simply taking a coffee liqueur, in which there is less sugar now than
there is in your chartreuse or benedictine. But I am mixing it with the
saliva, which is more than you are doing. The sugar, as you take it,
becomes acid in the stomach and retards digestion; by my method, it is
changed into grape sugar, which is easily assimilated.”
“To insalivate one’s liquor,” he explained to us, “gives one the most
exquisite pleasure imaginable, but it is a terrific test of quality.
It brings out the richness of flavor, which is lost when one gulps the
wine down. Did you ever notice the way a tea-taster sips his tea?”
As he talked he exposed the ignorance of the entire group on
physiological matters to an embarrassing extent, clinching his remarks
by asking General Wood the question,
“Would you engage as chauffeur for your automobile a man who knew as
little about his motor as you know about your own human engine?”
No one ever loved a practical joke better than Horace Fletcher. I was
a guest at a dinner he once gave at the Graduates’ Club in New Haven.
Among the others present were President Hadley of Yale, John Hays
Hammond, Walter Camp, and Professor Lounsbury. There was considerable
curiosity and some speculation concerning what would constitute a
Fletcher dinner. At the proper time we were shown into a private room,
where the table was set with the severest simplicity. Instead of china,
white crockery was used, and the chief table decorations were three
large crockery pitchers filled with ice water. At each plate was a
crockery saucer, containing a shredded-wheat biscuit. It was amusing
to glance around and note the expressions of dismay upon the faces of
the guests. Their worst apprehensions were being confirmed! Just as we
were well seated, the headwaiter came to the door and announced that
by mistake we had been shown into the wrong room, whereupon Fletcher,
with an inimitable twinkle in his eye, led the way into another private
dining room, where we sat down to one of the most sumptuous repasts I
have ever enjoyed.
Today, twenty years after his campaign, it is almost forgotten that
the American breakfast was at that time a heavy meal. Horace Fletcher
revolutionized the practice of eating, and interjected the word
_fletcherize_ into the English language. As a disciple of Fletcher
Sir Thomas Barlow, physician-in-chief to King Edward VII, persuaded
royalty to set the style by cutting down the formal dinner from three
hours to an hour and a half, with a corresponding relief to the
digestive apparatus of the guests. In Belgium, during the World War,
working with Herbert Hoover, Fletcher taught the impoverished people
how to sustain themselves upon meager rations. Among his admirers and
devoted friends were such profound thinkers as William James who, in
response to a letter from him, wrote, “Your excessive reaction to the
stimulus of my grateful approval makes you remind me of those rich
soils which, when you tickle them with a straw, smile with a harvest”;
and Henry James, who closes a letter: “Come and bring with you plenary
absolution to the thankless subject who yet dares light the lamp of
gratitude to you at each day’s end of his life.”
* * * * *
My acquaintance with Henry James came through my close association
with the late Sir Sidney Lee, the Shakesperian authority, and Horace
Fletcher.
“Don’t be surprised if he is brusque or uncivil,” Sir Sidney whispered
to me just before I met him at dinner; “one can never tell how he is
going to act.”
