Bible, which has been more often reprinted than any other book, and
which exists to this day as the great standard of the English language.
The taste for books of travel which arose in the last century was
largely increased by the voyages and discoveries of the English in North
America and the subsequent Puritan exodus there. These early accounts of
Virginia and New England, many of which are tracts of a few leaves only,
now command fabulous prices. The great collection of voyages under the
name of "Purchas: his Pilgrimes," was printed in five folio volumes,
1625-6, while De Bry, Hulsius, and Linschoten were enriching the world
with their collections of travels, printed in Germany and Holland. All
of these works were adorned with finely engraved plates, those to
"Purchas" being engraved by Elstrack, and, besides, it had a famous map
of the world, engraved by Hondius.
The controversial spirit engendered by the religious quarrels of the
century and by the great civil war gave incessant work to the printers;
and the many tracts and pamphlets thus produced were frequently
illustrated by rude and coarse woodcuts, of no value from an artistic
point of view, but curious from the indications they afford of the
costumes and manners of the time.
The first edition of Walton's "Angler" was printed by R. Marriott in
1653, 16mo, with plates in the text, engraved on steel by Lombart.
Butler's "Hudibras" appeared in 1663-78, and Milton's "Paradise Lost" in
1667, quarto. Fuller's "Worthies of England" was printed 1662, folio. We
have roughly mentioned the principal English books of the century, and
next approach the revival of literature and art in the eighteenth
century.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER V.
THE BOOK IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
The regency--Publishers at the beginning of the eighteenth
century--Illustrators in France; Gillot--The school of Watteau and
Boucher--Cars--The younger Cochin; his principal works in
vignettes--French art in England; Gravelot--Eisen--Choffard--The
_Baisers_ of Dorat; the _Contes_ of La Fontaine--the publisher
Cazin and the special literature of the eighteenth century--The
younger Moreau and his illustrations--The Revolution--The school of
David--Duplessis-Bertaux--The Book in Germany; Chodowiecki--In
England; Boydell and French artists--Caslon and
Baskerville--English books with illustrations--Wood engraving in
the eighteenth century; the Papillons--Printing offices in the
eighteenth century.
[Illustration: Fig. 79.--Letter by Cochin for the _Mémoires d'
Artillerie_ of Suvirey de St. Remy.]
Like experience has shown us in our time, but in another manner, the
beginning of the eighteenth century produced, in the manners and tastes
of the French, an unconscious but tenacious reaction. It seemed as if
the conceptions of romanticism had lasted long enough, and that the
cycle of Middle Age chevaliers had passed away, and that a return to
what is called nature was effected in literature and art. At the death
of Louis XIV., Olympus and its gods, majestic poses and suns, had become
wearisome. By a little half-open door, gaiety escaped from its prison
and fled. For the Book that door was the hand of Sébastien Leclerc.
The ancient school was replaced. Constrained during three quarters of a
century, French manners began to be joyous under the regency of the Duc
d'Orleans. If the representatives of another age still lived, if Rigaud
always painted his portraits in peruke, there were new-comers, enlivened
by the new fashions, less solemn and more bewitching. Le Brun was then
far in the past, and as amusing to the ladies of the regency as are now
to us the fashions of the Second Empire.
The Book, after its manner, followed the movement, and gradually found
the elements of its decoration in the tendencies of the day. Small sizes
were multiplied, types showed elegance, and vignettes became more and
more agreeable and intellectual. Amateurs had their _ex-libris_
engraved. The smallest pamphlets were covered with ornamental letters,
vignettes, and tailpieces, already very clever. Costume also, in its
shorter and lighter form, gave to designers a means of agreeably
composing a page of illustration and disseminating fancy in the figures.
These revolutions worked themselves simply from day to day, as taste
became more pronounced and exacting.
The commerce of the Book was still extending from the end of the
preceding century; and if the number of printers was limited and
arrested by certain somewhat hard laws, production in Paris was
enormous. Among regulations that weighed most heavily on publishers
figured the obligation put upon them by the ordinance of 1713 to
deposit eight copies of illustrated books. In 1725 the King issued other
regulations to affirm the rights of the university against the
corporation, forcing the masters to assist in a body at the processions
of the Sorbonne and to offer on the Day of the Purification a candle to
the rector. In spite of this ordinance, more religious than useful to
commerce, the fashion of vignettes increased. The principal shops were
searched, as they are still, for novelties; the Rue St. Jacques and the
Quai des Augustins, where they were grouped, were resorted to. The most
important booksellers in 1727 were Coignard, the Barbous--who essayed
afterwards, with Lengley Dufresnoy, to copy the Elzevirs,--Cavalier,
Robustel, Fournier, Ballard, and D'Houry. Of the two last, D'Houry
printed the calendars, and Ballard had the privilege for music. Another,
Leonord, published the books of the Dauphin. At these and other
publishers', recent works were examined, those who did not buy gave
their advice and took ideas, and so fashion slowly formed itself. It was
thus that Houdart de la Motte published with G. Dupuis in 1719 a
collection of fables, with illustrations of Claude Gillot, which was the
talk at the booksellers'.
In this book all was original: the author, who had had, five years
before, the eccentric idea of translating the Iliad without knowing a
word of Greek; the text, a kind of imitation of La Fontaine, without
salt or savour; the size, quarto, admirably printed by Dupuis, in the
Rue St. Jacques, with plates by Coypel, Massé, and, above all, the
charming vignettes of Gillot, the most pleasing and clever of all his
collaborators, a sort of Callot fallen into the eighteenth century, and
who ought to take the first place by birthright. Gillot has been
called, not without reason, "the last pagan of the Renaissance;" and
this pagan had the honour to give us Watteau.
[Illustration: Fig. 80.--Vignette by Gillot for the _Chien et le Chat_,
fable by Houdart de la Motte, in 1719.]
The Count de Caylus tells the story. Gillot had quitted the pencil for
the etching needle on seeing the work of his pupil. He had no reason to
complain; his pictures were of no value, and his prints gave other
artists the idea of imitating them. The whole French school of the
eighteenth century may have had its origin in this forgotten book,
illustrated by the master of Watteau. In fact, in the manner of the
little etching here given we may easily perceive the coquetry and
affectation that were later the dominant tone of vignettes. For, it may
well be said, the graceful, feminine, and arch manner of which we speak
was, above all, conventional and false. In opposition to the designers
and engravers of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century,
who reproduced naturally scenes of daily life in ideal conceptions, it
came, through the moral education of the artists, that they put forth
the ideal in the most ordinary things of life. Shepherds were no longer
the gross, rustic peasants that we find in primitive Flemish paintings
or in the "Hours" of Simon Vostre; they were coxcombs, pomaded and
adorned with ribbons, playing the bagpipes, and making love to the
shepherdesses of the court.
At first it was Watteau who influenced all the engravers in the pretty
and the smart; Boucher did the rest; and fatally the Book followed, and
followed impetuously, surpassing, if possible, the painted works. If the
severe poses, the grave touch, of the preceding century are no longer
found, they often go a little far in the contrary sense. It may be well
said here that the arts are ordinarily the result of the manners of an
epoch. The system of Law was not without influence on the entire
eighteenth century, by the terrible manner in which he upset fortunes,
awoke appetites, gave rein to aspirations hitherto held in check. Claude
Gillot, the designer, was one of the first victims of the Scotch banker;
he lost his fortune on the Exchange; but who may say what his artistic
ambition dreamed of in the midst of all these disorders? One thing is
certain: that Watteau, his pupil, broke off very short with the style of
the seventeenth century.
Laurent Cars was the engraver who multiplied the compositions of
Boucher, and made them the fashion. He engraved also, after the painter
of shepherds and nymphs, illustrations to Molière, the most agreeable
that there are for style and spirit. In engraving certain works of
Lemoyne, Cars did not completely desert the ancient school. He appears
at the beginning of the eighteenth century as if divided between two
manners each equally possible to him.
The work of these engravers was almost exclusively in etching, biting
with acid a copper plate covered with varnish, on which the drawing was
made by means of a point. This process, always previously used for
sketches, served also for finishing vignettes, which up to then had been
finished by the burin. The suppleness of the work was greater, and the
artist remained more himself than he could be with the stiff cutting
instrument of the seventeenth century.
The sizes of books had not yet all come to octavo or duodecimo. The
works of Molière published by Prault in 1734 in six volumes quarto,
under the direction of Marc Antoine Joly, give the idea of an important
work, not at all of theatrical pieces. To tell the truth, these somewhat
exaggerated dimensions allow artists more room for illustration; later,
when smaller forms predominated, text and engravings were so compressed
that they were not always clear and readable to every eye; but the
quarto was not graceful, it was not in harmony with the finikin, the
pastoral pieces, then presented, and it had to disappear as a current
size in illustrated publications.
The class of artisans employed on the Book is not identical in the
eighteenth century with that of printers and publishers. In the
beginning, as we have seen, the cutters of wood blocks and the printers
were often the same people, preparing their characters or their blocks,
and afterwards putting them under the press. Large printing offices had
very quickly changed that. Each particular work had its special workman.
Typography had its type-founders, compositors, forwarders, inkers, and
pressmen. In the eighteenth century this was complicated by designers,
engravers, plate-printers, and these different professions occupied
themselves on the Book in manipulating the sheets in their turn. In the
midst of this crowd, the designers and engravers, esteemed as was their
collaboration, were not the most honoured. Their homes often reflected
the effect of their life as clever artists, quick to spend the money
earned during the week; and we shall have occasion to name some of the
more miserable among them.
The booksellers, on the contrary, had become great personages. In the
preceding chapter we have seen Cramoisy and Vitré, to name only them,
acquire the greatest honours, the latter painted by Philip de Champagne,
with many others lords of the court. In the eighteenth century there
were Brunet, Ballard, Mariette, Chardon, Didot, and a host of others,
during the time of Watteau, Boucher, and Cars, of which we shall shortly
speak; and these several publishers had houses of their own, and
furnished shops and printing offices with the best apparatus. Saved from
falling into negligences by royal regulations on printing, they composed
with admirable characters, on paper of the first order, imperishable
works; and, usual consequence of their high situation, they paid the
artists badly charged with their work. It would be long and tedious to
enter into this matter in detail. They made progress by slow degrees,
and in good time they marvellously united copper plate engraving to
printed text, so marvellously, that in comparing their works to the wood
blocks of the sixteenth century, it may be asked which of the two styles
is superior in elegance and good taste.
[Illustration: Fig. 81.--Vignette for _Daphnis et Chloe_ by Cochin, for
Coustelier's edition.]
