book I

had 37 different varieties of title-page set up. My friend William Maxwell, who printed this book, said that he did not mind "losing" (printers are like farmers) on the text of a Nonesuch book because he always made up his loss on the title-page....

In 1925 we moved from our cellar to Great James Street and we decided (with some misgivings) to incorporate the firm. It seemed better to our auditors although we had suspicions that our subscribers might be discouraged from collecting when they saw first the formula "Ltd." on our letter-paper. We did them an injustice. The partners became directors and shareholders. Vera Meynell bought a little book entitled "The Secretary and His Directors" and, impressed by the legal penalties that hedge about these offices, occasionally wound up one of our long triangular discussions by taking down the minutes book and saying: "Well, I suppose that this might as well have been a board meeting." Once a year, for the benefit of Somerset House we (the directors) presented to ourselves (the shareholders) with all due formalities, a report on the year's accounts and progress. Otherwise it made no difference.

[Illustration: The Antigone Greek type used in Homer's _Iliad_, decorated by Rudolph Koch. Printed by Joh. Enschedé en Zonen. Published 1931; edition, 1450 copies.]

Even the "mundial bad-time" (to quote the phrase of an Indian friend) of 1930 did not seem to affect us or our customers much. But the second year of the great depression brought onto the market many hoarded copies of our books from the pickle-shelves of profiteers and deflated some of their more astronomical prices. Our survival-value (as luxury trades go) is perhaps due to the fact that even in boom-time we tried to be honest traders, not using our success with collectors to put prices as high as the traffic would bear, but giving a constant ratio of good value in the sheer materials of book-making, so that our paper, printing, binding were as good as any to be had at the price.

No book-producing of our kind can subsist without sales in America. It was our good fortune to ally ourselves in 1927 with Random House of New York. No collaboration could be more satisfactory from a technical or a personal point of view. It survived the get-rich-quick temptations of 1929; it has survived the difficulties of the depression. New blood and money entered the Press two years ago when Cecil Harmsworth, Desmond Harmsworth and Eric Harmsworth joined our board. But they belong to our Second Century, not to our first.

We have avoided antagonisms, even avoided competition. My friend Osbert Sitwell suggested that we should publish a satire on Noel Coward; Coward that we should publish his satire on the Sitwells. To both we said "no." How pleasant it would have been to issue them together in a single book! When I found that Peter Davies and the Nonesuch were both planning to reissue Cobbett's _Rural Rides_, we met and tossed for it. He won; and our editorial work was made over to him.

Of all Nonesuch books that by which I should best like the venture to be judged is our Shakespeare, edited by Herbert Farjeon. It brought us, among other things, a characteristic contact with T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence had written a letter of fervent praise of the Shakespeare to David Garnett; and I sought permission to use it. David Garnett was himself our ambassador. Lawrence appealed to the group of friends with whom he happened to be. "I don't want my letter to be reprinted. I hate the advertising of my name and opinions," he protested. To his obvious chagrin (for Lawrence had a passion for publicity as great as his passion against it) his friends supported his view. "After all," said they "you are not a Shakespeare expert." That decided Lawrence. "I think it is my duty to give permission," he said. This was his letter:

"We turn over to the Nonesuch Shakespeare. There you have created a most marvellous pleasure. I have handled it ever so many times, and read THE TEMPEST right through. It satisfies. It is final, like the Kelmscot Chaucer or the Ashendene Virgil. And it is a book which charms one to read slowly, an art which is almost gone from us in these times. Every word which Shakespeare uses stands out glowing. A really great edition. The tact and grace of your editor have been surpassing. I think I like the size and shape and binding almost as much as the text. The paper, too, is just right. Altogether a triumph. One of the best things is that it can be done again. Nobody will ever dare to produce the old type of edition now, while your text stands there to reproach them. It means a permanent improvement in Shakespeares."

"There they are, my fifty men and women." They must speak for themselves, and I have almost silenced them with my chatter. For their successors I can say only this: that it remains the ambition of the Press to make a worthy edition, textually and typographically, of every major English writer who has not already been appropriately served. It will make these books for money, and has no shame in that. We are not "Gentlemen Farmers" but workers at our trade. But we are enthusiasts also, even in our middle years; and still propagandists. Every well-designed book or advertisement or prospectus is the begetter of others; and good printing is one of the graces of life even where life is ungracious.

[Illustration: Title page for small book edited by Francis Meynell, composed in Janson and "printed on the premises" at the Press on Van Gelder mould-made paper. Edition, 1250 copies.]

In a letter from Vienna in 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writes of Prince Eugene's library that it is "though not very ample, well chosen; but as the Prince would admit into it no editions but what are beautiful and pleasing to the eye and there are nevertheless numbers of excellent books that are but indifferently printed, this finikin and foppish taste makes many disagreeable chasms in this collection!"

I should like to make Prince Eugene patron saint of the Nonesuch. And dear Lady Mary as well; for it remains the object of the Nonesuch Press to meet tastes finikin and foppish like his, studious like hers.

COMPOSED IN POLIPHILUS AND BLADO TYPES

FOOTNOTES:

[34] When we published the Compendious _William Morris_ I sent copies to G. L., to Ramsay MacDonald and to Mr. Baldwin--the last a stranger to me. Their replies make almost a résumé of their political characters. G. L. saw in the social essays a conscience-pricking reproach about things left long undone. J. R. M. saw in them a cause for self-congratulation. Mr. Baldwin did not answer for nearly two years: the book had been mislaid. But when he did answer he covered two pages with his close hand-writing to apologise and explain. The Perfect Gentleman!

[Illustration]CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD[Illustration]

_Printing for Love_

From _Cockalorum_: A Bibliography of the Golden Cockerel Press, June 1943-December 1948. (An address to the Art Society, University of the South West of England in Exeter, June, 1947.) Copyright 1950 by the Golden Cockerel Press. Reprinted by permission of author and publisher.

[Illustration] I have called this talk "Printing for Love." I have not come to preach a gospel to you, but, as I proceed to discuss printing and publishing and book-illustration, it will be apparent to you that one of the tenets of my religion is that we workers should do our job, whether it be farming, or gardening, book-keeping or building, hewing coal or engineering, _with a will_. In Ecclesiastes the Preacher advises us: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." (Ch. 9, v. 10.) You may say that my job is a nice job; that it is all very well for me to talk. I can assure you that book-manufacture is a most intricate process. Things tend to go wrong at every stage of production. Of worries we printers have no end.

I often feel like an Irish farmer driving his pig to market. In one hand he holds a stick to prod the pig. In the other a string tied to the pig's leg. The pig goes to the right and then to the left and the countryman wonders will he ever get that pig to the market. Many of my books are like that pig. They drive me to despair. And yet I love my printing like a mountaineer loves his mountains, which he climbs arduously with sweat and aching limbs. He has his reward when he reaches the summit and enjoys a fine view, much as I enjoy the appearance of a book which I have made with infinite pains. For both of us there is the joy of achievement--of something attempted, something done.

"Oh, but," you may expostulate, "supposing you were a sewer-man, could you bring love into your work?" I am sure I would. In fact this case in point was quoted recently on the wireless. If I remember rightly, a speaker had referred with commiseration to the lot of the sewer-man working underground among the rats in the muck and stench of drains. He was called to task by a most insulted sewer-man, who explained that his was a good job--as good as any other. All the artists and the craftsmen who co-operate with me--the paper-makers, the cloth-makers, the tanners, the brass-cutters, the illustrators, the compositors, the pressmen, the binders--aye, and the authors too, who write and rewrite their text until it seems to me just right for the Golden Cockerel--all of them have their worries and their toil, but their work for me is done with love.

This is a question you might ask yourselves: can a beautiful thing be made cynically? The dice is loaded against the unwanted child of a loveless marriage. You cannot divorce your work from your life. The two are parts of a whole. My religion is that love should be the basis of all one's living and all one's work. In so far as my books have been successful as works of art, it is because they have been made with love.

Only with great self-restraint can I refrain from reading you again that beautiful thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians on Faith, Hope and Love--you remember "Love suffereth long and is kind, love envieth not, love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up." Please read it now and then. It is so important.

Perhaps, when you heard my talk was to be called "Printing for Love," you thought, "Oh, he means printing without financial reward." Believe me, love, too, hath its reward. Make what you have to make, and do what you have to do, the way I advocate, and you will have your reward. You must have _faith_ in this. We have got to fight our battles against obstructions, but, if we fight well, and do what we are intended to do, everything is made possible for us: the most miraculous things happen in their due time.

At the Golden Cockerel I never choose a book because I think it a good seller. Publishing friends are astonished when I admit that quite recently I refused books offered to me by Evelyn Waugh--one of the best selling novelists of today--and Sir Osbert Sitwell. Of course I do not disapprove of the authors. I admire them greatly. But in each case the manuscript submitted was not one I wanted for the Cockerel.

I choose those books which I believe are _right_ for this gay, mirthful, versatile bird. At times he likes to play, at times to be serious. He is interested in genuine old tales of adventure written by explorers and missionaries, who may have travelled in birch-bark canoes or quaint unwieldy ships. He is interested in old peoples and their poetry. At present he is printing a translation of the epic of Gilgamesh preserved on stone tablets. It is at least six thousand years old and refers to a flood--like Noah's Flood--which was recent history to people then. They were either more or less civilized then than we are now, according to your view of what constitutes civilization. They appear to have had more to eat than we have now; they spent more time in making life beautiful, and in thoughtful enquiry into spiritual things, such as survival after death. They had libraries of books, not printed like Golden Cockerels, but inscribed on series of stone tablets. There were several "copies" of the epic of Gilgamesh in the library at Nineveh.

To return to the Golden Cockerel, he also loves the masterpieces of English and French literature and classical literature. He is really a very human bird, kind and sometimes very amorous, never spiteful, never morbid, never cruel. I personally pretend to run this Press, but you know this chimeric cockerel really rules the roost. When I and two friends took over the Press in 1933, I had quite different ideas for it from those I had accepted a few months later. This Cockerel had his own personality and traditions. I have rather enjoyed following his gaudy plumage along the aerial avenues in which he seems to want to fly.

This has not always been easy for me. From time to time I had partners to help me. Their ideas and mine naturally did not always coincide. They gave in to me so often that just occasionally I had, in common charity, to print and publish some book favoured by one of them and which I did not myself like. Usually on such occasions the finished book was to me abortive--a baby cuckoo among my own fledglings. And they usually did not sell well. Try as you may, you cannot do quite as well for someone else's offspring.

It has always been of paramount importance that my books should sell. As a husband and a father of three children, I have had to make the Cockerel pay. Otherwise I should have had to work at something else. Obviously you cannot make a large income from the sale of, say, half a dozen books a year in small limited editions. But the Cockerel has never let me down and always made it possible for me to keep on with this work. The late St. John Hornby, who used to publish those monumental Ashendene Press books at prices in the neighbourhood of 100 gns. has said that, taken all over, he would just approximately cover his costs. No profit! He was in a financial position to ignore costs and the necessity to make his books pay. In theory that is good. In practice I think it is wholesome that the products of your labour should be commercially right. The absolute necessity for you to sell what you produce makes you take notice of the reactions of your patrons, keeps you from being too personal, too idiosyncratic, too precious, shall I say too amateurish? Here I am on difficult ground. It depends what you mean by amateurish. I think of myself as a professional, but, to the trade publishers (who would not dream of rejecting a manuscript from Evelyn Waugh), I, and others like me, are looked on as amateurs, because we do what we like.

This type of amateur, who does what he likes, scientifically, is, I believe, very important. Into this category would fall research students, and poets, and scholars, and inventors, and all sorts of people. Has a scientific study ever been made of the amateur throughout the ages and his influence on our life? If not, _there_ is a noble thesis for a research student, and he could make of it a most interesting and I think saleable book. Perhaps _one of you_ will do it!

Now you may be thinking, "here's this chap and they tell me he has a certain reputation as a printer. We get him down here to talk to us about printing, and off he goes gassing about love, and Noah's flood, and how to make money without trying to."

Please forgive me! You see I started as a printer and taught myself how to dress a book according to my tastes. Then I became a publisher. Let us make no mistake: the important thing is the literary content of the book. How it is dressed is only of secondary importance. It _can_ be dressed any old how. Obviously it is better when it is suitably dressed. But the dress, that is, the printing and binding, must not be accorded _too_ great importance--it must not _vaunt_ itself. If you ask a book-seller who has built up a circle of people who collect "cockerels" _why_ they like cockerels, he will answer "because they are _cockerels_." By this he does not, I hope, mean "because they wear cockerel dress"--or, shall I say, "plumage"?--but rather that they are, in their literary content, in their dress, and in their illustration, examples of the cockerel idea of what a book should be.

Of course it is no good the author thinking he has done everything--it is the composite whole which is so engaging. I have known some illustrators who think the author doesn't count. And authors tend to think the artist a hack who should do what he is told. Both may think that my own small contribution, as the architect of the whole structure, is unimportant. Quite the greatest joy for me in publishing is being in constant delightful intercourse with these beautiful authors and artists. Beautiful is the right word. I don't mean physically, of course, but in their natures. Compare them if you like, to the most sensitive instruments designed by man and you behold these God-made beings a hundred-fold more sensitive. Go to the races and delight in the controlled nervousness and the pent-up fire of enthusiasm in those beautiful thoroughbred horses, and yet these dreamers of dreams, these passionate romancers, these scholars, in all the controlled exuberance of their knowledge and their zeal for research, these drawers of pictures, who "see the light that never was on sea or land": the horses are as nothing beside them!

Now, who are these authors and scholars and artists? Well, some are, of course, professionals, in the sense that they live by their art, and others, a lot of them, are civil servants, or architects, or even prime ministers, who make their art a hobby. But can we end there? Is not every roadman tidying his road, every thatcher on the roof, or every good accountant neatly writing his accounts, and every worker planting his allotment of a summer's evening, an artist to a greater or less degree? He seems to me, watching him, to be working for love. And so with those of us who make seemly books.

Normally you have the publisher who chooses what books he will publish, and contracts with the author to produce and sell his work in book form. You have also the paper-maker, the ink-maker, the type-founder, the maker of printing machinery and plant. You have the printer, with his compositors who prepare the type for press, his proof-readers, his pressmen who print the corrected type on the paper, and his warehousemen, who deal out the paper, and pack the printed sheets. You have the binders and manufacturers of material and machinery used in binding. Normally a host of people have taken their part, however small, in processes which go to the making of the finished book.

In a "private press" a very great deal of the work is concentrated in the hands of its owner. In certain cases the owner himself has set the type and printed it on a hand-press. His output has thus been severely limited to the productivity of one single pair of hands. This is not practical politics today--one's turnover is too small to cover overheads. An alternative is to employ skilled help with the type-setting and presswork. This was the method employed by the Golden Cockerel up to 1933. For reasons I need not go into, this method does not now pay.

The survival of the Golden Cockerel, since I and my friends took it over in the midst of the great depression, has been due in large measure to the method of production which we adopted. By working in with the Chiswick Press, a famous old firm of trade printers, we arranged that the Cockerel should have the use of their plant and their skilled labour precisely as and when we wanted it, without the necessity for capital expenditure on plant or of providing the wages of skilled craftsmen, week in week out, whether or not fully employed. Those were terrible times, and our solution was the only one practicable. It was a great experiment, but it worked. Of all the important private presses in this country, the Cockerel alone has carried on--and right through the war. In the books of the Golden Cockerel a great tradition survives.

But the survival of the Golden Cockerel, and of the tradition which it holds dear, is not achieved solely by its method of production. On the contrary, there are other prime factors. I have said that in my view the literary content of the book is more important than its dress. We must not print for the sake of printing. Firstly then I only print what I greatly desire to publish--something that is really good. I think I have been successful in finding a lot of new literary material which a sophisticated section of the community does enjoy to read. Of course some of my book-seller friends often beg me to print the old favourites, for which there is such a great demand. Occasionally I oblige. I have a Gray's _Elegy_ at the binders now and a Keats' _Endymion_ in the press. But generally the Cockerel prefers to be more enterprising. Look at all the literature we unearthed and published on the subject of the Mutiny on the Bounty--book after book. And then those volumes of Shelley's letters to Hogg. We found and published the journal kept by the Pilgrim Fathers when they went to America. Then there were the four previously unpublished books by that legendary character, Lawrence of Arabia, and so on. These are typical of the sort of thing we've found and published for the first time. Not the old favorites, but, because they add to literature and knowledge, so well worth making known.

The second important feature of Cockerels is their illustration with engravings. More than any other process, engraving harmonizes with type. Engraved wood-blocks and copper-plates are very difficult to print as they should be printed, especially on a durable rag-paper. They are therefore little used in these days of mass-production. In the hands of the team of artists who work for the Golden Cockerel, engraving as an artistic medium is flowering as never before. By the enthusiasm and _love_ which these artists bring to their work, they advance their techniques year by year, always improving on their own previous best, or the previous best of their competitors, till there sometimes seems to be no limit to the new effects they will obtain in their illustrations. It is an undying satisfaction to the Golden Cockerel to be able to encourage and advise talented engravers, and, by displaying their work to the best advantage, to build up for them the reputations they deserve. In the twenties it was Eric Gill, Robert Gibbings, Eric Ravilious, David Jones, Blair Hughes-Stanton, Agnes Miller-Parker and John Nash. In the thirties, and more recently, other engravers like Clifford Webb, John Buckland-Wright, Reynolds Stone, Gwenda Morgan, Peter Barker-Mill, and John O'Connor have come to the fore. You have seen a few examples of my own wife's work among the books I have brought along. And now we have others too, of an astonishing brilliance, like Dorothea Braby, coming on. It is impossible for me to be sufficiently grateful for the privilege of being able in my small way to nurture this flowering and progressive art.

After their literary content and their illustration, the third feature of Cockerels which has sustained the Press, when other presses have fallen out, is my policy of co-operating with the buying public--of producing books which they can afford to buy. Obviously the very rich men who can pay 100 gns. for a book are now very few and far between. I have resisted the temptation to compete with the 100 gn. books--the "museum pieces." I have resisted the temptation to spend so much on the production of my books that they are inaccessible. With the levelling of incomes there is now a considerable public, which, if it appreciates them, can buy Cockerels at the 2 guineas or 4 guineas which their production necessitates.

Those, then are the particular features of Cockerels which [Illustration] have maintained the Press through difficult years. That they are works of art--the conceptions of a book-architect--would not have sufficed, but, since they are expressions of the art of the book, let us consider them architecturally for a few minutes. The subject is vast: I must try to epitomise it....

COCKEREL DEVICES BY MARK SEVERIN

ARTHUR W. RUSHMORE

_THE FUN AND FURY OF A PRIVATE PRESS. Some Voyages of The Golden Hind_

From _Bookmaking and Kindred Amenities_ edited by Earl Schenck Miers and Richard Ellis. Copyright 1942 by Rutgers University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

[Illustration] "It's fun, isn't it?" said my wife. "I've gotten so that I can recall whole sonnets just by reading these first lines." We were sitting in a patch of warm September sunshine under the walnut, trimmed high like a giant umbrella, over the terrace back of the press. Proof and copy of the long Contents of Edna Millay's new volume of collected sonnets lay on the table between us as we idled, savoring the first signs of Fall in the yellow leaves that the breeze scattered about the gray flagstones. The air was spicy and the ageratum and marigolds in the border matched the autumn colors of the goldenrod and wild asters by the roadside. "I love gardening, too," she said loyally. "I must pot those double begonias before the frost gets them." I lit my pipe again and we went on with the proofs. One hundred ninety-two pages set in Bruce Rogers' beautiful Centaur, corrected, tied and wrapped, lay in neat piles waiting to be taken to Camden for printing. We had worked at it off and on all summer--painstaking work, but as rewarding, in our eyes at least, as any labor we could think of--interesting copy, lots of problems to argue over, the excitement of watching the author's mind at work as proofs came back with alterations, changes that in some miraculous way always added clarity or cadence to the lines; reading and re-reading proof until the sonnets became part of us. Now it was finished, and we had added one more book to the world's store and to our little shelf of Golden Hind Press imprints. This book will be published by Harper & Brothers in an edition which would take us the rest of our lives to print by hand. The design, the whole format and all the composition is ours. The printing and binding will be done elsewhere. Thousands of people will share our pleasure (or brand us failures). We feel that books of this type offer golden opportunities for the private press. We are not selling them, we are making them our way for someone else to sell. However, most of our books are printed on an old hand press, and given to our friends. So far we still have our friends.

As a hobby, a private press may be as extravagant, or as inexpensive, as one chooses to make it. It's fun and hard work and a challenge to all the intelligence one possesses.

We started our press in 1927, named it The Golden Hind after Drake's flagship that went on adventures no more hazardous than ours. Elmer Adler called it "A Busman's Holiday" for a publisher's production man. Perhaps he was right. At that time we knew little about the problems--about as much as parents do about the first baby. We don't know much yet, but we've had a swell time and through it have made a jolly lot of friends which in itself is reward enough.

We started with an ancient hand press of unknown vintage that had been in use in the cut-room at the old Harper plant in Pearl Street since before the knowledge of any man now living. I've an idea that it may have come from England when Harpers started in 1817. Until the 1830's all their books were printed on hand presses--so close are we to the beginnings of the art of printing.

Later, in Philadelphia, we found a big Washington hand press in perfect condition that was going out as old metal. The bed was smooth though the edges showed the nicks of hard wear from the endless up-ending of the forms of some country newspaper. With decent treatment it will be just as good a hundred years from now.

We made up in enthusiasm what we lacked in knowledge. It's not always wise to know too much--it's a great damper on ambition. Shortly after we started, a chance came to do a proposed definitive edition of a well-known poet's works. It was to be in seven folio volumes on handmade paper and no effort was to be spared to make it right. Six hundred pounds of 18 point Lutetia and weight fonts of the smaller sizes were ordered cast at the Enschedé Foundry in Haarlem, Holland, for the job. The type duly came, pages were set, and sample forms printed and bound--and then the project was withdrawn! In the light of accumulated experience I still break out in a cold sweat at the thought of our colossal nerve to have taken on such a task. Anyhow we had the type, and have used it many times. With it we have set the limited editions of each new book of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poems as they have come along, since 1928.

The status of a private press is difficult to define. As far as we are concerned it is to make as well as we can only those books that we want to do and to turn down all else; to have no "help," no payroll, keep no books; to care not a hoot about a balance sheet which has no column for satisfaction; and to take all the time we want to do the job the way we want it. From the standpoint of factory speed we are nothing to write home about--but we are not a factory and have no ambitions in that direction. Ours is a private press and we work as we please: that is where the fun comes in. We can work hard if need arises; then hours have no meaning, and we work till we get exhausted, fed up, and solemnly vow that we'll never do another book. But we have been at it nearly fifteen years and we still think, even though composition is exacting work, that such congenial labor is the best fun in the world. Sometimes we have furious arguments over punctuation, as though life depended on it. It is surprising how much warmth can be generated over the position of a comma. When we set _Shakespeare's Sonnets_ we had at least six different sources to work from, including a facsimile of the first edition. A single punctuation mark will completely change the meaning of a sonnet, so condensed is the wording to fit the mould. No two sources agreed throughout--who were we to put in Shakespeare's points for him--so the smoke got pretty thick sometimes, and the result was still another reading of the sonnets embodying those details we preferred from each: that's the fury of it.

The dream of every private press is to own its own private face. We had our chance but didn't know what to use for money so we let it go. One of the best presses in the United States now owns that type--alas! We have many, too many, faces and borders and florets collected from Europe when the world was sane, yet every new volume seems to need something we do not have. Fred Goudy cast for us at his shop at Marlboro two sizes of Mediaeval. We did Mrs. Browning's _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ in it. That type is precious now since the matrices were lost in the fire that destroyed all his equipment at Deepdene. Long before the Monotype cut the Deepdene face, Fred cast it for us. We used it for Dr. North's _Hymns_. Then along came a book my wife wanted to do. Two hundred and eighty-eight pages of 14 pt. A.T.F. Garamond all standing in galleys made a lot of type for us to store. We used it again for Frederic Prokosch's _The Assassins_ and later for _The Carnival_. Gradually the metal has crept into the house until scarcely a room is spared. We sleep with 60 cases of type in stands on our sleeping porch. We should be safe in a tornado--we have plenty of ballast.

A couple of years ago we did a group of Edmund Spenser's _Amoretti_ for Christmas. The lines breathe the spirit of another day and we wanted to preserve, if we could, the romantic atmosphere. I remembered that for the titles of the poems in _The Queen's Garland_, printed for R. H. Russell in 1898, D. B. Updike had used an odd Italic which he told me was Original Old Style cast by the old Farmer foundry in 1854. Some one had had fun with the 18 point size--it had a swell set of oversized vowels and all the long ſſ ligatures. The resulting effect looked much like very early printing. The mats were in the possession of the A.T.F. though they seemed never to have heard of them and were a bit annoyed by my insisting on seeing their file copy of the Farmer type book. There it was, and eventually they dug them out and cast them for us. We printed the book on our old Hoe hand press on Arak Ash white paper. For a frontispiece we used Virtue's beautiful engraving of Spenser. It was bound in tan boards with dusty rose cloth spine and a bright yellow label. In many ways it is our favorite book.

Last year we had fun (perhaps I should say I did as my wife did not give her fullest sympathy). 1940 was celebrated, and how! as the 500th Anniversary of the Invention of Printing. The whole country broke out in a rash of exhibitions, lectures, special articles and such like, on poor old Gutenberg about whom practically nothing is known to begin with, not even that he invented movable type. If he did, he was only trying to fake manuscript writing and should have been hung as a forger. I got pretty fed up on the tosh that was being handed out. So, to even the score, I "discovered" in a garret in Mainz, Germany, the private diary of Gutenberg's wife (no one but I knew he had one). By quoting from her diary I showed conclusively that all the credit was really hers. I had cuts made of the old leather-bound volumes of the diary (four old volumes from the Harper Medical Library) and a page of the manuscript (translated _into_ German and written in the lovely hand of Dr. Otto Fuhrmann). Dr. Herman Püterschein, that infallible authority on things typographic, wrote a Foreword. It was titled _The Mainz Diary: New Light on the Invention of Printing_ and 200 copies went out for Christmas. Then the unexpected happened. Letters began pouring in showing it was being taken as gospel. Pundits, librarians, experts in the graphic arts, fell for it hard. My wife threatened to disown me. Of course the tale hadn't a word of truth in it. I had been in Mainz and Frankfort a few years before so that the thing started off with some element of reality. A friend in London gobbled it whole--I had to send a letter by Clipper to keep him from showing it proudly to his friends. After all, my yarn had about as much truth in it as most of the hash that I'd been forced to listen to during the year and I'd gotten quite fond of Frau Gutenberg. I felt, too, that I'd done my bit for the cause. Many of the biggest libraries, including the Library of Congress, had requested and received copies. Ten years from now it will pop up in some bibliography of a Ph.D. thesis.

I had my fun all right.

But the boys got even with me. A year later, the editor of a well-known art magazine and his wife, with careful deliberation and much ingenuity, sold me down the river with a hoax that I gobbled whole. So we are even and everybody is happy.

Why are we so cracked about a private press? I often wonder myself. The house smells of printer's ink and type wash. Right now there are eleven metal-strapped type boxes on the sunporch where the expressman left them a week ago; and my wife is to have a luncheon tomorrow. Fine looking mess. I'll get around to them soon. There are piles of printed signatures of our Christmas book all over the place. The composing room is crawling with undistributed type. Can hardly work without spilling it. My pet Vandercook brayer has fallen arches--it was left in the sun yesterday and its insides turned to soup.

Next morning on my desk I found the proof of our new broadside _Emmer Jane_ with the drawing at the top beautifully colored by the artist. It's swell. Presently the messenger brought in the advance copies of the new _Sonnets_ bound in blue natural-finished cloth stamped in gold, just as I wanted it. I can hardly wait to get home to show them to my wife. We must get that new type to use for _The Ghost Ship_. We'll start it this week-end. How slow the days go. Isn't a private press fun!

_Postscript_ 1951:

Still hard at it. We are older but no wiser. Nowadays the grand-children come in the back door and call up the composing-room stairs, "Arthur, may we play type and picture cuts?" They spend hours at it and I spend hours putting things to rights.

The check-list has grown to 186 books and pamphlets. The work is still as exciting as ever, though we try to check the fury a bit. The skipper of the _Golden Hind_ retired in January 1950, which released more time for the press; being in business always was a nuisance.

We spent the summer doing a first edition of a Mark Twain book for Harpers--mixed with a lot of farming. For a retirement occupation we can commend a private press. It keeps up the interest in life.

Offers of work flow in, much more than we care to accept. We are not in business and we have more projects of our own than we shall ever complete.

It's fun to get up with the chickens and work together all morning, spend the afternoon puttering about outdoors, and retire at night dog tired--what my wife calls "nice tired," no nervous tension.

The _Golden Hind_ is twenty-four years old but her seams are tight and she manages nicely--who knows, maybe the voyage is only nicely begun.

COMPOSED IN FAIRFIELD TYPES

[Illustration]EDWIN GRABHORN[Illustration]

_The Fine Art of Printing_

An address before the Roxburghe Club of San Francisco at its meeting in the Allied Arts Guild, Menlo Park, California, May 15, 1933. Fifty copies printed by Edwin and Robert Grabhorn for members of the Roxburghe Club, May 15, 1933. Reprinted by permission of the author.

[Illustration] I know of no better way of beginning this talk to you tonight on PAPER, INK and TYPE than by first sketching a brief outline of the Art of Printing.

Printing in its childhood was an art. The highest period of any art is its childhood, because childhood moves by spontaneous inner urge, not by rules and intellectual bondage that runs all into fixed moulds. It is an accepted truth that as skill and elaboration creep into development of an art, simplicity, feeling and beauty decline. The early printers were not weighed down with rules, formulas and theories which have smothered us today. With but one font of type, a wooden frame with a screw attachment and a crude inking device, they have given us books of strength and beauty that we have never equalled.

We all like to think of the invention of printing as springing Minerva-like from the brain of man. Printing is, of course, the combination of paper, type, ink and the press; and these various elements were some three hundred years in the process of springing. Paper was the cheap substitute for vellum, and type the substitute for hand-writing.

All of us are more or less familiar with the invention of printing and with its God-like first-born, the Gutenberg Bible. Those who have had the thrill of examining the great 42-line Bible have told us that it is the most beautiful book ever printed. This is a magnificent tribute--one that I have never heard contradicted. Just how much of the beauty of this Bible is due to the art of the illuminator and how much to the skill of the printer has never been told by those who represent it to be the most perfect specimen of printing.

A few years ago a book speculator dissected an incomplete copy, selling the leaves with beautifully hand-illumined initials at twice the price of those pages without decoration. I hope this speculator lost his ill-gotten gains in the stock market.

A thing of beauty stands alone, and I know of no fixed law by which we can judge beauty except through the emotions; and emotions are rather difficult to tabulate. I, myself, can only contemplate the childhood of printing with amazement and admiration. In its youth it exhausted every possibility of type arrangement.

An estimate of the activity of those first wooden frames can only be guessed at. In Venice alone, as early as 1472, over two million separate volumes were printed. By the opening of the sixteenth century the art of printing had spread to every civilized country and the supply of its raw materials became so great that the process of cheapening set in.

The first printers had selected as models for their types the beautiful hand-written books of their day. The second generation of printers modelled their types from those of the first printers. The illuminator gave way to the wood-cutter and the fine art of printing became a science, then a craft, and when William Morris tried to stop its downward slide, in 1891, it was a trade.

During this downward trip through four centuries, weak attempts to restore the art of printing to its first high place in the life of man were made. Benjamin Franklin wrote on the "Improvement of Printing Backwards," protesting the discontinuance of the tall "f." But man was not interested in the intangible influence of art as much as he was in the perfection of the machine.

The ink was hardly dry on the effusions of our modern printing critics, when the collapse of over-production set in and silenced them, I hope, permanently.

Writing about modern books in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Francis Meynell of the Nonesuch Press says: "The type-setting machines used with as much skill as hand-set type will give a better result, and in alliance with fast but very perfect cylinder printing presses, will give this result not to a few, but to a multitude. It has taken us from the day of 'the book beautiful,' and given us the day of the beautiful book."

The fast moving cylinder presses of the Nonesuch Press have slowed up since this was written. And we can thank God that we have some opportunity for reflection.

One of the modern criticisms of William Morris and the private presses that he inspired is that too much stress was placed on method. Method means how a thing is done and how a thing is done is of very vital importance if we want to give our work durability.

I have said before that it was William Morris who attempted to stop the downward slide of printing. He was the leader in the revival of what is known as "modern fine printing." It has been said that Morris was inspired by a lecture of Emery Walker's on the Golden Age of Printing. While not denying Walker's position in this revival, we must admit that there is a vast gulf between talking and doing. Morris's was a very simple yet positive personality. There were no tints in his make-up. When asked if he liked colors, his answer: "blue and red," tells us whole volumes in folio. He had no tolerance for the effeminate printing of his day. He even scorned the sunny pages of the Italian Renaissance printers. It is no wonder that his Gothic books, in violent contrast to the weak old styles and modern type faces of his time--and our time, too--were startling. I have no doubt that some antiquarian hundreds of years hence, delving among musty tomes, will find Morris's books still giants in a land of dwarfs.

Whether you like or dislike Morris's books is of little concern to me. But what is of vital importance to me as a printer, and should be to all printers who are endeavoring to print books that will last, is the honesty of William Morris. Morris knew, because he was a collector of the earliest printed books, that those early printed books could not have descended to him, looking as sparkling and vital as the day they left their makers' hands, without honesty of craftsmanship. It was this craftsmanship that Morris revived, and that we today will have to revive again before our books can have any claims to a long life.

Let me briefly describe to you the various processes used in the making of books, beginning with the paper on which the book is printed. Morris found no paper being manufactured that was suitable for his use. It was only after months of experiment and failure, during which he worked at the paper mill himself, that a satisfactory sheet was made for him. With the closing of the Kelmscott Press after Morris's death, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker used his specifications for this paper at their Doves Press. This mill still manufactures this paper, and it can be obtained easily enough. But it is not popular with the printers of today because its texture is so tough, its resistance to type so great, that we rather choose the short cut to the Royal Road to Fine Bookmaking, using the many counterfeits with their imitation deckle edges and their artificial ageing at the mill. We also like opaqueness in our paper, although transparency is usually a guarantee of its quality. All-linen-rag quality paper can easily enough be printed on if dampened first. By lessening the resistance of the paper through dampening, the type can penetrate its tough fiber, and the ink thus becomes a part of the paper itself. But by taking the short cut and not dampening the paper, at least four times the quantity of pressure and ink must be used. This over-abundance of pressure and ink still does not penetrate the paper but leaves the ink upon the paper's surface so that it looks to me as if printed from an etcher's plate. The excessive amount of ink, because of the heavy varnish used in its manufacture, has a tendency to shine when dry, producing a luster that is hard on the eyes. In time a film of oil will encircle each individual letter, discoloring the paper, and the page will look like those cheaply printed eighteenth-century books do to us today.

I know of no process in the making of a fine book more difficult of perfecting than getting the right amount of pressure and ink into the paper. In hand-made paper there is only an approximate uniformity in the thickness of the sheets, and these variations can be overcome by using a hand-press. The sense of touch must be developed until you can feel the right amount of pressure through the lever. The mechanical press is so regulated that it cannot control the variations of the paper's thickness. The right pressure can, of course, be applied to the average sheet--the heavier and lighter sheets can be sorted out before printing. However, this is seldom done. The paper is usually sorted when the finished book is being collated.

I can speak with some authority on the importance of dampening a sheet of fine paper. Such a process takes lots of time, but if you think the time not well spent compare a book from the Kelmscott Press with any of the books of our best machine printers of today. You will see that decay is already beginning to set in in the machine book. The edges of the paper will soon turn yellow and the ink begin to spread.

I hesitate to turn from the processes of making a fine book endure without impressing upon you the importance of using the finest quality of paper. The paper, and the ink that becomes a part of that paper, determines the life of the book, just as stones and mortar do in architecture. No matter how fine the type or how beautiful the decorations, the book must die if quality be lacking in both paper and ink.

And now just a few remarks about the binding of a book. Bindings are the protection for the body of a book. Here permanency decreases as use increases. Only those books that have escaped usage have come down to us with their original bindings, except those bound in limp vellum. Heavy boards encased in leather were the protection of many early books. The swinging of the heavy covers breaks the hinges of the book, and this leads to destruction. William Morris revived the use of limp vellum as a book covering.

Of far more importance than the cover in the making of a fine book is the gathering and sewing. When the printed sheets are folded a trained eye should put them together so that pages either under- or over-inked may be taken out. If there are no extras, then all the light pages can be put into one book, and the dark in another. If this is done, the critic will say that the press work is even.

After the book is assembled the sheets are sewn together by hand, using a strong linen thread. Of course, they can be sewn on a machine, but you might just as well save that expense by gluing the sheets together. If you don't believe me, take a machine-sewn book, before it is glued, pull off the first section, hold it up by the last page and watch the book fall to pieces. Hand-sewn books are sewn on either cords or tapes. Of course, you can have cords and tapes on a machine-sewn book, but they will be false ones, pasted on after the book has been stabbed to death.

I do not want to give you the impression that I am some sort of John the Baptist crying in a wilderness of machines. Machines are designed for special purposes and when we try to use them for a different purpose from that for which they were intended we fail. You would think a carpenter who used a machine that was made to drive nails in an orange box unbalanced if he tried to adjust that machine to build a house. The delicately adjusted printing press that Francis Meynell idealizes was designed for producing our ephemeral printing.

A machine cannot create--it can only assist, directed by the mind and imagination. The more that is left to the machine, the worse the work. The machine can arrive at perfection, perfection that is cold and dead and mechanical. And it is this cold and dead perfection that brings me to the beauty of the book of today.

I would say that "Post-Modern" Fine Printing began in America with Bruce Rogers, at the plant of William Rudge. It was Bruce Rogers' books that have influenced American and English printers more than any other recent single force. It was the "charm" and finish of this man's work that none of us escaped. During the years that Bruce Rogers was designing special editions at the Riverside Press there were few collectors of his books. As late as 1920, I bought some of these books from the publishers. They had been in stock nearly twenty years! Among them was "The Song of Roland" at the publisher's price. When I first started printing I was already an admirer and collector of these Riverside Press limited editions.

Now William Rudge was a better business man than a printer. He recognized the ability of Rogers and engaged him. Then things began to happen to our Fine Art of Printing. The typographical designer came into fashion, the machine was glorified and we all became theorists. Printing was aimed at suitability. The scholar and critic displaced the master craftsman and the advertising artist was added by way of variety.

Each new type face, faithfully re-cut by the aid of the pantograph and resurrected from our admittedly worst periods of printing, was eagerly bought by our typographical experts. The printers who had been quietly producing books, trying to make them a little better than necessary, fell into the hands of the publisher and the publicity agent. And the publisher announced that the next limited edition of 1600 copies was completely over-subscribed--the poor printer got one-third of what you had to pay. It was a Wonderland, indeed, until Alice woke up, and the printer was left with all the cards, and they were all blank.

I am very glad it all happened. I would go through any form of hysteria again, if we could produce another _Leaves of Grass_. Since I am going to talk about type, I know of nothing better than to relate our experience in printing Walt Whitman's masterpiece, for it has shown me the folly of theory and intellect in art.

We accepted this undertaking with enthusiasm. Here was an opportunity to prove that we could print a book. The first deposit had no more than been spent when the publishers announced it as the finest book to be printed in America, and off we started on the wrong track.

Well, the finest book had to have the finest type and the finest type was the latest type. And it had to be a folio in size, because for One Hundred Dollars you had to get a folio. We bought one thousand pounds of the finest type; 18 point Lutetia, fresh from a new designer in Holland. And we hired two printers to set this bright new type and when it was all set, we pulled a proof and started to put grass into it--pale green grass, and it looked like grass and we pulled it out and tried again. Well, every time we tried that bright new type it didn't look right. So we dug up some of the latest theories about suitability, tried again, but it was no use. The brain told us one thing and our eyes another.

Meanwhile, one thousand pounds of bright new type and months of labor were tied up with strings and the Master Craftsman was getting worried. He went to specialists for advice. They said: "Try this new initial or this new picture," and the Master Craftsman went back to his shop and bowed his head.