As a matter of fact, I found Henry James a most genial and enjoyable
dinner companion, and never, during the few later occasions when I had
the pleasure of being with him, did he display those characteristics of
ill humor and brusqueness which have been attributed to him. It may not
be generally known that all his life--until he met Horace Fletcher--he
suffered torments from chronic indigestion, or that it was in
Fletcherism that he found his first relief. In a typically involved
Jamesian letter to his brother William he writes (February, 1909):
_It is impossible save in a long talk to make you understand how
the blessed Fletcherism--so extra blessed--lulled me, charmed
me, beguiled me, from the first into the convenience of not
having to drag myself out into eternal walking. One must have
been through what it relieved me from to know how not suffering
from one’s food all the while, after having suffered all one’s
life, and at last having it cease and vanish, could make one
joyously and extravagantly relegate all out-of-door motion to a
more and more casual and negligible importance. To live without
the hell goad of needing to walk, with time for reading and
indoor pursuits,--a delicious, insidious bribe! So, more and
more, I gave up locomotion, and at last almost completely. A
year and a half ago the thoracic worry began. Walking seemed to
make it worse, tested by short spurts. So I thought non-walking
more and more the remedy, and applied it more and more, and ate
less and less, naturally. My heart was really disgusted all
the while at my having ceased to call upon it. I have begun to
do so again, and with the most luminous response. I am better
the second half hour of my walk than the first, and better the
third than the second.... I am, in short, returning, after an
interval deplorably long and fallacious, to a due amount of
reasonable exercise and a due amount of food for the same._
[Illustration: _A Page from an Autograph Letter from Henry James to
Horace Fletcher_]
My one visit to Lamb House was in company with Horace Fletcher. The
meeting with Henry James at dinner had corrected several preconceived
ideas and confirmed others. Some writers are revealed by their books,
others conceal themselves in their fictional prototypes. It had always
been a question in my mind whether Henry James gave to his stories his
own personality or received his personality from his stories. This
visit settled my doubts.
The home was a perfect expression of the host, and possessed an
individuality no less unique. I think it was Coventry Patmore who
christened it “a jewel set in the plain,”--located as it was at the
rising end of one of those meandering streets of Rye, in Sussex,
England, Georgian in line and perfect in appointment.
In receiving us, Henry James gave one the impression of performing a
long-established ritual. He had been reading in the garden, and when
we arrived he came out into the hall with hand extended, expressing a
massive cordiality.
“Welcome to my beloved Fletcher,” he cried; and as he grasped my hand
he said, as if by way of explanation,
“He saved my life, you know, and what is more, he improved my
disposition. By rights he should receive all my future royalties,--but
I doubt if he does!”
His conversation was much more intelligible than his books. It
was ponderous, but every now and then a subtle humor relieved the
impression that he felt himself on exhibition. One could see that he
was accustomed to play the lion; but with Fletcher present, toward whom
he evidently felt a deep obligation, he talked intimately of himself
and of the handicap his stomach infelicities had proved in his work.
The joy with which he proclaimed his emancipation showed the real
man,--a Henry James unknown to his characters or to his public.
* * * * *
If William James had not taken up science as a profession and thus
become a philosopher, he would have been a printer. No other commercial
pursuit so invited him as “the honorable, honored, and productive
business of printing,” as he expressed it in a letter to his mother
in 1863. Naturally, with such a conception of the practice of book
manufacture, he was always particularly concerned with the physical
_format_ of his volumes. He once told me that my ability to
translate his “fool ideas” into type showed the benefit of a Harvard
education! He had no patience with any lapse on the part of the
proofreader, and when the galleys of his books reached this point in
the manufacture even my most experienced readers were on the anxious
seat. On the other hand, he was generous in his appreciation when a
proofreader called his attention to some slip in his copy that he had
overlooked.
After his volume _Pragmatism_ appeared and created such universal
attention, a series of “popular” lectures on the subject was announced
at Cambridge. The Harpers had just published a novel of mine entitled
_The Spell_, in connection with which I had devoted much time
to the study of humanism and the humanists of the fifteenth century.
Because of my familiarity with a kindred subject, I must confess to
a sense of mortification that in reading _Pragmatism_ I found
myself beyond my depth. A “popular” presentation appealed to me as
an opportunity for intellectual development, so I attended the first
lecture, armed with pencil and notebook. Afterwards it so happened that
Professor James was on the trolley car when I boarded it at Harvard
Square, and I sat down beside him.
“I was surprised to see you at my lecture,” he remarked. “Don’t you get
enough of me at your office?”
I told him of my excursions into other philosophic pastures, and of my
chagrin to find so little in pragmatic fields upon which my hungry mind
could feed. He smiled at my language, and entered heartily into the
spirit.
“And today?” he inquired mischievously.--“I hope that today I guided
you successfully.”
“You did,” I declared, opening my notebook, and showing him the entry:
“Nothing is the only resultant of the one thing which is not.”
