post-war typography in Europe and the United States, by Oliver Simon
and Julius Rodenberg. Copyright 1928 by Peter Davies, Ltd., London,
and Harper and Brothers. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
In our enthusiasm for the spirit we are often unjust to the letter.
Inward and outward, substance and form are not easily separated. In
many circumstances of life and for the vast majority of human beings
they constitute an indissoluble unity. Substance conditions form; but
form no less fatally conditions substance. Indeed, the outward may
actually create the inward, as when the practice of religious rites
creates religious faith, or the commemoration of the dead revives, or
even calls into existence, the emotions to which the ceremonial gives
symbolical expression.
There are other cases, however, in which spirit seems not to be
so closely dependent on letter, in which the quality of the form
does not directly affect the quality of the substance. The sonnets
of Shakespeare remain the sonnets of Shakespeare even in the most
abominable edition. Nor can the finest printing improve their quality.
The poetical substance exists independently of the visible form in
which it is presented to the world. But though, in this case, the
letter is powerless to make or mar the spirit which it symbolizes, it
is not for that reason to be despised as mere letter, mere form, mere
negligible outside. Every outside has a corresponding inwardness. The
inwardness of letters does not happen to be literature; but that is not
to say that they have no inwardness at all. Good printing cannot make a
bad book good, nor bad printing ruin a good book. But good printing can
create a valuable spiritual state in the reader, bad printing a certain
spiritual discomfort. The inwardness of letters is the inwardness of
any piece of visual art regarded simply as a thing of beauty. A volume
of the Penny Classics may give us the sonnets of Shakespeare in their
entirety; and for that we may be duly grateful. But it cannot at the
same time give us a work of visual art. In a finely printed edition
we have Shakespeare's sonnets _plus_ the lovely equivalent of, say a
Persian rug or a piece of Chinese porcelain. The pleasure we should
derive from bowl or carpet is added to that which the poetry gives us.
At the same time our minds are sensitized by the contemplation of the
simple visual beauty of the letters: they are made more susceptible of
receiving the other and more complex beauties, all the intellectual
and spiritual content, of the verse. For our sensations, our feelings
and ideas do not exist independently of one another, but form, as it
were, the constituent notes of what is either a discord or a harmony.
The state of mind produced by the sight of beautiful letters is in
harmony with that created by the reading of good literature. Their
beauty can even compensate us, in some degree, for what we suffer from
bad literature. They can give us intense pleasure, as I discovered
in China, even when we do not understand what they signify. For what
astounding elegances and subtleties of form stare out in gold or
lampblack from the shop-fronts and the hanging scarlet signs of a
Chinese street! What does it matter if the literary spirit expressed by
these strange symbols is only "Fried Fish and Chips," or "A Five Guinea
Suit for Thirty Shillings"? The letters have a value of their own
apart from what they signify, a private inwardness of graphic beauty.
The Chinese themselves, for whom the Fish-and-Chips significance is
no secret, are the most ardent admirers of this graphic beauty. Fine
writing is valued by them as highly as fine painting. The writer is an
artist as much respected as the sculptor or the potter.
Writing is dead in Europe; and even when it flourished, it was
never such a finely subtle art as among the Chinese. Our alphabet
has only six and twenty letters, and when we write, the same forms
must constantly be repeated. The result is, inevitably, a certain
monotonousness in the aspect of the page--a monotonousness enhanced
by the fact that the forms themselves are, fundamentally, extremely
simple. In Chinese writing, on the other hand, the ideographs are
numbered by thousands and have none of the rigid, geometrical
simplicity that characterizes European letters. The rich flowing
brushwork is built up into elaborate forms, each form the symbol of a
word, distinct and different. Chinese writing is almost the artistic
image of thought itself, free, various, unmonotonous. Even in the
age of hand-writing, the European could never hope to create, by
means of his few and simple signs, an art of calligraphy comparable
to the Chinese. Printing has rendered the Chinese beauty yet more
unrealizable. Where the Chinese freely painted we must be content with
reproducing geometrical patterns. Pattern making is a poorer, less
subtle art than painting. But it is still an art. By some one who
understands his business the printed page can be composed into patterns
almost as satisfyingly beautiful as those of the carpet or the brocade.