Then his tired eyes lighted on a dusty case of type, designed by the artist Goudy but the critics had condemned it to the graveyard. Wearily the Craftsman dug it up and set a page of Whitman in it. Then he pulled a proof and Lo! He saw something that the machine had discarded; he saw strength: he saw the strong, vigorous lines of Whitman, born of the soil, without grass. He saw what he had heard whispered before. He saw strong, vigorous, simple printing--printing like mountains, rocks and trees, but not like pansies, lilacs and valentines; printing that came from the soil and was not refined in the class-room.

And the printer knew that the limited edition was not a racket as long as he had honesty and sincerity, and reverence for the best traditions of his craft.

[Illustration]HOLBROOK JACKSON[Illustration]

THE TYPOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM MORRIS

From _The Printing of Books_ by Holbrook Jackson. Copyright 1938 by Cassell & Company, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. First read as a paper, at the William Morris Centenary Dinner of the Double Crown Club, London, May 2, 1934.

William Morris is an ironic figure. His achievements not only missed their mark, but hit marks he was not aiming at. His printing is no exception. The masterpieces of the Kelmscott Press which he aimed at making "useful pieces of goods" were typographical curiosities from birth, and so far removed from the common way of readers that they have become models of what a book should not be.

He was a Bibliophile, or more exactly, a typophile whose affections became unruly in the presence of decorated incunabula, and, although he was outwardly correct towards pure printing, his heart was not there. According to Sir Sydney Cockerell he flirted with the idea of a folio edition of _The Earthly Paradise_, "profusely illustrated by Sir Edward Burne-Jones," a quarter of a century before the inception of the Kelmscott Press. His personal taste was much the same then as later, although he continued to pay homage to good as distinct from fine printing. It was the "essence of my undertaking," he said, "to produce books which it would be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing and arrangement of type." Thus inspired by the example of "the calligraphy of the Middle Ages, and the earlier printing which took its place," and in spite of his passion for decorated books he observed that the early printed books "were always beautiful by force of the mere typography, even without the added ornament with which many of them are so lavishly supplied."

Much has been made of the emphasis he laid upon the book as an organic assembly of paper, type, and binding. But although few printers or publishers in the nineteenth century had insisted upon the excellence of these ingredients, as he did, the architectonic principle had never been wholly ignored. But in the main it was unconsciously observed. Deliberation is evident in the construction of the Pickering books, in the Keepsakes and Table Books of the thirties and forties, in the illustrated books of the sixties, and the later productions of the Daniel Press; and, if we may leave England for a moment, in such convenient publications as those of Bernhard Tauchnitz, where there is rectitude to satisfy the demands of the most austere of functionalists.

It was not, then, the architectonics of the Kelmscott books which evoked a typographical revolution. Nor was it the pursuit of beauty which always haunted Morris's intentions. "I began printing books," he said, "in the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty." Many printers and publishers of the time would have claimed as much. Bad taste in the arts and crafts is invariably the result of beauty-mongering, and the more costly books of the nineteenth century are littered with beauty from cover to cover.

Neither was it originality. Morris never sought to be original. He was a revivalist, and all his work is derivative. There is nothing new even in that, for all the arts and crafts are derivative, and originality is apt to be a myth and often a nuisance. Morris was even less original than many other earnest innovators, and the Kelmscott books are derivatives twice removed. They are modern variations of the early printed books of northern Europe, as they in turn were but mechanical imitations of the manuscripts which preceded the invention of movable types.

Nor again was there anything peculiar even in that, for all mechanical evolution seems to proceed in the same manner. The earliest railway carriages followed the lines of the stage-coach; the earliest steamships were schooners and brigantines with funnels and paddle-boxes; and the earliest motor-car was a horseless-carriage complete with tail-board. It is not surprising to learn that the earliest printed books were imitations of manuscripts, but it is surprising to find a nineteenth-century printer of genius imitating the imitations.

[Illustration: A page from _Poems By The Way_, written by Morris and set in the Kelmscott Golden type. This small quarto was the first book printed at the Press in two colors, black and red. Issued in October, 1891, in an edition of 300 copies on paper and 13 on vellum.]

There is, however, more than one difference between these mechanical devices and the Kelmscott books. The engineers copied because they could not think of anything better. Now and then they even made concessions to beauty, in the form of superadded decorations, much as Morris did. But there was a marked difference between them, for Morris knew better. Although to him beauty meant decoration or ornament, yet in the first edition of _The Roots of the Mountains_ he actually produced an undecorated book of great distinction. The book is not only admirable in itself, but it has had a better influence on recent typography than all the Kelmscott books together. Morris himself was delighted with the book. He declared it to be "the best-looking book issued since the seventeenth century," and added: "I am so pleased with my book, typography, binding, and must I say it, literary matter, that I am any day to be seen huggling it up, and am become a spectacle to Gods and men because of it." His enthusiasm rings true, but this was a passing fancy, for even then he was in hot pursuit of more opulent beauties.

It was the magnificence of the Kelmscott adventure which impressed and influenced printers, professional and amateur, and resuscitated the curious vogue for so-called "Private Press" books artificially rarefied and deliberately beautified. But, in spite of many extravagances and some few absurdities, the Kelmscott influence has been beneficial. Morris reasserted sound principles, and the richness of his books helped to secure their acceptance. "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." The style of the books themselves, because of their massive individuality, must always provoke differences of opinion, but in the house of books there are many mansions, and room for all tastes, whims, and even fads.

I prefer my books pocketable, flexible, and legible. In the Kelmscott books these qualities are not sufficiently balanced. Each is there in some measure, but something is invariably added to weaken proportion. William Morris (or worse, Burne-Jones) is always getting between reader and author. I like my Chaucer neat. Morris produced Chaucer as Henry Irving and Beerbohm Tree produced Shakespeare. I suspect that enthusiasts for such productions are not readers. The idea is supported by the fact that the majority of Kelmscotts are still in mint state; it is not easy to meet a copy bearing the honourable and endearing scars of use.

[Illustration: A page from the first book printed in the Kelmscott Troy type, _The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye_, a large quarto printed in black and red and published by Bernard Quaritch in 1892. The edition: Two volumes, 300 copies on paper and 5 on vellum. "As to the matter of the book," wrote Morris, "it makes a thoroughly amusing story, instinct with medieval thought and manners."]

Legibility is relative, as I am reminded by my own experience, for myself when young did eagerly frequent Pickering's _Diamond Classics_--a practice I should probably have defended with conviction based upon sight rather than insight. I take a different view today, not only of miniature types, but of rules and spacings generally. Morris granted the necessity of legibility. In this he differed from another poet and amateur of printing, Robert Bridges, who used Gothic characters for the Daniel Press edition of his poems to induce slow ingestion. Morris believed that solidity of type and setting made for easy reading. By solid type he meant "without needless excrescences" or "the thickening or thinning of the line," which, with reservations, can be defended. Density of type area is a different matter and, if I admit charm, I reserve the right to question even aesthetical propriety in favour of legibility. The solid page is impressive: solidity inspires confidence, but confidence, as we know, is often illusion and not always guiltless of trickery. The first edition of _The Roots of the Mountains_ would probably have been more readable with than without rules.

But although legibility must always be the first rule of printing, there are other important principles. Morris summed them up in the word "beauty" with impressive but dubious results, because of his predilection for ornamentation. Any plain space for him was an opportunity for decoration, or, in Ruskin's words, for "the expression of man's joy in his work." He would go out of his way to make books bigger than they need be so that he might have more space to fill with his and Burne-Jones's illustrations. His type-faces became picturesque, his margins inclined to pomposity, and his paper was pretentious. The Kelmscott books are overdressed. They ask you to look at them rather than to read them. You can't get away from their overwhelming typography, and, even if you could, you might still be cheated of your author by their high-minded purpose, for in addition to being the creations of an impressive genius the Kelmscott books were protests against the logical conclusions of mechanical book-production.

All these things are hindrances to reading, and I still believe that to be read is the destiny of a book, and that reading is best when you are least conscious of print or paper or binding. Since the Kelmscott books are not likely to induce that condition they must remain museum pieces, typographical monuments--beautiful and ineffectual angels beating in the void their luminous wings in vain.

COMPOSED IN EMERSON TYPES

_Stanley Morison_

FIRST PRINCIPLES OF TYPOGRAPHY

Published 1951 by the syndics of the Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

NOTE: This essay towards a rationale of book-typography was first attempted as an article, s.v. "Typography," in the twelfth edition of the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ (Chicago and London, 1929). It was reconsidered and entirely rewritten for No. 7 of _The Fleuron_ (Cambridge, 1930) when it also went out of print.... Although several reprints have been brought out and extracts have been made, demands continue for the whole text from printers as well as from those outside the trade for whom the article was originally written.... As the brevity of the essay seems to be one of its most approved qualities, no expansion, and only slight revision, was made.... The present reprint is that of the Amsterdam edition published in 1947, in which the first paragraph was interpolated.... It may be added that while the principles here set forth apply to the typography of books, the sections dealing with composition may be adapted to the design of newspapers and publicity....

S.M.

I

Letters of the alphabet that are cast or founded for the purpose of impressing upon paper are known as "types" and the impression thus made as a "print." But every impression, from any raised surface, is a "print." Hence the impression from the particular raised surfaces known as "types" is called a "typographical" impression; or, to use a more old-fashioned term, "letter-press." The precise form of the "types" and the exact position they need to occupy upon the selected paper involve skill in the art that is called "typography."

Typography may be defined as the art of rightly disposing printing material in accordance with specific purpose; of so arranging the letters, distributing the space and controlling the type as to aid to the maximum the reader's comprehension of the text. Typography is the efficient means to an essentially utilitarian and only accidentally aesthetic end, for enjoyment of patterns is rarely the reader's chief aim. Therefore, any disposition of printing material which, whatever the intention, has the effect of coming between author and reader is wrong. It follows that in the printing of books meant to be read there is little room for "bright" typography. Even dullness and monotony in the type-setting are far less vicious to a reader than typographical eccentricity or pleasantry. Cunning of this sort is desirable, even essential in the typography of propaganda, whether for commerce, politics, or religion, because in such printing only the freshest survives inattention. But the typography of books, apart from the category of narrowly limited editions, requires an obedience to convention which is almost absolute--and with reason.

Since printing is essentially a means of multiplying, it must not only be good in itself--but be good for a common purpose. The wider that purpose, the stricter are the limitations imposed upon the printer. He may try an experiment in a tract printed in an edition of 50 copies, but he shows little common sense if he experiments to the same degree in the tract having a run of 50,000. Again, a novelty, fitly introduced into a 16-page pamphlet, will be highly undesirable in a 160-page book. It is of the essence of typography and of the nature of the printed book _qua_ book, that it perform a public service. For single or individual purpose there remains the manuscript, the codex; so there is something ridiculous in the unique copy of a printed book, though the number of copies printed may justifiably be limited when a book is the medium of typographical experiment. It is always desirable that experiments be made, and it is a pity that such "laboratory" pieces are so limited in number and in courage. Typography today does not so much need Inspiration or Revival as Investigation. It is proposed here to formulate some of the principles already known to book-printers, which investigation confirms and which non-printers may like to consider for themselves.

II

The laws governing the typography of books intended for general circulation are based first upon the essential nature of alphabetical writing, and secondly upon the traditions, explicit or implicit, prevailing in the society for which the printer is working. While a universal character or typography applicable to all books produced in a given national area is practicable, to impose a universal detailed formula upon all books printed in Roman types is not. National tradition expresses itself in the varying separation of the book into prelims, chapters, etc., no less than in the design of the type. But at least there are physical rules of linear composition which are obeyed by all printers who know their job.

The normal Roman type (in simple form without special sorts, etc.) consists of an upright design, and a sloping form of it:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ&

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

_ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ&_

_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz_

The printer needs to be very careful in choosing his type, realizing that the more often he is going to use it, the more closely its design must approximate to the general idea held in the mind's eye of readers perforce ruled by the familiar magazine, newspaper and book. It does no harm to print a Christmas card in =black-letter=, but who nowadays would read a book in that type? I may believe, as I do, that black-letter is in design more homogeneous, more lively and more economic a type than the grey round Roman we use, but I do not now expect people to read a book in it. Aldus' and Caslon's are both relatively feeble types, but they represent the forms accepted by the community; and the printer, as a servant of the community, must use them, or one of their variants. No printer should say, "I am an artist, therefore I am not to be dictated to. I will create my own letter forms," for, in this humble job, no printer is an artist in this sense. Nor is it possible today, as it just was in the infancy of the craft, to persuade society into the acceptance of strongly marked and highly individualistic types--because literate society is so much greater in mass and correspondingly slower in movement. Type design moves at the pace of the most conservative reader. The good type-designer therefore realizes that, for a new fount to be successful, it has to be so good that only very few recognize its novelty. If readers do not notice the consummate reticence and rare discipline of a new type, it is probably a good letter. But if my friends think that the tail of my lower-case r or the lip of my lower-case e is rather jolly, you may know that the fount would have been better had neither been made. A type which is to have anything like a present, let alone a future, will neither be very "different" nor very "jolly."

So much for Type. The printer possesses also Spaces and Leads as a normal part of his typographical material, straight lines of metal known as rules, braces, and finally a more or less indiscriminate collection of ornaments--head and tailpieces, flowers, decorated initial letters, vignettes and flourishes. Another decorative medium at his option lies in his command of colour; red is, with sound instinct, the most frequently used. For emphasis, heavy faces are used. White space is an important item of composing-room equipment--margins, blanks, etc., being filled in with what are known as "quotations." The selecting and arranging of these elements is known as Composition. Imposition is the placing of the composed matter upon the sheet. Printing includes impressing in due order, perfecting the sheet in due register (backing up), regulating the inking, and achieving a crisp type-page. Finally the tone, weight and texture of the paper are important factors entering into the completed result.

Typography, therefore, controls the composition, imposition, impression and paper. Of paper, it is at least necessary to demand that it be capable of expressing the value of the composition; of imposition, that the margins be proportionate to the area of the text, affording decent space for thumbs and fingers at the side and bottom of the page. The old-style margins are handsome in themselves and agreeable to the purpose of a certain kind of book, but are obviously not convenient in books where the page dimension is unavoidably small or narrow, or the purpose of the book is to be carried in the pocket. For these and other kinds of book, the type may be centred on the measure of the page, and slightly raised above ocular centre.

Imposition is the most important element in typography--for no page, however well composed in detail, can be admired if the _mise-en-page_ is careless or ill-considered. In practical printing today, these details of imposition are on the whole adequately cared for; so that it is possible to report that the mass of books presents a tolerable appearance. Even a badly composed work may give a good appearance if it is well imposed--good imposition redeeming bad composition, while a good composition would be effectively ruined by bad imposition.

III

The designer of the book, therefore, first determines his imposition and then tackles the details of composition. The first principles of composition do not require much discussion since they necessarily follow from the conventions of alphabetical printing in the Roman letter accepted by those for whom we are printing. The matter is relatively simple. First, it is certain that the eye cannot read with ease any considerable number of words composed of letters embodying sharply contrasted thicks and thins; secondly, it is none the less certain that the eye cannot agreeably read a mass of words composed even in a rightly constructed letter, if the lines are beyond a certain length. The most expert reader's eye cannot seize more than a certain number of words in a given size except in a proportionate length of line. Thirdly, practice proves that the size of the letter must be related to the length of line. Respect for these principles will generally protect the reader from the risk of "doubling" (reading the same line twice). The average line of words which the reader's eye can conveniently seize is between ten and twelve. Nevertheless, the typographer, while exerting himself to the utmost to respect this ocular truth, is daily confronted with the fact that unavoidable conditions make it impossible for him to secure a type of the duly related size, and that he is driven to use a relatively small type. To obviate here the risk of "doubling," he consistently inserts proportionate leads through the matter, so opening the lines that the eye comfortably travels and returns from beginning to end and from end to beginning.

The practice of leading, denounced in certain quarters as essentially evil, is an inevitable necessity to a large proportion of printing; and the skilled typographer, making the best use of his material, makes in turn, wise use of leads. The orthodox high-brow view that leads produce in every instance an unhappy weak-looking effect will not survive a wide experience. On the contrary, it will be found that their absence may effectively ruin even a composition in large type, so that it is true to say that the intelligent use of leading distinguishes the expert from the inexpert printer. A slight differentiation of type-face may make the practice advisable. Clearly, while a letter of the size now under the reader's eye, with fairly long ascenders and descenders, would not require leading unless set to a measure of more than 3-1/2 in., there exist letters with short descenders designed rather to sustain leading by rule than by exception. Baskerville's is a type to which leading is invariably an advantage. The problem of determining the amount to be given is not to be settled by considering only the ascenders or the body of the type, because breadth of letter is also a factor to be reckoned with--some letters are narrow in respect to their height, while others are wide. A composition in a round, open, wide letter, chosen because it is rather loose (that is to say, the space between the letters is greater, or appears greater, by reason of the curves of the c, o, e, g), gains in consistency when there is a satisfactory lead between the lines. It is often argued that loose setting is not admirable in itself; to which it might be replied that the printer is generally bound to carry out the instructions of his customer; often to respect the wishes of an artist who may be illustrating the work; and, not seldom, committed by the publisher to a paper-size dictated by irrelevant considerations.

Further, it is obvious that the space between words composed in a condensed letter may be less than that between words in a round, wide form of letter. Where there is no leading between the lines, and the composition is, for extrinsic reasons, necessarily tight, it may be an advantage to set leads between the paragraphs, even though this result in pages with uneven tails. In paragraphing, it is important to realize that the opening sentence of a work should automatically manifest itself as such. This may be secured by the use of the large initial letter; the printing of the first word in CAPITALS, or SMALL CAPITALS ; CAPITALS _and_ SMALL CAPITALS ; or by setting the first word into the margin. On no account should the opening of a chapter be indented, since indention should mark (and always mark) the subsequent sections, i.e., the paragraphs, of the text. The abolition of paragraph-indentions is plainly an undesirable practice; nor is setting the first word in capitals or small capitals an agreeable substitute for the indention. The space of the indention should be sufficient to be noticeable.

As both measures must be related, displaying a proportion pleasing to the eye, the depth of the page follows from its width. It seems that the proportions of the oblong are more pleasing than those of the square; and as a horizontal oblong drives out the line to an impossible length, and a two-column arrangement is tedious, the vertical oblong has become the normal page.

Such are the elements of typography; and a volume built up of type-pages composed in accordance with them will be generally satisfactory. There remain only the page headings and the folio. By ranging the headings inside towards the gutter, to the left and right respectively, two pages are fixed as a unity; but they can also be ranged outside to the right and left, or they may be centered. The folio may be centered at the foot, or range either way at the top or bottom (preferably, for quicker reference, on the outside), but it cannot be centered at the top without cancelling the running page headline--only to be done by exception. The running headlines may be set in capitals of the text, in upper and lower-case of the text, or in a combination of capitals. Full-sized capitals overemphasize what is, after all, a repetitive page-feature inserted chiefly for the convenience of librarians and readers interested in the identification of leaves which have worked loose. If set in upper and lower-case, the headline loses in levelness, so that it seems well to employ S M A L L C A P I T A L S; these are best separated by hair spaces, since the unrelieved rectangular structure and perpendicularity of capitals tend to defeat instantaneous recognition. Full-sized capitals may well be used for chapter headings, with the number of the chapter in smalls; both indications being hair-spaced.

The reader, travelling from the generally invariable blank at the end of a chapter to the beginning of the next, finds a dropped chapter head an agreeably consistent feature, which saves him from feeling suffocated or overpowered by the text.

IV

The foregoing elementary directions affect the main part of the book, its body. There remains a section which goes before the text, known as the "preliminaries," often complicated both in respect to arrangement and draftsmanship. Before considering these, it may be well to summarize our present findings--to concentrate them into a formula. According to our doctrine, a well-built book is made up from vertical oblong pages arranged in paragraphs having an average line of ten to twelve consistently spaced words, set in a fount of comfortable size and familiar design; the lines sufficiently separated to prevent doubling and the composition being headed by a running title. This rectangle is so imposed upon the page as to provide centre, head, fore-edge and tail margins of dimensions suitably related not only to the length of line but to the disposition of space at those points where the text is cut into chapters, and where the body joins the prefatory and other pages known as "preliminaries."

Now these first pages, being intended rather for reference than for reading and re-reading, are less strictly governed by convention than the text-pages. They consequently offer the maximum opportunity for typographic design. The history of printing is in large measure the history of the title-page. When fully developed, the title occupied a recto page, either partially or wholly; and the title-phrase, or the principal words of it, has generally been set in a conspicuous size of type. Sixteenth-century Italian printers generally used large capitals copied from inscriptions, or by exception, from medieval manuscripts; while English use emulated the French in employing a canon line of upper and lower-case, followed by a few lines of pica capitals. Next came the printer's device, and at the foot of the page, his name and address. These large sizes of upper and lower-case, an inheritance from printers who were accustomed to black-letter (which cannot be set in solid capitals), have gone. The device has also vanished (it has been revived by a few publishers), and thus the contemporary title page is generally a bleak affair, exhibiting in nine out of ten cases a space between the title and the imprint of the printer-publisher, so that this blank tends to be the strongest feature on the page. When the device was first abandoned, the author, printer or publisher took advantage of the leisure of the reader and the blank at their disposal, to draft a tediously long title, subtitle and list of the author's qualifications, designed to fill the entire page. The present-day publisher goes to the other extreme, reducing the title to as few short words as possible, followed with "by" and the author's name. A professional writer may insert, e.g., "Author of _The Deluge_" under his name or there may be incorporated a motto; but apart from such exceptions, three and sometimes four inches of space separate the author's name from the first line of the imprint.

The result is that unless the title is set in a size of type out of all relation to that of the remainder of the book, this space is more conspicuous than the chief line. It is more reasonable to lessen this space by shortening the depth of the whole piece from title to imprint. It is clear that a volume in 12-point does not require a 30-point title unless it be a folio in double-column; and it is of no consequence if the title page is a little shorter than the text pages. There is no reason, other than a desire to be "different," for a title page to bear any line of type larger than twice the size of the text letter. If the book be set in 12-point, the title need be no larger than 24-point--and may decently enough be smaller. As lower-case is a necessary evil, which we should do well to subordinate since we cannot suppress, it should be avoided when it is at its least rational and least attractive--in large sizes. The main line of a title should be set in capitals; and, like all titling capitals, they should be spaced. Whatever may happen to the rest of the composition, the author's name, like all displayed proper names, should be in capitals.

V

Here we may pause to counter an objection. It will be contended that whatever the value of our preceding conclusions, their adoption must mean an increase in standardization--all very well for those who have an economic objective but very monotonous and dull for those whose aim is that books shall possess more "life." This means that the objectors want more variety, more "differentness," more decoration. The craving to decorate is natural, and only if it is allowed the freedom of the text pages shall we look upon it as a passion to be resisted. The decoration of title pages is one thing--that of a fount to be employed in books is another. Our contention, in this respect, is that the necessities of a mass-production book and the limited edition differ neither in kind nor in degree, since all printing is essentially a means of the multiplication of a text set in an alphabetical code of conventional symbols. To disallow "variety" in the vital details of the composition is not to insist upon uniformity in display. As already pointed out, the preliminary pages offer scope for the utmost typographical ingenuity. Yet even here, a word of caution may be in place, so soon do we forget, in arranging any piece of display (above all, a title page), the supreme importance of sense. Every character, every word, every line should be seen with maximum clearness. Words should not be broken except unavoidably, and in title pages and other compositions of centred matter, lines should hardly begin with such feeble parts of speech as prepositions and conjunctions. It is more reasonable, as assisting the reader's immediacy of comprehension, to keep these to the ends of lines or to centre them in smaller type and so bring out the salient lines in a relatively conspicuous size.

No printer, in safeguarding himself from the charge of monotony in his composition, should admit, against his better judgment, any typographical distraction doing violence to logic and lucidity in the supposed interests of decoration. To twist his text into a triangle, squeeze it into a box, torture it into the shape of an hour-glass or a diamond is an offence requiring greater justification than the existence either of Italian and French precedents of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or of an ambition to do something new in the twentieth. In truth, these are the easiest tricks of all, and we have seen so much of them during the late "revival of printing" that we now need rather a revival of restraint. In all permanent forms of typography, whether publicly or privately printed, the typographer's only purpose is to express, not himself, but his author. There are, admittedly, other purposes which enter into the composition of advertisement, publicity and sales matter; and there is, of course, a very great deal common to both book and advertisement composition. But it is not allowable to the printer to relax his zeal for the reader's comfort in order to satisfy an ambition to decorate or to illustrate. Rather than run this risk the printer should strive to express himself by the use of this or that small decorative unit, either of common design supplied by the type founders or drawn for his office by an artist. It is quite true that to an inventive printer decoration is not often necessary. In commercial printing, however, it seems to be a necessity, because the complexity of our civilization demands an infinite number of styles and characters. Publishers and other buyers of printing, by insisting upon a setting which shall express _their_ business, _their_ goods, _their_ books and nobody else's business or goods or books, demand an individuality which pure typography can never hope to supply. But book-printers, concerned with the permanently convenient rather than with the transiently sensational or the merely fashionable, should be on their guard against title-page borders, vignettes and devices invented to ease their difficulties. There is no easy way with most title pages; and the printer's task is rendered more difficult by the average publisher's and author's incompetence to draft a title or to organize the preliminaries in reasonable sequence.

VI

Those who would like to lessen or vary the tendency towards standardization in day-today book production have a field for their

## activity in the last-mentioned pages. The position on the page of

the half-title, title, dedication, etc., and their relation to each other, are not essentially invariable. Nevertheless, as it is well for printers and publishers to have rules, and the same rules, it may be suggested that the headings to Preface, Table of Contents, Introduction, etc., should be in the same size and fount as the chapter heads; and should be dropped if they are dropped. The order of the preliminaries remains to be settled. With the exception of the copyright notice, which may be set on the verso of the title page, all should begin on a recto. The logical order of the preliminary pages is Half-title or Dedication (I see no reason for including both), Title, Contents, Preface, Introduction. The certificate of "limitation," in the case of books of that class, may face the title where there is no frontispiece, be incorporated with the half-title, or be taken to the end of the volume. This order is applicable to most categories of books. Novels need neither Table of Contents nor List of Chapters, though one or the other is too often printed. If it is decided to retain either, it would be reasonable to print it on the back of the half-title and facing the title page, so that the structure, scope and nature of the book will be almost completely indicated to the reader at a single opening. Where the volume is made up of a few short stories, their titles can be listed in the otherwise blank centre of the title page.

VII

Fiction, Belles-Lettres and Educational books are habitually first published in portable, but not pocketable formats; crown octavo (5 by 7-1/2 in.) being the invariable rule for novels published as such. The novel in the form of Biography will be published as a Biography, demy octavo (5-5/8 by 8-3/4 in.), the size also for History, Political Study, Archaeology, Science, Art and almost everything but Fiction. Novels are only promoted to this format when they have become famous and "standard"; when they are popular rather than famous they are composed in pocket (4-1/2 by 6-3/4 in.) editions. _Size_, therefore, is the most manifest difference between the categories of books.

Another obvious difference is _bulk_, calculated in accordance with the publisher's notion, first, of the general sense of trade expectation and, secondly, of the purchasing psychology of a public habituated to certain selling prices vaguely related to number of pages and thickness of volume (inconsistently enough, weight does not enter into these expectations). These habits of mind have consequences in the typography; they affect the choice of fount and size of type, and may necessitate the adoption of devices for "driving out," i.e., making the setting take up as much room as possible. By putting the running headline between rules or rows of ornaments; introducing unnecessary blanks between chapters; contracting the measure; exaggerating the spaces between the words and the lines; excessively indenting paragraphs; isolating quoted matter with areas of white space: inserting wholly unnecessary sectional titles in the text and surrounding them with space; contriving to drive a chapter ending to the top of a recto page so that the rest of it and its verso may be blank; using thick paper; increasing the depth of chapter beginnings and inserting very large versals thereto; and so on, the volume can be inflated to an extra sixteen pages and sometimes more--which is a feat the able typographer is expected to accomplish without showing his hand.

Limited editions of standard authors, or of authors whose publishers desire them to rank as such, are commonly given a rubricated title or some other feature not strictly necessary. A dreadful example of overdone rubrication is to be found in an edition of Thomas Hardy's verse, in which the running heads throughout the book are in red--the production of a firm which desired to make an impression on the purchaser in view of the price asked for the edition. This could have been better done by reserving colour for the initial letters. Handmade paper is generally used for _éditions de luxe_, and none but the brave among publishers will disregard the superstitious love of the book-buying classes for its untrimmed, ugly and dirt-gathering edges. That most of the public prefer to have it so is because a trimmed

## book looks "ordinary" to them. Any book which is "different" from the

"ordinary" in one superficial way or another is apt to impress those lacking trade experience. And there has been a notable increase during recent years in the category of books, generally illustrated, known to the trade as _fine printing_, _éditions de luxe_, _press-books_, _limited editions_, _collectors' books_, etc. Hence, it is hoped that the above setting out of the first principles of typography may give the discriminating reader some sort of yardstick which he can apply not only to the entries catalogued by the book-sellers as limited editions, but to the output of publishers responsible for printing the literary and scientific books which are more necessary to society, and are often designed with greater intelligence.

COMPOSED IN NEW TIMES ROMAN TYPES

[Illustration]CARL PURINGTON ROLLINS[Illustration]

_American Type Designers and Their Work_

Published by The Lakeside Press 1947-1948. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

A piece of paper about two inches square, originally pinned to the manuscript of the Rev. Ezra Stiles's diary in the Yale University Library is all that remains of the first original American type design. It is a proof of letters made by Abel Buell, a Connecticut Yankee, in 1769.[35] Buell was his own designer, punch cutter, and caster, since in his day, as for many years after, the making of type was entirely a hand operation. Not the least exacting part of the work was the cutting of the punch on the end of a short bar of softened steel. It was not until the invention of the Benton pantograph punch-cutting machine in 1885 that any other method was known. All type made before 1885 was therefore dependent on hand punch cutting, and the designer of the type was almost always the same man who cut the punches.

Who these type designers were after Buell is a matter of uncertainty and obscurity. The first type specimen book in America was that of Binny & Ronaldson of Philadelphia, issued in 1812; and from then almost to our own day the type foundries have taken the credit for the type designs which they have offered for sale. Type designers, like architects, got no credit; possibly Modesty, with a backward glance at old specimen books, raised a warning finger, and the designers were willing to let the foundries have whatever glory there was.

[Illustration: The Punch Cutting Machine. _Courtesy George Macy Publications._]

Abel Buell and his contemporaries and successors followed the general trends in design in the arts as a whole. The Greek Revival and the Victorian Age, marked by the two great expositions at London and Philadelphia with their crudities and extravagancies in design, found echoes in our imitative craft of printing. So it is not surprising that type design began to improve, along with the other arts, with the advent of the '90's. We have always followed European and especially English models, and it is natural that the upheaval in type design in England under Morris's influence had immediate repercussions here. But while imitations of Kelmscott types were soon on the market, two surprisingly original American designs appeared at the same time as the imitations. About 1894 or 1895 the Central Type Foundry of St. Louis introduced a face which became widely used, called (for no better reason than attends the christening of most type faces) "De Vinne." It is of unknown parentage, though there is some reason to suppose that it descended from the Elzevirs; but it was a face of character and distinction. At the same time the same foundry brought out another design which had an acknowledged father--Will Bradley. Of this face it has been said that it has "remarkably bold letters, with peculiarities of form never before attempted." Thus we have in the De Vinne and the Bradley faces two fresh and distinctively American types, destined to be the forerunners of many others. And in one case the name of the designer was definitely attached.

With the invention of the pantograph punch cutter, type design became an "art" rather than a craft, and as might be expected the personality of the designer became for various reasons more important. It is not without interest that the chief designer of the American Type Founders Company--a man responsible for almost the whole type output of that foundry for many years--Morris Fuller Benton, was the son of the man whose machines were responsible for this revolution in type design. For it was the two basic machines invented and developed by Linn Boyd Benton which made it possible for those unskilled in the intricacies of type making to provide the basic designs for type. The machines were very ingenious, and the designs partook of the "faultily faultless, icily regular" perfection of the mechanical device. This method of making type faces involved the drawing of the design and the making of two or three patterns in thin brass of the outline of the letter--each pattern good for several sizes of type, and slightly modified for another group of sizes. This is the way in which modern type is designed. It is the reason why such a type series as "Cheltenham," designed by the architect Bertram G. Goodhue in 1900 for the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, while very expertly handled in the details, seems monotonous in mass; whereas the Caslon type of the original cutting shows all the inevitable variations of hand work.

A survey of the types of the first quarter of the present century, made by the Editor of the _Inland Printer_ in 1927, displays 161 type faces brought out by seven or eight of the leading foundries between 1900 and 1925. Of these, it was possible to name the designers of 72, almost all from the Barnhart Brothers & Spindler foundry of Chicago, whose records seem to have been in better shape, or whose generosity was more spontaneous. Oswald Cooper, Sydney Gaunt, Will Ransom, Robert Wiebking, and George Trenholm were the chief names. It is unfortunate that the names of the designers of the types put out by the American Type Founders Company have not been preserved except in rare instances. Of course, Benton was responsible for the greater portion, and on the aesthetic side they occasionally scored a triumph as in the case of the "Cloister" face.

The list included in the _Inland Printer's_ survey fails to include some of the outstanding designs of the period. Goodhue's "Merrymount" was done in 1894, but after 1900 we have Mr. Rogers's "Centaur," Mr. Hunter's odd but forceful types (properly cut on punches by the designer), the output of the rapidly growing composing-machine industry, and Frederic W. Goudy's fifty designs completed in that quarter century. Goudy's output of six score type designs in fifty years is an amazing record, one probably never equalled. Such designs as those for "Goudy Modern," "Goudy Text," and "Hadrian" would establish his reputation. He had his limitations as a designer--most of his designs lack a certain crispness--but his versatility was extraordinary.

In the years since 1925 new designers have come to the fore: Blumenthal with his "Emerson," Dwiggins with his "Electra" and "Caledonia," Ruzicka with his "Fairfield," and Chappell with his "Lydian." This brief survey cannot hope to mention all types or designs which American designers have contributed, but it is well to see if any tendencies can be detected.

The type which Buell made in 1759, as well as the type of his immediate successors into the first decades of the nineteenth century, were mainly variations on the so-called "modern romans" of Didot, Bodoni, Austen, and Thorowgood. As the artistic styles in design in general, not alone in type, gradually lost the evolutionary force which has developed letter forms through the centuries, eccentricity and anarchy came into play. The nineteenth-century types as shown in the specimen books of Bruce, Connor, Farmer, etc., and exhibited in all their grotesque horror in Fred Phillips' "Old-fashioned Type Book," had no legitimate parentage, and they are as well relegated to the bizarre and pseudo-nostalgic advertisement. The result of the Kelmscott "revival" was to turn attention to type forms of the past which could be revived for modern use, and the type designers after 1900 did a remarkable piece of work in introducing good type faces. The advertisers have been eager to use new and novel faces, and have greatly stimulated this activity, even in many cases over-exciting it. The most interesting result has been the renewed interest in calligraphy. First directed toward new forms of script, the truer form of broad pen lettering is now beginning to influence type design, to free it from too slavish a devotion on the one hand to the serif, and on the other to a too-free rejection of the serif altogether. Such a face as Mr. Chappell's "Lydian" is an example of real advance in design, and if one could adduce European examples, more could be cited.

American designers have not developed many new or good book faces; such types as Oxford, Centaur, Emerson, Fairfield, Electra, are the exception. Their efforts have been given to the drawing of display and advertising types--too often not to the enrichment of the printer's repertory. It is quite as true now as in the past that distortions of the normal Roman letter form in the direction of extra condensed or extra heavy or very light mono-line letters result in eccentricities which have no permanent value. On the other hand such novel type designs as Garamond Bold Italic, Hadriano, the newspaper Ionics, and Lydian are meritorious additions to the printer's fonts. When it is realized that eccentricity and originality are not the same thing, we may expect from our increasingly intelligent designers indigenous types of usefulness and charm.

FOOTNOTES:

[35] Reprinted in Lawrence C. Wroth's "The First Work with American Types," page 65.

TYPOGRAPHY--ERIC GILL

From _Printing & Piety_, An Essay on Typography by Eric Gill. Copyright 1931 by J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., London. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

One of the most alluring enthusiasms that can occupy the mind of the letterer is that of inventing a really logical and consistent alphabet having a distinct sign for every distinct sound. This is especially the case for English speaking people: for the letters we use only inadequately symbolize the sounds of our language. We need many new letters and a revaluation of existing ones. But this enthusiasm has no practical value for the typographer; we must take the alphabets we have got, and we must take these alphabets in all essentials as we have inherited them.

First of all, then, we have the ROMAN ALPHABET of CAPITAL letters (Upper-case), and second the alphabet which printers call ROMAN LOWER-CASE. The latter, tho' derived from the Capitals, is a distinct alphabet. Third we have the alphabet called _ITALIC_, also derived from the Capitals but through different channels. These are the three alphabets in common use for English people.

Are there no others? It might be held that there are several; there are, for example, the alphabet called Black Letter, and that called Lombardic. But these are only partial survivals, and very few people could, without reference to ancient books, write down even a complete alphabet of either. As far as we are concerned in modern England, Roman Capitals, Lower-case and Italics are three different alphabets, and all are current "coin." But however familiar we are with them, their essential differences are not always easily discovered. It is not a matter of slope or of serifs or of thickness or thinness. These qualities, though one or other of them may be commonly associated with one alphabet more than another, are not essential marks of difference. A Roman Capital A does not cease to be a Roman Capital A because it is sloped backwards or forwards, because it is made thicker or thinner, or because serifs are added or omitted; and the same applies to Lower-case and Italics (see Fig. 1).

[Illustration: Figure 1 illustrates the contention that slope in either direction does not deprive Capitals, Lower-case or Italics of their essential differences.]

[Illustration: Figure 2 in which the upper line of letters is essentially "Roman Lower-case"; the lower essentially "Italic."]

The essential differences are obviously between the forms of the letters. The following letters, abdefghklmnqrtu and y, are not Roman Capitals, and that is all about it. The letters shown in the lower line of Fig. 2 are neither Capitals nor Lower-case. The conclusion is obvious: there is a complete alphabet of Capital letters, but the Lower-case takes ten letters from the Capital alphabet, and the Italic takes ten from the Capitals and twelve from the Lower-case. Figure 3 shows the three alphabets completed, and it will be seen that CIJOPSVWX and Z are common to all three, that bdhklmnqrtu and y are common to Lower-case and Italics; that ABDEFGHKLMNQRTU and Y are always Capitals; and that aef and g are always Lower-case.

[Illustration: Figure 3 shows the differences and similarities between the three "current" alphabets. Note: the curve of the Italic y's tail is due to exuberance, and not to necessity.]

But tho' this is a true account of the essential differences between the three alphabets, there are customary differences which seem almost as important. It is customary to make Roman Capitals upright. It is customary to make Lower-case smaller than Capitals when the two are used together; and it is customary to make Italics narrower than Lower-case, sloping towards the right and with certain details reminiscent of the cursive hand-writing from which they are derived. Fig. 4 shows the three alphabets with their customary as well as their essential differences.

[Illustration: Figure 4 shows the Capitals, Roman Lower-case and Italics with their customary as well as their essential differences.]

Properly speaking there is no such thing as an alphabet of Italic Capitals, and where upright or nearly upright Italics are used ordinary upright Roman Capitals go perfectly well with them. But as Italics are commonly made with a considerable slope and cursive freedom, various sorts of sloping and quasi-cursive Roman Capitals have been designed to match. This practice has, however, been carried to excess; the slope of Italics and their cursiveness have been much overdone. In the absence of punch cutters with any personal sensibility as letter designers, with punch cutting almost entirely done by machine, the obvious remedy is a much more nearly upright and non-cursive Italic, and for Capitals the ordinary upright Roman. Even with a nearly upright Italic, the mere presence of the Italic aef and g alters the whole character of a page, and with a slight narrowness as well as a slight slope, the effect is quite different from that of a page of Lower-case.

The common practice of using Italics to emphasize single words should be abandoned in favour of the use of the ordinary Lower-case with spaces between the letters (l e t t e r - s p a c e d). The proper use of Italics is for quotations and footnotes, and for books in which it is or seems desirable to use a lighter and less formal style of letter. In a book printed in Italics upright Capitals may well be used, but if sloping Capitals be used they should only be used as initials--they go well enough with Italic Lower-case, but they do not go with one another.

We have, then, the three alphabets, and these are the printer's main outfit; all other sorts of letters are in the nature of fancy letters, useful in inverse proportion to the importance and quantity of his output. The more serious the class of book he prints, the wider the public to whom he appeals, so much the more solemn and impersonal and normal will be and should be his typography. But he will not call that book serious which is merely widely bought, and he will not call that a wide appeal which is made simply to a mob of forcibly educated proletarians. A serious book is one which is good in itself according to standards of goodness set by infallible authority, and a wide appeal is one made to intelligent people of all times and nations.

