FOR PRINTERS, BINDERS AND PAPER-MAKERS AND ALL WHO LOVE BOOKS
[Sidenote: From Manuscript to Book]
[Sidenote: Supply and Demand Interacting]
“An author, even an immortal genius, is, from the economic point of
view, a producer of raw material,” says the Britannica article
PUBLISHING, and from the educational point of view, his product, until
it has undergone the industrial and commercial processes of
reduplication and distribution, is as undeveloped as the seed lying
hidden in the winter soil. The history of civilization might, indeed, be
divided into four stages: the period before writing; the period before
printing, when libraries of manuscripts were almost exclusively the
property of kings and priests; the period of costly, hand-printed books;
and the period of the power-press, which began less than a hundred years
ago. Of these four periods, the first is almost unimaginable. You are
sometimes brought into contact with absolutely illiterate people. But
they live in shadow, not in total darkness; they get the diffused light
of our age of culture. The second period, the era of books in manuscript
we can, however, to some extent reconstruct; and by one fantastic
supposition we can even bring it into the focus of our 20th century. Let
it be assumed that for some reason the printing of the new Britannica
had been enjoined by the law courts, but that the original typoscript
was available for consultation—say in a public library at New York or
Chicago. Instead of your 29 volumes, weighing only 80 lbs. and occupying
only about two cubic feet of space, the walls of a large room would be
lined with partitioned shelves on which the 300,000 typed sheets and the
7,000 illustrations, on cardboard, would be ranged. What a mob of
students there would be, waiting their turns to read the 40,000
articles, what a mass of notebooks would be filled each day! The
impossibility of accomplishing, without the use of printing, all that
the Britannica does, will present itself very forcibly to your mind, in
another aspect, if you try to imagine 1,500 separate audiences,
assembled each day to listen to lectures by the 1,500 contributors to
the book. Any attempt to imagine the Britannica doing its work in any
way but the way in which it does makes you realize, too, that if it were
not for modern methods of _spreading_ knowledge, there would be no such
system of _assembling_ and co-ordinating knowledge as finds its fullest
development in the Britannica. It is not only for commercial reasons
that the demand must be sufficient to justify the supply; the 1,500
specialists who laid aside their usual work in order to write these
articles would never have combined their efforts if this vast public of
all educated English speaking people were not to have been enabled to
avail themselves of the result.
The industrial arts which make it possible to produce books swiftly and
to sell them at low prices are obviously subjects of interest not only
to those who do the producing and selling, but to all who profit by the
use of books. And, as the articles mentioned in this chapter show, these
arts are in themselves among the most ingenious and curious of all
processes; so that in a double sense they merit the attention of
everyone to whom the chapters on _Literature_ in this Guide would
appeal. As the warp of cloth carries the weft, so the raw material of
printers’ paper and printers’ ink carries the “raw material” of the
writer’s thoughts.
The article on PAPER (Vol. 20, p. 725) is equivalent to 35 pages of this
Guide and is illustrated with 15 diagrams. The article is divided into
three parts: _History_, by Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, director of the
British Museum; _Manufacture_, by J. W. Wyatt, author of _The Art of
Making Paper_; and _India Paper_, by W. E. Garrett Fisher.
[Sidenote: History of Paper]
The history of paper, like that of so many other great inventions, dates
back to an early period in China; and, as is the case with almost every
great contribution to civilization which came from China, paper came to
the Western world only after many years and only by chance. In the 8th
century of the Christian era, when paper had been made in China for 1000
years, some Chinese paper-makers were taken captives in Samarkand by
Arabs, who thus learned the methods of its manufacture. The Arabs and
the Persians used linen as a base for the paper instead of the cotton
the Chinese used; and the name “paper” was transferred from the Egyptian
rush and the writing material made from its fibres to the new product.
Paper was manufactured in Europe first by the Moors in Spain at Xativa,
Valencia and Toledo in the 12th century; and into Italy also it seems to
have been brought by the Arab occupation of Sicily. Among other
interesting points in regard to the history of paper are: water-marks as
a sign of age; old papers; variation in prices of paper; blotting-paper,
wrapping paper, etc. The articles PAPYRUS (Vol. 20, p. 743) and
PARCHMENT (Vol. 20, p. 798), both by Maunde Thompson, deal with these
earlier writing materials. PALIMPSEST (Vol. 20, p. 633) describes the
processes by which writings which have been scraped or washed from
sheets of vellum, so that the material might be used again, can
sometimes be chemically restored and deciphered.