The problem which confronts the contemporary printer may be briefly
stated as follows: to produce beautiful and modern print-patterns by
means of labour-saving machinery. There have been numerous attempts in
recent years to improve the quality of printing. But of these attempts
too many have been made in the wrong spirit. Instead of trying to
exploit modern machinery, many artistic printers have rejected it
altogether and reverted to the primitive methods of an earlier age.
Instead of trying to create new forms of type and decoration, they have
imitated the styles of the past. This prejudice in favour of hand-work
and ancient decorative forms was the result of an inevitable reaction
against the soulless ugliness of nineteenth-century industrialism.
Machines were producing beastliness. It was only natural that sensitive
men should have wished to abandon the use of machines and to return to
the artistic conventions in vogue before the development of machinery.
It has become obvious that the machine is here to stay. Whole armies
of William Morrises and Tolstoys could not now expel it. Even in
primitive India it has proved itself too strong for those who would,
with Gandhi, resist its encroachments. The sensible thing to do is not
to revolt against the inevitable, but to use and modify it, to make it
serve your purposes. Machines exist; let us then exploit them to create
beauty--a modern beauty, while we are about it. For we live in the
twentieth century; let us frankly admit it and not pretend that we live
in the fifteenth. The work of the backward-looking hand-printers may be
excellent in its way; but its way is not the contemporary way. Their
books are often beautiful, but with a borrowed beauty expressive of
nothing in the world in which we happen to live. They are also, as it
happens, so expensive, that only the very rich can afford to buy them.
The printer who makes a fetish of hand-work and medieval craftsmanship,
who refuses to tolerate the machine or to make any effort to improve
the quality of its output, thereby condemns the ordinary reader to a
perpetuity of ugly printing. As an ordinary reader, who cannot afford
to buy handmade books, I object to the archaizing printer. It is only
from the man with the machine that I can hope for any amelioration of
my lot as a reader.
To his credit be it spoken, the man with the machine has done his duty.
He has set himself to improve the sordid typographical surroundings in
which the impecunious reader was so long condemned to pass his life.
He has shown that cheap books need not necessarily be ugly, and that
machinery directed by a judicious mind can do as well as, or much
better than, the hand of an uninspired craftsman. There are publishers
in business today whose seven-and-sixpennies, regarded as typography,
are worth a guinea apiece. (What they are worth as literature is
another question.) There are a dozen Presses producing fine work at
moderate prices. The men behind the machines have used their brains.
Some of our excellent machine-printers are still, it is true, too fond
of using decorations borrowed from the past, and types that savour of
another age than ours. So long as our sense of period remains as strong
as it is, so long as we retain our love of the quaint and its more
modern equivalent, the "amusing," this tendency to substitute pastiche
for original creation is bound to persist. There is an incessant
demand for the antique: we should not be too hard on the printers who
supply it. If they are sinning, they are at least sinning in company.
Let the architects and painters, the interior decorators, and the
theatrical producers throw the first stone. There are pastichers among
the printers, just as there are pastichers among the professors of
every art. But there are also more original men, who are prepared to
encourage modern decorators and to use types that are elegant and
striking without being affectedly archaic.
With this last phrase I may seem to be damning the moderns with
the faintest of praise. But the truth is that Typography is an art in
which violent revolutions can scarcely, in the nature of things, hope
to be successful. A type of revolutionary novelty may be extremely
beautiful in itself; but, for the creatures of habit that we are, its
very novelty tends to make it illegible, at any rate to begin with.