The invention of printing and the breakdown of the medieval world happened at the same time; and that breakdown, tho' hastened by corruption in the Church, was chiefly caused by the recrudescence of a commercialism which had not had a proper chance since the time of the Romans. The invention of double-entry book-keeping also happened about the same time, and though, as with modern mechanical invention, the work was done by men of brains rather than men of business, it was the latter who gained the chief advantage.

Printing, a cheaper method of reproducing books than hand-writing, came therefore just at the right moment. Since its first fine careless rapture, and in spite of the genuinely disinterested efforts of ecclesiastical presses, University presses and the work of many notable individual printers and type-founders, the history of printing has been the history of its commercial exploitation. As is natural with men of business, the worse appears the better reason. Financial success is, rightly, their only aim, and technical perfection the only criterion they know how to apply to their works.

TYPOGRAPHY (the reproduction of lettering by means of movable letter types) was originally done by pressing the inked surface or "face" of a letter made of wood or metal against a surface of paper or vellum. The unevenness and hardness of paper, the irregularities of types (both in respect of their printing faces and the dimensions of their "bodies") and the mechanical imperfections of presses and printing methods made the work of early printers notable for corresponding unevennesses, irregularities and mechanical imperfections. To ensure that every letter left its mark more or less completely and evenly, considerable and noticeable impression was made in the paper. The printed letter was a coloured letter at the bottom of a ditch.

The subsequent development of typography was chiefly die development of technical improvements, more accurately cast types, smoother paper, mechanically perfect presses. Apart from the history of its commercial exploitation, the history of printing has been the history of the abolition of the impression. A print is properly a dent made by pressing; the history of letter-press printing has been the history of the abolition of that dent.

But the very smooth paper and the mechanically very perfect presses required for printing which shall show no "impression" can only be produced in a world which cares for such things, and such a world is of its nature inhuman. The industrial world of today is such, and it has the printing it desires and deserves. In the industrial world Typography, like house building and sanitary engineering, is one of the necessary arts--a thing to be done in working hours, those during which one is buoyed up by the knowledge that one is serving one's fellow men and neither enjoying oneself like an artist nor praising God like a man of prudence. In such a world the only excuse for anything is that it is of service.

Printing which makes any claim on its own account, printers who give themselves the status of poets or painters, are to be condemned; they are not serving; they are shirking. Such is the tone of the more romantic among men of commerce; and the consequence is a pseudo-asceticism and a bastard aesthetics. The asceticism is only a sham because the test of service is the profits shown in the accounts; and the aesthetics is bastard because it is not founded upon the reasonable pleasure of the mind of the workman and of his customer, but upon the snobbery of museum students employed by men of commerce to give a saleable appearance to articles too dull otherwise to please even the readers of _The Daily Mail_.

Nevertheless, as we have already shown, commercial printing, machine printing, industrial printing would have its own proper goodness if it were studiously plain and starkly efficient. Our quarrel is not with such a thing but only with the thing that is neither one nor the other--neither really mechanically perfect and physically serviceable nor really a work of art, i.e., a thing made by a man who, however laughable it may seem to men of business, loves God and does what he likes, who serves his fellow men because he is wrapped up in serving God--to whom the service of God is so commonplace that it is as much bad form to mention it as among men of business it is bad form to mention profits.

There are, then, two typographies, as there are two worlds; and, apart from God or profits, the test of one is mechanical perfection, and of the other sanctity--the commercial article at its best is simply physically serviceable and, per accidens, beautiful in its efficiency; the work of art at its best is beautiful in its very substance and, per accidens, as serviceable as an article of commerce.

The typography of Industrialism, when it is not deliberately diabolical and designed to deceive, will be plain; and in spite of the wealth of its resources--a thousand varieties of inks, papers, presses and mechanical processes for the reproduction of the designs of tame designers--it will be entirely free from exuberance and fancy. Every sort of ornament will be omitted; for printers' flowers will not spring in such a soil, and fancy lettering is nauseating when it is not the fancy of type-founders and printers but simply of those who desire to make something appear better than it is. Paradoxical though it be, the greater the wealth of appliances, the less is the power of using it. All the while that the technical and mechanical good quality is increasing, the de-humanizing of the workmen is also increasing. As we become more and more able to print finer and more elaborate and delicate types of letter it becomes more and more intellectually imperative to standardize all forms and obliterate all elaborations and fancifulness. It becomes easier and easier to print any kind of thing, but more and more imperative to print only one kind.

On the other hand, those who use humane methods can never achieve mechanical perfection, because the slaveries and standardizations of Industrialism are incompatible with the nature of men. Humane Typography will often be comparatively rough and even uncouth; but while a certain uncouthness does not seriously matter in humane works, lack of uncouthness is the only possible excuse for the productions of the machine. So while in an industrialist society it is technically easy to print any kind of thing, in a humane society only one kind of thing is easy to print, but there is every scope for variety and experiment in the work itself. The more elaborate and fanciful the industrial article becomes, the more nauseating it becomes--elaboration and fancifulness in such things are inexcusable. But there is every excuse for elaboration and fancy in the works of human beings, provided that they work and live according to reason; and it is instructive to note that in the early days of printing, when human exuberance had full scope, printing was characterized by simplicity and decency; but that now, when such exuberance no longer exists in the workman (except when he is not at work), printing is characterized by every kind of vulgarity of display and complicated indecency.

But, alas for humanity, there is the thing called compromise; and the man of business who is also the man of taste, and he of taste also who is also man of business will, in their blameless efforts to earn a living (for using one's wits is blameless, and earning a living is necessary), find many ways of giving a humane look to machine-made things or of using machinery and the factory to turn out, more quickly and cheaply, things whose proper nature is derived from human labor. Thus we have imitation "period" furniture in Wardour Street, and we have imitation "arts and crafts" in Tottenham Court Road. The-man-of-business-who-is-also-man-of-taste will tend to the "period" work, the-man-of-taste-who-is-also-man-of-business will tend to the imitation handicrafts. And, in the printing world, there are business houses whose reputation is founded on their resuscitations of the eighteenth century, and private presses whose speed of output is increased by machine-setting and gas engines. These things are more deplorable than blameworthy. Their chief objectionableness lies in the fact that they confuse the issue for the ordinary uncritical person, and they turn out work which is neither very good nor very bad. "Period" printing looks better than the usual vulgar products of unrestrained commercialism, and there is no visible difference, except to the expert, between machine-setting and hand-setting, or between sheets worked on a hand-press and those turned out on a power-driven Platen.

Nevertheless, even if these things be difficult to decide in individual instances, there can be no sort of doubt but that as industrialism requires a different sort of workman so it also turns out a different kind of work--a workman sub-human in his irresponsibility, and work inhuman in its mechanical perfection. The imitation of the work of pre-industrial periods cannot make any important ultimate difference; the introduction of industrial methods and appliances into small workshops cannot make such workshops capable of competition with "big business." But while false standards of good taste may be set up by "period" work, this "good taste" is entirely that of the man of business and his customers; it is not at all that of the hands--they are in no way responsible for it or affected by it; on the other hand, the introduction of mechanical methods into small workshops has an immediate effect on the workmen. Inevitably they tend to take more interest in the machine and less in the work, to become machine-minders and to regard wages as the only reward. And good taste ceases to be the result of the restraint put upon his conscience by the workman himself; it becomes a thing imposed upon him by his employer. You cannot see the difference between a machine-set page and one set by hand. No, but you can see the difference between Cornwall before and after it became "the English Riviera"; you can see the difference between riding in a hansom and in a motor-cab--between a "cabby" and a "taxi-man"; you can see the difference between the ordinary issue of _The Times_ today and its ordinary issue a hundred years ago; you can see the difference between an ordinary modern book and an ordinary book of the sixteenth century. And it is not a question of better or worse; it is a question of difference simply. Our argument here is not that Industrialism has made things worse, but that it has inevitably made them different; and that whereas before Industrialism there was one world, now there are two. The nineteenth century attempt to combine Industrialism with the Humane was necessarily doomed, and the failure is now evident. To get the best out of the situation we must admit the impossibility of compromise; we must, in as much as we are industrialists, glory in Industrialism and its powers of mass-production, seeing that good taste in its products depends upon their absolute plainness and serviceableness; and in so much as we remain outside Industrialism, as doctors, lawyers, priests and poets of all kinds must necessarily be, we may glory in the fact that we are responsible workmen and can produce only one thing at a time.

That if you look after goodness and truth beauty will take care of itself, is true in both worlds. The beauty that Industrialism properly produces is the beauty of bones; the beauty that radiates from the work of men is the beauty of the living face.

COMPOSED IN PERPETUA TYPES

[Illustration]

FREDERIC W. GOUDY

[Illustration]TYPES AND TYPE DESIGN[Illustration]

The Syracuse University School of Journalism awarded its first medal of honor to F. W. G. in 1936, "for distinctive achievement in typographic design." His address then, reflecting the typographic philosophy and practice of two-score years, is reprinted as published by the University in 1936.

It would be mere affectation on my part were I to pretend not to be touched by the signal honor you extend to me this evening, and I would be ungrateful indeed if I neglected to voice my very great appreciation of your kindness. I wish that I might express that appreciation in words that would leave no shadow of doubt in your minds as to the depth and sincerity of my feeling.

I am not conscious of any outstanding reasons for the kind words spoken here tonight of my work. At the same time I am under no illusions as to the ultimate value of the work I have _attempted_ to do, although it is, after all, merely the every-day work of an earnest craftsman who endeavors to perform each task well and the next one, if possible, even better; and withal no thought or expectation of acclaim.

My craft is a simple one. For nearly two score years it has been my constant aim and endeavor to create a greater and more general esteem for printing and type design; to give to printers and readers of print more legible and more beautiful types than those in current use. This has involved some little sacrifice; the missionary seldom acquires much more than the satisfaction of work well done, and yet, on the whole, I haven't done badly, since my work has brought me a wealth of friendship beyond measure.

And now to the subject which has been assigned to me for this occasion--something about types of the past, type revivals, and a bit about type design, as I see it. I trust you will not find that my brief postprandial attempt bears out Gay's lines too literally:

_So comes the reckoning when the banquet's o'er, A dreadful reckoning, when men smile no more._

One hundred and twelve years ago type design was generally imagined to be a matter that concerned only the letter cutter. J. Johnson, author of _Typographia_ (published in 1824), wrote of a type face that the printer needed only to "observe that its shape be perfectly true, and that it lines or ranges with accuracy, and that by noting certain mathematical rules the letter cutter may produce Roman characters of such harmony, grace and symmetry as will please the eye in reading; and by having their fine strokes and swells blended together in due proportion, will excite admiration." He says further that "if the letter stands even and in line, which _is the chief good quality in letter_, it makes the face thereof sometimes to pass, though otherwise ill-shaped." Type design as a profession evidently did not exist in 1824. And even today many printers are uninformed as to the various steps that must be taken between the inception of a type face in the designer's mind and its eventual appearance on the printed page.

Today the designing of type is practiced by few artists as a separate craft; it is an humble art at best--and a minor one. Yet every user of types demands in them certain artistic qualities, i.e., invention, novelty, style, beauty, distinction (a few insist on legibility); most of those users forget or do not realize that these are qualities an artist only may secure, and even the artist cannot always insure that his design will present all of them.

First: Invention requires that we soar above mere caprices of fashion or the demands of passing fancy. Our letter forms have become fixed in their essentials by long use and tradition, yet a study of all that has gone before will enable the designer seeking new expressions to infuse new life and character into traditional shapes and inspire him to create new designs based on the broad impressions stored in the granary of his mind.

Second: Novelty gives us some new impression suited to and brought about by new conditions of life and environment--by the changes that time has wrought. By novelty I do not mean, however, the imitation novelty so frequently met with and presented as something new; too often it means simply some older thing newly described. Achieving the fantastic quality reminiscent of the "slimy trail" of _Art Nouveau_, which you older ones will recall as rampant in the 1890's, produces freaks of fashion in an attempt to be novel, but may not, necessarily, always secure the novelty desired. Traditions of the past need not be disregarded nor overlooked in order to meet the prejudices of the present.

Just now a seemingly insatiable demand for novelty is giving us a senseless and ridiculous riot of "beautiful atrocities." The inundation of freak types is largely due to a revival of some former products of ignorance bringing in their train new designs even more bizarre in the attempt to secure "novelty"--a detestable word used frequently, I fear, like charity, to cover a multitude of sins. It has no place in artistic considerations, as a thing that really is good should be good for all time. Sporadic outbreaks in the name of novelty inevitably occur from time to time and fortunately have usually only their little day in the sun before vanishing forever into the limbo of the forgotten.

I do not wish to imply that novelty itself is undesirable--by no means; striving for newness keeps things fresh and alive. It is the re-presentation of the extraordinarily ugly and bizarre types of the middle of the last century with no exceptional artistic warrant for their revival, in an attempt to do something different, that I deprecate. Newness for its own sake only may not always be worth while.

I find it difficult to speak dispassionately of some of the types advertisers are using nowadays, because I am too deeply steeped in the traditions of the past to accept them. I cannot be accused of intolerance, however. The best art of the designer, the highest skill of the printer, and the clear, lucid argument of the advertisement writer must be requisitioned. Yet in much of the typography of today many of the new types display a marked avoidance of everything that is plain, simple and legible. Why are simplicity and easy readability no longer esteemed as desirable qualities in print? Why are these outlandish characters selected? For four hundred years the Roman types of the early Italian printers have furnished models to suit all tastes and serve every purpose.

For several years past advertisers and even our magazine and book printers have somewhat strayed from a definite standard of dignity and beauty in the quest for novelty. Foreign types, imported to add a touch of novelty to our advertising (types which, no doubt, are good enough for the conditions in the bailiwicks that gave them birth), too frequently impart to print a fantastic or a too fanciful effect when used under the entirely different conditions found here. These types are likely to impart to our printing an air of incongruity displeasing to the trained taste. _En passant_, I am reminded of a suggestion offered by Reinhardt, the scenic designer: "Do not try to inspire from foreign ideas. Be interested in them, of course, and they will help to fertilize your own."

Third: Style is a subtle quality that comes from an intelligent use of a good tradition renewed and advanced into our own times; it is a quality inseparable from the tools and materials employed, and is not to be acquired simply by taking thought or by a determination to attain it. Style is the living expression controlling both the form and the vital structure of the vehicle which presents thought in tangible form--an intimate and inseparable something in the work of a craftsman wholly unconscious of style or of any definite aim towards beauty for itself.

Fourth: Distinction is more difficult to secure, yet, when a type presents an unassuming simplicity; when it expresses thought in every detail; when it is clear, elegant, strong; nothing in it that is loose and vague, no finesse of design, but showing clearly in every line the spirit the designer has put into the body of his work, that type can hardly fail of real distinction. To meet the demands of utility and to preserve also an esthetic standard is the problem the type designer must attempt to solve. Obviously a large order for a mere amateur (or even for a professional designer).

As to legibility, I shall not here comment. Everyone knows (or thinks he knows) just what constitutes it; I fear I do not, or I would never permit myself consciously to make a type that was not the quintessence of legibility.

* * * * *

I am frequently asked how I design a type face. There are so many things that lead up to one that it is difficult to give a specific reply. I once told a student that "I think of a letter and then mark around the thought." That is hardly real designing. It may be easy to think of one letter, but to think also of its twenty-five relations which with it form the alphabet and so to mark around them that they will combine in complete harmony and rhythm with each other and with all--that is the difficult thing, the successful doing of which constitutes design. What is the inspiration for a new face? That also is difficult to answer. In the first place, it is hardly possible to create an absolutely new type or one that will not be reminiscent of the past.

It is quite within the province of the letter artist to take his inspiration for a new face from any source--the lapidary inscriptions of the first centuries of the Imperial age of Rome; a mediaeval brass that marks the last resting place of a departed ruler; a manuscript letter by some unsung scribe of the Renaissance, or an early type of the golden age of typography. Or maybe he may even strive to put into tangible form on his drawing board some vision from out of nowhere--the realization of a chance thought straying through an idle reverie which he will whip into a satisfactory medium of intellectual exchange. On the other hand, he may prefer to attempt the re-creation of new letter from the bones of a more ancient form, endeavoring to secure in it a new expression of life and vigor, with new graces suited to our times and our use.

If the designer chooses to disregard old types and go direct to their source, the manuscript hands of the scribes, well, why not? By revising their forms, refining them, eliminating their whimsicalities and vagaries and formalizing their irregularities, he may meet, too, the mechanical requirements and technical limitations of type founding. This, probably, is the more legitimate method, since in this way he will inspire from the real beginnings of our lower case forms. For myself I am inclined to agree with a writer who maintains that "it is doubtful whether the type designer benefits from a close study of hand lettering," meaning of course the manuscript hands of the past. Interesting as old manuscripts are, I find them of little practical use as offering models for new types. Speaking for myself only I find it more feasible to get my inspirations from a study of the earlier types that appeal to me. They frequently offer opportunity for new expression. With no attempt to copy their particular forms, or to make changes merely in weight or serif, I endeavor rather to tear from them the qualities and the spirit that makes them good, for incorporation in my own letter shapes.

I realize, of course, that the letters I may select as my models were, without doubt, inspired by some manuscript hand that personally I may find offers little for use in my own work. With complete independence of calligraphy I attempt, instead, to secure the negative quality of unpretentiousness; I strive for the pure contour and monumental character of the classic lapidary forms of the first centuries of the Christian era; I endeavor in my work to avoid any bizarre quality or exhibition of conscious preciosity. (It has been said that in this latter aim I sometimes fail.)

Once in a while a type face by some other designer seems to present an interesting movement or quality that I like. I take early opportunity to make it mine, frankly and openly, in the same way that a writer might use exactly the same words as another, but by a new arrangement of them present a new thought, a new idea, or a new subtlety of expression. Or as two painters using identical tools and colors, each might produce a masterpiece, yet the work of one probably would not resemble that of the other in any detail. By copying carefully a few characters of the type that appeals to me drawn by another hand, I try to secure in my own drawings some certain movement or rhythm his may present. I soon discard my model and proceed from there, as it were, under my own steam, and sometimes produce a face which my good friend Kent Currie says "has an acid, typy quality" and (in substance) that it is regular and well-ordered, that it has interest, color, movement, and sometimes quaintness.

Several years ago I accepted a commission to make a type for a magazine of large circulation. At that time it was my practice to make drawings from which matrices were engraved for me by the late Robert Wiebking of Chicago. His death occurred just about the time I was to send him my originals for translation into "mats" from which to cast the type. In order to carry out my arrangement with the magazine, and finding difficulty in procuring the work elsewhere, I determined to try doing also the mechanical work of matrix engraving myself. Like Moxon, I "learnt it of my own genuine inclination," with no previous instruction in the craft. With no engraving or casting plant ready to my hand I began the getting together of the various paraphernalia of a type foundry. Procuring machines for a type foundry was comparatively simple; the operation of them, making patterns for use in the engraving machines, the lining and fitting of the cast types, etc., all after I had reached my sixtieth birthday, was something else. Looking back, I am amazed at my temerity. It was literally a case of rushing in where angels might well fear to tread. Yet, since that time I have engraved many hundreds of matrices.

And now, one other personal note. It is my credo. For nearly two score years I have made use and beauty the great _desiderata_. I have never permitted myself intentionally to utilize the message I was attempting to present, to serve as a mere framework or scaffolding upon which to exploit my own skill, nor ever to allow my craft to became an end in itself instead of a means only to a desirable and useful end.

COMPOSED IN DEEPDENE TYPES

[Illustration]THEODORE LOW DE VINNE[Illustration]

_The Old and the New_

A FRIENDLY DISPUTE BETWEEN JUVENIS AND SENEX

with a note by FREDERIC W. GOUDY

Published by The Village Press, Marlboro, New York, 1933.

_Juvenis_: What is it that you admire in the types of old books? Don't you love them more for their quaintness than for their beauty? I have seen originals or accredited facsimiles of the best books of Gutenberg, Jenson, Aldus, Kerver, Caxton, and other notable printers, but I prefer modern types.

_Senex_: Then you have seen the pointed black-letter, the round gothic, the aldine Italic, the flemish black, and the early Roman. Did not any of these styles please you?

_Juvenis_: Not one. To try to read the pointed black of Gutenberg and Kerver is as repelling as a walk through the crypts of an old church; the round gothics are as scraggy as a heap of oyster shells; the Aldine italics are squeezed as to width, elongated as to height, and incongruously mated with absurdly small capitals; the flemish black-letter is the 'tour de force' of a literary acrobat. In all these characters I see bad drawing and disregard of proportion. The founding is as bad as the design; some characters are fitted too near, others too wide, and many letters are out of line.

_Senex_: You surely cannot censure Jenson's Roman for bad fitting?

_Juvenis_: I do except that, for Jenson was a good mechanic, and so was Kerver. Their types are well fitted and neatly lined. But I have small praise to give Jenson for his much admired Roman letter. Better, no doubt, than any other Roman of the period, but was it perfection? Bibliophiles forget that this Jenson Roman was out of fashion fifty years after his death, and that his models have been altered by every succeeding punch-cutter.

_Senex_: How, then, can you explain the favor shown to the recent types of William Morris? His 'Golden' type is based on the Jenson model; his 'Troy' and 'Chaucer' types are modeled after the round gothic of the fifteenth century.

_Juvenis_: I do not pretend to explain freaks of fashion in typography any more than in religion or art or music. The Athenians who worshiped an unknown or forgotten god have successors in every generation. There are Englishmen, nursed in the Catechism, who try to be devout Buddhists; there are Impressionists, Pre-Raphaelites, and Wagnerians.

The lover of singularity who can invent nothing that is new must hunt up something that is old, or at least odd, to keep up his reputation for discernment. It is enough for me to know that the literary world, outside of Germany, moved by common impulse, discarded all the early types. The sacred black-letter of Gutenberg, and other forms, went to oblivion for good reason. All were of bad form and hard to read--obscured by abbreviations, misuse of capital letters, absurd divisions, and inconsistent orthography. Much as a student of our time may profess admiration for early typography, he will not consult the 'Bible of Forty-two Lines' for a disputed text, when a more readable edition is accessible.

_Senex_: You confound two features of typography that should be kept separate. The shapes of early types should be considered apart from the skill, or want of skill, in their compositors. The black-letter types of the fifteenth century are often fair copies of the admirable manuscripts of the period.

_Juvenis_: The black-letter of every early printer was but a servile copy of the manuscript most attainable. Malformations were copied, but the flowing graces of penmanship could not be reproduced in mechanically square types. No punch-cutter of the period improved on the manuscript copy. All the early books abound in infelicities of design and cutting, indicating that the work was not as thoughtfully done as similar work is done now. It is a begging of the question to assume that the early punch-cutters were demigods in art. To say that they were right is to say that Albrecht Dürer and Geoffroy Tory, who wrote books on the true proportions of letters, and Granjon and Garamond, who gave a lifetime to type-making, were wrong. I prefer to accept the teachings of known artists as of higher authority.

_Senex_: Is not the difficulty of reading old black-letter due to its unfamiliar abbreviations and to mannerisms in type-setting now out of fashion? Would not modern types be obscure if similarly treated?

_Juvenis_: They would; but the fault begins with the shapes of the printed letters. You note it in the modern German fraktur, always a perplexity to every English-born student. The Germans themselves practically admit its inferiority. Their scientific books are usually in Roman. Their preference for Roman is a confession that Roman types are better, and that the printers of the seventeenth century did wisely in their general abandonment of pointed letters. The reading world had outgrown them. Why should we revive them?

_Senex_: Let us not trouble ourselves about pointed letters. There is no probability that they will ever be accepted by Americans for the texts of ordinary books. Let us consider the Roman types that have been in use by the Latin races and by English-speaking people for three centuries. Are modern types as readable as those of Jenson? Here is his Pliny of 1472, and here is the 'soprasilvio' of Bodoni, as exhibited in his _Manuale Tipografico_ of 1818. Which is better?

_Juvenis_: I am surprised at the question. Every character in the Bodoni type is correctly drawn; every system of uniform thickness, every hair-line and serif sharp as a knife-edge. Curves are true and graceful, angles exact; fitting and lining beyond criticism. In the Jenson type there is not one perfect letter. The hair-lines are scant and of unequal thickness, the serifs are stubby, the stems of uneven width, the characters out of proportion. Raggedness of drawing and roughness of cutting are not concealed by its fairly good fitting and lining. No publisher of the last two centuries would dare to print, and no reader consent to buy, a contemporary book in this type.

_Senex_: Can you not see something more in this Jenson type? Is it not more readable? I put them side by side at a distance of ten feet, where you can read the Jenson and cannot read the Bodoni.

_Juvenis_: True: but types in great primer are not made to be read at ten feet distance.

_Senex_: True again; but the mannerisms that obscure the Bodoni type at ten feet are more distressing in his small types, usually read at the distance of fifteen inches. The over-sharp hair-line, the dazzling serif, and the vanishing curve are more irritating in the smaller than in the larger sizes. Ordinary eyesight does not seize at a glance the entire face of modern type; it dimly sees hair-lines or serifs; it deciphers the stems only; it sees but half of the letter, and guesses at the invisible. The type of Bodoni is a wearying strain on the eye.

_Juvenis_: Your remarks do not fairly apply to readers of good sight.

_Senex_: They do apply to the majority of readers. It is a mistake to make for ordinary texts types with lines that cannot be easily seen by all.

_Juvenis_: If you think boldness of most importance in a type, why make Jenson's type your model? Why not go back still farther? Why not take up the lapidary letters of old Rome, Greece, or Etruria?

_Senex_: They are uncouth and wasteful of space. Designed to be chiseled on stone, they are unfit for types. The 'Caroline minuscule,' which is the basis of our Roman text letter, is more compact, quite as irregular, and much more readable.

_Juvenis_: If you believe that there was a gradual improvement in the shapes of letters between the first and fifteenth centuries, why stop at the fifteenth? Why not admit that this improvement continues?

_Senex_: Because the changes that followed were not always improvements. The faultless curves, sharp lines, and exact angles of Bodoni were disfigurements made at the expense of readability. Types are made to be easily read, not to show the skill of the designer. When they fail in readability the fault is fatal. The proper development of typography was checked by the invention of copper-plate that trod on its heels. Its delicacy of line, its perfect graduation of shadows, its vigorous blacks, and its facile rendering of a receding perspective put out of fashion all strong and manly work on wood. Dürer's 'Little Passion,' Holbein's 'Dance of Death,' and Vostre's _Book of Hours_ were put aside, and the insipid effeminacies of overworked line-engraving took their place. Punch-cutters of the sixteenth century thought that printing would be improved if they imitated the methods of line-engravers, and so they cut their types sharper and thinner. They would not see that relief engraving and incised engraving are diametrically opposed in theory and practice, and that the imitation of one process by the other is impossible. Repeated failures did not check this desire to imitate. Increasing refinements in types produced a corresponding degradation in printing. The inferiority of the average book of the eighteenth century is largely due to the so-called 'improved' faces of type. The most irrepressible imitator of copper-plate effects was Bodoni of Parma. William Morris is right in saying that his imitations of copper-plate delicacy indicate a real abasement of the typographic art.

_Juvenis_: If correct drawing, exact proportion, and high finish are merits in other arts, why should they be faults in type-making?

_Senex_: 'Finish' is a merit only when it improves; when it over-elaborates, when it leads the reader to think more of the means employed than of the object sought, it is a fault. Bodoni's careful drawing and finical cutting defeat the purpose for which types were made. They do not fully show the letter; they do show Bodoni; and it is a fair supposition that he was more intent on showing his skill than he was on aiding the reader. Your ideal of merit in types is that of mechanical precision. You forget that letters are of irregular shapes, with intent to make them distinct. The more you prune away the irregularities, the more indistinct they become. Readers do not isolate and critically examine each letter; they read words at a glance. They prefer characters with enough of irregularity to arrest the eye and fix the thought of the writer. It is with types as with penmanship. Has it been your misfortune to revise a long manuscript written in feminine style with a crow-quill pen, and with admirable precision, but with almost invisible hair strokes? Recollect your exasperation at its mechanical precision and wearisome monotony. How gratefully you turned to a jagged and masculine but readable style of penmanship, in which you were content to have all the rules of writing-masters violated! Recall these experiences, and then understand why I prefer old types. Not because they are old, or of faultless form, but because the letters are more distinct. They were made, not to show the skill of the punch-cutter, but to help the reader; and they deserve the credit due to straightforward workmanship.

A NOTE BY FREDERIC W. GOUDY

_In 1898 the name "De Vinne" meant little more to me than the name of a then popular display printing type, until the day, in a book-shop in Detroit, I chanced on a copy of_ The Book-lover's Almanac _for 1896. Of the eight or ten articles listed in the table of contents one was by Theo. Low De Vinne. The article was written in the form of a discussion between "Senex" and "Juvenis" on the comparative merits of the early type faces and those of Bodoni and his successors. This was, I believe, my first realization that "De Vinne" was the name of a living personality._

_I was just becoming interested in the history of the typography of books and was making also a closer study of type design, but it did not occur to me that such study would ever lead to the actual practise of the art I have since made peculiarly my own...._

_When I first read Mr. De Vinne's article it seemed to me that "Senex" had rather the better of the argument, indeed, I have not found, during the nearly two score years that have elapsed, any statements elsewhere that have changed materially the opinions then formed as to the soundness of his asseverations...._

_If I were asked to say what I think has been the greatest single influence in my work as a type designer I would be hard put to find a satisfactory reply; but there is no doubt in my mind that the principles set forth in this article and in his book_ Notable Printers of Italy During the 15th Century _have certainly loomed large in crystallizing the character of my types. The consistency of thought he displayed, his sound knowledge of old types, his fairness in the consideration of each moot point, the simple yet lucid presentation of his ideas and opinions interested me; they influenced my own thought, and in turn are reflected in my work._

_If, to my more mature consideration of this discussion there is any lapse of the author's pen, it seems to me it is, that "Senex" failed to stress more strongly a demand for greater grace and beauty in types in closer combination with legibility. I feel that the proper standard of beauty in types basically resides in their utility, but there are, nevertheless, secondary esthetic attributes which may be included without any sacrifice of life and vigor and legibility. A certain rugged beauty is perceived without difficulty, and irregularities which in isolated or individual characters, might seem objectionable from the standpoint of grace alone, may prove highly desirable in the composed line. Readability is of course to be considered above every other quality, because, failing this it fails utterly, regardless of every other excellence; yet, while striving for legibility, beauty of form should also be given almost equal consideration.... I venture to disagree with Senex's statement that "the lapidary letters of old Rome are uncouth and ... unfit for types"...._

_Marlboro, N. Y., May_, 1933

[Illustration: Bruce Rogers]

PARAGRAPHS ON PRINTING

From _Paragraphs on Printing_. Copyright 1943 by William E. Rudge's Sons. Reprinted by permission of author and publisher

_NOTE: The text for this book on the functions of the book designer was elicited from B.R. in talks with James Hendrickson. These informal observations on typographical problems were accompanied by numerous reproductions of pages of Mr. Rogers' design, by way of illustration and example._

You think of the _book_, the size and shape of the book, before you consider type or anything else. What kind of a volume should it be? In what particular form and in what face of type would _you_ like to read it? The type and format should be governed by your conception of the character of the subject matter. As an instance take Conrad's tale, _The Tremolino_, recently printed. It is a slight but vivid story, to be read almost at a glance, so it would have been a misfit to make it larger, say in octavo size. The vividness is indicated by the dramatic little cuts in color, the slightness by the dimensions and open character of the pages.

After the size is determined the selection of a suitable type comes next. And that depends usually on what types are available in the office in which the book is to be made. Even this is not always necessary, as many offices have composition done outside by type-composition firms, so that an almost unlimited choice may be yours. There are so many varieties of type now, that for almost any size or kind of book you plan you will readily find an appropriate face. At any rate it isn't so vitally important as other things.

[Illustration]

It is a great advantage in laying out a page, especially a title or display page, if the designer can handle pen or pencil; and the more definitely he can represent the type he proposes to use, the greater saving of time and expense there will be when it comes to the setting of it. It is true that some masters of printing do not resort to sketching--at least not more than mere lines on the paper, labeled with the kinds and sizes of type they represent. But to visualize the completed page in such slight indications is an unusual gift, and if one does not possess this gift there is the probability that the first setting of the page will have to be torn apart several times before a satisfactory one is produced. It is sometimes well worth while to work a page out very carefully, even in pen-and-ink, so that it will be a pretty close approximation to the finished thing; especially if you have to submit the scheme to a customer for his approval, or if he asks to see alternative treatments.

Of course, after many years of familiarity with type faces, it isn't necessary to draw them accurately for your own guidance, even though you should possess that ability; but some nevertheless find it a pleasant thing to see the page take form under their pencil or pen before it goes into actual type. Frequently, however, there is a sense of disappointment in seeing the first type proof, for the freedom and swing of your sketch has usually vanished in its translation into type; and the more formal the style of type the less it will retain the quality of your sketch.

[Illustration]

Making an "allusive" format for a book--that is, casting it in the style of the period of the original text--is in a small way something like planning the stage setting for a play. An up-to-date style for an ancient text would compare with staging _Hamlet_ in modern dress. However novel and effective in its own way, you feel it to be strange, and this sense of strangeness is an annoying distraction; you are forced to think of the setting and the designer rather than of the text.

* * * * *

The character of the text to be printed is of course the first thing to consider in selecting the kind of type; and the number of pages to which the book will probably run is the determining factor as to what size of type is possible. The width and length of the type page are then to be proportioned to the paper page, which in turn also helps to determine the size of the type. All these considerations are interlocking.

There have been several rules formulated for page proportions. One is that the width of the page should approximate one-half of the diagonal. Another is that the length of line should be one-half more than the length of a line of the twenty-six lower-case letters of the type used. But all such rules are only guides, to be discarded when the effect you are after seems to require something else; this something else to be determined only by the judgment of the designer and his feeling for the appearance of the page. In the reproduction of the styles of early typography the designer should avoid setting small type in too wide a measure. The old printers in their folio volumes did not seem to mind very long lines of comparatively small type. But most of these ancient books in Roman type were never intended for rapid reading. They were generally Latin texts where the eye follows the line better than in English or French composition. Latin composition naturally makes more beautiful pages on account of the preponderance of short letters--m, n, u, etc., with comparatively few ascenders and descenders. The evenness of spacing that the early printers got came from their abundant use of Latin abbreviations and their indifference as to how many consecutive word divisions occurred at the ends of lines, but it was never a conscious effort to obtain what is called "texture" in the page. There should be no laboring to produce a perfectly spaced page but rather an endeavor to avoid a badly spaced one.

* * * * *

The amount of leading that a page requires depends on so many factors that it is difficult to give any fixed method of procedure. The kind of type, the size of type, the length of line and the general character of the text all bear on this point. Generally speaking, most types should be at least slightly leaded, especially if the lines are fairly long. This helps the eye to catch the following line in rapid reading more easily than when the type is set solidly. The solid pages were usually adopted when old-style types were used exclusively; but when modern type came in, beginning with Bodoni, the custom of leading, sometimes double-leading, arose. The effect of these new types was helped by a generous amount of white paper between the lines. This applies to Bodoni, Bulmer, and the Scotch face and their derivatives. Antique types were, however, occasionally very freely leaded, especially in Spanish books of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

The conventional use of quotation marks is to place a double mark at the beginning and end of the passage quoted, with single marks for any quotations within it. In books with much conversation the use of double quotes frequently results in very mottled typography, and for many years some English printers have adopted the single mark for the major quotations, using double marks only if an inner quote occurs. This violates, a little, one's sense of relative importance, but in a book where there are only simple quotations there is no reason why the single mark should not suffice, much to the visual improvement of the typography. There is some possibility of confusion if the last word of the extract should chance to be a possessive plural, with an apostrophe, as the two marks are identical; but this occurs so infrequently as to be negligible.

Inverted commas were used for opening quotes in most founts until comparatively recent years, but now a separate pattern is provided for most founts. Reversed, instead of inverted commas now accompany many founts, particularly the reproductions of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century types, at which time they were first introduced.

French, Spanish and other continental founders furnish a special design of marks, « »; but these look rather strange to Anglo-Saxon eyes.

In Elizabethan printing the quotation marks sometimes ran entirely down the margins of the extracts, and if, as was frequently the case, the page was enclosed with rules, they were often placed outside the rules. This treatment occurs in one of the handsomest books of that period, _Nobilitas Politica vel Civilis_, printed in 1608 by William Jaggard, the printer of the First Folio fifteen years later. The _Nobilitas_ is generally accounted the masterpiece of his press, and in itself comprises nearly all of the various typographical features of books of that time. Large and small types, Roman, Italic, black-letter and Anglo-Saxon, both solid and leaded pages, tabular work with handsome braces, side notes, woodcut initials, head-pieces and tailpieces, and a series of costume plates engraved on copper and printed within the rules on folioed blank pages left for them in the form--all go toward making a book that is a compendious example for students of Elizabethan typography.

[Illustration]

Red is the most satisfactory secondary color with black, and you will often find that it is better to use just one spot of color on the page. In using red for an occasional display line, blue-red or purple-red or orange-red should be avoided. A red such as the early printers had, a full-bodied, rather dull vermilion, which will hold up well with the black, is the most successful. If it is desirable to employ the blue for a border or an initial it shows up much more brilliantly when the design is in white on a solid or stippled ground of the blue. An outline design in blue is too light in mass to accompany the black of the type. But black and blue alone are never so pleasing a combination as when red is introduced as the second color, with blue as the third.

The black for the text or reading types should be intense without being glossy, because the gloss causes a reflection of light and interferes with legibility. The same objection does not apply to colors, for a moderate gloss enriches them and overcomes a sort of dustiness that their surfaces take on.

The text pages of most books should be printed in black ink.[36] The tendency of a young printer is often to try for novelty by printing with color rather than with black, not realizing that most types were not designed for anything but black on white. If, however, the job is somewhat aside from the usual run of books, and is not of too great extent, a brown or green ink may be substituted for black if the tint be dark enough to afford perfect legibility. But the result then acquires something of the character of an object of art rather than a book.

* * * * *

Letter-spacing is often misused. It is safe to say that lower-case type should practically _never_ be letter-spaced, for the individual letters were designed for close combination with other letters of the alphabet. If it becomes necessary to fill out a line it is preferable to put all the extra space between the words even though the resultant "holes" are distressing to the eye. Sometimes with very large types it is permissible to letter-space in a minor degree, as the spaces between the letters naturally are larger and letter-spacing does not detract too much from the appearance of the line, especially if it is distributed according to the irregular space between the different letters as normally set.

With capitals or upper-case letters the conditions are different. Then it is frequently a great advantage to use letter-spaces, even considerably; but this depends upon the general style of the typography adopted for the book. In the hands of some contemporary printers the Aldine practice of wide letter-spacing of small capitals has been followed quite skilfully in title- or subtitle lines, chapter headings, and other display work. This is of particular advantage with the rather heavy-faced modern types, i.e., Scotch, Bodoni, etc.

It is well to avoid too many, and too open letter-spaced lines in any kind of display composition, for the effect is sometimes disastrous. Baskerville was very fond of letter-spacing and most of his work is, in that respect, extremely ugly.[37] He sometimes pushed spacing to the point of absurdity; notably in his great Bible, where in the heading of the Book of Job he set the letters J O B in capitals of about 48-point size with three inches of space between them. It could hardly be called a word, but rather just a bad job of type-setting.

The practice of letter-spacing to produce blocked-out lines of capitals must be done with great caution and skill or else a very uneven texture will be produced. Frequently it is better to abandon the idea of a block of type if the spacing cannot be done with a fairly uniform effect. It is a mistake to start with a determination to produce a block of type and then to persist in it at any cost of legibility or appearance. When lines of capitals are set without leading, letter-spacing should never be used. The leading should be in proportion to the spacing in order to keep the continuity of the lines of type, otherwise you will produce columns of letters instead of lines. It is hardly necessary to say that the best letter-spacing is not done with uniform spaces between the letters. The spacing on either side of a letter should be determined by the shape of the adjacent letters. Most compositors have now learned to use spaces according to the shape of the letters, but the cutting of such letters as V, W, to make them set closer than their natural width is usually very much overdone. The new logotypes cut for this purpose are equally faulty in this respect. The resulting effect is more noticeable and more objectionable than the natural setting of the type would be. Anything that strikes the eye as strange or unusual in a line of type is to be avoided.

