advertised Americanism of the publishers, however, seems not to have availed them in the attainment of success, and after their establishment had been destroyed by fire in the closing days of the year the business was never resumed.

It is not certainly known who was the maker of the significant Mercury types. Assuming that Sower's foundry was in full operation in the early months of 1775, we must assume also, in the absence of knowledge to the contrary, that its principal activity was in the manufacture of German letters for the great Bible, first published in 1776, and that Sower would not have been likely to engage in the making of Roman type on a large scale until this work had been completed. Because of our ignorance of other possibilities there remain to be considered only the two craftsmen, Fox and Bay, as the probable makers of this first successful American letter. According to McCulloch, Fox had cut and cast Roman letter at some period before the year 1774 while still working for Sower. [Pg 75] This statement contains all that is known of his efforts at making Roman type during the years that he remained with Sower, but there is the chance to be taken into account that the Mercury font was the result of his experimentation during this period in an art which later he pursued with no small degree of local success. On the same authority it is said, it will be remembered, that Jacob Bay had left Sower in 1774, and in a near-by house in Germantown had set up a type foundry on his own account. In this separate establishment, it is likely that he was able to devote to the business such time and energy as would be required in making a font of sufficient size to accommodate the needs of such a newspaper as the Pennsylvania Mercury. The fact of his separate foundry having been established sometime in 1774, the reference in the Convention resolution of January 1775 to the "ingenious artist" at Germantown and the appearance in April 1775 of the new font of type acclaimed by the publishers as "an attempt to introduce so valuable an art into these colonies" are considerations which, taken in their order, seem to give ground for an assumption that it was Jacob Bay who cut and cast the letters for "The first Work with Amer. Types." Until proof is forthcoming, however, this must remain an assumption and nothing more.

It is certain that both Fox and Bay maintained their interest in letter casting for many years. At the sale of Sower's confiscated property in the year 1778 both of these artisans were present as purchasers of type-making tools and material.[16] Bay especially seems to have taken advantage of the opportunity to secure equipment at this dispersal of his old master's goods. Among other purchases which he made at the sale of what was probably at the time the largest typographical establishment in the country were "a lot of letter moles" at three pounds, "a Box with 9 Crusibles" at £5 15s., a quantity of worn type at 8d. a pound and antimony worth £8 18s. 3d. He was living at the time in a house rented from Sower,[17] and at the sale of the printer's real property in September 1779 he purchased another house belonging to the estate for £4200, a sum which he paid in two installments before 28 October 1779.[18] In recording from tradition the fact that Bay secured at [Pg 76]this time one of the Sower houses, McCulloch asserts that he purchased it from John Dunlap, the printer, whom he paid in type of his own making. It is possible that he borrowed the purchase price from Dunlap on this or a similar basis of repayment, a transaction that would explain McCulloch's version of the story. It is said that he conducted his foundry until the year 1789, and that between this year and 1792 he sold the business to Francis Bailey. Fox continued the making of type until his death in the year 1805, when his son and partner Emmanuel Fox sold the equipment to Samuel Sower of Baltimore, the son of Christopher Sower, the Second, of Germantown, whose enterprise had been the determining cause of its existence.

McCulloch was emphatic in his praise of the sturdiness of Fox's types, but when he remarked to Archibald Binny upon the excellent wearing quality of a set of figures and capitals cast by the Germantown founder, which he and his father before him had been using for many years, that gentleman replied with scorn that they were "at first so devilish ugly ... the longest using cannot mar their deformity."

The type-founding operations of Fox and of Bay have greater importance in the history of the art in America than is usually conceded them. When they are referred to at all by general writers, their activities are mentioned briefly or in such a manner as to give one the impression that their efforts were sporadic or tentative. It is with the work of the Scotch founder Baine, using imported equipment, that the story of American type founding is usually begun, but with the Mercury font before us, cut and cast thirteen years before Baine's first operations, and with assurances by McCulloch that Fox cut and cast the letters used in the McKean edition of the Acts of the Pennsylvania Assembly, printed by Francis Bailey in 1782,[19] and with references by McCulloch to fonts produced by Bay, it seems certain that there exists material which will require a revision of the story of American type-founding origins. Beginning with the incontestable fact of the successful Mercury font of 1775 and accepting McCulloch's relation of later events as a working hypothesis, there is seen to exist a field for research which should prove productive of discoveries, inasmuch as the fact and the tradition indicate a continuous activity on the part of one or the other of these early Pennsylvania founders, Fox and Bay, from 1775 to 1805. In the course of these years other founders, better known to us, began their work, and between the years 1796 and 1801, more than one hundred American printers, from Massachusetts to Georgia, purchased type from the foundry of Binny & Ronaldson of Philadelphia.[20]

The identification of the various fonts of locally made type used in Pennsylvania in the quarter century following "The first Work with Amer. Types" would form an interesting chapter in the story of early American type founding.

COMPOSED IN MONTICELLO TYPES

From Bookmaking on the Distaff Side by Anne Lyon Haight. Copyright 1937 by the author and reprinted by her permission.

In my search for knowledge about lady bibliophiles I climbed the library ladder and among the books on collecting saw The Library, by Andrew Lang, London, 1881. Confident that I would find some charming and sympathetic essay on the subject, I took it down and turned to the index, but evidently I had forgotten Lang's prejudice, for to my horror the startling lines "Women the natural foes of books" met my eye. They were classed with the other enemies of books: damp, dust, dirt, book-worms, careless readers, borrowers, book stealers, book-ghouls, etc., so I hastily turned to the page and read: "Almost all women are the inveterate foes, not of novels, of course, nor peerages and popular volumes of history, but of books worthy of the name. It is true that Isabelle d'Este and Madame de Pompadour and Madame de Maintenon were collectors; and, doubtless, there are many other brilliant exceptions to a general rule. But broadly speaking, women detest the books which the collector desires and admires. First, they don't understand them; second, they are jealous of their mysterious charms; third, books cost money, and it really is a hard thing for a lady to see money expended on what seems a dingy old binding, or yellow paper scored with crabbed characters. Thus ladies wage a skirmishing war against book-sellers' catalogues, and history speaks of husbands who have had to practise the guile of smugglers when they conveyed a new purchase across their own frontier. Thus many married men are reduced to collecting Elzivers, which go readily into the pocket, for you cannot smuggle a folio volume easily."

[Pg 104]

Poor man, his experience with the fair sex must have been a very unfortunate one. Perhaps he had been disillusioned by reading of the sixteenth-century abbess of the convent of Rumsey in Hampshire, whom Dibdin tells about. She was bibulously rather than bibliographically inclined and bartered the books of the abbey for strong liquors and consequently was accused of immoderate drinking, especially in the nighttime when she invited the nuns to her chamber to participate in these excesses. But fortunately the women whom Lang describes in his diatribe are really the rare exception to the rule and only lack of space prevents my writing a folio volume about the many famous women collectors who have been friends not foes to books throughout the ages.

It is true though that the female of our species has never been as susceptible to the malady of book madness as the male, possibly because she has not had the same opportunity. Unless a woman is economically independent there are many demands upon her allowance and consequently she must really want a book very much to buy it instead of a new hat or something else that is dear to her heart. She is not as apt to buy for speculation or because a book is one of the conventional collector's items, but is more independent and adventurous in following her personal taste, although the spirit of a true collector of books is the same whether it be possessed by man or woman.

Strange to say, the first bibliophile on record is a woman. She was a Benedictine abbess named Hroswitha. She lived in the Nunnery of Gandersheim in Saxony in the tenth century. She not only read all the parchment rolls and great codices which came into her hands, but caused books to be written for her Convent, wrote plays in Latin and translated Terence. Hroswitha probably knew but little Greek, as certain monks of the period considered the language an invention of the devil. Her example was followed in the next century by the lovely and intelligent Countess Judith of Flanders, who, wherever she followed her warring English husband, caused the most exquisite illuminated manuscripts to be made. She continued her interests on the continent when she later married the Duke of Bavaria. Four of her manuscripts, magnificently bound, are now safely housed in the Pierpont Morgan Library where "though they are books worthy of the name" their beauty may be appreciated by women who are[Pg 105] not even "the brilliant exception to the general rule" of collectors.

The Golden Age of women bibliophiles in France from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries must have been a glorious time to have lived. The Queens, the Princesses, the Mistresses of the Kings and all the great ladies had their libraries. They were composed of beautifully illuminated breviaries, missals and manuscripts, and from the presses of the great printers of the day came romances, histories, plays and religious books, veritable works of art. These books and manuscripts were bound in gold and silver and jewels, embroidered velvet, and in some of the most beautiful leather bindings the world has ever seen. Briefly: Marguerite of Navarre was one of the famous scholars of her day and the author of a collection of love stories, The Heptameron. It is said of her "L'amour du livre, chez la fille de Catherine fut une véritable passion." Her books were bound by the famous Clovis and Nicolas Eve and were decorated with daisies. Madame de Pompadour was for many years an inspiring influence in art and letters, although she owned more plays, novels and other "productions légères" than serious works. She had a printing press at Versailles and also etched plates for illustrations and as gifts for her friends. La Countesse de Verrue was a discriminating collector, a patroness of all the arts and a fascinating woman. The Du Barry acquired 1,068 volumes. When she began to form her library she could scarcely read or write. However, with practise, she soon learned to read well, but like many of us never to spell. Anne of Austria was fortunate in having her friend Mazarin, a kindred spirit in bibliomania, to advise her. Marie Antoinette had two libraries. She kept her particular books in her boudoir in the Trianon and the titles in the catalogue are very entertaining. Mary Stuart had a catholic taste in literature and her books were exceptionally well chosen. In deference to the loss of her first husband some were bound in black with black edges. It is comforting to know that when she left France as a young widow to return to her native Scotland where so much tragedy awaited her "qu'elle avait pour les livres un goût profond, et ils etaient pour ainsi dire sa seule consolation loin de ce beau Pays de France." In England, one of the most fortunate of the many ladies who appreciated literature was Queen Elizabeth, for she lived in an age when masterpieces were being written, many of them dedicated to her[Pg 106] and many inspired by her. When she was young she embroidered velvets in gold and silver threads to bind her treasures. Among the manuscripts in the Bodleian Library are the Epistles of St. Paul, etc., which was Elizabeth's own book. She has written at the beginning "I walke many times into the pleasant fields of the Holy Scriptures, where I plucke up the goodlie-some herbes of sentences by pruning: chaw them by musing: and laie them up at length in the hie seate of memorie by gathering them together: that so having tasted their sweetness I may the less perceave the bitterness of this miserable life."

One of the most touching and beautiful tributes ever written to a woman is Sir Philip Sidney's dedication of his Arcadia to his "deare ladie and sister," the Countess of Pembroke, to whom he wrote in part: "you desired me to do it, and your desire, to my hart is an absolute commandment. Now it is done onely for you, onely to you." She was his great inspiration and helped him in the editing of the book.

Where there's a will there's a way and women seem able to smuggle folios as well as duodecimos into the library. Catherine de Médici, for instance, had such a passion for books that she got them by fair means or foul. She longed for the library of her cousin Marshal Strozzi and as soon as he died appropriated it for her own. Catherine neglected to pay for it and owed the book-sellers as well, so after her death when her books were about to be seized by her creditors, De Thou raised the money to pay for them and they were saved for the state. The fascinating and glamorous Diane de Poitiers was a practical business executive as well as a bibliophile, for it was she who supposedly advised Henry II to pass an ordinance requiring publishers to present a copy of each book they published to the royal libraries at Blois and Fontainebleau, thereby increasing these collections by more than seven hundred volumes. Thus the present-day copyright law was initiated by a woman. Catherine of Russia was also courageous in her methods of gratifying her literary tastes. She partitioned Poland in 1772 and seized enough books to form the foundation of the Imperial Library at the Hermitage. She used to ask the Ambassadors, particularly the Ambassador from England, to get foreign books for her and if she did not have the money to pay for them at the time she conveniently forgot about it.

[Pg 107]

In later days there were women in the young colony in America who enjoyed their books in the midst of their primitive surroundings. In 1643 in Emans, New York, the inventory of the Widow Bronck included Danish books. Mrs. Willoughby of Virginia left over one hundred volumes at her death in 1673, and in 1700 Elizabeth Tatham of New Jersey left five hundred and fifty-two volumes, while their New England contemporary, Hannah Sutton, acquired a library of about seventeen hundred volumes.

In the early nineteenth century Miss Richardson Currer of Eshton Hall, Craven, Yorkshire, amassed a large and scholarly collection of books on many subjects. It was housed in a great room with a gallery which must have been the envy of all book-lovers. She was the fond possessor of the rare Book of St. Albans, written and compiled by Juliana Berners, prioress of the nunnery of Sopwith in Hertfordshire. It is said that the ardent book collector Richard Heber, being unable to secure the book in any other way, ardently proposed marriage to Miss Currer. She was firm in her refusal however, preferring to keep this first book about sport to be written by a woman to herself.

One of the most learned lady bibliophiles of this century in America was Miss Amy Lowell of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her books and manuscripts, including her collection of Keats, are being preserved for posterity in the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial at Harvard. She always enjoyed smoking a good cigar while writing or carrying on her sparkling conversations, as she thought it made her thoughts flow more easily.

One could not write of women in connection with books without speaking of two distinguished custodians of famous libraries, scholars, who are as well known abroad as in America: [the late] Miss Belle Da Costa Greene, the brilliant Director of the Pierpont Morgan Library, and Miss Ruth Sheppard Granniss, former Librarian of the Grolier Club and sympathetic friend of all bibliophiles, male or female. They, of course, come under Lang's category of exceptional examples.

But what of the many other exceptions? Would Lang have thought that Miss Lowell could not understand books? Or that Diane de Poitiers could be jealous of their mysterious charms? Or that Catherine of Russia would hesitate to spend what money[Pg 108] she could procure to satisfy her passion for them? What could his lady friends have been like to be classed with the enemies of books—and such enemies at that?

It would appear that book collecting is a truly feminine pastime, containing many elements which appeal to their sex; romance, intellectual curiosity, love of the beautiful and the quest of something difficult to obtain. But feminine collectors should beware of pitfalls, for sometimes this mania arouses the baser instincts such as envy, extravagance and self-indulgence. Wives have even been known to spend their marketing money on books instead of daily bread, and to waste hours reading book catalogues instead of attending to their housewifely duties. Book collecting, however, is a common denominator of all ages and a medium through which the minds of both sexes may meet with pleasure, and therefore greatly to be recommended as a delightful occupation.

Copyright 1932 by The Marchbanks Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favorite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in color. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost ten thousand dollars; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.

Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfect wineglass are parallel in typography. There is the long, thin stem that obviates finger-prints on the bowl. Why? Because no cloud must come between your eyes and the fiery heart of the liquid. Are not the margins on book pages similarly meant to obviate the necessity of fingering the type-page? Again: the glass is colorless or at the most only faintly tinged in the bowl, because the connoisseur judges wine partly by its color and is impatient of anything that alters it. There are a thousand mannerisms in typography that are as impudent and arbitrary as putting [Pg 110]port in tumblers of red or green glass! When a goblet has a base that looks too small for security, it does not matter how cleverly it is weighted; you feel nervous lest it should tip over. There are ways of setting lines of type which may work well enough, and yet keep the reader subconsciously worried by the fear of "doubling" lines, reading three words as one, and so forth.

Now the man who first chose glass instead of clay or metal to hold his wine was a "modernist" in the sense in which I am going to use that term. That is, the first thing he asked of this particular object was not "How should it look?" but "What must it do?" and to that extent all good typography is modernist.

Wine is so strange and potent a thing that it has been used in the central ritual of religion in one place and time, and attacked by a virago with a hatchet in another. There is only one other thing in the world that is capable of stirring and altering men's minds to the same extent, and that is the coherent expression of thought. That is man's chief miracle, unique to man. There is no "explanation" whatever of the fact that I can make arbitrary sounds which will lead a total stranger to think my own thought. It is sheer magic that I should be able to hold a one-sided conversation by means of black marks on paper with an unknown person half-way across the world. Talking, broadcasting, writing and printing are all quite literally forms of thought transference, and it is this ability and eagerness to transfer and receive the contents of the mind that is almost alone responsible for human civilization.

If you agree with this, you will agree with my one main idea, i.e., that the most important thing about printing is that it conveys thought, ideas, images, from one mind to other minds. This statement is what you might call the front door of the science of typography. Within lie hundreds of rooms; but unless you start by assuming that printing is meant to convey specific and coherent ideas, it is very easy to find yourself in the wrong house altogether.

Before asking what this statement leads to, let us see what it does not necessarily lead to. If books are printed in order to be read, we[Pg 111] must distinguish readability from what the optician would call legibility. A page set in 14-point Bold Sans is, according to the laboratory tests, more "legible" than one set in 11-point Baskerville. A public speaker is more "audible" in that sense when he bellows. But a good speaking voice is one which is inaudible as a voice. It is the transparent goblet again! I need not warn you that if you begin listening to the inflections and speaking rhythms of a voice from a platform, you are falling asleep. When you listen to a song in a language you do not understand, part of your mind actually does fall asleep, leaving your quite separate aesthetic sensibilities to enjoy themselves unimpeded by your reasoning faculties. The fine arts do that; but that is not the purpose of printing. Type well used is invisible as type, just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas.

We may say, therefore, that printing may be delightful for many reasons, but that it is important, first and foremost, as a means of doing something. That is why it is mischievous to call any printed piece a work of art, especially fine art: because that would imply that its first purpose was to exist as an expression of beauty for its own sake and for the delectation of the senses. Calligraphy can almost be considered a fine art nowadays, because its primary economic and educational purpose has been taken away; but printing in English will not qualify as an art until the present English language no longer conveys ideas to future generations, and until printing itself hands its usefulness to some yet unimagined successor.

There is no end to the maze of practices in typography, and this idea of printing as a conveyor is, at least in the minds of all the great typographers with whom I have had the privilege of talking, the one clue that can guide you through the maze. Without this essential humility of mind, I have seen ardent designers go more hopelessly wrong, make more ludicrous mistakes out of an excessive enthusiasm, than I could have thought possible. And with this clue, this purposiveness in the back of your mind, it is possible to do the most unheard-of things, and find that they justify you triumphantly. It[Pg 112] is not a waste of time to go to the simple fundamentals and reason from them. In the flurry of your individual problems, I think you will not mind spending half an hour on one broad and simple set of ideas involving abstract principles.

I once was talking to a man who designed a very pleasing advertising type which undoubtedly all of you have used. I said something about what artists think about a certain problem, and he replied with a beautiful gesture: "Ah, madame, we artists do not think—we feel!" That same day I quoted that remark to another designer of my acquaintance, and he, being less poetically inclined, murmured: "I'm not feeling very well today, I think!" He was right, he did think; he was the thinking sort; and that is why he is not so good a painter, and to my mind ten times better as a typographer and type designer than the man who instinctively avoided anything as coherent as a reason.

I always suspect the typographic enthusiast who takes a printed page from a book and frames it to hang on the wall, for I believe that in order to gratify a sensory delight, he has mutilated something infinitely more important. I remember that T. M. Cleland, the famous American typographer, once showed me a very beautiful layout for a Cadillac booklet involving decorations in color. He did not have the actual text to work with in drawing up his specimen pages, so he had set the lines in Latin. This was not only for the reason that you will all think of, if you have seen the old typefoundries' famous Quousque Tandem copy [i. e., that Latin has few descenders and thus gives a remarkably even line]. No, he told me that originally he had set up the dullest "wording" that he could find [I dare say it was from the Congressional Record], and yet he discovered that the man to whom he submitted it would start reading and making comments on the text. I made some remark on the mentality of Boards of Directors, but Mr. Cleland said "No: you're wrong; if the reader had not been practically forced to read—if he had not seen those words suddenly imbued with glamor and significance—then the layout would[Pg 113] have been a failure. Setting it in Italian or Latin is only an easy way of saying 'This is not the text as it will appear.'"

Let me start my specific conclusions with book typography, because that contains all the fundamentals, and then go on to a few points about advertising.

The book typographer has the job of erecting a window between the reader inside the room and that landscape which is the author's words. He may put up a stained glass window of marvellous beauty, but a failure as a window; that is, he may use some rich superb type like text gothic that is something to be looked at, not through. Or he may work in what I call transparent or invisible typography. I have a book at home, of which I have no visual recollection whatever as far as its typography goes; when I think of it, all I see is the Three Musketeers and their comrades swaggering up and down the streets of Paris. The third type of window is one in which the glass is broken into relatively small leaded panes; and this corresponds to what is called "fine printing" today, in that you are at least conscious that there is a window there, and that someone has enjoyed building it. That is not objectionable, because of a very important fact which has to do with the psychology of the subconscious mind. This is the fact that the mental eye focusses through type and not upon it. The type which, through any arbitrary warping of design or excess of "color," gets in the way of the mental picture to be conveyed, is a bad type. Our subconsciousness is always afraid of blunders [which illogical setting, tight spacing and too-wide unleaded lines can trick us into], of boredom, and of officiousness. The running headline that keeps shouting at us, the line that looks like one long word, the capitals jammed together without hairspaces—these mean subconscious squinting and loss of mental focus.

