THE REVIVAL OF PRINTING
The revival of the art of printing began when Messrs Charles
Whittingham revived Caslon’s famous founts at the Chiswick Press
in 1844. The first volume of the revival was the _Diary of Lady
Willoughby_, printed for Messrs Longmans. Before that date, and
for a period covering something like a century and a half, a process
of degeneration had been at work in the craft of bookmaking, which,
towards the close of the eighteenth century, had reached a degree of
positive ugliness as supreme in its own way as the positive beauty
of the books by the great presses of the past. This is all the more
remarkable when it is remembered that the materials with which the
revival was begun existed so far back as the year 1720, when Caslon set
up his type foundry in London and commenced casting those “old-faced”
alphabets which had been drawn from the seventeenth-century Elzevirs
and Plantins.
But although the revival of printing began so far back as 1844 with
the work of the Chiswick Press, the revival of the personal note in
printing did not come about until a half-century later, when, during
the Eighteen Nineties, suddenly, with few obvious preliminaries, we
found ourselves in the midst of the Golden Age of what may be termed
subjective printing. The revival appeared to be extemporaneous, but,
like all such occurrences, it was founded on a succession of real if
imperceptible circumstances, not least of which were the existence
of ugliness and lack of individuality which sooner or later will, in
any age in which it occurs, provoke the finer and more impressionable
minds to protest. The protest in this instance took, in the productions
of the Vale, Kelmscott, Eragny, Essex House, and Doves presses, a
creative and positive form, as natural as the foliation and fruition
of plants. The tastes of such men as William Morris, Emery Walker and
Charles Ricketts were revolted at the vulgar, tawdry and expressionless
books of the time and, being masters of practical imagination, their
protest was creative. They wanted beautiful books, and instead of
grumbling with what existed, they set to work and made what they could
not buy. They were moved again by that vital form of atavism which,
by throwing back to an earlier period, picks up the dropped thread of
tradition, and so continues the process of evolution; their protest
therefore became, in the best sense of the word, a revolution: a
turning round to the period when craftsmanship, imagination and life
were one and indivisible.
In the making of books the first and most essential demand is for
legibility. The printing must be readable. To this end must type be
fashioned and page built. Charles Ricketts, with those two other
masters of the revival of great printing, William Morris and Emery
Walker, realised this need, and in their founts they aimed at clarity
and utility combined with personal expression. The commercial tradition
of the oblong letter, with its false utility, was abandoned, and the
dignity of the square and round types of Jenson restored, possible loss
of space by such a proceeding being obviated by greater care in the
building of the page and in the setting of the lines.
The Arts and Crafts movement had, as we have seen, set people of taste
hunting for the lost threads of good craft tradition, and the _fin
de siècle_ revival of printing as an art-craft was one of the most
successful results of its efforts. The study of well-printed books
of the past led William Morris and Emery Walker towards what may be
called a new ethic of good printing. They set forth their ideas in a
joint essay forming one of the _Arts and Crafts Essays_ of 1893.
“The essential point to remember,” they said, “is that the ornament,
whatever it is, whether picture or pattern-work, should form _part
of the page_, should be a part of the whole scheme of the book.
Simple as this proposition is, it is necessary to be stated, because
the modern practice is to disregard the relation between the printing
and the ornament altogether, so that if the two are helpful to one
another it is a mere matter of accident. The due relation of letters
to pictures and other ornaments was thoroughly understood by the old
printers; so that, even when the woodcuts are very rude indeed, the
proportions of the page still give pleasure by the sense of richness
that the cuts and letters together convey. When, as is most often the
case, there is actual beauty in the cuts, the books so ornamented are
amongst the most delightful works of art that have ever been produced.
Therefore, granted well-designed type, due spacing of the lines and
words, and proper position of the page on the paper, all books might be
at least comely and well-looking; and if to these good qualities were
added really beautiful ornament and pictures, printed books might once
again illustrate to the full position of our Society that a work of
utility might be also a work of art, if we cared to make it so.” This
passage contains the germ idea of the return to fine printing.