Periods and commas of letter-spaced capitals should not be set off from the last letter of the word, regardless of the amount of spacing used elsewhere in the line.

Colons and semicolons have traditionally been set apart from the word they follow, whether in capitals or lower case. In old books they are frequently centered in the space between the words where they occur. Exclamation and interrogation points should if possible be set off with thin spaces because they often form disagreeable and confusing combinations with the last letter of the word, such as ff!, ll!, f?, etc.

COMPOSED IN CENTAUR AND ARRIGHI TYPES

FOOTNOTES:

[36] Of the more than half-thousand books that Mr. Rogers has designed, only four come to mind as having the text matter printed in anything other than black; and these four were all slight volumes, more or less in the gift-book classification.

[37] "When we look at his books we think of Baskerville; while to look at the work of Jenson is to think but of its beauty, and almost to forget that it was made with hands!" UPDIKE, _Printing Types_, II, p. 116.

ADVENTURER WITH TYPE ORNAMENT [Illustration: B.R.]

_Paul A. Bennett_

Revised and amended from P.M., Vol. II, No. 5, New York, January 1936.

To anyone who has set or handled type, the achievements of Bruce Rogers in combining decorative type units to form a design are extraordinary. This may seem undiluted enthusiasm; actually and sincerely it is but simple fact.

How? Why? Only a detailed examination of a particular B.R. design with type ornaments will reveal. An examination, that is, accompanied by simultaneous scanning of a proof of the individual elements comprising the design. When one sees the units alone--some of them so seemingly useless that one wonders that anything, even second-rate stuff, could possibly be done with such drab material--then one appreciates the typographic magic B.R. has accomplished.

_How_ he sees anything in some of the units he uses so dexterously, I don't know. When and how he first became interested in doing designs with type ornaments is worth considering.

His experiments date back to Riverside Press days, though in that period no attempts were made to use type ornament except by conventional combinations into borders or head-pieces. But even at that time he had several seventeenth-century flowers recut for the decoration of a collection of early American documents, titled _Sailors Narratives of Voyages Along the New England Coast, 1524-1624_, edited by George Parker Winship.

Interest in combining type ornaments was shown again while at the University Press in Cambridge, England, during 1918-19, but he developed it there into nothing more than the revival of two or three other earlier ornaments which were used, as at Riverside, in conventional ways. A page of his scrapbook shows also a number of trials with Egyptian hieroglyphs, but apparently nothing came of these.

The germ of his allusive use of ornaments is probably to be found in the "Goosefest" menu which he concocted at Carl Rollins' Montague Press; when at the bottom of an elaborate bill of fare three of Will Bradley's strutting little figures are set (or laid) flat on their backs in a row, with the legend, "Turn over (not us but the leaf)."

The earliest traceable use of ornaments and punctuation marks that in combination bear directly upon the text thus decorated was in the heading for the first page of _The Symbol and the Saint_, where a line of parentheses, a cross and three dolphins symbolize the overseas quest of the hero of the tale. This same motif was developed and elaborated later in _Joseph Conrad the Man_, _The Ancient Mariner_, and other pieces. His scrapbook shows many unused variations on this theme. The sea and leaping dolphins and palms seem to be his favorite preoccupation.

[Illustration]

Probably the most difficult compositions of this kind he has produced are to be found in Conrad's unfinished novel, _The Sisters_; where in a space the width of the page and one-quarter to one-half inch in depth may be found suggestions of illimitable Russian wheat fields, Paris with its mansard roofs and French roads leading into it, a farewell scene at sunset on a winding Spanish road, etc., each based upon some phrase or paragraph in the story itself.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

Most certainly B.R.'s accomplishments surpass those decorative combinations of type ornaments shown in early printers' and type-founders' specimens--yes, even including the foremost achievements of the hallowed rule benders.

Little research is necessary to support these rather inclusive statements. An excellent example is the _Utopia_ title page, done for the Limited Editions Club. Here is swirling movement in a border, if ever you saw it. And accomplished, mainly, with two traits of ornament and their reverses. The entire border took but several more.

[Illustration]

Setting them out individually, doesn't give a hint of their possibilities. Yet look at the result of their use by B.R., scan the design closely to discover just where and how each element is placed with such telling effect--and you begin to appreciate the man's ability.

Another example--old stuff B.R. will call it--is the title page of a little Christmas book issued a dozen years ago by Rudge. Could one reasonably expect anything remotely approaching typographic whimsy from a few typographic toy soldiers, a dog, an elephant, a few Christmas trees, a half moon and some stars? Just glance at _The Symbol and the Saint_ title page though, and see how B.R.'s subtle skill utilized material teetering toward the junk pile.

"Never," your perceptive collector will say, "has anything more masterful been done with type ornaments than in the Grolier Club _Pierrot of the Minute_." Few would disagree, for if ever there was a typographic jewel, the _Pierrot_ is it. Yet B.R., in discussing it critically, termed it "French millinery. Probably all right for its purpose. Rather over-decorated, but then the poem itself seems over-decorative."

[Illustration]

There are dozens of other examples of B.R.'s mastery of typographic decoration. But space is not limitless, and I want particularly to say something about some designs with Linotype ornaments (drawn by T. M. Cleland) that Mr. Rogers devised a few years ago for the Linotype Company. These were used for the first time in the insert discussing the auction prices of twenty B.R. books, which appeared in _Barnacles From Many Bottoms_, several of which are shown on pages 290, 299 and 300.

That "something" may best be told, I believe, by excerpts from letters written to a Company executive, in April and May 1931, by B.R., who then was in London:

"... In an odd hour I got to playing about with some of the Cleland ornaments, cutting them out of a specimen and pasting them into a design which finally evolved itself into several amusing compositions. Later on it occurred to me that you might be able to use them in some piece....

"Having only a limited number of proofs, and no slugs whatever, I was able to work out the idea in only the roughest fashion--not fit to show anyone--but the principal one of the designs is for a page heading ... or the elements composing it could be used singly--as tail pieces, initial letters, etc.

"This probably is an impractical idea [a suggestion by Mr. Rogers on how the material might be used], but I only make it to put into action more or less work that I have already done to save it from the scrap basket--work that might be useful to your firm as a demonstration of what can be done with some of your product. I really don't think anyone has yet worked out the possibilities of your ornamental material, much of which is the best on the market."

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

Additional proofs of the Cleland ornaments were sent immediately to Mr. Rogers in London. With them he made eight designs, cutting the proofs and pasting the ornaments to show the desired effect. This tree, for instance, was used on the title page of the _Barnacles_ insert:

[Illustration]

This was printed from a line engraving made direct from Mr. Rogers' paste-up, and used "as is" to show how accurately his layouts for this type of work reach the composing-room.

A month later, in May 1931, Mr. Rogers returned his layouts with this note: "... I have only just been able to complete the designs I had begun.... One or two other combinations occurred to me, which I have also put in--but we could go on endlessly, almost, when once started on this kind of thing.... I would have built up the designs with impressions from sections of a slug, had you sent an inch or two of each unit; but it is perhaps better, though slower, to cut and paste proofs, as each cutting is a guide to the compositor as to how and where trimming or beveling the ornaments are necessary. But only a few such trimmings are required, and all the bevelings are at 45 degrees--as is the diagonal composition of the oak tree heads.

"If at all possible I would like to have a chance to revise proofs of these, before they are actually printed--but if that isn't feasible, then I must rely on the compositors getting the closest possible approximation to my pasted-up designs. As close setting as possible is the secret of most work of this kind. The various parts must hang together well--though I do not mind a slight indication at the joints that they are made of individual pieces of type. I once had an over-zealous electrotyper fill up all the joints with solder--and ruined the appearance of the design--it looked like a drawn one."

It wasn't possible to show Mr. Rogers what had been done with his layouts for the insert in _Barnacles_, which was essentially a surprise

## book distributed as a keepsake at a dinner in his honor.

The "fighting cocks," to cite one instance, were originally suggested by B.R. to be used to dress a page folio at the bottom of the page; in the insert they were raised to the top of the page and printed with his initials. Other slight adaptations of similar character were taken in that piece of printing.

[Illustration]

"Typographic whimsy," wrote Carl Purington Rollins in _B.R.--America's Typographic Playboy_, in 1927, "is a pretty difficult achievement. The compositor at the case is too much concerned with the practical minutiæ of his craft to have much time for such trivialities, and the man who designs printing at a draughting board is apt to find his humor, if he attempts it in type, limping like a thrice-told jest. Mr. Rogers has had the advantage of enough familiarity with type to know what can be done, and he has been able at times to work with compositors who take a large and robust view of their calling."

That "whimsy" Mr. Rollins had reference to lies in many of B.R.'s more ephemeral efforts, frequently reproduced. It is reflected to a measure, by _The Symbol and the Saint_ page. But there is considerably more than whimsy in the type ornament designs by B.R. These have graced dozens of books of varying subjects ... and the marvel of it all is, to me, that the man never repeats himself--he swings off on a new tack ... adventurous, exploring, mastering new trails, scattering typographic inspiration for dozens of others, pointing up paths they previously never even suspected.

_Postscript_, 1951:

It is fitting to add a note concerning one of B.R.'s more distinguished recent projects, the great folio Bible designed for The World Publishing Company, which was four years in the making.

The design of the World Bible employed decorative treatment for the bordered title page, the sixty-six book openings, initial letters and numerous tailpieces. "These, together with the type selected [a revised, special cutting of Goudy New-style], are intended to give a slightly oriental flavor to the volume," B.R. pointed out, "indicative of the Syriac and Hebrew sources of the text on which the King James translators based their classic version."

In discussing the matter of ornaments in the Bible with the publishers, B.R. revealed his thinking concerning their use: "... Most of the Books will probably not begin at the top of the page and the use of ornaments are to me necessary to separate the end of the preceding book from the title of the following one.

[Illustration]

"The Bible has always been a book on which much decoration and illustrations have been lavished, and there is no reason in tradition why it should be treated solemnly in that respect. The very first edition (of which I have specimen sheets and a whole Bible printed from the same type and with the same decorations by the same printer, twenty-five years later, 1635) is just peppered with woodcut decorations and type ornaments. So we have a good precedent for a decorated treatment--if any were needed. You know the Bible is on the whole one of the most exciting texts in existence, and the modern 'practical' treatment of it as mainly a book of devotion is ignoble, to say the least...."

Some of the typographic decoration and initials used in the Bible are included here. William Targ's detailed account, _The Making of the Bruce Rogers World Bible_, contains most of the decorative elements--initials, tailpieces and chapter initials--and reveals the intimate story of the progress of the book's production through the four years. It was published by World in 1949, in a limited edition of 1875 copies, 500 of which were for sale.

COMPOSED IN CENTAUR AND ARRIGHI TYPES

[Illustration: Book labels devised with typographic ornament by B. R. In the originals, a second color was used for each excepting the Reydel.]

SOME TENDENCIES IN MODERN TYPOGRAPHY [Illustration]

_Daniel Berkeley Updike_

From _Some Aspects of Printing Old and New_ by D. B. Updike. Copyright 1941 by the author. Reprinted by permission of the Providence Public Library, Providence, Rhode Island.

Not very long since I was asked by a printer to what extent he should accept or avoid modern trends in the design of types and books. I attempt here to answer that question.

I have a friend, connected with one of the great companies supplying machines for type composition. Not long since he spoke to me in unflattering terms of the examples of typography shown at an exhibition of the products of the Bauhaus School, originally of Weimar and later of Munich. He protested against a practice there manifested of discarding capital letters and depending solely on those in the lower-case. I consoled him by showing him a French book, printed entirely in this style. This volume, entitled _Typographie Économique_, was published in Paris in 1837 and so far as it had any influence on printing, then or later, is as dead as Queen Anne. The author, the Count de Lasteyrie, who promoted this scheme, was one of a race of French scientists, of some intellectual and social importance--one of the daughters of Lafayette married into that family. In the eighteenth century no less a person than the German writer Grimm tried a similar typographical plan. In the Fairy Tales containing "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," later compiled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the practice was not continued. This supports the contention that many new and disturbing experiments, under the patronage of distinguished names, are merely survivals or revivals of ancient failures. Thus in the light of experience, there is in Bauhaus typography nothing for my acquaintance--or anybody else--to be excited about.

Now Bauhaus typography is of the essence of modernism. That its position may be fairly stated I quote the following from a _Bauhaus Year Book_:--_verbatim_ and (I may add) _literatim_:

["] why should we write and print with two alphabets? both a large and a small sign are not necessary to indicate one single sound.

_A_ = _a_

we do not speak a capital A and a small a.

we need only a single alphabet. it gives us practically the same result as the mixture of upper and lower-case letters, and at the same time is less of a burden on all who write--on school children, students, stenographers, professional and business men. it could be written much more quickly, especially on the type-writer, since the shift key would then become unnecessary, typewriting could therefore be more quickly mastered and typewriters would be cheaper because of simpler construction, printing would be cheaper, for fonts and type cases would be smaller, so that printing establishments would save space and their clients money. with these common sense economies in mind ... the bauhaus made a thorough alphabetical house-cleaning in all its printing, eliminating capitals from books, posters, catalogs, magazines, stationery and even calling cards.

dropping capitals would be a less radical reform in english. indeed the use of capital letters occurs so infrequently in english in comparison with german that it is difficult to understand why such a superfluous alphabet should still be considered necessary.["]

Now in German printing all nouns have capital letters. In the sentence "A Dog chases a Cat into a Barn," dog, cat, barn are all capitalized. No one can be blamed for wanting to be rid of so much capitalization. But when Germans purge anything the innocent invariably suffer with the guilty. Thus all capitals must go. While it may have overcome a difficulty felt in Germany, this imported missionary zeal corrects no difficulty in the printing of English prose or poetry. In some instances such a custom brings about surprising results. Suppose, for example, a newspaper says "the white house favors black and prefers even green to a dyed-in-the-wool red." To make the sentence intelligible would need the addition of a number of words--which would not be _typographie économique_! We need labour this point no further but leave these experiments to the advertising of Coty and Elizabeth Arden. Such effects have what is called attention value--like Neon signs--but I am not considering that kind of typography. I have, however, here traced the source of a current fashion of printing signs and advertisements without capital letters.

I have been classed by my work as a conservative, but I am a liberal conservative or a conservative liberal--whichever you like or dislike. All I wish to conserve, either in traditionalism or modernism, is common sense. What little I have was gained by experience. I regard many typographic experiments with good will and many traditional viewpoints with tolerance. I agree wholeheartedly with neither. I remember--or try to do so--that every generation has in turn to be told that there was once a man named Caesar, who wrote a very dull

## book called the _Commentaries_, of which the first sentence is all

that most people remember; that the makers of Baker's Chocolate did not invent the familiar picture of a chocolate girl, which was an eighteenth-century painting by Jean Etienne Liotard now in a Dresden picture gallery, and that William Blake did not write, but only illustrated, the Book of Job. We who have long known these things forget that people are born not knowing them. We should therefore look tenderly on many typographic experiments. To us elders they may seem akin to lighting a fire with kerosene or applying one's tongue to metal in zero temperatures, but it is by such unwise ventures that we outgrow them. And as I have spent a long life learning, and to most questions do not yet know the answers, I have no right to frown on more youthful and enterprising enquirers.

Obviously some of the eccentricities of present-day typography are a natural reflection of that rather tortured world in which we find ourselves. If art, the drama, literature, and music reflect current trends of life it is natural that printing should in a measure do so. If we throw overboard old standards of conduct, we may far more readily throw over old standards of taste. When one casts a convention away as useless and outmoded, we often learn for the first time why it was there! It is urged that fuller expression of individuality, unhampered by rules, is development. It seems to me more accurate to say that through the experience of trying these experiments development comes--though not always of a kind expected. Such development ought never to stop until in the exact sense of the word we are "accomplished"--finished--which few live to be.

The _problem_ is to distinguish between a true development, and a false one. In judging either modernistic or retrospective typography, that is what must be decided. Do these developments--wise or otherwise, produce a well-made and readable book--in short a good book? "In the printing of books meant to be read," says an authority, "there is little room for 'bright' typography. Even dullness and monotony in the type-setting are far less vicious to a reader than typographical eccentricity or pleasantry. Cunning of this sort is desirable, even essential in the typography of propaganda, whether for commerce, politics, or religion because in such printing only the freshest survives inattention. But the typography of books, apart from the category of narrowly limited editions, requires an obedience to convention which is almost absolute--and with reason."

It is the fashion, just now, to decry typographic conventions. Some conventions and traditions deserve to be decried and some have already been laughed out of existence. There are, however, good and bad conventions and traditions in printing, just as there are true and false developments, and the trick is to know which is which! Convention and particularly tradition are, generally, the crystallized result of past experiments, which experience has taught us are valuable. In some of the extreme modernistic typography a little more tradition might come in handy. The trouble with the modernist is that he seems afraid not to throw everything overboard and mistakes eccentricity for emancipation. Thus some books of today seem to be the arrangement of a perverse and self-conscious eccentricity. Such printing is often the work of eager, ambitious, and inexperienced men, and because they are young and God is good, one can afford to be patient; sure that they will, in the long run, outgrow the teething, mumps, and measles of typography. Their convalescence will possibly be hastened by meditating on the saying of Lord Falkland that "when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change."

No movement ever accomplishes all that its first promoters intended or hoped for; almost all movements make some lasting contributions to our common stock. Every new idea, every new invention brings along with its expected benefits unforeseen evils. Modernistic architecture is at present exciting because new and unusual; when more common it will become commonplace. When it becomes difficult to differentiate the exterior of a modernistic church from a warehouse, we may get very, very tired of it. Then a compensating reaction will set in and balance will be restored. The same thing is true of modernistic typography. At present, it shocks us into attention, but we get tired of being shocked, for we do not want printing to surprise but to soothe us. The modernist must remember, too, that "such a thing as an underivative work of art does not and cannot exist, and no great master in the arts has thought or asserted otherwise." We gladly admit that some modernistic formulas have had good results. In architecture, perhaps to some degree in typography, they have taught us to get rid of clutter and useless ornamentation. But neither the one nor the other leads anywhere--except to a dead end.

The conservative, however, need not think that all truth is on his side. However much he tries to practise retrospective or "period" typography, consciously or unconsciously his work will show the influence of his time. Just as there is a popular idiom in speech which varies in each decade, so there is a current idiom in printing. All these idioms, literary and typographic, have not come to stay, but some become accepted terms. Under Theodore Roosevelt we suffered from the word "strenuous." President Harding inflicted the word "normalcy" on American speech. We now have "reactions," and "contacts." Clergymen "challenge" things, have "spiritual adventures," talk of "strategic positions" for their parish houses and aid parochial charities by "clarion calls," though if confronted with a "clarion" (if this instrument exists outside of sermons) they would be quite unable to blow it. All these catch-words and stock phrases are in the air. We suffer much the same thing in typography, about which there is also a new jargon which replaces the old _clichés_ of my youth about rhythm, balance, and colour. Neither in speech nor printing can one make a clean sweep of the past nor help being of the present, no matter how hard one tries. I deplore violent attempts to make current printing accord with the spirit of the age. It always has, always will, and does now.

Nor need the conservative sniff at typographic experimentation. To turn to another department of daily life, what would happen if no one had ever tried experiments with food? In the distant past there was the first human being who--as an experiment--ate an oyster, though perhaps first trying jelly-fish with less comfortable results. Others died of eating toadstools before people learned that they could survive on mushrooms. Almost all our vegetable food we owe to gastronomic adventurers. Thus the hide-bound conservative owes sustenance to the fruits, and vegetables, of experiment.

To speak more seriously, both modernist and conservative should lay to heart what Benedetto Croce says in his _Autobiography_ about "the impossibility of resting on the results of past thought" and the necessity of modesty in stating one's present position. "I see," he writes, "a new crop of problems springing up in a field from which I have but now reaped a harvest of solutions; I find myself calling in question the conclusions to which I have previously come; and these facts ... force me to recognize that truth will not let itself be tied fast.... They teach me modesty towards my present thoughts, which tomorrow will appear deficient and in need of correction, and indulgence towards myself of yesterday or the past, whose thoughts, however inadequate in the eyes of my present self, yet contained some real element of truth; and this modesty and indulgence pass into a sense of piety towards thinkers of the past, whom now I am careful not to blame, as once I blamed them, for their inability to do what no man, however great, can do ... to fix into eternity the fleeting moment."

There is, to the reasonable mind, no real quarrel between modernism and traditionalism in printing, _except in degree_. Modernism must and does influence the conservative in spite of himself--if by modernism we mean a healthy awareness of the needs of the time in which we are living. Tradition must and does influence the modernist, if by tradition we mean patient and respectful appraisal of what that accumulation of yesterdays, which we call the past, has to teach. It is only by experience that we can effect a wise blend of the two. Then we produce books which, while representing the best practice of our time, will outlast it. The appraisal of their ultimate values we must leave to the future.

"There is no past that we need long to return to," said Goethe, "there is only the eternally new which is formed out of enlarged elements of the past; and our real endeavor must always be towards new and better creation."

COMPOSED IN BELL TYPES

[Illustration]PETER BEILENSON[Illustration]

_The Amateur Printer_:

HIS PLEASURES AND HIS DUTIES

From _Graphic Forms: The Arts As Related to the Book_. Copyright 1949 by Harvard University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Although the title of this piece is sufficiently long to be impressive and important-sounding, all I really want to write about is printing as fun. I am going to write about the amateur printer, and the amateur is the fellow who has fun.

I do not wish to belittle the affection a professional printer may have for his work. He should love his work. But he can love it only in a different way: for after all he is essentially a businessman about it. His work, like that of any other businessman, is something he has to sit down to by nine in the morning and something he can't leave until five at night. It is something that involves landlords and labor unions, payrolls and tax inspectors, truckmen, office-boys, salesmen, compositors, pressman, bindery workers--and customers. He has to worry about payments, and depreciation, and publicity, and time sheets.

The professional has to concern himself with all these things which are not printing at all, because he is in business and has to make money. His primary yardstick of success as a professional is: _How much money did we make last year?_ Of course he has other minor yardsticks of success too: he may be successful because his presses turn out useful things like timetables, or gratifying things like corporation reports for the year, or beautiful things like four-color reproductions of Varga girls. To make these things well is a kind of fun; and insofar as the fun comes from the satisfaction in the thing itself rather than in the profit that derives from it, I'd like to call it amateur satisfaction.

But essentially our professional printer--and permit me to limit myself to the professional book printer--is supposed to make money, not to have fun. And he makes money best, nowadays, if his plant is equipped with the efficient modern machinery which is designed for maximum production. Such machinery is a wonderful creation of man; it is thrilling to watch in action; and it gets results. But it has its disadvantages. Now that mechanization is becoming more and more complete in more and more places, we can begin to see clearly the greatest disadvantage of all: under such mechanization individual workers have lost pride and satisfaction in their work, because they have become mere replaceable units of less and less importance; whereas the machines they operate are more and more important, and have become the essential units.

A generation ago the professional printer might have boasted of his skilled compositors, who could set type more expertly, or his skilled pressmen, who could make more careful overlays or match ink better than someone else's craftsmen. Today he boasts of his remote-control composing machines, his presses which come close to eliminating make-ready altogether, and his ink supplier's new gadget which matches colors scientifically. Today the most successful printer is the one who with the least possible dependence on man-power, can keep the most presses running fastest for the greatest number of hours per day and days per year. He is not the one with the most skilled craftsmen.

In such a world, where the executive's function is to feed the machine and the workman's is to tend it, the human spirit begins to cry out for the fun in work which I have called the amateur satisfaction. It is true that today's shorter working hours--which the machine makes possible--permit people to have more outside fun; permit the manager to play more golf, and the workman to play more softball (or more pinball) in the late afternoon; it is true that more people now see more beer advertised on more television programs, and may even drink more of it, in the evenings. But managers and workmen alike turn so avidly to such kinds of fun because they no longer get fun out of their daily work. It is becoming harder and harder for people to equate work and happiness.

Now I do not set myself up as a social reformer dedicated to the dream that all people should be happy in their work. Nor do I propose as a step to this end that we revert, smash the wonderful machines, and go back to the good old days when everyone really _did_ work with his hands--usually from dawn to dark, six days a week. There was no pinball or television then, but _still_ I do not wish to go back! Nor do I suggest that the solution is the promised thirty-hour week, with all the workmen driving their own Buicks home at two each afternoon, and taking out the wife and kiddies to Braves Field or the Gardner Museum.

But I do suggest that some of you people who really love printing, but are too involved with the nine-to-five daily business of it to enjoy it much, should enrich your lives by becoming amateur printers in your spare time. You will have fun.

* * * * *

I yield to no man in my boredom with vegetables and salads. I see green at every meal save breakfast. I have eaten enough stringbeans to stretch--if they were straightened out and laid end to end--from Fordhook Nurseries in Delaware to the city of Burbank, California. If you could see all the lettuce leaves I have consumed in my lifetime, piled leaf on leaf and dripping in their oils, their vinegar, their mayonnaise, and their roquefort dressings, you would be absolutely appalled. But, bored as I am with green things on the table--bored because despite their goodness they have been too plentiful and too easily come by--I am not bored on those occasions when, like Candide, I cultivate my garden, get my hands into the dirt, and smell God's good fragrance in the loam. To watch the power of living things like salad greens and stringbeans pushing their way out of the seed, up through the earth, reaching down for water and up for sunlight with an irresistible drive, is to realize afresh the power of life on this planet. It is a reinvigorating and religious experience. It is impossible to watch seeds grow into plants and flowers and fruit and still to believe cynically in a mere mechanistic explanation for such a life drive. To get back to the seed, the earth, and the root is to re-experience the fun and meaning of life.

In the same way that I have become bored with salad, we have all become bored with words, printed words. We have seen too many of them, we have read too many of them, we have measured, or proofread, or edited, or sold, too many of them. We have forgotten their primal power, their irresistible living urge. We have forgotten that sincere authors have not put them down on paper because of two cents a word or 10 per cent of the retail gross--that they have been written (in the best cases) out of human necessity, human ebullience, human passion, human sympathy, or human understanding. The industrial book-printing world cannot ever think of words in that way. It must always think of them as areas of type 22 by 28 picas, as numbers of pages which do or do not make up a multiple of thirty-two, as units of sale at $3.00 less 40 per cent.

To go back to nature and become an amateur printer in such an industrialized book world is like working in the garden when you are bored with salad. You really get back to the roots of words. If you are a genuine amateur printer, and set the type and print the pages yourself, you actually can share in the creative agonies and satisfactions of the author. For you put down his words, letter for letter in your type-stick, just as he did with his quill or his battered Remington. The best way on earth to appreciate an author and his creative spirit (or for that matter to realize more quickly the faults in him) is to pick him up letter by letter from a California case. An even more acid test is to distribute the type after printing him. In such a case you pick up half a dozen lines of type at once and work backwards, distributing the last word of the last line first. It is a revelation how the hollowness of an author can show up under this treatment. It is especially cruel to poets, for every word which is not really necessary, which is there just for padding or for a rhythm or a rhyme, becomes as noticeable as the well-known sore thumb. But the genuine, sincere author with a pure style stands up beautifully under such treatment, and has his reward in your pleasure at this discovery.

After you have set your author's type you must make up his pages, choose his decorations or illustrations, and set his headings. You must decide whether to stretch him to twenty-four pages or condense him to sixteen. You must buy his paper, lock up his pages in your chase, make him ready, curse your press which is printing him, apply your ink to his words, and impress him for posterity. Perhaps you will thereafter fold him, sew him, and encase him in boards.

In so doing, you become, to the extent of sixteen or twenty-four pages, in an edition of one hundred or three hundred copies, God. You have created something which did not exist before, and which would not have existed save for your thinking brain and tired back and dirty hands. True, you have not created Heaven and Earth, and you have undoubtedly worked at your creation for more than the original quota of six days. But anyway you have given the world something which was at first only words you loved, and is now a whole, real book, which you love all the more because it is your book, your child, your embodiment of those words. That is the fun and satisfaction of being an amateur. In our printing world there is no other satisfaction equal to it.

* * * * *

Good old Ralph Waldo Emerson was mortally right when he wrote down his doctrine of Compensation. His doctrine of Compensation says that every pleasure carries some penalty, every gain some kind of loss. Every duty accepted gives you a satisfaction, and every satisfaction received involves you in a duty. Thus far I have written of the satisfaction of your being an amateur printer. Now I wish to write of your duty and obligation.

The amateur book printer has a duty which, if he will accept it, will in the long run return to him the greatest satisfaction. This duty is to teach the professional, by example, about the outer cultural world, and to experiment for him in matters of printing style. Now this is directly contrary to what ninety out of one hundred current amateurs would seem to think, and I must therefore beg their ninety pardons if I disturb their habits of mind.

Most amateurs either don't trouble their minds about problems of printing style at all, or else they fall too easily into the habit of working in the Colonial style, or Venetian style, or some other historical style, rather than in a contemporary one. Maybe they do so for psychological reasons. And maybe not. I am too set in my diction to learn the trick of talking in psychological terms. I would express their case like this: Amateurs who work in historical styles do so because they are romantics, romantics who turn away from the impersonal machine world of the present for a breath of the more human and glamorous-seeming past. I sympathize with such an instinct, and hold myself ready to defend any man who seeks to re-inject a human element into the printing craft.

The trouble is, such amateurs think that because printing in the past was done by hand, and because there is something more satisfying and human about printing by hand, they must therefore work in an antique printing style and make Colonial and Venetian books in order to enjoy themselves. This is a false syllogism. I strongly recommend printing by hand to amateurs because it will give them greater satisfaction, not because it will make their books look like antiques. It is too easy to fabricate such antiques, and to do so will in the long run give you less enjoyment than making something which in style is original and new.

As a matter of fact it is already too late to think in terms of revivals and reproductions. In printing, the revival habit started over a hundred years ago with Whittingham and Pickering, when they dusted off the forgotten Caslon types and the eighteenth-century style. It has been going on ever since, and reached a climax of understanding and skill in our century at the hands of Updike, Rogers, Rollins, Goudy, and others. This revivalism was a kind of search for humanism, and a kind of rebellion against commercialism. These men were not unique. In every generation since 1800, in every art and craft, every field of thought, the Industrial Revolution has prompted men to make the same search backward for satisfactions which the modern world did not seem to offer.

Too many of our amateurs are still making the same search, although the Industrial Revolution is well over one hundred years old, all the necessary backward searching has been done, and all the historical styles have been reworked. Our predecessors have made it unnecessary for us to go through the process once again. We can see now that their work was an escape perhaps for them, but that it can never be a durable way of creative realization for us. From now on, we must join up with the forward-looking crowd who think they can build a new world.

The book-printing industry has not been very forward-looking in matters of style. With the exception of a few printers and designers, book printers have been unhealthily backward. Therefore the time is ripe for amateur book-experimentalists to prod and teach them. The amateur can do it.

He is, or should be, a man with interests in other fields of culture than his own. He is aware already of what has been done in painting and music, in fabrics and furniture design, in architecture too--most important of all. He must now help printing to develop its own new styles, equivalent to those in other fields. That he can do so is evidenced by the fact that in recent years the greatest strides forward have been taken not by the professionals but by people who in a sense are amateurs, but who have known how to apply modern ideas from other fields.

The Bauhaus group first became notable, between the wars, by applying the functional theories of modern architecture to the printed page. The Black Sun Press and Harrison of Paris applied the ideas of Monroe Wheeler and others who were stimulated by modern painting. There may be similar publishing projects in this country today, but they are not yet influential. The most effective, most vocal, most lovable of contemporary American influences is that rugged individual Merle Armitage, whose ideas have been influential in shaping my own attitude. Such people all know that the world has changed; that it will never turn back again; and that it is up to us to catch on to the flying coattails of Today. I urge other amateurs to join the ranks of these apostles of change. It will be a great day for all of us when ninety out of one hundred are experimentalists, and not the other way around.

Of course in urging amateurs to develop new styles, I am not recommending any easy hobby. It is simple, but dull, to copy an old style. It is hard, but exciting, to work out a new one. And while you are working at it, you must expect cynical observers to give your experiments the adjective "wacky"; you must expect certain curious kinds of people to praise your work for the wrong reasons; and you must expect alternating moods of conceit and frustration. The proofs you gloat over at night will become commonplace by dawn. Your wife may go back to her mother in rage and despair. You may need sleeping pills.

You will make misjudgments about the intelligence of ordinary readers. You will make mistakes of taste. You will find it too easy to get an effect by means of shock, and you will forget that any book, even a twenty-first-century book, must be a coherent unit. And you will often, since there are no highway markers for the explorer, feel lonely and discouraged, and want to go back to the old familiar well-traveled roads again.

But if you go through with it, or even if you just play with it sometimes as a hobby, you can have great fun. For it will put you out in the open, free to please yourself, with the boss and the customer left far behind. You can be subtle or bold, as you feel the urge, for you do not have to please the great common denominator, the common man. You can advance your own work by looking to other fields of creation, enjoying and profiting by the experiments going on in them. You can feel yourself a part of the whole forward-looking culture of your day, and not someone off in a little forgotten corner.

And, if you do strike a vein with the glitter of real gold in it, you will become rich indeed. For you will have become a creator in a new sense; your duty done as an amateur will be compensated with a twenty-four-carat satisfaction. At such a moment of realization you will have earned the privilege to rest and feel content. As on a seventh day after six of creation, standing late at night with bloodshot eyes and inky fingers and aching back in a paper-littered room, you have become a creator. You have not merely escaped from the flattened monotony of the machine age--you have become one of the shapers of its future. More power to you in that work!

T. M. CLELAND

_Harsh Words_

An address delivered at a meeting of The American Institute of Graphic Arts, in New York City, February 5th, 1940, on the occasion of the opening of the eighteenth annual exhibition of the Fifty Books of the Year. Copyright 1940 by T. M. Cleland. Reprinted by permission.

Mr. Chairman and Members of The American Institute of Graphic Arts:

The generosity of your invitation to me to speak on this important occasion leaves me a trifle bewildered. I am so accustomed to being told to keep my opinions to myself that being thus unexpectedly encouraged to express them gives me some cause to wonder if I have, or ever had, any opinions upon the graphic arts worth expressing. But since it is the theory of your Committee that I have, and it may never be anybody's theory again, and they have gone so far as to give me no instructions or suggestions as to the scope or the limitations of what I might say, it would seem as ungracious to decline such an exceptional offer as it would be to abuse it. So if I accept it as wholeheartedly as I believe it was given--if I take you at your word and say things that I have long wanted to hear somebody say--I hope it will not be thought an abuse of this kindly tendered privilege.

I realize that, nominally at least, my subject must be that of printing and typography as exemplified by the selection of the fifty best books of the year which we are here to celebrate; and I suppose, by comparison to deplore the fifty thousand worst books which may be seen elsewhere. But by what may seem a very odd paradox, I don't quite know how to stick to this subject without wandering a good way off it. Or, perhaps I should say that I cannot approach it directly except by a very roundabout way.

If I have a thesis for these remarks, I can only develop it in terms of a tree. This is because I do not believe that invention in the arts can be picked from empty space like objects in a prestidigitator's act. Fruits really grow on trees and trees have roots in the earth. The tree I have in mind is cultural civilization: one of its limbs is art and a branch of this we call the graphic arts, and a twig on this branch is printing and typography. I promise not to dig into the roots of this tree, but I may be found, monkey-wise, climbing all over it before I am through.

I am at some disadvantage in that I do not belong to any organizations for the advancement of typography and the graphic arts--not even to this one--and I am ill-informed and out of touch with what is going on in these fields except by casual observation. But as members of this very useful organization, you are not engaged in printing or other graphic arts, I take it, solely for each other, but for the enjoyment and delectation of the world at large. So there is a partially compensating advantage in my being "at large" myself, and thus able to speak of present trends in the graphic arts as they appear from the outside, looking in. But this advantage may in turn be offset by the fact that I cannot honestly speak of what I see with much enthusiasm. I can bring you no message of hope or light of inspiration. Much as I am filled with admiration and respect for many individual talents and accomplishments that still contrive to exist, they seem to me to stand unhappily isolated in what I can't help viewing as artistic bankruptcy and cultural chaos. Among them are printers making beautiful books and other things about as well as these things have ever been made. But as to the general volume of printing, no one has asked me, to be sure, what I thought was the lowest point of artistic taste in the five hundred years of its existence which we are celebrating this year, but if anyone _should_ ask me, I would be bound to say that we have reached that point just about now. Things may get worse, but it's hard to see how they can. To paraphrase a remark in the concluding chapter of Updike's classic work on printing types, it has taken printers and publishers five hundred years to find out how wretchedly books and other things can be made and still sell.

I am not forgetting that there were some very benighted periods of taste in other centuries that would seem to refute this sweeping assertion. Perhaps it is worth noting here--and the fact is peculiarly ironical--that the design and style of official and governmental things--money, postage stamps, bonds and stock certificates--was created and solidified into a seemingly unalterable convention at that hitherto all time low point of the decorative arts in the mid-nineteenth century. So powerful is this convention that we would be suspicious of a ten dollar bill that was not visually saturated with ugliness. A counterfeiter with aesthetic sensibilities must not only sweat blood but weep tears over the job of imitating one. But in the sadly perverted taste of that epoch there was a kind of innocence: standards were still respected, and proficiency, though overworked and misdirected, was recognized and not condemned.

Today when I look about in the bookstore, and more especially on the newsstands, or open the pages of most of the magazines with the biggest circulations, I want to do what the little boy did in the story which was a favorite of my friend, the late Hal Marchbanks. The little boy had been to his first party, and when he arrived home, his mother said: "Did mama's little boy have a nice time at the party?" "Yep," he replied. "What did mama's little boy do at the party?" "I thow'd up."

Against this steady decline in both taste and workmanship, your fifty books selection and exhibit each year has been a noble effort, and in this country, almost the only concerted one of consequence to uphold some standards. You have inspired both publishers and printers to earnest endeavor to improve their products with frequently admirable results. But these are only fifty books out of how many other books and other printed things. Without this good work of yours, one wonders if any standards at all would survive the flood of cheap and easy mechanization, careless workmanship and bad taste. Not that there is anything wrong with machines. The first hand press, it should be remembered by its sentimental admirers, was also a machine. We have not learned to use the machines at their best, but accepted them like fruits in the Garden of Eden, and thought of nothing but how much we could get out of them in speed and quantity and profit. Because we can do with them easily what formerly demanded time and pains to do at all, we have too easily assumed that they delivered us from the need of any time or pains.

Before I go any farther on or off the track with these random remarks, I should like it to be understood that I am addressing them

## particularly to any students and beginners in the graphic arts that may

be present, rather than to those who are arrived. I am a student and still a beginner myself, and so my interest and my heart are naturally with my own kindred. I speak as an old beginner to younger ones. I am at a great disadvantage with regard to the number of years I have left in which to get started, and if I have any advantage at all, it is only in experience with the bewilderments and illusions that clutter our common way in learning and trying to practice one or more of the graphic arts. The confusions and distraction of this day make the path of the student and beginner rough and tortuous. Having travelled it for more years than I like to admit, when I look backward, I am astonished to discover the number of twists and turns and pitfalls I might just as well have spared myself.

Perhaps the most foolish of these was the fear of not being original--what Romain Rolland calls "the fear of the already said." The notion that I must do something new every day, or I would not be creative--forgetting that God made the planets all the same shape as far as we can see, and that the oak tree does not alter the form of its leaves from year to year. There is no supposition so pathetically misleading as that creative originality is within your own volition--the notion that it can be acquired leads to deplorable results. It distracts the mind and energies of the young student from gaining needful technical competence--from learning his trade, and in more mature stages tempts the would-be artist into vulgar mannerisms and formulas which he will call his "style."

The idea that originality is essential to the successful practice of the graphic arts is more prevalent today than it ever was in the days when the graphic arts were practiced at their best. The current belief that everyone must now be an inventor is too often interpreted to mean that no one need any longer be a workman. Hand in hand with this premeditated individualism goes, more often than not, a curious irritation with standards of any kind. The conscious cultivator of his own individuality will go to extravagant lengths to escape the pains imposed by a standard.

But of all the perils that lie in wait for adolescent artists there is none more seductive than the bewildering array of ologies and isms that leer and beckon to him at every crossroad of his journey. Just as isms and ologies have taken the place, in social and political life, of right and wrong; so have they become the accepted terms of the arts. In fact, nonsense is now so universally the language of art that it is nearly hopeless to try to make oneself understood in any other.

