medical diagnosis. That a person cannot read or write is now a
sufficient criterion of mental defect; and this is so in a sense which
would have been utterly false of Britain or the United States alike
when Charles Dickens wrote an uncharitable record of his transatlantic
itinerary. Until the middle of the nineteenth century there was
everywhere a large underprivileged class cut off from the possession of
books and without the incentive to purchase reading matter....
By attaching a cast of the hand-set type to cylinders it was possible
to take advantage of the introduction of steam power with considerable
economy of time entailed in running off the printed sheet; but it was
impossible to reap the harvest of this economy while it was still
necessary to set type by manual extraction from a box of each die for
a letter, cypher or punctuation mark. Also, the manufacturer of paper
from rag was a relatively costly process by modern standards; and
the discovery of a cheaper source of raw material was a precondition
of expanding trade in the printed word. Rag, be it said, is simply
woven fibre of cotton or flax; and any vegetable fibre is good enough
for the work of the wasp. It was therefore a great advance, when it
was possible to use the by-products of the lumber camps for paper
manufacture. Wood pulp as a source of paper came into its own in the
eighties, though its use goes back to a German patent about 1840.
In 1857 Routledge had introduced, as an alternative source of raw
material, esparto grass from Spain and North Africa; and there had
been notable advances in the mechanics of paper production during the
preceding fifty years.
In 1803 the French printer Didot brought into England a device which
took advantage of steam power by running wet pulp on to a moving,
endless belt of wire mesh through which the water drained off. It could
run off in a day six miles of paper of uniform width. In 1821 Crompton
invented the process of drying by steam-heated rollers. Between
1803 and 1815 König in Germany and Cowper in Britain had perfected
power-driven machinery for printing off a continuous roll of paper from
cylinders carrying the type cast. The four-cylinder machine patented
by Cowper and Applegarth in 1827 ran off 5,000 sheets per hour of the
London _Times_ simultaneously printed on both sides. The Walter Rotary
of 1866 appears to have been the first cylinder machine to print on
both sides of an unwinding roll of paper with a power-driven mechanism
to cut the sheets, previously fed to the machine by hand. By that time
a cheaper source of paper was available.
The advent of cheap paper accommodated the purchase of reading matter
to the purse of the poorer classes in the community; but it did not
bring into their lives a daily stimulus to read. While type-setting
remained a manual operation, the maintenance of a daily press was beset
by many difficulties and possible only because it did not as yet aspire
to the topical immediacy which could coax a large semi-literate section
of the population into the habit of daily reading. What made possible a
truly popular press was an invention thus described by McMurtrie:
Setting extensive manuscripts by hand is, of course, a very slow and
laborious process, and as the printing industry grew in extent and
importance it was only natural that efforts should be made to devise a
means of setting type mechanically at greater speed and less cost....
The failures were myriad. All efforts to take the foundry type used
by the compositor and set it up mechanically came to naught. Finally,
however, Ottmar Mergenthaler invented a machine which, by the action
of a keyboard somewhat resembling that of a type-writer, assembled
not type but matrices and, when a whole line was set and spaced, cast
this line in one piece, or "slug," of type metal. This machine, which
was first put into practical use in 1886, and appropriately christened
a "linotype," gave a revolutionary impetus to the printing industry
... as with all new inventions of importance it was expected that
thousands of compositors would be thrown out of work. But, again as
usual, the industry grew so fast that more men were employed than
before.
This device is not the only machine which sets type. On its heels came
the monotype which employs the pianola principle for power transmission
and is for some purposes preferable. The technical advantages of one or
the other are irrelevant to our theme. What makes printing by linotype
an outstanding achievement of nineteenth-century technology is that it
permits type-setting to keep pace with the tempo of topical affairs at
a time when a railroad schedule co-ordinated by telegraphy has made man
minute-conscious for the first time in history. It is at once a new
goad to the new social discipline of punctuality and a new means of
satisfying an appetite for sensation among a section of the population
not as yet attuned to habitual reading....