And if what I have said is true of book printing, even of the most exquisite limited editions, it is fifty times more obvious in advertising, where the one and only justification for the purchase of space is that you are conveying a message—that you are implanting a desire,[Pg 114] straight into the mind of the reader. It is tragically easy to throw away half the reader-interest of an advertisement by setting the simple and compelling argument in a face which is uncomfortably alien to the classic reasonableness of the book-face. Get attention as you will by your headline, and make any pretty type pictures you like if you are sure that the copy is useless as a means of selling goods; but if you are happy enough to have really good copy to work with, I beg you to remember that thousands of people pay down hard-earned money for the privilege of reading quietly-set book-pages, and that only your wildest ingenuity can stop people from reading a really interesting text.

Of course every one of you realizes that whatever interesting effects you can produce with displayed advertising, Direct Mail is your paradise. It is here that you approach the august precincts of the designer of books; here you can deal in the fascinating questions of paper, ink, presswork, and all those minute and thrilling technicalities by which the craftsman proves his worth. You also have the satisfaction of knowing that the better and more mannerly Direct Mail advertising looks, the more solid returns it will bring in.

To sum up: printing demands a humility of mind, for the lack of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in self-conscious and maudlin experiments. There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline. When you realize that ugly typography never effaces itself, you will be able to capture beauty as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something else. The "stunt typographer" learns the fickleness of rich men who hate to read. Not for them are long breaths held over serif and kern, they will not appreciate your splitting of hair spaces. Nobody [save the other craftsmen] will appreciate half your skill. But you may spend endless years of happy experiment in devising that crystalline goblet which is worthy to hold the vintage of the human mind.

COMPOSED IN BEMBO TYPES

Copyright 1931 by The Limited Editions Club. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

In adopting a prescribed title for this paper, I must begin by registering my dissent to its validity. There is no such thing nor can there be such a thing as "the ideal book." No single book, no particular style of book can be said to represent in itself an ideal below which all other books and other styles which differ from it fall. A certain book may be ideal for its purpose, but books can no more conform to a fixed ideal than can churches, cocktail-shakers, or hats. The best that one can do is to attempt to enumerate and codify those elements of good book-making that enter into what may be called the "fine" book.

It is difficult to declare oneself an advocate or exponent of fine printing or fine book-design without being misunderstood. Such a declaration, however, is not to arrogate superiority. It merely means that one believes in certain principles of craftsmanship and in upholding certain standards based upon a scrupulous and uncompromising observance of refinements and minutiæ. It is a mistake to assume that the word "fine," as applied to printing and to books, is a comparative term meaning a grade or measure of merit. Consider for a moment its true meaning: delicate, studied, subtly calculated. It represents not a grade of excellence, but a quality, a quality distinguishing those books and pieces of printing which the term properly describes from other books or pieces of printing. It may be allowed, however, that fineness is itself a comparable term; that there are, in other words, degrees of fineness. Thus a book may be fine without being of the first order of fineness. But if we are to seek for a standard of excellence equivalent to what is implied by the word "ideal," it should be obvious that only fineness of the first order can be considered. A fine [Pg 116]book of the first order is the end-result of a sedulous effort on the part of designer, printer, and binder to bring to their artifact every care for physical and technical details, every revision in the interest of betterment, of which they are capable, to the end that the finished product shall represent the capacity of each for the fulfilment of his artistic wish, his desire for perfection. To slacken this effort, to compromise wittingly (or wilfully), to surrender to expediency, is to repudiate fineness of the first order.

It is this concern for perfection that Mr. Stanley Morison means when he says "The fine printer begins where the careful printer has left off." It is this concern with perfection that Conrad celebrated when he wrote:

"Now the moral side of an industry, productive or unproductive, the redeeming and ideal aspect of this bread-winning, is the attainment of the highest possible skill on the part of the craftsman. Such skill, the skill of technique, is more than honesty; it is something wider, embracing honesty and grace and rule in an elevated and clear sentiment, not altogether utilitarian, which may be called the honor of labor. It is made up of accumulated tradition, kept alive by individual pride, rendered exact by professional opinion, and, like the higher arts, it is spurred on and sustained by discriminating praise. This is why the attainment of proficiency, the pushing of your skill with attention to the most delicate shades of excellence, is a matter of vital concern. Efficiency of a practically flawless kind may be reached naturally in the struggle for bread. But there is something beyond—a higher point, a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride beyond mere skill; almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art, which is art."

In dealing with the constituents of the fine book I intend no disparagement of seemly, modest, and honestly-made books to which the term "fine" is not strictly applicable. Even the humblest volume, ad pauperum commoditatum, may be, by virtue of its suitability to purpose and its seemliness, wholly admirable. As for the better class of trade books, the productions of university and great commercial presses, they often display qualities of design and workmanship of a high order. Though not of the first order of fineness, they represent, with gratifying frequency, what Conrad called "efficiency of a practically flawless kind."[Pg 117] That the best of them belong, however, to a lower stratum than the truly fine book may be, I think, quite easily demonstrated. One does not have to consider the work of the Doves Press or the Bremer Presse or the finer examples of French printing of the sixteenth or eighteenth century the ne plus ultra of book-making in order to recognize in them a quality (mark the word) which the trade edition, however charming, never does and never can attain. By reason of this quality—the quality of fineness—they are different from trade books, whether or not they are superior must remain for each of us a question of personal values. Since that is true, let us now—having cleared the ground and removed perhaps the possibility of a misapprehension with regard to the title of this paper—consider the values and the physical constituents of the fine book.

These constituents fall into three divisions: first, Dimensional (size and proportions); second, Tectonic (plan and construction); and third, Visual (appearance).

It would be absurd to contend that, ideally, a book should be of a certain size. Very large books are, of course, awkward to handle and are unsuitable, let us say, for reading in bed or in a railway train. But it does not follow that, because our habits of life differ so radically from those of the more leisurely and contemplative past, the tall volume is no longer justified. The large book is not an impediment to meditative reading and, although the "handy volume" will, in most circumstances, serve every purpose, there are those who, undeluded by pragmatism and undebased by false ideas of efficiency, may still, in the seclusion of study or library, find pleasure in the leisurely perusal of, let us say, The Golden Legend, in folio, nobly enthroned upon its lectern. Again, there is nothing incongruous or unpractical about the scholar (perhaps I should say, "research-worker") making use of a huge volume, spread before him on a library table. Large volumes are, moreover, frequently justified by the fact that illustrative plates of a large size are often desirable or essential. Who will deny that reproductions of Egyptian papyri, of eighteenth century engraved portraits, of Oriental carpets, in fact, of almost all works of art other than such small objects as miniatures or jewelry, would be better in folio than in octavo or duodecimo? It can be said, I think, that the very large book should be unconditionally condemned only when its size defeats the purpose to[Pg 118] which, by reason of its content, it would normally be put. Stateliness of form imparts dignity. It may be argued, therefore, that a great work on engraved gems, imposing in size, with plates, each showing many specimens, comports better with the character of its subject matter quite aside from any advantage it offers for comparative study, than would the same work printed as a book one might slip in one's pocket. Stateliness of form implies stateliness of content, and vice versa. Let a book be, for a generation, of such good report that it may be said to have become a classic, and a large-paper edition is justified. Let those who must cavil do so. If they cannot rise above the utilitarian ideal, they can easily obtain the work in a small format and be happy.

It may not be out of order to say at this point that, while a considerable range in the size of books is not only permissible but desirable, there are limits at both ends of the scale where practicability ceases to exist and we pass into the realm of curiosities and tours de force. Thus the miniature book, for all its charm, lies outside the confines of normal book-design. As to the maximum size that may be legitimately allowed for a book, it should never, I think, exceed the normal folio height (defined approximately by the larger moulds employed for manufacturing hand-made paper) while its bulk and weight should not preclude the possibility of holding it by the spine with one hand while turning the leaves with the other, when such a method of referring to its contents may be necessary. And now a final word as to dimensions. Large or small, the most perfect book will always be one of which the thickness bears a just and agreeable relation to its height and width. Small and slender books are delightful objects which no one could wish to abolish (one cannot say as much for the lamelliform folio, a veritable atrocity), but their inferiority to books of a meet thickness becomes apparent when, with (or, worse yet, without) their vertical, neck-twisting titles they are placed on a shelf.

We must next turn our attention to those aspects of a book which have to do with its plan and construction and which we have called tectonic.

In its physical character a book addresses itself to two of our senses, the sense of sight and the sense of touch. Because the tactile qualities of a book are relatively of less importance than its visual[Pg 119] aspects, let us first deal with those elements which are, in part at least, evaluated through the sense of touch.

Our first impression of a book is received from its exterior, its binding. Now the qualities to be looked for in the binding of a book are: (1) the character and quality of the material, (2) suitability, (3) soundness and charm of design, (4) agreeable color (a relative term), (5) workmanship, (6) pleasantness to the touch. Granting adequacy in all of these (and no book can pretend to fineness without such adequacy), there is still another desideratum less easy to specify. It might be called (7) "the evidence of durability." A book when taken in the hand should have a feeling of compactness, almost of solidity. I do not mean by this that it should feel like a block of wood, but it should, when picked up, when opened, or when its hinges are tested, give the impression that leaves and cover are so firmly (and honestly) knit together that they constitute a unit, having in its "feel" the evidence (or the assurance) of durability.

The next characteristic of a book to be noted through the sense of touch is the texture of the paper. By "texture" several things are meant: a surface agreeable to the hand, the degree of crispness, an impression of toughness (again the evidence of durability), and the degree of flexibility. Ideally, the paper in a book should satisfy all these requirements and should possess as well certain qualities of character, style, and color, pleasing to the informed eye. These will be dealt with in their proper place. The paper should be flexible, without the flimsiness characteristic of papers weak in substance. It should bend readily when the leaves are turned and should flow smoothly through the hand when all the leaves are bent at once. Stiffness in the leaves of a book (an all too common defect) is not, it should be observed, always the fault of the paper. It is often due to the choice of a paper too heavy for the size of the leaf. The same paper in a larger leaf might have the desired flexibility.

The final tactile test of a fine book (applicable, alas, to very few books indeed) resides in the character of the impression of the type on the paper. In the best printing, the surface of the page, if rubbed with the palm of the hand, shows a slight and pleasant roughness due to the sinking of the type into the paper. Such printing is rare in modern books because it is difficult of[Pg 120] attainment with machines designed for quantity production. To attain the effect described the paper should be dampened before printing, and an ink employed that is adaptable only to the hand press. Dry paper, particularly when heavily sized, resists a deep impression. It can be heavily impressed, but there is not the same difference between the impressed and unimpressed portions, due to the impaction of the substance caused by the pressure of the type, which results when dampened paper is used. In the latter instance, the depth of impression is within the sheet, not an embossment on the reverse side. This incisiveness, without a corresponding relief on the back of the sheet, is shown when an impression without ink is made on a hand press with dampened paper and a hard packing.

In printing on dry paper it is necessary, if adequate color is to be obtained, to use such a quantity of ink, of a consistency suitable to machine-press printing, that a really deep (not merely heavy) impression cannot be imparted to paper without "spreading," which slightly modifies the sharpness of the type. The machine printer must choose therefore between a surfacy quality with sharpness and a heavy (not necessarily deep) impression with a loss of sharpness, neither of which is ideal. There are some that will question the truth of this statement, calling attention to specimens of machine printing on dry paper in which the ink has been driven into the sheet and perfect sharpness maintained. It may be said, however, in support of our contention, that, under the test of hand and eye, this perfectly printed dry sheet will be found, in the last analysis, to lack, in comparison with a sheet perfectly printed by hand on dampened paper, a certain almost-indefinable something that can perhaps be best described as a living quality. This ultimate grace arises, I think, from the fact that in competent hand-press printing the third dimension is not merely suggested but actual; we have, in other words, not merely sharpness but crispness; the effect attained is sculptural. No printing that is lifeless, or to which such terms as "slick" and "dry" may be appropriately applied can be called fine printing.

Turning now from the tactile to the visual elements of the fine book, we shall consider, first of all, that fundamental factor of all books, the text-page, upon the form or "layout" of which all other typographic elements must, to a large extent, depend. The[Pg 121] text-page is of primary importance because by its rightness or wrongness a book must stand or fall.

The elements of the text-page that call for consideration may be grouped under three heads: first, Form (the proportions—width to height—of the type-page and the balance of the rectangle of type with the rectangle of paper); second, Space (the ratio between the areas of the type-page and the paper-page); third, Tone (the tonal value of the type mass and the relation between its tone and the white area of the margins). In the perfect text-page all these elements may be observed in nice adjustment, severally and mutually.

There are those who contend that a proper relation of margins to type-page may be arrived at by employing ratios identical with those to be found in the well-proportioned pages of the early printers. Others declare that correct margins can be created by the application of an arithmetical or a geometrical formula. It can be admitted that such procedures are, at least, safe; that is to say, the danger of malproportioned margins will be avoided. But neither the method nor the result can be ideal for the simple reason that, while providing for the factors of form and space, they fail to provide for the factor of tone. It should be obvious that a rectangle of black type, with no space (leading) between lines, and a rectangle of the same shape and size printed from light-face type and generously leaded call for different margining.

All of this may seem to be supervacaneous, but the stubborn fact remains that no one of the factors set forth above can be ignored. It is perfectly true that the accomplished book designer will compass the desired end through a sagacious application of his knowledge and taste, but we are concerned here with presenting the elements of the ideal book and it is therefore essential that all the elements, no matter how much the initiated may take some of them for granted, should be, for the benefit of the layman, categorically enumerated.

It is necessary at this point to allude to the dictum—voiced in high places as well as in low—that a book is primarily something to be read; that every factor which does not contribute to that end is an impertinence. The worthy champions of this faith would be on firmer ground if they heaped their condemnation[Pg 122] upon such adjuncts of a book as actually lessen its readability. M. Paul Valéry has disposed of the matter so effectively from the aesthetic point of view in his essay, Les deux vertus d'un livre, that nothing remains to be said on that side of the question. But there are other objections to be raised to this ipse dixit of the mechanists. Their contention that what we all grant is at once the basic and paramount function of a book, its readability, is its only function would, if carried to its logical conclusion, lead to a doctrine in book design equivalent to what is known in present-day architecture as "functionalism." Since functionalism or, as it is sometimes called, the "machine and function" principle, demands that the design of a building must grow out of and be restricted by its predetermined use or purpose, it should follow that, if the sole purpose of a book is that it be something to read, there is no reason, based upon utility, for not using the whole area of the paper-page, with margins of no more, let us say, than a quarter of an inch or so. The uncomely, marginless illustrations of certain recent books represent an application of this principle. If the protagonists of the utilitarian ideal admit that margins are other than a waste of usable space, they make a concession to the aesthetic conception of a book, for the determination of margins, the mise en page, is primarily an element of design. It will be argued no doubt, in contravention of this statement, that margins make for ease of reading (utility), but that this is an untenable defensive assumption should be proved by the perfect readability of newspaper columns separated only by a light rule, or by the two-column book or magazine page with only a pica of white between the columns. Since it cannot be denied that the margins of a book, if well proportioned, promote pleasure, an aesthetic function, the true functionalist should, to be consistent, insist upon doing away with them.

We may turn now from that major fundamental of the fine book—a text-page of perfect seemliness—to a consideration of other elements. But before doing so, it may be proper to explain what some of my readers may deem an omission. I have said nothing about the choice of type. It is axiomatic that good letter is a prime essential of the good book. There are only two kinds of type, good and bad. Good types, whether based upon classical models or the quasi-original forms of contemporary type-designers, are sufficiently numerous to make a suitable selection, pro[Pg 123]vided the printer knows anything whatever about the subject, quite simple. It should be pointed out, however, that, other things being equal, type cast from matrices struck from hand-cut punches is superior to machine-cut type. This superiority is a matter of real importance, chiefly in printing by means of the hand press. Only in such printing is the difference between the hand-cut and machine-cut letter fully apparent.

No type is good if some of the characters are marked by eccentricity. Unorthodox peculiarities in the forms of certain letters sometimes lend charm to a type-face, but there is a difference between a peculiarity of shape thoughtfully and discreetly arrived at and freakish variations which do not justify themselves and bespeak only a stupid desire for novelty at any cost.

Given the seemly text-page as the prime requisite of the fine book, our next consideration should be what may be called integration of the parts. Here we must again think in terms of architecture, with which art book-design has so much in common. Let the parts of a book be few or many, simple or complex, it is of the first importance that they be, one to the other and each to all, harmoniously correlated.

In the simple undecorated and unillustrated book it is not only desirable that sunken pages, if any (the first pages of chapters or sections, for example), should show an equal sinkage. But all isolated typographic elements, such as half-titles, elements of the title page, copyright notice, dedication, headings of preliminary and supplementary matter, etc., should fall on levels which, though not necessarily identical, bear a mensural, not an arbitrary, relation one to the other and to the structure of the book as a whole. This requires, perhaps, some elucidation. Suppose we give the first pages of our chapters a uniform sinkage. These pages, let us say, establish three levels for us—(1) the chapter heading, (2) chapter title, and (3) the first line of text. If we adopt the same sinkage for Contents, Illustrations, Appendices, and Index, putting the headings of this group on the same level as the chapter headings (LEVEL 1), the first text lines of this group should be on the same level as the chapter titles (LEVEL 2), or on the level of the first text lines of the chapters (LEVEL 3). If, on the other hand, we adopt a different sinkage (smaller) for the second group, we may still relate it mensurally to the first group by placing the first text lines of Group 2 on the same level as the chapter headings[Pg 124] of Group 1. Suppose further that we place our half-titles on one of the three or four levels that have been established. We still have to deal with a copyright notice, perhaps a limit notice, a bibliographical note, and a dedication. It is not essential that all of these should fall on the same level, but it is essential that each be related to some one of the established levels. Finally, it is desirable that such major elements of the title page as a subtitle or the author's name should be placed on one of the established levels.

An observance of this principle makes for homogeneity of design. In reading a book so put together we are spared (without knowing that we are spared) the disturbance of our sense of balance which results, almost without our knowing it, when our eyes fall upon a page some part of which is not "tied in" architecturally with the rest of the book. The effect is similar to that of a many-paneled room with an impost cornice at a certain height in all the panels except two or three where it is either higher or lower. We have, in one case, faulty architecture; in the other, faulty book-making. In judging a book or a building, it should be borne in mind that, however charming its parts, it must be regarded as a whole. If our contemplation of it is to be attended with pleasure and comfort, its parts must be so disposed, so correlated, that they will not produce a "jumpy" effect.

It is not contended that every book in which this refinement of perfectly integrated parts has been ignored should be considered a failure because it is less than perfect. If that were true, few books would pass the test. It would indeed be hypercritical to insist that a failure to observe this principle actually spoils an otherwise well-made book. It is desirable, however, that the principle should be observed as far as the material will permit. It must be recognized, also, that sometimes the elements are so diverse—chapter headings or the internal titles of essays, short stories or poems—that a strict adherence to the principle becomes impossible. In such instances, the designer's task is still to strive for order and integration. Perfect order, symmetry, and balance may be unattainable, but this does not justify him in being haphazard. When order is observed we may not be conscious of it; when it is not observed we are aware of its absence. Movement is of the highest importance as a factor of design—such movement, for example, as is imparted to a book by this very diversity of its elements—but good design demands movement that is ordered,[Pg 125] not arbitrary. If liberties are taken (and it is desirable, in the interest of vitality and charm, that they should be taken) they must justify themselves aesthetically; they should not only please us in themselves but as evidence of the designer's intelligence, his insight, subtlety, sensitiveness, discrimination, and tact. However diverse the elements or parts of a book may be, however they may, by reason of such diversity, render perfect order and balance impossible, their arrangement should at least possess a rationale.

This need of a fundamental balance has its basis in its pleasure-giving value. I have adverted to the analogy between book-design and architecture, let me point now to an equally pertinent analogy with the structure of poetry. "Verse," says Poe, "originates in the human enjoyment of equality, fitness. To this enjoyment, also, all the moods of verse—rhythm, meter, stanza, rhyme, alliteration, the refrain, and other analogous effects—are to be referred." Specifically, the parts of a book—half-titles, headings, etc., etc.—should be, severally and collectively, related as are such structural elements in verse as recurrent rhythms, rhymes, and refrains.

We must now consider the decorated or illustrated book. In the first place, it should be understood that no form of decoration or illustration is legitimate in the strictly fine book except such as are printed from wood or metal engraved by hand, preferably in relief which comports with type both in physical character and in the means by which the image is imparted to the paper. Process-engravings are disqualified not only because of the preponderant mechanical factor, but because mechanical engraving in relief cannot produce a line of the delicacy and purity obtained with the engraving tool. As a corollary to the principle of integration set forth above let us take first the type of decorated book to which most obviously it applies. A book carrying on various pages head-bands of varying depth and varying tone—deep, shallow, black and heavy, light and delicate—will produce a disturbing effect. Less obvious but hardly less disturbing is a succession of initial letters differing in size, in tone, or in position on the page. The book with initial letters strewn through the text, sometimes several on a single page, is a challenge to the designer. When thus arbitrarily employed it is important, in order that the initials shall not be obtrusive, that they be so selected as to size (in proportion to the page) and so integrated with the book as a whole that their[Pg 126] "accidental" character is either disguised or lost and their recurrence actually contributes to the unity of the volume by virtue of their consistent accentual value.