Brood mare to all of these extravagancies--and I have lived to see many of them come and go--is that one which achieves the super absurdity of calling itself "modernism"; and none has been expounded and exploited in more contradictory and antic ways. To deliberately call oneself "modern" is no less ludicrous than something an old Danish friend told me years ago about a line in one of the books of a very prolific writer of historical romances in his country. In a tale with a medieval setting this writer had one of his knights in armour cry out to another: "We men of the middle ages never take insults, etc."

Embraced with fanatic enthusiasm by many architects and designers is the current quackery called "Functionalism." It, in common with its many predecessors, offers a new gospel for the regeneration of our aesthetic world by restricting all design to the function of its object or its materials. Like the new religions and philosophies that have paraded in and out of our social history for countless generations, it purports to be an original concept. It has brought to us such gladsome gifts as concrete boxes with holes in them for buildings, chairs of bent pipe with no hind legs, glass fireplaces, beds of cement blocks joined by structural steel, the queer agglomeration of unsightly edifices we call the World's Fair and many other specimens of stark and forbidding claptrap. Unless all signs are misleading me, it is another mass vulgarity like the age of golden oak and mission furniture, even now on its way to the junk pile or the attic, perhaps to be someday rediscovered there and dragged out by future generations in search of quaintness.

It seems to me, ladies and gentlemen, that _all_ art was _modern_ when it was made, and still is if it is suitable to life as we now live it; and I look in vain for any applied art worthy the name that was not also, in some sense functional. From the buttresses of a gothic cathedral to the gayest Chippendale chair one finds, upon analysis, a perfect work of engineering perfectly adapted to its purpose. If this were not so, these things would hardly have endured for so long a time. So that common regard for function which has always been the basic principle of first-rate design, assumes the impressive aspect of a religion, with high priests and ritual, by the simple addition of an "ism." As students and beginners in search of truth, we are today being pushed and pulled about by no end of such bogus preachments--familiar faces with false whiskers--old and common principles dolled up with new names and often used to account for incompetence and laziness.

And what is the meaning of this term "functionalism"? Must a design be related to no functions except mechanical and material ones? Might not the most fantastic and elaborate works of the geniuses of the baroque and rococo styles have also been functional in that they expressed the spirit and fitted perfectly the life they were intended to serve?

We hear much holy talk of "simplicity" in this day and the idea of simplicity expressed by a total absence of everything not essential to mechanical function has been elevated to a fetich. We have divorced simplicity from its old mate charm as we might break up the happy relationship of ham and eggs or pork and beans. But in this reverent renunciation of all adornment not strictly functional in this limited sense, have we paused to ask whether we are in fact following a basic human instinct, or merely attempting to make a virtue out of poverty of invention? There is no evidence that man is imbued with an instinctive love of simplicity in the objects with which he finds it useful to surround himself. Indeed, our museums are bulging with evidence to the contrary. From the Cro-Magnon cave to gothic cathedrals, from the temples of India to the palace of Versailles, the earth has been made to flower with man's inherent love of ornament. It would seem then that ornamentation is deeply rooted in the human instinct since no tribe, however primitive in other respects, is without it. The restraints of this instinct and the tempering of it with what we call taste is a cultivated faculty like the restraint of our other appetites; but to be a teetotaler in ornament or in anything else, is to confess to either weakness of control or incapacity for enjoyment. "A teetotaler," said Whitman, "is just another kind of toper."

This instinctive yearning for ornamentation is well demonstrated in the case of our own Rockefeller Center; where it has been catered to with peculiar ineptitude. Here all the important structures have been piously stripped of everything non-essential to mechanical function. Pillars, pilasters, cornices and mouldings--ornaments that at least have their genesis in structural functions--have all been piously renounced. And then because it was found that the human spirit could not tolerate such barren starkness, and business might suffer from it, ornaments have been pasted around its doorways and approaches like gold paper lace on a pasteboard box--ornaments completely unrelated to any structural function of any kind. Sculptures, fountains, trees, flowers and awnings have all been pressed into service to compensate for this spurious simplicity. Many of these things are beautiful in their own right like Mr. Manship's golden figure of Prometheus. One of the little office girls that further decorate the scene at the noon hour, was overheard the other day explaining to another that this was a statue of "Primiscuous escaping from Responsibility."

So under this wildly flapping banner of "Modernism" marches a quaint array of worn and shabby syntheses for art, each day parading a new dress and a new alias. The common urge for self-expression can always find one or another of them at its service. For those who are

## particularly deficient in the talent, energy and patience demanded

for the mastery of an art, something called "non-objective" art has been invented. For this the only things required are a box of paints, brushes and a surface to exercise them on. With these simple and easily procurable tools you express your own inner emotions and need not trouble yourself with anyone else's or with what anyone else sees. If you watch the others you will see that it is mostly being done with triangles, circles or vortexes of paint just as it comes from the tube. If you have no paint, toothpaste will do as well. If, after a few minutes of this, you are tired, stop--you will have added spontaneity to its other attractions. The fact that it deals only with your own emotions will not prevent you putting it on exhibition for other people to enjoy. If anyone balks at enjoying it, you smile wanly and shrug your shoulders and pity them for their dumb enslavement to outworn tradition. It works like a charm--no one will dare attack you--they will all be afraid that you've got something there. People have a terror of making mistakes--as if they had not been made by the best people in all ages. It is the most perfect device yet invented for attracting attention to yourself with the least trouble. A generation ago we heard a great deal about "art for art's sake": now it is art for the artist's sake, like bread for the baker's sake or medicine for the doctor's sake. And I say, for God's sake, tell me what art made through the vision of a human eye with a brain behind it is _not_ "non-objective"? No two men will ever draw or paint the same picture of the same object. Only the lens of a camera will render it quite objectively, and even the camera in the hands of an artist is capable of some degree of subjectivity.

And since I have inadvertently mentioned the camera, I ought to say a good word for it too. It is just now in its hey-day and people are taking greater pains with it than they are willing to take with any other medium of artistic expression. I see a great many very fine pictures made with it, in spite of its obvious limitations. But it has also been tortured into serving as a medium for self-conscious originality until its "new ideas" have come to be, in their way, in their monotony and staleness, an intolerable bore.

The marvels of color photography have revealed to us hitherto unsuspected depths of aesthetic sordidness. This factual reproduction of what we are told are "Nature's colors," I am given to understand, is not yet wholly perfected. Only when it is will we know the worst--only then will we know what the things that through our eyes have stirred us by their beauty, really are! Perhaps another super instrument of disillusionment will be invented to reveal us, not in form and color alone, but in spirit, to each other as we really are. Good-by then to human love, respect and friendship!

I have strayed a good way from my subject, as I warned you that I might; and these remarks must appear by now to be not only ramblings but the ravings of an old reactionary who is blind to anything that is new. That deduction will be almost literally correct, ladies and gentlemen. There is no denying that I am old, and toward much that I see around me, I am reactionary; and I have learned nothing in all my years of striving for knowledge, more convincing than that statement in the Book of Ecclesiastes to the effect that there is nothing new under the sun. I plead guilty to this hideous indictment and throw myself on the mercy of this court. I am even happy to have learned that much, and wish, in the manner of the camp meeting revivalist, that I might pass on something of this blessed revelation to the "brethern and sistern" present.

While I thus brazenly deny the existence of anything really new, and fail to recognize what is called "progress" and deplore the waste of talent and energy that is dissipated in striving for these things, I am far from blind to the value of revolt. Our creative sense is all too prone to doze off into dreams of past glories. From these, and the sterile copying of them, we may be awakened and rescued by even the crudest of revolutions. We may benefit from them provided we do not let them tear up our roots--provided we still can recognize an illusion when we meet it. The squirrel in his revolving cage must have some illusion of progress, else he would not take any exercise, and without exercise he would fatten and sicken and die.

And, remember, there is always progress to be made within yourselves, no matter if it is the same progress in the same direction that has been made by countless other souls. And there will, I hope, always be things new to you, as there are every day things new to me, even if the sun has seen them all before. I don't want to live a day longer than I can learn.

There is no reason to suppose that there is not today as much latent talent for the arts in existence, as at any time in their history. But talent for art is not talent for being an artist--one may have much of the one, without much of the other. It seems to me that there are more temptations and distractions working against the talent to be an artist today than ever before. More alluring short cuts and seductive philosophies--a disturbing babel of undigested ideas and indigestible objectives. If in this riot you can keep your heads and not lose sight of the important difference between "a grain of truth" and the whole truth, if you can grow in understanding of what it is you want to do, you may, even now, have a good chance of doing it.

But what has all this to do with printing and typography and their related graphic arts? I seem by now to be so far off the track that it will take a derrick and wrecking crew to get me back on again. As a matter of fact I have not forgotten the subject altogether and have, in my lumbering way, been working toward it. But because I can't think of typography as an art in itself, unrelated to all the other arts, I could not approach it except by the way I have.

All of these things that I have been complaining about in the other arts, have their counterparts in present-day typography and printing. The same restless craving for something "new," the same preoccupation with isms, the same monotonous sameness. But this poison is aggravated in the case of printing and typography, by the fact that of all the arts, it is, by its very nature and purpose, the most conventional. If it is an art at all, it is an art to serve another art. It is good only in so far as it serves well and not on any account good for any other reason. It is not the business of type and printing to show off, and when, as it now so frequently does, it engages in exhibitionistic antics of its own, it is just a bad servant.

For this reason the embarrassing ineptitude of the current efforts toward a "new typography" are even more distressing than similar contortions in other fields. Typography, I repeat, is a servant--the servant of thought and language to which it gives visible existence. When there are new ways of thinking and a new language, it will be time enough for a new typography. When we have altered all of our manners and social customs, only then will it be time to radically alter the well grounded conventions of this very minor art. Within them there is now ample room, as there always has been, for the exercise of ingenuity, skill and individual taste. I suggest that those who cannot abide the conventions of typography are mostly those who have never tried them.

In what does the newness of this new typography consist? It seems to be new as the neu in neurosis from which it largely derives. It is new as it would be new for a man to enter the dining room on his hands instead of his feet, and instead of eating his soup, to pour it into his hostess's lap. It is as new and agreeable and pleasing to look at as delirium tremens which it closely resembles. The new typography engages in such side-splitting pranks as putting the margins of a book page in just the opposite arrangement to that which practical utility and well founded tradition have always placed them. It might with equal reason and originality, turn the type page upside down. In advertising display it makes use of that highly original and refreshing device of printing what is to be read at a cockeyed angle. The make-up expert indulges that other fresh and original dodge of bleeding pictures off the edge of the page so that a flat two dimensional photograph is viewed without a frame on two of its sides and must compete with a background of all the three dimensional things in the room.

I refuse to bore you or myself by enumerating all the tiresome stock-in-trade eccentricities of the typographic expert in search of something new--the epileptic fits he throws to attract attention to himself at the expense of the words he is printing. You see enough of them every day to know what I mean. Nearly every magazine and newspaper page, not to mention a good many books, present the same revolting spectacle--the order of the day, it seems, is disorder.

And speaking of magazines, it has fallen to my lot from time to time in the past thirty-five years to design and redesign a number of periodicals of one kind and another. Such jobs require really very little actual work--it's by endless argument and conference that they can wear you to the bone. My simple purpose with these things has always been to bring any measure of order the case will permit out of the disorder in which I generally find it. My mission, if I have any, is to suppress typography, not to encourage it--to put it in its place and make it behave like a decently trained servant. I find magazines rolling in the gutter covered with the accumulated mud of years of dissipation. I pick them up and brush them off, give them a cup of black coffee and a new suit of clothes and start them off on respectable typographic careers. But like other missionaries, more often than not, I find them a year or so later, back in the same gutter, drunk and disorderly and remorselessly happy about it.

If the philosophy of functionalism has hit the new typography as it has the other applied arts, I see no evidence of it. On the contrary, in this field, anything goes, so long as it is eccentric, free from the restraints of reason, and can successfully discourage the reader from reading. All the distortions of the Roman alphabet that were discarded a half century ago--in fact any types which are as nearly unreadable as types can be made--have been dragged out again and called "modern." These range from the elaborately ornamental letters of the most depraved periods of design to the stark diagrams of letters that were called by type-founders in my youth: "Printer's lining gothic"--as absurd a misnomer as could be imagined, since they have nothing whatsoever to do with gothic letters or any other letter forms known to history. Laymen called them, more accurately, "block letters"; but in the new typography they are elegantly referred to as "sans serifs" because, among other features of the Roman alphabet which they lack, is a total absence of serifs. They bear the same relation to Roman letters as would an engineer's drawings for a trolley track. At the moment they are very much in vogue and are widely believed to be modern and to be a simplification in harmony with the new architecture, furniture and other things. They are supposed to represent the spirit of our day like the noise of rivetting hammers in a modern musical composition. They simplify the traditional forms of type as you might simplify a man by cutting his hands and feet off. You can no more dispense with the essential features of the written or printed Roman alphabet, ladies and gentlemen, than you can dispense with the accents and intonations of human speech. This is simplification for simpletons, and these are block letters for blockheads.

The users of typography and printing, the publishers and advertisers, are also confused by illusions of their own. Foremost among these is the notion that they require every week new types to give freshness and effectiveness to what they print and publish. This wholly unwarranted assumption is undoubtedly a godsend to the type-founders, however disastrous it is to the development of a sane and ordered typography. It has peopled the earth with typographic experts who know "the latest thing" and not much else, and it has relieved the designers of printing from the burden of knowing anything about design. It is so much easier to buy new types than to learn how to use effectively the types we already have. And if, instead of flooding our composing rooms with new types, which are seldom more than variations upon old themes of distortion, our type-founders would give us at least twice as many sizes as they now make, of a few good types, we should have a really flexible medium to work in. We would have to make fewer compromises with good design, and they might profit commercially, as typography surely would profit artistically.

And this constructive suggestion reminds me that I ought perhaps to temper this hurricane of destructive criticism with some further helpful hints. At the moment I can only think of two that might relieve the dreadful situation that I have pictured. One is that we organize a pogrom of all type designers--a little hard on them perhaps, but they would gain martyrdom to a cause--and the other is that we establish a concentration camp in which to intern all those who think up or think they think up new ideas in typography for such time as it will take them to recover from their delusion. There they might while away pleasant hours in the distinguished company of the inventors of paper-towels, pasteboard milk bottles and beer in cans.

With my younger colleagues still in mind, I ought to say something of the practical problems that we encounter in professing and practicing one or other of the graphic arts. We are, or should be, if we are really artists, more concerned with what we give to our art than with what we get out of it. But we have to live--or think we do--and to do that by the practice of art is certainly no easier now than it ever was. If anything, it's a little harder. Beyond that inner satisfaction with what we can give--and there is only a little of that and at rare intervals--the only two things to be got _out_ of art are money and fame; and I daresay there are few of us who would not welcome a little of both. But we must compete today with a great many of those who work for nothing else; and who, under the banner of one or another of these isms of which I've been prating, can concentrate upon that unique objective unhampered by any serious interest in art itself. They are devotees of success, like their commercial brethren, and by means of the same promotional paraphernalia they succeed so well that one is tempted at times to believe that the only living art is the art of self promotion.

Another curious development of these times is the classification of artists according to political ideology. We hear now of "left wing" artists. As nearly as I can discover, these are to be recognized by their contempt for any sort of craftsmanship and a peculiar inability to keep their drawings clean. They make penury--the unhappy lot of nearly all artists--a pious virtue, and they are not infrequently big with pretension to being the only serious interpreters of life and truth. These are balanced on the other end of the political see-saw by a school of "economic royalists" who have made of art a commercial opportunity. As Industrial Designers with large staffs and control boards and troops of indefatigable press agents, they have welded art and commerce so successfully that it is nearly impossible to tell them apart. Somewhere between the two is the artist; and he is as often as not a forgotten man. Not quite poor enough to be picturesque or heartrending, just well enough off to keep his collar and his drawings clean, he must nevertheless spend an exorbitant part of his life and energies in worrying about bills.

And now to stop the clamor of the butcher, the baker _et al._, to whom must we sell our graphic arts? For the most part, I suppose, it will be to publishers, industrialists and advertising agents. The publisher is a pretty decent sort, on the whole, but if he is a book publisher, he can generally be recognized as such by the fact of having very little money to spend on art. In my own experience, the most generous and appreciative customer for our wares has been the industrialist. What you do for him can often increase his profit very materially, and he is not slow to recognize that fact.

The advertising agent, speaking very generally and with the particular exception of one very dear friend in mind, deals largely in what might be called scientifically organized fraud. I am aware that to say this now is to risk being called a "communist transmission belt"--whatever that may be. It has even been suggested that by these animadversions upon advertising, I am biting the hand that fed me; but I suggest that I am biting the hand that I have fed until I am fed up on feeding it. It may be that you will find, as I sometimes have, in the ranks of these shock troops of deception, sympathetic and amiable clients for your work who can deal differently with artists than they deal with the public--but not very often. Each of them employs what is called an Art Director whose importance is derived, not so much from art as from the financial size and number of advertising accounts toward which he directs it. It is his duty to furnish you with what he calls "ideas," upon the theory that an artist is not mentally up to having any of his own. Ten to one he will end by altering your drawing to give it the "wallop" thought to be essential to all advertising. A public, already groggy and half blind from the incessant battering of advertisements with a punch, will hardly notice the difference.

"To think at all," says the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset, "is to exaggerate." A careful measurement of anatomical detail in the drawings and sculptures of Michelangelo will reveal startling exaggerations of fact, but these enlargements upon fact are but his medium for truthful expression. He gives us the figure of a man or woman more essentially true than could be made by any anatomist with micrometer calipers. So, I humbly pray, ladies and gentlemen, that you will apply no instruments of precision to my words--they are the best I could find in this emergency for saying what I believe to be true. If you think me guilty of exaggeration, the foregoing remarks are my only defense. But if you accuse me of being facetious, I will tell you that I have never been more serious in my life.

COMPOSED IN BODONI BOOK TYPES

[Illustration]OSCAR OGG[Illustration]

_A Comparison of Calligraphy & Lettering_

Copyright 1947 by the _American Artist_. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and author.

Superior writing and able lettering have never made inconsequential literature valuable, nor have poorly conceived, incompetent calligraphy and lettering ever invalidated good literature. Letters which are well considered, expertly executed, conscientiously fitted to their purpose, however, can create visually a spiritual state in a reader which will influence him to be receptive to the message he reads. It may even be possible that beautiful writing, aside from the intense pleasure it gives us as graphic art, helps to make uninspired authors seem more profound.

Perhaps it is this realization that has made graphic artists in recent years exhibit a notable increase in interest in American "calligraphy." The quotes are intentional. So much which is not calligraphy has had the term applied to it and so much which is calligraphy has been considered something else, that some sort of evaluation and comparative definition now appears to be wise.

The aura of romance which has surrounded the tools, the methods, and the products of the scribe has tended, we believe, to place them in the eyes of practicing letter artists somewhat higher in the scale of the arts than those of the letterer. Hence the "lettering man" likes to call himself a "calligrapher." This same snobbishness is often evident between easel painters and illustrators, between book illustrators and magazine illustrators, between book designers and advertising typographers. And all of it is false. By simple definition lettering and writing are related but certainly not competitive arts.

_Calligraphy_ is "beautiful writing."

_Lettering_, in modern usage, refers to built-up, designed forms.

Stanley Morison, in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, says: "Calligraphy is the art of fine writing. Writing is a means of communication by agreed signs; if these signs or symbols are painted or engraved on stone or wood [or paper] we have that extension and application of writing known as _lettering_, _i.e._ a script generally formed with mechanical aids such as the rule, compass, and square. But it is the essence of hand-writing that it be free from such, though not from all, government.... Calligraphy may be defined as freehand in which freedom is so nicely reconciled with order that the understanding eye is pleased to contemplate it."

[Illustration: The same nib was used for built-up and written forms in this freely rendered fragment of a ninth-century manuscript.]

Built-up and written forms each have their place. One of the tenets of fine letter art is that the forms be in perfect taste; that is, that the letter and its method of production be in harmony with its use. A delicately drawn cursive is as out of place on a subway card advertising a cough remedy as is a poster _egyptienne_ on the title page of a small volume of romantic poetry. To assume, however, that either the written or the drawn form is the more aristocratic is unsound. To attempt a representation of either by the other is likewise illogical. Written letters, based on traditional manuscript usage, are more serious in concept than their less restrained contemporary built-up characters and do not permit of the same unconcern with anatomical discrimination. Both, properly executed, can be superb examples of letter art--and both can be terrible.

[Illustration: A simple Roman, executed entirely with a broad nib. Characteristic strokes employed in writing the above.]

[Illustration: A similar letter designed and built up using a brush. Characteristic outlines to be filled in for above.]

The growing practice of calling all script-like letters "calligraphy" is unjust to writing and lettering alike. Particularly the practice of producing with a pointed pen or brush the built-up, tricked-out impersonations of broad nib writing must be abandoned if the art of making letters is to remain honorable.

Having defined, then, the general limitation of the terms, let us look at some of the principal differences in character between the two. Historically, we find them side by side. Since they were both produced by scribes and illuminators working in like tradition, there was no question of fitness one with the other. Both stemmed from the same source and were produced with the same type of tool. They were necessarily in harmony.

Contemporarily, however, much lettering is executed by craftsmen who neither know or care about the historical background of the alphabet. The responsibility for this lies, we believe, as much with the purchaser as with the producer of letters. The art director, working in a viciously competitive field, demands of the letterer something "different." The result is usually a built-up form which has little in common with its ancestors, either in shape or method of production. But, if it is handsome in itself, it may have a real affinity for a text of type. A written element may also serve beautifully as a foil for the rigidity of a type page.

[Illustration: These two treatments of a title are by no means the only likely ones by either method. The lower form was actually used. The letter was designed in the spirit of the type which was used in conjunction with it. Perhaps if a written title had been chosen, one based on an Italian rather than an English hand would have been more suitable. The great difference in these two treatments is that the written serves as a contrast, while the built-up harmonizes with the type on the page.]

To establish further the variance between calligraphy and lettering, a brief inspection of the methods of production may be advantageous. The designed form is conceived as a drawing--it is a device which may be finished up with any instrument at hand. The only limitation which the designer must not exceed is the recognizability of the particular letter.

The written form depends upon tradition for letter shape and upon tool for letter character. Distortion is possible and poor form not unusual, but since the pen is essentially _the_ letter-making tool, the natural action of a properly cut pen eliminates at least some of the opportunities for improbable forms.

[Illustration: These two letters, enlarged from the two renderings of "Wartime Correspondence," illustrate the control which is exerted by the cut and size and handling of a square nib upon the calligraphic form as opposed to the freedom from constraint in the built-up treatment. The tool decided the shape of the first. A careful patterning of curves and weights to conform to the type of the book page (Poliphilus) determined the second. A Soennecken steel pen was used for the written, and a pointed brush for the built-up.]

The calligraphic and the built-up approach to the execution of a book title may indicate how each may be employed frankly and honestly without recourse to camouflage to procure particular effects. The size, general weight, and disposition of the letters are indicated in the rough layout. The artist who executes the built-up rendering will keep the weight of letters _even_ by constant checking of one against the other. The calligrapher will cut a reed or pen to this weight and thus maintain even color.

It will be noted that the designed form is completely and finally established in the penciled form. The laying-out for the written form is less accurate and is the product of a double pointed tool, set to the width of the nib to be used. In any but a very tight design such as this, the pen-executed letter requires rather less preliminary penciling than is here indicated. A line for the bottom of the letters is usually sufficient.

It has been impossible to crowd all one should like to write on this subject into these few words. If, however, this first voicing of a need for a sane concept of the relations between lettering and calligraphy has even the smallest influence, the author will bear with pleasure the rightful criticism of incompleteness.

[Illustration: The width of the nib is that of the widest part of the down-stroke. Strokes 5 and 6 fill the openings thus left.]

[Illustration: Layout and demonstration of the written form (calligraphic).]

[Illustration: The center line is drawn by compass. Width of the swell is arrived at by moving the point 1/2 this width to right and left.]

[Illustration: Layout and demonstration of the designed form (lettered).]

[Illustration]ALDOUS HUXLEY[Illustration]

_Typography for the Twentieth-Century Reader_

The introduction from _Printing of Today_, an illustrated survey of post-war typography in Europe and the United States, by Oliver Simon and Julius Rodenberg. Copyright 1928 by Peter Davies, Ltd., London, and Harper and Brothers. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

In our enthusiasm for the spirit we are often unjust to the letter. Inward and outward, substance and form are not easily separated. In many circumstances of life and for the vast majority of human beings they constitute an indissoluble unity. Substance conditions form; but form no less fatally conditions substance. Indeed, the outward may actually create the inward, as when the practice of religious rites creates religious faith, or the commemoration of the dead revives, or even calls into existence, the emotions to which the ceremonial gives symbolical expression.

There are other cases, however, in which spirit seems not to be so closely dependent on letter, in which the quality of the form does not directly affect the quality of the substance. The sonnets of Shakespeare remain the sonnets of Shakespeare even in the most abominable edition. Nor can the finest printing improve their quality. The poetical substance exists independently of the visible form in which it is presented to the world. But though, in this case, the letter is powerless to make or mar the spirit which it symbolizes, it is not for that reason to be despised as mere letter, mere form, mere negligible outside. Every outside has a corresponding inwardness. The inwardness of letters does not happen to be literature; but that is not to say that they have no inwardness at all. Good printing cannot make a bad book good, nor bad printing ruin a good book. But good printing can create a valuable spiritual state in the reader, bad printing a certain spiritual discomfort. The inwardness of letters is the inwardness of any piece of visual art regarded simply as a thing of beauty. A volume of the Penny Classics may give us the sonnets of Shakespeare in their entirety; and for that we may be duly grateful. But it cannot at the same time give us a work of visual art. In a finely printed edition we have Shakespeare's sonnets _plus_ the lovely equivalent of, say a Persian rug or a piece of Chinese porcelain. The pleasure we should derive from bowl or carpet is added to that which the poetry gives us. At the same time our minds are sensitized by the contemplation of the simple visual beauty of the letters: they are made more susceptible of receiving the other and more complex beauties, all the intellectual and spiritual content, of the verse. For our sensations, our feelings and ideas do not exist independently of one another, but form, as it were, the constituent notes of what is either a discord or a harmony. The state of mind produced by the sight of beautiful letters is in harmony with that created by the reading of good literature. Their beauty can even compensate us, in some degree, for what we suffer from bad literature. They can give us intense pleasure, as I discovered in China, even when we do not understand what they signify. For what astounding elegances and subtleties of form stare out in gold or lampblack from the shop-fronts and the hanging scarlet signs of a Chinese street! What does it matter if the literary spirit expressed by these strange symbols is only "Fried Fish and Chips," or "A Five Guinea Suit for Thirty Shillings"? The letters have a value of their own apart from what they signify, a private inwardness of graphic beauty. The Chinese themselves, for whom the Fish-and-Chips significance is no secret, are the most ardent admirers of this graphic beauty. Fine writing is valued by them as highly as fine painting. The writer is an artist as much respected as the sculptor or the potter.

Writing is dead in Europe; and even when it flourished, it was never such a finely subtle art as among the Chinese. Our alphabet has only six and twenty letters, and when we write, the same forms must constantly be repeated. The result is, inevitably, a certain monotonousness in the aspect of the page--a monotonousness enhanced by the fact that the forms themselves are, fundamentally, extremely simple. In Chinese writing, on the other hand, the ideographs are numbered by thousands and have none of the rigid, geometrical simplicity that characterizes European letters. The rich flowing brushwork is built up into elaborate forms, each form the symbol of a word, distinct and different. Chinese writing is almost the artistic image of thought itself, free, various, unmonotonous. Even in the age of hand-writing, the European could never hope to create, by means of his few and simple signs, an art of calligraphy comparable to the Chinese. Printing has rendered the Chinese beauty yet more unrealizable. Where the Chinese freely painted we must be content with reproducing geometrical patterns. Pattern making is a poorer, less subtle art than painting. But it is still an art. By some one who understands his business the printed page can be composed into patterns almost as satisfyingly beautiful as those of the carpet or the brocade.

The problem which confronts the contemporary printer may be briefly stated as follows: to produce beautiful and modern print-patterns by means of labour-saving machinery. There have been numerous attempts in recent years to improve the quality of printing. But of these attempts too many have been made in the wrong spirit. Instead of trying to exploit modern machinery, many artistic printers have rejected it altogether and reverted to the primitive methods of an earlier age. Instead of trying to create new forms of type and decoration, they have imitated the styles of the past. This prejudice in favour of hand-work and ancient decorative forms was the result of an inevitable reaction against the soulless ugliness of nineteenth-century industrialism. Machines were producing beastliness. It was only natural that sensitive men should have wished to abandon the use of machines and to return to the artistic conventions in vogue before the development of machinery. It has become obvious that the machine is here to stay. Whole armies of William Morrises and Tolstoys could not now expel it. Even in primitive India it has proved itself too strong for those who would, with Gandhi, resist its encroachments. The sensible thing to do is not to revolt against the inevitable, but to use and modify it, to make it serve your purposes. Machines exist; let us then exploit them to create beauty--a modern beauty, while we are about it. For we live in the twentieth century; let us frankly admit it and not pretend that we live in the fifteenth. The work of the backward-looking hand-printers may be excellent in its way; but its way is not the contemporary way. Their books are often beautiful, but with a borrowed beauty expressive of nothing in the world in which we happen to live. They are also, as it happens, so expensive, that only the very rich can afford to buy them. The printer who makes a fetish of hand-work and medieval craftsmanship, who refuses to tolerate the machine or to make any effort to improve the quality of its output, thereby condemns the ordinary reader to a perpetuity of ugly printing. As an ordinary reader, who cannot afford to buy handmade books, I object to the archaizing printer. It is only from the man with the machine that I can hope for any amelioration of my lot as a reader.

To his credit be it spoken, the man with the machine has done his duty. He has set himself to improve the sordid typographical surroundings in which the impecunious reader was so long condemned to pass his life. He has shown that cheap books need not necessarily be ugly, and that machinery directed by a judicious mind can do as well as, or much better than, the hand of an uninspired craftsman. There are publishers in business today whose seven-and-sixpennies, regarded as typography, are worth a guinea apiece. (What they are worth as literature is another question.) There are a dozen Presses producing fine work at moderate prices. The men behind the machines have used their brains.

Some of our excellent machine-printers are still, it is true, too fond of using decorations borrowed from the past, and types that savour of another age than ours. So long as our sense of period remains as strong as it is, so long as we retain our love of the quaint and its more modern equivalent, the "amusing," this tendency to substitute pastiche for original creation is bound to persist. There is an incessant demand for the antique: we should not be too hard on the printers who supply it. If they are sinning, they are at least sinning in company. Let the architects and painters, the interior decorators, and the theatrical producers throw the first stone. There are pastichers among the printers, just as there are pastichers among the professors of every art. But there are also more original men, who are prepared to encourage modern decorators and to use types that are elegant and striking without being affectedly archaic.

With this last phrase I may seem to be damning the moderns with the faintest of praise. But the truth is that Typography is an art in which violent revolutions can scarcely, in the nature of things, hope to be successful. A type of revolutionary novelty may be extremely beautiful in itself; but, for the creatures of habit that we are, its very novelty tends to make it illegible, at any rate to begin with. I know a rather eccentric German typographical reformer, for whom legibility is the greatest enemy, the infamous thing that must at all costs be crushed. We read, he argues, too easily. Our eyes slide over the words, and the words, in consequence, mean nothing to us. An illegible type makes us take trouble. It compels us to dwell on each separate word: we have time, while we are deciphering it, to suck out its whole significance. Putting his theory into practice, this reformer had designed a set of letters so strangely unlike those with which the typographical practice of generations has made us familiar, that I had to pore over a simple English sentence as though it were Russian or Arabic. My friend was perhaps justified in thinking that we read too much and too easily. But his remedy, it seems to me, was the wrong one. It is the author's business to make reading less facile, not the printer's. If the author concentrated more matter into the same number of sentences, his readers would have to read more carefully than they do at present. An illegible type cannot permanently achieve the same result, for the simple reason that it does not permanently remain illegible. If we are prepared to make the effort to read until the novel forms have become familiar, the illegible type will come to be perfectly legible. In practice, however, we are reluctant to make this effort. We demand that typographical beauty shall be combined with immediate legibility. Now, in order that it may be immediately legible, a type must be similar to the types with which we are familiar. Hence, the practical printer, who has to live by selling his wares to a large public, is debarred from making revolutionary innovations in the designs of his type. He must content himself with refining on the ordinary, accepted types of commerce. If he has great typographical reforms in view, he must proceed towards them by degrees, modifying the currently accepted designs gradually, so as not to repel the ordinary lazy reader, who is frightened by the idea of making any unnecessary effort. In other arts, where form and substance are directly associated, revolution is possible, may even be necessary. But the outward form of literature is not typography. The association, in a book, of literature with one of the graphic arts is in the nature of an accident. The printer who would at one stroke revolutionize his art frightens away readers, for whom the idea of revolution in literature, or in any one of the graphic arts that is independent of literature, has no terrors. The reason for this is obvious. People buy books for the sake of the literature contained in them and not, primarily, as specimens of graphic art. They demand of the typography that it shall be beautiful, yes; but also that it shall give them immediate and unhampered access to the literature with which it is associated. Printers may desire to be revolutionary; but unless they can afford to sell no books, they are compelled by the force of circumstances to adopt a cautious policy of gradual reform. The Communist must either turn Liberal or retire from business.

MERLE ARMITAGE

NOTES ON MODERN PRINTING

From Notes on Modern Printing by Merle Armitage. Copyright 1945 by William E. Rudge's Sons. Reprinted by permission of author and publisher.

HOW DOES ONE DESIGN A BOOK? I CONCLUDE AS I BEGAN WITH A FEW GENERAL IDEAS AND SUGGESTIONS:

1. Allow the subject of a book to determine its design and format.

2. Design a book for effortless reading, utilizing the format to enhance or interpret the text.

3. Use the prime materials--type, paper and space--to achieve your results. Meaningless decorations disclose the designer's poverty of invention.

4. Simplicity is the best policy.

5. Make no attempt to design every page ... let type and space have their natural rhythm.

6. Understand the text ... know your primary aims ... let form follow function.

7. Type ornaments have their place ... but an ornament designed for general use has no particular significance.

8. A brilliantly designed book can't save a dull or mediocre text.

9. A page of type can be a thing of unique, arresting beauty.

10. Mere type legibility is to a book as mere shelter is to architecture.

11. Book design should be a synonym for the arrangement and integration of materials--paper, binding, illustration, type and space.

My friends of the musical world believe that music is the most important thing in life. Painters are absolutely certain that the reformation will come only through an understanding of art. Acquaintances among the engineers are sure that by technological development alone can emancipation come to man, while scientists rightfully take the credit for progress in the contemporary world. Friends in industry insist that mass production is the great panacea. The photographers can prove that photography makes the pictorial painters unnecessary, and the writers I have encountered are convinced that the written word is the one route to world unity.

However, the painter ... the musician ... the engineer ... the photographer ... the industrialist ... the scientist ... and the writer have a rendezvous with the book. Here, the knowledge, the romance, the fiction, the facts, the speculations, the opinions, and the accomplishments of the world are made permanently articulate.

This is our day, our time, our environment. We can make a statement, through the employment of design, that is valid and true ... not divorced from tradition, but using the great works of the past as a springboard toward new horizons!

COMPOSED IN GILL SANS TYPES

Benjamin Franklin: PRINTER and PUBLISHER

JOHN T. WINTERICH

From _Early American Books and Printing_ by John T. Winterich. Copyright 1935 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd., agent.

Josiah Franklin was reared a dyer in the village of Ecton in Northamptonshire, but soon after his arrival in America, about 1682, he foresaw a greater future in the trade of tallow-chandler and soap-boiler. It was a calling which seems humble enough in a day that has evolved such mouth-filling occupational designations as sales engineer, merchandising counsel, and mortician. Josiah Franklin, had the locution been available in his era, might have asserted with all accuracy that he was an important factor in public utilities--even our own catch-phrase epoch has not been quite equal to the coinage of the label "public utilitarian." For when the Boston town watch wanted fresh candles they bought them from Josiah Franklin--from other tallow-chandlers too, perhaps, but at least some, by documentary evidence, from Josiah Franklin.

The close relationship between progress in the science of artificial illumination and progress in the dissemination of the printed word could be charted with almost mathematical accuracy.... Most of the books of colonial days were designed for the use of those whose professions exacted some considerable amount of "required reading"--ministers, physicians, lawyers, public officials, schoolmen. The man who toiled with his hands (and hands are eminently useful in the building-up of a new country) labored while the light of heaven would let him and then returned to a home wherein the conveniences were hardly such as to make reading a pleasure. Lincoln studied by the glare of blazing pine-knots, but the middle-class Bostonian and New Yorker and Philadelphian of the generations immediately preceding Lincoln (to say nothing of their country cousins) had to depend on illuminants that offered no greater inducements to either the solace or the benefits of type.

Josiah Franklin's wife and their three children accompanied him to America. Before her death she bore him three more children. Josiah remarried, and of the second union ten children were born. Of this multitudinous offspring thirteen grew to maturity--a remarkable proportion for the time and region. The eighth child and last son of the second marriage, christened Benjamin after a paternal uncle, was at first intended for the Church, but Josiah could not afford to give him the education which this most learned of the professions demanded, and at the age of ten, after receiving as thorough an intellectual rearing as could be expected in so short a space, Benjamin Franklin quit school to assist his father in the fabrication of candles and soap. An elder brother, John, had already become proficient in the twin arts of illumination and sanitation and had gone to the bustling colony of Rhode Island to practice them. Another brother (and another Josiah) had also investigated them, found them not to his liking, and run away to sea.

Benjamin, also, made it clear that the parental pursuits were not to taste, and a wise father, fearing another abrupt departure, took Benjamin walking about Boston, that he might "see joiners, bricklayers, turners, braziers, etc., at their work" and thereby, boywise, make known to his elder which way his inclinations lay. A patent leaning toward books at length persuaded the father to make him a printer, despite the fact that another brother, James, Benjamin's elder by nine years ... had adopted the craft. Benjamin conceded a preference to the claims of printing over those of tallow-chandlery, but he still sniffed, with the true landsman's appetite, the tang of the salt breeze that blew in from the east. Josiah, however, was insistent, and the parental insistence of 1718 was no toy scepter to swing above the head of a sub-adolescent boy. Accordingly, Benjamin was duly indentured to James "to serve as an apprentice till I was twenty-one years of age, only I was to be allowed journeyman's wages during the last year."

Before long, Benjamin was writing odds and ends of verse, and James, with the inbred Franklin sagacity, encouraged him in his endeavors and let him put some of his compositions in type.

One (declared Benjamin) was called _The Lighthouse Tragedy_, and contained an account of the drowning of Captain Worthilake, with his two daughters: the other was a sailor's song, on the taking of Teach (or Blackbeard) the pirate. They were wretched stuff, in the Grub-street-ballad style; and when they were printed he sent me about the town to sell them. The first sold wonderfully, the event being recent, having made a great noise. This flattered my vanity; but my father discouraged me by ridiculing my performances, and telling me verse-makers were generally beggars.

The importance of these two pieces consists in the fact that they were "the first with which Franklin's name can be identified as either author or printer," according to Dr. William J. Campbell, who adds that "no copy is known to exist, nor is the exact title of either of them known." This was true in 1918, when Dr. Campbell's admirable catalogue of _The Collection of Franklin Imprints in the Museum of the Curtis Publishing Company_ was issued, and it is unfortunately still true today [1935]. If they were at all like similar productions of both earlier and later date, they were broadsides--single sheets that were distributed like handbills, the main difference being that they commanded a price. They would command a fantastic price today, together or singly, and their eventual discovery is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility. A copy of one--or copies of both--may be tucked away in some forgotten contemporary theological compendium which has not been opened for a century.

The disappearance of these broadsides is regrettable on many counts, not least of which is the fact that even if Benjamin had never accomplished anything else, he could at least claim credit for sponsoring perhaps the most textually interesting productions of his brother's press. James Franklin was a skilled printer--London trained, and "no slovenly self-taught colonial," in Paul Leicester Ford's phrase--and James was not, of course, in any degree responsible for the dullness of the copy that was brought to his shop. A brief glance at a few of his imprints of this period is of interest mainly because of the certainty that Benjamin worked on many of them.

