publisher demanded of a printer after a particularly aggravating error.
“If they were not,” was the patient rejoinder, “they would not be
engaged in making books!”
There is an intangible lure that keeps all those associated with the
book under subjection. There is a mysterious fascination in being a
party to the perpetuation of a human thought that yields something
in addition to pecuniary returns. To the author, the inestimable
gratification of conveying a message to the world makes him forget
the tedious hours of application required before that message can be
adequately expressed. To the publisher, the satisfaction of offering
the opportunity for occasional genius to come into its own more
than balances the frequent disappointments. To the book architect,
the privilege of supplying the vehicle for thought, and of creating
the physical form of its expression, yields returns not altogether
measurable in coin of the realm.
* * * * *
In 1891, during my apprenticeship at the old University Press, in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, John Wilson, its famous head, permitted me to
sit in at a conference with Eugene Field and his friend and admirer,
Francis Wilson, the actor, booklover, and collector. The subject under
discussion was the manufacture of a volume of Field’s poems, then
called _A New Book of Verses_, which later became famous under the
title of _Second Book of Verse_.
Field’s personal appearance made a deep impression that first time I
saw him. I was then an undergraduate at Harvard, and this was a live
author at close range! He entered the office with a peculiar, ambling
walk; his clothes were ill-fitting, accentuating his long legs and
arms; his hands were delicate, with tapering fingers, like a woman’s;
his face was pallid; his eyes blue, with a curiously child-like
expression. I remember my feeling of respect, tinged somewhat with
awe, as I saw the pages of manuscript spread out upon the table, and
listened eagerly to the three-cornered conversation.
[Illustration: Autograph Page of Eugene Field Manuscript
From _Second Book of Verse_, New York, 1892]
In considering the manufacture of his book, Eugene Field had clearly
defined ideas of the typographical effect he wished to gain; John
Wilson possessed the technical knowledge that enabled him to translate
those ideas into terms of type. The examination of the various faces
of type, the consideration of the proportions of the page, the
selection of the paper, the plan for the design of the cover and the
binding,--all came into the discussion.
As I listened, I was conscious of receiving new impressions which gave
me a fuller but still incomplete understanding. Until that moment I had
found little of interest in the adventure of making books. Now came a
realization that the building of a book, like the designing of a house,
offered opportunity for _creative_ work. This possibility removed
the disturbing doubts, and I undertook to discover for myself how that
creative element could be crystallized.
Years later came an unexpected echo to the Field episode. After the
publication of the _Second Book of Verse_, the manuscript was
returned to Field, who had it bound in half leather and placed it
in his library. Upon his death many of his books went by bequest to
his life-long friend, Horace Fletcher, the genial philosopher and
famous apostle of dietetics. When Fletcher died, he bequeathed Field’s
personal volumes to me. By this curious chain of circumstances,
thirty-three years after I had seen the manuscript spread out upon the
table at the University Press, it came into my possession, bearing the
identical memoranda of instruction made upon it by John Wilson, whose
large, flowing hand contrasted sharply with the small, copper-plate
characters of the author’s handwriting.
[Illustration: Autograph Verse in Eugene Field’s Own Copy of _Trumpet
and Drum_]
The present generation of booklovers would think themselves transported
back ages rather than decades were they to glance into a great
book-printing office of thirty-five years ago. The old University Press
at that time acknowledged competition only from the Riverside and the
De Vinne Presses, and conditions that obtained there were typical
of the times. The business office was called the “counting-room”;
the bookkeeper and the head-clerk were perched up on stools at high,
sloping desks, and wore long, linen dusters and black skull caps. John
Wilson sat at a low table desk, and his partner, who was the financial
executive, was the proud possessor of the only roll-top desk in the
establishment. Near him, perhaps because of its value as a novelty and
thus entitled to the same super-care as the cash, was installed the
telephone. Most of the letters were written by Mr. Wilson in his own
hand. One of my first responsibilities was to copy these letters on the
wetted tissue pages of the copy-book with the turn-screw press.
[Illustration: JOHN WILSON IN 1891
_Master-Printer_]
There was no particular system in effect, and scientific management
was unknown. Mr. Wilson used to make out his orders on fragments of
paper,--whatever came to hand. When the telephone was first installed
he refused to use it, as he considered this method of conducting
business as “sloppy” and even discourteous. To employ a stenographer
would have been an evidence of a lazy disposition, and a dictated
letter was an offence against dignity and decorum.
* * * * *
A week’s work at that time consisted of fifty-nine hours instead of the
present forty-eight. Hand composition and electrotyping were figured
together as one process and charged at from 80 cents to $1 per thousand
ems. Changes required in the type by authors cost 50 cents an hour. An
author could afford in those days to rewrite his book after it was in
type, but today, with alterations costing five times as much, it is a
different proposition!