An arbitrary arrangement of tailpieces is likely to produce a "jumpy" effect. Since the spaces (at the ends of chapters or sections) within which tailpieces may be placed differ in area, such decorative elements cannot always fall on the same level. This irregularity can be compensated for in a measure by adjusting the size of the decoration to the area of the space it occupies. By what may seem to be a negation of the law of balance here insisted upon, such a variation is more productive of architectural harmony than tailpieces of uniform size would be if disposed in spaces of varying area.

Returning for a moment to the undecorated book, it may be remarked in passing that verse, particularly a collection of short lyrics, does not lend itself to good book-design. It should be enough to point out that the disproportion between type mass and white paper caused by short measure and the frequently meager letter-press deprive books of verse of the book's basic structural factor, the rectangle of type. How decoration can be employed to overcome this deficiency is perfectly exemplified in the original edition of Dorat's Les Baisers.

With the principles of balance and unity still in mind, it will hardly, I think, admit of contradiction that the scattering of odd-sized illustrations through the text is incompatible with both of these principles. Such illustrations, particularly those of irregular shape bounded on two or three sides by type, are as destructive of balance and unity as is poor fenestration in a building. It is not enough that something like a balance is effected on facing pages (an elementary principle in layout); the lack of a complete integration of the pictures with the book and the disturbance created by distorting the letter-press into odd shapes preclude the possibility of such a book being regarded as well-planned, much less ideal, however charming it may be in detail.

We have seen, while considering the major aspects of book-design, in what wise paper must be judged with regard to those first or immediate impressions gained from seeing and feeling it. I must now carry the consideration of paper a little farther. Since style and character are essential qualities of the fine book, we must insist upon these qualities in every element of its substance. Now[Pg 127] style and character at their utmost are peculiar (for reasons that have to do with the methods of manufacture) to hand-made paper only, laid or wove, and, it may be further insisted, to only the best hand-made paper. Desirable as wove paper is for certain purposes, it cannot be denied that it has less character than the laid sheet. It is also true that no feature of fine laid paper gives more character to a sheet than the so-called "antique" factor, a slight thickening of the pulp and greater opacity along the chain-lines. By an "improved" method of mould-making, introduced by Baskerville, this thickening was eliminated, but, whatever mechanical superiority its absence may represent, there can be no question but that it represents a loss of character. All book papers produced by machinery (particularly the laids in which the effect of laid lines is mechanically faked) are as much imitations of and substitutes for hand-made paper as machine-made lace is a substitute for hand-made lace, and the disparity in quality is as great. We speak of "imitation lace" and "real lace," meaning machine-made and hand-made; we might, with equal propriety, speak of "imitation paper" and "real paper." Ideally, then, the fine book, in the fullest and strictest sense of the term, can be printed on no other than paper that is hand-made and of the best quality.

As to the color of paper for fine books, the whole question may be considerably clarified at once by the statement that everything suggestive of artificiality should be avoided. A paper that is chalky white or bluish white tells us at once that the rags which went into its manufacture were chemically (that is to say, artificially) bleached. A great many toned papers, described as "cream" or "india," are artificially colored and show it. The most desirable tone for fine book paper is the "natural" tone of unbleached (and sorted as such) linen rags. Its slight creamish color is at once pleasant to the eye and holds the promise of that agreeable mellowness which comes, very slowly, with age. A number of very pleasant books have been printed in recent years on gray, blue, green, and brownish papers (the last usually a deliberate simulation of ancient paper), but, despite their charm, they are, I think, open to the charge of affectation, against which, if true, there is of course no defense. If not actually "arty," they come perilously near to it.

It has not been my purpose in this paper to lay down the rules[Pg 128] for making a fine book, for, after all, rules are of no use whatever (in an art or in a craft) except to be broken—wisely. Neither has any attempt been made, since this is not a technical treatise, to outline the methods by which the results described may be produced. I have tried merely to set forth the various criteria by which fine books should be judged and the principles (quite different from rules) that underlie them. If the "specifications" seem over-exacting, if they are to be dismissed as trop raffinés, I must ask the caviler if that which purports to be "fine" can be "too refined"? Let those who wish to compromise (with popular taste, with outlay and returns, with honesty, with self-respect, or with machinery) do so, but unless the thing they produce represents, with eloquence and beauty, the full and unconditional employment of every realizable aid to betterment, physical and technical, it is something other than a fine book of the first order. We must discourage ourselves in order that we may be strong.

Copyright 1919 by L. B. Siegfried. Reprinted by permission of the author.

W. A. DWIGGINS, Secretary

384A Boylston Street, Boston
December 1, 1919

[Pg 130]

It may be said in introduction that the Society's Investigation into the Physical Properties of Books was undertaken by a special committee whose personnel insured that its consideration would be thorough and unbiased.

The Committee began its labour by an examination of all books published in America since the year 1910. This examination forced upon the investigators the conclusion that "All Books of the present day are Badly Made." The conclusion was unanimous.

Working out from this basic fact in an effort to arrive at the reasons underlying the evil, the Committee held numerous sittings in consultation with men concerned with various branches of printing and publishing. From these sittings there developed a mass of information of an unusual and stimulating character.

The publishers have chosen from the Record of the examination a few examples, not because they are extraordinary but because they present typical points of view. They are transcribed verbatim. It will be obvious that in certain cases it has been no more than courteous to suppress the names of the persons assisting the investigation. For the sake of uniformity it has been deemed wise to follow this practice throughout.

I. MR. B.

Q: Mr. B——, will you please tell the committee why you printed this book on card-board?

A: To make it the right thickness. It had to be one inch thick.

—Why that thick, particularly?

—Because otherwise it would not sell. If a book isn't one inch thick it won't sell.

—Do you mean to say that people who buy books select them with the help of a foot rule?

—They have to have some standard of selection.

[Pg 131]

—So that it is your practice to stretch out the text if it is too short by printing it on egg-box stock?

—Not my practice, particularly. All publishers do it. We are obliged to use this and other means to bring the book up to a proper thickness. You must remember that our prices are not based on the contents of a book but on its size.

A chart showing the percentage of excellence in the physical properties of books published since 1910.

—You mention other methods. Would you mind telling us what other method you use?

—We can expand the letter-press judiciously. We limit the matter to seven words on a page, say, and so get a greater number of pages. We can use large type and can lead considerably.

—But does not that practice hurt the appearance of the page? Make a poor-looking page?

—I am afraid I do not get your meaning.

—I mean to say, is not the page ugly and illegible when you expand the matter to that extent?

[Pg 132]

—You don't consider the look of a page in making a book. That is a thing that doesn't enter into the production of a book. If I understand you correctly, do you mean to say that it matters how a book looks?

—That was the thought in my mind.

—That's a new idea in book publishing!

—You were speaking of the pressure of industrial conditions since the war. Under these conditions what percentage of the traditions of the craft can you preserve, would you say?

—The traditions of what craft?

—The craft of printing, obviously. What I am trying to get at is this:—There are certain precise and matured standards of workmanship in the printing craft; these standards are the results of experiment through nearly five hundred years. How far are these standards effective under your present-day conditions?

—Those standards, so far as I know anything about them, are what you would call academic. In the first place, book-manufacturing is not a craft, it is a business. As for standards of workmanship—I can understand the term in connection with cabinet-making, for example, or tailoring, but I should not apply the expression to books. You do not talk about the "standards of workmanship" in making soap, do you?

—Then in your mind there does not linger any atmosphere of an art about the making of books?

—When you talk about "atmosphere" you have me out of my depth. There isn't any atmosphere of art lingering about making soap, is there?

—You would class soap-making with book-making?

—I can see no reason why not.

—May I ask you why you were selected by —— Company to manage their manufacturing department?

—Really, I must say that you overstep the borders—

—Please do not misinterpret my question. It is really pertinent to the inquiry.

—It should certainly be obvious why a man is chosen for a given[Pg 133] position. I am employed to earn a satisfactory return on the shareholders' investment. Is that the information you want?

—I think that is what we want. Would you then consider yourself as happily employed in making soap as in making books?

—Quite as well employed, if making soap paid the dividend.

—While we are on this subject, may I ask you how you choose the artists who make your illustrations?

—My practice is to select an illustrator whose name is well known.

—Is that the only point you consider?

—I should say, yes. I am not aware of any other reason for spending money on this feature. It is always an uncertain detail and this way of making a choice puts the matter on a safe basis.

—It is sometimes assumed that the illustrations should have a sympathetic bearing on the story. Does not that consideration have some weight with you in choosing your artist?

—None, I should say. You see, the pictures are not really a necessary part of the book. They are a kind of frill that the public has got in the way of expecting, and we have to put them in. Illustrations as a rule stand us as a dead loss unless they are made by a well-known artist. Then, of course, they help sell the book.

II. MR. MCG.

A: The gentlemen of the committee must remember that the book-publishing business is a gamble. Each new issue, particularly in the department of fiction, is a highly adventurous risk. Our percentage of blanks would astonish you if we dared to state it. But any book may turn out a best-seller. This hope keeps us going. It is absolutely a gamble, as I say. You can see that under these conditions we cannot spend very much money on non-essentials. We have to strip the books down to the barest necessities.

Personally I should like to see the firm put out nothing that is not well designed and well printed. But as an agent of the firm I have to set aside my personal preferences. The directors are very much down on what they call art.

[Pg 134]

—Has the firm ever looked into the question of good workmanship as a possible aid to sales?

—Not under the present management. The founder looked at good work as more or less a marketing advantage.

—What do you think caused the present management to change from that opinion?

—They haven't changed. They never had it. They get at the matter from another angle altogether. Their policy is to reduce the production cost to the minimum. The minimum in theory would be reached when the public complained. The public hasn't complained, so you can't tell when to stop cheapening.

You see the directors don't look at a book as a fabricated thing at all. Books are merely something to sell—merchandise. Our management—and all the rest of them, for that matter—come from the selling side of the business and do not have any pride in the product. Old Mr. —— was a publisher because he liked books. That made an entirely different policy in the old firm, of course.

—To get back to the question of good workmanship helping sales:—Here are two books published abroad to be sold at 50 cents and 80 cents. They can very well be called works of art. Do you not think that these well designed paper covers would stand out among other books and invite customers to themselves?

—Undoubtedly they would.

—Have you ever tried the experiment of putting out editions in paper covers of attractive design?

—Never. It couldn't be done. People wouldn't buy them.

—But you said a moment ago—

—Moreover the difference of cost between cheap cloth sides and paper covers of the kind you have there is so slight that it wouldn't pay to try the experiment. People want stiff board covers. It doesn't much matter what is inside, but they insist on board covers.

—How do you arrive at that fact?

—Through our salesmen.

—And you say that paper covers have never been tried?

[Pg 135]

—Never. None of our travellers would go out on the road with a sample in paper covers.

—A little while ago you said something about your salesmen helping you to an understanding of the public taste. I infer that you get considerable help from this source?

—Most valuable help indeed. We depend entirely on the reports the sales force turns in in these matters. The salesmen are in direct contact with the retailers and are naturally in a position to feel the public pulse, so to speak. Their help is invaluable. They can anticipate the demand very often.

I had reference more particularly to the way books are made.

—Oh, on that point too. We never make a final decision on a cover design, for instance, without showing it to the salesmen. They very often make valuable suggestions as to changes of colour, etc. They run largely to red.

—It would seem, then, that the designing of the books is very much in the hands of the salesmen?

—Quite in their hands.

—Are the office-boys often called into consultation?

—Mr. —— finds his stenographer a very great help in passing upon certain points—illustrations, etc.

—Does it appear to you that the sales department would be the one best qualified to pass on points of design?

—Well, there, you see—the books have to be sold—that is what we make them for—and the sales department is the one in closest touch with the people that buy the books—that knows just what they want.

—The standards of quality, then, are set by the people who buy the books?

—Oh, absolutely so. How else would you move the books? It is a merchandising proposition, you must remember.

—But do you not think that people would buy decently made books as willingly as poorly made books?

At the same price, yes. No question about it. The book-buying[Pg 136] public doesn't worry its head about the way books are made. It doesn't know anything about it. And well made books cost more. The trade is committed to a dollar-and-a-half article and can't risk going above it.

—Your opinion is that the price of a well made book would be so high as to prevent its sale?

—In the case of fiction, yes. The price has become almost a fixture.

—We shall have to go outside of fiction, then, to look for well made books?

—It amounts to that.

—You have said that certain unproductive factors prevent you from spending what you otherwise might on good workmanship. What specific factors would you mention?

—Plates—electros. We plate everything on the chance of its running into several printings. 80 per cent of the books are not reprinted. You can see that the money tied up in plates is a very considerable sum, and, as I say, 80 per cent of it is dead loss. We are obliged to take the chance, however.

—Has any remedy occurred to you?

—If stereotyping could be revived as an accurate process it might help us out. It would cost much less to make and to store paper matrices than to make electrotypes. The difficulty here is that no one knows how to make good stereotypes, and the stereotype plates at their best are more trouble to make ready. Trouble with the press-room, you see.

—Is it possible under good conditions to get satisfactory results from stereotype plates?

—Unquestionably. The books printed from this kind of plates in the first days of the invention are entirely satisfactory.

III. MR. L.

Q. Can a trade-edition book be well made and sell for $1.50?

—That depends on how high you set your standard.

—Well, let us not be too rigorous. Can it be made better, say, than this book?

[Pg 137]

—Beyond question. It will all depend upon whether or not the printer has a few lingering memories of the standards of printing.

—But should not the setting of standards come from the publisher?

—Oh yes, under ideal conditions. Both printer and publisher should have a hand in it.

—How would you make a book of fiction to be sold for $1.50?

—Well, such a book could have a good title-page as cheaply as a bad one—and the whole typographic scheme would cost no more if it were logically done instead of crudely strung together. By logically done I mean with well proportioned, practicable margins and legible headings, etc. The press-work on books is reasonably good but the "layout" or design is entirely neglected. It calls for a little planning, of course, but no more than should be available in any reputable plant. It isn't so much that these books are badly planned as it is that they are not planned at all.

—But most printing firms have a planning department, do they not?

—The planning in most presses is concerned with the handling of material, not with the designing of material. This is no doubt due to the fact that the Taylor System has not yet got around to Aesthetic Efficiency.

—Are not the typographical unions concerned to train their men on these points of design that you mention?

—The unions have only one idea—and it is not concerned with the improvement of printing.

—Are there any trade schools that teach these things? Are not the employers' associations promoting schools to train men in the craft?

—The employers' associations have one idea—a little different from the idea of the unions, perhaps, but not concerned with the improvement of printing. There are trade schools but they teach only the mechanics of the craft.

—Apparently, then, there is no place in this country where one can learn how to design printing?

—You can safely say that there is no such place.

[Pg 138]

IV. MR. A.

Q: What is your own opinion on the subject of illustrations in books?

—In what particular do you mean?

—I mean, do you think that illustrations help or hinder the quality of a book?

—The question is too general to be answered easily. May I ask you to be more specific?

—For example, here is a "best-seller" with several—five or six—half-tone illustrations. Do you consider that these pictures make the book a more complete thing as a specimen of book-making?

—Most certainly not.

—Then would you say that illustrations in such books were a detraction?

—Illustrations such as these, yes. Though it would be hard to detract from this particular book.

—It is a standard book—a standard type of book.

—I fear that it is.

—What kind of illustrations would you favour?

—For many books, none at all. In these books of current fiction the pictures are either futile or else detrimental to the development of the plot. They give the game away, so to speak, when the author may wish to hold the story in suspense. The effort to avoid this disaster accounts for the multitude of undramatic pictures you see in books.

—Your theory of no pictures should appeal to the publishers but I doubt if the illustrators will stand with you.

—Illustration is a trade as well as an art.

—True. But we are trying to limit the inquiry to the artistic side at present. When, then, according to your deductions, would illustrations be called for?

—When they can make a stage-setting for the story. When they ornament it or suggest it, perhaps, instead of reveal it. Impressions and "atmosphere" instead of literal diagrams with a cross marking the spot where, etc.

—But perhaps people like the cross marking the spot where.

[Pg 139]

—We are limiting the discussion to the artistic side, are we not?

—What about the half-tone process of engraving?

—The process is a way of doing a thing that cannot be done cheaply by any other means.

—Do you consider it a process that adds to the artistic possibilities of book printing?

—You mean according to the standards that prevailed in the earlier days of the craft?

—I do. Yes.

—According to those standards it seems to me that half-tones will always have to be considered as necessities forced upon the book-printer. They demand a kind of paper that is never a satisfactory book-paper. In the case of the kind of books we are talking about the relief line methods have always given the most artistic results, because they are so closely related to the character of type.

One regrets, however, to give up the chances for tonal designs that the half-tone process provides. Probably the designers and printers will work out a satisfactory relation between half-tones and type when the craze for photographic detail passes a little. As things stand, I should say that the best results are to be had with uncoated book-papers and with line plates. It is true books are rarely illustrated this way—current fiction, I mean—but the method might be used to produce a very attractive and unusual result.

—Then you would condemn the use of half-tones in this kind of book?

—If you mean the usual kind of half-tones printed separately and inserted, I do. But if you are making a book of travel, for example, the half-tones from photographs explain and justify themselves.

But on this whole subject of book illustration it strikes me that if you are to make the design from the start you might as well make it in harmony with the kind of paper and printing you are planning to use, and get all the artistic advantage of fitting your means to your limitations.

[Pg 140]

Are you familiar with the Christy-Holbein Test?

—Yes. That is to say, I have heard of your applying it, and remember that the percentages were very much against Holbein.

—Ninety-three to seven, on an average. How do you explain such a crudity of taste in these groups of people otherwise well educated?

—By the deduction that they are not educated. That is to say that these people, cultivated in other ways, react precisely like savages when confronted with pictures or drawings. They "go for" the tinsel and glitter and are opaque to the higher and more civilized values. They get the most pleasure from drawings that they think they could make themselves. This is the basis of the Eight-year-old Formula widely applied in the department of newspaper comics: "Make your drawing so that it can be understood by a child eight years old."

All of this is clearly lack of training, because their taste is good in other matters—music, for example, and house furnishings.

—You would deduce, then, that the periodical and book-publishing industry has failed to train the taste of its public in such matters?

—It has done worse: it has depraved that taste. Because there was, not very long ago, a fine tradition in this country in the line of illustration.

—Why should the publishers find any advantage in depraving the taste of the public—as you say they have done?

—Because they turned their backs on the standards of the publishing business and became merchandisers solely. They had to sell the goods and they had to "sell" a big new public. The quickest way to this public—through flash-and-crash tactics—they adopted. And naturally ran themselves and the public down hill.

—May there not be other sides to it, too? May it not be that the art schools are not now producing draughtsmen of a calibre to support the fine tradition you mention?

—That may have something to do with it. But even that is[Pg 141] mixed up with the other. I think that the chief difficulty is with the publishers.

—And the public?

—The public will follow if the publishers lead.

V. MR. S.

A. Are you not making the mistake of keeping too close to the publishers? It seems to me that you will not get at all the facts behind the situation until you get in touch with the people we sell the books to. They are the factors that bring about the conditions you object to. The publisher is merely a machine for selling the public what it wants.

—Then the publisher has no selective function?

—Absolutely none.

—How does the public bring about the condition we object to?

—Obviously by buying the books.

—I mean to say, how does the public prevail upon you to sell it trashy books instead of well made books?

—The public is entirely uneducated on the subject of books, in your sense. People know nothing at all about paper or printing or pictures or things of that sort. One book is as good as another to any educated man so long as he can read it. He doesn't know that there is any such thing as good printing or bad printing or good or bad taste in making books. Under these conditions we should be fools to spend money on features that do not have any bearing on sales. It's a simple business proposition.

—Would the public that you are discussing buy well made books as willingly as trashy books?

—Oh, absolutely. It's the books they are interested in—what they contain, not how they are made. They wouldn't know the difference.

VI. MR. G.

A: What's the use of talking about standards in connection with things like these? These are not books. They aren't fit to wad a gun with. I wouldn't have them in the house. Nobody pays any attention to stuff like that.

[Pg 142]

There isn't what you would call a book on the table, except this one, perhaps. That's printed in England and sent over in sheets and bound on this side. But that one is set in a bastard Caslon. It isn't the original Caslon but a revision with the descenders cut off. See how he's got his O upside down!

Those others—what's the use of talking about them at all? It reminds me of the story about the Chinaman—

—But, Mr. ——, do you not think it possible to get up this class of books in a manner that would suit you better?

—You can't hope to get anything like a decent book until you do away with the damnable cheap paper and the vile types. And then you will have to start in and teach the printer how to print. There aren't more than a half a dozen presses in the country that know how to print. Most printing looks like it had been done with apple-butter on a hay-press—

—What you say is unhappily true. What we are trying to find out are the causes of this state of things.

—The causes are everywhere—all through the rattletrap, cheap-jack, shoddy work that is being done in every kind of trade. Nobody cares for making decent things any more.

The only cure is to get back to decent standards of workmanship in everything again. But the case seems to me to be hopeless. I try to do printing up to a decent standard—and that is about all any of us can do. I don't believe you can hope to do much good through your societies and investigations. I believe in each one doing his own job in the best way he knows how. That's the only way you can raise the standard. It's the work you turn out that counts.

AN ABSTRACT OF THE COMMITTEE'S RECOMMENDATIONS

Two main questions resulting from the Inquiry present themselves to the Committee. The first question is: Is it within the power of the Society of Calligraphers, of any society, or of Society itself, to restore to the printing of books a standard of good work? The second and major question: Are books necessary to the present social state?