The product of James Franklin's press (says Ford in _The Many-Sided Franklin_, New York, 1899) is a dreary lot of "gone-nothing-ness." A few of the New England sermons of the day; Stoddard's _Treatise on Conversion_; Stone's _Short Catechism_; _A Prefatory Letter about Psalmody_, in defense of church singing, which many Puritans still held to be unholy; an allegory styled _The Isle of Man, or, Legal Proceedings in Manshire Against Sin_; Care's _English Liberties_; sundry pamphlets on the local politics of the moment, such as _A Letter from One in the Country to his Friend in Boston_, _News from the Moon_, _A Friendly Check from a Kind Relation to the Chief Cannonneer_, and _A Word of Comfort to a Melancholy Country_; two or three tractates on inoculation, and one aimed half at the Boston clergy and half at the fair sex, entitled _Hooped Petticoats Arraigned by the Light of Nature and the Law of God_, were the chief output of the new printer during the years his brother served him.

In the summer of 1721, James Franklin established a newspaper, _The New England Courant_. Two years earlier he had been engaged to print the _Boston Gazette_, but with the transfer of its management a few months later the contract had gone elsewhere. The _Courant_ was a new departure even for the novelty that was American journalism--so extensive and violent a departure, indeed, that in the following year the authorities sentenced the printer-proprietor to a month's imprisonment for his insolence. The punishment did not improve him; free again, he pressed the thorn of the _Courant_ deeper into the flesh of his persecutors, with the consequence that he was soon forbidden "to print or publish" either the _Courant_ "or any other pamphlet or paper of the like nature" unless it were first submitted to the secretary of the province.

There were two apparent ways out of the dilemma, and one was as eminently unsatisfactory as the other. The first was to quit printing and publishing. The second was to submit to the censorship. James hit upon a more ingenious solution. He turned the _Courant_ over to sixteen-year-old Benjamin. Benjamin's indentures as apprentice to James had five years to run, and in order to forestall any objection on the part of the authorities that an apprentice was not competent to manage the paper, the indentures were ostentatiously canceled and a new document drawn up as a private and confidential (but none the less binding) memorandum which in theory was no one's affair save James's and Benjamin's. The half-sheet issue of the _Courant_ for February 4-11, 1723, identified it as "printed and sold by Benjamin Franklin in Queen Street, where Advertisements are taken in." Benjamin Franklin's name thus first appeared in an imprint. It remained on the tail-board of the _Courant_ until the paper's discontinuance in 1726, long after Benjamin had left Boston.

The gratifying tableau of two stalwart brothers battling loyally side by side for freedom of the press, however, was not the whole picture. James and Benjamin had differences, and Benjamin later admitted that he himself was "perhaps ... too saucy and provoking," and that James, despite "the blows his passion too often urged him to bestow upon me," was "otherwise not an ill-natur'd man." Benjamin, at all events, decided to take advantage of the freedom accorded him by the cancellation of his indentures, which act he later conceded to have been "not fair" and "one of the first errata of my life." James spread the tidings of this perfidy throughout Boston, and every local printing establishment thereupon became a closed shop to Benjamin Franklin.

If James assumed that Benjamin would thus be forced to return to his own shop, he reckoned without his Benjamin. For not long thereafter, with the connivance of a friend, John Collins, Benjamin was smuggled aboard a New York-bound sloop, and three days later, thanks to a fair wind, he was in a city which was not yet a metropolis judged even by easy colonial standards. He called on "old Mr. William Bradford" (aged sixty), who had nothing to offer, but who suggested that his son Andrew, then flourishing (after a fashion) in Philadelphia, might have a position for him, since Andrew's "principal hand," Aquila Rose, had just died.

Franklin set out by water by way of Perth Amboy. It is interesting to note, in view of the dispute regarding the earliest New Jersey imprint ... that the trip from New York to the New Jersey port took thirty hours. All in good time he reached Philadelphia.

Washington did not cut down a cherry tree and then inform his father that he could not tell a lie; Wellington did not say "Up, Guards, and at 'em!" or Pershing, "Lafayette, we are here." The dear old legends explode all about us; it is gratifying to recall that there is one at least the accuracy of which is unimpeachable. Walking up Market Street, Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin did pass the home of his wife-to-be with a roll under each arm and munching a third, and his wife-to-be did see him and note that he made "a most awkward, ridiculous appearance."

Andrew Bradford had nothing to offer--the vacancy left by the death of Aquila Rose had already been filled. But Franklin was not yet done with the ghostly trail of Aquila. At Andrew Bradford's suggestion he waited on Samuel Keimer, who had recently set up as a printer despite a meager endowment of equipment, native ability, or acquired skill. He found Keimer "composing an Elegy on Aquila Rose" directly from the type.

So there being no copy (recorded Franklin), but one pair of cases, and the Elegy likely to require all the letters, no one could help him. I endeavor'd to put his press (which he had not yet us'd, and of which he understood nothing) into order fit to be work'd with; and, promising to come and print off his Elegy as soon as he should have got it ready, I return'd to Bradford's, who gave me a little job to do for the present, and there I lodged and dieted. A few days after, Keimer sent for me to print off the Elegy. And now he had got another pair of cases, and a pamphlet to reprint, on which he set me to work.

This broadside poem, therefore, was the first piece of Philadelphia printing with which Franklin's name is clearly identified. The "pamphlet to reprint" may have been _A Letter to a Friend in Ireland_, _The Doctrine of Absolute Reprobation Refuted_, _A Letter from One in the Country to His Friend in the City_, _A Parable_, or (and this would certainly have been Franklin's choice) _The Curiosities of Common Water_, all of which Keimer imprints of 1723 are listed in the short-title check list which follows the Curtis catalogue. No more specifically is it possible to identify the "little job" which Andrew Bradford gave him.

It is not likely that Franklin would have long continued with Keimer (who was "an odd fish; ignorant of common life, fond of rudely opposing receiv'd opinions, slovenly to extream dirtiness, enthusiastic in some points of religion, and a little knavish withal") even if a roundabout coincidence had not brought him to the attention o£ the governor of the province, Sir William Keith, whose quarrel with William Bradford had been one of the impulses that had established the latter as New York's first printer. Keimer "star'd like a pig poison'd" one day when no less a worthy than Sir William entered the shop in search of the new assistant from Boston. Governor and assistant adjourned to a tavern, where the former disclosed a grandiose idea for setting the newcomer up in a shop of his own. He must first, of course, go to London to buy equipment, and to this end the governor loaded him down with enthusiasm and letters of credit. After a short visit to Boston, where all "made me welcome, except my brother," who "receiv'd me not very frankly, look'd me all over, and turn'd to his work again", Franklin sailed for London, which he reached the day before Christmas, 1724--to learn, to his intense mortification, that Sir William's letters of credit were worthless, since that gentleman's prowess as a promiser and his shortcomings as a performer were rather more familiar in the old country than in the new.

Franklin, however, had little difficulty in extricating himself from the crisis into which he was precipitated on his arrival in London by the non-negotiability of Sir William Keith's commercial paper. "I immediately got into work at Palmer's," he says, "then a famous printing house in Bartholomew Close, and here I continu'd near a year." Samuel Palmer, declares John Clyde Oswald in _Benjamin Franklin, Printer_ (New York, 1917), "was more than an ordinary printer. He had visited America, was letter-founder as well as printer, and was engaged in the writing of 'A History of Printing,' only a third of which he had completed when he died in 1732."

Franklin identifies only one of the jobs on which he worked at Palmer's. "I was employed," continues the _Autobiography_, "in composing for the second edition of Wollaston's _Religion of Nature_." The name of William Wollaston (1659-1724) now survives mainly by virtue of this adventitious association with a nineteen-year-old immigrant compositor. _The Religion of Nature Delineated_ first appeared in 1722 in a small privately printed edition. Presumably this first edition is now rare, but no collector is impressed thereby, preferring above it that on which Franklin worked (the third in strict sequence, but the second published edition), which, happily, is relatively common. It bears the imprint: "London: Printed by S. Palmer, and sold by B. Lintott, W. and J. Innys, J. Osborn, J. Batley, and T. Longman. 1725." The printer from America pondered over the copy as he set it, and out of his ruminations came a pamphlet reply to the recently deceased author: _A Dissertation on Liberty And Necessity, Pleasure and Pain_ (London, 1725). Franklin printed one hundred copies, gave a few to friends, and then, repenting of his materialistic agnosticism, "burnt the rest except one copy"; pride of authorship would not wholly down. That copy may be one of the four known to survive today, all in institutional collections.

Receiving a better offer from John Watts, who conducted a larger printing establishment, Franklin went thither, remaining six months, when he accepted the proposal of a Philadelphia merchant then in London that he return and act "as his clerk, keep his books, in which he would instruct me, copy his letters, and attend the store." In leaving London, therefore, Franklin supposed that he thereby "took leave of printing forever."

Man proposes. Franklin and his new employer reached Philadelphia; the store was duly opened and its new clerk installed; four months later the employer died. The establishment was taken over by the executors and Franklin was out of work. Keimer wanted him back as foreman of his new and larger shop, but Franklin, who knew well his Keimer, first sought a place at his new trade of clerk and salesman. Nothing offered, so he reluctantly accepted Keimer's bid. The affiliation did not last long. Franklin and Keimer quarreled over "a trifle" that represented the culmination of a long series of abuses:

A great noise happening near the courthouse, I put my head out of the window to see what was the matter. Keimer, being in the street, look'd up and saw me, call'd out to me in a loud voice and angry tone to mind my business, adding some reproachful words, that nettled me the more for their publicity, all the neighbors who were looking out on the same occasion, being witness how I was treated. He came up immediately into the printing-house, continu'd the quarrel, high words pass'd on both sides, he gave me the quarter's warning we had stipulated, expressing a wish that he had not been oblig'd to so long a warning. I told him that his wish was unnecessary, for I would leave him that instant; and so, taking my hat, walk'd out of doors.

Had affairs not fallen out thus ludicrously, then some other incident would have "snapt our connections." If no "great noise" had occurred near the courthouse (what, one wonders, was the cause of the disturbance?), there would still have been a subsequent great noise in Keimer's shop, and the hireling would have spoken his piece to the overlord and walked out of the identical door to the fulfillment of his high destiny.

Franklin was of more than half a mind to return to Boston, in which event Philadelphia would one day have been compelled to seek another patron saint. Fortunately for Philadelphia, while working at Keimer's, Franklin had struck up a friendship with Hugh Meredith, a fellow craftsman, who suggested a partnership. A secret agreement was drawn up, and pending the completion of arrangements for launching the venture, Franklin sought temporary work at Bradford's. Keimer meanwhile was negotiating with the provincial government of New Jersey for the printing of an issue of paper money at Burlington, and urged Franklin to accompany him if he was awarded the job. The plan went through, and the pair were in Burlington three months. "There is not a single piece of this paper money known to exist today," says Dr. Campbell, "and of the New Jersey Laws that they printed at the same time there are only two known copies...."

In the summer of 1728 the new firm of B. Franklin and H. Meredith came into existence. They had scarce "opened our letters" (their cases, that is, not the morning mail) when a friend "brought a countryman to us, whom he had met in the street inquiring for a printer." The identity of this bucolic, casual, but superlatively important patron of the typographic arts is unknown and probably forever unknowable, for he could hardly have been aware that he was the instrument of Providence chosen to motivate the first imprint issued by Franklin as a master printer. Dr. Campbell surmised the job was "probably stationery or a small handbill." Whatever it was, it has probably vanished beyond hope of recall, or at least beyond hope of positive identification.

Almost on the heels of this first customer came another--none other than Samuel Keimer, whose general ineffectualness and chronic state of panic provide much of the comic relief in the history of early American printing. Keimer had been working off and on for three years on William Sewell's _History of the Rise, Increase, and Progress of the Christian People Called Quakers: The Third Edition, Corrected_. The end was not in sight, and Keimer, evidently in a condition of acute mental distress, rushed to the new shop for assistance. Franklin and Meredith composed and printed "forty sheets," totaling nearly a third of the seven hundred pages--the first known job to issue from their shop, even though it did not bear their imprint. Sewell's _History_ is doubly a Franklin item, as Franklin must have worked on the book while he was still in Keimer's employ.

Thanks to the diligence of its proprietors--or of one of them, for Meredith "was often seen drunk in the streets, and playing at low games in alehouses"--the new shop prospered. But about the middle of 1730 it encountered a hazard which its sponsors had not foreseen. Meredith's father had advanced one hundred pounds to put the enterprise on its feet and had promised another hundred. When the time came for him to meet his obligation, he could not, and "the New Printing-Office near the Market" was faced with a creditor's suit. This crisis confirmed young Meredith's conviction that he was not cut out for the printing business; moreover, he was anxious to join a company of fellow Welshmen who were planning a settlement in North Carolina. Two of Franklin's friends offered to come to the aid of the senior partner, and the difficulty was amicably adjusted. Thus was the "B. Franklin" imprint born. It appeared for the first time not on anything in English, but at the bottom of the title-page of _Mystische und Sehr Geheyme Sprueche_, by Conrad Beissel, whose religio-communistic Ephrata colony, itself to become one day an important printing center, had been organized only a few years before.

Shortly before the dissolution of the firm of Franklin and Meredith there had been another odd run-in with Keimer. Franklin was already planning a newspaper, and "foolishly" imparted the secret to a friend who forthwith made it known to Keimer. Toward the end of 1728 the not-to-be-anticipated Keimer issued the first number of _The Universal Instructor in all Arts and Sciences: and Pennsylvania Gazette_. It was Keimer's inescapable genius to start what he could not finish, and he was soon glad to dispose of the paper to Franklin and Meredith, whose control dates from October 2, 1729. One of Franklin's first acts as a newspaper publisher--his memory must have harked back to the old Boston days--was to shorten the too comprehensive title to _The Pennsylvania Gazette_.

Probably some three months after the departure of Meredith, Franklin initiated a new partnership. He married. "Partnership" is no romantic figure of speech. The name of Deborah Read has an honored place on the roster of women who helped to make American printing. By her husband's own testimony, her share in the work of the establishment included, in some measure, the "folding and stitching" of pamphlets, and it is not unlikely that her hands had a busy share in the preparation of some of the series of pamphlets with which, more than with any other, Franklin's name is most clearly associated as author-printer-publisher--the _Poor Richard_ almanacs.

The importance of the almanac in the colonial scheme has already been stressed. Franklin was naturally alert to this importance; in fact, as soon as the house of Franklin and Meredith was in existence he had commissioned Thomas Godfrey to compile an almanac. Godfrey was "a self-taught mathematician, great in his way," but "he knew little out of his way," and there was considerable of the prima donna in his make-up. He prepared almanacs for 1730, 1731, and 1732, and then, in an outburst of temperament, transferred his skill to the shelter of Andrew Bradford. The fortunate result, certainly not anticipated by Thomas Godfrey in his dudgeon, was, as Paul Leicester Ford defines it, the birth of American humor. Franklin initiated the _Poor Richard_ series, compiling the bulk of the contents himself, but attributing their authorship to Richard Saunder or Saunders, whose almanacs had enjoyed enormous popularity in England and were still enjoying it, though Saunders had been gone this many a year. A _Poor Robin_ series of almanacs was also popular in England, and James Franklin a few years earlier had begun a series of Rhode Island almanacs under this title. _Poor Richard_ was an immediate success, and though the first number was not advertised in _The Pennsylvania Gazette_ until December 19, 1732, which was rather late in the year for a new almanac, three printings were necessary to supply the demand. _Poor Richard_ thereafter issued regularly every December under Franklin's own editorship until 1757 (for 1758).

_Poor Richard's_ rich wisdom has become part of common speech wherever English or any other language is spoken. Everyone from China to Peru knows that God helps those that help themselves, that three removes are as bad as a fire, that

_Vessels large may venture more, But little boats should keep near shore._

A recent commentator--Carl L. Becker in the _Dictionary of American Biography_--says of the _Poor Richard_ almanacs:

Nothing better exhibits the man, or better illustrates his ingenuity as an advertiser.... "Richard Saunders," the Philomath of the _Almanack_, was the Sir Roger de Coverley of the masses, pilfering the world's store of aphorisms, and adapting them to the circumstances and the understanding of the poor. "Necessity never made a good bargain." "It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright." "Many dishes make diseases." "The used key is always bright." The _Almanack_ was immediately successful and commonly sold about ten thousand copies. "As Poor Richard says" became a current phrase, used to give weight to any counsel of thrift. The work made Franklin's name a household word throughout the colonies.... The introduction to the last _Almanack_ (Father Abraham's speech at the auction) spread the fame of Poor Richard in Europe. It was printed in broadsides and posted on walls in England, and, in translation, distributed by the French clergy among their parishioners. It has been translated into fifteen languages, and reprinted at least four hundred times.

Franklin's rise to the position of the most important printer in the colonies after the well-entrenched Bradfords was now rapid. Before long he was official printer to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. Of the bulk of his non-governmental productions, Ford writes that while generally "of little moment," still "there can be no doubt that as a whole they contain more of genuine merit than those of any other printer of the same or previous periods in the colonies, the amount of doctrinal and polemical theology being a minimum, and bearing a less proportion to the whole mass than can be found in the books of contemporary American printers." In 1735 appeared over Franklin's imprint James Logan's _Cato's Moral Distichs Englished in Couplets_. Nine years later Franklin sponsored Samuel Richardson's _Pamela_--not only the first American edition, but the first novel to be printed in America, "Price 6 s." In the same year, 1744, he issued what is generally regarded as the typographical masterpiece of his press, _M. T. Cicero's Cato Major, or His Discourse of Old-Age: With Explanatory Notes_ (also Englished by James Logan), referring to it in a four-page foreword of his own composition as "this first Translation of a Classic in this Western World." This was a wide error, for George Sandys had translated Ovid on the banks of the James River a life-span earlier, and the translation had been printed in London in 1626; moreover, Franklin forgot those _Moral Distichs_ of Cato and James Logan which he himself had issued in 1735.

In 1748, Franklin formed a partnership with an alert young Scotchman whom he had engaged five years before, and the "Franklin and Hall" imprint thereupon replaced (with a few exceptions) the familiar "B. Franklin." A few earlier connections must be mentioned. Franklin's name is found on several German titles in combination with that of Gotthard Armbruester and with that of Johannes Böhm, and, apparently once only, with that of Johannes Wüster, but these seem to have been purely partnerships of convenience, and suggest no such dual affiliations as those with Meredith and Hall. The Hall partnership lasted eighteen years, and during that period Franklin's connection with printing and publishing became less and less important as the crisis in international affairs that was bringing on the American Revolution grew more and more acute. But the printer in him could not wholly be suppressed. When he went to Paris in 1776 as representative of the colonies, he established a little press for his own amusement at his home in Passy, then a suburb, now as much a part of the metropolis as Greenwich Village is of New York. It was not quite such a toy as Robert Louis Stevenson and his stepson Lloyd Osbourne were one day to set up in Switzerland, the main difference being that the Stevenson-Osbourne combination knew nothing about printing and was joyously aware of it, whereas Franklin, with just as joyous awareness, knew as much about it as any man of his time. One factor the two private presses of Passy and Davos-Platz have in common--their productions are excessively rare and costly collector's playthings. The story of the French venture is authoritatively set forth in Luther S. Livingston's _Franklin and His Press at Passy_, issued by the Grolier Club of New York in 1914. Livingston listed thirty-two entries, and since his monograph was published six others have come to light, according to Will Ransom's _Private Presses and Their Books_ (New York, 1929).

The output of Franklin's press from 1729 to the termination of the Hall partnership (1766) is statistically impressive. The following summary is tabulated from the short-title check list of all Franklin imprints known in 1918 which Dr. Campbell appended to the Curtis catalogue (excluding _The Pennsylvania Gazette_ and the numerous issues of paper currency printed by Franklin from 1731 to 1764):

1729 8 1748 30 1730 15 1749 33 1731 8 1750 19 1732 15 1751 24 1733 14 1752 18 1734 15 1753 16 1735 20 1754 15 1736 8 1755 27 1737 13 1756 26 1738 9 1757 31 1739 12 1758 13 1740 46 1759 16 1741 45 1760 10 1742 31 1761 12 1743 25 1762 8 1744 25 1763 15 1745 15 1764 18 1746 23 1765 19 1747 27 1766 4

Any book, pamphlet, broadside, or periodical that bears a Franklin imprint, alone or in combination, is worth treasuring on that account alone. In general, the scale of desirability is set by scarcity, this scale one might suppose, should follow the line of chronology with reasonable accuracy, but it happens that it does not. The Sewell _History_, for instance, ought by chronological measurement to be an excessively rare book as the first book on which Franklin worked as an independent printer, and rare it assuredly is, but by no means to the point of utter elusiveness.

Twelve years later the total of Franklin imprints was moving toward two hundred--and in that twelfth year, 1740, there issued from his press the second edition of David Evan's _A Short, Plain Help for Parents and Heads of Families, to Feed Their Babes with the Sincere Milk of God's Word. Being a Short, Plain Catechism, Grounded Upon God's Word, and Agreeable to the Westminster Assembly's Excellent Catechism._ No copy of the first edition is known to be extant--Dr. Campbell quoted the title imperfectly from a contemporary advertisement--and neither Hildeburn nor Campbell knew that a second edition had ever been issued. Neither did anyone else until 1929, when a copy came to light and won its way to a New York book-seller's catalogue. The book is mentioned here, not because it possesses great intrinsic importance (it would be of trivial note if a hundred or two copies of it survived), but as an indication of the fact that unrecorded Franklin imprints are likely to appear at any time, and as indication, further, that the scarcity of Franklin imprints does not altogether parallel the dates of his

## activity as printer and publisher.

In these notes it has been necessary to neglect Franklin, the author (save as Poor Richard), in favor of Franklin, the printer and publisher. But it would be an effrontery to allude even briefly to Franklin without mention of the _Autobiography_. Begun in 1771 in the quiet charm of an English country-seat, the first great American classic never was completed. The manuscript first appeared in print, by an odd series of accidents, in French in 1791. Subsequently Franklin's grandson, William Temple Franklin, issued it in a Bowdlerized English version that would have afforded the old man quiet and somewhat indignant laughter. The text was not definitely published until 1868, soon after John Bigelow had come into possession of the original manuscript.

Franklin's epitaph is easily the most familiar in American history, and almost as well-known a document, perhaps, as Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. It is not generally known, however, that the original version of it was composed in 1728, the very year in which its author, a youth of twenty-two, entered into partnership with Meredith. The version written in that year, which differs in minor details from the final draft, was this:

THE BODY OF B FRANKLIN PRINTER, (LIKE THE COVER OF AN OLD BOOK ITS CONTENTS TORN OUT AND STRIPT OF ITS LETTERING & GILDING) LIES HERE, FOOD FOR WORMS. BUT THE WORK SHALL NOT BE LOST; FOR IT WILL, (AS HE BELIEV'D) APPEAR ONCE MORE, IN A NEW AND MORE ELEGANT EDITION REVISED AND CORRECTED, BY THE AUTHOR.

_Note_: A documented account of the various transcripts of Franklin's celebrated epitaph appeared in _The New Colophon_, Volume 3, New York, 1950. It discusses the date of its composition, place of first publication and the differing texts, and was written by Lyman H. Butterfield, associate editor of the Jefferson papers.

COMPOSED IN BASKERVILLE TYPES

[Illustration]EARNEST ELMO CALKINS[Illustration]

_The Book & Job Print_

From _The Colophon_, New Graphic Series No. 1. Copyright 1939 by the publisher. Reprinted by permission of the author and Mr. Elmer Adler.

I

The printing office was a long narrow room over a store. One front window was appropriated to a cubicle known as "the office"--seldom used, its desk piled high with galley proofs and dusty government reports. Frames for type cases occupied the two remaining front windows and the three at the back. In between were the hand-power cylinder press, the two Gordon jobbers, an imposing stone for the newspaper and one for job work. Along the walls ran the dump--sloping shelves divided longitudinally by strips of wood, holding galleys and standing jobs tied up with white packthread. The prevalent odor was a mixture of benzine and warm roller composition familiar to old-time printers, but sweeter than the scents of Araby to the young apprentice about to be initiated into the craft and mystery of printing.

They seated him on a high stool before a case in the darker part of the room, with a composing stick, a setting rule, and a piece of patent medicine reprint. A slug on a string hung on his upper case to hold the copy in place, for the oldest rule of the printing trade is "follow copy though it goes out the window." In each corner of the lower case boxes Big Sweeny, the foreman, had stuck letters from a job font to guide the youngster in learning the case.

For days the tyro was absorbed in the seemingly impossible task of setting a stick full of type and "dumping" it on the galley. The first lot exploded in the air; it took hours to distribute the "pi."

In a few weeks he had learned his case, except the small boxes around the edge, double ffls and ffis and little-used punctuation points. He could distinguish a 3-em space from a 5-em, and justify a line by distributing them judiciously, remembering, as was often impressed on him, to put more space between words ending in tall letters. He began to look about him and take stock of the curious world in which he found himself.

For years he had dreamed of printing, his appetite whetted by the life of Franklin in the Harper Story Books, and a manual of instructions for young printers in the same volume. He pored over type specimen books obtained from Barnhart Brothers & Spindler, and reveled in the amazing faces shown. Other boys had their ambitions--firemen, policemen, railroad engineer--but his hero was the journeyman printer, a green shade over his eyes, sleeves rolled to display a bright red undershirt, spitting tobacco with an accuracy that missed nothing but the spittoon. Tales told by typographical tourists, the tramp printers, were his folklore, and for some years after he learned his trade his chance to work came mostly in "subbing" for printers frankly laying off to get drunk.

Type had two names. He was setting brevier Roman; the smaller size used for quotations and for county correspondence was nonpareil. Other sizes with equally picturesque names piqued his curiosity. In the early eighties the point system had not reached the prairies. Later he became familiar with it. The old names of the types with approximate sizes in points that prevailed in the days of our young apprentice were as follows:

Diamond, 4-1/2-point; Pearl, 5-point; Agate, 5-1/2-point; Nonpareil, 6-point; Minion, 7-point; Brevier, 8-point; Bourgeois, 9-point; Long Primer, 10-point; Small Pica, 11-point; Pica, 12-point; English, 14-point; Columbian, 16-point; Great Primer, 18-point; Paragon, 20-point; Double Pica (strictly this should be Double Small Pica), 22-point; Two-line Pica, 24-point; Two-line English, 28-point; Two-line Great Primer, 36-point; Two-line Double Pica, 44-point; Canon, 48-point.

It must not be supposed that all these sizes were found in the office of the Book & Job Print, nor for that matter probably anywhere but in the warehouses of Barnhart Bros. & Spindler, Marder, Luse & Co., MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan Co., Bruce, or other type-founders.

Our apprentice was afflicted with one of those curious prying minds that sought to know the reason for all things. Much typographical history lurked behind the names given to type sizes. _Diamond_, _agate_ and _nonpareil_, it seemed, were merely fancy names, but _brevier_ was so-called because it had been used to print breviaries; _canon_, from the first lines of the canonical mass, and _primer_ for primaries or elementary prayer books. _Bourgeois_ has been attributed to the city of Bourges, to a printer named Bourgeois, and to having been used in cheap books for the middle classes, the bourgeoisie. _Minion_ was said to be the French word _mignon_, darling. But the origin of _pica_, so constantly used as a yardstick for measuring leads, slugs, reglets, and the width of columns and pages, is as fascinating as it is baffling.

_Pica_ is Latin for magpie, and it has been ingeniously supposed that some work now lost, an account of that thievish and mischievous bird, was printed in type now bearing that name. De Vinne[38] cites a far more amusing derivation: "Like great primer, pica takes its name from its early use as a text letter. 'The Pie,' writes Mores, 'was a table showing the course of the service of the church in the time of darkness. It was called the Pie because it was written in letters of black and red, as the Friars de Pica were so named from their party-colored raiment black and white, the plumage of the magpie.'" And is it not at least probable that "pi," a jumble of unsorted type, is also derived from the same source, either because of the pied feathers of the bird, or from its habit of assembling a miscellaneous collection of objects in some hiding place?

As he explored his upper case, our apprentice discovered that while the capitals and small capitals were ranged in alphabetical order, _J_ and _U_ were left to the end like substitute ball players on the bench. By studying an unabridged dictionary he learned that those letters were late comers into the alphabet; the old scribes, finding that _I_ tended to become confused with the last stroke of the previous letter, gave it a tail to distinguish it. The two forms were used indiscriminately for the consonant and vowel sounds of _I_ until in due course they were separated. In the same way _V_ was half of _W_, distinguished as singleyou and doubleyou. _V_ was carelessly written as _U_ and even as _Y_, and had all the sounds, but was at length assigned one job, and the _U_ added to the alphabet. How long ago that happened! So conservative was the printing art that even after two hundred years the case had not been shifted to accommodate them, and dictionaries as late as 1800 still used both forms in the same classification. Our apprentice felt that the office where he was learning his trade had not changed greatly, typographically at least, since Plantin.

II

The number and variety of faces at the disposal of the master printer equalled their ugliness, though this apprentice considered them all beautiful. There were of course the Roman faces, some of which were good, and still are, but these were strangely distorted as condensed, extra-condensed, extended, expanded, as well as shaded, open, skeleton, contour, sloped (both ways), ornamented, and hair-line letters.

One would think these were enough for all the printing anyone would want to do, but there was also a bewildering multitude of so-called job types of fancy and fantastic design. Each foundry put out a book as big as a dictionary, filled with bizarre creations in which the innocent alphabet was twisted and tormented and decorated until some of its masterpieces were illegible.

Among them were a number informally standardized and cast by all foundries. Such were Antique, Boldface, Gothic, Lightface, Clarendon, Caledonian, Ionic, Doric, Egyptian, Runic, Celtic, Rustic, Script, Grecian, Monastic, Norman, Title, and these too were also condensed, extended and otherwise squeezed, stretched and pulled about. When the type-writer came there was added that monstrosity, type-writer type. But the pride of each foundry was its own exclusive creations, to which were given names as fantastic as the designs, putting Pullman nomenclature to shame, such as Pansy, Olive, Asteroid, Van Dyke, Vulcan, Schwabacher, Florist, Teuton, Text, Eastlake.

From such an array the country printer was expected to choose the types to equip his shop. His outfit consisted of fair quantities of Roman, nonpareil, brevier and long primer for straight matter--the weekly newspaper, booklets and pamphlets, with larger sizes for job work, too many faces with few fonts large enough to set more than a line or two. This did not matter since it seemed obligatory to set in a different letter each line of display, advertisements, title pages, as well as dodgers and handbills, the greater the contrast and variety the better, with "ands" and "thes" in lines by themselves, centered and flanked by flourishes on each side. Type larger than two-line canon was made of wood, and was called "stud-horse type" because used for the big bills tacked up on barns and trees to advertise the services of a stallion.

Small fonts of job type were listed in foundry catalogues "5A 13a," to indicate quantity, other letters being in proportion. There was seldom more than one of little used letters, necessitating a shift to another font when a line turned up with two Xs or two Zs. Job types were laid in cases like the uppers of Roman, the boxes all of a size, capitals on one side, lower case on the other.

New type was an abomination. The compositor's fingers, already tender from the lye used to wash forms, were cut by the sharp edges, and his eyes blinded by the glare from sorts, and the printers were forever prowling the shining metal. There was chronic clack of up and down the live bank with tweezers, pulling out the needed letters, and inserting an equal-sized type upside down to mark the place. Another source of trouble was the font from a different foundry, supposedly the same body, but with a slight variation, that was forever getting into the wrong case and being set up, dropping out when the form was lifted.

III

The apprentice was kept too busy to have much time for the acquisition of abstract knowledge. In return for instruction in the art and mystery of printing he was expected to perform the duties of a "devil." He arrived at half-past six, started the fire in the pot-bellied stove, swept up (no light job, for the continuous barrage of fine-cut and plug formed a coping around the feet of every frame, and the trimmings from the big knife lay in windrows). All day he ran errands with proofs, handbills, billheads, advertisements, to submit to customers; wet down paper for the weekly run of the newspaper, and pasted the subscribers' names on them for the mail; distributed "pi," and rushed the growler for thirsty journeymen.

But he learned that the printers in one shop were a "chapel," the head was the "father," who was not the foreman. It thrilled him that such expressions went back to the time when Caxton had his press in Westminster Abbey. A small group of men working on the same job was a companionship, and had strict rules as to who was to do what. Points of procedure, such as the first or a "fat take," or the selection of a victim to set up the beer, was determined by a curious custom. The men gathered around the imposing stone, and each in turn shook out a few em-quads, five or seven, throwing them on the stone like dice. The one with the most nicks uppermost was the winner.

These were time-honored practices, but each shop had customs peculiar to itself. He learned not to whistle at his case, for a sponge of dirty water was apt to take him squarely in the mouth. When late he found lines set up in his composing stick, which he had to distribute before he began work, at his own expense--when he was finally promoted to piece work,--

_A diller, a dollar, a ten-o'clock scholar, What makes you come so soon? You used to come at ten o'clock, But now you come at noon._

For some time his tormentors had alluded mysteriously to the "type louse" that haunted the forms, and promised to show him one when found. A journeyman working at the stone over a newspaper form wet down for distribution called him over, and pointing excitedly, cried,

"Now, there, look!"

He looked.

Handfuls of type had been removed, and the water gathered in small pools between the columns. The apprentice bent over eagerly to behold the strange insect, whereupon the journeyman shoved up a column of type, forcing the water to rise like a fountain into the apprentice's innocent face, while the force roared with laughter and pounded with their composing sticks on the frames.

IV

In a small office in pre-union days, every printer was or became an "all-round" man. Not only could he stick type (and some old-time printers had a wonderful instinct for spacing), but he could "kick" a jobber, impose, make ready, and feed a cylinder press. Some of the vagabond printers who drifted back and forth across the West, working a few days at each halt, were not only craftsmen but characters. It was amazing how promptly they became at home in a strange shop, in a few moments working as if they had been there for years. The saga of the typographic tourist has yet to be told.

It was not long before he found himself standing on one leg like a stork, working the treadle of the Gordon jobber with the other, feeding some small job, milk tickets or dodgers or billheads, against three 3-em quads pasted to the tympan in lieu of gaugepins. As the press had no grippers the feeder must grab the printed sheet before the ink pulled it off and insert the next, regulating the speed according to his need. Pasting scraps of cardboard on the quads to project a bit helped hold the printed card or paper. The regular gaugepins sold never seemed to work as well as quads, and anyway, old-time printers were self-helpful and never bought what they could make.

From feeding press he graduated to making ready and locking up forms. There were always enough odds and ends of furniture for small jobs without cutting new, but for big work, particularly a book or pamphlet, the furniture was cut to fit the job. The form was "locked" by driving quoins, wedge-shaped bits of hard wood, along the tapering side sticks with an implement known as a shooting stick, notched at one end. The form was planed with a block of wood beaten over the form to drive down type that might stick above the printing surface. Something like this still prevails, no doubt, but not with such primitive tools, and very little printing is now done from the type. I am sure the shooting stick and wooden quoins must be as obsolete as ink balls.

The night before the newspaper was run off, the paper was laid down on a broad platform, a quire at a time, drenched with water, covered with a wide board, and a heavy stone placed on top to squeeze the water out. Dampening was necessary to make the ink stick. Subscribers received their papers so wet they had to dry them before reading. The press was a cylinder with a large flywheel having a handle attached. It was run by human power--a husky Negro, who also furnished the muscle for the big knife, or guillotine, with which books were trimmed. In the words of the proprietor he "always gives a scent back no matter what we pay him." The apprentice and devil doubled for the porter when he was otherwise engaged, but shortly steam was installed, adding greatly to the excitement on press day.

Feeding the dampened sheets against the gripper was not easy, and often he missed. To stop the press he grasped the long switch lever and threw the overhead belt on to the idle pulley. If it failed, as it sometimes did, the tympan was inked, and several sheets must be run through before it ceased to offset on the wrong side of the paper, a waste of which his employer made him emphatically aware. It had been easier to stop the press when it was turned by hand.

A daily chore which fell to his lot cruelly sharpened the appetite of a hungry boy toward the noon hour. This was the menu card from the local hotel with corrections for the day's dinner (square meal, 25 cents). He picked up the standing type, slid it on a galley, and proceeded to pull out yesterday's banana fritter and stewed corn and insert today's pear fritter and stewed tomatoes. He then ran off thirty copies, taking extra care as the stock was special and had the word _Menu_ embossed in gold and other decorations. It was a sort of Barmecide's feast for him, whetting an appetite that needed no whetting.

Every printing office boasted one of those geniuses expert at rule twisting, who with shears, file and pliers bent brass rule into patterns that would print scrolls and flourishes around headlines and on title pages, ornaments for the corners of boxes, and when needed extra long braces. Some could create intricate designs, birds with streamers in their beaks in which type could be set, like those that were the pride of the writing masters. Like leads, brass rule was bought in lengths of a foot or so, and cut as needed. Much ingenuity was required to make the corners meet, until the arrival of "labor-saving," with corners mitered or beveled.

V

When work in the printing office became slack he was moved to the bindery, where the files of Godey's, Peterson's and Ballou's Magazines were put in dull black covers with names lettered on the spine. Its principal work, however, was the manufacture of account books, made to order to fit the individual book-keeping methods of bank or merchant. The ancient ruling machine of mahogany looked something like a loom for weaving cloth. Until the advent of loose-leaf books and adding machines, business men kept their accounts in three enormous tomes labeled respectively Day Book, Journal, and Ledger. Every transaction was entered in the Day Book chronologically. It was reëntered in the Journal to separate outgo from income. Finally, each item appeared in the Ledger under the name of the customer, or creditor, to show the status of individual accounts.

Sheets of paper, bearing picturesque old names--Royal, Crown, Demy, or Foolscap--were fed to the ruling machine, and came into contact with a battery of pens, each with its own little fountain of ink, red or blue, as the line demanded--both colors ruled at once. The sheets were then printed at the top of each page with the name of the firm, numbered by hand, and bound in the familiar heavy books, with covers half an inch thick, hinges of rawhide, red leather backs and corners, and sides decorated with marbled paper.

The marbled paper was made in the shop. A square tray or pan of slate was filled with a thin sizing of water and gum tragacanth. On its surface were gently shaken little blobs of color that spread slowly on the surface of the pool. The fashion in blank books seemed to run to red, blue and white. The spots of color were combed into the wavy patterns peculiar to such books. A sheet of paper laid on the surface of the water took off a fine impression of the pattern. These sheets were used for end-papers as well as covers. The edges of the book were also marbled. All this was once done in a small printing office in a prairie town of about 12,000 inhabitants. The books were sturdy and durable. I have seen many of them preserved in vaults beneath banks, filled with the neat Spencerian hand of the bookkeepers of that era, the pupils of the writing masters who drew without taking pen from paper the flowing florid birds trailing messages from their bills.

He was for some years a "two-thirder." A two-thirder received two-thirds the wages of a journeyman printer, which were fifteen dollars a week. They did not have piece work at the Book & Job Print, but later he entered another world, worked on the evening newspaper of the town and tasted the excitement of a race against bogie, the average day's work of ten thousand ems, the printer's measure familiar to all crossword puzzle fans. The piece rate was twenty-five cents a thousand, whether leaded brevier or solid nonpareil. A rapid compositor could set ten or more thousand a day, according to luck with "takes." One learned the fine art of jockeying for position, slowing up when the next take on the hook, was an undesirable one, or speeding in the race for a fat one. Fat takes were pickups--railroad time table, baseball score, market report, taken from the live bank, corrected and added to one's string to be paid for as if set. Each compositor had a numbered slug that he dumped on the galley with his stickful of set matter. When the galley was proved he kept a copy, and at the end of the day pasted up his work, being careful to join the takes closely, signed his name and turned it in. As soon as the paper was up there was a let-down, the tension relaxed, pipes were lit, conversation was possible, and the men picked up incredibly long handfuls of type from the forms returned from the pressroom, and proceeded to throw in a thumping big case against next day's work.

Cuts, if any, were of wood. There was an engraver in the town who supplied illustrations when badly enough needed and plenty of time was available. He made both the drawing and the block, and was a better engraver than artist. His pictures were what is now modernist and even surrealist. An ingenious method of making cuts in an emergency was nipped in the bud by the progress of zinc etching. That was the chalk plate. A metal plate coated with a film of chalk could be drawn on with a sharp instrument, cutting through the chalk to the plate. The plate was then used as a matrix to make a casting that would print the lines drawn, something after the manner of a stereotype.

But the pride of the country press was its stock of ready-made cuts--Lodge emblems: Masonic, Odd Fellows, I.O.G.T.; patriotic: eagle, star, flag, Liberty Bell; trade symbols: mortar and pestle, false teeth, piano, anvil, watch, domestic animals, together with the inevitable pointing finger (fist) and clasped hands. There were houses, ships, buggies, and, even still on hand in some offices, runaway slaves. These were used to embellish circulars, invitations, or programs, and were also used in small ads in the newspaper.