The wages were as ridiculously low as the prices charged to customers.
The girls in the composing room made from $9 to $12 a week, and those
receiving the maximum considered themselves potential Hetty Greens.
Today, receiving $40 to $45 a week, they find difficulty in making both
ends meet. The make-up man, with the “fat” he received in addition
to his wage of $16, actually earned about $20 a week, as against $50
to $60 a week now. The foreman of the composing room, with more than
two hundred employees under him, received a weekly return of $23, as
against $75 to $100 now.
Typesetting, thirty-five years ago, was almost entirely by hand, as
this was before the day of the linotype and the monotype. Thorne
typesetting machines, which then seemed marvels of mechanical
ingenuity, failed to prove economical because they required two
operatives and so easily got out of order. The composing room itself
was laid out with its main avenues and side streets like a well-ordered
town, divisions being marked by the frames bearing the cases of type in
various faces and sizes. The correcting stones ran down the center.
The foreman of the composing room was the king of his domain and a
power unto himself. Each side street was an “alley,” in which from four
to eight typesetters worked, back to back. These were sometimes boys
or men, but usually girls or women. The “crew” in each alley was in
charge of an experienced typesetter. It was he who received from the
foreman the manuscript to be put into type; who distributed the copy,
a few pages at a time to each of his subordinates; who supervised the
work, and arranged for the galleys to be collated in their proper order
for proofing; and who was generally responsible for the product of his
alley. As was characteristic of the times in well-conducted industrial
plants, the workers in this department, as in the others, were simply
a large family presided over by the foreman, who interpreted the
instructions from the management; and by the heads of the crews, who
carried out the detailed instructions of the foreman.
There was a pride in workmanship that is mostly lacking in
manufacturing plants today, due largely to the introduction of
labor-saving machinery, and again to the introduction of efficiency
methods. Both were inevitable, but the price paid for the gain in
production was high. I am old-fashioned enough to hope that modern
ideas of efficiency will never be applied in the printing industry to
the extent of robbing the workman of his individuality. Books are such
personal things! I am in full sympathy with that efficiency which cuts
out duplication of effort. I believe in studying methods of performing
each operation to discover which one is the most economical in time and
effort. I realize that in great manufacturing plants, where machines
have replaced so largely the work of the human hand, it is obviously
necessary for workmen to spend their days manufacturing only a part
of the complete article; but when the organization of any business
goes so far as to substitute numbers for names I feel that something
has been destroyed, and that in taking away his individuality from the
workman the work suffers the same loss.
I have even asked myself whether the greatest underlying cause of
strikes and labor disturbances during the past ten years has not been
the unrest that has come to the workman because he can no longer
take actual pride in the product of his hand. Years ago, after the
death of one of my oldest employees, I called upon his widow, and
in the simple “parlor” of the house where he had lived, prominently
placed on a marble-top table as the chief ornament in the room, lay
a copy of Wentworth’s “Geometry.” When I picked it up the widow said
proudly, “Jim set every page of that book with his own hands.” It was
a priceless heirloom in which the workman’s family took continued and
justifiable pride.
The old University Press family was not only happy but loyal. When
the business found itself in financial difficulties, owing to outside
speculations by Mr. Wilson’s partner, the workmen brought their
bankbooks, with deposits amounting to over twenty thousand dollars,
and laid them on Mr. Wilson’s desk, asking him to use these funds in
whatever way he chose. The sum involved was infinitesimal compared to
the necessities, but the proffer was a human gesture not calculable in
financial digits.
* * * * *
Proofreading was an art in the eighteen-nineties instead of an annoying
necessity, as it now seems to be considered. The chief readers
were highly educated men and women, some having been clergymen or
schoolteachers. One proofreader at the University Press at that time
could read fourteen languages, and all the readers were competent to
discuss with the authors points that came up in the proof. The proof
was read, not only to discover typographical errors, but also to query
dates, quotations, and even statements of fact. Well-known authors were
constantly running in and out of the Press, frequently going directly
to the proofreaders, and sometimes even to the compositors themselves,
without coming in touch with the counting-room. Mr. Wilson looked
upon the authors and publishers as members of his big family, and “No
Admittance” signs were conspicuous by their absence.
The modern practice of proofreading cannot produce as perfect volumes
as resulted from the deliberate, painstaking, and time-consuming
consideration which the old-time proofreaders gave to every book
passing through their hands. Today the proof is read once, and then
revised and sent out to the author. When made up into page form and
sent to foundry it is again revised, but not re-read. No proof used to
go out from a first-class printing office without a first and a second
reading by copy. It was then read a third time by a careful foundry
reader before being made into plates. Unfortunately, with labor at its
present cost, no publisher could produce a volume at a price that the
public would pay, if the old-time care were devoted to its manufacture.