[Pg 143]

I. When the Committee began its work it assumed as a matter of course that the established standards of printing would serve it as guide-posts and criteria. It expected to traverse a country where the highways were in need of repair, perhaps, and the marks of direction dim, but on the whole a negotiable country. It found a very different state of things.

Instead of roads to be followed with some excusable discomfort it found not even trails. Such highways as had once been charted were obliterated. Not only hair-lines but the most elementary blazemarks were overgrown and lost beyond any hope of recovery. Instead of following the planned course of visit and consultation the Committee was forced to reorganize itself into an expedition of discovery. It has been fortunate to return at all.

The collected data of the exploration can lead to but one conclusion: That the whole fabric of Standards of Workmanship will have to be rebuilt from the beginning. Whether this can be done under the present state of society is a matter to be discussed in connection with the second question.

II. Are books necessary to the present social state? The Committee's finding is, unanimously and conclusively, No.

During the past twenty years many influences have been at work to wean mankind from the use of books. Automobiles, the motion-picture drama, professional athletics, the Saturday Evening Post—these operated even before the Great War to discourage the habit of reading. Since the war the progress of society—culminating, in America, in the dictatorship of the proletariat—has effectually completed the process. Books as an element vital to the welfare of the race have been eliminated.

The Society of Calligraphers is thus freed at one stroke from the obligations implied in the first question. But there are still books in existence, and for these the Committee feels a professional concern. For the Investigation, if it has done nothing else, has disclosed the most cogent and ineluctable fact: that wherever there is contact between books and the public, the effect upon the books is deleterious.

So far as the immediate situation is concerned, the public, by[Pg 144] discontinuing the contact, has obviated the danger. But in a period of revolution no condition can be taken for granted as fixed. It is quite within the range of possibility that the public, under compulsion, may turn again to books and reading; and this, the Committee believes, is a contingency the Society should be prepared to meet.

Publishers as a group promise, for the immediate future, to be a harassed and unimpressionable body. Influence upon them can be brought to bear only through public demand. Should a public demand for books revive, it will be imperative for the Society either to quench it altogether—a project which the Committee has discarded as visionary—or to take it in hand at its inception and give it constructive shape by forcing upon public attention such knowledge of the more elementary points of good taste as shall make impossible the further prostitution of standards. As the most direct means to this end it is urgently recommended by the Committee that the Society take up at once the study of advertising.

From Publishers' Weekly, Sept. 2, 1939. Copyright 1939 by R. R. Bowker Co.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

MR. MCG.

Q: Twenty years ago you were kind enough to discuss book-manufacturing with us.

—Twenty years. Remarkable memory!

—It meant a great deal to us—your help. It was in 1919. We were conducting an inquiry—perhaps you remember—into the physical qualities of books.

—Oh, yes! How you could improve them, and so on. Yes.

—Now we are back again—to see what you think now.

—Good. Interesting idea. Ask me questions.

—For instance ... Does it strike you that trade books have improved in the twenty years?—as physical objects,—packages?

—Packages. Very neat. Sums up the situation.

—We mean, both as implements, tools, for getting a job done; and as pleasant things to look at, handle, use ... or the contrary.

—Well. Let's see. Yes. I think trade books have improved decidedly in twenty years. Decided improvement.

—What points of improvement, would you say?

—Well. More care taken with the get-up, margins, format as you call it, title pages. Real design coming into it. And much more careful about the type—legibility and all that—paper, suita[Pg 146]bility for reading, good surface for the eye, etc., etc.

—You said, twenty years ago, that your directors' lack of interest in the product hampered you. Since you have been in charge here have you been able to bring your books up to a level that suits you better?

—Yes ... and no.... Costs have climbed in twenty years, materials, labor. We've pushed up retail prices, but the manufacturing costs eat up all we gain. More than eat it up. Less margin now for design or style or whatever than twenty years ago, I'd say.

—That looks like faulty adjustment somewhere, doesn't it?

—Situation needs adjusting, certainly!

—I mean, maybe you are paying out money for quite unnecessary features.

—Possibly.

—Not a strictly factual meeting of the conditions, perhaps?—not "realistic," as the dictators say. Have you ever thought how you might study the market-product relations from an entirely new and fresh angle?

—Now there! ... that's interesting ... I have. I've thought a lot about it. When I get off into the Maine woods and look back at it there's one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb. We've got into a rut. The whole trade has. Not a shadow of a doubt about it. We let ourselves be ruled by a whole catalog of standards and values and "musts" that are as dead as the dodo. Standards inherited from an entirely different state of society. A thousand years different, you might say. It is amazing how conservative a tribe we are, we book people.... Take the cover of a book, for example. Take this cover here, for instance. We spent a lot of trouble and money dickering it up—worry about the colors and the design—cost of dies, cost of stamping, cost of foil ... and not a soul will ever see it! It's all hidden away under the jacket, and it'll stay hidden under the jacket! All this book-cover stuff is ... what's the word? ... vestigial—like your appendix—something no longer used—something useless left over from an earlier stage of evolution. Did you ever see anybody in a book store turn the jacket back and look at the cover? Did you ever hear of a cover[Pg 147] that helped sell a book?—to the slightest extent? No. And when they get 'em home and read 'em and lend them to their friends the jacket stays on. Never comes off. Book-covers are just expense—useless expense—the decoration and things, I mean.

—You would do away with covers, then?

—No. It's got to be in boards—people want them that way—it's one of your "realistic" details.

—In your "new angle" volume would you have the insides as you do them now?

—No. There again I'd let the demand shape the product. Your market doesn't give a hang about the type and printing so long as they can read it.

—That sounds like twenty years ago!

—I know. Very likely it does.

—Haven't things changed?

—Not much. It's as true now as it was then.

—But all this talking and writing and lecturing....

—Two or three thousand persons, perhaps—two or three thousand have become "book conscious" as they say—the limited edition crowd. I'm dealing with the ten million.... There's a lot of whoosh in all that book beautiful stuff, you know.

—Mr. —— thinks it helps to tell them about type and paper, etc.

—I know. It doesn't. They don't understand his little notices—it's all shop talk. He likes 'em. He thinks they give the books tone, I daresay. I think it doesn't matter a damn one way or the other. All that shop detail is zero. They don't care to know and they don't need to know. Just make your book so it will read handily and let it go at that.

—Have you got this "new angle" idea to a point where you could describe a book made that way?

—Well. I might. Take the cover—I'd have board covers and cloth. But I wouldn't stamp them. Bright color. Gay. Patterned cloth sometimes. I'd have the simplest kind of paper label on the backbone. Printed from type—standard affair—library label that you could read. No embroidery, just plain function. On the least expensive terms possible. Make it a kind of house-trademark[Pg 148] feature.... Inside I'd forget all I knew about fine printing—the art—it's a great art—forget all I knew—start fresh with the use.

—You like fine printing.

—That's right. I do. In its place. The place isn't trade books. You can't have fine printing in trade books. All you can have along that line is cheap imitation—celluloid collar and no shirt. If you go out with your imitation fine printing as a mark to shoot at you come back with what we turn out now, all of us—shabby genteel, to the limit. My book won't try to get by with a paper collar. My book won't have any collar. It will get down to the basis of realism—a handy, efficient, cheap tool for temporary use. Read it—throw it away. Who saves a book now? If you save it, where are you going to put it? In the car?

—That suggests question of size—what do you think about size?

—Oh, small, by all means. For the usual job not larger than the 5-1/2x7-3/4 range. Smaller than that when you can.

—You think people do not want a big package for their money?

—Not when they want a book to read. If we can get the price down they'll flock to small size, I'm sure. When they pay two-fifty, three, perhaps they want their poundage. Books for gifts too, possibly—want 'em impressive. But on my basis of a good workable tool they'll like them small and handy.

—Your point in general, then, is that modern books should be looked at as temporary affairs.

—Absolutely. Temporary affairs. Like magazines. And they ought to be produced as temporary affairs. Paper a little better than newsprint, but not much better—better color, on the warmish side instead of blue-grey. "Guaranteed by the Bureau of Standards to last three hundred years." Bosh. Presswork: set your standard at the level of legibility. That's low—look at the newspapers. Get it so you can read it easily and let the fine points ride. Give up points of paper and make-ready to get a cheaper package. You are making a tool, remember, not a bijou—you're making a sound, efficient, easy-working tool—tools don't need paper lace and fake-leather upholstery to make them sound—when a tool is efficient it has a style of its own, inevitably.

—Your dictum is, "books as tools."

[Pg 149]

—Books as tools. Right. But here's a point. All this is on the technical side. Treat a book as a temporary affair. But while it lasts I'd take considerable pains to have it be a lively affair. Not freakish—you can't play tricks with the reading process—but lively, like a good, interesting talker. Little fresh twists, but hardly noticeable in detail. A lot of ways to do it in an inconspicuous way. Mustn't be conspicuous—mustn't interfere with the reading job. Little touches of ornament in the right places. Pictorial bits—pictures are coming back into trade books again, in a new form—easy, swift, simple illustrations that fit in with the "temporary affair" style. Some of the money saved by a strategic retreat from impossible printing standards I'd put into things like that—to keep the pages gay and interesting.

—In this connection, do you think that modern books ought to be "modernistic" in design?

—Absolutely not. As I said a minute ago, you can't play tricks with the process of reading.... One of the necessities of the modernistic stuff is the necessity to shock you—to make people jump. You can't set off firecrackers on a book page every few paragraphs without taking the reader's mind off the text. You simply can't read in the neighborhood of modernistic design. It isn't because you are not used to it. It's in the very nature of the style.... I'm talking about books, of course. For advertising, it's prime. Have all the modernistic design you want on your jacket. The more the better.

—And that brings us....

—Yes. I've been waiting for it. That brings us to book-jackets!

—Yes. What do you think....

—Now there you are in another country entirely. Now's the time to beat the drums and run up the flags and drape the bunting.... All the money you can't afford to spend on covers you can afford to spend on jackets. Because, first, the jacket is the cover; and second, the jacket helps directly in selling the book. Jackets are advertising—posters—billboards—so make 'em shout.

—Attractive?

—If you mean pretty, not so important. If you mean oomph, by all means. Feminine charm, in the prevailing mode.... But[Pg 150] sock-'em-in-the-eye. Make them strong. Make them so people can't miss seeing them.

—What is your own formula?

—Formula? I haven't any formula.... If I had I think it would be contrast. Contrast with all the other books on the table. Don't follow anybody's style. Get away from the prevalent "successful" style of the moment. Take a look at the tables—what would stick out now more than plain white paper with plain black type? I'd probably varnish it. Contrast.

—Do jackets sell books?

—Oh ... no. Jackets don't sell books. They help. What sells a book is the stuff inside—story—text. But books need to be seen. Jackets help make them visible.

—You save on covers and spend on jackets. You save on paper and printing, and put some of the saving into pictorial and design features. Would you come out with enough saving to get the retail price down from two fifty?

—I think so. I think if the thing were studied out on our "new angle" basis you'd find that you not only liked my books a lot better—as "packages"—but that you'd be able to buy more of them.

MR. A.

Q: One thing I wanted to ask ... you have had a considerable part in shaping your juvenile department.

—Yes. I have.

—My question may seem a little ... cool.... Do you prepare your juvenile titles with the children themselves in view—the ultimate consumers?

—The question's quite proper. I am glad you asked it—it goes straight to the heart of a big trouble about children's books.... The children themselves in view, eh? The ultimate consumers.... No. I am sorry to say, we do not. We can't. Because children do not buy books.... You see, a juvenile, like any other book on our list, has to please the person that's likely to buy it. And that[Pg 151] means, a book to please adults—a book that a grown-up will mark down as something a child ought to like. Ought to, you see—the adult's judgment, not the child's. We can't get past it. We can't find out what the child really does like. When children rally to an author, or a style of book, then we get a glimpse of the children's state of mind. But that is our only contact.... All our new ventures have to be baited and primed to catch the fancy of the mothers and the cousins and the aunts—against the interests of the ultimate consumer, you might say, when that is necessary. Sometimes a juvenile runs to large sales purely on the strength of adult appreciation alone, like Ferdinand, for instance.... If it were possible, there is nothing I should like better than to deal with the children direct. I have children of my own. I think I understand them ... to a certain extent. I think I could please them. Once or twice—this is a confession—I did take a direct hand—made a couple the way I thought they ought to be. My judgment against the child's, eh?... Complete failures—drugs.... I couldn't move them—couldn't get past the censor—couldn't sell the grown-ups.

—Have you ever thought of ways for getting into direct touch with the children?

—I can see no practicable way. As the case stands you can't penetrate the Adult Front Line.

MR. L.

Q: This scheme of Mr. McG.'s for a different kind of book—what do you think of it?

—If he can control his "decline from a high estate" I am with him, emphatically. Books need to be cheaper. Books vis-à-vis market certainly need to be studied all over again—from a new base line. I agree with his findings about shabby-genteel. And I'm sure that I'd like his "cheap" books much better than the kind I buy now, if he can liven them up as he suggests. The question is, can he stop his "strategic retreat" at the right point? It's like inflation: easy to start, but...! He drops the standard of material and process—will his proofreading go down hill too?... Many French books in paper wrappers—made at the lowest cost-level, badly[Pg 152] printed on cheap paper—have an air and a style that our own more expensive affairs can't quite achieve. Somebody laid a finger on them. Who, in Mr. McG.'s scheme, is to be this somebody whose touch creates liveliness and interest? A highly important factor in the product!... If we can get the liveliness and interest, we will be glad to trade more expensive paper and printing to get it. Our books are pretty dull.... But, just inferior printing on cheap paper, without the lively touch and style, is going to bore us worse yet!

—You mean dull in content?

—I mean dull optically, visually.... Like—to put it into terms of sound—like a long, droning recital of a tedious story—no inflection—no climax—no motion. ... I like Mr. McG.'s figure of a "good, interesting talker."

—You'd spice it up with "modernist" feeling?

—No. He's right, there. No fireworks. Keep the explosions outside the book.

—You have used "contemporary" design.

—Yes, but you'll notice, not in places where reading is going on.... Another point: letting the market set the tone is not good merchandising. The market needs to be led, by a tone a little higher than its average taste.... And Mr. McG.'s good tool isn't made by majority vote in Congressional committee—it's made by somebody who knows, expertly and practically, just what the tool is intended to do and how it works.

—You are for "books as tools."

—I am for books as tools—and that means cheaper books.... I think, too, that a lot of the things that make books expensive are false value—brummagem.... But the trade is so firmly established in the tradition of false-front and bustle-rear that I'm afraid it's going to take an awful tussle to get it back to real values again—to the tool basis—to the simplicity and directness and general fitness-for-its-job, for example, that makes a carpenter's plane a masterpiece of appropriate design.

COMPOSED IN ELECTRA TYPES

From The Penrose Annual, Vol. 44. Copyright 1950 by Lund Humphries Ltd., London, and Pitman Publishing Corp., New York. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.

We live in an unhappy age. I suppose that it must be the most wretched known in history since the hordes of Genghis Khan swept across the face of the eastern world. Yet it is not the physical losses—though these are bad enough—which are responsible for the malaise, but a spiritual shortcoming: a lack of direction and a lack of faith. Ours is an age in which there is no single thing, not great or small, which can escape our petty probing, our questioning and our doubts. Nothing is because it is: a shadowy reason must be sought behind.

In the course of man's desire to examine and explain away everything, one of the multitudinous minutiæ which have come in for worried attention is the position of printers, particularly in relation to the publishers they serve. The first four centuries of printing produced ninety-nine per cent of all the books which are worth looking at: yet, at what time during that period did anyone worry about the division of responsibility in a book's production? Then, it was a matter which somehow got done; now, unfortunately, it is a subject for discussion.

When Sweynheim and Pannertz started work at Subiaco in 1465 they were at the same time both printers and publishers, and this represents a dual personality. But when Fichet, the Rector of the Sorbonne, decided to set up the first French press five years later within the precincts of the University, he imported three printers from Germany, and possibly the first printer-publisher relationship was born. That this relationship was a living thing is shown by the fact that Fichet had the books which the press produced printed in Roman type. Soon after the great Rector [Pg 154]had gone into voluntary exile for his political opinions, the press moved out of the University precincts to become a normal commercial printing shop, and Gering and Krantz reverted to the use of gothic type! Since the use of Roman lay within the high road of French classical development—France being the only country in Europe which did not begin its printing history in gothic—this stands as the first instance of the views of a publisher, as a man ordering the print, being in advance of the more timorous craftsmen, who were glad to revert to their old, safe and conventional ways as soon as the refining influence was removed.

French printing as a whole in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is full of printer-publisher problems for our questing minds. Simon le Vostre, the great ecclesiastical publisher of his age, used Pigouchet mostly for his printing; the Hardouyn brothers commissioned several lovely books from Anabat: why, and who dictated the terms? The balance of power may then well have lain with the printer, since in the Hardouyn's 1500 Book of Hours the first page is filled with Anabat's superb device. But what shall we say of the Hours printed in 1527 by Simon du Bois, but which bears on every page the unmistakable stamp and signature of its publisher, Geoffroy Tory? Now, they say, too, that Tory was not a binder: yet from him we have two gilt panels done to his order and to his design, matching exactly the work which he hired his printers to do for him.

I feel we are too certain in our minds that in the past printers were ipso facto publishers, or that those "for" whom they printed were merely agents. Like a fatal crack hidden for many years in the foundations of an outwardly sound edifice, the split between printer and publisher had occurred at the Sorbonne in 1470, but was patched, mended and ignored from time to time for long thereafter. Yet like that neglected flaw which, having widened until it defies repair, will in the end bring the whole building down, the printer-publisher relationship has now some time ago irrevocably divided.

Today the publisher and the printer are two separate men: there are few exceptions to this rule. Mr. Oliver Simon recently began one of his all too rare essays with the words "Printing is a way of life"; and later he remarked that "if he (the printer) is not something of an artist, he cannot hope to evolve and maintain a typographic style." But these words must be read in con[Pg 155]junction with one of Holbrook Jackson's many wise remarks: "whether it (printing) is an art or not is a secondary affair, so long as it is good printing. 'Art happens' says Whistler, and the printer who sets out to be an artist is liable to make a mess of both art and print." One further quotation will show how readily Holbrook Jackson's wisdom can be thrown out of the window; in these pages last year Mr. Herbert Read criticised the English and American editions of his own book, The Grass Roots of Art. He wrote "On balance, I do not find much to choose between these two designs from a functional point of view, but discounting a poverty due to material restrictions imposed on the English publisher, there is a certain liveliness in the American production, which, were I a purchaser faced with a choice, would induce me to buy the American edition, even if it cost me rather more. But if the English edition had been printed on better paper, it would have been the easier of the two editions to read...." With the exception of the last sentence, the whole of this passage seems misleading and irrelevant. The use of the word "functional" is one of the crosses which we in the twentieth century have to bear, but, since it has occurred, we must presume the function of printing to be that of presenting the written word to the reader in its most easily assimilated form; if the English edition in question is, apart from its paper, more easily readable, how can both editions be equally functional? The implication that a piece of printing—particularly when the text is a work of serious criticism—is to be purchased (even at a higher price) for its liveliness at the expense of its readability is particularly unfortunate. If for "liveliness" we read "speciousness" or "pretention" we have found a ready definition of the one quality which should be excluded from book printing at almost any cost. For this reason I am frightened of Mr. Simon's statement that "printing is a way of life"; good printing implies a philosophy, it is true, but I fear that printers who are far from good may assume airs above their station and, when they produce a perfect horror, state "that is my way of life—take it or leave it." If they do, they may be astonished at how fast any decent publisher will embrace the latter course. I disagree with a great deal more which Mr. Read wrote in his article, but there is room here for comment only upon his remarks about Baskerville type. Baskerville is not an easy type, nor a safe one (though printers may find that it satisfies their[Pg 156] customers). The "gentlemanly sort of type which passes unnoticed, unquestioned" is undoubtedly Caslon and all its derivatives. Baskerville with its broad face and flourishing Italic is hard to handle, and in consequence is employed in a higher percentage of bad printing than any other type face.

It is generally agreed that when an irresistible force meets an immovable body, the result is a stalemate; equally obviously, whichever power wanes first will suffer an immediate eclipse. From this we may proceed by a process of elimination. A publisher who knows what he wants employs a printer who is an artist, and the result should be a masterpiece of give and take. A publisher who does not know what he wants employs a printer who is an artist, and the result should be a piece of fine printing. A publisher who knows what he wants employs a printer who is not an artist, and the result will depend on the degree of taste of the publisher. A publisher who either does not know what he wants or does not care, and employs a printer who is not an artist, will both get and deserve a shambles. From these simple equations one constant factor emerges—the publisher; and this fact is not at all at variance with the traditional saw that he who pays the piper calls the tune.

There have been a number of eminent publisher-printer relationships in the past. I have mentioned the French of 1500-1550, where there seems already to be evidence of a publisher's taste exerting an influence. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries offer no examples which are worthy of study: the works undertaken by one printer on behalf of a syndicate of publishers produce no evidence of the book's appearance being dictated by any taste other than that of the printer himself.