There were molds for casting rollers that looked much like huge candle molds. The roller composition was a mixture of glue and molasses, consistency varying according to the season of the year. It was more practicable to buy rollers by this time, but homemade rollers were still cast occasionally. In a near-by village as late as 1889 a four-column folio weekly newspaper was run off--pulled, I should say--on a hand-lever press, one page at a time, the same method and almost the same press as that which printed the _Virginia Gazette_, or the earlier _Saturday Evening Post_, or for that matter all incunabula.

It is quite likely that all the old-time editors of country newspapers were printers. The tradition no longer holds, but one apprentice printer in my old shop whose destiny was no doubt influenced by this early contact with type was John Finley, who became editor of the country's greatest newspaper. There are still men, though not so many as there were once, playing important roles in world affairs who at some time in their lives experienced the thrill of handling the twenty-four (now twenty-six) potent little lead soldiers that change the history of the world. No man ever loses that sense of the importance of printing, or can look upon a printed thing with indifference, who has once felt it. Nor for that matter does he ever forget the lay of the case. It is a craft that gets into the blood.

In 1889 or thereabouts I witnessed a scene which foretold the great change that was coming to the art I had learned with such patience and diligence, as revolutionary as the change of shipping from sail to steam. There arrived and was set up a machine intended to set type. Its name was Thorne, and its principle was to release the letter called for when the key was pressed by means of nicks in the body of the type, like the tumblers of a Yale lock. The type travelled in the channels to a galley, and was justified by hand, if I remember rightly. Obviously the device depended upon a hair-trigger nicety of adjustment. Even the mechanics who came with it had difficulty in making it work. It jammed repeatedly, and before many hours the floor was covered with broken sorts. After a few months it was packed up and sent back, and the old-fashioned method of setting by hand was reinstated, until that day when that office, like every one of its class, was equipped with a battery of linotypes. Thus vanished a craft that had been four hundred years in the making, that uncanny skill with which a good printer manipulated type.

The tramp printer, with his thirst, his steel setting rule, his budget of gossip of all the printing offices in a wide territory, has become extinct. The callous forefinger of the printer is as much a legend as the miller's sensitive thumb.

VI

Did they print books in those far-away prairie printing offices? They certainly did. One of the rarest items of Western Americana bears a Galesburg imprint. A pioneer of that town, a genius who played the flute and made many inventions, one of them the rotary plow still used to clear snow from the tracks of western railroads, was Riley Root. In 1849 he caught the gold fever and made the trip to Oregon and California over-land in a covered wagon. He had many adventures, and on his return wrote a book that was printed in Galesburg and is now a collector's item. A famous Boston book-seller became excited when he discovered a copy. "Unknown," he wrote in 1932, "to Wagner, Smith, Cowan, or as far as we know to any other bibliographer of the West, and unrecorded in the entire run of American Book Prices Current."

The front wrapper reads:

Journal of Travels / from / St. Josephs to Oregon / with / observations of that country / together with / a Description of California, / its agricultural interests, / and / a full description / of / its Gold Mines. / By Riley Root / Galesburg, Ill. / Intelligencer Print / 1850.

The matter on the wrapper is repeated on the title page with some minor variations. The book is a substantial pamphlet, size 9-1/2 by 6 inches, 144 pages, uncut. The Boston bookman continues:

"Riley Root's Journal has everything that a rare piece of Western Americana should have. In the first place, it _looks_ rare. Like several rare Western items of which only a few copies exist, it was printed in a small mid-Western town. 'Galesburg, Illinois, 1850' is an imprint that has charm for the collector."

It must be excessively rare. The only other copy of which I know, besides the one described, is now appropriately in the Seymour Library of Knox College. Of this copy the librarian said (when he acknowledged the gift to the Library in 1931):

"This little unbound pamphlet was written by Riley Root who came with his family to this prairie country in 1836, when he was 37 years old, and helped to build the houses of Log City, the forerunner of Galesburg.... It was printed in Galesburg in 1850 by the 'Intelligencer Print' and bears in the border of the cover the name of the compositor, Southwick Davis, who graduated from Knox in the first class--that of 1846. This creditable piece of printing was done only about fourteen years after Galesburg was staked out and when Knox College was graduating its fifth class.

"In April 1848 Riley Root left Galesburg to make this over-land journey, crossing the continent by way of the Oregon Trail to Oregon City, a distance of 1846 miles from St. Josephs on the Missouri River, which was regarded as the starting point for the long journey through the Indian Country. Although gold had been discovered at Sutter's sawmill in California on February 10th, 1848, nearly two months before Mr. Root left Galesburg, it is not probable that he learned of that famous event until he reached Oregon in mid-September. The news spread slowly even on the Pacific coast, credible reports reaching San Francisco only in May. Mr. Root says that the excitement ('yellow fever,' he calls it) began in Oregon about the middle of August, and that within one month nearly 2,000 persons left Oregon for the gold fields. The purpose of Mr. Root's over-land journey to Oregon is not stated, but it would seem from an entry in his diary seven months after reaching Oregon City, to the effect that he had been 'roaming up and down the valley, in pursuit of information,' that he was scouting for new lands on a new frontier. Finding himself in the midst of all the gold rush 'commotion' he may very well have been attacked by the 'yellow fever' bug himself. At any rate he left Oregon in April, 1849, just a year after leaving Galesburg, and going to San Francisco and the California gold fields, spent five months, returning to Illinois by way of Panama and New Orleans. He arrived in Galesburg, January 8, 1850.

"This little pamphlet records the details of this epic journey, and if Riley Root's reputation rested on this alone he would take high rank as a historian. It is extremely well done and is a faithful journal of not only the day to day happenings, but of the country and its climate, the wild animals, the Indians, the geology and botany, the mountains, the forests and streams, and many other features that give evidence of the observant eye of the author. One interesting and important chapter relates the harrowing details of the Indian massacre of November, 1847, in which Dr. Marcus Whitman and his wife lost their lives. This story was supplied to Mr. Root by eye-witnesses and is said to be its earliest publication in book or pamphlet form."

Among the many changes of ownership of presses in Galesburg, it would be difficult to decide whether the shop in which I learned my trade was a descendant of the Intelligencer Print or not, but it was produced in just such a primitive and resourceful plant.

FOOTNOTES:

[38] _Plain Printing Types_, Theodore L. De Vinne, New York, 1902.

_James Shand_

_AUTHOR AND PRINTER: G.B.S. AND R. & R. C.: 1898-1948_

From _Alphabet and Image_: 8, Winter, 1948. Copyright by Art and Technics, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the author and publisher.

[Illustration: Topolski's drawing from the illustrated Penguin _Pygmalion_.]

Author and printer, publisher and book-seller; these conjunctions flow too easily from the pen. They cover an immeasurable sum of human experience, both melancholy and magnificent, in the long history of the book trade; they should be used with more reserve.

Fortunately for the reader, the writer is no doctor in bibliography expounding the perils and diseases of textual transmission, but a typographical reporter, with an interim case-history of a particular author, a particular printer and a healthy body of work in progress.

Our author is George Bernard Shaw, sometime of Dublin: our printer, R. & R. Clark, now, as always, of Edinburgh. The association is unique in more than a geographical sense; in time it covers fifty years; in space it defies quantitative analysis. Bernard Shaw's quota, if consigned to the Society of Authors, would probably make that body independent of the publishing trade for years to come.

Miss Marjorie Plant has pointed out, in her always readable economic history, _The English Book Trade_, that there was once a time when "the person who was of no account whatever in the early years of the

## book industry was the author." At a later period when the printer was

dominated by book-seller and publisher, Dr. Johnson wrote in _The Gentleman's Magazine_ in 1739, "We can produce some who threatened printers with their highest displeasure for having dared to print books for those who wrote them!"

In the history of English literature the relations of author, printer and publisher have often been bitter and obscure, posing many problems in bibliography and textual criticism. Dr. McKerrow, introducing the literary student to bibliography, suggests that "the best way of obtaining a clear and lively comprehension of the processes by which the books of Shakespeare's time were produced" would be by actually composing a sheet or two in exact facsimile of an Elizabethan quarto and printing it on a hand-press. "Once he does this," he adds, "he will find that the material book, apart altogether from its literary content, can be a thing of surprising interest."

The surprise of Dr. McKerrow's student trying to disentangle the impositions by which the Penguin edition of more than a million copies of Shaw's plays were produced on modern perfector printing presses and automatic folding machines would indeed be considerable. Nevertheless it is to be doubted whether there are as many bibliographical vagaries and obscurities in Shaw as in the folios and quartos of Shakespeare. Certainly there is something of the same fascination in the printing and production of the "material" books of the later playwright; apart from the literary antics of an ebullient Irish author with that most emotional of all romantic characters: seemingly hard-headed Scots printers.

Since we are presenting the romance of playwright and printer, without benefit of publisher, let us set our characters in their dramatic place and scene. The place is Edinburgh; the scene R. & R. Clark; the principal characters, Edward Clark, Bernard Shaw and William Maxwell; with a faint echo off-stage from that habitual bankrupt, Grant Richards, later deserted for the more solid attractions of a "commissioned" Constable.

[Illustration: Shaw's original shorthand draft of his letter to Maxwell on the centenary of R. & R. Clark in 1946.]

Professor G. M. Trevelyan, in one of those two brilliant chapters on Scotland in his _English Social History_, points out that rapidly developing eighteenth-century Edinburgh "was hardly less important than London in the British field of letters."

Mr. Stanley Morison, speaking in Edinburgh in 1944 on the subject of _The Typographic Arts_, pointed out that the first history of typography ever written for the instruction of the trade was James Watson's _The Art of Printing_, published in Edinburgh in 1713.[39] A few years later the Edinburgh book-seller, Alexander Donaldson, who set up shop in the Strand and put Edinburgh printed classics on sale at 30 per cent to 50 per cent below the usual prices, was largely responsible for the creation of a "permanent and enlarged printing and type-founding industry in Edinburgh." Mr. Morison also asserts that in the last quarter of the eighteenth century Scotland led the interest in technicalities of printing.

The first edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, printed in Edinburgh in 1771, was brought out by "a Society of Gentlemen of Scotland." John Bell's _British Poets_ and _British Theatre_ were printed at the Apollo Press by Gilbert Martin, an Edinburgh printer of whom Mr. Morison would gladly know more.

"The social, imaginative and intellectual life" of Scotland in the early nineteenth century centred largely in Edinburgh on Burns and Scott, Adam Smith and _The Edinburgh Review_. The familiar publisher names, Ballantyne, Blackwood, Chambers, Constable, Nelson, were also printers. In type-founding, Miller & Richards' Scotch Roman cut in 1803, and the later Old Style, were widely used throughout the trade, at home and abroad, right up to the present day.

It was in 1846, six years before Alexander Phemister cut the now famous Old Style, that Robert Clark, with a loan of £200, laid the modest foundations of R. & R. Clark. After serving his apprenticeship in Montrose as compositor and pressman (what is called in the Edinburgh trade a "twicer") he sought experience in London as a journeyman, before returning to Edinburgh to start his own business. His London experience must have been of some value to him because it was not long before he and his partner, James Kirkwood, had developed an active business with London publishers: Macmillans, Bentley, John Murray, Smith Elder, A. & C. Black, amongst others.

Robert Clark's policy of providing fine quality, with conscientious service at the highest possible price, no doubt contributed to the financial success of a rapidly developing business which moved to the present printing works at Brandon Street in 1883. Robert Clark's only surviving son, Edward, took over sole control after his father's death in 1894. William Maxwell first appears on the scene at this time, entering R. & R. Clark as a shorthand writer in 1892.

It was in 1892 that Shaw's first play, _Widowers' Houses_, was produced; 1898 when _Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant_, published by Grant Richards, were printed by R. & R. Clark.

Few living authors nowadays can claim continuous direct relations with one printer over a period of fifty years. Books are now the product of mechanical composing machines, automatic printing presses, and mechanized binderies. They require expert control by experienced production staffs dealing with many different paper-makers, printers and binders. For this reason alone the printed works of such a productive author as Bernard Shaw are a remarkable exception to the general rule in the highly-organized printing and publishing trades.

Commission publishing is the resort of authors whose reputation guarantees a lucrative circulation and who can afford the necessary capital. Shaw now deals directly with his printer and binder, buying and paying for his own composition, machining, paper and binding.

Shaw had always very definite ideas about the format of his books and, with the complete and friendly co-operation of his present publisher, has dealt continuously with R. & R. Clark since 1898. Clarks are now 102, Shaw 92, Maxwell 75; this unique association of author and printer is also a competition in longevity.

[Illustration: Page from the Standard Edition, which began publication in 1931, in Fournier small pica, 1-1/2 points leaded, large crown octavo, 5x8 inches.]

The influence of Bernard Shaw on our time has been profound; in the theatre, in films and in broadcasting. The circulation of his printed works has been immense. His direct collaboration with his printer over a long period is of more than professional interest to publishers, printers and bibliographers. This unique author-printer relationship provides an unusual aspect for us of the wit, vigour and working methods of one of the most successful authors and playwrights of our time; demonstrating also in no uncertain terms the integrity, craftsmanship and mechanical resource of the printing house of R. & R. Clark, so soundly based and flexibly developed over the last hundred years in the solid traditions of the Edinburgh book-printing trade.

In 1946, on the occasion of the centenary of R. & R. Clark, Shaw wrote of that renowned Edinburgh printing firm, "Ever since it printed my first plays, _Pleasant and Unpleasant_, in 1898, it has been as natural a part of my workshop as the pen in my hand." Few printers can ever have received so eloquent a tribute from so eminent an author.

As a young author, Shaw's experiences with publishers had not been exactly encouraging. Between 1879 and 1883, as regularly as clockwork, at the rate of one a year, they rejected all his novels. The climate in publishing at that time is best described by Shaw himself writing to Daniel Macmillan in 1943. The letter is quoted in full in Charles Morgan's _The House of Macmillan_; a small portion bears reprinting here. After describing how Meredith turned him down for Chatto's without extenuating circumstances; how Blackwood accepted his first novel but reneged; how Smith Elder were polite and asked to see future efforts, Shaw goes on to write: "I am now one of the few who personally remember the Grand Old Men of the publishing world of that day: Alexander Macmillan, Longmans and Bentley. They were so powerful that they held the book-sellers in abject subjection, and were denounced by Walter Besant and his newly-organized Society of Authors as remorseless sharks. When they died and were succeeded by their sons, the hereditary system did not always work as well as it did in Bedford Street; and the book-sellers got the upper hand. John Murray's Byronic prestige was so select that I did not dream of trying him until years later, when I was an author of some note and had already helped to bankrupt three publishers. I offered him _Man and Superman_. He refused in a letter which really touched me. He said he was old-fashioned and perhaps a bit behind the times; but he could not see any intention in my book but to wound, irritate and upset all established constitutional opinion, and therefore could not take the responsibility of publishing it. By that time I could command sufficient capital to finance my books and enter into direct friendly relations with the printers (this began my very pleasant relations with Clarks of Edinburgh). I took matters into my own hands and, like Herbert Spencer and Ruskin, manufactured my books myself, and induced Constables to take me "on commission."

Sidney and Beatrice Webb sent Shaw to their Edinburgh printer. An informative and amusing correspondence reprinted at length by Grant Richards in _Author Hunting_ reveals how he was ruled and educated by Shaw in the choice of type, "Morris" margins, specimen pages, paper and other details of production. Holbrook Jackson has pointed out in an article in number four of _The Fleuron_ that Shaw's books followed the model of William Morris's _Roots of the Mountains_, printed in Caslon Old Face at the Chiswick Press in 1892. Shaw, Socialist intimate and admirer of Morris, was also in close touch with Emery Walker, and familiar no doubt with the typographical ideas of Morris, Walker and Cobden-Sanderson, first elaborated in Edinburgh in 1889 at a meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Art, and later published in _Arts and Crafts Essays_ printed in Edinburgh in 1893.

In preliminary discussions of the production of _Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant_, Shaw insisted on a trade union printer. Grant Richards doubted whether a union house could do justice to his ideal of the book beautiful. "I had few notions of what makes a union house," wrote Grant Richards. "I do not think I had a union house on my list. The problem shifted to the question of fair wages, and R. & R. Clark were approved." Shaw, in a letter to Grant Richards in 1897, observed, "Clark is all right; a first-rate house. I enclose a letter which you can hold as a certificate of compliance with my fair wages clause."...

Edward Clark doubtless also got much entertainment from his dealings with a teetotal, non-smoking, vegetarian, Socialist of an author. There is a story that, on one specimen, Shaw's instructions for close and mechanically-equal spacing between words were so precisely followed by the pragmatical Scots, that at the end of some closely spaced lines the definite article "the" was divided "t-" and "he" turned over, and the indefinite article "a-" with "n" turned over. Shaw's comment when returning the specimen, as Maxwell tells the story, was, "Excellent; but please do not go so far as to prove the author is really a damn fool." Shaw denies the story; nevertheless, true or untrue, it has a Shavian flavour.

Shaw's choice of Caslon for his original edition was inevitable. We know that he picked up the pre-Kelmscott formula ready-made from William Morris; but, unlike the founding fathers of the private press movement, he lacked the unearned income to indulge in a privately-cut type-face. In 1897 we must remember that there were only two text-types available in most book-houses: Old Style or Modern. More often than not, before mechanical type-setting, there was not even any choice. Publisher and author often had to accept the type of which there happened to be, at any given moment, the greatest amount of "dis."

Shaw's original hand-set page in type-founder's Caslon, long primer solid, stood up to thirty years' constant use. To our post-war eyes, conditioned by authorized economy standards, the precise and consistent setting of the plays, with their even Roman small caps, lower-case italics in square brackets, with occasional lower-case Roman words letter-spaced, has considerable nostalgic typographical charm. Here is sense and sensibility in book-making, well ahead of its typographical time. Of course, there are many people, William Maxwell and Bernard Newdigate amongst them, who protested that long primer Caslon set solid was too small and too difficult to read. But Shaw proved faithful to his original style and to his original setting until the plates wore out. He liked a colourful block of letter-press without white "rivers." He complains that modern printing ink is not black enough.

In the middle twenties when the project of a Limited Collected Edition was discussed, Shaw still preferred Caslon, but agreed to a larger size, pica solid, on a larger page, medium octavo. But, and to William Maxwell it was a considerable but, Shaw specified hand-setting. As a disciple of William Morris, Shaw objected to setting his books by machine. Our William from Edinburgh thereafter called on Shaw with two different specimen pages, one hand-set in original Caslon and one "machine-justified" in Monotype Caslon. Both were submitted to Shaw without saying which was which. The suspected Monotype "justification" was preferred. Maxwell triumphed. Emery Walker, consulted by letter, also approved the machine-set page.

What a victory for the machine! Or rather, what a subtle example of Maxwell's typographical tact and persuasiveness! The re-setting of the whole of Shaw by hand would have been an inexcusable and expensive drudgery. Maxwell convinced Shaw that the mechanical composing machine could equal hand-setting in typographical quality and close spacing between words and sentences.

The devotion to Monotype Caslon in the middle twenties seems strange to us now, looking back from a wealth of typographical equipment, including Bembo, Bell and Times. But if we look round the literature of the trade at that time, particularly at _The Fleuron_, we note that Caslon in its Monotype version had a vogue, almost a kind of typographical Indian summer. _The Fleuron_ number one was set in the "then fashionable" design known as Garamond; number two in Baskerville; numbers three and four reverted to Caslon. When Mr. Stanley Morison took over the editing of numbers five, six and seven, and the printing moved from Curwen to Cambridge, the final volumes were all set in Fournier.

It was about this same time that William Maxwell told Shaw that his old Caslon plates were worn out and suggested complete resettings in a new Standard Edition in large crown octavo in small-pica Fournier 1-1/2-points leaded. In the final choice of type for the Standard Edition, we detect again how Shaw trusted William Maxwell's judgment and accepted his advice. No doubt there was an improvement in readability over the original edition, but my own feeling is that the Standard Edition, as at present printed, has none of the evocative charm of the original edition. It may be that the Sundour binding seems prosaic. But Shaw, disgusted by the fading of his green covers, was converted to Sundour by a Winterbottom director emphasizing that not even the Indian sun could change it.

When Shaw first saw Maxwell's specimens for the new Standard Edition in various type-faces, Caslon, Baskerville, Scotch Roman, Old Style and Fournier amongst others, he replied, "I like them all but I'll stick to Caslon until I die: and after I am dead you can do what you like." Fortunately, Shaw is still alive and the Standard Edition is in Fournier.[40]

I cross-examined William Maxwell closely and at some length on this switch from Caslon to Fournier. His persuasive and peculiar ability to get his own way, even in face of such a do-or-die statement of Shaw's, must be remarked here. I am afraid, however, the only light I can throw on this, the greatest typographical conversion of all time, is that Maxwell himself is very fond of Fournier italics. Maxwell is no hard-headed Scot. He comes from the soft Hyperborean north, where the Gulf Stream makes the fuchsias grow six feet high. When he confesses to an affair with an elegant French type there isn't much chance for even an Irish author, much less the English public, to break up the "auld alliance." Thus Shaw's Standard Edition, now running into some thirty-five volumes, began publication in Fournier in 1931 and has steadily reprinted in this type and format at intervals ever since.

In an article on "Author and Printer" in the eleventh impression of the ninth edition of Collins's _Authors' and Printers' Dictionary_ Dr. R. W. Chapman observes: "The prolixity of modern writing, fostered by cheap paper and print, by the habit of making books out of articles and lectures, by the use of typewriters and stenographers, is a positive evil."

[Illustration: Shaw's meticulous proofreading is indicated by this heavily-corrected proof of _On the Rocks_, with a complete retyping of the passage below.]

Shaw's method, probably verging on the diabolical to Dr. Chapman, is to write everything first in shorthand. A double-spaced typescript then becomes his working copy, to be sent to the printer only after careful emendation and revision, in Shaw's always clear hand.

The manuscripts, typescripts, galley, page and final press proofs, indeed the whole apparatus of the Shavian "workshop" in William Maxwell's collection, show the great pains Shaw takes in writing and revising before setting. His meticulous proof reading is as characteristic as the clarity of his proof correction. William Maxwell tells me that Shaw's first-proof corrections are often heavy, sometimes involving considerable re-setting and re-make-up. But wherever lengthy excisions or additions are made in final proofs, Shaw is always careful to supply the exact number of words; sometimes in shorter corrections counting individual letters in substituted words in order to avoid over-running and re-justification.

By all the standards of Horace Hart and Howard Collins, Shaw would qualify as an admirable and expert author in the technical aspect of his relations with his printer--except, perhaps, for Dr. Chapman's scholarly strictures on prefatorial prolixity and diabolonian authorship.

Shaw's plays are drafted in what he calls Author's Shorthand (simplified Pitman); typed by his secretary; revised; printed; and passed for press after two more revisions. For rehearsal, fifty copies are struck off as "By a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature." If more are required they are "By Bernard Shaw." These sets are "privately printed." Alterations and additions in rehearsal and during the run of the play are incorporated as final corrections before publication.

One of the most interesting Shaw exhibits in William Maxwell's possession is the original of the filmscript of _Pygmalion_. Shaw allowed no hand but his own on the scripts of his films. The corrected copy of the play, with alterations in dialogue and time scheme for the screen and the additional scenes and sequences, is in itself remarkable visual evidence of Shaw's nimble-witted inventiveness. Few playwrights at the age of eighty-five have tackled so successfully the transition into another medium, cooperating with director and producer to present in all its freshness and verve the authentic Shavian touch on both sound-track and screen.

The original edition, the Limited Collected edition, the Standard edition, form the bulk of Shaw's printed works; his printed ephemera are not my concern here. There are, however, various editions of what we might call out-of-the-run-plays-and-prefaces books: _The Intelligent Woman's Guide_, _Everybody's Political What's What_, the two-column quarto editions of the _Prefaces_ and _The Complete Plays_, the illustrated _Black Girl_, the illustrated _Good King Charles's Golden Days_ (there was also an illustrated edition of _Geneva_ printed by the Chiswick Press) and the illustrated Penguin edition of _Pygmalion_. "Omnibus" editions of the _Plays and Prefaces_ have been published by Odhams, cheap editions by Penguin; and _Back to Methuselah_ by the Oxford University Press in World's Classics. The Odhams omnibus was reprinted from Shaw's plates; the Penguin editions were re-set in Times.

_The Intelligent Woman_ was instructed in Caslon on a page dimension decided by William Maxwell; a binding design by Douglas Cockerell; and a four-colour half-tone jacket from an original drawing by Eric Kennington of a nude female Intelligencer looking down a well. She, needless to add, had a much less shapely figure than the Black Girl.

The typography of _The Intelligent Woman's Guide_ (1928) is in the Caslon formula. We need only note in passing that the drop initials at the beginning of chapters are tightly fitted and spill over into the margins. The binding suggests that too much Cockerell can spoil a trade binding. The jacket was regrettable: the externals of this book seem out of character with the rest of Shaw's production. A more acceptable popular edition, printed from the same plates, with reduced margins in small demy octavo, was published a year later in 1929.

[Illustration: Shaw's note on the corrected _Pygmalion_ filmscript in which he altered the dialogue and time scheme, providing additional scenes and sequences for the film as shown in the two pages following.]

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

The two-column edition of the _Complete Plays_, set in Scotch Roman in quarto, is a skillful piece of book-making; a pleasant, readable page, which William Maxwell can appropriate entirely to his own credit. For size, weight and general colour the Scotch Roman was eminently successful for all the plays in one volume, not too heavy in the hand, in a format which makes for easy reference and re-reading.

The contrast of the two-column Fournier setting of the _Prefaces_ with the two-column setting of the _Complete Plays_ in Scotch Roman is to the advantage of the Scotch Roman. The small pica Fournier is too large in relation to the width of the column and, to my eye, does not look at all happy in this two-column setting.

_Everybody's Political What's What_ provides us with an interesting example of the close collaboration in proof-reading between William Maxwell, his press-readers and Shaw. Shaw, to illustrate some argument, asserted erroneously that so many codfish were being caught at one period that great quantities were being thrown back into the sea. Maxwell pointed out that codfish were never thrown back into the sea; they are salted, dried, preserved and disposed of in many other ways. Shaw, hazy about varieties, intended fish in general and not codfish in

## particular.

Also in this book, Shaw mentioned that when an outsider wins a race, book-makers lose. William Maxwell, no mean expert in the making of these other kinds of "books" and having absorbed, no doubt, from Edward Clark some knowledge and appreciation of "the sporting spirits," questioned this; and innumerable letters from punters and bookies overloaded Shaw's letterbox. He re-worded the passage to silence the rule-of-thumb practitioners.

We have all been afflicted from time to time in prefaces and authors' notes with the names of odd people who have also "read the proofs." There can be few authors who get the benefit of skilled press-reading and skilled scrutiny from a managing director so knowledgeable about fish and about "bookies." The codfish and "bookie" stories are an interesting indication of how every page of Shaw's goes through a double sieve at Brandon Street, such is the passion of Scots for accuracy in type-setting. The Scots' passion for perfection in press-work comes to light in this association with the production of _The Black Girl_.

Some time prior to 1932, Shaw asked Maxwell to suggest an engraver-illustrator for this Voltairean tale; Maxwell suggested John Farleigh. With that thorough attention to detail characteristic of the Scot, he not only ensured that Shaw should have an illustrator capable of interpreting his ideas, he also took care that the engravings, paper and ink should all be happily matched and tested. By accepting full responsibility for the typography of the illustrated page, he undoubtedly produced an illustrated Shaw of a quality and at a price which was a credit to author and printer.

My typographical feelings about _The Black Girl_ are mixed. The engravings seem rather too heavy for the Fournier setting; it may be an odd observation to make about a Shaw book, but the illustrations overload the text of this slim book; the binding is too much and too black. Shaw's own wash drawings of the Black Girl are much more subtle in suggestion than John Farleigh's white line. But there was little doubt about the success of _The Black Girl_ with a large public. It is an interesting and successful example of a short book with text and illustrations printed at one impression, and without any complications in binding.

The contrast between Farleigh's sharp white line and Topolski's loose black squiggle in the illustrated edition of _Good King Charles's Golden Days_ demonstrates what I mean by the rigidity of _The Black Girl_ page. Shaw as an author is impossible to illustrate; he can only be annotated and decorated. There is an engaging light-hearted quality about Topolski's cosmopolitan draughtsmanship which seems to suit Shaw better than Farleigh's engravings.

Maxwell's earliest recollection of meeting Shaw is of going to see Mrs. Shaw at the Adelphi about the printing of her translations of some plays by Brieux, the author of _Damaged Goods_. Shaw had written an introduction to them.

In the centenary letter to William Maxwell in November 1946, Shaw wrote: "I remember Edward Clark very kindly and very well; but it was with you that our business relations developed into a cordial personal relationship which has been of inestimable value to me as an author...."

[Illustration: Correction in popular edition of _The Intelligent Woman's Guide_ showing careful count of words and letters for exact fit of substituted passage.]

William Maxwell at an early stage in his career became aware of the printer's responsibility to the author. Clark's work for Robert Louis Stevenson must often have been recollected and discussed. Many other authors have passed through Brandon Street on their way. It is one of the doubtful pleasures of a book-printing establishment to deal direct with authors. Maxwell has had his full share of that kind of mixed pleasure and responsibility with Hardy, Kipling, the Webbs, Sir James Frazer, Hugh Walpole, Virginia Woolf, Charles Morgan, Osbert and Edith Sitwell.

I began with an Edinburgh book-printer; I conclude with an honorary LL.D. of Edinburgh University. In 1947 that ancient University conferred on William Maxwell that honour which he values above any personal recognition. It was a deserved compliment to R. & R. Clark and to Scottish printing as a whole.

No man is self-made; but so far as any one individual can by his own efforts raise the standard of his trade, the renown of his firm and add to the lustre of his native city, Dr. William Maxwell has done so by his devoted and sedulous years in the service of many authors and many publishers....

This inadequate typographical report is in no sense intended to be either accurate or inclusive. Nor do I make any claim for startling innovations in graphic design or any particularly noteworthy contributions to typography. This productive association has covered fifty of the most inventive years in the mechanical development of book-printing; Bernard Shaw himself wrote, "I have not had to think about my printing. I have left it to do itself, which means that R. & R. Clark had to do it." All the same he thought a lot about it.

I may well conclude with the final paragraph of Shaw's letter to William Maxwell of November 1946. "Long may you and R. & R. Clark Ltd. flourish after we have said our last farewell which we shall both, I hope, be still too busy to attend to."

COMPOSED IN CALEDONIA TYPES

FOOTNOTES:

[39] Two excerpts are included in this book, see pages 86 and 87.

[40] A specimen page from _The Devil's Disciple_ is shown on page 386.

[Illustration]PAUL A. BENNETT[Illustration]

_On Type Faces For Books_

It is simple enough to understand that type, paper and ink are components of book printing. But not so easy to comprehend the reasons for the variety of papers available, nor the many dozens of type faces offered for book composition.

The reasons for this great variety are partly functional, partly aesthetic, and competitive. Papers differ in many ways--color, finish, opacity, strength and bulk are some of them.

Type faces differ, too, and for equally valid reasons. There are the important design and style differences that comprise the old style, transitional and modern faces suitable for books. And distinctions in weight or "color"; distinctions in roundness, in degree of compactness, and distinctions in legibility, and in size.

To the designer of books, type face selection is important in relation to the character of the text to be printed. The size of type selected, and the amount of "leading," or space between its lines, has a bearing upon the number of pages the manuscript will make.

Some shorter manuscripts, for instance, need to be "driven out" or padded, to make the book appear greater in content than it actually is, to justify its price. Others need every possible degree of compression to get the manuscript into a lesser number of pages, which, in turn, means fewer "forms" to print, fewer "signatures" to bind, and less paper to use.

To turn from the functional use of type to the aesthetic, and also make a rather loose analogy, one may think of the type face as a garment with which the designer dresses the author's words.

In this instance the designer selects a type face to develop an "allusive" format--to reflect something of the style of the period of the manuscript. Bruce Rogers, the greatest master of allusive book-making, in his "Paragraphs on Printing" points out that in a small way this is "like planning the stage setting for a play.

"An up-to-date style for an ancient text would compare with staging _Hamlet_ in modern dress. However novel and effective in its own way, you feel it to be strange, and this sense of strangeness is an annoying distraction; you are forced to think of the setting and the designer rather than the text."

It is easier to suggest a feminine appeal with types like Estienne or Fairfield or Garamond, than with less decorative faces such as Baskerville, Bodoni or Janson. Yet it is foolish to go too far in this direction. Strictly speaking, there are no definitely feminine or masculine types--the way type is handled has much to do with the mood it evokes. And it is dangerous to pin labels on types without knowing a great deal of their background and derivation.

The idea of using many distinguished types for the composition of this book was deliberate: The intent was to demonstrate, on a uniform paper surface and under identical printing conditions, the "behavior" of twenty of the finest types of our time.

And to afford a basis for comparison that might not only illumine some of the points mentioned, but also provide reference specimens of these notable book faces. To that end, a complete alphabet showing in caps and lower-case of each face is included, with a brief account of its background and development.

Not every essay will be equally appealing, typographically. Yet the variety of faces used in setting them seems more successful than would be the less sensitive treatment of uniform typography. Reading the articles and studying the performance of the individual types should provide an increased appreciation of the part typography plays in developing the book's format.

In this present instance, the designer has chosen one basic "background" face, Janson, for the majority of the essays. And has "interleaved," so to speak, many of the essays set in different types. This treatment lessens any tendency toward uneven color and spottiness, and minimizes some of the potential "scrap book" feel of many differing type specimens.

The problem of coupling face with essay was carefully considered. There could be none but the obvious selection of the author's own design in connection with five of the essays: Electra for W. A. Dwiggins' "Investigation into the Physical Properties of Books"; Perpetua for Eric Gill's "Typography"; Times Roman for Stanley Morison's "First Principles of Typography"; Deepdene for Frederic Goudy's "Types and Type Design"; and Centaur for the extracts from Bruce Rogers' _Paragraphs on Printing_.

Some background on the type selections for other essays may be of interest: Monticello, a recutting of one of the earliest American types, was a natural and excellent choice for Lawrence Wroth's "First Work with American Types," as was Bembo, one of Beatrice Warde's favorite faces for her "Printing Should Be Invisible." Bell, which Mr. Updike was one of the first to use with distinction--he called it Mountjoye when he acquired it in 1903--was the choice for his "Some Tendencies in Modern Typography."

The selection of Poliphilus for Sir Francis Meynell's "Some Collectors Read" seemed appropriate in recognition of the many fine Nonesuch books he had set in English Monotype faces; while that of Baskerville for John Winterich's essay on Franklin as printer and publisher was because Baskerville was a type Franklin greatly admired. Caledonia, an original Dwiggins face influenced by Scotch Roman, was the more subtle choice for Scot printer James Shand's revealing account of George Bernard Shaw's relations with his printer--more appropriate to Shand's preference and background, than would have been the choice of Caslon or Fournier, in which Shaw's books have been set.

* * * * *

The brief mention of old style, transitional and modern faces may need amplification. And also the descriptive terms Linotype and Monotype, which are trade-marked words that indicate _methods_ of composition.

In _Linotype_, the product is an actual line of type, called "slug" in printer's parlance. This is produced by one machine, from matrices assembled through finger action on a keyboard. In operation, the assembled line moves to the mold for casting and the matrices are then returned (distributed) to their channels in the magazine for use in other lines.

In _Monotype_, the product is individual pieces of type--letters and spaces assembled into a line of many elements, as in hand type. The Monotype machine consists of two units: the keyboard (which resembles a type-writer) punches holes in a roll of paper, not unlike that in a player piano. This roll is then fed into the casting unit, where it functions by controlling levers which bring the matrix of each character into position for casting letters and spaces in sequence in the lines.

[Illustration]

The distinctions between type faces called old style, transitional _or_ modern, are apparent at a glance to the technician. Just as, for instance, you distinguish instantly between a Scandinavian, a Latin-American, or a Mongolian. Analysis may indicate that the chief factor in your instant recognition of these types is memory of features.

So too in type faces. Here the differences are more minute, and essentially a matter of design distinctions: the weight and relation of thick and thin strokes, the treatment and stress of curves, and the handling of "serifs." There is little difference in the actual shapes of letters, which is as it should be.

One of the more lucid accounts of the development of letter forms is W. A. Dwiggins' "The Shapes of Roman Letters," included in his _Mss. by WAD_. Illustrations from this minor classic are used here by permission.

Remember that most of the letter forms we meet are modifications of written letters, shaped by pen action. Some differences in the details of serif treatment are indicated by these Dwiggins drawings:

[Illustration] _a_ _b_ _c_ _d_

_a_ shows a commonly designed serif detail, much better handled by natural pen action in _b_. The arch of a letter, frequently handled in type as _c_, is more crisp and attractive in _d_, the natural pen form.

In type, serifs help carry the eye in a horizontal direction, a designer friend points out, setting up a "flow" from letter to letter within the word, and from word to word across the line.

[Illustration] _e_ _f_

Contrast the "degenerate, commonly used" form of o shown in _e_, with the more attractive pen form in _f_. Here is graphic distinction in the treatment and stress of curves.

The two most common classes of type faces are "old style" and "modern." The "transitional," a merging of the old style form into the modern--is typified by the illustration of Bulmer, between the Janson and Bodoni specimens used for the visual presentation on page 404.

Our old style faces descend from the early Italian Roman types and differ in minor details and "national" characteristics. Among the old style faces used in this book are Bembo and Centaur, which reflect the Italian form; Estienne, Granjon and Garamond, which reflect the French form; Caslon and Janson, typical of the English-Dutch form; and Fairfield and Times Roman, as differing expressions of contemporary old style types.

Modern faces, the result of a swing of taste in the opposite direction, stemmed from an effort to copy in type the letters of eighteenth-century copper-plate engravers. Bodoni, the classic form of the modern, is included in its lighter rendering, named Bodoni Book. The first English modern, named Bell, is also included; together with two contemporary moderns, the Dwiggins-designed Electra and Caledonia faces, cut by Linotype. All three are less severe than Bodoni and retain elements of the transitional form in some letters.

The two really transitional faces included are the classic Baskerville, and Monticello, which verges somewhat more to the old style character.

"Letters," as Mr. Dwiggins illustrates graphically, "are made out of thick 'stems,' thin 'hair-lines,' loops and 'serifs,' or finishing strokes."

[Illustration]

How the variations that produce the different styles of Roman types actually came about is easily understood by seeing how the nib of the pen is slanted to write an old style letter like Caslon (_g_), as against holding it at right angles to the written line for the modern letter, such as Scotch (_h_):

[Illustration] _g_ _h_

Differences in curve and finish are a natural result of these two pen positions.

As Mr. Dwiggins explains: "In writing lower-case 'a,' for example, the stroke begins at the little bulb at the upper left-hand corner, passes over the arch at the top, descends to form the straight stem, and finishes with an upward flick; a second motion forms the loop. As the line moves, it swells and thins in accordance with the shape of the pen and the direction of the movement.

[Illustration] _i_ _j_

"In the Caslon letter (_i_), the swelling at the top begins at the bulb or dot; the arch expands throughout its whole curve; the loop has a decided tilt, as has the finishing stroke.

"In the Scotch letter (_j_), the arch is a thin line; the expansion does not begin until the downward stroke of the stem; the swelling of the loop is at right angles to the line of writing, and the letter ends with a perpendicular flick.

"In the 'b,' one notices the difference in the loops and in the serifs at the tops of the letters.

[Illustration] _k_ _l_

"The typical 'old style' serif at the top (_k_) tilts as the pen is tilted; the loop is a tilted sweep of the slanted pen; while the serif and loop of the 'modern' letter (_l_) partake of the perpendicular position of the pen. These characteristics of tilt or perpendicularity appear in all the lower-case letters and to a limited extent in the capitals."

To check the distinctions in different characters in the following twenty types, a magnifying glass will be helpful.

"The artistic quality of a type letter," Mr. Dwiggins concludes, "is determined by its degree of grace of line and proportion. The standards of grace and proportion are to be looked for in the natural motions of the pen. But the quality called art is dependent, too, upon the artist's appreciation of the material in which he works--namely metal. The draughtsman does not attempt to copy _exactly_ the form of his pen-written model, but modifies the pen form to a shape suitable to its final state--that of a metal punch."

NOTES ON THE TYPE FACES USED IN THIS BOOK _By Paul A. Bennett_

NOTE: The following specimens are set in a 10 point type size, except Centaur, in 14 point, and Eldorado, in 11 point, which were the only sizes available for this book.

