give her fullest sympathy). 1940 was celebrated, and how! as the 500th
Anniversary of the Invention of Printing. The whole country broke out
in a rash of exhibitions, lectures, special articles and such like,
on poor old Gutenberg about whom practically nothing is known to
begin with, not even that he invented movable type. If he did, he was
only trying to fake manuscript writing and should have been hung as a
forger. I got pretty fed up on the tosh that was being handed out. So,
to even the score, I "discovered" in a garret in Mainz, Germany, the
private diary of Gutenberg's wife (no one but I knew he had one). By
quoting from her diary I showed conclusively that all the credit was
really hers. I had cuts made of the old leather-bound volumes of the
diary (four old volumes from the Harper Medical Library) and a page
of the manuscript (translated _into_ German and written in the lovely
hand of Dr. Otto Fuhrmann). Dr. Herman Püterschein, that infallible
authority on things typographic, wrote a Foreword. It was titled _The
Mainz Diary: New Light on the Invention of Printing_ and 200 copies
went out for Christmas. Then the unexpected happened. Letters began
pouring in showing it was being taken as gospel. Pundits, librarians,
experts in the graphic arts, fell for it hard. My wife threatened to
disown me. Of course the tale hadn't a word of truth in it. I had been
in Mainz and Frankfort a few years before so that the thing started off
with some element of reality. A friend in London gobbled it whole--I
had to send a letter by Clipper to keep him from showing it proudly to
his friends. After all, my yarn had about as much truth in it as most
of the hash that I'd been forced to listen to during the year and I'd
gotten quite fond of Frau Gutenberg. I felt, too, that I'd done my bit
for the cause. Many of the biggest libraries, including the Library of
Congress, had requested and received copies. Ten years from now it will
pop up in some bibliography of a Ph.D. thesis.
I had my fun all right.
But the boys got even with me. A year later, the editor of a well-known
art magazine and his wife, with careful deliberation and much
ingenuity, sold me down the river with a hoax that I gobbled whole. So
we are even and everybody is happy.
Why are we so cracked about a private press? I often wonder myself.
The house smells of printer's ink and type wash. Right now there are
eleven metal-strapped type boxes on the sunporch where the expressman
left them a week ago; and my wife is to have a luncheon tomorrow. Fine
looking mess. I'll get around to them soon. There are piles of printed
signatures of our Christmas book all over the place. The composing room
is crawling with undistributed type. Can hardly work without spilling
it. My pet Vandercook brayer has fallen arches--it was left in the sun
yesterday and its insides turned to soup.
Next morning on my desk I found the proof of our new broadside _Emmer
Jane_ with the drawing at the top beautifully colored by the artist.
It's swell. Presently the messenger brought in the advance copies of
the new _Sonnets_ bound in blue natural-finished cloth stamped in gold,
just as I wanted it. I can hardly wait to get home to show them to my
wife. We must get that new type to use for _The Ghost Ship_. We'll
start it this week-end. How slow the days go. Isn't a private press fun!
_Postscript_ 1951:
Still hard at it. We are older but no wiser. Nowadays the
grand-children come in the back door and call up the composing-room
stairs, "Arthur, may we play type and picture cuts?" They spend hours
at it and I spend hours putting things to rights.
The check-list has grown to 186 books and pamphlets. The work is still
as exciting as ever, though we try to check the fury a bit. The skipper
of the _Golden Hind_ retired in January 1950, which released more time
for the press; being in business always was a nuisance.
We spent the summer doing a first edition of a Mark Twain book for
Harpers--mixed with a lot of farming. For a retirement occupation we
can commend a private press. It keeps up the interest in life.
Offers of work flow in, much more than we care to accept. We are not
in business and we have more projects of our own than we shall ever
complete.
It's fun to get up with the chickens and work together all morning,
spend the afternoon puttering about outdoors, and retire at night dog
tired--what my wife calls "nice tired," no nervous tension.
The _Golden Hind_ is twenty-four years old but her seams are tight and
she manages nicely--who knows, maybe the voyage is only nicely begun.