* * * * *
Time was when a reputation for careful proofreading was an asset to a
Press. One day the office boy came to my private office and said that
there was a man downstairs who insisted upon seeing me personally, but
who declined to give his name. From the expression on the boy’s face I
concluded that the visitor must be a somewhat unique character, and I
was not disappointed.
As he came into my office he had every aspect of having stepped off
the vaudeville stage. He had on the loose garments of a farmer, with
the broad hat that is donned only on state occasions. He wore leather
boots over which were rubbers, and carried a huge, green umbrella.
He nodded pleasantly as he came in, and sat down with great
deliberation. Before making any remarks he laid his umbrella on the
floor and placed his hat carefully over it, then he somewhat painfully
removed his rubbers. This done, he turned to me with a broad smile of
greeting, and said, “I don’t know as you know who I am.”
When I confirmed him in his suspicions, he remarked, “Well, I am Jasper
P. Smith, and I come from Randolph, New Hampshire.”
(_The names and places mentioned are, for obvious reasons, not
correct._)
I returned his smile of greeting and asked what I could do for him.
“Well,” he said, “my home town of Randolph, New Hampshire, has decided
to get out a town history, and I want to have you do the printin’ of
it. The selectmen thought it could be printed at ----, but I says to
them, ‘If it’s worth doin’ at all it’s worth doin’ right, and I want
the book to be made at the University Press in Cambridge.’”
I thanked Mr. Smith for his confidence, and expressed my satisfaction
that our reputation had reached Randolph, New Hampshire.
“Well,” he said, chuckling to himself, “you see, it was this way.
You made the history of Rumford, and I was the feller who wrote
the genealogies. That’s what I am, a genealogy feller. Nobody in
New Hampshire can write a town history without comin’ to me for
genealogies.”
After pausing for a moment he continued, “It was your proofreadin’ that
caught me. On that Rumford book your proofreader was a smart one, she
was, but I got back at her in good style.”
His memory seemed to cause him considerable amusement, and I waited
expectantly.
“It was in one of the genealogies,” he went on finally. “I gave the
date of the marriage as so and so, and the date of the birth of the
first child as two months later. Did she let that go by? I should say
not. She drew a line right out into the margin and made a darned big
question mark. But I got back at her! I just left that question mark
where it was, and wrote underneath, ‘Morally incorrect, historically
correct!’”
* * * * *
When the first Adams flat-bed press was installed at the University
Press, President Felton of Harvard College insisted that no book of his
should ever be printed upon this modern monstrosity. Here was history
repeating itself, for booklovers of the fifteenth century in Italy for
a long time refused to admit that a printed volume had its place in a
gentleman’s library. In the eighteen-nineties one whole department at
the University Press consisted of these flat-bed presses, which today
can scarcely be found outside of museums. If a modern publisher were
to stray into the old loft where the wetted sheets from these presses
were hung over wooden rafters to dry, he would rub his eyes and wonder
in what age he was living. The paper had been passed through tubs of
water, perhaps half a quire at a time, and partially dried before being
run through the press. The old Adams presses made an impression that
could have been read by the blind, and all this embossing, together
with the wrinkling of the sheet from the moisture, had to be taken out
under hydraulic pressure. Today wetted sheets and the use of hydraulic
presses for bookwork are practically obsolete. The cylinder presses,
that run twice as fast, produce work of equal quality at lower cost.
* * * * *
In those days the relations between publishers and their printers were
much more intimate. Scales of prices were established from time to
time, but a publisher usually sent all his work to the same printer. It
was also far more customary for a publisher to send an author to the
printer to discuss questions of typography with the actual maker of the
book, or to argue some technical or structural point in his manuscript
with the head proofreader. The headreader in a large printing
establishment at that time was a distinct personality, quite competent
to meet authors upon their own ground.
* * * * *
One of my earliest and pleasantest responsibilities was to act as Mr.
Wilson’s representative in his business relations with Mrs. Mary Baker
Eddy, which required frequent trips to “Pleasant View” at Concord, New
Hampshire. Mrs. Eddy always felt under deep obligation to Mr. Wilson
for his interest in the manuscript of _Science and Health_ when
she first took it to him with a view to publication, and any message
from him always received immediate and friendly consideration.
In the past there have been suggestions made that the Rev. James Henry
Wiggin, a retired Unitarian clergyman and long a proofreader at the
University Press, rewrote _Science and Health_. Mr. Wiggin was
still proofreader when I entered the Press, and he always manifested
great pride in having been associated with Mrs. Eddy in the revision of
this famous book. I often heard the matter referred to, both by him
and by John Wilson, but there never was the slightest intimation that
Mr. Wiggin’s services passed beyond those of an experienced editor. I
have no doubt that many of his suggestions, in his editorial capacity,
were of value and possibly accepted by the author,--in fact, unless
they had been, he would not have exercised his proper function; but
had he contributed to the new edition what some have claimed, he would
certainly have given intimation of it in his conversations with me.