The nineteenth century saw the publisher come into his own. One of the greatest publisher-printer partnerships in the history of British book-production is that of Pickering and Whittingham. It would be reasonable to suppose that Pickering was the moving force in this partnership, since the ideas are publishing ideas mainly exemplified by the Aldine poets and the Diamond classics, and their starting point is Pickering's choice of the anchor and dolphin with the motto grouped about it: Aldi Discip. Anglus. To the same taste of Pickering and his delight in the printing of Aldus and his contemporaries may be attributed the gracious and restrained use of sixteenth-century fleurons which[Pg 157] in the eighteen-thirties are not readily to be found elsewhere, and the curiously appropriate renaissance borders occasionally introduced. Another partnership in which I suspect that the publisher had a considerable say was that of Edward Moxon and Bradbury & Evans. In 1850 Moxon issued the first edition of two most important works, Wordsworth's Prelude and Tennyson's In Memoriam; both were printed by the same printer. But eight years later we may point to John Murray's edition of Coleridge's Table Talk; this, too, was printed by Bradbury & Evans with more than a glance over the shoulder at Pickering's publications, but without the guiding hand of Moxon. It is an interesting book, for it just fails before every problem which the text sets. Pickering would have set the solid prose at least a point smaller and increased the margins; in the same way he would have managed to get more space between each specimen of Table Talk. Instead of a page of grace and readability, there is in consequence a slightly crowded air and the eye skips disconcertingly from line to line.

Little more than thirty years later British book production was influenced by the most powerful small group of publishers which had ever turned printing upside down: it was indeed a small group—it consisted of three men: John Lane, Elkin Mathews and Leonard Smithers. The splendid series of publications for which each of these extraordinary individuals was responsible need no enumeration here ... but it is worth pointing out that they were the pioneers of the asymmetry which Mr. Read praises as an unusual and notable feature in the American edition of his book already mentioned. Holbrook Jackson said the last word on the publisher-printer relationship: "it was publishers like Pickering, Moxon, Field and Tuer, Elkin Mathews, John Lane and J. M. Dent who by their example in the nineteenth century helped to defend [my italics] printing from printers who were content to do as they were told, and, if no one told them, to follow rule-of-thumb methods which tended always to become worse rather than better."[32]

To quote again from Holbrook Jackson: "It was long before the average printer took advantage of the awakening of typographical taste which began in the eighteen-nineties. The men who extended and consolidated that taste came from anywhere but the printing offices. The majority of modern typographers [Pg 158]are intellectuals or scholars who have forced themselves on the trade, often through the publishing houses." In almost every age there have been a few commercial printers of first-class standing, but perhaps it is no coincidence that it would be difficult to name one who was at work in the eighteen-nineties—the most lively age of the publisher's influence. The situation has not materially changed by the middle of the twentieth century, except that in our own age we are fortunate in having among us a few printers who bow to no man, and have left their mark upon this country's production. First among them stands Mr. Oliver Simon, whose steady output of fine printing must command unqualified admiration. Both the Cambridge and the Oxford University Presses have evolved styles of their own, and there are a few others who are fine printers in their own right. But on the other side of the ledger there is Sir Francis Meynell, who, despite the criticism that much of his work is pastiche, showed with exquisite taste [in the first hundred Nonesuch Press books] what could be made of the types and ornaments which Mr. Stanley Morison had made available through the Monotype Corporation, and all this with a multitude of printers who were set to work and produced but one result—pure Meynell. There is also the more recent example of Mr. Jan Tschichold at work in the Penguin pool.

This lamentable lack of taste among the generality of printers led publishers to give instructions as to their wishes, and this in turn has created a new position in publishing offices: the typographer. Once this person made his appearance on the payroll, the initiative passed from the printer for ever. In the first place, if the publisher employs a typographer he is going to be sure he gets his money's worth; in the second, human nature being what it is, most printers will willingly accept a publisher's design because it is the line of least resistance, and because, according to the best principles of business, the customer is always right.

I cannot see why the initiative in design should ever pass back to the printer. The problem was admirably expressed by D. B. Updike in his little book of essays on the craft, In the Day's Work: "If printers had more of a standard and a stiffer one, both about the types they employ and the way in which they use them, printing would be better. The printer, if he has no standard, must allow the customer to dictate his own wishes about types." I hope that there will always be the handful of printers who are great enough to say "you will do it my way—or else," but the rest will do as they are told by publishers' typographers, which amounts to the substitution of house styles for printers' styles. Printing, like so many arts, has fallen into the hands of the middleman—for such indeed the publisher is. There I am sure it will remain, and it is now for the middleman to justify himself. If he will take his responsibilities seriously he can do nothing but good. The good printer's compositor who is "something of an artist" will go on setting the target; but the publisher's typographer can, if he will, go far towards dragging the mediocre printers up towards the same high standard. If this is done, design in British printing will show a welcome overall improvement.

From the Manual of Linotype Typography, Copyright 1923 by Mergenthaler Linotype Company, Brooklyn, N. Y. Reprinted by permission of the publishers. Corrected and amended by the Editor.

The experienced designer is familiar with the successive parts of a complete book. All less formal embodiments of the book idea have some of these parts, and their position in the whole scheme should be governed by the traditions of the book proper.

In order to leave complete freedom as to number of pages, the favorite custom is to number the text pages in arabic folio numbers, beginning with 1. The front pages are then numbered with Roman folios, and thus it makes no difference with the body how many or few front pages are finally found necessary.

The typographical treatment of front matter and chapter pages throughout the book should be in perfect harmony, whether the treatment is simple typography or calls for elaborate embellishment. The character of the book is largely decided by what is done in this respect, and the intelligent designer fully realizes its importance and the chance thus given him for distinguished work.

The following summary gives these parts in proper sequence, and the nature of each.

BASTARD TITLE (always a right-hand page)

Nowadays this page (often miscalled "Half Title") is used merely because custom demands the familiar resting place for the eye in advance of the Title Page. It should never be omitted in work of any pretension to style and quality, and it should never be made unduly prominent by decoration or other treatment. Conventional dignity is the safe note for this page in the book.

ADVERTISING CARD (always a left-hand page)

If an Advertising Card or other similar announcement is required, it should be typographically a part of the book, no mat[Pg 161]ter what the client's style in his advertising typography may be. If a customer has a special or unique form of advertising, and insists on its use, the printer should inform him that it conflicts with the harmony of the book to do so.

THE TITLE PAGE (always a right-hand page)

The Title Page gives the reader his sense of the whole book's quality. It should, therefore, be as nearly perfect as may be. Its first essential is that the eye shall read instantly the three important facts that it has to tell: the title of the book, the name of the author, and the imprint. In the case of a business volume this means the merchandise or business subject, the name of the business house, and the address or addresses. The typography should make these three divisions clear at a glance. There should be as little else on the title page as possible. Everything that can be left out is an aid to quality. The principle of the page is that it is an announcement of the book's contents and that it should not go beyond a very few display lines. It is the door to the house. White space is of the greatest value in this part of the book. If decoration is used, it should never be made more important than the type lines. The use of different faces of type is almost always bad, and success is obtained only occasionally by a genius. So important is harmony that it is not safe even to combine lines of capitals and lower case letters, except after careful planning and with assured understanding and talent.

COPYRIGHT (always a left-hand page)

The Copyright of the volume should be placed a little above the center of the page. The best taste calls for caps and small caps, or small caps alone. It is customary to use the bottom of this page for the printer's imprint or the international requirement, "Printed in the United States of America," or both, but the size of page should be considered.

DEDICATION (always a right-hand page)

The character and purpose of the Dedication dictate that its treatment should always be formal. The "monumental" style is appropriate and correct. Small caps are the best. The Dedication[Pg 162] should always be a right-hand page. Its reverse must be left blank.

PREFACE [OR FOREWORD] (always a right-hand page)

A Preface that has simply the ordinary character usual to most prefaces should be set in the same size of type as the body of the book, and in the same face. For any preface of unusual importance, the page may be double-leaded, or set in a type one size larger than the body. If the book has both Preface and Introduction, the Preface may be set in italics to mark the distinction. Italics may also be employed if the Preface has been written by a person other than the author. In this case, however, the Preface is preferably placed after the Contents and the List of Illustrations.

CONTENTS (always a right-hand page)

The Contents or Table of Contents, filling as many pages as necessary, follows the Preface. The quality of this part of the book-job depends on the little niceties of spacing, margin, and proportion of white space to type which are too often ignored, even in otherwise pretentious books. The Contents pages are almost as important as the Title Page in establishing a sense of quality.

THE LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (always a right-hand page)

The List of Illustrations follows the Contents pages, but no matter where the Contents finishes, the List of Illustrations should begin on a right-hand page. Obviously its typographical style should be the same as the Contents.

INTRODUCTION (always a right-hand page)

The Introduction follows the List of Illustrations, and its composition should be in the same size and face as the body of the book. Any typographical distinction between Preface and Introduction should be limited to the former, as stated under "Preface." Authors are not always clear in their understanding of the difference between a Preface and an Introduction. Their Introduction often is really a Preface, and should be so entitled[Pg 163] and placed in the book accordingly. The Preface is the author's personal remarks to the reader, and these may be of any character, treating of any subject. The Introduction, on the other hand, should treat specifically of the subject of the book, and should contain only statements of direct bearing and importance.

HALF TITLE (always a right-hand page)

As the Bastard Title always precedes the Title Page, so the Half Title always precedes the first page of the text—the page which carries the title of the book at its top. The Half Title must always be on the right-hand page immediately preceding this page, and it should consist of not more than the title of the volume. Half Titles may run through a book before various divisions.

Those sections of a book which follow the text must be treated with the same typographic care as the pages which precede the text. These sections are usually as follows:

APPENDIX (always a right-hand page)

This should be set in the same face as the text, but in one size smaller type. If the text ends on the left-hand page, a Half Title may be thrown between the text and the Appendix.

GLOSSARY (preferably a right-hand page)

The size of type used for the Glossary depends wholly upon its nature, but it usually is two full sizes smaller than that used in the text of the volume. A Half Title may be thrown in before the Glossary, if the text ends on the left-hand page.

BIBLIOGRAPHY (preferably a right-hand page)

The comments made under "Glossary" apply equally to the Bibliography. The combination of titles of books and the names of authors offers an attractive opportunity for artistic treatment.

INDEX (always a right-hand page)

If the text ends on the left-hand page, a Half Title may be thrown in before the Index. The type used for the Index is[Pg 164] usually 8 point size set in double column. There is so much difference in the way the index entries read that great care should be exercised to select a model which will fit the particular case in hand.

Have there been any material changes in the anatomy of the book in the past quarter century? Should there be, to have the contemporary book reflect the times in which it is designed, set and printed?

As these and other questions occurred, we re-appraised the Anatomy of the Book summation in The Manual of Linotype Typography, reprinted in the foregoing pages. That text seemed to stand up pretty well. It was written originally by William Dana Orcutt for the Manual, whose typographical plan and critical comment was prepared with the co-operation of the late Edward E. Bartlett, then Director of Linotype Typography.

What revisions or additions would Mr. Orcutt suggest for a reprinting? What would other prominent designers and book-makers suggest?

The idea of a symposium appealed. The counsel of Bruce Rogers, Carl Purington Rollins and Joseph Blumenthal, in the field of fine and privately printed books, was invited, with that of P. J. Conkwright in the university press field.

Trade book-makers would also have opinions and suggestions, in all probability. Counsel was sought from Milton Glick, who heads the Viking Press design and production activity; Morris Colman, former chairman of the A.I.G.A. Trade Book Clinic and one of Viking's top designers; Arthur W. Rushmore, former Harper vice-president in charge of design and production, now retired to the delights of his Golden Hind Press, at Madison, N. J.; and Ernst Reichl, one of our ranking modern designers,[Pg 165] whose long association in book manufacturing with H. Wolff and as a free-lance brought an unmatched experience in working with many publishers. Mr. Reichl also has been prominent in A.I.G.A. Book and Magazine Clinic activities.

The comment of an author and a publisher also seemed in order, and happily one in each field with a considerable appreciation of the graphic arts was obtained: Evelyn Harter, whose novel, Dr. Katherine Bell, was recently published by Doubleday, and who formerly headed design and production activity for Random House, Smith and Haas and other firms before retiring to private life as Mrs. Milton Glick. As publisher-designer-printer all in one, Peter Beilenson was invited to comment. He, with Mrs. Edna Beilenson, directs the Peter Pauper Press in Mt. Vernon, and is consistently represented in the A.I.G.A. "Fifty Books of the Year" selections.

"So far as I know," Mr. Orcutt wrote, "the Anatomy remains the same today and I can think of no changes I would want to make. I may be wrong, but I am still hoping that it is one thing that doesn't change."

To Joseph Blumenthal, who directs the Spiral Press in New York, and whose books are famed for their simplicity of design and excellence of typography and presswork, the statements of the Anatomy are sane and safe. "In the hands of a sufficiently experienced and versatile designer," he added, "no rule is absolute to the point where it cannot be broken, at least in part, where occasion requires."

To Bruce Rogers, most distinguished of designers of books, the Anatomy "is an excellent short treatise that covers all the points of a well-designed volume.... I recommend it for the perusal of anyone engaged in book-making. Following it literally would result in a decided advance in that art."

Several minor suggestions that B.R. made have been incorporated in the text of the Anatomy as here reprinted. These concerned the substitution of "should" for "must" in several instances, "in order not to be too dogmatic." His other points were: 1, "that it is frequently preferable to place the preface before the contents"; and 2, "that there seem to be too many half-titles recommended for anything else than a de luxe book—especially at the end, for the index and vocabulary."

[Pg 166]

To Carl Purington Rollins, Printer Emeritus to Yale University, lecturer and writer on the graphic arts and one of the foremost American masters of the book, the Anatomy "is a very sound and sensible guide for young book makers—and, to judge from the queer books coming out of New York, older ones could profit from it. I have no disagreement with it in any particular," he continued, "and if it will not make a genius, it will at least prevent a diligent reader from going astray."

P. J. Conkwright found the text clear and concise. "Any extensive elaboration would defeat its usefulness, I think, to those approaching the subject for the first time.

"My only quarrel," he added, "is with the paragraph concerning Copyright. If there is no Dedication I like the Copyright statement and printer's imprint grouped together a little above the center of the page. If there is a Dedication, I like the Copyright statement at the top of the page lining with the top line of the title page, and the printer's imprint at the bottom of the page, lining with the bottom line of the title page.

"This is a good example, however, of how an elaboration of the text can get too involved for a beginner."

To several experienced trade-book designers with considerable production and manufacturing experience, the Anatomy text was less satisfactory.

Both Evelyn Harter and Milton Glick found the text too dogmatic in its dicta. They were bothered most by the first two sentences under Copyright, the last sentence under title page and "references to 'genius.'" They both liked best the remarks regarding Contents, Preface and Introduction.

"Ought not the topics of chapter openings be included," Mr. Glick inquired, "also illustrations, captions, running page heads, folios and such?"

As an ex-designer turned author, Miss Harter has "come to appreciate more than ever the values of legibility and simplicity, with no extraneous tricks."

Morris Colman concurred in feeling the Anatomy text is pretty arbitrary for today, and that chapter openings, running page heads and all other normal elements of a book should be included.

"In particular," he added, "I would like to see the various arguments presented both in terms of tradition and also in terms[Pg 167] of the particular function which each element of a book performs.

"For example, the title page is not only the 'main entrance' but it also is the source of the bibliographic information which appears in hundreds of library cards, catalogs, etc., and its contents and arrangement determines whether it will be listed in all these places in such form that you or I could find it if we wanted it.

"There are certain legal requirements which influence the form and content of copyright pages. Dedications, while formal in a technical sense, may need to be treated quite informally to express the spirit of the particular dedicator.

"And with many kinds of contemporary books," he continued, "the contents page is made to precede any other preliminary matter, despite tradition, for the greater convenience of the reader. I am sure that this is always why the Index is invariably the last element in back matter."

To Arthur Rushmore, the Anatomy "is darn good copy, clearly stated. There are a couple of amplifications that might help give more clarity:

"Advertising Card seems a little vague. This is more likely to be a 'List of Author's Books' or 'Series Title and Titles of Books already issued' if the book is in a historical or other series.

"Copyright: Relatively few books carry the Printer's name on copyright and the line 'Printed in the United States of America' looks better and obviates a printing problem if run as a line directly under the copyright notice. A single line at the foot of the page, after the first 500 impressions of 1951 printing, is either bold face or completely unreadable.

"Dedication: To me, 'small caps are the best' is doubtful. Small caps are the worst printing of all characters in a font, and unless small caps of a larger size than text will look too weak and small. I'd say 'should be planned with the utmost care for balance and position on page.'

"Half Title: First paragraph too dogmatic. If book is a novel, or book without 'Parts' then half title should be 'book title' backed blank and folioed in Roman front matter. If book has 'Parts,' the half title should not bear book title, but should carry the Part or[Pg 168] Section Title and folio arabic 1, backed blank 2 and first page of text folio 3. Similar half title for all other Parts or Sections folioed in."

Peter Beilenson, whose comment on the pleasures and duties of the amateur printer is well worth reading (page 313), thinks the Anatomy "perfectly all right, so far as it goes. If it wavers from the perfect, it is in being too strict—vide the remarks about the title page, the "it should never" of the bastard title, etc.

"But," he asks in suggesting the text be extended, "what about additions to the coverage? Footnotes, running heads, chapter titles, initials, etc., are not the limbs of the anatomy, but they are organs. What about the binding? The jacket? The direction of the stamping of the title on the spine?"

To Ernst Reichl, the Anatomy comprises "what might be called the basic minimum. Any designer worth his salt should not only start with this standard but also allow his imagination to roam far beyond it.

"An 'anatomy,' however precise and objective, necessarily breaks down a living entity into component parts. These parts in reality show much more cohesion than is apparent in their piece-by-piece description.

"In the modern book, in particular, we tend to treat the volume as a whole and to submerge the importance of the single page in it. The bastard title, for instance, might be left entirely blank; the title page may be spread over two pages and the advertising card incorporated into it; the copyright page and the dedication page might be treated as a double-page spread, etc.

"The tendency today," he summarized, "is altogether to handle the double-page spread as the unit of the layout, rather than the single page. This may help to break down in some degree the rigidity and formality which awes ordinary human beings, and makes them as reluctant to touch a book as to put on a dress suit. It may also help to make our books a little more ordinary and lively."

From Publishers' Weekly, Oct. 5, 1935. Copyright 1935 by R. R. Bowker Co. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

The development of trade book-making since 1920 has been an extraordinary phenomenon in the conservative business of publishing. At that time most publishers looked upon "manufacturing" as a necessary but routine activity, ranking with accounting, shipping and such, and on a far lower intellectual plane than the cultivation of authors and reviewers, or the writing of good blurbs. The production of books was usually entrusted to an uninspired saint who was expected to be hard on his printer's back and soft under his boss's feet. The idea of the publisher himself taking any interest in the aesthetics of book-making was thought to be a trifle queer.

There was, to be sure, a small traffic in books printed for collectors, and the term "fine printing" had already come to mean "not printed to be read." Typography, as usual, was less than twenty years behind current architecture, and American type founders had already cleaned up the Renaissance and were well on their way into the eighteenth century, while American typographers, like interior decorators, were learning to hop nimbly from period to period. Everyone was learning to blame the machine for the things we were too greedy or too lazy to do properly; fortunately small power presses could be made to imitate hand-press printing, so it was not really necessary to do business at hand-press rates.

In the field of general publishing, however, the hand-press page was out of the question, period styles were incongruous, and the real problem of designing the trade book had never been attempted, because it had never been seen with any clarity. There [Pg 170]were many experiments with new binding materials and designs, and with printers' flowers and other typographic embellishment, but these were all attempts to "dress up" the old formats, and arose from no real understanding of the problem.

Today [1935], thanks to the leadership of a very few publishers, the educational work of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and perhaps to the enthusiasm of the designers themselves, there is a steadily widening appreciation of good trade book-making, and a better perception of the problem among book-makers. We are learning to plan books in three dimensions, considering proportion and weight and the texture of materials—designing for the hand as well as for the eyes. We are getting free of "period" styles and "period" motifs, and developing a new idiom to suit new methods of production. We are finally trying to make the physical aspect of our books bear some relation to the culture of our own time.

Everyone has come to recognize certain aesthetic values in cheap machine-made glass and metal-ware, if it be designed for the machine and does not attempt to imitate the hand-made, and we find in it a quality different from, but not necessarily inferior to, that of the more elegant article. Thus in printing we are coming to realize that electrotyped plates, made from machine-set type and printed on wood-pulp paper on a perfecting cylinder press can produce a page quite as satisfactory, aesthetically, as the product of the hand-press. It is this new sense of values, born of respect for the machine and for what it can do if used with character, that must be the basis of the designer's attitude. If he is working with his fingers crossed, his work will show it.

The problem of suiting type to subject is the cause of much confusion. We give too little study to the characteristics of type-faces, and the announcements of the foundries and composing-machine people frequently attribute the most fantastic qualities to their new types.

Furthermore, most of the faces available on the composing machines have been cut to reproduce some earlier design, and few to meet the contemporary technical or literary requirements, so that we have several great gaps in the line of type resources that need to be filled. Recent books examined, and a great part of all current book-making, show that we have largely thrown off the[Pg 171] reactionary hand-press ideal, and that we are learning to construct instead of decorate. We have finally obtained a supply of modern book cloth; Europe has given us a supply of modern display types; and we are anxiously awaiting the composing-machine companies' arrival in the Twentieth Century.