COMPOSED IN FAIRFIELD TYPES
[Illustration]EDWIN GRABHORN[Illustration]
_The Fine Art of Printing_
An address before the Roxburghe Club of San Francisco at its meeting
in the Allied Arts Guild, Menlo Park, California, May 15, 1933.
Fifty copies printed by Edwin and Robert Grabhorn for members of the
Roxburghe Club, May 15, 1933. Reprinted by permission of the author.
[Illustration] I know of no better way of beginning this talk to you
tonight on PAPER, INK and TYPE than by first sketching a brief outline
of the Art of Printing.
Printing in its childhood was an art. The highest period of any art
is its childhood, because childhood moves by spontaneous inner urge,
not by rules and intellectual bondage that runs all into fixed moulds.
It is an accepted truth that as skill and elaboration creep into
development of an art, simplicity, feeling and beauty decline. The
early printers were not weighed down with rules, formulas and theories
which have smothered us today. With but one font of type, a wooden
frame with a screw attachment and a crude inking device, they have
given us books of strength and beauty that we have never equalled.
We all like to think of the invention of printing as springing
Minerva-like from the brain of man. Printing is, of course, the
combination of paper, type, ink and the press; and these various
elements were some three hundred years in the process of springing.
Paper was the cheap substitute for vellum, and type the substitute for
hand-writing.
All of us are more or less familiar with the invention of printing
and with its God-like first-born, the Gutenberg Bible. Those who have
had the thrill of examining the great 42-line Bible have told us that
it is the most beautiful book ever printed. This is a magnificent
tribute--one that I have never heard contradicted. Just how much of the
beauty of this Bible is due to the art of the illuminator and how much
to the skill of the printer has never been told by those who represent
it to be the most perfect specimen of printing.
A few years ago a book speculator dissected an incomplete copy, selling
the leaves with beautifully hand-illumined initials at twice the price
of those pages without decoration. I hope this speculator lost his
ill-gotten gains in the stock market.
A thing of beauty stands alone, and I know of no fixed law by which we
can judge beauty except through the emotions; and emotions are rather
difficult to tabulate. I, myself, can only contemplate the childhood of
printing with amazement and admiration. In its youth it exhausted every
possibility of type arrangement.
An estimate of the activity of those first wooden frames can only
be guessed at. In Venice alone, as early as 1472, over two million
separate volumes were printed. By the opening of the sixteenth century
the art of printing had spread to every civilized country and the
supply of its raw materials became so great that the process of
cheapening set in.
The first printers had selected as models for their types the beautiful
hand-written books of their day. The second generation of printers
modelled their types from those of the first printers. The illuminator
gave way to the wood-cutter and the fine art of printing became a
science, then a craft, and when William Morris tried to stop its
downward slide, in 1891, it was a trade.
During this downward trip through four centuries, weak attempts to
restore the art of printing to its first high place in the life of man
were made. Benjamin Franklin wrote on the "Improvement of Printing
Backwards," protesting the discontinuance of the tall "f." But man was
not interested in the intangible influence of art as much as he was in
the perfection of the machine.
The ink was hardly dry on the effusions of our modern printing critics,
when the collapse of over-production set in and silenced them, I hope,
permanently.
Writing about modern books in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, Francis Meynell of the Nonesuch Press says: "The
type-setting machines used with as much skill as hand-set type will
give a better result, and in alliance with fast but very perfect
cylinder printing presses, will give this result not to a few, but to
a multitude. It has taken us from the day of 'the book beautiful,' and
given us the day of the beautiful book."
The fast moving cylinder presses of the Nonesuch Press have slowed
up since this was written. And we can thank God that we have some
opportunity for reflection.
One of the modern criticisms of William Morris and the private presses
that he inspired is that too much stress was placed on method. Method
means how a thing is done and how a thing is done is of very vital
importance if we want to give our work durability.
I have said before that it was William Morris who attempted to stop the
downward slide of printing. He was the leader in the revival of what
is known as "modern fine printing." It has been said that Morris was
inspired by a lecture of Emery Walker's on the Golden Age of Printing.