[Sidenote: Paper Manufacture]
In taking up the study of paper manufacture, the first article to be
read is FIBRES by C. F. Cross, the well-known analytical and consulting
chemist, and especially the section in it on _Paper-making_ (Vol. 10, p.
312). This describes the treatment of cotton and flax for writing and
drawing papers, wood pulp, esparto, cellulose and cereal straws for
printing-paper, etc. See also the article CELLULOSE (Vol. 5, p. 606) by
C. F. Cross. The section on _Manufacture_ in the article PAPER, already
mentioned, should next be read. Here it is stated that rags, linen or
cotton, were the principal materials used for paper in Europe until the
middle of the 19th century; and then when prices rose, because the
necessarily inelastic supply was no longer sufficient, esparto-grass,
wood and straw began to be used as substitutes. The change from
hand-making to machinery began in France in 1798 and was accomplished in
England in 1803, with the result that hand-made paper is now used only
where great durability is the chief requisite, as for bank-notes and
drawing paper.
Actual paper manufacture may be divided into two processes: the
preliminary cleaning and reduction to pulp; and the methods of
converting pulp to paper—including beating, sizing, colouring, making
the sheet or web, surfacing, cutting, etc. Reduction to pulp is
described in the treatment of esparto, straw and wood, and there are
cuts showing rag-boiler, rag-breaking engine, esparto boiler, press-pâte
or half-stuff machine, esparto bleaching and beating plant, and the
Porion evaporator and the Yaryan multiple-effect evaporator for soda
recovery.
Paper-making proper, after the pulp has been prepared, is next
described. The first process is beating; and besides the esparto
bleaching and beating plant, described under bleaching, there are
drawings of the Taylor and Jordan beaters and a description of them and
of the Kingsland beater. Sizing, loading and colouring are then
explained. The other main topics of the section on manufacture are: hand
manufacture (with two illustrations), paper machine, with pictures of
the paper machine, of the dandy roll, of super-calender and of reel
paper cutters, and paragraphs on straining, forming the sheet, shake,
water marking and couching, pressing and drying, surfacing, machine
power, tub-sizing, glazing or surfacing for better grades, cutting,
sheeting, sizes (with table), standards of quality, the paper trade, and
a list of the best books on paper.
[Sidenote: India Paper]
The article PAPER closes with a brief history and description of India
paper, which is of particular interest because of the adoption and
successful use of this paper in the new Encyclopaedia Britannica. In
this true India paper, “the material used is chiefly rag,” but “the
extraordinary properties of this paper are due to the peculiar care
necessary in the treatment of the fibres, which are specially beaten in
the beating engine.” The first India paper was brought to England from
the Far East in 1841 by an Oxford graduate, and the name India was used
merely to express this Oriental origin, as in “Indian ink” or in the
name “Indians” as applied to the American aborigines when their home was
thought to be a part of the East. Just where the paper came from is not
known. It was given to the Oxford University Press and was used in
printing a very small English Bible in 1842. This book was only
one-third the usual thickness, and attracted much attention by its
lightness and by the opacity of the thin tough paper.
In 1874 a copy of this Bible fell into the hands of Henry Frowde, and
experiments were instituted at the Oxford University paper mills at
Wolvercote with the object of producing similar paper. On the 24th of
August 1875 an impression of the Bible, similar in all respects to
that of 1842, was placed on sale by the Oxford University Press. The
feat of compression was regarded as astounding, the demand was
enormous, and in a very short time 250,000 copies of this “Oxford
India paper Bible” had been sold. Many other editions of the Bible,
besides other books, were printed on the Oxford India paper, and the
marvels of compression accomplished by its use created great interest
at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. Its strength was as remarkable as its
lightness; volumes of 1500 pages were suspended for several months by
a single leaf, as thin as tissue; and, when they were examined at the
close of the exhibition, it was found that the leaf had not started,
the paper had not stretched, and the volume closed as well as ever.