Still, although so much research and good work was done by William
Morris and Emery Walker, the desire to produce books of dignity and
beauty inspired more than one group of enthusiasts, and the founders
of the Kelmscott Press were not the first in practical results. _The
Hobby Horse_ (1886–1892), edited by Herbert P. Horne and Selwyn
Image, with its carefully built pages, was an earlier intimation of
coming developments, and Hacon & Ricketts devised a new typographical
beauty by the publication of _The Dial_, in 1889. The revival,
however, began to find itself at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition of
1888, when Emery Walker contributed an essay on printing to the
catalogue. In the years 1889 and 1890 Morris made a definitely
practical move by superintending the printing of three books, _The
House of the Wolfings_, _The Roots of the Mountains_ and the
_Gunnlang Saga_, at the Chiswick Press. All this time he had been
brooding upon the idea of a Press of his own, and he made his first
experiments towards the foundation of the Kelmscott Press in 1889
and 1890. “What I wanted,” he wrote in the _Note_ on his aims in
founding the Kelmscott Press, “was letter pure in form; severe, without
needless excrescences; solid, without the thickening and thinning of
the line which is the essential fault of the ordinary modern type, and
which makes it difficult to read; and not compressed laterally, as
all later type has grown to be owing to commercial exigencies. There
was only one source from which to take examples of this perfected
Roman type--to wit, the works of the great Venetian printers of the
fifteenth century, of whom Nicholas Jenson produced the completest and
most Roman characters from 1470 to 1476. This type I studied with much
care, getting it photographed to a big scale, and drawing it over many
times before I began designing my own letters; so that though I think
I mastered the essence of it, I did not copy it servilely; in fact, my
Roman type, especially in the lower case, tends rather to the Gothic
than does Jenson’s.” The desire thus embodied in words became a living
fact. During 1890 Morris was experimenting with his types, and on the
31st January in the following year the first trial sheet was printed
on the Kelmscott Press, which had been set up in a cottage close to
Kelmscott House on the Upper Mall, Hammersmith.
[Illustration: PAGE DECORATION FROM THE KELMSCOTT
COLERIDGE
_By William Morris_]
The first book printed was Morris’s own romance, _The Story of the
Glittering Plain_; it was finished on 4th April, and in the same year
_Poems by the Way_ was set up and printed. For the next five years, and
to the end of the great craftsman’s life, books were printed at the
rate of about ten each year, and in all fifty-three works were issued
during the life of the Press (1891–1897), which together stand unique
among books both for honesty of purpose and beauty of accomplishment.
The books published naturally reflect Morris’s own literary taste.
The act of printing was with him an act of reverence, and all of the
volumes issued were printed in the spirit of love of fine literature
and his own work. Three founts of type were created by Morris. The
first, called the “Golden,” was a Roman type inspired by Jenson but
having a Gothic appearance, which makes it unlike any other type in
existence. This fount has extremely beautiful letters, solid and clear,
making a page of vivid blackness combined with absolute legibility.
The next, called the “Troy,” was a large Gothic type, beautiful in
its way, and quite legible, but archaic in effect and unsuitable for
general printing. The last type to be cast was the “Chaucer”; this was
simply the “Troy” type reduced for the purpose of printing the noble
folio edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. With these three founts
books of several sizes were produced with equally good results. There
were delightful 16mo’s, such as _The Tale of the Emperor Coustans_,
_The Friendship of Amis and Amile_ and Morris’s own lecture on _Gothic
Architecture_, which was printed by the Kelmscott Press at the Arts
and Crafts Exhibition of 1893. The octavos covered a wide field, and
included some of the masterpieces of the Press, notably the _Poems_
of Coleridge, Tennyson’s _Maud_, _Hand and Soul_, by Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, and _The Nature of Gothic_, by Ruskin. The quartos contain
several of Morris’s own works, notable examples being _News from
Nowhere_ and _The Wood Beyond the World_, and Caxton’s _Historyes of
Troye_, _The Golden Legend_ and George Cavendish’s _Life of Cardinal
Wolsey_. Nine books were issued in folio--namely, _The History of
Reynard the Fox_ (1892), _The History of Godfrey of Bologne_ (1893),
_Sidonia the Sorceress_, by William Meinhold, translated by Lady
Wilde (1893), _The Story of the Glittering Plain_,[8] by William
Morris (1894); _Atalanta in Calydon_, by Swinburne (1894), _The Tale
of Beowulf_ (1895), _The Life and Death of Jason_, by William Morris
(1895), and _The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer_ (1896).