While not denying Walker's position in this revival, we must admit that
there is a vast gulf between talking and doing. Morris's was a very
simple yet positive personality. There were no tints in his make-up.
When asked if he liked colors, his answer: "blue and red," tells us
whole volumes in folio. He had no tolerance for the effeminate printing
of his day. He even scorned the sunny pages of the Italian Renaissance
printers. It is no wonder that his Gothic books, in violent contrast to
the weak old styles and modern type faces of his time--and our time,
too--were startling. I have no doubt that some antiquarian hundreds of
years hence, delving among musty tomes, will find Morris's books still
giants in a land of dwarfs.
Whether you like or dislike Morris's books is of little concern to me.
But what is of vital importance to me as a printer, and should be to
all printers who are endeavoring to print books that will last, is the
honesty of William Morris. Morris knew, because he was a collector of
the earliest printed books, that those early printed books could not
have descended to him, looking as sparkling and vital as the day they
left their makers' hands, without honesty of craftsmanship. It was
this craftsmanship that Morris revived, and that we today will have to
revive again before our books can have any claims to a long life.
Let me briefly describe to you the various processes used in the
making of books, beginning with the paper on which the book is printed.
Morris found no paper being manufactured that was suitable for his
use. It was only after months of experiment and failure, during which
he worked at the paper mill himself, that a satisfactory sheet was
made for him. With the closing of the Kelmscott Press after Morris's
death, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker used his specifications
for this paper at their Doves Press. This mill still manufactures this
paper, and it can be obtained easily enough. But it is not popular with
the printers of today because its texture is so tough, its resistance
to type so great, that we rather choose the short cut to the Royal Road
to Fine Bookmaking, using the many counterfeits with their imitation
deckle edges and their artificial ageing at the mill. We also like
opaqueness in our paper, although transparency is usually a guarantee
of its quality. All-linen-rag quality paper can easily enough be
printed on if dampened first. By lessening the resistance of the paper
through dampening, the type can penetrate its tough fiber, and the
ink thus becomes a part of the paper itself. But by taking the short
cut and not dampening the paper, at least four times the quantity of
pressure and ink must be used. This over-abundance of pressure and ink
still does not penetrate the paper but leaves the ink upon the paper's
surface so that it looks to me as if printed from an etcher's plate.
The excessive amount of ink, because of the heavy varnish used in its
manufacture, has a tendency to shine when dry, producing a luster
that is hard on the eyes. In time a film of oil will encircle each
individual letter, discoloring the paper, and the page will look like
those cheaply printed eighteenth-century books do to us today.
I know of no process in the making of a fine book more difficult of
perfecting than getting the right amount of pressure and ink into the
paper. In hand-made paper there is only an approximate uniformity in
the thickness of the sheets, and these variations can be overcome by
using a hand-press. The sense of touch must be developed until you can
feel the right amount of pressure through the lever. The mechanical
press is so regulated that it cannot control the variations of the
paper's thickness. The right pressure can, of course, be applied to the
average sheet--the heavier and lighter sheets can be sorted out before
printing. However, this is seldom done. The paper is usually sorted
when the finished book is being collated.
I can speak with some authority on the importance of dampening a sheet
of fine paper. Such a process takes lots of time, but if you think the
time not well spent compare a book from the Kelmscott Press with any
of the books of our best machine printers of today. You will see that
decay is already beginning to set in in the machine book. The edges of
the paper will soon turn yellow and the ink begin to spread.
I hesitate to turn from the processes of making a fine book endure
without impressing upon you the importance of using the finest
quality of paper. The paper, and the ink that becomes a part of that
paper, determines the life of the book, just as stones and mortar do
in architecture. No matter how fine the type or how beautiful the
decorations, the book must die if quality be lacking in both paper and
ink.
And now just a few remarks about the binding of a book. Bindings are
the protection for the body of a book. Here permanency decreases as
use increases. Only those books that have escaped usage have come down
to us with their original bindings, except those bound in limp vellum.