Two years later:

The end of a three-hour period spent examining a month's output of American trade books leaves one thinking much more about the book making situation in general than about the four books one has chosen. What impresses one is not that four books, or forty, are decently made, but that all the rest are so badly made.

After my last experience in inspecting a collection of this kind, I wrote, with some satisfaction and much optimism: "We are learning to plan books in three dimensions ... designing for the hand as well as for the eye.... We are finally trying to make the physical aspect of our books bear some relation to the culture of our own time." Well, I still think we are only trying.

Designing a book is a problem in three dimensions. The first essential is good and suitable materials, the second good proportions, the third a good type, and the last good typographic arrangement. Good decoration (or any decoration) is not essential at all. If the materials are poor in quality and unsuitable to the idea of a book; if the proportions detract from the aesthetic effect, or from the book's practical usefulness, typography can do very little to save it.

In the last two years the publishers have been increasing trim sizes without increasing list prices, and at the same time increasing bulks, instead of reducing them to compensate. What that means in simple arithmetic is that when a novel is increased from a 7-1/2 inch 12mo to an 8-1/8 inch large 12mo, and the bulk from 1 inch to 1-1/8 inches, it requires a third more cubic inches of paper, a seventh more square inches of cloth, a sixth more board, etc.—all for the same money. It means even softer, less printable, less bindable paper; cheaper binding materials throughout; sewing in 32's and other skimping in workmanship. And it means clumsier, uglier, more perishable books.

[Pg 172]

While other industries are seeking to make the implements of living more convenient and more durable and more beautiful, we are deliberately making books less convenient and less durable and less beautiful. While other industries are helping to develop popular taste and anticipating changes in it, we are waiting for our customers to get mad at us. While we see the masses getting wise to other frauds of branding and packaging, we still hand our "intelligent minority" the old fraud of inflated books.

The digest magazines can get millions of readers, though magazines have always had large pages, but "that's not the book business." A few of the publishers can sell small books, but "that's all right for their lists." Booksellers can tell us the public is on to us, but "their customers aren't typical book buyers." Our friends can tell us they like to carry books in their pockets, and that they have no more room on their shelves, or under their beds, but they're only our crazy friends. Our salesman can tell us he got a bad order because the book was too thin—and ah! there we have the real and only truth.

Publishers of new books blame this practice on the reprints, but they themselves control much of the offending reprint output. We allow the cheapest and shoddiest goods to set our styles; as if Fourteenth Street were to lead our dress industry, and jerry-built Queens our builders. Publishing is indeed, as we are so often told, a "different" kind of business!

Most of the books I examined suffered from this inflation. In most cases the money spent on them would have produced a sound, handsome, and durable book in a smaller size, and without small type or crowding. Books printed on proper paper were so rare that I found myself reluctant to discard the few I found, however undistinguished in other respects some of them were. (I felt the same way about the few books with trimmed edges—but that is a delicate subject better discussed face to face, and with weapons, than in a family journal.)

Most of the books suffered also from too much typography. I think we are all trying desperately to overcome typographically the handicap of paper and materials. Some of us find that if we don't do stunts the publisher will think we're not trying. Some of us are still suffering a little from Rogers-complaint. And some of us are perhaps just too anxious to express ourselves.

Whatever the reason, we seldom have the courage to let a simple book stay simple. We are very particular about the type[Pg 173] we select, and then we are afraid to use it boldly, and to depend on the design of the letter for our effects. Books with illustrations, diagrams, complicated heads, or other special matter, we are apt to handle well; but when the copy is simple we do insist on using rules and/or ornament. When we use ornament we are inclined to have meaningless little units repeated endlessly throughout the book, instead of a few positive, significant elements, used with proper restraint.

In many of the books I saw, the design bore no relation to the subject matter, either in materials, format, or typography, and these were by no means all from the hands of inexperienced designers. Many suffered, of course, because good types are not available for certain problems. None of the composing machines has a really suitable type for books on contemporary subjects: the natural and social sciences, architecture and technology, etc. There should be several such types, comparable to the old numbered "moderns" and "old styles" but better in design, traditional in general form but impersonal and mechanized in drawing; and cut in several weights for different papers. If I may conclude by quoting again from my last effort in this medium, we are still "anxiously awaiting the composing-machine companies' arrival in the Twentieth Century."

Postscript, 1951:

Re-reading the above complaints, I am saddened to find how many of them I would repeat today. Many of them, but not all. The inflated book is becoming rare, but it took a world war to finish it off. With it we are losing the sloppy rough-cut fore-edge. "Period" typography is quite dead, but its belated and tortured passing is no credit to any of us.

We still have too much typography, however; too many self-conscious tricks, too much un-discipline. And we still lack many of the types we need. The war may fairly be blamed for disrupting the programs of the machine people, for a book face takes years of labor and trial to produce. But where are the new hand-types?

A healthy printing industry needs a prolific type design program. Creative type-founding stimulates the typographer, and paves the way for the machine cutting. We need ignore competition in the foundry field, and all we have is one tired monopoly.[Pg 174] Perhaps most of us are too polite to point, but let us not think that we can ignore the foundry situation, and supply the lack of types with calligraphy. Every creative period in printing history has produced its own new types. The present period can make no important contribution without doing the same.

From Private Presses and Their Books, by Will Ransom. Copyright 1929 by R. R. Bowker Co. Reprinted by permission of author and publisher. Corrected and amended by the author.

Whenever private presses are mentioned, one of two questions is certain to be heard. The layman asks, "What do you mean, a private press?" while a collector smiles quizzically and inquires, with gentle malice, "How do you define a private press?" There have been many answers and much discussion, but common agreement has not yet fixed upon a single definite phrase. Perhaps one fascinating element of the subject is this very uncertainty.

There is really little question about the meaning of "private" in any connection, with its connotation of complete personal freedom in thought and expression and exemption from exterior influence or compulsion. So it is a simple matter to define a private press in those terms. The usual argument, however, is less concerned with a fundamental definition than with its interpretation. The uncertainty is about which of the many presses of past and present shall be considered, from the collector's viewpoint, private enterprises as distinguished from commercial ventures. Actually the line of demarcation is so broad and nebulous that decision must always remain a matter of personal opinion. For a working basis, the following statements provide the best available material.

John Martin, in his Bibliographical Catalogue of Books Privately Printed (1834), included certain presses whose productions "were not intended by the writers for sale, and the circulation of which has been confined entirely to their friends and connexions or to those who took an interest in the matter contained in them." The intent is apparent, but it applies equally to privately printed and private press printing, which [Pg 176]are different matters. The restriction to "writers" is unfortunate, and Martin contradicts himself by including at least one press, Strawberry Hill, many of whose books were offered for public sale. On the other hand, he omitted many which were clearly within his own terms.

M. Claudin, the French bibliographer, explains at greater length that a private press is "one set up in a monastery, a palace, a residence, or a private house, not the office of a printer. In fact it is a press reserved for personal and not for public use, patronized, held, owned, or hired for the occasion by a private person at his own house, or by a congregation in, or close to, their buildings. Whether the copies issued were merely intended for the use of an ecclesiastical order or to be presented to high personages, whether they were exposed for sale or reserved for exchange ... makes no essential difference." That seems to cover the ground pretty thoroughly.

Alfred W. Pollard, one of the foremost English authorities, says: "For a press to be private a double qualification seems to be necessary: the books it prints must not be obtainable by any chance purchaser who offers a price for them and the owner must print for his own pleasure and not work for hire for other people." And Falconer Madan, another noted English bibliographer, condenses his decision into "a press carried on unofficially by a person or group of persons for his or their private purposes."

The following paragraph, as originally written, erroneously ascribed the quotation to John T. Winterich. It should have read: Still another neatly phrased version occurs in English Books 1475-1900, by Sawyer and Darton: "Perhaps, in the end, the best definition of a private press is that it is an enterprise conceived, and masterfully and thoroughly carried out, by a creative artist who (whether or not he likes to cover some of his expenses by sales) does his work from a sincere conviction that he is so expressing his own personality."

Except that any book offered for sale may easily come into the hands of "any chance purchaser" who learns of it, and that "creative artist" is a severe limitation, the common factor of independent expression is apparent in all these.

Granting the connotation of "privacy" as an imperative factor, a survey of impulses and characteristics provides a better understanding of the matter. Actually, the principal differences of opinion and the major argument derive from the question of whether or not the productions of a press are sold or given away. But what difference does that make if the fundamental impulse and continued purpose prove monetary[Pg 177] return to be a minor consideration, a casual effect rather than a desired result? It is true that many private presses, even some of the greater ones, continued for longer and more prolifically than they would have without patronage, but that was because their subscribers liked the result of what was done in free personal expression. Even the Kelmscott Press produced an edition for Way and Williams with a Chicago imprint, but it should be noted that the publishers bought the book and the book-making of Morris' choice instead of engaging him to carry out their wishes. So there seems to be sufficient justification for disregarding the financial element, so long as it is clearly secondary, except to note that a private press must be free from the necessity of considering that phase of the matter.

As individual expression chooses many avenues, each with its particular attraction, the reasons for establishing private presses are numerous and varied. They have sprung from the dreams and desires of craftsmen, authors and artists, prophets and dilettantes. Broadly, they divide into two general classes, one being concerned with literary content and the other with typographic form, with perhaps a third division concerned only with enjoying something to play with. The typographic viewpoint seems to attract popular interest to the greatest extent.

The simplest and perhaps the truest type of private press is that maintained by one who is, at least by desire, a craftsman and finds a peculiar joy in handling type, ink, and paper, with sufficient means and leisure to warrant such an avocation. His literary selection may leave something to be desired and art may be disregarded or amazingly interpreted, but he has a good time. As a correspondent recently wrote: "This small effort shows the difficulties of an amateur both with ink and with type. But as it is a matter of the mere fun of the thing, rather than business, I am in that singularly fortunate position of being able to tell anyone who doesn't like it to go jump in the lake." Another version of the same spirit was happily expressed by Edwin Roffe (Rochester Press) in 1861:

At the other extreme is the author who is entirely or largely concerned with producing his own writings. He may turn printer by choice[Pg 178] or for economy, or may hire a workman, but he must, to qualify as a private press, maintain the equipment in his own ownership or control. In this group the personal element is usually the one point of interest, as the typography is generally a mere means to an end. Somewhere in this rating may be included the secret presses devoted to political and religious propaganda in the days when free speech was a hazardous adventure; also those which, like Middle Hill, were established to preserve and distribute rare or unique items of information and record.

Then there is the dilettante who dabbles a little in both phases but performs few of the functions in his own person. His viewpoint is more nearly that of a publisher, yet insofar as he maintains a press and follows an individual program he is a member of this goodly company. Horace Walpole was an excellent example. "Present amusement is all my object," he said at the start, and no doubt he accomplished that purpose not only for himself but for many of his friends.

Another distinct approach to private press activity, most familiar because its results have been more significant and have affected typography as a whole more emphatically, is from the standpoint of aesthetic or artistic vision. Men with a fine feeling for beauty have done marvels with available materials, but the impulse usually includes type design. "Let's make a new fount of type" voiced the conception of the Kelmscott Press and the next ten or twelve years saw almost as many types designed, not all successful but certainly bearing the impress of individual expression. Even Dr. Daniel, with no assumption of creative ability, served the cause well by searching out and reviving the Fell types.

Finally, there is a kind of press which may or may not be considered private but is certainly not commercial, a press maintained by a school for educational purposes of one form or another. Rarely do these reach a collector's attention, since their products are distinctly localized, but there are instances of significant accomplishment. The notable example is the Laboratory Press where, under the direction of Porter Garnett, students of printing learn something of typography in terms of the ideal, not to mention other cultural by-products. Mr. Garnett's statement may well be added to the definitions already quoted. "Issuing publications (for such, in spite of their slenderness, our students' specimens are), and having no commercial function, the Laboratory Press is, in the purest sense of the term, a private press; and its purpose being solely educational, it may be said to be the first private press to be dedicated exclusively to educational ends." On the sole point of priority the[Pg 179] Whitnash and School Presses might be offered in evidence, but no comparison of purpose can fairly be suggested.

Somewhat in the same spirit is the use of a private press for experimental work, as proposed by James Guthrie, who has said: "The artist at the press is, before everything, an explorer. His true mission is to suggest and demonstrate, not ideas thirty years old, but new ideas, which may take our friend the fine printer (by easy methods) another thirty years to see the drift of!" That approach, as well as another stated intention towards "a gesture of protest and criticism," is of a part with the purpose animated by vision of new and finer achievement. That there was feeling of experiment in the first Kelmscott type and book is a matter of record, as is the fact that subsequent experience and development have changed the result in some important details.

While these groups serve to distinguish the main differences between various kinds of private presses, very few individual instances lie within one classification. Craftsmen have turned to writing, authors to printing, and dilettantes to both. Some have achieved simultaneous distinction in type design, writing, and book-making. Such versatility is rare, yet it is illuminating to note that the outstanding figures, those who have contributed most of permanent worth to subsequent culture, of which William Morris is the chief example, are the ones who have combined the greatest number of elements in their activities.

Out of all these has come something more than individual purpose and personal endeavor. Though the poorest of them have earned nothing more than pity or at best a genial tolerance, the significant presses have contributed richly to the program of typography and to aesthetic progress in general. Although the story of private presses is no more than a tiny chapter in the annals of graphic art, although all of them are but an infinitesimal part of the deluge of printers and printing since the middle of the fifteenth century, their influence, particularly upon book design, is strikingly impressive out of all proportion to their size and number. Verily, they are "the little leaven that leaveneth the whole lump."

After all is said, the distinguishing quality of a private press is no less than a matter of spirit, indefinable except by inference. Whatever decision is made concerning the status of a press, with regard to its being private or not, must be based upon a recognition of the ideal apparent in its works, with due consideration for the human elements of its activities. Freed from the confining strictures of details, a private press may be defined as the typographic expression of a personal ideal, conceived in freedom and maintained in independence.

[Pg 180]

PRESS MARK, ITS SECOND, BY FREDERIC W. GOUDY. Mr. Ransom was associated with the Village Press during its beginning months at Park Ridge, Ill., in the Summer of 1903.

POSTSCRIPT, 1951:

Twenty-four years later the question is still academic. Instead of a few distinguished private presses there is now a spate of "press books," some of which are produced in home privacy, others designed or printed or published by an outstanding personality, and a few, regrettably, on the border line of the commercial limited editions racket. But the meaning of "privacy" remains unchanged and a private press is what it has always been, a personal activity. I cannot improve on my original statement.

To fill out the record with some definitions that were unknown or omitted in the earlier chapter, and to get all of the statements into one place, we may begin with William Morris's Note on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press (1898): "I began printing books with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty, while at the same time they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye, or trouble the intellect of the reader by eccentricity of form in the letters."

C. R. Ashbee, of the Essex House Press, stated in The Private Press: A Study in Idealism (1909): "A private press as we understand it at the present day in England and America is a Press whose objective is first of all an aesthetic one, a press that if it is to have real worth challenges support on a basis of Standard, caters for a limited market and is not concerned with the question of the Commercial development of printing by machinery." In 1933 (also twenty-four years later) he repeated that definition in The Book-Collector's Quarterly (No. XI, p. 72) and added: "That, I think, is as near as we shall get."

For the Doves Press, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson explained his purpose in the three Catalogues Raisonné of 1908, 1911, and 1916, shortened[Pg 181] in the last: "... to attack the problem of Typography as presented by ordinary books in the various forms of Verse, Prose, and Dialogue and, keeping always in mind the principles laid down in the Book Beautiful, to attempt its solution by the simple arrangement of the whole Book, as a whole, with due regard to its parts and to the emphasis of its capital divisions rather than by the addition & splendour of applied ornament."

Among the commentators and bibliographers, Robert Steele, in The Revival of Printing (1912) makes no attempt at definition, and G. S. Tomkinson, in his Select Bibliography of Modern Presses (1928) "still seeks the right answers." In the latter book, Bernard H. Newdigate's introduction contains two statements which indicate the spirit that informs private presses and in recent years has expanded into more public book-making: "... a zeal in the pursuit of their art which has been inspired by something more than mere money-making, and in many cases by the attainment of a degree of excellence which invests their work with a peculiar interest for all those who study printing..." and specifically about operators of private presses who "have printed their books because they have judged the books worth printing for their own sakes, or worth printing in some particular way; and it is the particular way in which each of these printers has sought to give expression to his conception of how his books should be printed and the way in which he has overcome the limitations of his type and plant and solved the several problems which beset the studious printer in every detail of his work, that give them so much individual interest...."

In later years, we have had noble bibliographies of the Nonesuch, Grabhorn, and Ashendene Presses, Bruce Rogers' Paragraphs on Printing, and Daniel Berkeley Updike's Notes on the Merrymount Press and Some Aspects of Printing, Old and New. All of these are required reading for collectors of press books, and each represents a personal viewpoint, but only one defines a private press.

That is the Ashendene Bibliography, but one who seeks for a formal declaration will not find it. The few phrases that can be isolated—" ... the absorbing interest of an otherwise busy life...."—"The Press was started solely for the sake of the interest and amusement I expected to derive from it...."—"... the striving after an ideal...."—these casual comments are slender evidence. If, however, the entire Foreword is read, one discovers just why and how a private press is operated—"the letter killeth, but the spirit maketh alive."

COMPOSED IN ELDORADO TYPES

From the Centaur announcement booklet, Lanston Monotype Corporation, Ltd., London, 1929.

Printers, as a class, like all other craftsmen, can only thrive by supplying their customers with what they want at prices which they are willing to pay. Here and there an exceptionally gifted and courageous craftsman may rely on being able to obtain a better price for better work, and be rewarded for his confidence, but success will always depend not only on himself but also on two external factors over which he has very little control; the existence of enough customers, or potential customers, able to recognise better work than that which they have been getting, and the ability and willingness of these customers to pay a higher price for it as long as a higher price is necessary for its production. But occasionally the discriminating customer (or potential customer) may not find a master-craftsman able and willing to do for him what he wants, and if so, if he cares enough about it to be an enterprising amateur, he starts a press of his own to print the books he wants as he thinks they ought to be printed. Very often he fails; almost always he finds that he must engage at least one skilled journeyman to help him through. But occasionally he succeeds, and when he succeeds he brings new life into the craft of printing.

Definitions of what constitutes an "amateur" have always proved difficult. The two characteristics of the class of which I am thinking are that they have been readers and lovers of books before they have become printers and that they will not knowingly print any book badly for the sake of making a profit off it. [Pg 183]As a rule they will only print the books they like, and they will print them according to their own standards. That some of them have made a good living by their work, does not alter their status.

In the early days of printing amateurs abounded, but not at the very first. When printing was invented it was applied first of all to multiplying a few much-used Latin grammars and calendars for which there was a large and steady sale, because the production of manuscript copies had been too slow and too expensive. These early efforts, which have come down to us mainly in fragments found in binding, are rude and ugly enough. There is no evidence of any effort to make them beautiful for the sake of making them beautiful, and there was no need to do so. Fifteenth-century schoolmasters did not cosset their pupils with pretty school-books; they beat them. Their standard in printing was strictly utilitarian. But when the adventure was once undertaken, whether it was by Gutenberg, or by Fust and Schöffer, of printing large Bibles for use in church, there was at once admitted a standard of dignity, and this the Church for centuries did more than any other body to maintain. Furthermore when the goldsmith Fust and the scribe Peter Schöffer, greatly daring, set themselves to produce psalters for use in choir which, by red printing and by large and small capitals in red and blue, should rival the beauty of the hand-written and hand-painted psalters then in use, to the dignity of the first Bibles there was added beauty and charm, and in a few years bookmen all over Europe were eager to apply the new craft to multiplying the books in which they were specially interested. A few secular highbrows stood aloof. As some old ladies still drive out in their carriage and pair (a very pleasant and dignified way of getting about) and abjure motor-cars, so there were a few great bookmen who clung to manuscripts and would not have a printed book in their libraries. In the same way for some twenty years bishops looked askance at presses and types, and it was not until 1474 that a printed missal was placed upon an altar, and not until 1479 that more than two editions were printed in any year, or anywhere outside Italy. But when Milan and Rome had continued to set the example, German bishops were content to follow it, and when they decided to print they found a vigorous way of maintaining a high standard. They commissioned the best printer they could get to do the work; they allowed him to charge an agreed price[Pg 184] for it, and they obliged every Church in their province or diocese to provide itself with a copy before a specified date.[33]

In France in several instances a Bishop, or the Canons of a Cathedral, arranged with a printer to come to the Cathedral town and print a missal or breviary under their supervision. These good men were perhaps rather amateur publishers than amateur printers working private presses with a hired man to do the heavy work. But if we choose to think of them only as customers, they were customers who knew what they wanted and brought the printer under their roof as the best means of seeing that they got it.