One of the ancestors of this group of vignettists was the younger
Cochin, who had engraved the plate of the monks in the fables of
Houdart, illustrated by Gillot. Cochin, in spite of his passion for
allegory and his very marked taste for affectation, gave, it may be
said, with the designer-engraver St. Aubin, an enormous impulse to the
art of adorning books. From the beginning of his career he worked for
the publishers, composing frontispieces, ornamented letters, and
tailpieces, or transferring to copper the drawings of others. Singular
type of artist, besides, educated, well brought up, epicurean and
spendthrift, friend of great lords, and protected by Madame de
Pompadour. When he travelled in Italy with her young brother Abel
Poisson, Cochin did everything, was ready at the least request,
inventing curious menus, giving representations of fêtes, and yet
finding the time to decorate books and design vignettes profusely.
He worked chiefly for Jombert, a sort of learned bookseller, King's
printer for the artillery, who dates from July, 1736. Jombert was
visited by painters. He gave little private soirées, which Cochin
attended, and where he daily made numerous friends. It was in this
house, of so special a character, and, it may be said, so little
artistic at first sight, that Cochin invented his best frontispieces,
among them that of the _Calcul Différentiel_, that of the _Astronomie
Physique_, and the plates of the _Méthode de Dessin_, after Boucher. He
was one of the first to produce engraved titles, with which the
publisher Prault ornamented his dainty volumes, and which were imitated,
up to the end of the eighteenth century, by all the illustrators who
followed. In that to the works of Madame Deshoulières the letter itself
is engraved. Since then the open letter has been copied in typography.
These vignettes were used many times by publishers, sometimes simply
effacing the inscription, sometimes reproducing the original design by
a different artist. The boy with the swan had decorated in 1744 a
"Jerusalem Delivered" in Italian, by the same publisher, Prault; it was
then engraved by Aveline. Fessard engraved the second plate, which is
here reproduced.
[Illustration: Fig. 82.--Title-page engraved by Fessard after Cochin for
the works of Madame Deshoulières, 1747.]
Nearly all the frontispieces of the Book with vignettes of the
eighteenth century preserve this arrangement: an ornamented and draped
border, with garlands of roses, symbols, and cupids, in the middle the
title, in red and black, composed in open letter, often a scroll with
the address of the publisher, but rarely a mark. It was the time of
little winged cupids, goddesses, and gods. The goddesses were the
favourites of the kings, Madame de Pompadour or the princesses, but
rarely the virtuous Marie Leczinska, too homely and too much ignored to
tempt the artists; the kings or the princes were the gods.
After Jombert, Prault, and Coustellier, Cochin worked for François
Didot, syndic of the printers, for whom he prepared a set of
illustrations to Molière. Unfortunately Didot died in 1757, and the
project fell with him. Of the work of Cochin there only remains the set
of _Tartufe_ etchings in octavo.
In the vortex into which he was plunged, he successively illustrated the
works of Rousseau, published at Brussels, quarto; those of Boileau,
published by David and Durand, octavo; and Henault's "History of
France," in the same size, with numerous vignettes. One of these should
be noted in a book treating of printing; it is that in which Cochin
pretends to show to his contemporaries the interior of a workshop in
1470. Without doubt the sketch of this print was taken in one of the
houses frequented by him--at Jombert's, Didot's, or David and
Durand's--for that room in which compositors are working and printed
sheets drying was not an invention of Cochin, and served to reproduce a
printing office of the eighteenth century.
[Illustration: Fig. 83.--Vignette taken from P. Corneille's _Théâtre_,
by Gravelot.]
With Cochin soon worked a number of designers and aqua-fortists, too
prudent to lose the opportunity. The fashion arrived for books
beribboned, festooned, and flowered. Hubert François Gravelot had
carried to London this style of new works, which he knew how to
decorate, in his manner, better than any one, with letters, figures, and
tailpieces. He did not engrave much himself, leaving this work to lesser
artists, and contenting himself with subtle invention and graceful
subjects. With Eisen, Cochin, and Moreau, he is the French artist in the
sense of the time, free, bold, and ingenious, but perhaps a little out
of place in England. He published his plates to the "Decameron" in 1757,
one of the most curious of his sets of plates, and a hundred various
vignettes. On his return to France he designed the _Théâtre_ of P.
Corneille, from which the _Galerie de Palais_ is here reproduced, on
account of the illustration of bookselling which it gives. In 1764 the
large _salon_ of the Palace was still, as in the time of Abraham Bosse,
a place where shops were fitted up and the new books discussed. Side by
side with the dressmakers and merchants of every category, the
bookseller offers to his customer the recent products of Parisian
presses. Certain works were sold under cover and not shown; there is
here something to pique the curiosity of unoccupied young men who
strolled about and prolonged their stay in the galleries.
[Illustration: Fig. 84.--Border designed by Choffard in 1758.]
Eisen has a simplicity, a good taste, and a special and singularly
perfect economy of artistic effect combined with typography. It appears
hard that the designer had no consultative voice in the choice of
impression and disposition of the Book. The union of the two forces,
the vignette and the composition, is so close that it may be believed
one was made for the other, neither venturing to assert itself. In the
pretty and elaborate inventions of the artists reigned a lackadaisical
affectation that was delightfully becoming; the rock-work, which it
still had, suited admirably the borders of the first page. The _Lettres
d'une Peruvienne_ has a very agreeable title, but little different, on
the whole, from that of Madame Deshoulières, by Cochin. It is the same
with the _Lettres Turques_, published at Amsterdam in 1750, and
generally in all the frontispieces signed by him. As to the other
decorations of the Book, there were also a number of ingenious artists,
confusing cupids and flowers, imposing blazons, delighting in playing
with accumulated difficulties. Under this assuredly involuntary but real
direction, publications attained proportions of luxury and coquetry
until then unknown. The volume of _Baisers_ of Dorat would not have
lived but for Eisen and the delightful fancies with which he adorned it.
At the same time, we find Choffard, another designer and etcher of much
repute, and sought after by the booksellers. Under his pencil the
vignette became a _chef-d'oeuvre_, the tailpiece was a delightful
compound of judicious and sportive ornament, the taste for which grew
more and more. From delicate foliage are suspended roses, shepherds'
pipes, lyres, and zithers. With the zephyrs scrolls or ribbons float,
carried by winged cupids. The initial letters are real pictures, of such
fineness and precision that the difficulties of their reproduction
prevent us from putting them before the reader.
When the _fermiers généraux_, those great amateur financiers of the last
century, conceived the idea of an edition of the _Contes_ of La Fontaine
at their expense, their eyes naturally fell upon the artists best
prepared to illustrate the inimitable fancies of the great poet, Eisen
and Choffard. The first had for his task the composition of the plates,
Choffard the general decoration. Ficquet was added for the portrait of
the _bonhomme_ La Fontaine--Ficquet, whose specialty in this _genre_ was
dazzling in its delicacy and spirit; Diderot wrote a short introduction;
the composition was confided to a printer of the first order, and it was
put on sale by Barbou.
[Illustration: Fig. 85.--Vignette by Eisen for the Quiproquo in the
Contes of La Fontaine, in the edition of the fermiers généraux.]
It is not a book to be recommended from a moral point of view, but the
typographical art, joined to that of designers and engravers, never
obtained a more complete success: the size in octavo, the impression
clear, united with the dimensions of the plates in a harmonious
elegance, well calculated to please the three rich personages and the
joyous amateurs to whom the _Contes_ address themselves. True, Eisen has
dressed the greater part of the characters in the costume of his time,
which is a little hurtful to one's feelings to-day; it may be imagined,
however, that it was La Fontaine who was mistaken, so that these
delicate, risky tales appear to be created for the seigneurs of the time
of Louis XV.
All the special literature sought for then by rich people had not the
value of the _Contes_. There was at Rheims a person, who has to-day
become the _mode_, as he was in the time of Louis XVI., who sold under
cover a quantity of licentious books of the better kind, adorned with
figures by Eisen, Marillier, or Cochin; this was Cazin, an artist in his
way, but whose good name suffered under a scandalous trial. An order of
the Council of State in 1764 enjoined him to cease his trade in the
Place Royale at Rheims, where he sold his particular merchandise. It
appears that the sentence was not without appeal, for we find Cazin at
Paris about 1785. He was one of those who were ruined by the Revolution,
after he had popularised the editions known as _Petits Formats_, printed
by Valade, of Paris.
[Illustration: Fig. 86.--Card of the publisher Prault, uncle by marriage
of Moreau le Jeune.]
We have come to the most beautiful illustrated books of the eighteenth
century, and to the illustrious artists of whom we shall speak in good
time should be added the younger Moreau and St. Aubin, the former nephew
by marriage of the publisher Prault, and therefrom a decorator of the
Book, the other thrown by Gravelot into full work, and rapidly becoming
the most subtle and adroit of the etchers of the time. Moreau did not
wait long after his marriage before setting to work. He began with
ornaments destined for the _Histoire de France_ of President Henault;
then he composed, in his own personal manner, titles and tailpieces for
his uncle. In the Book he is the propagator of garlands of roses, which
he grouped with an ideal grace; he twined them in the borders of his
frontispieces, and put them judiciously in his tailpieces. He excelled
in inventing subjects referring to the text which were not commonplace
ornaments suitable for anything. The tailpiece on p. 202, taken from the
works of Molière, brings forcibly to mind the _Médecin malgre Lui_, with
its wood-cutter unmercifully beaten with sticks and muffled in a
scientific robe. It is the same with other illustrations, that cannot
be displaced from the position assigned to them by the artist without
disappointment.
[Illustration: Fig. 87.--Tailpiece from the _Médecin malgre Lui_, by
Moreau le Jeune.]
The year 1773, which saw the publication by De Bret of the works of
Molière, may perhaps be considered as that in which the French Book of
the eighteenth century reached its culminating point. M. de Laborde,
first valet de chambre of the King and governor of the Louvre, published
with De Lormel, printer to the Academy of Music, his celebrated
collection of _Chansons_, dedicated to the young Dauphiness Marie
Antoinette, and partly illustrated by the younger Moreau. The work is
exquisite, of powerful yet simple grace. The sentimental note of the
century was struck in it, the insipid love of shepherdesses there
tenderly sighed, and the designer has delightfully rendered this arch
side of the pastoral song.
Our task does not permit us to linger over the works of this prodigious
and charming artist, but we must mention his inimitable plates to J. J.
Rousseau, the finest and most agreeable of his compositions and
vignettes, also his _chef-d'oeuvre_, the _Histoire du Costume_.
[Illustration: Fig. 88.--Vignette of the "Pardon Obtenu," designed by
Moreau le Jeune, for Laborde's _Chansons_, in 1773.]