I know a rather eccentric German typographical reformer, for whom
legibility is the greatest enemy, the infamous thing that must at
all costs be crushed. We read, he argues, too easily. Our eyes slide
over the words, and the words, in consequence, mean nothing to us. An
illegible type makes us take trouble. It compels us to dwell on each
separate word: we have time, while we are deciphering it, to suck
out its whole significance. Putting his theory into practice, this
reformer had designed a set of letters so strangely unlike those with
which the typographical practice of generations has made us familiar,
that I had to pore over a simple English sentence as though it were
Russian or Arabic. My friend was perhaps justified in thinking that we
read too much and too easily. But his remedy, it seems to me, was the
wrong one. It is the author's business to make reading less facile, not
the printer's. If the author concentrated more matter into the same
number of sentences, his readers would have to read more carefully
than they do at present. An illegible type cannot permanently achieve
the same result, for the simple reason that it does not permanently
remain illegible. If we are prepared to make the effort to read until
the novel forms have become familiar, the illegible type will come to
be perfectly legible. In practice, however, we are reluctant to make
this effort. We demand that typographical beauty shall be combined
with immediate legibility. Now, in order that it may be immediately
legible, a type must be similar to the types with which we are
familiar. Hence, the practical printer, who has to live by selling
his wares to a large public, is debarred from making revolutionary
innovations in the designs of his type. He must content himself with
refining on the ordinary, accepted types of commerce. If he has great
typographical reforms in view, he must proceed towards them by degrees,
modifying the currently accepted designs gradually, so as not to repel
the ordinary lazy reader, who is frightened by the idea of making
any unnecessary effort. In other arts, where form and substance are
directly associated, revolution is possible, may even be necessary. But
the outward form of literature is not typography. The association, in
a book, of literature with one of the graphic arts is in the nature of
an accident. The printer who would at one stroke revolutionize his art
frightens away readers, for whom the idea of revolution in literature,
or in any one of the graphic arts that is independent of literature,
has no terrors. The reason for this is obvious. People buy books for
the sake of the literature contained in them and not, primarily,
as specimens of graphic art. They demand of the typography that it
shall be beautiful, yes; but also that it shall give them immediate
and unhampered access to the literature with which it is associated.
Printers may desire to be revolutionary; but unless they can afford
to sell no books, they are compelled by the force of circumstances to
adopt a cautious policy of gradual reform. The Communist must either
turn Liberal or retire from business.
MERLE ARMITAGE
NOTES ON
MODERN PRINTING
From Notes on Modern Printing by Merle Armitage. Copyright 1945
by William E. Rudge's Sons. Reprinted by permission of author and
publisher.
HOW DOES ONE DESIGN A BOOK? I CONCLUDE AS I BEGAN WITH A FEW GENERAL
IDEAS AND SUGGESTIONS:
1. Allow the subject of a book to determine its design and format.
2. Design a book for effortless reading, utilizing the format to
enhance or interpret the text.
3. Use the prime materials--type, paper and space--to achieve your
results. Meaningless decorations disclose the designer's poverty of
invention.
4. Simplicity is the best policy.
5. Make no attempt to design every page ... let type and space have
their natural rhythm.
6. Understand the text ... know your primary aims ... let form follow
function.
7. Type ornaments have their place ... but an ornament designed for
general use has no particular significance.
8. A brilliantly designed book can't save a dull or mediocre text.
9. A page of type can be a thing of unique, arresting beauty.
10. Mere type legibility is to a book as mere shelter is to
architecture.
11. Book design should be a synonym for the arrangement and
integration of materials--paper, binding, illustration, type and space.
My friends of the musical world believe that music is the most
important thing in life. Painters are absolutely certain that
the reformation will come only through an understanding of art.
Acquaintances among the engineers are sure that by technological
development alone can emancipation come to man, while scientists
rightfully take the credit for progress in the contemporary world.
Friends in industry insist that mass production is the great panacea.