Heavy boards encased in leather were the protection of many early
books. The swinging of the heavy covers breaks the hinges of the book,
and this leads to destruction. William Morris revived the use of limp
vellum as a book covering.
Of far more importance than the cover in the making of a fine book is
the gathering and sewing. When the printed sheets are folded a trained
eye should put them together so that pages either under- or over-inked
may be taken out. If there are no extras, then all the light pages can
be put into one book, and the dark in another. If this is done, the
critic will say that the press work is even.
After the book is assembled the sheets are sewn together by hand, using
a strong linen thread. Of course, they can be sewn on a machine, but
you might just as well save that expense by gluing the sheets together.
If you don't believe me, take a machine-sewn book, before it is glued,
pull off the first section, hold it up by the last page and watch the
book fall to pieces. Hand-sewn books are sewn on either cords or tapes.
Of course, you can have cords and tapes on a machine-sewn book, but
they will be false ones, pasted on after the book has been stabbed to
death.
I do not want to give you the impression that I am some sort of John
the Baptist crying in a wilderness of machines. Machines are designed
for special purposes and when we try to use them for a different
purpose from that for which they were intended we fail. You would
think a carpenter who used a machine that was made to drive nails in
an orange box unbalanced if he tried to adjust that machine to build
a house. The delicately adjusted printing press that Francis Meynell
idealizes was designed for producing our ephemeral printing.
A machine cannot create--it can only assist, directed by the mind and
imagination. The more that is left to the machine, the worse the work.
The machine can arrive at perfection, perfection that is cold and dead
and mechanical. And it is this cold and dead perfection that brings me
to the beauty of the book of today.
I would say that "Post-Modern" Fine Printing began in America with
Bruce Rogers, at the plant of William Rudge. It was Bruce Rogers'
books that have influenced American and English printers more than
any other recent single force. It was the "charm" and finish of this
man's work that none of us escaped. During the years that Bruce Rogers
was designing special editions at the Riverside Press there were few
collectors of his books. As late as 1920, I bought some of these books
from the publishers. They had been in stock nearly twenty years! Among
them was "The Song of Roland" at the publisher's price. When I first
started printing I was already an admirer and collector of these
Riverside Press limited editions.
Now William Rudge was a better business man than a printer. He
recognized the ability of Rogers and engaged him. Then things began to
happen to our Fine Art of Printing. The typographical designer came
into fashion, the machine was glorified and we all became theorists.
Printing was aimed at suitability. The scholar and critic displaced the
master craftsman and the advertising artist was added by way of variety.
Each new type face, faithfully re-cut by the aid of the pantograph and
resurrected from our admittedly worst periods of printing, was eagerly
bought by our typographical experts. The printers who had been quietly
producing books, trying to make them a little better than necessary,
fell into the hands of the publisher and the publicity agent. And the
publisher announced that the next limited edition of 1600 copies was
completely over-subscribed--the poor printer got one-third of what you
had to pay. It was a Wonderland, indeed, until Alice woke up, and the
printer was left with all the cards, and they were all blank.
I am very glad it all happened. I would go through any form of hysteria
again, if we could produce another _Leaves of Grass_. Since I am
going to talk about type, I know of nothing better than to relate our
experience in printing Walt Whitman's masterpiece, for it has shown me
the folly of theory and intellect in art.
We accepted this undertaking with enthusiasm. Here was an opportunity
to prove that we could print a book. The first deposit had no more than
been spent when the publishers announced it as the finest book to be
printed in America, and off we started on the wrong track.
Well, the finest book had to have the finest type and the finest type
was the latest type. And it had to be a folio in size, because for One
Hundred Dollars you had to get a folio. We bought one thousand pounds
of the finest type; 18 point Lutetia, fresh from a new designer in
Holland. And we hired two printers to set this bright new type and
when it was all set, we pulled a proof and started to put grass into
it--pale green grass, and it looked like grass and we pulled it out and
tried again. Well, every time we tried that bright new type it didn't
look right. So we dug up some of the latest theories about suitability,
tried again, but it was no use. The brain told us one thing and our
eyes another.