As evidencing the activity of French artists of the Book in the
eighteenth century, we cite the number of works illustrated by the
respective artists enumerated in the last edition of M. H. Cohen's
valuable _Guide de l'Amateur de Livres à Gravures du XVIII^e
Siècle_:--
Aliamet, 34.
Audran, 16.
Aveline, 33.
Baquoy, 87.
Basan, 9.
Binet, 48.
Borel, 29.
Boucher, 47.
Bovinet, 34.
Cars, 13.
Chedel, 21.
Chenu, 18.
Choffard, 50.
Cochin, 143.
Coypel, 24.
Dambrun, 77.
Delaunay, N., 95.
Delignon, 50.
Delvaux, 66.
Duclos, 49.
Duflos, 56.
Dunker, 15.
Duplessis-Bertaux, 22.
Eisen, 135.
Elluin, 14.
Fessard, E., 69.
Ficquet, 14.
Flipart, 24.
Fokke, 14.
Folkema, 17.
Fragonard, 10.
Freudeberg, 7.
Gaucher, 55.
Ghendt, 78.
Godefroy, 29.
Gravelot, 86.
Grignion, 13.
Gutenberg, 20.
Halbou, 58.
Helman, 22.
Ingouf, 18.
Langlois, 18.
Le Barbier, 54.
Le Bas, 39.
Lebran, 21.
Leclerc, 11.
Legrand, 45.
Lemire, 77.
Lempereur, 68.
Leveau, 31.
Longueil, 97.
Marillier, 116.
Martinet, 27.
Masquelier, 42.
Massard, 40.
Monnet, 67.
Monsiau, 22.
Moreau, 138.
Née, 48.
Pasquier, 18.
Patas, 65.
Pauquet, 23.
Petit, 23.
Picart, 62.
Ponce, 65.
Prévost, 40.
Prud'hon, 14.
Queverdo, 54.
Rigaud, 18.
Roger, 17.
Romanet, 26.
Rousseau, 24.
St. Aubin, 70.
Scotin, 27.
Sève, 29.
Simonet, 83.
Tardieu, 64.
Tilliard, 15.
Trière, 39.
Doubtless some of these ascriptions are for frontispieces only, but as a
list of the principal book illustrators of the time, and as showing the
measure of their popularity, this table is of much interest.
With the Revolution the decline of the Book arrives, as that of all the
arts. Moreau, friend of David, had become affected by the new ideas and
the burlesque renaissance of Greek and Roman art. He made his apology on
the altar of the gods, and engraved portraits on wood to punish himself
for having painted the elegancies of fallen tyrants. At this game,
nerve, as well as suppleness, was lost; and if he had had only the
artistic knack of the Revolution, his daughter, married to Charles
Vernet, could not have written of him, "That which can be most admired
is, at the same time, the fecundity and flexibility of Moreau's talent,
that marvellous facility of conceiving a picturesque scene and disposing
it in an interesting and truthful manner in the least extended space."
This was true before, but after?
In spite of his passion for the ideas and men of the Revolution, Moreau
found himself at the end of his resources. Renouard, the publisher,
received him as he had received St. Aubin, to whom he advanced sum
after sum to prevent him dying of hunger. Like most of his
contemporaries, Moreau, pressed by want, "took, quitted, and retook the
cuirass and the hair-shirt." He had drawn for everybody: for Louis XVI.,
for the Republic, for Napoleon I.
The worst of it is that after his designs for Ovid, Molière, and
Rousseau, dating from the reign of Louis XVI., he should have done them
again in 1804, 1806, and 1808. The difference was great, even probably
for his publishers, Renouard and Dupréel. It does not appear that the
pontiff of the new school, David, knew of his distress; and Moreau
succumbed in 1814 to a cancerous scirrhus of the right arm, forgotten
and in the greatest misery.
We have passed a little quickly to the end of the century because it is
of no importance to name each of the publishers and artists, but only to
sketch briefly their tastes or their manner. We have not dwelt long on
the engravers so called, because of their number; but their dexterity
remains proverbial; they handled etching with extreme suppleness, and
often interpreted the drawings of illustrators in remitting them to the
needle. Many of these, not to say all, made use themselves of the
etching needle, St. Aubin for example, who knew how to give to the work
of others his personal mark and distinction.
[Illustration: Fig. 89.--Title designed by Moreau le Jeune in 1769 for
the publisher Prault.]
The Revolution passed over some among those that it ruined, and, as
stated above, they followed the movement, and lost themselves in the
school of David. It was Duplessis-Bertaux who, after having furnished to
Cazin, the publisher, vignettes for his _Recueil des Meilleurs Contes
en Vers_, 1778, and many other books, after having worked for Didot,
devoted himself to patriotic engraving and to the reproduction of scenes
of the Revolution. When he published his _Tableaux Historiques_, in
three volumes folio, adorned with nearly two hundred large plates, it
was under the Consulate, that is to say far from the time when the work
was begun. Renouvier assures us, with his exclusive disdain for the
eighteenth century, that Duplessis-Bertaux was a mystifier, and that his
scenes of the Revolution were a hoax, "in the kind of spirit in vogue
under the Directory." The truth is that the artist, in place of being a
cheerful Callot, as might be thought from his manner of engraving, so
like that of the Lorraine artist, was imbued with the emphatic and
exaggerated impressions of the first Republic, its _sans-culottes_ in
the poses of the Sabines and its _tricoteuses_ apeing Penelope.
The immense artistic advance made in France in the eighteenth century in
the manufacture and illustration of the Book made itself felt throughout
Europe. In Germany, Chodowiecki, born at Dantzic of a family of
apothecaries, developed his talent from ornamenting the boxes of his
father, and from 1758 to 1794 he designed numerous plates for books and
almanacs, a little heavy in engraving, but singularly clever in
composition. There were a few others also designing, and Kilian,
Folkema, and Ridinger produced some fine engravings, but the Book did
not make so much progress in Germany as in France and England.
In England a vast improvement was manifested. Fine types were cast by
Baskerville and Caslon; printing machines were perfected. The
illustration of books by engraved plates was in the first half of the
century almost entirely done by foreigners, but an English school was
arising, which attained perfection in the latter half of the eighteenth
and first half of the nineteenth century. Wood engraving also, which,
with the exception of blocks for head and tailpieces, had become almost
a lost art, was revived by Bewick, to become later one of the chief
adornments of the Book.
Before 1716 English printers obtained their best founts of type from
Holland, but the establishment of the Caslon foundry rendered them
independent. William Caslon, the first great English type-founder, was
born 1692, and died 1766. The foundry still exists, pre-eminent in the
beauty of its characters. Baskerville established a foundry about 1750,
and printed at Birmingham with his own types a number of extremely
beautiful books. The impetus given to fine printing by these two men
rapidly spread itself, and laid the foundation of the perfection which
English book-making reached.
As mentioned above, Gravelot illustrated many English books in the early
part of the century. He designed a set of plates to Shakespeare in 12mo,
1740, and another in quarto, 1744, besides numerous frontispieces and
other plates in all kinds of books. Among other foreigners who engraved
for English publishers were Grignion, Kip, Van der Gucht, Houbraken, and
Bartolozzi. Bartolozzi, who was very prolific in the production of
engraved plates, may perhaps be called the founder of that great English
school of engraving which arose with the establishment of the Royal
Academy in 1769 and the encouragement given by Alderman Boydell.
Houbraken and Vertue engraved a set of fine portraits in folio for
Rapin's "History of England," 1736; William Hogarth designed plates for
Butler's "Hudibras," 1744; and among other curiosities of English
engraving before 1750 were Sturt's edition of the Common Prayer,
entirely engraved on copper plates, 1717, and an edition of Horace
entirely engraved by Pine, 1733. That the taste for illustrated books
soon grew to be great is evidenced by the publication of such expensive
works as Boydell's edition of Shakespeare, in nine volumes folio,
commenced in 1791, and adorned with a hundred plates from pictures
specially commissioned by the spirited publisher; Claude's _Liber
Veritatis_, with three hundred engravings by Richard Earlom 1777, Sir
Robert Strange's engravings of fifty historical prints about 1750,
collections of views in Great Britain by Kip, Buck, and Boydell;
Holbein's "Collection of Portraits" 1792, a hundred and fifty plates to
Shakespeare engraved by S. and E. Harding 1793, all of which cost great
sums to produce, and greatly contributed to the elevation of public
taste. Among the artists of the latter half of the century who
contributed to the decoration of the Book are Thomas Stothard, whose
very beautiful designs, extending into the next century, excelled those
of all his contemporaries in their grace and spirit; Robert Smirke, best
known by his plates for Shakespeare, "Don Quixote," and "Gil Blas;"
Burney; and Richard Westall. It may be said generally that the English
books of the eighteenth century were of a more solid character than the
French, although English art, especially in the decoration of the Book,
owes much to French initiation. It is curious to read now the opinion of
a contemporary French engraver on English art. Choffard, in the preface
to Basan's _Dictionnaire_ 1767, wrote, "They" (the English), "having
been supported by some foreign talent, are trying to create talent among
themselves; but they have not seized the flame of genius that vivifies
all art in France."
[Illustration: Fig. 90.--Tailpiece engraved on wood by John Baptist
Papillon (before 1766).]
However, what had become of engraving by cutting in reverse, the figure
in relief, from which printing could be done? It had, we may think,
nearly disappeared in the midst of the continued invasion of the burin
and etching. It only appeared from time to time in head and tailpieces,
remaining purely typographical and lost in other decorations. There were
always wood engravers, not very clever, capable only of working simple
lines without charm. One of them resolved to resuscitate the art, and
made various attempts about the end of the reign of Louis XIV. and
beginning of that of Louis XV. He was named John Papillon, and was born
at St. Quentin in 1661. His experiments did not go beyond a book of
prayers, with thirty-six figures in relief after Sébastien Leclerc. His
son, John Baptist, succeeded him, and continued to engrave without
ceasing subjects of ornament, letters, often tailpieces, of a good style
upon the whole, and taking an excellent place in an elaborate book.
Unfortunately, grace had fled; the processes that the practitioners
exhibited one after the other were lost; and the Papillons
reconstituted, we may say, a vanished art. John Baptist also published
in 1766 a theoretical treatise on wood engraving, abounding in
historical errors, but in which something to learn may be found if taken
with discernment. He says in his preface, "Now that excellent work is
done on copper, wood engraving is neglected, and the use lost of
designing and cutting the shadows of the pencil on the wood block; most
of those who work in it have neither design nor taste, and only follow
their own ideas; it is not astonishing that only very mediocre pieces
come from their hands, to say nothing stronger; the profound ignorance
of nearly all who meddle with it contrives more and more to destroy the
beauties of this art in which many people find neither pleasure nor
grace. To obviate all this, if it be possible to me, I have undertaken
to give my precepts and observations to those who wish to apply
themselves to my engraving."