That the Moslem world of Omar Khayyam and Alkarismi transmitted so
many of the benefits of Chinese civilisation to the West, reaping
themselves no advantage from the invention of printing, illustrates
a truth which Marxist dogma ignores. Fruitful innovation is, as the
Marxist rightly asserts, the result of interplay between human needs
and natural resources; but the triple formula of means, motive and
opportunity suffices to account for the vagaries of man's history only
if we recognise the inherent inertia of human motivation. Beliefs do
not come from heaven; but they have a remarkable tenacity in the teeth
of worldly profit, a tenacity forcefully illustrated by two facets of
the Moslem creed. In the racy, though none the less scholarly, account
of the history of printing already cited several times in this chapter,
McMurtrie states:
The Koran forbade games of chance.... The Koran had been given to the
Moslems in written form, and writing, therefore, was the only means
by which it might ever be transmitted. To this day the Koran has
never been printed from type in any Mohammedan country; it is always
reproduced by lithography.
One consequence of this is that Moslem countries, and African
communities which have received their script from Moslem missionaries,
suffer from the educational disability of a cursive style which is
ill-suited to easy reading. If we are tempted to ascribe this to
defective hereditary equipment of peoples whose culture was the
inspiration of Europe in the Middle Ages, we may well reflect with
moral and intellectual benefit to ourselves on the complacency
with which western scholars disown the constructive tasks of
language-planning at a time when scientific journals embodying new
discoveries are appearing in twenty or more languages.
Statistics which convey a clear picture of the mounting volume of
printed matter issued annually during the four centuries of European
printing are hard to come by. The number of editions printed in England
increased from 13 in 1510 to 219 in 1580, to about 600 a year in
the first two decades of the nineteenth century and 12,379 in 1913.
Unhappily, an edition is a grossly misleading index of production,
even of new books. What we call a modern best seller signifies a first
edition of over 25,000 copies. In the fifteenth century, the average
edition was about 300 copies. Till the middle of the eighteenth, an
edition rarely exceeded 600; but there were notable exceptions. There
were 34 editions of the _Adagia_ of Erasmus, each of a thousand copies,
in the first few decades of the sixteenth century, and 24,000 copies
of his _Colloquia Familiaria_ came out in the same author's lifetime.
Of Luther's tract _To the Christian Nobility_ 4,000 copies were sold
within five days. The Bible Society, founded in 1711 by Baron von
Canstein in Halle, printed within a short space of time 340,000 copies
of the New Testament and 480,000 copies of the Scriptures as a whole.
The British and Foreign Bible Society, founded in 1804 by Thomas
Charles of Bala as an incident in his crusade against Welsh illiteracy,
was responsible for the issue of 237 million copies in the three
decades 1900-1930....
* * * * *
So far, we have taken no cognisance of the formative role of the master
printer _vis-à-vis_ the culture of contemporary western civilisation.
We shall now try to get into focus the consequences of something quite
new in the history of our species, the emergence of a social personnel
with a vested interest in the enlightenment of mankind. Of such was the
inventor of the first saleable electrical device, the originator of the
very names positive and negative in their now most common technical
context, a man who rendered signal service for his country at the court
of France and put his signature to the Declaration of Independence,
the man whose last will and testament begins "I, Benjamin Franklin,
Printer...."