The paper, when subjected to severe rubbing, instead of breaking into
holes like ordinary printing paper, assumed a texture resembling
chamois leather, and a strip 3 in. wide was found able to support a
weight of 28 lb. without yielding. The success of the Oxford India
paper led to similar experiments by other manufacturers, and there
were, in 1910, nine mills (two each in England, Germany and Italy, one
each in France, Holland and Belgium) in which India paper was being
produced. India paper is mostly made upon a Fourdrinier machine in
continuous lengths, in contradistinction to a hand-made paper, which
cannot be made of a greater size than the frame employed in its
production.
In addition to technical information in regard to paper the student of
the manufacture of books must know something about ink.
[Sidenote: Ink]
The necessary information he will find in the article INK (Vol. 14, p.
571) with special descriptions of writing inks, tannin inks, China or
Indian ink, logwood ink, aniline ink, copying ink, red and blue ink,
marking ink, gold and silver inks, indelible or incorrodible ink,
sympathetic ink, and, of the most importance for our present purpose,
printing inks.
The process of putting ink on paper is a subject which in the Britannica
takes much more ink and paper than the subject of ink or of paper.
[Sidenote: Printing]
This topic is treated in two main articles: one dealing with type and
the other with presses. The former, TYPOGRAPHY (Vol. 27, p. 509), is a
good sized treatise in itself, being equivalent to more than 135 pages
of this Guide. It is divided into two parts: _The History of
Typography_, by John Henry Hessels, author of _Gutenberg: an Historical
Investigation_; and _Modern Practical Typography_, by John Southward,
author of _A Dictionary of Typography and its Accessory Arts_, and Hugh
Munro Ross, editor of _The_ (London) _Times Engineering Supplement_.
The former part of the article, and the longer, is a very important and
elaborate contribution to the knowledge of early printing. On these
first developments the student should read the same writer’s article
GUTENBERG (Vol. 12, p. 739) and should notice the great difficulty
surrounding the whole question of the “invention,” obscured by the fact
that so many of the documents on Gutenberg exist only in copies, while
others seem to be forgeries by two librarians of the city of Mainz who
were eager to prove the claims of their fellow citizen Gutenberg to be
the inventor of printing with movable metal types. See also Mr. Hessel’s
article on JOHANN FUST (Vol. 11, p. 373). The honour of the invention of
typography, Mr. Hessels decides, belongs to Lorens Janszoon Coster of
Haarlem and its date was somewhere between 1440 and 1446. In Mexico
printing was established in 1544, in Manila in 1590, and in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, in 1638 or 1639. The early printers had only a few types
of each character in a fount, and they printed books, even small
quartos, page by page.
This whole treatment of the history of typography is too elaborate to be
summarized here, but it is interesting to note that the article gives
information about the history of the earliest types—Gothic, Bastard
Italian, Roman, Burgundian, etc., with fac-similes of 13 different and
characteristic faces between 1445 and 1479; and of different styles and
alphabets—Italic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic,
Coptic, Samaritan, Slavonic, Russian, Etruscan, Runic, Gothic,
Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon, Irish, Music, Characters for the Blind,
Initials, Ornaments and Flowers.
[Sidenote: Practical Typography]
The second part of the article TYPOGRAPHY, on _Modern Practical
Typography_, will be of more value, probably, to most students of
printing and book-making. It deals with the following topics:—
Material characteristics of Type. Fount may consist of 275 “sorts” or
characters. Numbers of sorts vary with different languages—and with
different styles and writers; Dickens draws heavily on vowels,
Macaulay on consonants. Bill of type or scheme—how computed.
Logotypes or word character as distinct from letters.
Parts of a type—face, stem, serif, beard, shoulder, shank, belly,
back, counter, nick, kern, feet, burr and batter.
Species of letter—short, ascending, descending, long, superior,
inferior, fat-faced, lean-faced, bastard.
Sizes: classification by names and by point-system.
Varieties of face: Roman, sanserifs or grotesques; black; script; old
style; Caslon; influence of William Morris and the Kelmscott Press;
Vale Press.
Manufacture of type: type metal; punch, drive and matrix (with
illustrations); type-casting—by hand and machine; inventions of Bruce,
Barth, Wicks, with description and picture of the Wicks rotary
type-casting machine.