Meanwhile, one thousand pounds of bright new type and months of labor
were tied up with strings and the Master Craftsman was getting worried.
He went to specialists for advice. They said: "Try this new initial or
this new picture," and the Master Craftsman went back to his shop and
bowed his head.
Then his tired eyes lighted on a dusty case of type, designed by the
artist Goudy but the critics had condemned it to the graveyard. Wearily
the Craftsman dug it up and set a page of Whitman in it. Then he pulled
a proof and Lo! He saw something that the machine had discarded; he saw
strength: he saw the strong, vigorous lines of Whitman, born of the
soil, without grass. He saw what he had heard whispered before. He saw
strong, vigorous, simple printing--printing like mountains, rocks and
trees, but not like pansies, lilacs and valentines; printing that came
from the soil and was not refined in the class-room.
And the printer knew that the limited edition was not a racket as long
as he had honesty and sincerity, and reverence for the best traditions
of his craft.
[Illustration]HOLBROOK JACKSON[Illustration]
THE TYPOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM MORRIS
From _The Printing of Books_ by Holbrook Jackson. Copyright 1938 by
Cassell & Company, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
First read as a paper, at the William Morris Centenary Dinner of the
Double Crown Club, London, May 2, 1934.
William Morris is an ironic figure. His achievements not only missed
their mark, but hit marks he was not aiming at. His printing is no
exception. The masterpieces of the Kelmscott Press which he aimed at
making "useful pieces of goods" were typographical curiosities from
birth, and so far removed from the common way of readers that they have
become models of what a book should not be.
He was a Bibliophile, or more exactly, a typophile whose affections
became unruly in the presence of decorated incunabula, and, although
he was outwardly correct towards pure printing, his heart was not
there. According to Sir Sydney Cockerell he flirted with the idea of
a folio edition of _The Earthly Paradise_, "profusely illustrated by
Sir Edward Burne-Jones," a quarter of a century before the inception
of the Kelmscott Press. His personal taste was much the same then as
later, although he continued to pay homage to good as distinct from
fine printing. It was the "essence of my undertaking," he said, "to
produce books which it would be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of
printing and arrangement of type." Thus inspired by the example of "the
calligraphy of the Middle Ages, and the earlier printing which took its
place," and in spite of his passion for decorated books he observed
that the early printed books "were always beautiful by force of the
mere typography, even without the added ornament with which many of
them are so lavishly supplied."
Much has been made of the emphasis he laid upon the book as an organic
assembly of paper, type, and binding. But although few printers or
publishers in the nineteenth century had insisted upon the excellence
of these ingredients, as he did, the architectonic principle had never
been wholly ignored. But in the main it was unconsciously observed.
Deliberation is evident in the construction of the Pickering books,
in the Keepsakes and Table Books of the thirties and forties, in the
illustrated books of the sixties, and the later productions of the
Daniel Press; and, if we may leave England for a moment, in such
convenient publications as those of Bernhard Tauchnitz, where there is
rectitude to satisfy the demands of the most austere of functionalists.
It was not, then, the architectonics of the Kelmscott books which
evoked a typographical revolution. Nor was it the pursuit of beauty
which always haunted Morris's intentions. "I began printing books," he
said, "in the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim
to beauty." Many printers and publishers of the time would have claimed
as much. Bad taste in the arts and crafts is invariably the result of
beauty-mongering, and the more costly books of the nineteenth century
are littered with beauty from cover to cover.
Neither was it originality. Morris never sought to be original. He was
a revivalist, and all his work is derivative. There is nothing new even
in that, for all the arts and crafts are derivative, and originality is
apt to be a myth and often a nuisance. Morris was even less original
than many other earnest innovators, and the Kelmscott books are
derivatives twice removed. They are modern variations of the early
printed books of northern Europe, as they in turn were but mechanical
imitations of the manuscripts which preceded the invention of movable
types.