As regards the printing of secular books in the fifteenth century, since the craft was a new one, it was necessarily run in the first instance by men who had been brought up in other occupations. In this sense nearly every native printer outside Germany was an amateur. At the outset the newcomers were largely clerks in minor orders and professional scribes; but merchants, professors and men of letters generally were attracted to the new craft, many of them doubtless only to make money, others to print books in which they were specially interested. Even more than in the case of the bishops or canons who commissioned missals and breviaries, we must think of this motley crowd of recruits rather as amateur publishers than amateur printers. It may be doubted whether even Caxton (who was by trade a mercer) in all his fifteen years in the business, set up the equivalent of one of his small folios with his own hands. He started his press because [Pg 185]he wanted to get his books into print as the easiest way of circulating them; but there are no signs that he took any special interest in fine printing for its own sake, or took any joy in producing a handsome book. His standards were those of a competent but unenterprising scribe, who only wanted to set his words down accurately on the page so that they could be easily read. The master printers all over the Continent of Europe, when they had the courage to stand out against the pressure to cut prices or increase profits by using cheaper and cheaper paper, and crowding more on to it, were doing much better work than Caxton, and when they found customers who encouraged them to do their best, their work altogether outclassed his.

When we turn to the scholar-printers of the sixteenth century I think it would be hard to deny the claim of Aldus and the Estiennes to a disinterested love of good printing, as well as a desire to get the books in which they were interested into print. It is true that the rich scholars of Italy and France were used to a high standard of excellence in the books, manuscript or printed, which they put on their shelves, but it is to the credit of Aldus and the Estiennes and Simon Colines and Geoffroy Tory that they catered also for the needs of less wealthy scholars, not by cheapening paper or crowding more old types on a page, but by designing, or causing to be designed, new fonts, with which they could print more economically without loss of beauty. Moreover, more especially at Lyons, the new ideals of compact printing, of the small book beautiful, were applied to printing not only in Greek and Latin, but in the vernacular, and these sixteenth century models can still be imitated without archaism or ostentation, which, when fifteenth century masterpieces are followed, are often difficult to avoid.

"A penny, I trow, is enough for books," said one of Robert Copland's customers to him, somewhere about 1530, and the spirit of that remark haunted the vernacular English book trade for nearly a century and a half. Amid all the outpouring of the wonderful Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, though no printing was allowed in the provinces except at Oxford and Cambridge, there was not a sufficient demand for books in all England to provide work for more than about five and twenty master printers many of whom had only a single press, with a couple of journeymen and an apprentice. The Privy Council was always trying to[Pg 186] keep down the number, both of printers and presses, and its action in so doing is usually represented as solely dictated by the fear of their being employed in producing seditious or schismatic pamphlets. No doubt this fear was the main cause of the Council's action. But if there had been enough lawful work for twice as many printers and presses, the number might have been doubled with no increase of risk. The risk lay solely in the fact that a man who owned and could use a press, if he could not get enough lawful work to give him a living, might be tempted to take secret work. Unless they were desperate, men would not risk hanging to earn a few shillings, or a few pounds, but there is ample evidence that in Shakespeare's day some of the small master printers really were desperate, and it was only natural that they should do bad work—as indeed they did. All over Europe printing at the beginning of the seventeenth century was bad; in England it was very bad indeed.

During the second half of the seventeenth century and the whole of the eighteenth, the wealth of England steadily increased, and with its wealth the standard of education. There was a much greater demand for books, and though printing was permitted after 1693 in the provinces without restrictions, there was clearly more work to do in London. Printing became neat, and on occasion elaborate, and throughout the eighteenth century, both in England and Scotland, there were constant experiments and efforts to improve it, to which full justice has not yet been done. Among these efforts to improve it there is no reason to include Horace Walpole's private press at Strawberry Hill, or any of the other private presses which, possibly in imitation of his example, subsequently sprang up, except perhaps that at Lee Priory. The Strawberry Hill books were handsomely printed according to the taste of the day, but they showed no originality, such as was displayed by Baskerville or even the Foulises, and they certainly started no style. The other private presses of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were purely literary in their aims, and many of the books produced at them are below the average good commercial work of the day.

In the middle of the nineteenth century the great spread of education caused a demand for very cheap books, both for amusement and instruction, which led to some lowering of standard.[Pg 187] More dangerous still were the very gaudy ideals of decorative work which found favour during the era inaugurated by the Great Exhibition of 1851. There was an epidemic of bad taste among book buyers and publishers, and therefore printers responded to it, as they always will, whether gladly or reluctantly, respond to any popular demand which brings grist to their mill. Meanwhile much quite good work was being done by the Chiswick Press and other firms, but the influence of the amateur on the professional printing of that period is not much in evidence, either for good or for evil.

The Daniel Press, worked as an amusement by the Rev. C. H. O. Daniel, Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, for a good many years, beginning about 1874, seems to me one of the best examples of a really amateur press that can be adduced. The interest of its books is mainly literary, but it is also typographical, and though the performance is usually slight, and even thin, Dr. Daniel showed real flair in his revival of the old Fell types, his uses of italics, and the happy knack with which the work was put on the page. I think that Dr. Daniel's influence may possibly be traced, though only quite slightly, in some of the pretty books (often a little spoilt by the weakness of the ink) published by Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., in the eighties, most of them printed by Messrs. Ballantyne. If this is true, it is so much more to Dr. Daniel's credit.

We come now to the movement of which William Morris was the leader, which placed to the credit of English typography some of the finest books the world has ever seen. Morris must be classed as an amateur, and his press as a private press, because he printed to please himself, and no offer of money, however great, would have induced him to print anything he really disliked. We must not, however, allow the private income which enabled Morris to carry out his ideas without worrying over cash-returns, or the fact that he sold most of his books by means of circulars from a private house instead of over a counter, or any other consideration, to blind us to the fact that he was one of the world's greatest craftsmen, and certainly, if we consider his versatility, his sureness of touch and his imagination, the finest that the British Isles have ever produced. If he had had the largest printing house in London, and had printed the Kelmscott books in a special depart[Pg 188]ment of it to advertise the rest, it could not have made him more of a craftsman than he was. He stands in a very real sense alone by virtue of his unique and splendid personality.

Admiration for Morris led to the setting up of several private or amateur presses, which did excellent work in his spirit: notably the Doves Press, conducted at first by Mr. Cobden-Sanderson, an ex-barrister, who had produced some real masterpieces as a bookbinder, and Mr. Emery Walker, the photo-engraver, who had ever been ready to help anyone trying to promote good printing; afterwards by Mr. Cobden-Sanderson alone. There was also the Ashendene Press of Mr. St. John Hornby, one of the partners in Messrs. W. H. Smith & Son, who, I fancy, has done rather more of the work with his own hands than most other private printers. Robert Proctor's Greek type, again, was brought into existence by love of Morris, but Proctor, like Messrs. Ricketts and Shannon, who were responsible for the Vale Press books, had no press of his own.

The beauty of all these books reinforced the influence of the Kelmscott Press ones, by proving that what Morris had done on his own lines could be done by lesser men with the variations suggested by their individual tastes. They reinforced also the proof which Morris had given, that so long as it is regarded as a hobby (or in a commercial house as an advertisement) the production of really fine specimens of printing is not an impossibly expensive one. Morris made no profit from the Kelmscott books as a pub[Pg 189]lisher; could allot himself no payment for all the magnificent decorative work which he put into them with his own hands. He got nothing from his venture save the joy of achievement and pleasure of giving copies to his friends. But he proved the existence of a public willing to pay for the cost of print and paper, even when both print and paper were the best which money could buy; and I believe that most venturers in the same field have been supported to about the same extent. From our present point of view, this is one of the most important results which Morris achieved. The direct influence of his work on men like Mr. Updike and Mr. Bruce Rogers can only be reckoned very slight. But if the Kelmscott books had not made the success they did, neither Mr. Updike nor Mr. Bruce Rogers would have been given his chance, and to make it possible for younger men to get their chance is one of the finest things a master craftsman can do.

Private presses have multiplied greatly in the last thirty years, and some of them have done fine work. But the influence which they are exercising on the commercial printing of the present day is not in any way comparable to that which the Kelmscott and Doves books exercised a generation ago. There is no virtue in a book being printed in a small edition or in a private house, and no virtue in producing endless specimens of printing rather than books. Mr. Meynell and the Nonesuch Press (whose achievements I should admire much more joyously if it had not been called a "press") have shown what a diversity of interesting work can be obtained from commercial printers by a man who has good taste and knows how to get what he wants. When fine work can be obtained in this way private presses seem of little use save as an amusement to their owners. But no one is as yet making full use of the revolution (a much greater revolution than that inaugurated by the Aldine italics) which the "Monotype" machine has effected in modern printing just at the moment when (owing to the economic conditions, compositors having at last secured a fair wage) it was most needed. Thanks to the wonderful facility with which small types can now be cut and the greater quickness of machine-setting there is now only one obstacle to a new triumph of the Small Book Beautiful; and that is the obsession of the paymaster, the Customer, that it is unreasonable to expect him to pay anything approaching the same price for compact books in small clear type with no needless expanse of blank paper around the type page, as for the same number of words printed in larger type and with much more blank paper. The obsession is fostered by the fact that the reprints of popular books which have passed out of copyright and which often are produced in very pretty forms, are sold in large quantities at small prices, because no author has to make a livelihood out of them. But if a book does not appeal to a large public and yet has to earn money for its author it cannot be sold at a low price, and it is childish for the customer to insist that this fact should be concealed from him by books being made needlessly large in order that he may persuade himself that he is still getting plenty for his money. Publishers and Printers and Authors should unite to educate their paymaster the Customer on this point, and it is much to their interest to do so, for the book space which is now occupied by a couple of hundred volumes might easily hold two or three times as many if all books were printed with pleasant compactness. If an Amateur would arise who would help to train Customers to pay high prices for beautiful compact books he would be doing good service. At present most of the finely printed books are needlessly and inconveniently large.

This essay appeared originally in The Colophon, Part IV, 1930. It was revised and retitled The Personal Element for inclusion in The Nonesuch Century, 1936, from which it is here reprinted.

It wouldn't be easy to imagine an idea, a policy and a business more "personal" than our Nonesuch has been. This is my excuse for the personal (worse, the first-personal) character of these ensuing notes.

Nonesuch was started by three of us in the close quarters of a basement room (two of the three became husband and wife); at our busiest and most successful we have never had an office staff of more than three, usually our friends as well as our associates; we later lived above and in our office; we have been responsible ourselves not only for every decision of policy of what to publish and not to publish but also for every piece of printing, of make-up, of advertising; for jackets, catalogues, specimen pages and a vast deal of miscellaneous editing. And, more than anything else, it is our own taste which has determined our choice of books and choice of styles. In short everything (except typing and account-adding in later days) has been done by Vera Meynell or David Garnett or me.

When I set myself to the making of these notes I thought I should only have to remember, not to reconstruct. I had by heart all that was worth knowing about the beginnings of the Nonesuch in itself. But for its remoter beginnings in myself I found that I had in fact to go back to my childhood.

[Pg 192]

What induced this revision of my opinion was a phrase (quoted in my brother Everard's "Life" of Francis Thompson) from a letter of my mother's. "Please return" she had written to Thompson, "the revise proofs sixteen pages at a time."

First of all (said I to myself) I am the son of a mother who was not only a poet but who knew also that page proofs have to be dealt with in units of sixteen. Yes, and that was only a trifle of the family's knowledge. I have often seen my mother unflinchingly cut a treasurable phrase in one of her essays so that it should end to the line or paragraph of the printer's prescription; and correct a proof so that a word deleted here would be promptly balanced by an added word there to save the over-running of the corrected lines. Where did she learn this tenderness towards my craft? But from my father, of course.

And then I realised that, if he likes it or not, the Nonesuch Press is really my father's grand-son. In establishing it I was doing no more than reverting to type.

There was of course the literary background, the great names and exciting personalities of the writers who were my parents' friends. There was George Meredith whose limping descent of the staircase I can just, and whose yearly tip of a pound at Christmas I can very easily, remember. There was the silver teapot which I never carried to be replenished without remembering my father's solemn sanctification of it: "Robert Browning has taken his tea from this." There was W. B. Yeats standing owl-like at the door blinking to discover my mother through the smoke emitted from the Egyptian cigarettes which I had lately been sent at top speed to buy, my father sometimes going twice through his pockets before he assembled the necessary tenpence halfpenny. (Tenpence halfpenny was also the price of a box of soldiers, and once I thought of buying soldiers instead of cigarettes and running away from home.) There was Francis Thompson, "The Poet" as we children always called him, fragile, mannered, and complaining of the weather or of the quality of our food. Much later I remember Jack Squire discussing the plans for the first London Mercury; and Hilaire Belloc brought by Wilfrid Blunt because of my[Pg 193] father's "discovery" of his first writing in the Morning Post. I don't remember Stevenson or Patmore; but framed holographs of In the Highlands and The Toys were set between the gold Japanese embroideries which surrounded the sitting room. This literary "atmosphere" was more continuously and intensively itself than anything I know today—even in psycho-analytic or Communist circles. "Does he write? Then do bring him." "Is he a Thompsonian? Of course he must come."

Every Sunday afternoon and evening my parents were "at home." There was endless poetry-reading, endless "literary talk" by my mother's devoted admirers. No, not endless. There were two signals for their departure. The first gong, so to speak, was the arrival of the hot blackcurrant jam drink. The second was my father unbuttoning, almost unostentatiously, the top button of his boots.

But all this was literature, not letters, and letters was after all the chief occupation of the house. A literary hot-house should have produced in me, very nearly did produce, an over-sensitive literary plant. And sure enough I wrote poetry, with three of my sisters and one of my brothers. (George Moore in one of the "Hail and Farewell" volumes has a disconcerting fancy of the young Meynells assembling for their verse-writing hour once a week.) But letters made me into a printer.

In a play about Francis Thompson which was lately produced my father had necessarily to be represented. He objected to his portrayal under his own name, and he was therefore made to appear as John Oldcastle, his writing-name before I was born. In one scene he was shown sitting in the office of the paper which he edited, Merry England. He struck the bell twice for his sub-editor, once for his office boy, three times for his secretary. There was indeed such a magazine. But there was never an office, never a secretary, never a sub-editor, never an office boy. The whole work was done by my mother and father and amateur helpers on and about the library table. If I was allowed in the room on press-days the bargain was that I was to sit under the table. Mostly this was fun. I learned a lot[Pg 194] about the leg-fidgets of writers. And "under the table" became my own kingdom, from which I could at the age of seven declaim without embarrassment Gray's "Elegy" to the Sunday night supper guests. But one memory survives which still carries horror with it—the memory of my mother suddenly going down on her knees, down to my level, and burying her face in her hands. She had just been told, in the midst of proof-correcting, of the death of Coventry Patmore.

"The Poet" was one of the helpers—a feared helper. He would wish to engage all the rest in argument as to the desirability of this or that paragraph. On one occasion, J. L. Garvin, who could disturb by his brilliant relevance almost as much as Thompson by his dull irrelevance, made an unexpected call. Proofs were already overdue. By a masterly manoeuvre "the poet" was sent to entertain him. Garvin, the liveliest talker of our day, was overwhelmed by Thompson's discussion of the relative merits of Lyons and A.B.C. tea shops. He sat mumchance an afternoon through. Thompson reported: "Never have I known Garvin so brilliant."

Merry England was a monthly, but its crises were not less acute for that. You can put off so easily until too late what has to be done only once a month. But The Weekly Register, which was also my father's property, and which was written almost wholly by himself and my mother, was a weekly. The correction of proofs was a diurnal occupation with Thursdays as the grand climax. It was printed by the Westminster Press; and here, too, my father was the begetter of my trade. For he was part-owner of the Westminster Press and helped to establish with it a style of typography and a care for detail in printing which were far ahead of the run of commercial presses.

When he was over fifty my father added the last segment to the circle. Magazine proprietor, editor, writer, printer, he now became book publisher, as managing director of Burn & Oates. He transferred from John Lane Francis Thompson's books and my mother's, and he gave me my first job. He gave me also my first lesson in detail. The Collected Works of Francis Thompson were issued by Burns & Oates a few months after I had joined the firm, and I was allowed to have a hand in designing the edition. When it was printed my father discovered that several commas had broken away from the ends of lines and that a number of the kerns or top loops of the letter "f" had been broken. Day after day piles of the imperfect volumes were massed in his flat, which was immediately above the office. We had a sort of fire-bucket drill. One of my sisters would find the page, my father would dab in the comma, I would do the blotting and another sister would restack the books. Some scores of thousands of pen corrections were thus made. I don't think my father would have trusted any one of us to do the actual pen work. He leant back, he quizzed, he admired after every stroke.

The title page of Bunyan's classic, composed in Caslon and Deutsche Zeitschrift, printed by the Kynoch Press, edition, 1600 copies.

In 1913, pursuing a common typographical errand, I chanced to meet Stanley Morison, who had just emerged from a bank and was anxious to concern himself with book-production, and he joined forces with me at Burns & Oates. A year later as a personal venture I purchased a hand press, which I kept in my dining room; and my next step was to persuade the delegates of the Oxford University Press to let me use some of their seventeenth century Fell types. They were very obliging, and they let me have what I wanted, charged me for it as if it were sold, but very properly kept the legal title to it, so that if I were to misuse this cherished type they could at any time call upon me to surrender it. I still have these Fell types in my possession. "The Romney Street Press," since I lived in that street, was my new "style," and I issued a prospectus, which I regard now with mixed feelings of shame and admiration at my audacity; for if ever there was a gold-brick prospectus this was one! Here it is:

I may say at once that the only two books which I issued (Ten Poems by Alice Meynell, and The Diary of Mary Cary) were, with a good deal of difficulty, disposed of—yes, the whole of the fifty copies; but there were no general subscriptions to the Press, not one, and the cost of equipment, forty pounds, bore heavily upon me. Perhaps because of this, perhaps because my dining room was my workshop, and printer's ink was apt to get into the soup, I discontinued the venture—which in any case (since I had no technical assistance and very little competence myself) was decidedly irksome.

Meantime decisive things had happened to me. I had met George Lansbury, inspiration of my politics, and I had met Bruce Rogers, inspiration of all eager typographers. For the next five years I worked in close association with George Lansbury. (I suppose that he has lately become one of the most generally loved men in England. To anyone who has known him in times of deep stress as intimately as I have that cannot be surprising. There is no qualification in my admiration and affection.[34]) In him I found a most ready support for [Pg 198]my "propaganda" view of good printing and good craftsmanship of any kind. Lansbury secured the financial support which made it possible for me to start the Pelican Press. I think the Pelican was a pioneer in the policy of having very few types but all of them of good design. We set advertisements for commerce, which was in those days something of an innovation; and we printed political pamphlets in the Minority Labour interest. These pamphlets are odd to look at now. The slogan of "fitness for purpose" had not yet informed us. A report of the great meetings which we held at the Albert Hall after the first Russian revolution was designed with the mannered elegance which would have suited better an essay by Walter Pater. And I remember myself writing a double-page political manifesto for the Weekly Herald, calling upon the proletariat to rise and end the war, which was set in Cloister Old Face with a seventeenth century flower border and sixteenth century initials.... I set up with elegance what must be the rarest of Siegfried Sassoon first editions. I myself have no copy. Bertrand Russell brought him to see me when Sassoon had decided to refuse to go back to the war, and I made into a leaflet his letter of explanation to his Commanding Officer. I am now astonished at what we published without prosecution. Now it would be "seditious propaganda." I can only put it down to the innocent elegance of typography!

Soon after the war I began making proposals from the Pelican Press to various publishers. Would they allow me to print for them this that and the other book in a "really nice" edition? I pointed out that if they were in fact wrecked upon the conventional desert island and wished to take with them the conventional choice of two books, Shakespeare and the Bible, they would not find a current edition of either fit for a tasteful shipwreck. But my arguments were fruitless—except of a plan for myself. Why shouldn't I do what I wanted them to do? Why wait on them? So I began to hanker after the as yet unnamed, unmanned and unfinanced Nonesuch Press. The next step was to bind David Garnett and Vera Mendel to the adventure.

David Garnett's family history, like my own, is full of literature.[Pg 199] He is the son of two writers and the grandson of a third. He too, after a brief excursion into the Natural Sciences, reverted to type, opened a book-shop (with Francis Birrell), wrote his first novel and, in the same year, lent both the cellar of his book-shop and the assistance of his critical and book-learned mind to our new venture. He too "liked" books. He could, I mean, enjoy the feel of a book, its weight, shape, edges, the synthesis of sensitive things which is represented by that most insensitive word "format."

Vera Mendel was the useful necessary incubator for our schemes. She provided our small capital and she did the routine work. She was also our fearless critic-in-chief. The things she stopped us doing! She, too, developed in me the sense which David Garnett already shared with her—the sense of responsibility about texts. And she put sobriety whenever she could into my lush "blurbs." Her flexibility of mind made our work, too, flexible. She translated Toller's first play, which was among our earliest books; and shared with me the editing of The Week-End Book. For the first eighteen months, while I was working full time at the Pelican Press and David Garnett at his book-shop, and before we felt justified in employing as much as an office girl, she did everything, from editing to stamp-licking, that I could not steal time to do.

This about ourselves. Whence our corporate name? We began by looking not for a name, but for a device; and we found in a tapestry surviving from Nonesuch Palace the elements which Stephen Gooden made into our first "mark." In adapting the device, we took also the name; and I silenced an early objection that it was too boastful by pointing out that Nonesuch means "nonpareil" and so had an esoteric meaning. For nonpareil is the name of a very small and very humble size of type. Nonesuch was chosen, then, in a spirit of mixed hope and humility. Ralph Hodgson, the poet, who was interested in my enterprise, was most anxious that I should call it the Pound Press. (He had lately seen and admired my father's seventeenth-century farmhouse, which has in front of it a delightful yard or "pound.") Every book, he urged, warming to his subject, should weigh a pound and cost a pound! After some intensive correspondence his enthusiasm was routed, and the Nonesuch Press came into being.