The photographers can prove that photography makes the pictorial
painters unnecessary, and the writers I have encountered are convinced
that the written word is the one route to world unity.
However, the painter ... the musician ... the engineer ... the
photographer ... the industrialist ... the scientist ... and the writer
have a rendezvous with the book. Here, the knowledge, the romance,
the fiction, the facts, the speculations, the opinions, and the
accomplishments of the world are made permanently articulate.
This is our day, our time, our environment. We can make a statement,
through the employment of design, that is valid and true ... not
divorced from tradition, but using the great works of the past as a
springboard toward new horizons!
COMPOSED IN GILL SANS TYPES
Benjamin Franklin:
PRINTER and PUBLISHER
JOHN T. WINTERICH
From _Early American Books and Printing_ by John T. Winterich.
Copyright 1935 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Reprinted by permission of
Curtis Brown, Ltd., agent.
Josiah Franklin was reared a dyer in the village of Ecton in
Northamptonshire, but soon after his arrival in America, about 1682,
he foresaw a greater future in the trade of tallow-chandler and
soap-boiler. It was a calling which seems humble enough in a day that
has evolved such mouth-filling occupational designations as sales
engineer, merchandising counsel, and mortician. Josiah Franklin, had
the locution been available in his era, might have asserted with all
accuracy that he was an important factor in public utilities--even
our own catch-phrase epoch has not been quite equal to the coinage
of the label "public utilitarian." For when the Boston town watch
wanted fresh candles they bought them from Josiah Franklin--from other
tallow-chandlers too, perhaps, but at least some, by documentary
evidence, from Josiah Franklin.
The close relationship between progress in the science of artificial
illumination and progress in the dissemination of the printed
word could be charted with almost mathematical accuracy.... Most
of the books of colonial days were designed for the use of those
whose professions exacted some considerable amount of "required
reading"--ministers, physicians, lawyers, public officials, schoolmen.
The man who toiled with his hands (and hands are eminently useful in
the building-up of a new country) labored while the light of heaven
would let him and then returned to a home wherein the conveniences were
hardly such as to make reading a pleasure. Lincoln studied by the glare
of blazing pine-knots, but the middle-class Bostonian and New Yorker
and Philadelphian of the generations immediately preceding Lincoln (to
say nothing of their country cousins) had to depend on illuminants that
offered no greater inducements to either the solace or the benefits of
type.
Josiah Franklin's wife and their three children accompanied him to
America. Before her death she bore him three more children. Josiah
remarried, and of the second union ten children were born. Of this
multitudinous offspring thirteen grew to maturity--a remarkable
proportion for the time and region. The eighth child and last son of
the second marriage, christened Benjamin after a paternal uncle, was at
first intended for the Church, but Josiah could not afford to give him
the education which this most learned of the professions demanded, and
at the age of ten, after receiving as thorough an intellectual rearing
as could be expected in so short a space, Benjamin Franklin quit
school to assist his father in the fabrication of candles and soap. An
elder brother, John, had already become proficient in the twin arts
of illumination and sanitation and had gone to the bustling colony of
Rhode Island to practice them. Another brother (and another Josiah) had
also investigated them, found them not to his liking, and run away to
sea.
Benjamin, also, made it clear that the parental pursuits were not
to taste, and a wise father, fearing another abrupt departure, took
Benjamin walking about Boston, that he might "see joiners, bricklayers,
turners, braziers, etc., at their work" and thereby, boywise, make
known to his elder which way his inclinations lay. A patent leaning
toward books at length persuaded the father to make him a printer,
despite the fact that another brother, James, Benjamin's elder by nine
years ... had adopted the craft. Benjamin conceded a preference to
the claims of printing over those of tallow-chandlery, but he still
sniffed, with the true landsman's appetite, the tang of the salt breeze
that blew in from the east. Josiah, however, was insistent, and the
parental insistence of 1718 was no toy scepter to swing above the head
of a sub-adolescent boy. Accordingly, Benjamin was duly indentured to
James "to serve as an apprentice till I was twenty-one years of age,
only I was to be allowed journeyman's wages during the last year."