At first, the master printer was also a publisher, till the
trade began to expand a book-seller as well, and sometimes, like
Caxton, translator or author. Nor is it surprising that printing and
bookselling still preserve the professional outlook of the mediaeval
craftsman far more than any other contemporary commercial undertaking,
with _mores_ peculiar to themselves. Today, as throughout the past four
centuries, there is still a place for the small-scale high-quality
firm in printing, publishing or bookselling alike. Throughout the five
centuries of printing from movable type the small proprietor has ever
been the ally of novel thought; and the book trade still thrives on
the free expression of views which are anathema to big business, oil
politicians and Wall Street tycoons. To say this is not to say that
every publisher, every partner in a printing firm or every back-street
book-seller is in the vanguard of liberal sentiment and fertile
cerebration; but to be blind to their contribution to our common
culture is to be blind to one of the burning issues of our age. Even
to say that the publisher, the printer or the book-seller is always
ahead of his business colleagues in joining the bandwagon of progress
is to dispel a miasma of moral indignation which distorts our view of a
decision contemporary man has to make wisely or incur the prospect of a
dark age of superstition and authority....
[Illustration: Colophons. Ruth S. Granniss]
Copyright 1930 by _The Colophon_. Reprinted by permission of the author.
The late printer-scholar, Theodore Low De Vinne, was wont to exclaim
with regret over a puzzling bookish question, "Alas, bibliography
is not an exact science!" Since his day, what with the learned
publications of bibliographical societies (first and foremost--that
of England), with such scholarly independent productions as Ronald B.
McKerrow's _Introduction to Bibliography_ and some of its followers,
and with such undertakings as the _Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke_--not
to speak of the many masterly library catalogues and bibliographies
which these late years have brought us--we are almost tempted to
reverse his dictum. We have all these, added to the wealth of pioneer
writings of book-lovers like Richard de Bury, Gabriel Naude, Guillaume
François De Bure, Gabriel Peignot, Thomas Frognall Dibdin, and the more
scientific but no more (nor less) book-loving Panzer, Hain, Brunet,
Renouard, Bradshaw, Haebler, Proctor, Claudin, and our own Wilberforce
Eames. We pause for breath, but have only picked a few random names
from the long roll of those who have loved and worked for the arts that
go into the making, and the science that goes into the understanding
of a printed book--the vehicle which must continue to preserve and
to carry down through the ages the results of men's thoughts and the
records of their deeds.
All this is as it should be, but of late, and especially in connection
with the present vogue for collecting the works of living authors, a
certain quality (shall we call it self-consciousness) has crept in,
an undue stressing of small technicalities, and we blush to confess
a confused feeling of sympathy for the modern book-hunter, who is
having so much of his fun taken away from him by neat little textbooks
and articles, bristling with allusions to "points," "right copies,"
"firsts" and the like (with the inevitable quotation marks) and
filled with weighty questions of dollars and pounds--the seemingly
all-important matter of the investment value of our treasures. This
surely is not the fine frenzy which possessed Charles Lamb when
he wrote: "Do you remember the brown suit which you made to hang
upon you, till all your friends cried 'Shame upon you!' It grew so
threadbare--and all because of that folio 'Beaumont and Fletcher,'
which you dragged home late at night from Barker's in Covent Garden. Do
you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds
to the purchase, and had not come to a determination till it was near
ten o'clock of the Saturday night, when you set off from Islington,
fearing you should be too late. And when the old book-seller with some
grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was
setting bedwards), lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures, and
when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as cumbersome, and when
you presented it to me, and when we were exploring the perfectness of
it (_collating_ you called it), and while I was repairing some of the
loose leaves with paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be
left till daybreak--was there no pleasure in being a poor man!"
Where there is much smoke, however, there is fire, and it is assuredly
good that this interest in bibliographical things should have swept the
country, and incidentally that the joys of the bibliomaniac and the
bibliophile are being experienced today by many more than the elect few
of the past, on whom we love to dwell. But if we moderns are doomed to
buy our first editions ready labelled and to have our equations worked
out in advance, if a fine copy must be termed immaculate and the back
of a book must be its spine, etc., etc., ad infinitum, let us start
with the right premises, and hold on to the terms which were proverbial
before we were born. Which brings us to our point--What is a Colophon?