Page from Montaigne's Essays, composed in Poliphilus and Koch Antiqua, printed by R. & R. Clark. Published 1931; edition, 1375 sets of two volumes.

So there we were, in 1923, in our cellar under Birrell & Garnett's book-shop, book-enthusiasts, amateurs in the literal, though not, I hope, the derogatory sense of the word, tackling the donkey work of book production and the mule work of book distribution.

For nearly two years we continued in the half light of our limited premises, producing illuminating works in limited editions, and varying the daily task with such occasional diversions as "invoice bees"—parties to which our friends were bidden in order to help us between drinks with the task of writing our invoices, "statements," et caetera.

It is scarcely worth recording the vicissitudes of those underground activities. Only when we tried to stop an ever-rising tide of Congreves—which, as with breaking back I eagerly unloaded the volumes from the lorries, narrowly escaping immuring V.M. in that unhistoric cellar for good—only then did we wonder whether, for purposes of self-preservation, the Press might not have to expand. (Indeed, one wall did bulge alarmingly.) Happily, part of the edition of Congreve got lost in Devonshire.... The lorries which were carrying the bound books from the printers at Plymouth broke down before we did.

I myself travelled the first books, being received with varying degrees of courtesy by the book-sellers. Of those who were civil some were encouraging, some politely discouraging. When, very soon, we were obliged to "ration" orders, these were rewarded and persuaded, and the discourteous received no more than their small deserts.

We meant to have fun with our business and fun we have had. Even when it had outgrown its puppyhood we continued to button-hole our customers and sell them not only our goods but our tastes and our views. Let me anticipate for a moment and quote a sample from the opening paragraph of our 1929 catalogue.

[Pg 202]

But this jape, and others, were part of a serious and deliberate policy. From the beginning we had a plan and hoped to have a public. In the words of our first (1923) catalogue, we intended to make books "for those among collectors who also use books for reading." We intended to choose our books to suit our tastes, not the imputed taste of a hypothetical public.

Not that we felt ego-centric and exclusive about it, like the Californian millionaire who, I am told, caused a Shakespeare to be printed to suit his own taste and his own library—an edition of one copy. We have made now over a hundred editions to suit our own personal requirements—the author we wanted, the text we wanted, the format we wanted, the decorations we wanted. And if there had been no other profit from the Press, this shelf of my library would have seemed in itself a sufficient recompense for my share of the work. But fortunately, many other people also wanted these books. For our taste proved to be a normal contemporary taste. We did not create the vogue for Donne, for instance—we were ourselves part of that general tendency which has in these days found him afresh.

My previous experience in printing had shown me quite clearly[Pg 203] that, in order to avoid monotony and to produce desirable editions at a reasonable cost, one must intelligently exploit the best mechanical equipment and the highest technical skill available. Today there is more fine typographical material to be had than even the largest printing house in the country could possess; and the various commercial presses have developed technical skill and variety along various lines. There was therefore no good reason, we thought, for a new "private press" in the old style, arrogantly self-contained, and with but one type and obsolete "hand" machinery.

Our stock-in-trade has been the theory that mechanical means could be made to serve fine ends; that the machine in printing was a controllable tool. Therefore we set out to be mobilisers of other people's resources; to be designers, specifiers, rather than manufacturers; architects of books rather than builders.

The propriety of our use of the word "Press" was called in question by Arnold Bennett and others. Pedantically it may be wrong; by the spirit it is nearly right. There is no exact word for our function, which was new. Nor for my own part in that function. When I have wanted to "sign" a book, at first I wrote "Typography by." But typography is only a quarter of my battle, and that phrase puts undue emphasis on one department, one only, of a job the essence of which is that it is manifold. A number of books I signed F. M. Finx. But "finxit" means "fashioned," and so "made," rather than "designed." I also used the phrase "under the care of," but this is vague and inaccurate, suggesting merely the oversight of someone else's designs. Perhaps "This book was planned by" is the least inaccurate formula, though this again leaves out the whole business of overseeing. Overseeing is no purely typographical matter. It means the planning and coordinating of the whole book—text, editor, and artist, as well as paper-maker, printer and binder. In fact, it involves an editorial as well as a typographical attitude.

[Pg 204]

Opening page from Voltaire's Princess of Babylon with line drawing by Thomas Lowinsky. Composed in Caslon, printed by the Westminister Press. Published 1928; edition, 1500 copies.

Foulk Grevill writing of the posthumous edition of Sidney's Arcadia said "This requyres the care of his friends, not to amend (for I think that falls within the reach of no man living) but only to see to the paper, and other common errors of mercenary printing." My own interest and ambition in founding the Nonesuch was to see to the paper and other common errors of mercenary printing; but D. G. and V. M. aspired to tackle the question of amendments as well. From our fourth book onwards that policy has governed all our major publications. When, as sometimes happens, a text needs no more editing: when it is adequately and accurately "established," there is still the quasi-editorial function of the illustrator. He may, he should, become in his designs more than a decorator; he should, I believe, become a significant commentator. "Kauffer on Burton" is, for example, how I would describe the drawings for our edition of The Anatomy.

Our books were published in "limited editions" because we had to rope in the collector as well as the reader and student. We have found that it was necessary to impose another sort of limit on our output—a limit to the number of titles we could conveniently and properly publish in a given time. We came to the conclusion that eight books a year was about as much as we could manage if every detail was to be our personal concern and if all were to be freshly designed. The making of our books in a great variety of styles was an early principle, firmly held to. I did not want people to be able to say at the first sight of our books, "Oh yes, that must be a Nonesuch book." I wanted them to say, "That's not a bad looking book," and then to find that it was ours. My calculation—it was a calculation, not a programme—proved surprisingly right. Our first hundred books have taken us twelve years to make.

Our friends have been our editors; and our editors have been our friends. We have had the most valuable suggestions for books, and the most valuable criticism of details of production even, from them. I have seldom "passed" a binding, for example, without asking Geoffrey Keynes's opinion of it. His well-wishing has been of extraordinary value to us, apart from the many editions which he has himself admirably edited for the Nonesuch. It was he who introduced us to those other excellent editors of our texts, John Hayward [Pg 206] and John Sparrow—the former a keen critic and helpful adviser. E. McKnight Kauffer, Stephen Gooden and T. L. Poulton have also done for us much more than illustrate a number of our books.

E. McKnight Kauffer (who drew us from the life for the last of his illustrations to The Anatomy of Melancholy) at one time had office-room with us. The hours I spent in discussing aesthetics with him were stimulating—over-stimulating, we found, when there was work to do. So, in the end, we nailed up a list of "red-herring words" ("functional," "the Artist" and so forth) which were not to be used during office hours on pain of a fine of sixpence for each use. But there was no sixpenny escape from George Moore. While Ulick and Soracha was at the printers, he came almost daily, hung up his square bowler hat and settled down to read aloud to us the revisions he had made in his last batch of proofs. Each time it was an entirely new text. The first version was almost illiterate. The second grammatical but undistinguished. The third a transfiguration. It was fascinating to see the process of his composition at close quarters: and our feelings were undisturbed by anxieties about the printer's bill, for he had proposed at the outset that he should pay for his own corrections. They exceeded the original cost of the setting. In any event, who am I to be critical? For one book I had 37 different varieties of title-page set up. My friend William Maxwell, who printed this book, said that he did not mind "losing" (printers are like farmers) on the text of a Nonesuch book because he always made up his loss on the title-page....

In 1925 we moved from our cellar to Great James Street and we decided (with some misgivings) to incorporate the firm. It seemed better to our auditors although we had suspicions that our subscribers might be discouraged from collecting when they saw first the formula "Ltd." on our letter-paper. We did them an injustice. The partners became directors and shareholders. Vera Meynell bought a little book entitled "The Secretary and His Directors" and, impressed by the legal penalties that hedge about these offices, occasionally wound up one of our long triangular discussions by taking down the minutes book and saying: "Well, I suppose that this might as well have been a board meeting." Once a year, for the benefit of Somerset House we (the directors) presented to ourselves (the shareholders) with all due formalities, a report on the year's accounts and progress. Otherwise it made no difference.

The Antigone Greek type used in Homer's Iliad, decorated by Rudolph Koch. Printed by Joh. Enschedé en Zonen. Published 1931; edition, 1450 copies.

Even the "mundial bad-time" (to quote the phrase of an Indian friend) of 1930 did not seem to affect us or our customers much. But the second year of the great depression brought onto the market many hoarded copies of our books from the pickle-shelves of profiteers and deflated some of their more astronomical prices. Our survival-value (as luxury trades go) is perhaps due to the fact that even in boom-time we tried to be honest traders, not using our success with collectors to put prices as high as the traffic would bear, but giving a constant ratio of good value in the sheer materials of book-making, so that our paper, printing, binding were as good as any to be had at the price.

No book-producing of our kind can subsist without sales in America. It was our good fortune to ally ourselves in 1927 with Random House of New York. No collaboration could be more satisfactory from a technical or a personal point of view. It survived the get-rich-quick temptations of 1929; it has survived the difficulties of the depression. New blood and money entered the Press two years ago when Cecil Harmsworth, Desmond Harmsworth and Eric Harmsworth joined our board. But they belong to our Second Century, not to our first.

We have avoided antagonisms, even avoided competition. My friend Osbert Sitwell suggested that we should publish a satire on Noel Coward; Coward that we should publish his satire on the Sitwells. To both we said "no." How pleasant it would have been to issue them together in a single book! When I found that Peter Davies and the Nonesuch were both planning to reissue Cobbett's Rural Rides, we met and tossed for it. He won; and our editorial work was made over to him.

Of all Nonesuch books that by which I should best like the venture [Pg 209] to be judged is our Shakespeare, edited by Herbert Farjeon. It brought us, among other things, a characteristic contact with T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence had written a letter of fervent praise of the Shakespeare to David Garnett; and I sought permission to use it. David Garnett was himself our ambassador. Lawrence appealed to the group of friends with whom he happened to be. "I don't want my letter to be reprinted. I hate the advertising of my name and opinions," he protested. To his obvious chagrin (for Lawrence had a passion for publicity as great as his passion against it) his friends supported his view. "After all," said they "you are not a Shakespeare expert." That decided Lawrence. "I think it is my duty to give permission," he said. This was his letter:

"There they are, my fifty men and women." They must speak for themselves, and I have almost silenced them with my chatter. For their successors I can say only this: that it remains the ambition of the Press to make a worthy edition, textually and typographically, of every major English writer who has not already been appropriately served. It will make these books for money, and has no shame in that. We are not "Gentlemen Farmers" but workers at our trade. But we are enthusiasts also, even in our middle years; and still propagandists. Every well-designed book or advertisement or prospectus is the begetter of others; and good printing is one of the graces of life even where life is ungracious.

Title page for small book edited by Francis Meynell, composed in Janson and "printed on the premises" at the Press on Van Gelder mould-made paper. Edition, 1250 copies.

In a letter from Vienna in 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writes of Prince Eugene's library that it is "though not very ample, well chosen; but as the Prince would admit into it no editions but what are beautiful and pleasing to the eye and there are nevertheless numbers of excellent books that are but indifferently printed, this finikin and foppish taste makes many disagreeable chasms in this collection!"

I should like to make Prince Eugene patron saint of the Nonesuch. And dear Lady Mary as well; for it remains the object of the Nonesuch Press to meet tastes finikin and foppish like his, studious like hers.

COMPOSED IN POLIPHILUS AND BLADO TYPES

From Cockalorum: A Bibliography of the Golden Cockerel Press, June 1943-December 1948. (An address to the Art Society, University of the South West of England in Exeter, June, 1947.) Copyright 1950 by the Golden Cockerel Press. Reprinted by permission of author and publisher.

I have called this talk "Printing for Love." I have not come to preach a gospel to you, but, as I proceed to discuss printing and publishing and book-illustration, it will be apparent to you that one of the tenets of my religion is that we workers should do our job, whether it be farming, or gardening, book-keeping or building, hewing coal or engineering, with a will. In Ecclesiastes the Preacher advises us: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." (Ch. 9, v. 10.) You may say that my job is a nice job; that it is all very well for me to talk. I can assure you that book-manufacture is a most intricate process. Things tend to go wrong at every stage of production. Of worries we printers have no end.

I often feel like an Irish farmer driving his pig to market. In one hand he holds a stick to prod the pig. In the other a string tied to the pig's leg. The pig goes to the right and then to the left and the countryman wonders will he ever get that pig to the market. Many of my books are like that pig. They drive me to despair. And yet I love my printing like a mountaineer loves his mountains, which he climbs arduously with sweat and aching limbs. He has his reward when he reaches the summit and enjoys a fine view, much as I enjoy the appearance of a book which I have made with infinite pains. For both of us there is the joy of achievement—of something attempted, something done.

"Oh, but," you may expostulate, "supposing you were a sewer-man, could you bring love into your work?" I am sure I would. In fact this case in point was quoted recently on the wireless. If [Pg 213]I remember rightly, a speaker had referred with commiseration to the lot of the sewer-man working underground among the rats in the muck and stench of drains. He was called to task by a most insulted sewer-man, who explained that his was a good job—as good as any other. All the artists and the craftsmen who co-operate with me—the paper-makers, the cloth-makers, the tanners, the brass-cutters, the illustrators, the compositors, the pressmen, the binders—aye, and the authors too, who write and rewrite their text until it seems to me just right for the Golden Cockerel—all of them have their worries and their toil, but their work for me is done with love.

This is a question you might ask yourselves: can a beautiful thing be made cynically? The dice is loaded against the unwanted child of a loveless marriage. You cannot divorce your work from your life. The two are parts of a whole. My religion is that love should be the basis of all one's living and all one's work. In so far as my books have been successful as works of art, it is because they have been made with love.

Only with great self-restraint can I refrain from reading you again that beautiful thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians on Faith, Hope and Love—you remember "Love suffereth long and is kind, love envieth not, love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up." Please read it now and then. It is so important.

Perhaps, when you heard my talk was to be called "Printing for Love," you thought, "Oh, he means printing without financial reward." Believe me, love, too, hath its reward. Make what you have to make, and do what you have to do, the way I advocate, and you will have your reward. You must have faith in this. We have got to fight our battles against obstructions, but, if we fight well, and do what we are intended to do, everything is made possible for us: the most miraculous things happen in their due time.

At the Golden Cockerel I never choose a book because I think it a good seller. Publishing friends are astonished when I admit that quite recently I refused books offered to me by Evelyn Waugh—one of the best selling novelists of today—and Sir Osbert Sitwell. Of course I do not disapprove of the authors. I admire them greatly. But in each case the manuscript submitted was not one I wanted for the Cockerel.

[Pg 214]

I choose those books which I believe are right for this gay, mirthful, versatile bird. At times he likes to play, at times to be serious. He is interested in genuine old tales of adventure written by explorers and missionaries, who may have travelled in birch-bark canoes or quaint unwieldy ships. He is interested in old peoples and their poetry. At present he is printing a translation of the epic of Gilgamesh preserved on stone tablets. It is at least six thousand years old and refers to a flood—like Noah's Flood—which was recent history to people then. They were either more or less civilized then than we are now, according to your view of what constitutes civilization. They appear to have had more to eat than we have now; they spent more time in making life beautiful, and in thoughtful enquiry into spiritual things, such as survival after death. They had libraries of books, not printed like Golden Cockerels, but inscribed on series of stone tablets. There were several "copies" of the epic of Gilgamesh in the library at Nineveh.

To return to the Golden Cockerel, he also loves the masterpieces of English and French literature and classical literature. He is really a very human bird, kind and sometimes very amorous, never spiteful, never morbid, never cruel. I personally pretend to run this Press, but you know this chimeric cockerel really rules the roost. When I and two friends took over the Press in 1933, I had quite different ideas for it from those I had accepted a few months later. This Cockerel had his own personality and traditions. I have rather enjoyed following his gaudy plumage along the aerial avenues in which he seems to want to fly.

This has not always been easy for me. From time to time I had partners to help me. Their ideas and mine naturally did not always coincide. They gave in to me so often that just occasionally I had, in common charity, to print and publish some book favoured by one of them and which I did not myself like. Usually on such occasions the finished book was to me abortive—a baby cuckoo among my own fledglings. And they usually did not sell well. Try as you may, you cannot do quite as well for someone else's offspring.

It has always been of paramount importance that my books should sell. As a husband and a father of three children, I have had to make the Cockerel pay. Otherwise I should have had to work at something else. Obviously you cannot make a large[Pg 215] income from the sale of, say, half a dozen books a year in small limited editions. But the Cockerel has never let me down and always made it possible for me to keep on with this work. The late St. John Hornby, who used to publish those monumental Ashendene Press books at prices in the neighbourhood of 100 gns. has said that, taken all over, he would just approximately cover his costs. No profit! He was in a financial position to ignore costs and the necessity to make his books pay. In theory that is good. In practice I think it is wholesome that the products of your labour should be commercially right. The absolute necessity for you to sell what you produce makes you take notice of the reactions of your patrons, keeps you from being too personal, too idiosyncratic, too precious, shall I say too amateurish? Here I am on difficult ground. It depends what you mean by amateurish. I think of myself as a professional, but, to the trade publishers (who would not dream of rejecting a manuscript from Evelyn Waugh), I, and others like me, are looked on as amateurs, because we do what we like.

This type of amateur, who does what he likes, scientifically, is, I believe, very important. Into this category would fall research students, and poets, and scholars, and inventors, and all sorts of people. Has a scientific study ever been made of the amateur throughout the ages and his influence on our life? If not, there is a noble thesis for a research student, and he could make of it a most interesting and I think saleable book. Perhaps one of you will do it!

Now you may be thinking, "here's this chap and they tell me he has a certain reputation as a printer. We get him down here to talk to us about printing, and off he goes gassing about love, and Noah's flood, and how to make money without trying to."

Please forgive me! You see I started as a printer and taught myself how to dress a book according to my tastes. Then I became a publisher. Let us make no mistake: the important thing is the literary content of the book. How it is dressed is only of secondary importance. It can be dressed any old how. Obviously it is better when it is suitably dressed. But the dress, that is, the printing and binding, must not be accorded too great importance—it must not vaunt itself. If you ask a book-seller who has built up a circle of people who collect "cockerels" why they like cockerels, he will answer "because they are cockerels." By this[Pg 216] he does not, I hope, mean "because they wear cockerel dress"—or, shall I say, "plumage"?—but rather that they are, in their literary content, in their dress, and in their illustration, examples of the cockerel idea of what a book should be.

Of course it is no good the author thinking he has done everything—it is the composite whole which is so engaging. I have known some illustrators who think the author doesn't count. And authors tend to think the artist a hack who should do what he is told. Both may think that my own small contribution, as the architect of the whole structure, is unimportant. Quite the greatest joy for me in publishing is being in constant delightful intercourse with these beautiful authors and artists. Beautiful is the right word. I don't mean physically, of course, but in their natures. Compare them if you like, to the most sensitive instruments designed by man and you behold these God-made beings a hundred-fold more sensitive. Go to the races and delight in the controlled nervousness and the pent-up fire of enthusiasm in those beautiful thoroughbred horses, and yet these dreamers of dreams, these passionate romancers, these scholars, in all the controlled exuberance of their knowledge and their zeal for research, these drawers of pictures, who "see the light that never was on sea or land": the horses are as nothing beside them!

Now, who are these authors and scholars and artists? Well, some are, of course, professionals, in the sense that they live by their art, and others, a lot of them, are civil servants, or architects, or even prime ministers, who make their art a hobby. But can we end there? Is not every roadman tidying his road, every thatcher on the roof, or every good accountant neatly writing his accounts, and every worker planting his allotment of a summer's evening, an artist to a greater or less degree? He seems to me, watching him, to be working for love. And so with those of us who make seemly books.

Normally you have the publisher who chooses what books he will publish, and contracts with the author to produce and sell his work in book form. You have also the paper-maker, the ink-maker, the type-founder, the maker of printing machinery and plant. You have the printer, with his compositors who prepare the type for press, his proof-readers, his pressmen who print the corrected type on the paper, and his warehousemen, who deal out the paper, and pack the printed sheets. You have the binders and[Pg 217] manufacturers of material and machinery used in binding. Normally a host of people have taken their part, however small, in processes which go to the making of the finished book.

In a "private press" a very great deal of the work is concentrated in the hands of its owner. In certain cases the owner himself has set the type and printed it on a hand-press. His output has thus been severely limited to the productivity of one single pair of hands. This is not practical politics today—one's turnover is too small to cover overheads. An alternative is to employ skilled help with the type-setting and presswork. This was the method employed by the Golden Cockerel up to 1933. For reasons I need not go into, this method does not now pay.

The survival of the Golden Cockerel, since I and my friends took it over in the midst of the great depression, has been due in large measure to the method of production which we adopted. By working in with the Chiswick Press, a famous old firm of trade printers, we arranged that the Cockerel should have the use of their plant and their skilled labour precisely as and when we wanted it, without the necessity for capital expenditure on plant or of providing the wages of skilled craftsmen, week in week out, whether or not fully employed. Those were terrible times, and our solution was the only one practicable. It was a great experiment, but it worked. Of all the important private presses in this country, the Cockerel alone has carried on—and right through the war. In the books of the Golden Cockerel a great tradition survives.