Many of the volumes have woodcuts, chiefly from drawings by
Burne-Jones, and Morris designed all the elaborate initial letters,
borders, title-pages and other decorations. It would not be easy in the
ordinary way to single out any book for special notice among so many
masterpieces of printing, each possessing characteristics of its own
worthy of individual praise, but one book, and as it happens the one
that Morris printed with his fullest reverence, does actually stand
out from among the rest with distinction. That book is the noble folio
containing the works of Chaucer enshrined in type cast for the purpose,
with Morris’s own superb and appropriate decorations, and eighty-six
illustrations by Burne-Jones. Never was author paid so handsome a
tribute as by this book, and when it is in its complete form, with
Cobden-Sanderson’s binding, one is surely in the presence of the most
beautiful and the best designed book the world has ever seen.
William Morris was essentially a decorator; he would have had every
one of the fine products of his amazing vitality burst into flower and
leaf, into wondrous device and every beauty of form. Yet in everything
he did the fine simplicity of his nature was a saving grace. But with
the books designed by Charles Ricketts we find the expression of an
entirely different temperament, or a temperament which was assertively
personal and essentially individual, as against the democratic and
communal sense of Morris. This individuality is seen in most of the
books of the Vale Press, and in those beautiful volumes, _The Dial_ and
Oscar Wilde’s _The Sphinx_ and _The House of Pomegranates_, which were
the immediate forerunners and first causes of that Press.
Both William Morris and Charles Ricketts, however, were inspired in
their first founts by the classical types of Jenson, in whom the Roman
letter had its consummation, although the deep-rooted Gothic spirit
of Morris was naturally not to be tied to that particular form. The
significance of this adoption of the Roman type lies in the fact
that although the first movable types were a standardisation of the
written missal of the Middle Ages, and essentially Gothic in character,
lettering itself was of Greek and Roman origin. Indeed, where the
Teutonic designers departed most from the Roman standard, as they
did in their capital letters, they were not nearly so successful as
when they adhered more strictly to the earlier forms, as they did in
their superior “lower cases.” Morris, in spite of his intense love of
Gothic, fully realised this, and although the Kelmscott books in the
mass reveal beauties suggesting Caxton and Wenkyn de Worde, it will be
found on a more intimate acquaintance with them that the Renaissance
has contributed in no small way to their final charm.
Just as William Morris, in Charles Ricketts’s words, derived
inspiration from the “sunny pages of the Renaissance,” and finally made
books equal to, and in some cases better than, the best books of the
Gothic printers, so Ricketts took inspiration from the same source,
and although the volumes of the Vale Press never quite resemble the
Gothic books, he has admitted the value even to him of the products of
the Kelmscott Press. Speaking of the books made under his supervision
before the establishment of the Vale Press, he wrote, in his _Defence
of the Revival of Printing_: “I regret that I had not then seen _The
House of the Wolfings_ or _The Roots of the Mountains_, printed for Mr
Morris as early as 1888[9]; these might have initiated me at the time
to a better and more severe style, and I am now puzzled that my first
impression of _The Glittering Plain_, 1891 (the first Kelmscott book),
was one of disappointment.”
The earliest of the Ricketts books were inspired but not printed by
the founder of the Vale Press. They were and are a standing example of
what can be done through the ordinary commercial medium when taste is
in command. The illustrations, cover designs, end-papers, and general
format of these books were the work of Ricketts; and the type was the
best that could be found in some of the more responsible printing
houses. The first example of this work is to be found in _The Dial_--a
sumptuously printed quarto magazine first published at the Vale,
Chelsea, in 1889; No. 2 appeared in February 1892; No. 3 in October
1893; and No. 4, which bore the imprint, “Hacon & Ricketts,” in 1896;
the fifth and last number appearing in 1897. _The Dial_ was issued
under the joint editorship of Charles Ricketts and Charles H. Shannon.
The first number contained an etching by Ricketts and a lithograph
in colours and gold, and twelve other designs by him. The cover was
designed by Shannon, but was discarded in subsequent issues, its place
being taken by a superior design, cut as well as drawn by Ricketts.
In the second number the latter also makes his first appearance as an
engraver on wood, one of the main features of the volume being his
series of initial letters, ornaments, head-pieces, and _culs-de-lampe_.
In No. 4 of _The Dial_ appeared two specimen pages of the Vale Press,
then being formed.
Before the Press was established, however, other important books had
been issued under his supervision. One of the earliest of these,
_Silverpoints_, by John Gray, was published by Elkin Mathews and John
Lane in 1893. A few of the initials of this uncommon but elegant
volume are decorated, but the majority are simple Roman capitals, the
text of the volume being in italics. Earlier even than this the two
artists had collaborated in the production of Oscar Wilde’s _House of
Pomegranates_, published by Messrs Osgood, M’Ilvaine & Co. in 1891.