Before long, Benjamin was writing odds and ends of verse, and James,
with the inbred Franklin sagacity, encouraged him in his endeavors and
let him put some of his compositions in type.
One (declared Benjamin) was called _The Lighthouse Tragedy_, and
contained an account of the drowning of Captain Worthilake, with
his two daughters: the other was a sailor's song, on the taking of
Teach (or Blackbeard) the pirate. They were wretched stuff, in the
Grub-street-ballad style; and when they were printed he sent me about
the town to sell them. The first sold wonderfully, the event being
recent, having made a great noise. This flattered my vanity; but my
father discouraged me by ridiculing my performances, and telling me
verse-makers were generally beggars.
The importance of these two pieces consists in the fact that they were
"the first with which Franklin's name can be identified as either
author or printer," according to Dr. William J. Campbell, who adds
that "no copy is known to exist, nor is the exact title of either of
them known." This was true in 1918, when Dr. Campbell's admirable
catalogue of _The Collection of Franklin Imprints in the Museum of the
Curtis Publishing Company_ was issued, and it is unfortunately still
true today [1935]. If they were at all like similar productions of
both earlier and later date, they were broadsides--single sheets that
were distributed like handbills, the main difference being that they
commanded a price. They would command a fantastic price today, together
or singly, and their eventual discovery is by no means beyond the
bounds of possibility. A copy of one--or copies of both--may be tucked
away in some forgotten contemporary theological compendium which has
not been opened for a century.
The disappearance of these broadsides is regrettable on many counts,
not least of which is the fact that even if Benjamin had never
accomplished anything else, he could at least claim credit for
sponsoring perhaps the most textually interesting productions of his
brother's press. James Franklin was a skilled printer--London trained,
and "no slovenly self-taught colonial," in Paul Leicester Ford's
phrase--and James was not, of course, in any degree responsible for the
dullness of the copy that was brought to his shop. A brief glance at a
few of his imprints of this period is of interest mainly because of the
certainty that Benjamin worked on many of them.
The product of James Franklin's press (says Ford in _The Many-Sided
Franklin_, New York, 1899) is a dreary lot of "gone-nothing-ness." A
few of the New England sermons of the day; Stoddard's _Treatise on
Conversion_; Stone's _Short Catechism_; _A Prefatory Letter about
Psalmody_, in defense of church singing, which many Puritans still
held to be unholy; an allegory styled _The Isle of Man, or, Legal
Proceedings in Manshire Against Sin_; Care's _English Liberties_;
sundry pamphlets on the local politics of the moment, such as _A
Letter from One in the Country to his Friend in Boston_, _News from
the Moon_, _A Friendly Check from a Kind Relation to the Chief
Cannonneer_, and _A Word of Comfort to a Melancholy Country_; two
or three tractates on inoculation, and one aimed half at the Boston
clergy and half at the fair sex, entitled _Hooped Petticoats Arraigned
by the Light of Nature and the Law of God_, were the chief output of
the new printer during the years his brother served him.
In the summer of 1721, James Franklin established a newspaper, _The
New England Courant_. Two years earlier he had been engaged to print
the _Boston Gazette_, but with the transfer of its management a few
months later the contract had gone elsewhere. The _Courant_ was a
new departure even for the novelty that was American journalism--so
extensive and violent a departure, indeed, that in the following
year the authorities sentenced the printer-proprietor to a month's
imprisonment for his insolence. The punishment did not improve him;
free again, he pressed the thorn of the _Courant_ deeper into the flesh
of his persecutors, with the consequence that he was soon forbidden "to
print or publish" either the _Courant_ "or any other pamphlet or paper
of the like nature" unless it were first submitted to the secretary of
the province.