It was probably the essays of Papillon that provoked curious experiments
on the part of other wood engravers. Duplat, at the beginning of this
century, proposed to prepare a relief on stone, and as this would be
broken under pressure, he invented a mould; that is to say, he took a
leaden matrix from the stone cutting, and ran a resistant metal into
this mould, thus obtaining a relief similar to the stone. Renouard, the
publisher, made the trials; and the younger Moreau made the designs.
Moreau become an essayer of processes in 1811! One of the plates of La
Fontaine's _Fables_, published by Renouard in 1812, in two volumes,
12mo, is here reproduced.
[Illustration: Fig. 91.--Experiment in engraving in relief by Moreau le
Jeune for Renouard's edition of La Fontaine's _Fables_.]
It appears, however, that the publisher was thwarted by bad printing.
The printers of Didot or Mame, much as they consecrated all their care
to it, did not yet know perfect workmanship; they put the most intense
blacks into fine sheets. The great publishers trusted that better days
would leave to more clever men the task of perfecting the invention.
[Illustration: Fig. 92.--Portrait of Thomas Bewick.]
Wood engraving owes its revival and almost perfection in England to
Thomas Bewick, who published his first work in 1770, his "General
History of Quadrupeds" 1790, and his "Birds" 1797. In these works he not
only depicted his subjects with the most scrupulous fidelity, but in the
tailpieces of the several chapters he drew the most quaint, humorous,
and faithful representations of country life. He, with his brother, John
Bewick, and their pupils, among whom was Luke Clennell, had an influence
upon English art and the decoration of the Book in England which exists
to our day. Not alone with us, for he may be said to have repaid the
debt which we owed to France for her illustrated books of the eighteenth
century by stimulating the art of wood engraving, which was practised by
Tony Johannot and the other illustrators of the nineteenth century.
To return to the eighteenth century, with which this chapter is
specially occupied, we have said that the Royal Printing House, after
various fortunes, still existed; and in 1788 it worked, for better or
for worse, at the Louvre. According to the budget of that year, it cost
the King 90,000 livres, of which the director had 1,400.
There were, on the other hand, a certain number of official printing
offices, that of war, for example, which was devoted entirely to the
work of the Ministry. It was situated at Versailles, and was created in
1768. It is told of Louis XV. that, being one day in this workshop, he
found a pair of spectacles, left as if in inadvertence on a printed
sheet. As his sight was weakening, he took the spectacles and looked
through them. The sheet was a hyperbolical eulogium composed, as if at
random, by the director Bertier, in honour of the King. Louis XV.,
having read the dithyramb, replaced the spectacles, and quietly said,
"They are too strong; they make objects too large."
Who would believe that at the end of the century of Voltaire and
Rousseau a craftsman would be found desirous of leading back the
typographical art to its cradle, and of making xylographs again, under
the name of polytypes? A German was the original who conceived the plan.
He obtained an order of council for the establishment of his presses in
1785, but the same council suppressed them 1st November, 1787. His
process was to substitute for movable characters a plate of fixed
letters, and probably engraved.
Another eccentricity of typography at the end of the century was the
introduction of "logography" by John Walter, the proprietor and printer
of the _Times_ newspaper, which consisted in casting whole the words in
most common use, in place of separate letters. The system had soon to be
abandoned, but the early numbers of the _Times_, which was started
January 1st, 1785, were printed on it.
In the eighteenth century there was a printing establishment for each of
the constituted bodies; the King, the Queen, the princes, each had their
own. The royal lottery occupied a special printing house.
The young inmates of the blind asylum worked under the direction of M.
Clousier, royal printer. Louis XVI. authorised the celebrated Haüy,
their master, to allow them to print; and in 1786 they composed an essay
on the education of the blind. Pierre François Didot was in 1785 printer
to the Prince, afterwards Louis XVIII.; and he published the _Aventures
de Télémaque_, in two quarto volumes, from this special printing office.
The English colonies in North America early established printing there,
their first book, the "Book of Psalms," known as the Bay Psalm Book,
being dated 1640. By the middle of the eighteenth century literature
held a strong position in the colonies, the greater part of it being, as
might be expected, English; but the revolution and subsequent
establishment of the United States created a national American
literature, which has flourished to this day. Among the printers of
North America in the eighteenth century, the most famous was the
celebrated philosopher Dr. Benjamin Franklin, who served his
apprenticeship to the printing press in London. He returned to America
in 1726, and worked as a printer with his brother at Philadelphia.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER VI.
THE BOOK IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
The Didots and their improvements--The folio Racine--The school of
Didot--Fine publications in England and Germany--Literature and art
of the Restoration--Romanticism--Wood engraving--Bewick's pupils,
Clennell, etc.--The illustrators of romances--The generation of
1840--The Book in our days in Europe and America.
Political imitators had not been found for the French Revolution in all
the neighbouring countries of Europe, but its Greco-Roman art
established itself, and by degrees was introduced into the studios of
painters and the printing offices. Prud'hon, Gerard, Girodet, and later
Desenne, without counting the younger Moreau and his contemporaries of
the older regime, rallied to the new study, forming a school of
illustrators and vignettists with which the publishers could resolutely
advance. England followed suit with Flaxman, West, Fuseli, Barry, and a
crowd of others. Among the publishers the powerful family of the Didots
took first rank, and its members, at once type-founders, printers,
booksellers, and _savants_ of the first order, were the best fitted to
direct an artistic and literary movement. When Napoleon crowned himself
emperor of the French, the elders of the family had already brought
about a number of perfections and discoveries in their profession by
which their workshops had profited. François Ambroise, who died in the
year of the Empire, had given an exact proportion to types, a free and
elegant turn, but perhaps too regular and precise to be agreeable. He
had also invented a press called the _presse à un coup_, in which the
impression was taken by a single pull instead of being produced by a
series of successive strikings. His brother, Pierre François, spoken of
in the preceding chapter, was a type-founder and paper-maker at Essones,
and counted among his official titles "printer to the Comte de
Provence," as François Ambroise was to the Comte d'Artois.
Of these two branches equally faithful to typography, Pierre Didot, son
of François Ambroise, became the head on the death of his father. Born
in 1760, he had studied his art with passion, and had merited the
installation of his workshops in the Louvre, where he published a
celebrated collection known as the Louvre editions, the
_chef-d'oeuvre_ of which was the works of Racine. The splendid
execution of this book, in three large folio volumes, was a true
typographical revolution. Never in any country had scrupulous perfection
of detail been joined to so masterly a knowledge of disposition and form
of characters. The great artists of the Davidian school had the honour
of seeing their drawings reproduced as illustrations, and those named
above designed the fifty-seven plates with which the edition was
adorned. Pierre Didot displayed a great affectation in only printing two
hundred and fifty copies of his irreproachable and marvellous work, of
which a hundred had proofs of the plates before letters. Published by
subscription, the ordinary edition was issued at 1,200 francs, and with
proofs 1,800 francs.
To these superb works Firmin Didot, his brother, added ingenious
discoveries. Struck with certain difficulties of printing as well as of
correction, he imagined the welding together of the types of a forme,
when once obtained without faults, so as to avoid the trouble of new
composition. This process, useless for books of small number, had a
capital importance in the case of reimpressions of popular and
successful works. He named this method stereotype, and from 1799 he
published a Racine in 18mo by this method; but the originality of the
method, which he was the first to call stereotype, ended with its name,
for the process had already been discovered by William Ged, a goldsmith
of Edinburgh, in 1725, the first book produced in this manner being an
edition of Sallust, printed in 1744, 8vo, "non typis mobilibus ut vulgo
fieri solet, sed tabellis seu laminis fusis, excudebat."
This admirably directed house, we may indeed say this school of
typography, formed with Renouard, Claye, Rignoux, and others, the
greater number of the French publishers of the middle of the century.
When the Czar Alexander went to Paris, he wished to do honour to the
greatest French practitioners in the science of printing, in the persons
of the brothers Pierre and Firmin Didot. But these were not the only
ones. The sons of Pierre François, Henri and Pierre François II.--the
latter specially applied himself to paper-making, under the name of
Didot St. Leger--followed in the footsteps of their father and uncle.
Pierre François made at Essones an excellent paper, which he brought to
the perfection of making it in endless rolls, such as are made to-day
for rotary machines. Bernardin de St. Pierre retired to Essones about
the end of the last century, and there married the daughter of Pierre
François II. It is a curious coincidence that the same village contained
at once the man whose works at the beginning of the century had so
extraordinary a success and the great family of printers who had given
definitive impetus to typographical work. It was in this tranquil circle
that the author of "Paul and Virginia," at the age of sixty, sought
repose; that the publication of his book was resolved upon with all the
luxury due to its success, with admirable type and with plates by
Prud'hon and others. He added to it the _Chaumière Indienne_, written in
1790, on the eve of the Terror, which is one of the most delicate novels
of the time.
The homely and sweet literature of Bernardin de St. Pierre, the heroic
inventions of Girodet, Gerard, and Chaudet in the Greek or Roman style,
the clever but severe typography of the Didots--such is the composition
of the Book at the beginning of the century, and also its avowed
tendency and good taste. Under Louis XV. the nymphs carried panniers;
Polyeucte had peruke and sword. It would be unbecoming not to give Juno
or Venus the head-dress adopted in paintings and vignettes. At the time
which now occupies us fashion in clothing directed designers also. The
hair of goddesses was _à la Titus_; the waist was under the arms; golden
circles were on the brow. Simple mortals walked naked on the roads,
with plumed casques and superb shields. There were heroes putting forth
their disproportioned arms, others raising their eyes to heaven in
impossible attitudes. Such were all the vignettes, from Girodet to the
humblest, the last, the most forgotten.
It happens, by an oddity of which the cause is vainly sought, that this
classic and revolutionary school of David identifies itself so well with
the Napoleonic epoch, then with the people of the Restoration, that it
seems expressly made for them. At the same time, under Louis XVIII. and
Charles X. the Romans and Greeks had not the bold carriage of their
early days; they became more citizenised, and assumed the air of the
national guards of the kingdom of which later an excessive use was made.