The result was less a success than a curious attempt at decorated
bookmaking; the most successful parts being the vignettes by Ricketts.
Among other books of this period are the _Poems_ of Lord de Tabley
and _In the Key of Blue_, by John Addington Symonds, the former with
illustrations and cover, the latter with cover only, by Ricketts.
All these books were more or less tentative. The road towards
perfection was being made; something very like perfection was reached,
however, in the _Daphnis and Chloe_ (1893), the _Hero and Leander_
(1894) and _The Sphinx_ (1894)--the two first published by Ricketts &
Shannon at the Vale Press, the last by Mr John Lane. The _Daphnis and
Chloe_ is a quarto volume printed in old-faced pica type and profusely
and beautifully illustrated with designs and initial letters from
woodcuts. It is said to be “the first book published in modern times
with woodcuts by the artist in a page arranged by himself.” _Hero and
Leander_ (Marlowe & Chapman’s version) is an octavo; it is conceived in
a more restrained key, and the result is altogether more satisfying,
in spite of a formal hardness in the setting of the decorations. Theme
may have something to do with this, just as it has in _Daphnis and
Chloe_, where the lightness of the subject carries triumphantly the
luxuriance of the decorations. _The Sphinx_, by Oscar Wilde, is the
most remarkable of the books of this period. It is a small quarto in
ivory-like vellum, with a rich design in gold, printed and decorated
throughout in red, green and black. The exotic mind of Wilde is
revealed in the decorations of this volume more than in any other: the
strange vision of things, the imagination that moulds passionate ideas
into figures which are almost ascetic, and into arabesques which are in
themselves glimpses and revelations of the intricate mystery of life.
[Illustration: PAGE DECORATIONS FROM JOHN GRAY’S
_SPIRITUAL POEMS (VALE PRESS)_
_By Charles Ricketts_]
The first book printed in the Vale type was _The Early Poems of John
Milton_, a quarto decorated with initials and frontispiece, cut by
the artist on wood. Speaking of the frontispiece of this volume, H.
C. Marillier says: “It is interesting to compare this with one of the
Kelmscott frontispieces, in order to realise how completely individual
is each case, and how different is the design of the borders. There is
nothing in all the flowing tracery of William Morris which remotely
resembles the intricate knot-work and geometrical orderliness of the
Milton borders.” This is true, and a further glance at the Vale Press
books reveals also that the inventiveness of Charles Ricketts is much
greater than that of William Morris, though it is not so free and,
paradoxically, not so formal. But, unlike those of Morris, the Vale
designs do not convey a sense of inevitability, a feeling that the
design is the unconscious blossoming of the page.
The Kelmscott books not only look as if letter and decoration had grown
one out of the other; they look as if they could go on growing. The
Vale Press books, on the other hand, have all the supersensitiveness
of things which have been deliberately made according to a fastidious
though eclectic taste and a strict formula. It is the difference
between naturalness and refinement. Yet at the same time, although
Ricketts does not suggest organic growth in his decorated books, he
suggests growth by segregation--by a rearrangement of parts which
seem to have come together mathematically, or which are built up in
counterpoint like a theme in music. Particularly do we get this effect
from the decorations of the Vale Shakespeare and from many of the minor
decorated leaves throughout all the volumes. In the use of leaf figures
as a kind of super-punctuation, an intellectual process seems to have
taken the place of the subtle and indefinable taste which dominates
matters of art. The leaves seem to have been _thought_ into their
places, and the result is not always happy.
The books of the Vale Press have other qualities which distinguish them
from those of other similar presses. The Kelmscott Press, in the matter
of bindings, for instance, confined itself to vellum and plain grey
boards. The Doves Press, established in the next decade, adhered to a
fine and peculiar kind of vellum. The Vale Press books made a departure
in several instances by appearing in daintily decorated paper boards
of various colours, the designs having a pleasant chintz-like effect,
more often to be met with in the end-papers of some modern books, but
an obvious development of the Italian decorated paper cover. Again
colours, red and sometimes blue and green, play a large part in the
pages of the Vale Press books, blending with the black in many cases
most satisfactorily.