“That led me home,” I said soberly, with an intentional double meaning.
Professor James laughed heartily.
“Did I really say that? I have no doubt I did. It simply proves my
contention that philosophers too frequently exercise their prerogative
of concealing themselves behind meaningless expressions.”
Two of Professor James’ typographic hobbies were paper labels and as
few words as possible on the title page. In the matter of supplying
scant copy for the title, he won my eternal gratitude, for many a
book, otherwise typographically attractive, is ruined by overloading
the title with too much matter. This is the first page that catches
the eye, and its relation to the book is the same as the door of a
house. Only recently I opened a volume to a beautiful title page. The
type was perfectly arranged in proportion and margin, the decoration
was charming and in complete harmony with the type. It was set by an
artist-printer and did him credit; but turning a few more pages I
found myself face to face with a red-blooded story of western life,
when the title had prepared me for something as delicate as Milton’s
_L’Allegro_. A renaissance door on a New England farmhouse would
have been equally appropriate!
I commend to those who love books the fascinating study of title pages.
I entered upon it from curiosity, and quickly found in it an abiding
hobby. The early manuscripts and first printed volumes possessed no
title pages, due probably to the fact that the handmade paper and
parchment were so costly that the saving of a seemingly unnecessary
page was a consideration. The _incipit_ at the top of the first
page, reading “Here beginneth” and then adding the name of the author
and the subject, answered every purpose; and on the last page the
_explicit_ marked the conclusion of the work, and offered the
printer an excellent opportunity to record his name and the date of
the printing. Most of the early printers were modest in recording
their achievements, but in the famous volume _De Veritate Catholicæ
Fidei_ the printer says of himself:
_This new edition was furnished us to print in Venice by Nicolas
Jenson of France.... Kind toward all, beneficent, generous,
truthful and steadfast in the beauty, dignity, and accuracy
of his printing, let me (with the indulgence of all) name him
the first in the whole world; first likewise in his marvelous
speed. He exists in this, our time, as a special gift from
Heaven to men. June thirteen, in the year of Redemption 1489.
Farewell_
* * * * *
Bibliographers contend that the first title page was used in a book
printed by Arnold Ther Hoernen of Cologne in 1470. In this volume an
extra leaf is employed containing simply an introduction at the top.
It has always seemed to me that this leaf is more likely to have been
added by the printer to correct a careless omission of the introduction
on his first page of text. Occasionally, in the humanistic manuscript
volumes in the Laurenziana Library, at Florence, there occurs a
“mirror” title (see _opp. page_), which consists of an illuminated
page made up of a large circle in the center containing the name of the
book, sometimes surrounded by smaller circles, in which are recorded
the titles of the various sections. This seems far more likely to have
been suggestive of what came to be the formal title page.
[Illustration: MIRROR TITLE
From Augustinus: _Opera_, 1485.
Laurenziana Library, Florence]
By the end of the fifteenth century the title page was in universal
use, and printers showed great ingenuity in arranging the type in
the form of wine cups, drinking glasses, funnels, inverted cones,
and half-diamonds. During the sixteenth century great artists like
Dürer, Holbein, Rubens, and Mantegna executed superbly engraved
titles entirely out of keeping with the poor typography of the books
themselves. In many of the volumes the title page served the double
purpose of title and full-page illustration (see _pages_ 228 and
241). What splendid examples would have resulted if the age of engraved
titles had coincided with the high-water mark in the art of printing!