England also had a splendid series of publishers and printers. From
Boydell, Harding, the Murrays, Fisher; from Bulmer, Bensley, Strahan,
the Whittinghams, and Hansard, to our day, there has been an unbroken
and constantly increasing line of clever, practical men, adorning the
professions to which they devoted their energies, often realising that
fortune which properly directed energies command. In the first half of
the century a vast number of splendidly printed books were issued,
ornamented in the most lavish manner with beautiful illustrations,
engraved on steel or copper plates, and with delicate woodcuts. Book
illustration in England may be said now to have reached perfection. When
the banker-poet Samuel Rogers wished to bring out an illustrated edition
of his works, he employed the two most capable artists of the time,
Thomas Stothard and J. M. W. Turner; and they produced an admirable
series of designs, which were exquisitely engraved by Finden, Goodall,
and Pye. The work was printed by T. Davidson, in two volumes, octavo:
the "Italy" in 1830 and the "Poems" in 1834; these two volumes, from the
perfect harmony of the typography and illustration and their combined
beauty, may be referred to as the perfection of book-making. A very
charming series of volumes is found in the "Annuals," "Keepsakes,"
"Amulets," and similar annual publications, illustrated with beautiful
steel plates by the best engravers. The splendidly printed and
illustrated bibliographical works of Dr. T. F. Dibdin may also be
mentioned. They extend to several volumes, and were printed by Bulmer
and his successors Nicoll and T. Bensley, illustrated by engraved plates
and woodcuts by F. C. Lewis and others. H. G. Bohn, besides the fine
series known as "Bohn's Libraries," numbering over six hundred volumes,
in every branch of literature, art, and science, published many finely
illustrated books, and as a bookseller had the largest stock of his day.
Charles Knight did marvels in popularising literature in his day.
William Pickering published a long series of very beautiful books, and
in conjunction with Charles Whittingham, printer, of the far-famed
Chiswick Press, revived the Aldine or old-faced types; one of the most
beautiful of his publications was Sir Harris Nicolas's edition of
Walton's "Angler," in two volumes, imperial octavo, with a very fine set
of steel plates, designed by Stothard and engraved by Augustus Fox and
W. J. Cooke, besides engraved vignettes and representations of fish
drawn by Inskipp.
In Germany perhaps the most remarkable achievement of the century is the
extraordinary series of volumes of English authors, now (1887) numbering
2,500, issued by Baron Tauchnitz, of Leipzig, which, although eminently
popular in their character, are well and tastefully printed. Among the
most notable of the printing and publishing houses of Germany, many of
them combining the two trades, are J. G. Cotta, dating from 1640;
Breitkopf and Härtel, dating from 1719; Justus Perthes, founded 1796; T.
O. Weigel, 1797; F. A. Brockhaus, 1805; B. G. Teubner, 1811; W.
Drugulin, 1829; J. J. Weber, 1834, etc. Germany has advanced with
England and France in fine typography and illustration in their several
kinds. The modern school of book illustration in Germany undoubtedly has
its origin in the influence given to it by the designs of the artist
Adolph Menzel, amongst which a series of two hundred illustrations to
the works of Frederick the Great, engraved on wood by the Vogels,
Unzelman and Müller, show him to be one of the most powerful and
accurate draughtsmen of the century.
To return to France, a new literature arose that was to react against
the Greek full of Gallicisms; but the movement, in reversing the ancient
state of things, in wishing to replace antiquity by the Middle Ages, old
Romans by old French, completely changed the physiognomy of the Book.
The engraved vignette and the copper plate of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries were to lose their supremacy and to give way to
etching and wood engraving, also a revival of the Middle Ages.
[Illustration: Fig. 93.--Wood engraving by Clennell after West, for the
diploma of the Highland Society.]
It is not sufficiently known that wood engraving, after the unfortunate
attempts of Papillon in France, was restored in England by Thomas
Bewick, who founded a school, of which, at the commencement of our
century, Clennell and the brothers Thompson were members. One of the
Thompsons went to France about the middle of the Restoration, doubtless
with the hope of profiting by his art, and he offered to the Print
Department of the National Library the diploma of the Highland Society,
a large folio wood block, very adroit and very curiously cut, after the
drawing of the celebrated Benjamin West, and copied from Clennell's
original block of the same subject. M. Duchesne, then Keeper of the
Prints, speaks of this last process as of an apparition: "This print
makes apparent the long-neglected and often reappearing art of wood
engraving, which, though it could never equal copper engraving,
nevertheless merits the attention of amateurs when a capable hand is
exercised upon it." It was, we see, a curiosity then, this relief
cutting, of which the resurrection was to give an enormous impulse to
the Book from the facilities of printing and the economies realised by
the possibility of intercalation in periodicals. In fact, metal printing
necessitated so much trouble, more for engraving than for the
impression. With wood blocks surrounded by type the ordinary press
sufficed. The _Magasin Pittoresque_, which was commenced in 1833, and
the success of which from the first was very great, was born of these
new combinations. Before it the _Messager Boiteux_ of Strasbourg and
other popular almanacs progressed very well with their illustrations on
wood. A kind of firm of engravers, at the head of which were Best and
Andrew, undertook the illustrations of the _Magasin Pittoresque_. In a
few years progress was immense, other publications came into existence,
and a definitive return was made to the vignette in relief. The French
illustrated paper preceded our _Illustrated London News_ by nine years.
Lavish use was now made of wood engraving, which had thus been suddenly
revived in the very midst of the new romantic effervescence, amid a war
of books, which, in order to please, had above all to captivate the eye,
reacting at once against the spirit and the art of the Restoration.
Never before had artists to such an extent taken active part in a purely
literary warfare. All the fantastic tendencies of young France were
embodied in the lame and halting lines of the time and similar wretched
doggerel. Doubtless the leaders of the school did not go quite so far,
and their reputation even suffered from such theories; but, as always
happens in such cases, the disciples outstripped their masters.
[Illustration: Fig. 94.--Vignette by Devéria for the _Fiancé de la
Tombe_.]
The brothers Johannot were the first to join in the fray, under the flag
of the poets and others of the romantic school, such as Victor Hugo, De
Vigny, Paul Lacroix, George Sand, and Devéria, most ruthless of
illustrators. The last-named had designed vignettes on wood, of all
others, for Baour-Lormian, that is to say for the foe of the new ideas,
at once the interpreter of Ossian and the bourgeois bard, full of fire
and fury against everything in turn. The _Légendes, Ballades, et
Fabliaux_, illustrated by Devéria in 1829, although a sort of compromise
with the lovesick swains of mediæval times, did not escape the shafts of
ridicule.
In the midst of this movement the Book became democratic; it was printed
on sugar-paper for reading-rooms and scullery maids. The generation of
romancists diffused its paper-covered works, printing a thousand copies
and selling five hundred with great difficulty. Poets publishing five
hundred were happy with a sale of two hundred and fifty. Unheard-of
titles were then needed to catch the eye, ridiculous and ghastly
frontispieces to tickle the fancy of the riffraff. Paul Lacroix called
himself the "Bibliophile Jacob," and invented surprising headpieces and
foolish designs. And then, as in the fifteenth century, as in the old
times, certain signs become popular with the reading public. In the
place of the Doctrinals, Complaints, and Disputes, so common in the
titles of those epochs, new fancies spring up and have their day.
Eccentric devices recommend romantic trash, in which the assassin's
dagger, blood, and the horrors of the tomb have replaced the insipid
fantasies of the fallen regime. Pétrus Borel, the werewolf, a sort of
historic ghoul prowling about the graveyards, enjoyed a monopoly, as it
were, of the ghastly titles and contents of this charnel-house
literature; it was for his _Champavert_, published in 1833, that Gigoux
composed a kind of Bluebeard surrounded by female skeletons, that opened
the eyes of publishers to his value as a vignettist.
Although he threw himself soul and body into the romantic movement, the
young artist did not alone design subjects called "abracadabrants,"
following the neologism of the time, any more than the booksellers only
published romances. An attempt was made, by publishing them in parts, to
still further popularise the old writers at all harmonising with the
current taste. The publisher Paulin thus issued the _Gil Blas_ of Le
Sage, with illustrations in the text by the younger Gigoux, of which the
best was hoped. The history of this celebrated enterprise has been
written by the artist himself in the curious _Causeries_ published
recently by him, fifty years after his work on Gil Blas; and this
interesting view of an epoch already far distant gives us in a few words
the ordinary economy of these popular impressions in parts.
[Illustration: Fig. 95.--Vignette by John Gigoux for _Gil Blas_.]
It appears that Paulin, publisher in the Rue de Seine, not being very
well off, had associated himself with a man of business named Dubochet,
who had before made an enormous fortune with gas. The two represented
fifteen thousand to twenty thousand francs, and they ordered a hundred
drawings on wood from the young artist. He set to work with precaution,
for Dubochet was hard to please, without knowing much about the
business, and fined the engravers for the least faults. Gigoux set
himself to give his compositions in simple line, without complicated
shadows, so as to allow the wood-cutters to preserve a free outline. It
was nearly the same thing as the process of the old artists of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of Vostre and Holbein: true engraving
in relief. The success of the first sheets was extraordinary; new
vignettes were ordered from Gigoux; in place of a hundred they wanted
three hundred, then four hundred; then at the end of the work they
counted six hundred at least. Money filled the chests of the firm, but
when the artist claimed a small share of the benefits, they laughed in
his face.
Properly speaking, it was the first serious attempt at illustration by
the recovered method of engraving in relief, but it was not the only
one. Curmer, the publisher of the Rue Richelieu, prepared a Bible in
1835 and several other volumes, among which were the "Paul and Virginia"
and the _Chaumière Indienne_ of Bernardin de St. Pierre. He had also
collected around him a circle of artists that included Wattier, Devéria,
and Meissonier, who was the most perfect and correct of the designers on
wood. Meissonier designed very soberly, without effects of light, little
scenes admirably cut by an engraver named Lavoignat, a master in the
largest sense of the word. Curmer wrote in 1835 in the preface to one of
his books, "We hope we have raised a monument to wood engraving. It is
easy to judge of the resources presented by this art. We are compelled
to have recourse to England to accomplish our work. Peace to willing
publishers!"
[Illustration: Fig. 96.--Vignette by Daumier for the _Cholera à Paris_.]
Curmer acknowledges the importance of English specialists in this new
process for vignettes, and the willing publishers were not wanting; they
came from all parts. He himself did not stop on the way; he continued
his work on a large scale; and Charles Blanc was able to say of him
later, as well as of Furne, "He desired to illustrate books for
everybody, as the great booksellers of the last century had illustrated
their rare editions for a small number of privileged persons." But he
did not always confine himself to wood engraving; he also employed
etching and lithography. These, requiring separate printing, did not
make intercalation with the text any easier than engraving with the
burin; but they served to illustrate periodicals, the _Charivari_ and
_L'Artiste_, as well as some books, where they replaced the engraved
plates of the preceding century. At the same time, the latter process
was not altogether neglected; about 1840 it was revived, and steel was
used in place of copper, as it better resisted repeated impressions. The
publisher Furne, while he employed wood engraving, adorned with separate
plates on steel his better publications. For him worked Raffet, one of
the romanticists enamoured of the Napoleonic epic, which he had
popularised, with Charlet and Bellangé, by the pencil, wood, and
lithography. Raffet had transferred upon wood, as if in play, the three
hundred and fifty-one vignettes of the _Histoire de Napoléon_, by De
Norvins, which would to-day suffice for the glory and reputation of many
artists. In fact, the analytical and inductive spirit of the artist led
him to leave nothing to the chances of inspiration and commonplace of
illustration. He laboriously reconstituted, fragment by fragment, the
physiognomy of the "old army;" and imbued with the perfect science of
detail, he allowed his pencil full play in bold and luminous inventions,
where may be seen again, with their peculiar appearance, the heroes of
other days, the soldiers of the Rhine and Italy, of Austerlitz and
Waterloo.
