At the meeting of the British librarians at Cambridge in 1882 a bomb was
thrown into the camp of the book producers in the form of the question:
Who spoils our new English books? In the explosion which followed,
everybody within range was hit, from "the uncritical consumer" to "the
untrained manufacturer." This dangerous question was asked and answered
by Henry Stevens of Vermont, who, as a London bookseller, had for nearly
forty years handled the products of the press new and old, had numbered
among his patrons such critical booklovers as John Carter Brown and
James Lenox, and had been honored with the personal friendship of
William Pickering the publisher and Charles Whittingham the printer. He
had therefore enjoyed abundant opportunity for qualifying himself to
know whereof he spoke. If his words were severe, he stood ready to
justify them with an exhibit of sixty contemporary books which he set
before his hearers.[2]
The truth is, however unwilling his victims may have been to admit it,
that his attack was only too well timed. The men of creative power, who
had ennobled English book production during the second quarter of the
nineteenth century, had passed away, and books were being thrown
together instead of being designed as formerly. The tradition of
excellence in English bookmaking still held sway over the public, and,
as their books sold, most producers saw no reason to disturb themselves.
What to them was progress in other lands, or the claims of a future that
could not be enforced? But after Mr. Stevens's attack they could at
least no longer plead ignorance of their faults. It is certain that an
improvement soon began, which culminated in the present great era of
book design throughout the English world. If the famous bookseller's
address were not the cause of the change, it at least marked a turning
point, and it deserves to be studied as one of the historic documents of
modern printing. It is more than this, however; it is a piece of
creative criticism, and though teaching not by example but by
contraries, it forms one of the best existing brief compends of what a
well-made book must be.
The critic of books as they were made a generation ago begins with the
assertion of a truth that cannot be too often repeated: "The manufacture
of a beautiful and durable book costs little if anything more than that
of a clumsy and unsightly one." He adds that once a handsome book and a
new English book were synonymous terms, but that now the production of
really fine books is becoming one of England's lost arts. He indulges in
a fling at "the efforts of certain recent printers to retrieve this
decadence by throwing on to the already overburdened trade several big,
heavy, and voluminous works of standard authors termed 'éditions de
luxe.'" He assures his hearers that his judgments were not formed on the
spur of the moment, but were based partly on long personal
observations--Stevens was the author of that widely influential piece of
selective bibliography, "My English Library," London, 1853--and on the
results of the international exhibitions since 1851, especially those
of Vienna (1874), Philadelphia (1876), and Paris (1878), in the last of
which he was a juror. His conclusion is "that the present new English,
Scotch, and Irish books, of a given size and price, are not of the
average quality of high art and skill in manufacture that is found in
some other countries." He reminds his hearers that "it is no excuse to
say that the rapidity of production has been largely increased. That
amounts merely to confessing that we are now consuming two bad books in
the place of one good one."
Mr. Stevens now comes to the direct question: Who spoils our new English
books? He answers it by naming not less than ten parties concerned: (1)
the author, (2) the publisher, (3) the printer, (4) the reader, (5) the
compositor, (6) the pressman or machinist, (7) the papermaker, (8) the
ink maker, (9) the bookbinder, and (10), last but not least, the
consumer. There is no question of honesty or dishonesty, he says, but
there is a painful lack of harmony, the bungling work of one or the
clumsy manipulation of another often defeating the combined excellence
of all the rest. The cure he foresees in the establishment of a school
of typography, in which every disciple of these ten tribes shall study a
recognized grammar of book manufacture based on the authority of the
best examples.
He now returns to the charge and pays his respects to each member of the
"ten tribes" in turn. The author's offense is found to consist largely
of ignorant meddling. The publisher is too often ignorant, fussy,
unskilled, pedantic, shiftless, and money-seeking, willing to make books
unsightly if their cheapness will sell them. The printer is the
scapegoat, and many books are spoiled in spite of his efforts, while he
gets all the blame. But he is apt to have faults of his own, the worst
of which is a failure in the careful design of the books intrusted to
him. "It was not so," says Mr. Stevens, "with our good old friends
William Pickering and Charles Whittingham, publisher and printer,
working for many years harmoniously together. It was their custom, as
both used repeatedly to tell us, to each first sit upon every new book
and painfully hammer out in his own mind its ideal form and proportions.
Then two Sundays at least were required to compare notes in the little
summer house in Mr. Whittingham's garden at Chiswick, or in the
after-dinner sanctuary, to settle the shape and dress of their
forthcoming 'friend of man.' It was amusing as well as instructive to
see each of them, when they met, pull from his bulging side pocket
well-worn title-pages and sample leaves for discussion and
consideration. When they agreed, perfection was at hand, and the 'copy'
went forward to the compositors, but not till then. The results, to this
day, are seen in all the books bearing the imprint of William Pickering,
nearly all of which bear also evidence that they came from the 'Chiswick
Press.'"
The reader, Mr. Stevens holds to be, under the printer, the real man of
responsibility; but he too is often hampered by want of plan and due
knowledge of the proportions of the book that he is handling. He also
should go to the school of typography, and the readers of different
offices should learn to agree. The compositor is pronounced "a little
person of great consequence." His moral responsibility is not great, but
too much is often thrust upon him; in fact he is, in many cases, the
real maker of the book. "He ought to have a chance at the school of
typography, and be better instructed in his own business, and be taught
not to assume the business of any other sinner joined with him in the
manufacture of books." Between the compositor and the pressman is a long
road in which many a book is spoiled, but the responsibility is hard to
place. Few people have any idea what constitute the essentials of a
book's form and proportions. Yet our old standards, in manuscript and
print, demand "that the length of a printed page should have relation to
its width, and that the top should not exceed half the bottom margin,
and that the front should be double the back margin."
The papermaker comes in for a large share of blame, but the remedy lies
only in the hands of the consumer, who must insist on receiving good and
durable paper. "The ink-maker is a sinner of the first magnitude." The
first printing inks are still bright, clean, and beautiful after four
hundred years; but who will give any such warrant to even the best inks
of the present day? Mr. Stevens pronounces the sallow inks of our day as
offensive to sight as they are to smell. The bookbinder is adjudged
equal in mischief to any other of the ten sinners, and the rest are
called upon to combine to prevent their books from being spoiled in
these last hands.
The consumer, after all, is the person most to blame, for he has the
power to control all the rest. Or, in the critic's closing words: "Many
of our new books are unnecessarily spoiled, and it matters little
whether this or that fault be laid to this or that sinner. The
publisher, the printer, or the binder may sometimes, nay, often does, if
he can, shift the burden of his sins to the shoulders of his neighbor,
but all the faults finally will come back on the consumer if he
tolerates this adulteration longer."
The great constructive feature of Mr. Stevens's address, which is one
that brings it absolutely up to date, is his call for a school of
typography, which shall teach a recognized grammar of book manufacture,
especially printing, a grammar as standard as Lindley Murray's. He
believes that the art of bookmaking cannot be held to the practice of
the laws of proportion, taste, and workmanship, which were settled once
for all in the age of the scribes and the first printers, without the
existence and pressure of some recognized authority. Such an authority,
he holds, would be furnished by a school of typography. This, as we
interpret it, would be not necessarily a school for journeymen, but a
school for those who are to assume the responsibility too often thrown
upon the journeymen, the masters of book production. With a large annual
output of books taken up by a public none too deeply versed in the
constituents of a well-made book, there would seem to be much hope for
printing as an art from the existence of such an institution, which
would be critical in the interest of sound construction, and one might
well wish that the course in printing recently established at Harvard
might at some time be associated with the name of its prophet of a
generation ago, Henry Stevens of Vermont.