The question would seem a reflection upon the intelligence of the
average book-lover, at this late day, were it not that there seems to
be a growing tendency, shared (even instigated) by lexicographers, to
mis-define the word, or to use it out of its truly bibliographical
and philological meaning. To book-lovers and collectors of even the
preceding generation, acquainted as they were with the niceties
of their vocation, or avocation, the suggestion of more than one
signification would have seemed well-nigh an insult. Perhaps it is
even because we are living in this late day that heresies have crept
in. After all, it is nearly a quarter of a century since the Caxton
Club of Chicago brought out _An Essay on Colophons_, by Dr. Alfred W.
Pollard, later Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, whose
word on all bibliographical matters carries the highest authority--the
Club thereby performing one of those great services to students of
bibliography for which it and similar institutions are acclaimed by an
appreciative, if limited, circle. Perhaps the very limits of the circle
are accountable for lack of knowledge, and it may be that a book,
printed nearly twenty-five years ago in an edition of some two hundred
and fifty copies, may never have come within the ken of a writer on
bookish things today--even of an earnest one. But that is just where
our quarrel begins--ought anyone to write on colophons, or on anything
else, without some knowledge of at least the chief literature of the
subject, and should the next man, and the next, be allowed to hand on
an error, or perhaps a misconception, without a thought of the original
sources of information? For that is just what has been happening in
America in this matter, and what it seems must also be occurring in
greater ones. There is plenty of thorough scholarship here, scholarship
that shrinks from no drudgery--then why is it that so much hasty,
slipshod work is allowed to pass?
But we were speaking of colophons--a word which, to many people who
trouble with it at all, seems to mean almost anything,--for instance
the mark or device of a printer or publishing firm, placed anywhere
at random in a book, possibly bearing a motto or a name. Indeed, this
is the signification which has frequently been given to it of late in
print and in common speech by people who should have known better,
and whom a little thought or a little more research would have taught
better. For instance, a publisher's assistant suggested that a given
place upon the title page is the proper location for the colophon; a
librarian wrote to request a copy of the "colophon of the Grolier Club"
to add to a collection; a book-trade magazine issued an article on
devices or trade-marks of publishers of today, appearing on the title
pages of their publications, and dubbed them all colophons; a college
professor used the term in like manner; and all this occurred within a
period of a few months.
The only protest to be raised in print seems to be that of Leonard L.
Mackall, in his dependable "Notes for Bibliophiles," a department of
the _Herald Tribune's_ Sunday magazine, _Books_. In the issue of March
17, 1929, he wrote: "Right here we must call special attention to the
fact that, some modern ignorant or careless misuse to the contrary,
notwithstanding, a colophon is not really a colophon at all unless
it appears at the end of the book. Most certainly the word does not
properly mean merely a publisher's device wherever used, as stated in a
[recent] anonymous illustrated article."
No one has heeded him, however, and my own like-minded objections were
met with the advice to look in the dictionary, and then the blow fell!
It is true that some dictionaries, but by no means all, countenance
this usage of colophon as a device upon a title page. Before quoting
their definitions, let us look at the Oxford English Dictionary, where
we find:
1. "Finishing stroke"; "crowning touch," _obs._
2. The inscription or device, sometimes pictorial or emblematic,
formerly placed at the end of a book or manuscript, and containing the
title, the scribe's or printer's name, date and place of printing,
etc. Hence, _from title page to colophon_.
It may be noted that, of the various examples (1774-1874) quoted by the
Oxford English Dictionary, not one refers to the colophon as placed
elsewhere than at the end of the book.
Our Century Dictionary is sound on the subject, but we have in Funk &
Wagnalls' Standard Dictionary:
1. An inscription or other device formerly placed at the end of books
and writings, often showing the title, writer's or printer's name and
date and place of printing.
2. An emblematic device adopted by a publisher and impressed on his
books, usually on the title page of each volume (accompanied by an
illustration of the printer's mark of Nicolas Jenson, inscribed:
"Colophon of Nicolas Jenson" [1481]).