A truly lively period was that of 1840, a living and unthinking
generation. By the side of those great artists of whom we have spoken,
and who will be more admired some day, there were the fantasists Traviès
and Daumier, who adorned the illustrated journals with innumerable
sketches, and Grandville and Gavarni, one caricaturing animals in a
celebrated book, _Les Animaux Peints par Eux-mêmes_, which is more than
a _chef-d'oeuvre_; the other coolly studying the vices and faults of
his time, with the precision of an anatomist, in _Les Anglais Peints par
Eux-mêmes_ of Labedollière, in the _Diable à Paris_, without counting a
thousand other works which his penetrating imagination produced.
[Illustration: Fig. 97.--Vignette by Gavarni for _Paris Marié_.]
Presently photography came, which was to reverse completely the
conditions of illustration of the Book by the numerous means of
reproduction to which it gave birth. Then wood engraving entered on a
new phase, a complete transformation of its ordinary terms, under the
influence of Gustave Doré. Little by little it had been attempted to
render in relief that which engraved plates only had hitherto done.
Black, half-tints, lowered tones, were tried where formerly a simple
line, bold and spirited, signified everything. The house of Hachette,
founded by one of the normal teachers of the liberal movement, at the
beginning of the century, was, together with Lahure, the promoter of
relief so inclusive and practical. The numerous periodicals of these
publishers spread the taste afar. England, for its part, entered on the
road, followed by America and Germany. To-day wood engravings have
reached perfection, finesse, and suppleness; but they are not, properly
speaking, engravings on wood.
[Illustration: Fig. 98.--Balzac writing his _Contes Drôlatiques_.
Vignette by Gustave Doré.]
[Illustration: Fig. 99.--Wood block by Bewick, from his "Fables," 1818.
The fox and the goat.]
We have seen that French publishers were largely indebted to English
wood engravers for their blocks. The school that was established by
Bewick and his pupils made enormous progress. From the "Fables,"
published in 1818, we reproduce an illustration as also a specimen from
the second volume of the "British Birds." Luke Clennell was one of the
most distinguished of Bewick's pupils; and he made some excellent
blocks, among them the illustrations to an edition of Rogers's "Poems"
(1812), engraved from pen-and-ink drawings by Thomas Stothard. It was
Stothard's opinion that wood engraving best reproduced pen-and-ink
drawings. Other pupils of Bewick were J. Jackson, John Thompson, who
engraved Harvey's beautiful illustrations to Milton and Henderson's
"History of Wines," S. Williams, Orrin Smith, Robert Branston, and C.
Nesbit. The most prolific and perhaps the most popular book-illustrator
of the century in England, was George Cruikshank, who engraved most of
his own designs on wood, steel, or with the etching needle; the
catalogue of his works by Mr. G. W. Reid, formerly keeper of the Prints
in the British Museum, occupies three quarto volumes. The designs of
"Phiz," as H. K. Browne called himself, largely contributed to the
popularity of the works of Charles Dickens; and the mere mention of
Richard Doyle and John Leech will recall the palmy days of _Punch_,
although both of these artists did excellent work in book illustration.
From the days of the Bewicks to the present wood engraving has formed
the most widely used means of illustration in England and the United
States. Its adaptability to the printing machine renders it admirably
suited to the production of books in large numbers and at low expense.
Without it we could not have our _Graphics_ and _Illustrated News_, nor
the floods of cheap but splendidly illustrated magazines which are
appearing on both sides of the Atlantic. True, many of these blocks are
due to the "processes" which photography has made available, but they
are nevertheless the outcome of wood engraving. We cannot leave this
subject without mentioning the admirable "Treatise on Wood Engraving,"
by W. A. Chatto, with numerous illustrations, published originally by H.
G. Bohn in 1839 and since reprinted.
[Illustration: Fig. 100.--Wood block from Bewick's "British Birds." The
common duck.]
[Illustration: Fig. 101.--Wood engraving by Clennell, after Stothard,
for Rogers's Poems, 1812.]
In our days the great Paris publishers have returned to the books of the
eighteenth century, ornamented with vignettes on copper; many of them
purely and simply imitate by photographic processes the pretty editions
of Eisen and Moreau, but they do not merit the name which they bear. As
to those whose specialty is handsome books with figures by contemporary
artists, those who always are in the front, as the Mames, Quantins,
Hachettes, Plons, Jouausts, of France; the Longmans, Murrays,
Macmillans, Kegan Pauls, Cassells, and Chattos of England; the Harpers,
Scribners, Lippincotts, and Houghtons of the United States, they are to
us what the ancients of whom we have spoken were to their
contemporaries. Now the processes of illustration are without number:
wood, metal, heliogravure, phototype, and others. And if the mechanical
means, if the heliogravures, have at present the importance claimed,
they by no means add to the intrinsic value of wood engravings, but to
the rapidity and economy of their manufacture. The Book, the true Book,
has nothing to do with all these inventions, and may well confine itself
to the burin or the relief block.
But as regards the Book, properly so called, it never was the object of
more excessive care or of more unfortunate precipitation. It may be
remarked that works least destined to live in the libraries, those
thousands of lame pamphlets on questions of small provincial erudition
or the cap-and-sword romances, are ordinarily the best and most
carefully printed, in opposition to other more important works composed
in heads of nails and on worn-out paper. There are in reading-rooms a
good number of pamphlets that will not be found in fifty years, and will
be worth their weight in banknotes, even if dirty and tattered, on
account of their intrinsic value.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER VII.
TYPES, IMPRESSION, PAPER, INK.
After this summary, and necessarily very compressed, sketch of the
general history of the Book, it will not be without importance to place
some technical information before the reader, to explain as clearly as
possible the function of the presses, the practical side of typography,
from the engraving of the character and the founding of types up to the
binding, taking by the way composition, impression, and collation. Many
of these operations have been already sketched in the preceding part of
our work; we have spoken of engraving of the punch, of impression, of
the thousand details that constitute the typographic art, and the
knowledge of which is so little diffused. We return to it now, with more
method, on the different subjects, and shall try to point out the
principal features.
We have seen in our first chapter what patient researches the discovery
necessitated for the Mayence printers in the founding of the character
in matrix. True, the punch and the matrix had existed from time
immemorial for coins and seals. To engrave in relief a punch of
material hard enough to strike a resisting metal, and to run into the
space obtained by this blow a melted alloy, which took at its extremity
the same form as the punch had given, is, in a few words, the whole
economy of the process. For the engraving of the punches a sort of burin
of tempered steel was used, which scooped out the part intended to
remain white in the letter.
From the beginning the printers themselves engraved their own
characters. The most ancient, whose constant preoccupation was the
imitation of manuscript, copied the Gothic letter of ordinary writing.
Soon afterwards, Jenson, the French refugee at Venice, designed a round
letter, like that of Sweynheim and Pannartz, the Roman publishers, in
1467; and his type, absolutely perfect, is used to this day.
In France the introducers of the invention in Paris also imitated the
Roman, but multiplied abbreviations until they became tedious. We can
imagine what the engraving of a character could be where so few letters
stood alone, where lines abridged the nasals; the words _pro_, _pre_,
figured as in manuscripts; the sign 9 signified _cum_ or _con_ in Latin
or French words, without reckoning a thousand other rigorous usages.
This truly perplexing profusion of signs as well as the want of
precision and clearness in the letter enables us now to recognise the
first Parisian _incunabula_.[A]
[Footnote A: See above, figs. 10, 11, 12.]
The first English printers used Gothic or black letter. Caxton brought
his first fount from Cologne, but that which he made afterwards for
himself was of the same character. Wynkyn de Worde, Pynson, and their
successors used the same style; and for official publications and Bibles
the black letter was used up to the seventeenth century.
[Illustration: Fig. 102.--Type-founder in the middle of the sixteenth
century. Engraving by Jost Amman.]
But the art of the founder-engraver was destined to specialise itself.
There were artisans in this branch, and among them in France, in the
fifteenth century, Simon de Collines, who engraved good Roman characters
about 1480. Later was Claude Garamond, of Paris, who died about 1561, a
pupil of Geoffroy Tory, the most celebrated of all of them; Tory
definitely proscribed the Gothic character, of which Vostre and Verard
had made constant use. Garamond worked in this way, producing with
microscopical precision new letters, among others those of Robert
Estienne, the most marvellous and the most distinct. It was he who was
charged by Francis I. to form the celebrated royal Greek types. He
assisted in getting up the _Champfleury_ of Geoffroy Tory.
On his death William Lebé succeeded him, and inherited his punches. Lebé
engraved by preference Hebrew characters, of which he made a specialty.
His travels to Rome and Venice had given him a singular value in his
art; and when he died about the end of the century, he was incontestably
the first cutter of Oriental characters in the whole world. Philip II.
of Spain had begged him to engrave the letters of the Bible of which
Plantin had undertaken the impression, and Francis I. had charged him to
make types for the Estiennes.
At the commencement of the seventeenth century we find James Sanlecque,
pupil of Lebé, and his son. During this period several women succeeded
their husbands as type-founders. In the eighteenth century Philip
Grandjean, an artist who was royal printer to Louis XIV., was keeper of
the foundry afterwards united, in 1725, to the Royal Printing House;
Fournier succeeded the Lebés, then P. S. Fournier the younger, who
engraved with great success. In our days we have seen above the Didots
themselves working their punches; and one of them, Henri, founded
microscopical characters for a La Rochefoucauld about the middle of the
nineteenth century.
We have referred to English type-founders of the eighteenth century in
Chapter V.
The type, or character used in printing, is a composition of lead and
pure antimony, which, melted, form a resisting and at the same time
supple mixture. Lead alone would be crushed, and the first printers
often suffered in making their experiments. The proportion of the
mixture is four of lead to one of antimony.
The matrix is combined in such manner that the _eye_--that is to say,
the part of the character intended to produce the impression--and also
the shank intended to hold the letter are cast together.
