"A woman's fitness comes by fits," said slanderous Cloten; but to say as
much of fitness in book design would be on the whole a compliment.
Fitness as applied to book design means, of course, that the material
form of the book shall correspond to its spiritual substance, shall be
no finer and no meaner, and shall produce a like, even if a slighter,
esthetic impression. At the outset we have to surrender to commercialism
more than half our territory. All agree that our kings should be clothed
in purple and our commoners in broadcloth; but how about the
intellectual riffraff that makes up the majority of our books? Are our
publishers willing that these should be clothed according to their
station? Hardly; for then would much of their own occupation be gone. It
is recognized that for a large proportion of our publications the
design--the outward appearance--is in great measure counted on to sell
the book; and printers and publishers will not consent to send the
paupers of literature forth upon the world in their native rags, for so
they would find no one to welcome them. It will be useless to quarrel
with the fact that the design of many books is meant as a bait and not
as a simple interpretation of their meaning and worth. Design of this
character, however, is relatively easy; it is really not design at all,
but millinery. It is when his work becomes genuinely interpretative that
the designer's difficulties begin.
The first business of the designer, therefore, is to understand the book
he is treating. Here, of course, his judgment, however sincere, may be
mistaken or misled. A classical instance of this is found in connection
with one of the most famous books in the history of modern
printing,--Barlow's "Columbiad." This work, which first appeared in 1787
under a different title, was enlarged to epic proportions during the
next twenty years, and was finally given to the world in 1807 in the
belief on the part of its author and in the hope at least on the part of
its publisher that it would take rank and be honored for all time as the
great American epic. Under this misconception the book was clothed in a
form that might worthily have enshrined "Paradise Lost." Its stately
quarto pages were set in a type specially designed for the work and
taking from it the name of Columbian. The volume was embellished with
full-page engravings after paintings in the heroic manner by Smirke; in
short, it was the most pretentious book issued in America up to that
time, and it still ranks, in the words of Professor Barrett Wendell,
"among the most impressive books to look at in the world." But alas for
the vanity of human aspirations! "The Columbiad" is now remembered as a
contribution to typography rather than literature. The designer overshot
his author.
We have tacitly assumed that a book has but one interpretation and
therefore but one most appropriate design. This, however, is far from
the truth. When, after various more or less successful editions of
Irving's "Knickerbocker" had appeared, Mr. Updike brought out some
twenty years ago his comic edition, with the whole make-up of the book
expressive of the clumsy and stupid Dutchmen depicted in Irving's
mock-heroic, we felt at the moment that here was the one ideal
"Knickerbocker." Yet, much as we still admire it, does it wholly
satisfy us? Is there not as much room as ever for an edition that shall
express primarily not the absurdity of its subject-matter, but the
delicate playfulness of Irving's humor and the lightness and grace of
his exuberant style? Has there ever been a final "Don Quixote"?
Certainly not in the recent monumental editions with their quagmire of
footnotes. Moreover, if _we_ had a final edition of the great romance it
would not remain final for our children's children. Every age will make
its own interpretations of the classics and will demand that they be
embodied in contemporary design. Thus every age in its book design
mirrors itself for future admiration or contempt.
Obviously, in giving form to a single work a designer is freer than in
handling a series by one or by various authors. In such cases he must
seize upon more general and therefore less salient characteristics. The
designer of "Hiawatha" or "Evangeline" has a fairly clear task before
him, with a chance of distinct success or failure; but the designer of
an appropriate form for the whole series of Longfellow's works, both
prose and poetry, has a less individualized problem, and must think of
the elements that run through all,--sweetness, grace, gentleness,
dignity, learning. Yet, though general, these qualities in a series may
be far from vague. We have only to consider the absurdity of a
handy-volume Gibbon or a folio Lamb. On looking at the bulky,
large-type, black-covered volumes of the Forman edition of Shelley and
Keats one instinctively asks, "What crime did these poets commit that
they should be so impounded?" The original edition of the life of
Tennyson by his son, in two lumbering, royal octavo volumes, comes near
to what Thackeray called the Farnese Hercules, "a hulking abortion."
Contrast with it the dignity linked with charm of the original edition
of Longfellow's life by his brother. But of all monstrosities of book
design the British three-volume novel mania is responsible for some of
the worst. Henry Ward Beecher's one novel, "Norwood," which appeared in
America becomingly clad in a single volume, received in England the
regulation three-volume dress, in which it looks as ridiculously
inflated as did a slender miss of that period in the crinoline then in
vogue. There is one abomination in book design for which I owe a
personal grudge to commercialism, and that is the dropsical book form
given to Locker-Lampson's "My Confidences." If ever there was a winsome
bit of writing it is this, and it should have made a book to take to
one's heart, something not larger than a "Golden Treasury" volume, but
of individual design. My comfort is that this will yet be done, and my
belief is that art will justify itself better in the market than
commercialism did. A more modern instance of expansion for commercial
reasons defeating fitness in design is furnished by Waters' translation
of "The Journal of Montaigne's Travels." Here we have three small
volumes outwardly attractive, but printed on paper thick enough for
catalogue cards, and therefore too stiff for the binding, also in type
too large to be pleasant. The whole should have been issued in one
volume of the same size in smaller type, and would then have been as
delightful in form as it is in substance.
It is not enough that all the elements of a book be honest, sincere,
enduring; otherwise the clumsy royal octavos of Leslie Stephen's edition
of Fielding would be as attractive as "the dear and dumpy twelves" of
the original editions. Royal octavo, indeed, seems to be the pitfall of
the book designer, though there is no inherent objection to it. Where in
the whole range of reference books will be found a more attractive set
of volumes than Moulton's "Library of Literary Criticism," with their
realization in this format of the Horatian _simplex munditiis_? For
extremely different treatments of this book size it is instructive to
compare the slender volumes of the original editions of Ruskin with the
slightly shorter but very much thicker volumes of the scholarly
definitive edition, which is a monument of excellence in every element
of book design except the crowning one of fitness. Our libraries must
have this edition for its completeness and its editorship; its material
excellence will insure the transmission of Ruskin's message to future
centuries; but no one will ever fall in love with these volumes or think
of likening them to the marriage of "perfect music unto noble words."
Granted that the designer knows the tools of his trade,--grasps the
expressional value of every element with which he has to deal, from the
cut of a type to the surface of a binder's cloth,--his task, as we said,
is first to know the soul of the book intrusted to him for embodiment;
it is next to decide upon its most characteristic quality, or the sum of
its qualities; and, lastly, it is so to use his physical elements as to
give to the completed book an expression that shall be the outward
manifestation of its indwelling spirit. This is all that can be asked of
him; but, if he would add a touch of perfection, let him convey the
subtle tribute of a sense of the value of his subject by reflecting in
his design the artist's joy in his work.