Type-setting by hand. Type case, with illustration. Composition,
justifying. Imposition. Signatures. Forme, quoin, side-stick,
foot-stick, shooting-stick. Distributing.
Type-setting by machine. Linotype and Monotype. Earlier machines—the
Paige (in which Mark Twain lost a fortune). Distributing
machines—Delcambre, Fraser, Empire, Dow, Thorne, Simplex (with cut).
Linotype—with diagrams and description. Monotype (the machine used for
the Encyclopaedia Britannica) with illustrations of perforated strip.
Electrotyping and Stereotyping. Shells. Turtle, Flong. Wood’s
Autoplate process. See also the articles ELECTROTYPING (Vol. 9, p.
252) and ELECTROPLATING (Vol. 9, p. 237).
The reader should next turn to the articles ENGRAVING (Vol. 9, p. 645),
LINE-ENGRAVING (Vol. 16, p. 721), WOOD-ENGRAVING (Vol. 28, p.
798)—special reference to America where this method is still used for
some book and magazine illustration—to LITHOGRAPHY (Vol. 16, p. 785)
including offset printing; and PROCESS (Vol. 22, p. 408), for further
information in regard to “printing” apart from (and before) actual press
work. The last-named of these articles is by Edwin Bale, art director of
Cassell & Company, Ltd.; it would occupy about 20 pages of this Guide;
and it is illustrated by a plate showing the three-colour process. The
article describes:
(1)—relief processes, line blocks, swelled gelatin process,
typographic etching, halftone processes, three colour blocks, colour
filters;
(2)—intaglio processes, monotype, electrotype, steel-facing,
blanketing, changes in machinery;
(3)—planographic processes, including woodburytype, stannotype,
collotype or phototype, heliotype and photolithography. In relation to
lithography there is further information in the biographical sketch of
Senefelder, its inventor.
[Sidenote: Press-Work]
The article PRINTING (Vol. 22, p. 350) deals entirely with the subject
of press-work, thus using printing in the narrower and more correct
sense of the word. In length this article is equivalent to 25 pages of
this Guide; and it contains 9 illustrations of presses. The article is
by C. T. Jacobi, author of _Printing_, and _The Printer’s Handbook of
Trade Recipes_. The article gives a history of the printing press, which
was practically unchanged for a century and a half, until the Dutch
map-maker Blaeu greatly simplified it. The first important metal
press—earlier ones were of wood—was invented by Lord Stanhope nearly two
hundred years later. It had greater power with smaller expenditure of
labour, and its workings, as well as that of the Blaeu press, and of the
Albion, which was used by William Morris at Kelmscott, may be readily
understood from the illustrations in the article. Another hand press is
the Columbian, invented in 1816 by a Philadelphian, George Clymer, and
still in use for heavy hand work. Power presses began to be made at the
end of the 18th century, but the presses invented by William Nicholson
(1790) and Friedrich König (adopted by the London _Times_ in 1814)
printed only on one side at a time, as did the “double platen” machine
of a little later date. The cylindrical eight feeder built by Augustus
Applegath in 1848 for the London _Times_ and the Hoe Type Revolving
Machine are described in the section on the history of power presses,
which closes with the story of Bullock’s machine (1865) for printing
from a continuous web of paper.
[Sidenote: Modern Presses]
The closing section of the article on printing is devoted to a
description of modern presses. It opens with a list of the principal
types of presses still in use, which are classified under the following
seven heads:—
(1)—iron hand-presses like the Albion or Columbian, for proof-pulling
or limited editions;
(2)—small platen machines for job or commercial work;
(3)—single cylinder machines (“Wharfedales”) printing one side only;
(4)—perfecting machines, usually two cylinder, printing both sides,
but with two distinct operations;
(5)—two-revolution machines with one cylinder;
(6)—two-colour machines, with one cylinder usually, but two printing
surfaces and two sets of inking apparatus;
(7)—rotary machines for printing from curved plates upon an endless
web of paper—principally for newspapers or periodical work.