The letters, once founded according to their different forms, are
afterwards disposed in boxes with compartments, or "cases." These cases
serve to classify the character by letters, italics, capitals, lower
case, punctuations, accents, etc.
As we have said, the relation of letters among themselves in the
composition of a language is called the "fount." For example, it is
certain that the Italian employs the letter _a_ more than _b_, the
letter _a_ appearing in nearly every word; a compositor to compose in
this language should therefore have more of _a_ than of _b_. The
relation between these two letters and all the others is the "fount." In
French the proportion of a fount is about 5,000 _a_ for 800 _b_, 3,000
_c_, 3,000 _d_, 11,000 _e_, etc. The fount varies with the languages. In
English the proportion is 8,500 _a_ to 1,600 _b_, 3,000 _c_, 4,400 _d_,
etc.
Before 1789 there were in all twenty different "bodies" of letters that
bore fantastic names. The "Parisienne" was the smallest size, and the
"Grosse Nonpareille" the largest. In the sixteenth century a character
called "Civilité" was invented. It sought to imitate fine cursive
writing. In the last century this idea was reproduced, and the "Bâtarde
Coulée," which did not have great success, was made. In English types,
Joseph Moxon in 1669 had eleven sizes; Caslon in 1734 had thirty-eight.
[Illustration: Specimen of imposition]
When a printer wishes to compose a work, he first decides in which body
he will print it. His choice made, he places in the compositors'
"cases"--that is, in the boxes placed before each one of his
workmen--the chosen character, with its italics, capitals, signs, etc.
Then he gives them the "copy," that is to say the manuscript of the
author to be reproduced. The compositors take a "galley" according to
the size of the book; and, letter by letter, by running their fingers
through the different cases, they place side by side the words
laboriously composed, and necessarily presenting their reverse, so that
they will show their proper face when printed.
The composition terminated, the process of "imposition" takes place.
This is the disposition by pages in an iron chase, in such manner that
the sheet of paper shall be printed on both sides, the pages exactly
following one another.
It will be seen by the specimen on the preceding page that if the two
sheets be brought together, page 2 of II. will fall exactly opposite
page 1 of I, page 7 opposite page 8, and so on. Nothing is easier than
this combination for folio, quarto, or octavo sizes, but as the smaller
sizes are multiplied even to 128mo, tables are necessary to prevent
error.
The imposition is completed by building up the composition in a chase by
means of pieces of metal called "furniture," which regulate the margins.
When the whole is in proper place, it is squeezed up and adjusted by
means of sunk reglets. The chase may now be placed under the press
without fear of the characters falling out or getting mixed.
A pressman takes a "proof" after having rubbed the relief of the
characters with ink, and on this proof are corrected the author's or
compositor's faults by indications in the margin by understood signs. By
this amended proof the compositor amends his faults one by one: leaves
out superfluous characters, puts turned characters straight, spaces or
draws closer the lines, etc.
The corrections finished, the time has come to print. In the time of
Geoffroy Tory this operation was made as we shall explain; it was the
same before and the same after. Two pressmen have tempered with water
the tympan, or more elastic part of the carriage, against which will be
directed in good time the blow from the type; they have also damped the
paper intended for the impression, so that it may retain the greasy ink
with which the characters are charged; then the formes are washed before
putting them under the press.
In the figure which we reproduce, which dates from about 1530, we see
the workshop of Jodocus Badius, of Asch, father-in-law of two celebrated
printers, Vascosan and Robert Estienne. The press rolls--that is to say,
the formes--have been placed in the "carriage," or movable chase, which,
coming forward, receives the sheet of paper and the ink, and returns
under the press to receive the blow of the "bar." In the room, lighted
by two windows, the compositors work. In front one works at the bar,
while his comrade distributes the ink on the "balls." These balls are
leather pads, on which the greasy ink, made of lampblack and oil, is
spread, to more easily rub the forme after each blow. Ordinarily the
inker had two functions: he prepared the ink, distributed it, and kept
his eye on the printed sheets to correct faults, blots, and difference
of tint. Here the workman is simply occupied by the balls. Printed
sheets and prepared paper are on a table by the side of the press. This
press is composed of the rolling chase, the tympan, and the "frisket," a
smaller tympan, which work against one another. The tympan, we have said
above, receives directly the blow. And it was so for nearly four
centuries; the mechanical means of our days have a little changed the
work, but the principle is always the same.
[Illustration: Fig. 103.--Mark of Jodocus Badius of Asch, representing
the interior of a printing office about 1535. Engraving _à la croix de
Lorraine_.]
Towards the end of the sixteenth century, a press cost about a hundred
and twenty-seven crowns, with its diverse utensils, as may be seen in an
unpublished piece analysed by Dr. Giraudet, of Tours, in a very
interesting pamphlet: _Une Association d'Imprimeurs et de Libraires de
Paris Réfugiés à Tours au XVI^e Siècle_. The workshop of Jamet Métayer,
of Tours, cost a rent of eighty-three crowns--about twenty pounds of
current money.
Workmen were then paid by the "day;" and it came to be one of the
expressions then so much used in manual labour, corresponding to the sum
of the least work of a good workman. M. Ladevèze, printer, thought that
the "day" represented the work of about twenty thousand Roman or Cicero
letters employed by a compositor.
With us the "day" of compositors and pressmen is differently calculated.
The latter have to take a certain number of sheets.
The sheet, composition and press work, cost nearly seven crowns, or
nearly two pounds. Jamet Métayer paid twenty crowns for four sheets in
Italics; he demanded three months for the work.
The primitive presses were wooden screw presses, and they so remained
until the beginning of this century, when Lord Stanhope, a celebrated
electrician, author, and politician, perfected them and gave his name to
a new machine. His improvement consisted in that the bar was no longer
fixed to the vice, but to a cylinder outside. A counter-weight brought
back the platen at each blow. Pierre Didot had previously made metal
platens. In 1820 the use of the Stanhope press commenced in France.
England had, besides, taken a preponderating place in typographical
invention. The printer of the _Times_, John Walter, at the beginning of
the nineteenth century, seeking to publish his journal quicker,
associated himself with craftsmen who constructed mechanical presses for
him. The Didots lost no time, and themselves made improvements.
In 1848, the presses of the _Constitutionnel_, thanks to the application
of steam, produced twenty thousand papers an hour. In our time there are
machines that print only on one side, as well as double machines,
printing both sides at once. The rotary machines, with endless paper,
take thirty-five thousand impressions an hour. In the newspaper machines
of Marinoni, the great inventor, the paper is unrolled, printed, cut,
and folded without leaving the machine, and falls into a place from
which it is taken ready for the subscriber. The latest perfection of the
printing press is the Walter press and the rotary machine of R. Hoe and
Co., of New York, extensively used throughout the world. The elaborate
book has little to do with these marvellous processes, although in its
turn it largely benefits by the improvement of the printing machine.
It is apart from our purpose to speak at length on the manufacture of
paper. It is certain that it was well made before the invention of
printing, for most of the accounts of the fifteenth century are written
on linen paper, very resisting and well sized. Later on rags were used
in this manufacture; and here, in a few words, is how paper was made in
the mould, or "hand-made" before the invention of machinery for the
purpose:--
[Illustration: Fig. 104.--Paper-making. Workman engaged on the tub with
the frame of wires. Engraving by Jost Amman.]
The rags, having been thoroughly cleansed, were put into vats, where
they were worked up under a beating press until they were reduced to
pulp. This pulp was thrown into hot water and stirred until the mixture
was uniformly made. Then a mould of fine wire cloth, fixed upon a wooden
frame, and having a "deckle" to determine the size of the sheet, was
taken; in the middle of this frame was disposed, also in brass wire, a
factory mark, intended to appear in white in the sheet of paper, and
called the "water mark." This mould was dipped into the vat of pulp and
drawn out again. After gently shaking it to and fro in a horizontal
position, the fibres of the pulp became so connected as to form one
uniform fabric; and the water escaped through the wires. The deckle was
then removed from the mould, and the sheet of paper turned off upon a
felt, in a pile with many others, a felt intervening between each sheet,
and the whole subjected to great pressure, in order to absorb the
superfluous water. After being dried and pressed without the felts, the
sheets were dipped into a tub of size and again pressed to remove
surplus size. This primitive method of paper-making is represented in
fig. 104, and the same principle is still in use for the production of
hand-made paper. Machinery has effected many improvements and economies
in the production of woven paper.
China and Japan have their special paper manufacture. In Japan the
material employed is the bark of the _morus papifera sativa_.
[Illustration: Balance used by Jenson, at Venice.]
According to their fineness, size, and weight, papers have received
different names, proceeding from the water mark.
Faust at Mayence used paper marked with a bull's head. Jenson at Venice
used a balance of which the form varied. This latter came from a mill
which furnished Vicenza, Perugia, and Rome. Jenson used, besides a
crown, a cardinal's hat.
The bull's head underwent transformations, it had stars and roses, and
was special to Germany, and it may sometimes be found in Italy.
The wires and bridges served to determine the size of a book. Looking at
a folio leaf against the light, the wires will be seen to be
horizontal, and the bridges vertical. In quarto they will be reversed,
the paper having been folded in four instead of in two. The bridges
become horizontal. They return to the vertical in octavo, and so on.
As for ink, it was from the beginning a composition of lampblack and oil
of different quality and nature, mixed with resin to obtain a greater
and quicker dryness. Ink for engravings was more carefully made. For
coloured inks various powders are mixed with the oil and resin, and a
title in red and black has to go through the press twice: once for the
red and once for the black.
From the above it can be understood that illustrations in relief can
easily be introduced into the composition, whether in combination with
text or in separate pages. Another question presents itself: Did the old
printers employ casting, or did they print directly from the wood block
itself? In other words, the block having been cut, did they make with it
a mould into which melted metal could be poured to obtain a more
resistant relief? The fact is difficult to elucidate. It appears to-day
that Simon Vostre, Verard, and others printed relief engravings on
metal, but were they cut directly or obtained by casting, as they are
now? It cannot be determined yet.
CHAPTER VIII.
BOOKBINDING.
The binding of the first printed books--Ancient German
bindings--Binding in the time of Louis XII.--Italian
bindings--Aldus--Maioli--Grolier--Francis I.--Henri II. and Diane
de Poitiers--Catherine de Medicis--Henri III.--The Eves--The
"fanfares"--Louis XIII.--Le Gascon--Florimond Badier--Louis
XIV.--Morocco leathers--Cramoisy--The bindings of the time of Louis
XIV.--The regency--Pasdeloup--The
Deromes--Dubuisson--Thouvenin--Lesné--The nineteenth
century--English binders--Roger Payne--Francis Bedford.