Some fifty books in all were produced, and these covered a wide
literary field, including such works as Landor’s _Epicurus_, _Leontion_
and _Ternissa_; _Spiritual Poems_, by John Gray; _Fair Rosamund_, by
Michael Field; the poems of Sir John Suckling; Shakespeare’s _Songs
and Sonnets_; _Nymphidia_, by Michael Drayton; Campion’s songs;
_Empedocles_, by Matthew Arnold; two volumes of Blake, and two of
Keats; Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnets; _Dramatic Romances_, by Robert
Browning; the _Lyrical Poems_ of Shelley; _The Ancient Mariner_, by
S. T. Coleridge; _Sonnets from the Portuguese_, by Elizabeth Barrett
Browning; _Hand and Soul_ and _The Blessed Damozel_, by Dante Gabriel
Rossetti. Besides these, certain volumes illustrated by Lucien Pissarro
were issued under the imprimatur of the Vale although printed on the
artist’s own private press, afterwards to be known as the Eragny Press.
The Vale Press books were not presumably the kind of books destined
for an immediate and wide popularity. Yet each issue was speedily
taken up by the limited public there is for fine examples of art-work,
and the fact that almost immediately, and sometimes before the date
of publication, the volumes were being quoted in the book markets at
a premium would indicate that the books were not above the taste of
everybody. Be this as it may, the demand for such books compared with
that of the ordinary commercial volume was, and is at any time, a small
one. At the same time, the effect of the Vale Press publications upon
the general taste in books has been more pronounced than that of any
of the other great presses of the Eighteen Nineties. This is probably
due to the fact that Charles Ricketts not only at first worked through
the ordinary publisher, but that he had his work done by a good trade
firm of printers, Messrs Ballantyne & Hanson, and did not own, as
William Morris did, his own presses. In the same way Morris himself had
a marked effect upon ordinary straightforward printing, by insisting
upon an intelligent use of Caslon’s old-faced type when supervising the
printing of his own prose works. He knew it was not safe to leave so
important a matter to the haphazard of commerce. The supreme result of
this concern is to be seen, of course, in the splendid first edition of
_The Roots of the Mountains_, issued by Messrs Reeves & Turner and
printed at the Chiswick Press. The influence of Charles Ricketts’ books
is to be seen in many of the early publications of Mr John Lane and
Messrs Dent & Co.; and the latter firm attempted deliberately to follow
the Kelmscott tradition with Aubrey Beardsley’s edition of the _Morte
d’Arthur_.
After the death of William Morris and the conclusion of the work of
the Kelmscott Press, those who acted as Morris’s assistants in the
actual work of printing joined C. R. Ashbee of the Guild of Handicraft,
who established the Essex House Press, using a fount of type designed
by himself. Several well-printed volumes were the result of this
enterprise, including the _Treatises of Benvenuto Cellini on Metal
Work and Sculpture_, Bunyan’s _Pilgrim’s Progress_, Shakespeare’s
_Poems_, Shelley’s _Adonais_, and _King Edward VII.’s Prayer Book_, a
noble folio printed in red and black. Some interesting books were also
printed by H. G. Webb at the Caradoc Press; and a simple dignity and
altogether pleasant result has been achieved by Miss Elizabeth C. Yeats
in the books printed on the Dun Emer, later called the Cuala Press, at
Dundrum near Dublin.
But the most notable outcome of the revival of printing since the
closing of the Kelmscott and Vale presses is the Doves Press,
established in 1900 by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson at Hammersmith. A
beautiful Roman type was designed by Emery Walker, whose genius for
fine craftsmanship in everything associated with the printing arts
made for the further success of this venture which has to its credit a
series of books of unsurpassable beauty. The Doves Press, although in
the direct line of descent from Morris, was to some extent a reaction
against decorated page, and by adhering strictly to the formal beauty
of well-designed type and a well-built page it proved that all the
requirements of good taste, good craftsmanship and utility could
be achieved. There is nothing, for instance, quite so effective as
the first page of the Doves Bible, with its great red initial “I”
dominating the left-hand margin of the opening chapter of Genesis
like a symbol of the eternal wisdom and simplicity of the wonderful
Book. Neither foliation nor arabesque could better have introduced the
first verse of the story of the Creation than this flaming, sword-like
initial. This edition of the Bible in itself represents the last
refuge of the complex in the simple, and stands beside the Kelmscott
_Chaucer_ without loss by comparison in beauty or workmanship.
The Doves Press came nearer than the other private presses towards the
realisation of its founder’s axiom of the whole duty of typography,
which, he said, was “to communicate to the imagination, without loss
by the way, the thought or image intended to be communicated by the
author.”
[Illustration: FRONTISPIECE AND TITLE-PAGE OF _THE
HOUSE OF JOY_
_By Laurence Housman_]