The phrase "usually on the title page" (not in the Oxford English
Dictionary) seems to us absolutely wrong, and not to be countenanced
for a moment by bookmen who have proper regard for the correct usage of
words.
The corresponding definition in late editions of Webster's Dictionary
is:
An emblem, usually a device assumed by the publishing-house, placed
either on the title page, or at the end of a book.
In what subtle way this secondary and inadequate definition has crept
into American usage we do not know, and we plead earnestly for its
abandonment.
In the encyclopedias consulted, there is nothing disturbing, the
definition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, written by Dr. Pollard,
being especially clear and concise. It runs in part as follows:
... a final paragraph in some manuscripts and many early printed
books, giving particulars as to authorship, date and place of
production, and sometimes expressing the thankfulness of the author,
scribe or printer on the completion of his task ... the importance of
these final paragraphs slowly diminished, and the information they
gave was gradually transferred to the title page. Complete title pages
bearing the date and name of the publishers are found in most books
printed after 1520, and the final paragraph, if retained at all, was
gradually reduced to information as to the printer and date. From
the use of the word in the sense of a "finishing stroke" (from the
story that the final charge of the cavalry of Colophon was always
decisive) such a final paragraph as has been described is called by
bibliographers a "colophon," but this name for it is quite possibly
not earlier than the eighteenth century.
Let us turn from general works to those specifically bibliographical.
In his _Introduction to Bibliography_,[2] Dr. McKerrow writes: "In the
early days of printing, the end of the book was the normal place for
the printer's name and the place and date of printing to appear. The
history of the colophon is merely that of the gradual transference of
this information to the title page. When this was complete the colophon
was as a rule of no use and it was abandoned."
Later, among his cataloguing instructions we find: "A colophon should
always be noticed, if there is one. It is also, I think, desirable to
record the occurrence of a printer's device (even without a verbal
imprint) at the end of a book, as this often appears to take the place
of a colophon."
Iolo Williams' _Elements of Book-Collecting_[3] contains this
paragraph: "In the earliest printed books the title page's functions
were performed by the colophon, a word which is a transliteration of
the Greek, a summit or finishing stroke. The colophon is put, not near
the beginning of the book, like the title page, but at the end, and
it usually takes the form of a statement that here ends such-and-such
a book, written by so-and-so, printed by so-and-so at such-and-such a
place and date. The use of the colophon has been revived in certain
finely-printed modern books, but such modern volumes usually contain
both a title page and a colophon."
Though not quite as satisfying, the following allusion in Van Hoesen
and Walter's _Bibliography_[4] should be quoted, as occurring in a
modern American treatise on the subject: "The early printers used
the colophon at the end of the book instead of a title page, and the
colophon is still used to indicate the printing firm in cases where it
is not part of the publishing firm given on the title page."
These are the latest printed words that we have noticed. Suffice it to
say that we have nowhere found in earlier important manuals anything
but the (to us) proper explanation of the term. In other words, we
gather from important sources that, while a colophon may include or
even take the form of a printer's mark or device, such a mark, placed
upon a title page, is not a colophon.
Aroused by the dictionary findings, and discovering those American
students of bibliography whom I consulted to be in agreement with me,
I wrote to Dr. Pollard, as to a court of final appeal, to inquire
if he considered it meticulous to object to the intrusion of this
illogical trade definition which some dictionaries and many people are
giving us. His answer, which I am allowed to quote, seems definite and
wise enough to carry conviction, coming as it does from the admitted
authority on the subject: "If a sufficient number of people misuse a
word, Dictionaries have to record the wrong use as well as the right,
as in the case of _hectic_ and crowds of other words. But the misuse
of the word _colophon_ as a synonym for the printer's mark or device,
without regard to position, has not yet gone as far as this and should
be strenuously resisted. By standard use as well as by etymology, the
word means the crowning stroke, or finishing touch, to a book or part
of a book, and it must come at the end of the book, or part of a book,
rightly to be given this title.