Leading the reader now towards the final perfection of the Book:
printing, which had stirred up and reversed so many things, created, so
to speak, the art of binding. Previously the binder was simply a workman
sewing together the leaves of a manuscript, with no science or device
but to clasp the whole together solidly with cord and string. As luxury
increased the old binder was no longer thought of. On the wooden boards
which closed the Book, jewellers encrusted their wares, lavishing ivory
and precious stones to the taste of the amateur or the bookseller.
Generally these works covered books of precious miniatures, the
_Horoe_, or manuscripts that were deemed worthy of such magnificent
clothing, rarely copies without importance. Printing at once disordered
the tribe of copyists as well as the binders did jewellers. The demand
increasing, rich bindings were soon abandoned, and each bookseller
applied himself to the work, or at least covered in his own house books
intended for sale. The fashion was not then to expose for sale, as now,
unbound books. Purchasers wanted an article easy to handle, and which
they were not obliged to return for ulterior embellishment.
So to the public were presented the works laboriously composed by
Gutenberg, Schoeffer, and Fust, somewhat after the manner of
manuscripts, which they pretended to imitate, with their solid wooden
boards covered with pig or calfskin. At the four corners, copper nails,
with large heads, prevented rubbing against the shelves of the bookcase,
for at that time books were ranged on their sides, and not as they are
to-day. We must return to the bibliomaniac of the "Ship of Fools" to get
an idea of these depositories; before him may be seen ranged on a desk
large folios, with nails on their sides, in the shelves, so defying the
dust, in place of being placed upright on their edges, which rendered
them liable to spots and stains. (See fig. 23.)
Unhappily the wooden sides had in themselves a germ of destruction, the
worm, capable first of reducing the sides to powder and then ravaging
the body of the work, the ligatures and cords. Certain preparations
destroy the insect, but the precaution often has no effect, and it is
thus that the disappearance of volumes formerly so abundant, but almost
impossible to find now, may be explained.
[Illustration: Fig. 105.--Bookbinder's shop in the sixteenth century.
Engraving by Jost Amman.]
From the beginning the operations of the binder were what they still
are, except for improvements. They consist in the collation of the
sheets of a book, folding them, beating them to bring them together and
give them cohesion, and sewing them, first together, then on the cords
or strings, which form the five or six bands seen on the backs.
Primitively these cords were united to the wooden boards, and over both
was placed a resistant skin, on which from relief or metal engravings
were struck the most pleasing decorative subjects. Pigskin, white and
fine, lent itself, especially among the Germans, to these fine
editions; and although they were issued in great number, the wooden
boards have not permitted them all to exist in our time.
The most ancient that we are able to cite are German works of the time
of Louis XI.; they are very strong and coarse. The cords in them form an
enormous and massive projection. The inside of the board was often
without lining of paper or stuff. In the case of fine editions a sombre
velvet was sometimes used, such as Verard used to bind the books of the
father of Francis I., as we have before said.
Art did not enter into these works of preservation until about the end
of the fifteenth century, with arms and emblems. At the beginning of the
sixteenth century, some bindings were ornamented for Louis XII. and the
Queen, Anne de Bretagne; but not more than five or six specimens remain.
They are of coarse aspect. The workman who tooled the binding here
reproduced from the curious example of M. Dutuit, of Rouen, has thrown
his subjects one upon another. Arms, porcupines, ermines, are treated so
as to be confusing, and form a medley that is not pleasing. In recalling
the delightful borders of Vostre and Pigouchet, contemporaries of this
mediocre work, it is astonishing to see the degree of inferiority
reached by a profession that should be inspired by graceful subjects of
decoration.
[Illustration: Fig. 106.--Binding for Louis XII. Collection of M.
Dutuit, of Rouen.]
It happened that France again found in Italy masters capable of
revealing secrets of composition and arrangement to enable her to strike
out a new road. The Italian wars would not have had these artistic
results if it had not been for the enormous sums that they swallowed up.
The curious part of the enterprise was that a war treasurer, a
financier, employed by the French kings in these expeditions, through
his relations of taste and friendship with the Alduses of Venice,
brought to France the love of sumptuous bindings, of editions superbly
clothed. He was named Jean Grolier, that bibliophile of the sixteenth
century, who was, above all others, even King Francis, the first to
appreciate the art of binding. It is not too much to say art, for if
better had not been done before, it may safely be said that nothing
better has been done since; and the books of Grolier remain as the most
perfect and most admirable types of this kind of decoration.
Born of an Italian family established at Lyons, where most of his
relatives did a great business, Jean Grolier had the good fortune to
succeed his father, Stephen Grolier, treasurer of the Duke of Milan. He
became in his turn Minister of Finances, and was called to accompany the
kings in their expeditions in Italy. The situation of the treasurers
during these campaigns was important; they handled the pence levied with
great trouble in the cities of France "for making war." Many abused
their trust, and were punished, and among others the Lallemants, whom
documents show us to have been in connection with Grolier, and who
suffered, with Semblançay, the most terrible trials of the time.
Italian art gave then a free course in the decoration of books. Of the
interior we have spoken in our first chapters on the wood engravings;
for the exterior, the cover of the volume, foliage, golden flowers
worked with a hot iron, and polychromatic compartments obtained by
coloured pastes were multiplied. Thus was produced on the outside that
which it was not sought to obtain on the inside, the variation of tints
so select among the Italians, and so forsaken since the invention of
printing. In the midst of these literary men was a lover of books and
fine connoisseur who, not content with choosing the best editions, such
as those of Ferrara, Venice, and Basle, bound them superbly, with
compartments of admirable tone, and had his name and device inscribed on
the sides in the fashion of the time. He was named Thomas Maioli, and
following the custom of the amateurs of the time, he offered the
enjoyment of his library to his friends. "Tho. Maioli et amicorum," he
inscribed, as did later Grolier, as also did others, but he somewhat
modified the enthusiasm of his friendship by a sceptical device,
"Ingratis servire nephas," which might very well be the cry of the owner
of books betrayed by his borrowers.
Maioli did not alone use these devices; he had also a macaronic phrase
of which the sense is not very clear: "Inimici mei mea michi, non me
michi." He also sometimes used his monogram, which was composed of all
the letters of his name.
The relations of Grolier with this unknown and mysterious bibliophile,
whose name is not always found outside his volumes, are not doubtful.
Brunet possessed a volume that had belonged to Maioli and had passed
through the hands of Grolier. What better proof could be wished of the
communion of ideas and tastes between the two collectors?
But these amateurs were not alone. Beside them were princes and great
lords, lay and ecclesiastic. From the commencement of the sixteenth
century bookbinding had received an enormous impulse from the tastes and
the predilections for these lofty fancies. And it cannot be ascribed to
the simple skill of the workmen experimenting in that line. In the
century that saw Italian artists occupied in making designs for mounted
plates and painting beautiful ladies, the courtesans of Venice could not
be alarmed at finding them painting models for bindings, with
compartments of varied tone and style. Maioli affected white on a dark
background, that is to say on a background of dark leather. He made
scrolls of foliage in white or clear paste with a very happy effect.
This was the time when Grolier travelled in Italy, in the suite of the
French, and when he began his collections. He had adopted as his
heraldic emblem the gooseberry bush, which in French came very near to
his name--_groseillier_; and his motto was "Nec herba nec arbor"
("Neither tree nor herb"), explicative of the moderation of his wealth.
He was soon in connection with the Alduses, and through them with the
principal learned men and binders of the time, for it was not in the
offices of the Manutiuses that could be found workmen, like those of the
Chamber of Accounts in France, obliged to swear that they did not know
how to read. The master was not hindered by details of difference of
language, and it followed that his workmen understood Greek and Latin,
for he often gave them instruction in those languages. How far off these
erudite and conscientious workmen appear to-day!
Following the fashion, Grolier put his name on the upper side of his
books--"Jo. Grolierii et amicorum"--in gold letters, and on the other
side a pious motto, the sense of which was a hope often uttered by the
financiers of the sixteenth century, imprisoned and hung every instant:
"Portio mea, Domine, sit in terra viventium." Generally all the Grolier
books which came from the Alduses have the name on the upper side and
the motto on the other side; the title was placed above the name, and
often disposed in rows. Some large volumes had the cover ornamented with
an architectural design, like the Jamblichus of the Libri collection,
which had on the front the façade of a temple, with the title in rows on
the door. This volume was printed by Aldus in 1516, and probably
decorated by him for the account of the great French amateur.
Jean Grolier is said to have himself designed some of the subjects of
his ornaments, and their perfection indicates an active and enlightened
supervision. On his return to France, where he had a house near the
Porte de Bucy, he was put in relation with Geoffroy Tory, the artist
best fitted to understand him, and who was at once painter, engraver,
printer, and binder. It was there that, in the leisure of his financial
functions, between two projects of revictualling the forts of Outre
Seine and Yonne, Grolier invented combinations, sought interlacings, and
laid out foliage. Tory himself teaches us these works in combination. He
invented antique letters for Grolier, he tells us in his _Champfleury_.
It was for him, too, that he interwove so finely his compartments for
binding, and that he reproduced the delightful ornaments of his books of
hours in golden scrolls.
As we have said, Grolier placed his titles on the sides of his books on
account of the arrangement of the works on the shelves of the library
where they were laid. For this reason also the back was neglected, and
no ornament used upon it; thick and heavy with its projecting bands,
without decoration between the bands, this part of the bound volume was
a kind of waste in a splendidly cultivated garden. The profusion of
books brought about a revolution. There was no longer room to place on
their sides the innumerable books that were produced; they were then
placed on their edges, as now, and the back also was decorated. For this
the bands were made to disappear, and replaced by decorative subjects in
compartments like the sides. Then with Grolier the bands reappeared, and
the title was placed between them, as it still is.
The books of Grolier have been divided, according to their production,
in four or five principal classes, in which they may always be placed.
First were the works ornamented in compartments, gilt, with scrolls in
full gold; then the same with the scrolls _azurés_, that is to say
equally gilt, but having parallel lines like the _azure_ of heraldry.
Following comes the school of Geoffroy Tory, with gilt compartments in
the style of the great French decorator; last the polychromatic
bindings, in which, by the aid of colour or mastic, the alternating
tones are mixed. Grolier also had some mosaic bindings, composed of
little pieces of leather connected by incrustation or paste, pure
Italian bindings; but these were not numerous, especially if compared
with those conceived in the manner of Geoffroy Tory.
One of these latter works is here reproduced from one of the beautiful
books in the collection of M. Dutuit. This copy has the back flat, and
the interlacings of the decoration are most complicated and clever.
[Illustration: Fig. 107.--Binding for Grolier in the collection of M.
Dutuit.]
Grolier got his Levant moroccos through the dealers of Venice, to make
sure of the material he employed.