These seven classes are next described in detail and the article
illustrates them all. A cut of an Albion press is given in an early part
of the article, and the other six presses shown in the cuts are:
The Golding jobber platen machine
Payne & Sons’ Wharfedale stop-cylinder machine
Dryden & Foord’s perfecting machine
The Miehle two-revolution cylinder machine
Payne & Sons’ two-colour single cylinder machine
Hoe’s double-octuple rotary machine
The article closes with a discussion of the following very practical
topics: the preparation or “make ready” for printing; recent development
in printing with cross references to the article PROCESS; and a
paragraph on the management of a printing house.
[Sidenote: Proof-Reading]
From this closing paragraph and the article on PRINTING, the student is
referred to the article PROOF-READING (Vol. 22, p. 438) which is by John
A. Black, head press reader of the 10th edition of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, and John Randall, sub-editor of the _Athenaeum_ and of
_Notes and Queries_ and former secretary of the London Association of
Correctors of the Press, so that this article, like all the other
articles on the subject of book-making, is written by eminent practical
authorities on the subject.
[Sidenote: Bookbinding]
The same is true of the article BOOKBINDING (Vol. 4, p. 216), which
naturally follows in a systematic course of study. This is by Cyril J.
H. Davenport, assistant keeper of books in the British Museum and author
of _History of the Book_, etc. This article is illustrated with 14
figures, including 8 in halftone, showing typical fine bindings. The
other illustrations show machines and processes used in binding. Besides
a historical sketch of book-binding the article treats of the following
topics:
Modern methods and modern binding designers; machine binding, machine
sewing, rounding and backing, casing, wiring, and blocking. A
case-making machine, a casing-in machine and a blocking machine are
shown in the illustrations.
A bookbinder or a student of the subject will find a great deal of very
valuable information elsewhere in the book, particularly in the article
LEATHER (Vol. 16, p. 330) by Dr. J. Gordon Parker, principal of the
Leathersellers Technical College, London, and author of _Leather for
Libraries_, etc. The article occupies the equivalent of 55 pages of this
Guide; and the possessor of the Britannica will be interested to know
that the leather bindings used for its volumes were all made according
to specifications drawn up by Dr. Parker, the greatest authority in the
world on tanning, curing and dyeing leather for book-bindings.
[Sidenote: Publishing and Book-Selling]
The last stages in getting the author’s raw material “from him to the
ultimate consumer” are those in which the publisher and bookseller play
their part; and for a description of their functions the student should
refer to the articles on publishing and book-selling in the Britannica.
The article PUBLISHING (Vol. 22, p. 628) explains that publishing and
book-selling were for a long time carried on together since “booksellers
were the first publishers of printed books, as they had previously been
the agents for the production and exchange of authentic manuscript
copies.” The separation of publishing from book-selling is due to “the
tendency of every composite business to break up, as it expands, into
specialized departments.” As publishers became a separate class the work
of their literary assistants also broke up into specialized
departments—proof-reading and the reading of manuscripts submitted by
authors—or the work of _printers’_ readers and _publishers’_ readers.
The importance of the work of the publisher’s reader is dwelt upon in
this article which sketches besides the growth of the Society of Authors
in England and of the formation there of the Publishers’ Association and
the Booksellers’ Association. The article also outlines the methods of
publishing in the United States and gives particular prominence to the
effect on the British market of the introduction of American books and
of American book-selling methods.
[Sidenote: Historical and Miscellaneous Articles]
Among other articles of interest to the manufacturer of books are the
following: BOOK (Vol. 4, p. 214) by Alfred William Pollard, assistant
keeper of books in the British Museum, gives a general historical
description of books and in particular calls attention to the great
change in book-prices in the last thirty years. “About 1894 the number
of medium-priced books was greatly increased in England by the
substitution of single-volume novels at 6s. each (subject to discount)
for the three-volume editions at 31s. 6d.... The preposterous price of
10s. 6d. a volume had been adopted during the first popularity of the
Waverley Novels and had continued in force for the greater part of the
century.” To-day, well printed copies of these novels sell for 1s. in
England and for 35 cents in the United States.