As the art of printing declined, the engraved title was discarded, and
the printer of the seventeenth century seemed to feel it incumbent
upon him to cover the entire page with type. If you recall the early
examples of American Colonial printing, which were based upon the
English models of the time, you will gain an excellent idea of the
grotesque tendency of that period. The Elzevirs were the only ones who
retained the engraved title (_page_ 241). The Baskerville volumes
(_page_ 247), in the middle of the eighteenth century, showed a
return to good taste and harmonious co-ordination with the text; but
there was no beauty in the title until Didot in Paris and Bodoni
in Parma, Italy, introduced the so-called “modern” face, which is
peculiarly well adapted to display (_page_ 253). William Morris,
in the late nineteenth century, successfully combined decoration with
type,--over-decorated, in the minds of many, but in perfect keeping
with the type pages of the volumes themselves. Cobden-Sanderson,
at the Doves Press, returned to the extreme in simplicity and good
taste (_page_ 265), excelling all other printers in securing
from the blank space on the leaf the fullest possible value. One
of Cobden-Sanderson’s classic remarks is, “I always give greater
attention, in the typography of a book, to what I leave out than to
what I put in.”
* * * * *
The name of William Morris today may be more familiar to booklovers
than that of Cobden-Sanderson, but I venture to predict that within
a single decade the latter’s work as printer and binder at the
Doves Press at Hammersmith, London, will prove to have been a more
determining factor in printing as an art than that of William Morris
at the Kelmscott Press, and that the general verdict will be that
Cobden-Sanderson carried out the splendid principles laid down by
Morris more consistently than did that great artist-craftsman himself.
[Illustration: T. J. COBDEN-SANDERSON, 1841-1922
From Etching by Alphonse Legros, 1893]
The story of Cobden-Sanderson’s life is an interesting human document.
He told it to me one evening, its significance being heightened by
the simplicity of the recital. At seventeen he was apprenticed to
an engineer, but he worked less than a year in the draft room. He
disliked business as business, and began to read for Cambridge, with
the idea of entering the Church. While at Trinity College he read for
mathematical honors, but three years later, having given up all idea
of going into the Church, he left Cambridge, refusing honors and a
degree, which he might have had, as a protest against the competitive
system and the “warp” it gave to all university teaching. Then, for
seven or eight years, he devoted himself to Carlyle and the study of
literature, “Chiefly German philosophy,” he said, “which is perhaps not
literature,” supporting himself by desultory writing and practicing
medicine. When he was thirty years old he was admitted to the Bar,
which profession he abandoned thirteen years later to become a manual
laborer. The following is quoted from notes which I made after this
conversation:
_I despaired of knowledge in a philosophical sense, yet I
yearned to do or to make something. This was the basic idea
of my life. At this time it was gradually revealed to me that
the arts and crafts of life might be employed to make society
itself a work of art, sound and beautiful as a whole, and in
all its parts._
It is difficult to associate Cobden-Sanderson’s really tremendous
contributions to bookmaking as an art with his self-effacing
personality. If I had met the man before I had become intimately
acquainted with his work, I should have been disappointed; having
had him interpreted to me by his books before I met him, his unique
personality proved a definite inspiration and gave me an entirely new
viewpoint on many phases of the art of typography in its application to
human life.
In person, Cobden-Sanderson was of slight build, with sloping
shoulders, his most noticeable feature being his reddish beard tinged
with gray. He was nervous and shy, and while talking seldom looked
one squarely in the eye, yet at no time could one doubt the absolute
sincerity of his every word and act. He was hopelessly absent-minded.
Invited to dine with me in London, he appeared the evening before the
date set, retiring overwhelmed with embarrassment when he discovered
his mistake. On the following evening he forgot the appointment
altogether! Later, when in Boston, he accepted an invitation to dine
with a literary society, but failed to appear because he could not
remember where the dinner was to be held. He had mislaid his note of
invitation and could not recall the name of the man who sent it. On
that evening he dashed madly around the city in a taxicab for over an
hour, finally ending up at his hotel in absolute exhaustion while the
members of the literary society dined without their lion!
While president of the Society of Printers in Boston, I arranged for
Cobden-Sanderson to come to America to deliver some lectures on _The
Ideal Book_. Among these were four given at Harvard University. At
the conclusion of the last lecture he came to my library, thoroughly
tired out and completely discouraged. Seated in a great easy chair he
remained for several moments in absolute silence, resting his face upon
his hands. Suddenly, without a moment’s warning, he straightened up and
said with all the vehemence at his command,
“I am the veriest impostor who ever came to your shores!”