The characteristic about Mrs. Eddy that impressed me the first time
I met her was her motherliness. She gave every one the impression of
deepest interest and concern in what he said, and was sympathetic
in everything that touched on his personal affairs. When I told her
of John Wilson’s financial calamity, she seemed to regard it as a
misfortune of her own. Before I left her that day she drew a check for
a substantial sum and offered it to me.
“Please hand that to my old friend,” she said, “and tell him to be of
good cheer. What he has given of himself to others all these years will
now return to him a thousand-fold.”
At first one might have been deceived by her quiet manner into thinking
that she was easily influenced. There was no suggestion to which she
did not hold herself open. If she approved, she accepted it promptly;
if it did not appeal, she dismissed it with a graciousness that left no
mark; but it was always settled once and for all. There was no wavering
and no uncertainty.
After Mrs. Eddy moved from Concord to Boston, her affairs were
administered by her Trustees, so I saw her less frequently. To many her
name suggests a great religious movement, but when I think of her I
seem to see acres of green grass, a placid little lake, a silver strip
of river, and a boundary line of hills; and within the unpretentious
house a slight, unassuming woman,--very real, very human, very
appealing, supremely content in the self-knowledge that, no matter what
others might think, she was delivering her message to the world.
* * * * *
By this time, I had discovered what was the matter with American
bookmaking. It was a contracting business, and books were conceived and
made by the combined efforts of the publisher, the manufacturing man,
the artist, the decorator, the paper mills’ agent, and, last of all,
the printer and the binder. This was not the way the old-time printers
had planned their books. With all their mechanical limitations,
they had followed architectural lines kept consistent and harmonious
because controlled by a single mind, while the finished volume of
the eighteen-nineties was a composite production of many minds, with
no architectural plan. No wonder that the volumes manufactured, even
in the most famous Presses, failed to compare with those produced in
Venice by Jenson and Aldus four centuries earlier!
When I succeeded John Wilson as head of the University Press in 1895,
I determined to carry out the resolution I had formed four years
earlier, while sitting in on the Eugene Field conference, of following
the example of the early master-printers so far as this could be done
amidst modern conditions. Some of my publisher friends were partially
convinced by my contention that if the printer properly fulfilled his
function he must know how to express his clients’ mental conception
of the physical attributes of prospective volumes in terms of type,
paper, presswork, and binding better than they could do it themselves.
The Kelmscott publications, which appeared at this time, were of great
value in emphasizing my contention, for William Morris placed printing
back among the fine arts after it had lapsed into a trade.
I had no idea, when I presented my plan, of persuading my friends
to produce typographical monuments. No demand has ever existed for
volumes of this type adequate to the excessive cost involved by the
perfection of materials, the accuracy of editorial detail, the supreme
excellence of typography and presswork, and the glory of the binding.
Sweynheim and Pannartz, Gutenberg’s successors, were ruined by their
experiments in Greek; the Aldine Press in Venice was saved only by the
intervention of Jean Grolier; Henri Étienne was ruined by his famous
_Thesaurus_, and Christophe Plantin would have been bankrupted by
his _Polyglot Bible_ had he not retrieved his fortunes by later
and meaner publications. Nor was I unmindful of similar examples that
might have been cited from more modern efforts, made by ambitious
publishers and printers.
What I wanted to do was to build low-cost volumes upon the same
principles as _de luxe_ editions, eliminating the expensive
materials but retaining the harmony and consistency that come from
designing the book from an architectural standpoint. It adds little
to the expense to select a type that properly expresses the thought
which the author wishes to convey; or to have the presses touch the
letters into the paper in such a way as to become a part of it,
without that heavy impression which makes the reverse side appear like
an example of Braille; or to find a paper (even made by machine!) soft
to the feel and grateful to the eye, on which the page is placed with
well-considered margins; or to use illustrations or decorations, if
warranted at all, in such a way as to assist the imagination of the
reader rather than to divert him from the text; to plan a title page
which, like the door to a house, invites the reader to open it and
proceed, its type lines carefully balanced with the blank; or to bind
(even in cloth!) with trig squares and with design or lettering in
keeping with the printing inside.
By degrees the publishers began to realize that this could be done,
and when once established, the idea of treating the making of books
as a manufacturing problem instead of as a series of contracts with
different concerns, no one of which knew what the others were doing,
found favor. The authors also preferred it, for their literary children
now went forth to the world in more becoming dress. Thus serving in the
capacity of book architect and typographical advisor, instead of merely
as a contrasting printer, these years have been lived in a veritable
Kingdom of Books, in company with interesting people,--authors and
artists as well as publishers,--in a delightfully intimate way because
I have been permitted to be a part of the great adventure.
* * * * *