It may be added that one of the most striking lessons to be learned from
the Britannica, in relation to the improvements and economies effected
by the application of the most modern processes to the manufacture of
books, is supplied by the consideration of the Britannica itself. The
extent of the composition and machinery involved, the accuracy of the
proof-reading, the novel employment—upon a large scale—of India paper
and flexible bindings, the beauty of the illustrations, and, above all,
the low price at which the product is sold, form a combination of the
very latest perfections of every department of the industry.
Read too BOOK-COLLECTING (Vol. 4, p. 221) also by A. W. Pollard; the
article BOOK PLATES (Vol. 4, p. 230) by Egerton Castle, illustrated with
ten cuts of book plates (which are so well chosen that book plate
collectors have not infrequently asked the publishers of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica for extra copies so that they might include
them in their collections); the article BOOKCASE (Vol. 4, p. 221) from
which the reader may be surprised to learn that “the whole construction
and arrangement of bookcases was learnedly discussed in the light of
experience by W. E. Gladstone in the _Nineteenth Century_ for March
1890;” and the article BIBLIOGRAPHY AND BIBLIOLOGY (Vol. 3, p. 908) by
A. W. Pollard, supplemented by the article INCUNABULA (Vol. 14, p. 369).
The following alphabetical list of articles and sections of articles,
although it does not profess to be complete, will give the student some
idea of the large number of topics connected with the general subject of
the manufacture of books:
Albion Press
Aniline Ink
Applegath, Augustus
Autoplate Process
Backing
Barth, Henry
Bastard Letter
Batter
Bibliography and Bibliology
Bill of Type
Binding
Black Type
Blaeu Press
Blanketing
Bleaching
Blocking
Blue Ink
Boiling
Book
Book-Binding
Bookcase
Book-collecting
Book-Plates
Bookselling
Bourgeois
Breaking
Brevier
Bruce, David
Burr
Case-making Machine
Casing
Casing-in machine
Caslon Type
Casting
Cellulose
China Ink
Chinese Paper-makers
Chiswick Press
Clymer, George
Collotype
Colour Filters
Colour Process
Columbian Press
Composition
Copying Ink
Coster
Couching
Cutter
Dandy Roll
Delcambre Machine
Distributing
Distributing Machines
Dow Machine
Drive
Drying
Electroplating
Electrotyping
Empire Machine
English Type
Engraving
Esparto
Evaporator
Face
Flong
Forme
Fount
Fraser Machine
Fust
Glazing
Golding Machine
Gold Ink
Goodson
Gutenberg
Half Stuff
Half-tone
Heliotype
Hoe, Robert
Imposition
Incunabula
Indelible Ink
Indian Ink
India Paper
Ink
Intaglio Process
Italic Type
Jordan Beaters
Justifying
Kelmscott Press
Kern
Kingsland Beater
König, Friedrich
Lanston Monotype
Leather
Line-Engraving
Linotype
Lithography
Logwood Ink
Machine Presses
Marking Ink
Matrices
Miehle Press
Minion
Monoline
Monotype
Morris, William
Nicholson, William
Nick
Nonpareil
Octuple Rotary Machine
Off-set Printing
Old-style Type
Paige Composing Machine
Paper
Papyrus
Parchment
Pearl (type)
Perfecting Machine
Photolithography
Phototype
Pica
Planographic Process
Platen
Point System
Porion Evaporator
Power Presses
Pressing
Press Plate
Press-work
Primer
Price of Paper
Printing
Printing Ink
Process
Proof-reading
Publishing
Pulp
Punch
Quality, Standards of Paper
Rag
Red Ink
Reel Paper Cutter
Relief Process
Roman Type
Rotary Presses
Rounding
Ruby
Scheme of Type
Senefelder
Serif
Sewing
Shake
Sheeting
Shells
Signature
Silver Ink
Simplex Machine
Sizes of Paper
Sizing
Soda Recovery
Stanhope Press
Stannotype
Steel-facing
Stem
Stereotyping
Straining
Super Calender
Surfacing
Swelled Gelatin Process
Sympathetic Ink
Tachytype
Tannin Ink
Thorne Machine
Three Colour Process
Tub-sizing
Turtle
Type-case
Typograph
Typography
Vale Press
Water mark
Wharfedale Presses
Wicks, Frederick
Wiring
Woodbury Process
Wood Engraving
Wood’s Autoplate
Writing Ink
Yaryan Evaporator