Seeing my surprise and incredulity, he added,
“I have come to America to tell you people how to make books. In
New York they took me to see the great Morgan Library and other
collections. They showed me rare _incunabula_. They expected me to
know all about them, and to be enthusiastic over them. As a matter of
fact, I know nothing about the work of the great master-printers, and
care less!”
My face must have disclosed my thoughts, for he held up a restraining
hand.
“Don’t think me such an egotist as my words imply. It isn’t that
at all. It is true that I am interested only in my own work, but
that is because my work means something more to me than the books
I produce. When I print a book or bind one it is because I have a
message in my soul which I am impelled to give mankind, and it comes
out through my fingers. Other men express their messages in different
_media_,--in stone or on canvas. I have discovered that the book
is my medium. When I bind and decorate a volume I seem to be setting
myself, like a magnetized needle, or like an ancient temple, in line
and all square, not alone with my own ideal of society, but with that
orderly and rhythmical whole which is the revelation of science and
the normal of developed humanity. You asked me a while ago to explain
certain inconsistencies in my work, and I told you that there was no
explanation. That is because each piece of work represents me at the
time I do it. Sometimes it is good and sometimes poor, but, in any
case, it stands as the expression of myself at the time I did it.”
As he spoke I wondered if Cobden-Sanderson had not explained why, in
the various arts, the work of those master-spirits of the past had not
been surpassed or even equaled during the intervening centuries. It is
a matter for consideration, when the world has shown such spectacular
advance along material lines, that in painting, in sculpture, in
architecture, in printing, the work of the old masters still stands
supreme. In their time, when men had messages in their souls to give
the world, the interpretation came out through their fingers, expressed
in the medium with which each was familiar. Before the invention of
printing, the masses received those messages directly from the marble
or the canvas, or from the design of some great building. The printed
book opened to the world a storehouse of wisdom hitherto unavailable,
and made individual effort less conspicuous and therefore less
demanded. The few outstanding figures in every art have been those who,
like Cobden-Sanderson, have set themselves “in line and all square,
not alone with their own ideals of society, but with that orderly and
rhythmical whole which is the revelation of science and the normal of
developed humanity.” It is what Cobden-Sanderson has done rather than
his written words, that conveys the greatest message.
While Theodore Roosevelt was President of the United States, and on the
occasion of one of his several visits to Boston, his secretary wrote
that the President would like to examine with me some of the special
volumes I had built. I knew him to be an omnivorous reader, but until
then did not realize his deep interest in the physical side of books.
He came to the University Press one bitterly cold day in January, and
entered my office wrapped in a huge fur coat. After greeting him I
asked if he wouldn’t lay the coat aside.
“Of course I will,” he replied briskly; “it is just as easy to catch
hot as it is to catch cold.”
We devoted ourselves for an hour to an examination and discussion of
certain volumes I had produced. One of these was a small twelve-mo
entitled _Trophies of Heredia_ containing poems by José-Maria
de Heredia, brought out in artistic _format_ for a Boston
publishing house, which had proved a complete failure from a commercial
standpoint. Probably not over two hundred copies of the book were ever
sold. Evidently one of these had fallen into the President’s hands, for
he seized my copy eagerly, saying,
“Hello! I didn’t remember that you made this. Extraordinary volume,
isn’t it? I want to show you something.”
Quickly turning to one of the pages he pointed to the line, _The
hidden warmth of the Polar Sea_.
“What do you think of that?” he demanded. “Did you ever think of the
Polar Sea as being warm? And by Jove he’s right,--it _is_ warm!”
Later, in Washington, I accepted his invitation for luncheon at the
White House and for an afternoon in his library, where we continued our
discussion of books. Before we turned to the volumes, he showed me some
of the unusual presents which various potentates had given him, such as
a jade bear from the Tzar of Russia, a revolver from Admiral Togo, and
line drawings made personally by the Kaiser, showing in detail every
ship in our Navy. When I expressed surprise that such exact knowledge
should be in the possession of another country, my host became serious.