BASKERVILLE, the fine transitional face named for the eighteenth-century English printer, is available in several contemporary versions. The Linotype cutting used here, most faithful to the original Roman, was produced from a complete font cast from the original matrices, exhumed at Paris in 1929. For twenty years Baskerville has been a favored type with American book-makers.

[Illustration: BASKERVILLE was used for setting _Benjamin Franklin: Printer and Publisher_, pp. 352-367.]

BELL, the fine English transitional-modern, was cut by Richard Austin about 1788 for John Bell, a leading English book and newspaper publisher. The English Monotype version used here was reproduced in 1931 from the original punches, then in possession of the Stephenson-Blake foundry in Sheffield. Bruce Rogers used the type (calling it Brimmer) for many fine Riverside Press books.

[Illustration: BELL was used for setting _Some Tendencies in Modern Typography_, pp. 306-312.]

BEMBO, the fine Venetian old face, is a revival by English Monotype of one of the earliest Aldine romans. That was cut before 1500 by Francesco Griffo of Bologna, the designer responsible for the first Italic type a half-dozen years later, and named for Pietro Bembo, the humanist scholar (later Cardinal and secretary to Pope Leo X), whose _De Aetna_ was printed by Aldus in 1495.

[Illustration: BEMBO was used for setting _Printing Should Be Invisible_, pp. 109-114.]

BODONI BOOK, a light weight rendering of the popular A.T.F. Bodoni, is widely used in the United States for book and periodical composition. Introduced in 1910, it is not a copy of the types of the great Italian, Giambattista Bodoni, but rather a version retaining his principle of modern letter design. The lessened degree of contrast between its thick and thin lines make it gain in reading ease.

[Illustration: BODONI BOOK was used for setting _Harsh Words_, pp. 321-336.]

CALEDONIA, a contemporary Linotype face designed by W. A. Dwiggins, was inspired by the work of Scotch type-founders, in particular by a lighter weight, more slender transitional face cut by William Martin for Bulmer around 1790. Christened for its forebears, Caledonia resembles neither--though it has touches of both Bulmer's Martin and Wilson's Scotch, and also "something of the simple, hard-working, feet-on-the-ground quality of Scotch Modern."

[Illustration: CALEDONIA was used for setting _Author and Printer: G.B.S. and R. & R. C._, pp. 381-401.]

CASLON, the great eighteenth-century English old style, has suffered more from "improvement and refinement" by succeeding generations of type founders than most celebrated types. A development based on Dutch models rather than an original creation, Caslon has been eloquently termed "the finest vehicle for the printed conveyance of English speech that the art of the punch-cutter has yet devised." Monotype's excellent rendering used here (No. 337) reflects the essential qualities of the original.

[Illustration: CASLON was used for setting _Typographic Debut_, pp. 78-82 and _Metal-Flowers_, pp. 83-84.]

CENTAUR, a distinguished Italian Renaissance face designed by Bruce Rogers, was cut by Robert Wiebking of Chicago in 1914, in the 14 point size. Its first use by BR was in a limited edition of De Guerin's _The Centaur_, printed at Carl Rollins' Montague Press. The face, recut by English Monotype in 1929, seemed to D. B. Updike to be "one of the best Roman founts yet designed in America." The Italic is Arrighi, designed by Frederic Warde, used since there is no Centaur Italic.

[Illustration: CENTAUR was used for setting _Paragraphs On Printing_, pp. 281-289, and _B.R.: Adventurer With Type Ornament_, pp. 290-305.]

DEEPDENE, designed and cut by Frederic W. Goudy in 1927, was named for his estate at Marlboro-on-Hudson. In his _A Half Century of Type Design_, Mr. Goudy mentions the face was "suggested by a Dutch type (the Lutetia of Van Krimpen) which had just been introduced ... but as with some of my previous designs, I soon got away from my exemplar to follow a line of my own." The Monotype recutting, done later, is used here.

[Illustration: DEEPDENE was used for setting _Types and Type Design_, pp. 267-273.]

ELDORADO, the latest Linotype face designed by W. A. Dwiggins, was developed through the war years and completed in 1951. It was suggested by an uncommonly compact and distinctive eighteenth-century face used in Madrid by the Spanish printer, DeSancha. In no sense a copy, Eldorado retains in its letter anatomy something of the treatment of curves, arches and junctions that brought distinction to its antecedent, as well as flavor of Spanish typographic tradition.

[Illustration: ELDORADO was used for setting _What is a Private Press_, pp. 175-181.]

ELECTRA, an original modern, designed for Linotype by W. A. Dwiggins, reflects the warmth and distinction of his personal lettering. The effort was to work into Electra letter shapes, where possible, some of the twentieth-century spirit: electricity, high-speed steel, streamlined curves, the readers' familiarity with newspaper and type-writer faces ... to develop letters filled with energy, human warmth and personality. Electra is available with either an oblique Roman lower-case companion form, or the more familiar cursive.

[Illustration: ELECTRA was used for setting the _Investigation Into the Physical Properties of Books_, pp. 129-144 and _Twenty Years After_, pp. 145-152.]

EMERSON was designed by Joseph Blumenthal and cut by Monotype in England in 1934. The face is a duplicate of his Spiral Press type, designed several years earlier and cut for him by Louis Hoell in Frankfort, Germany, in 1931. This face was initially used for a limited edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay on _Nature_, printed on a hand press at Croton Falls in 1932, and privately published. The accompanying Emerson Italic was designed in 1936.

[Illustration: EMERSON was used for setting _Typography of William Morris_, pp. 233-238.]

FAIRFIELD, a slightly decorative, original and contemporary old style, was designed for Linotype by Rudolph Ruzicka, the distinguished American wood engraver. Sharply cut, as though the letters came from the artist's graver rather than pen, Fairfield was designed for reading by "one of the most knowledgeable men in the country about letter forms and their style." To invite continuous reading, the designer feels, "type must have a subtle degree of interest and variety of design."

[Illustration: FAIRFIELD was used for setting _The Fun and Fury of a Private Press_, pp. 220-225.]

GARAMOND was introduced in America by ATF in 1919, when their cutting, based on the _caractères de l'Université_ of the Imprimerie Nationale, appeared. Since, at least eight other versions have been made: by the English and American Linotype and Monotype, by Intertype, Ludlow, and the Stempel foundry. A documented article considering the XVI and XVII sources of the Garamond types, by Paul Beaujon, appeared in _The Fleuron_, V. This version is the American Monotype.

[Illustration: GARAMOND was used for setting _Colophons_, pp. 31-44.]

GILL SANS, designed by Eric Gill in 1928, was patterned after lettering done for the Douglas Cleverdon book-shop in Bristol. First offered by English Monotype as a titling font (caps, figures and points only), the lower-case was added as the face grew in favor. Today, Gill is the most popular sans serif in England. It ranges through a variety of weights, including light, normal, heavy, extra heavy, and shadow and outline display and condensed versions.

[Illustration: GILL SANS was used for setting _Notes on Modern Printing_, pp. 350-351.]

GRANJON was designed for Linotype by the late George W. Jones, one of England's greatest printers. It is neither a copy of a classic face nor an original creation, but rather something between the two, with its basic design stemming from classic Garamond sources. An exceedingly compact and useful old style, Granjon is exceptionally clear in small sizes. Its space-saving virtues are important in the book and periodical field.

[Illustration: GRANJON was used for setting _Printers as Men of the World_, pp. 88-102.]

JANSON, the distinguished seventeenth-century old style face, is presumed Dutch in origin. It was issued by Anton Janson, a Leipsic punch-cutter and type-founder, between 1660 and 1687. Little is known of Janson to supplement his first type specimen issued in 1675. The original matrices, bought in Holland from the heirs of Edling, Janson's successor, are possessed by the Stempel foundry in Frankfort, Germany. The Linotype recutting of Janson was made from type cast from the original matrices.

[Illustration: JANSON was used for setting all the essays in this book excepting those indicated in other faces.]

MONTICELLO is a recutting of the famous Binny & Ronaldson Roman No. 1, a distinguished early American face cut in 1796 in Philadelphia. Type cast from the original matrices by A. T. F. has been favored for years by such discriminating printers as D. B. Updike, Fred Anthoensen and the Grabhorns. Linotype's remodeling of the type for modern use was named for the _Papers of Thomas Jefferson_, a fifty-volume publishing project by Princeton, for which the face was adopted.

[Illustration: MONTICELLO was used for setting the _First Work With American Types_, pp. 65-77.]

PERPETUA was designed by Eric Gill, the eminent English sculptor and maker of letters with pen, chisel and graver. Mr. Gill's account of his type (cut in England): "from drawings made by me. Those drawings were not made with special reference to typography--they were simply drawn with brush and ink. For the typographical quality of the fount, as also for the remarkably fine and precise cutting of the punches, the Monotype Corporation is to be praised."

[Illustration: PERPETUA was used for setting _Typography_, pp. 257-266.]

POLIPHILUS is a literal reproduction of the Aldine Roman used in the _Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_ in 1499, cut by Francesco Griffo. The recutting, by the English Monotype organization in 1923 (from sheets of the book) was attempted with the thought of providing a type to convey an old-world atmosphere appropriate for reprinting fifteenth-century classics. The accompanying Italic, named _Blado_, was the first of a number of Chancery italics to come from European type-founders.

[Illustration: POLIPHILUS was used for setting _Some Collectors Read_, pp. 191-211.]

TIMES ROMAN was designed by Stanley Morison for the London _Times_, and first used in that great newspaper. Its masculine simplicity, directness of design and excellent color makes it exceptionally useful for periodicals and general commercial work. The basic design objective of maximum legibility in minimum space has resulted in the larger letter-structure that makes each point size seem the equivalent of a size larger in most other types.

[Illustration: TIMES ROMAN was used for setting _The First Principles of Typography_, pp. 239-251.]

INDEX

Adler, Elmer, 221

advertising card, 160-61, 167, 168

_Aesop_ (Parma, 1483), 57

Aldine Poets series, 156

Aldine type face, 241 Italic, 274

Aldus; _see_ Manutius, Aldus

alphabet Greek, 4-14 Hebrew, 13-14 letters of, 6-13 Phoenician, 4-14 Roman, 4-14 sources of, 3-14

American Institute of Graphic Arts, xiv, 170 "Fifty Books of the Year," 165, 321-22 Trade Book Clinic, 164, 165

American Type Founders Co., 254

Ames, Joseph, _Typographical Antiquities_, 38, 78

Anabat, 154

Anne of Austria, 105

Anthoensen, Fred, 419

Antigone Greek type, 207

Apollo Press, 384

appendix, 163

Applegarth, Augustus, 27

Armitage, Merle, xii-xiv, 319 _Notes on Modern Printing_, 350

Arnoullet, Balthazar, 60

Arrighi type face, 414

Arrivabene, Georgius, 53

Ashbee, C. R., _The Private Press_, 180

Ashendene Press, 181, 188, 215 _Bibliography_, 181 _Virgil_, 209

Austin, Richard, 92, 99, 411

back matter, 163-64

Bagford, John, 64

Bailey, Francis, 76

Baldwin, Stanley, 197 n.

Barker-Mill, Peter, 218

_Barnacles from Many Bottoms_, 297

Barnhart Brothers & Spindler (Chicago), 254, 369

Bartlett, Edward E., 164

Baskerville, John, 60, 64, 92, 98, 186 letter-spacing of, 287-88

Baskerville type face, 155-56, 244, 404 specimen, 411

bastard title, 160, 168

Bauhaus School, typography of, 306-7, 319

Bay, Jacob, 69-77

Bayer, Herbert, xii, xiv

Beaujon, Paul, 417

Becker, Carl L., 363

Begg, John, xiv

Beilenson, Peter, xiii, 164, 165, 168 _Graphic Forms_, 313

Bell, John, 92, 411 _British Poets_, 100, 384 _British Theatre_, 78, 384 career of, 99-100

Bell type face, 403 specimen, 411

Belloc, Hilaire, 192

Bembo, Pietro, 53, 94, 412

Bembo type face, 403 specimen, 412

Beneti, Cyprian, 41

Bennett, Arnold, 203

Bennett, Paul A., xv, 290

Bensley, Thomas, 92

Benton, Linn Boyd, 254

Benton, Morris Fuller, 254

Berghen, Adrien van, 46, 48

Bernard, St., _Sermones_ (1481), 44

Berners, Juliana, comp., _Book of St. Albans_, 107

Berthelet, Thomas, 50

Besant, Walter, 387

Bible Estienne, 97 first printed, 183-84 German (1478), 18 Gutenberg, 226-27 Latin (1456), 18 Plantin polyglot, 96 printing monopoly in England, 184 n. Rogers _World_, 302-4 Sower's German, 67, 70 Vulgate (Venice, 1487), 53

bibliography, 163

binding, 119

binding, limp vellum, 230

Binny, Archibald, 76

Binny & Ronaldson (Philadelphia), 77, 252, 419

Birrell, Francis, 199

black-letter Gutenberg, 274-76 modern, 241

Black Sun Press, 319

Blado, Antonio, 54

Blado Italic type face, 54, 420

Blaeu, Willem J., 89

Blumenthal, Joseph, 164, 165 Emerson, 255, 416

Blunt, Wilfrid, 192

Bocard, Andrieu, 41

Bodoni, Giambattista, 60, 64, 92, 98 _Manuale Tipografico_ (1818), 276

Bodoni Book type face specimen, 412

Bodoni's 'soprasilvio,' 276-78, 284, 287

Bologna, Francesco da, 92

book, anatomy of; _see under individual headings_

## book design, principles of, 115-28, 281-89, 350-51

_Book of St. Albans_, 107

Bourdillon, F. W., 79

Boydell, John, _Shakespeare_, 78

Braby, Dorothea, 218

Bradbury & Evans, 157

Bradford, Andrew, 356-57, 362

Bradford, William, 356, 358

Bradley, J. W., _Dictionary of Miniaturists_, 40

Bradley, Will, 253, 291

Bradley type face, 253

Bridges, Robert, 238

Brimmer type face, 411

Browning, Robert, 192

Buckland-Wright, John, 218

Buell, Abel, 65-66, 68, 71-73, 252, 255

Bull of Pius IX (Mainz, 1463), 42, 53

Bulmer, William, 92, 100, 413

Burn & Oates, 194, 196

Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, 233, 236, 238

Caledonia type face, 255, 404 specimen, 413

Calkins, Earnest Elmo, 368

calligraphy, 255, 337-43 defined, 337-38

Cambridge University Press, 51, 158, 184 n., 185, 291

Campbell, Dr. William J., _Collection of Franklin Imprints_, 354, 357, 360, 365

Canstein, Baron von, 29

Capell, Edward, _Prolusions_, 78

capital letters, 257-61

Cary, Mary, _Diary_, 197

Caslon, William, 63, 64, 89, 92

Caslon type face, 142, 156, 195, 204, 241, 254, 391 rediscovery of, 318 Shaw's preference for, 390 specimen, 413

Catherine de Médici, 106

Catherine the Great, 106

Caxton, William, 19, 29, 42, 49, 89, 92, 184-85 _Dictes or Sayengis_, 19, 80

Caxton Club, 33

Centaur type face, 220, 255-56, 403 specimen, 414

Central Type Foundry (St. Louis), 253

_Century Dictionary_, 34

Champollion, J. F., 3

Chapman, Dr. R. W., 392, 394

Chappe, Paulinus, 18

Charlemagne, 12

Charles, Thomas, 29

Cheltenham type face, 254

Chesterfield, Earl of (Philip Stanhope), 90

Chiswick Press, 217

Christie, E. D., 95

_Chronicles of the londe of England_, 40

Cicero, _Epistolae_ (Venice, 1469), 40

Clark, Edward, relations with Shaw, 382-401

Clark, Robert, 384-85

Clark, R. & R., Shaw's printer, 381-401

Claudin, Anatole, 176

Cleland, T. M., xiii, 112-13 _Harsh Words_, xi, 321 type ornaments, 297, 299

Cleve, Johann von, _Cantiones_, 42

Cloister type face, 254

Cobbett, William, _Rural Rides_, 208

Cobden-Sanderson, T. J., 180-81, 188, 229, 388

Cockerell, Douglas, 395

Cockerell, Sir Sydney, 233

Coleridge, S. T., _Table Talk_, 157

Colines, Simon, 185

Collins, F. H., _Authors' and Printers' Dictionary_, 392

Collins, Howard, 394

Colman, Morris, 164, 166-67

colophon, 32-44, 52 defined, 32-38 examples of, 38-42, 44

composition, defined, 242

Conkwright, P. J., 164, 166

Conrad, Joseph, 116

Cooper, Oswald, 254

Copland, Robert, 185

copyright, notice of, 161, 166, 167, 168

Coward, Noel, 208

Cowper, Edward, 26-27

Croce, Benedetto, _Autobiography_, 312

Crompton, 26

Currer, Mrs. Richardson, 107

Currie, Kent, 272

Daniel, Rev. C. H. O., 178, 187

Daniel Press, 187, 234, 238

Darton, F. J. H.; _see_ Sawyer, C. J.

Davies, Peter, 208

Davis, Southwick, 379

Dawson, Thomas, 51

Day, John, 50, 80

Daye, Matthew, 97

Daye, Stephen, 97

_Deceyte of Women, The_, 53, 61

Decretals of Gregory IX (Rome, 1474), 41

dedication, 161-62, 166-68

Deepdene type face, 223, 403 specimen, 414

de La Haye, Corneille, 60

Dent, J. M., 157

DeSancha, Antonio, 415

De Vinne, Theodore Low, x, 31 _Notable Printers of Italy_, 279 _Plain Printing Types_, 370 _Treatise on Title-pages_, 42-43, 274

De Vinne type face, 253

Diamond Classics, 156, 236

Diane de Poitiers, 106

Dibdin, T. F., 104

_Dictionary of American Biography_, 363

Didot, Firmin, 26 career, 100

Didot, François Ambroise, 92

Didot family, 64, 90, 92, 101

_Diui Athanasii_ (Paris, 1500), 41

Dolet, Etienne, 94-96

Donaldson, Alexander, 384

Dorici brothers, 53

double-page spread, 168

Doves Press, 117, 180, 188, 229

Du Barry, Countesse, 105

du Bois, Simon, _Hours_ (1527), 154

Dunlap, John, 76

Dunster, Henry, 98

Dunster, Mrs. Henry, 98

Dürer, Albrecht, 55, 92, 275, 277

Dwiggins, W. A., x Caledonia, 255, 413 Eldorado, 415 Electra, 255, 415 _MSS by WAD_, 129, 405 "Shapes of Roman Letters," 405-7

Dyck, Christoffel van, 92

Edinburgh, publishing history of, 384-85

Ege, Otto, ix, 3

Eldorado type face, specimen, 415

Electra type face, 255-56, 403 specimen, 415

Elizabeth, Queen, 105-6

Elzevir family, 60, 92, 97

Emerson type face, 255-56 specimen, 416

_Encyclopaedia Britannica_, 35, 227, 239, 338 first edition, 384

engraving for illustration, 218 invention of, 25

Enschedé Foundry, 221-22

Erasmus, Desiderius, 94 _Adagia_, 29 _Colloquia Familiaria_, 29

Essex House Press, 180

Estienne, Robert, 94 n. career, 96-97

Estienne family, 92, 96 n., 185

Eugene, Prince of Savoy, 211

Evans, Sir Arthur, 4

Eve, Clovis, 105

Eve, Nicolas, 105

_Exercitium super Pater Noster_, 23

Fairfield type face, 255-56

Fairfield type faces, specimen, 416

Faques, William, 50

Farjeon, Herbert, 209

Farleigh, John, 399

Fell types, 178, 187, 196

Fichet, Guillaume, 153-54

Field and Tuer, 157

Figgins, Vincent, 92

Fine, Oronce, _Quadrans Astrolabicus_, 56

Finley, John, 378

_Fleuron, The_, x, 388, 391, 417

Flower, Desmond, 100, 153

Ford, Paul Leicester, _Many-Sided Franklin_, 354-55, 362, 363-64

foreword; _see_ preface

format; _see_ book design

Foulis, Andrew, 186

Foulis, Robert, 186

Fournier, P. S., 57, 59, 64

Fournier family, 92

Fournier type face, Shaw's choice of, 392

Fox, Emmanuel, 70, 76

Fox, Justus, 67-77

_Fragment of World Judgment_, 18

François I, 49, 94-95, 97

Franklin, Benjamin, 29 _Autobiography_, 366 career, 101-2; as printer, 352-67 _Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity_, 359 epitaph, 366-67 and Hall, 365 imprints, 357, 361, 364, 366 "Improvement of Printing Backwards," 227 _New England Courant_, 355-56 _Pennsylvania Gazette_, 362 _Poor Richard_ almanacs, 362-63

Franklin, Deborah Read, 362

Franklin, James, 353-56, 358, 362-63 imprints, 354-55

Franklin, Josiah, 352-53

_Freeman's Oath, The_, 97-98

Froben, Johann, 62

front matter elements of, 160-63, 166-68 typography of, 246-49

Fuhrmann, Dr. Otto, 224

Funk & Wagnalls' _Standard Dictionary_, 34

Fust, Johann, 18, 38-39, 42, 49, 53, 91, 92, 183

Galesburg imprint, 378-80

Galloway, Joseph, 74

Garamond, Claude, 92, 93, 276

Garamond type face, 62, 223, 256 specimen, 417

Gardiner, Thomas, 51

Garnett, David, and Nonesuch Press, 191, 198-99, 205, 209

Garnett, Porter, xiii, 115, 178

Garnett, Richard, 37-38

Garvin, J. L., 194

Gaunt, Sydney, 254

_Geistliches Magazien, Ein_, 67-69, 71

Geminus, Thomas, _Anatomy_, 57

Gentry, Helen, _Chronology_, 91

Gering, Ulrich, 154

_Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke_, 31

Gibbings, Robert, 218

Gilgamesh, epic of, 214

Gill, Eric, xiii, 218, 257, 417 Perpetua, 419

Gill Sans type face, specimen, 417

Glick, Milton, 164, 166

Glogoviensis, Johannes, 53

glossary, 163

Godfrey, Thomas, 362

Golden Cockerel Press, 212-19 imprints, 217-18

Golden Hind Press, 164, 220-25 imprints, 220-23

Goltzius, Hubert, 60

Gooden, Stephen, 199, 206

Goodhue, Bertram G., 254

Gordon, Watson, 129

Goudy, Frederic W., xiii, 222, 232, 267, 274, 279, 318 Deepdene, 414 _Half Century of Type Design_, 414 type designs, 222, 255

Grabhorn, Edwin, xiii, 226

Grabhorn Press, 181, 226-32, 419 Whitman, _Leaves of Grass_, 232

Graf, Urs, 55

Granjon, Robert, 57, 276

Granjon type face, specimen, 418

Granniss, Ruth Sheppard, 31, 107

Greene, Belle Da Costa, 107

Greenhood, David; _see_ Gentry, Helen

Grevill, Sir Foulk, 203

Grien, Hans Baldung, 55

Griffo, Francesco, 412, 420

Grimm, Baron Melchior von, 306

Grimm, Jacob, 307

Grimm, Wilhelm, 307

Grolier, Jean, 92, 94

Grolier Club, 51, 83 n., 107, 365 Dowson's _Pierrot of the Minute_, 297-98

Grotefend, G. F., 3

Gryphius, Sebastian, 95

Gutenberg, Johann, 18, 23-24, 90-92, 183 Bible, 226-27 Rushmore hoax, 223-24 types of, 274

Guthrie, James, 179

Hadrian type face, 255

Haebler, Dr. Konrad, 53

Haight, Anne Lyon, 103

half title, 163, 165, 167-68

Hall, D., 364-65

Han, Ulrich, 41

Hardouyn brothers, 154 _Book of Hours_ (1500), 154

Harmsworth, Cecil, 208

Harmsworth, Desmond, 208

Harmsworth, Eric, 208

Harper & Brothers, 221, 225

Harrison, Henry, 319

Hart, Horace, 394

Harter, Evelyn, ix, 88, 164-66

Hayward, John, 205

Heber, Richard, 107

Hector, Benedictus, 48

_Heiligen_, 22

Hendrickson, James, 281

Henry II of France, 106

Hind, Arthur M., 23

Hodgson, Ralph, 199

Hoell, Louis, 416

Hogben, Lancelot, ix, 15

Holbein, Hans, the Elder, 55

Holbein, Hans, the Younger, 55 "Dance of Death," 277-78

Hopfer, Daniel, 55

Hornby, St. John, 188, 215

Hroswitha, 104

Hughes-Stanton, Blair, 218

Huxley, Aldous, xiii, 344

_Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_, 420

imposition, defined, 242-43

impression, 119-20, 229-30

index, 163-64

ink colors used, 286-87 varnish in, 229

_Inland Printer_, 254

Intelligencer Print (Galesburg), 378-80

introduction, 162-63

Italic type, 257-61 first used, 412 proper use of, 261

Jackson, Holbrook, xi, 155, 388 _Anatomy of Bibliomania_, x _Fear of Books_, x _Printing of Books_, x, 157-58, 233

Jacobs, S. A., xiv

Jaggard, William, _Nobilitas Politica_ (1608), 285-86

Janson, Anton, 418

Janson type face, 210, 403 specimen, 418

Jenson, Nicolas, 34, 92, 274, 288 n. _Pliny_ (1472), 276

Jenson's Roman type face, 274-77

John of Speier (Spire), 19, 40

Johnson, A. F., 52

Johnson, J., _Typographia_, 78 n., 268

Johnson, Samuel, 382

Jones, David, 218

Jones, George W., 418

Josephy, Robert, ix, xiii, 169

Judith, Countess of Flanders, 104

Kauffer, E. McKnight, 205-6

Keimer, Samuel, 357-58, 359-62 imprints, 357 _Universal Instructor_, 362

Keith, Sir William, 358

Kelmscott Press, 43, 177-80, 187-88, 233-38 binding, 230 _Chaucer_, 101, 209, 236 paper, 228-29 _Recuyell of the Histories of Troye_, 237 types, 253, 255 _see also_ Morris, William

Kennington, Eric, 395

Kent, Henry Watson, xiv

Kerver, Thielman, 274

Keynes, Geoffrey, 205

Kipling, Rudyard, 7

Kirkwood, James, 385

Koberger, Anton, 92

Koch, Rudolph, design, 207

König, Friedrich, 26

Krantz, Martin, 154

Kromberger, Johann, 97

Laboratory Press, 178

Lamb, Charles, 32

Lane, John, 157, 194

Lang, Andrew, _The Library_, 103-4

Lansbury, George, 197-98

Lasteyrie, Count de, _Typographie Economique_ (1837), xii, 306

Lawrence, T. E., 209, 218

leading; _see_ letter-spacing

Lee, Marshall, ed., _Books for Our Time_, xiv

Lee Priory Press, 186

Leeu, Gerard, 40

LeRouge, Pierre, 50

lettering, 338-43, 405-7 defined, 338

letter-spacing, 287-88 leading, 243-44, 284 "driving out," 250, 402

Lewis, W. S., 98-99

ligature, 80-81

Linotype, defined, 404

list of illustrations, 162

Livingston, Luther S., _Franklin and His Press at Passy_, 365

Longlond, J., _A Sermon_ (1536), 58

Lowell, Amy, 107

lower-case letters, 257-61

Lowinsky, Thomas, drawing, 204

Lutetia type face, 232, 414

Luther, Martin _To the Christian Nobility_, 29 tracts, 55

Lydgate, John, 53

Lydian type face, 255-56

McCulloch, William, 69-71, 74, 76

MacDonald, James Ramsay, 197 n.

Machiavelli, Nicolò, _Discorsi_ (1531), 54

Mackall, Leonard L., "Notes for Bibliophiles," 34

McKerrow, Ronald B., ix, 78 _Introduction to Bibliography_, 31, 35-36, 382

Macmillan, Daniel, 387

McMurtrie, D. C., _The Book_, 18-19, 23, 27, 28

Madan, Falconer, 176

Maillet, Jacques, 47, 50

_Mainz Diary: New Light on the Invention of Printing_, 224

Malory, Sir Thomas, _Morte d'Arthur_, 41

Mansion, Colard, 19

Manutius, Aldus, 48-49, 50, 89, 92, 156, 185 Bembo's _De Aetna_, 412 career, 93-94

Marchant, Guy, 47

Marguerite of Navarre, 105

Marie Antoinette, 105

Martin, Gilbert, 384

Martin, John, _Bibliographical Catalogue of Books Privately Printed_, 175-76

Martin, William, 92, 413

Mary Stuart, 105

_Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-Letter_, 66

Mathews, Elkin, 157

Maxwell, William, 206 relations with Shaw, 381-401

Mazarin, Jules, 105

Mendel, Vera; _see_ Meynell, Vera

Meredith, George, 192, 387

Meredith, Hugh, 360-62

Mergenthaler, Ottmar, 27, 254

_Merry England_, 193-94

Merrymount Press, xii, 181

Merrymount type face, 254

metal flower; _see_ printer's flower

Meynell, Alice, 192-94 _Ten Poems_, 197

Meynell, Everard, 192

Meynell, Sir Francis, xiv, 158, 189, 231 Nonesuch Press, 191-211 "Printer's Flowers and Arabesques," x on type-setting machines, 227-28

Meynell, Vera and Nonesuch Press, 191, 198-99, 201, 205, 206-7

Meynell, Wilfrid, 192-96, 199

Middle Hill Press, 178

Middleton, Henry, 80

Miller & Richards, 384

Miller-Parker, Agnes, 218

missals, first printed, 22-23

Mitchelson, David, 66-67

Monotype, 158, 189 defined, 404

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 211

Montague Press, 291 De Guerin's _The Centaur_, 414

Monticello type face, 403 specimen, 419

Moore, George, 193 _Ulick and Soracha_, 206

Mores, Edward Rowe, ix, 83, 370

Morgan, Charles, _House of Macmillan_, 387

Morgan, Gwenda, 218

Morison, Stanley, x, xiii, 99, 116, 158, 196, 384 on calligraphy, 338 "First Principles of Typography," 239 Times Roman, 420

Morris, William, xi, 179, 390 achievement and influence, 187-88, 227, 228-29, 230, 253 career, 100-1 _Note on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press_, 180 _Roots of the Mountains_, 236, 238, 388 typography of, 233-38, 275, 278 _see also_ Kelmscott Press

Mountjoye type face, 403

Moxon, Edward, 83, 157

Moxon, Joseph, 57

Murray, John, 157, 387-88

Musurus, Marcus, 94

Nash, John, 218

National Association for the Advancement of Art, 388

Nelson, George, xiv

_New Colophon, The_, xv

_New England Courant, The_, 355-56

New York _Herald Tribune_, 34

Newdigate, Bernard H., 181, 390

Niccolo, Simon di, 41

Nichols, Dr. Charles L., _Justus Fox_, 70

Nonesuch Press, 158, 181, 189, 228 history of, 191-211

Nonesuch Press, imprints, 195, 200, 204-5, 207, 209-10 press mark, 199 and Random House, 208 _Shakespeare_, 209

_Nuremberg Chronicle, The_, 41, 91, 92

O'Connor, John, 218

Ogg, Oscar, ix, 337

Olpe, J. von, 91

Orcutt, William Dana, _Manual of Linotype Typography_, 160-65

Original Old Style type face (Italic), 223

ornament; _see_ type ornament

Oswald, John Clyde, _Benjamin Franklin, Printer_, 358

_Oxford English Dictionary_, 34-35

Oxford type face, 256

Oxford University Press, 51, 79, 158, 184 n., 185, 196

Palmer, Samuel, 358-59

Pannartz, Arnold, 78, 153

paper, 16-18, 26-27 Chinese invention of, 17 dampening of, 229 esparto grass, 26 mills, 17-18, 26-27 papyrus, 17 rag, 26 texture of, 119 wood pulp, 26

Patmore, Coventry, 193, 194

Pelican Press, 198

Pelliot, Paul, 25

Pembroke, Countess of (Mary Herbert), 106

Penguin Books, 158 editions of Shaw, 381-82, 395

_Pennsylvania Gazette, The_, 362-63

_Pennsylvania Mercury, The_, 65, 68, 71-74 types for, 74-76

Perpetua type face, 403 specimen, 419

Peter Pauper Press, 165

Petit, Jean, 41

Phillips, Fred, _Old-Fashioned Type Book_, 255

pi, derivation of name, 370

pica, derivation of name, 370

Pickering, William, 156-57, 234, 318

Pigouchet, Phillipe, 154

Pio family, 94

Plant, Marjorie, _English Book Trade_, 382

Plantin, Christopher, 60, 96

playing cards, 21-22

Pleydenworff, Wilhelm, 41

Poe, E. A., "The Gold Bug," 8

point system, x, 369

Poliphilus type face, 200, 403 specimen, 420

Pollard, Alfred W., xi, 35, 36-37, 176, 182 _Essay on Colophons_, 33, 37-38, 40-41

Pollard, Graham, 78 n.

Pompadour, Mme. de, 105

Poulton, T. L., 206

preface, 162-63

printer, amateur, 182-90 _see also_ private press

printer's flower, 57-59, 83-84, 156-57 _see also_ type ornament

printer's mark, 45-51

printing development of, 15-30 importance of, 85-87 principles of, 226-32 restricted in England, 185-86

private press defined, and aims of, 175-81, 182 influence of, 186-90 principles and pleasures of, 313-20 types of, 177-79 _see also_ printer, amateur

Proctor, Robert, 188

Proctor's Greek type face, 188

Psalter (Mainz, 1457), 38-39, 49, 183

punch-cutting machine, Benton pantograph, 252-54

punctuation marks, 81-82, 285, 289

Püterschein, Dr. Herman, 224

Pynson, Richard, 53

Pythagoras, 12

Rabelais, François, _Pantagruel_, 95

Radin, Simon, 41

Random House, and Nonesuch Press, 208

Ransom, Will, ix, 254 _Private Presses_, 175, 365

Ratdolt, Erhard, 53, 55

Ravilious, Eric, 218

Rawlinson, Sir Henry C., 3

Read, Herbert, _Grass Roots of Art_, 155, 157

_Recuyell of the Histories of Troye_, 19, 49

Regiomontanus (Müller, J.), _Calendar_, 53

Reichl, Ernst, xiv, 164-65, 168

Reinheckel, Andreas, 42

Reuchlin, Johann, 94

Richards, Grant, 384, 385 _Author Hunting_, 388

Ricketts and Shannon, 188

Riverside Press, 231, 291, 411

Rochester Press, 177

Rodenberg, Julius; _see_ Simon, Oliver

Roeder, Ralph, 93

Roffe, Edwin, 177

Rogers, Bruce, xiii, 164, 165, 188, 220, 318, 411 Centaur, 255, 414 designs, 290-305 influence, 231 _Paragraphs on Printing_, 181, 281-89, 403 _World_ Bible, 302-4

Rollins, Carl Purington, xiii, 98, 164, 166, 252, 291, 318, 414 _B. R.--America's Typographic Playboy_, 300-1

"Romney Street Press," 196-97

Root, Riley, _Journal of Travels_ (Galesburg, 1850), 379-80

Rose, Aquila, 356-57

Routledge, George, 26

Rudge, William, 231

Rudge Press, 295

running head, 245

Rushmore, Arthur W., ix, 164, 167-68, 220

Russell, Bertrand, 198 _Unpopular Essays_, xii-xiii

Ruzicka, Rudolph design, 51 Fairfield, 255, 416

Sandford, Christopher, _Cockalorum_, 212

sans serif type face, 332-33, 417 specimen, 417

Sassoon, Siegfried, 198

Savonarola, Girolamo, tracts, 53

Sawyer, C. J., and Darton, F. J. H., _English Books 1475-1500_, 176

Schöffer, Peter, 38-40, 42, 49, 53, 91, 183

School Press, 179

Scotch Modern type face, 284, 287, 413

Schwartz, Joseph, xv

Schwartz, Miriam, xv

serifs, 255, 405-7

Shand, James, xiv, 381

Shaw, G. B., xiv editions, 385-88, 391-92, 395, 398-99 filmscripts, 393-95 letters quoted, 383, 387-90 proof correction, 393-94, 396-97, 398, 400 relations with R. & R. Clark, 381-401 shorthand, 383, 394 type preferences, 391-92

Shaw, Mrs. G. B., 399

_Ship of Fools, The_ (1494), 91

Sidney, Sir Philip, _Arcadia_, 106, 203

Simon, Oliver, 154, 158 and Rodenberg, Julius, _Printing of Today_, 344 n.

Sitwell, Sir Osbert, 208, 213

Smithers, Leonard, 157

Sower, Christopher, Jr., 67-70, 72, 74-75

Sower, Samuel, 76

Sparrow, John, 206

Spiral Press, 165, 416

Squire, Sir John C., 192

Steele, Robert, _Revival of Printing_, 181

Stevenson, R. L., 7

Stiles, Rev. Ezra, _Literary Diary_, 71-72, 252

Stöckel, Wolfgang, 53

Stone, Reynolds, 218 design, 102

Strawberry Hill Press, 176, 186

Strozzi, Piero, 106

Sutton, Hannah, 107

Sweynheim, Conrad, 78, 153

table of contents, 162, 167

Targ, William, xv _Making of the Bruce Rogers World Bible_, 304

Tatham, Elizabeth, 107

Tauchnitz, Bernhard, 234

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, _In Memoriam_ (1850), 157

Thomas, Isaiah _Additions to Thomas's History of Printing_, 69-70, 74 _Specimen of Printing Types_, 63

Thompson, Francis, 192-94

Times Roman type face, 403 specimen, 420

title page Bagford collection, 64 development of, 42-43, 52-64 engraved, 57-60 type ornaments, 57-60 typographic, 60-64 typography of, 161, 167-68, 246-47 woodcut, 53-57

Tomkinson, G. S., _Select Bibliography of Modern Presses_, 181

Topolski, Feliks, 399 drawing, 381

Tory, Geoffroy, 60, 62, 92, 154, 185, 275

Tournes, Jean de, 55, 95

Trautwein, Joseph, xv

Trenholm, George, 254

Trevelyan, G. M., _English Social History_, 384

Tschichold, Jan, 158

type faces modern, 170-71, 174, 404-6 old style, 404-5 principles of design, 267-73 transitional, 404-6 used by job printers in 1880's, 369-72 _see also_ typography, _and under individual names_

type founding, early history of, in U. S., 65-77

type ornament, 57-59 Cleland's designs, 297, 299 Rogers's designs, 290-305 _see also_ printer's flower

typographer, and publisher, 153-59

_Typographie Economique_; _see_ Lasteyrie, Count de

typography Bauhaus, 306-7 characters in early English, 78-80 defined, 239-40 in modern trade books, 169-74 of William Morris, 234-38 old vs. modern, 274-80

typography, principles of, 109-14, 160-68, 239-51, 257-66 problems in modern, 344-49, 402-7 tendencies in modern, 306-12, 321-36 _see also_ type faces

Typophiles, The, 102, 129

Ulhard, Philip, 42

Updike, Daniel Berkeley, xii, xiii, 92-93, 95, 188, 223, 288 n., 318, 403, 414, 419 _In the Day's Work_, x, 158 _Notes on the Merrymount Press_, 181 _Printing Types_, x, 88 _Some Aspects of Printing_, x, 181, 306

Vale Press, 188

Valéry, Paul, _Les deux vertus d'un livre_, 122

Van Doren, Carl, 101

Van Hoesen, H. B., _Bibliography_, 36

Vascosan, Michel de, 60

Vele, Abraham, 53, 61

Verrue, Countesse de, 105

Vico, Enea, 60

Vincentino, Lodovico, 54

Vorsterman, Willem, 50

Vostre, Simon le, 154 _Book of Hours_, 278

Waflard, 92

Walker, Emery, 188, 228, 229, 388

Walpole, Horace, 98-99, 178, 186

Walter, F. K., _Bibliography_, 36

Wang Cheng, 25

Warde, Beatrice, xiii, 109

Warde, Frederic, 414

Warton, Thomas, _History of English Poetry_, 37

Watson, James, ix _Art of Printing_, 85, 384

Watts, John, 359

Waugh, Evelyn, 213

Way & Williams, 177

Webb, Beatrice, 388

Webb, Clifford, 218

Webb, Sidney, 388

Webster's _Dictionary_, 35

_Week-End Book, The_, 199

_Weekly Register, The_, 194

Weiditz, Hans, 55

Westcott and Thomson (Philadelphia), xv

Westminster Press, 194

Wheeler, Monroe, 319

Whitnash Press, 179

Whittingham, Charles, 156, 318

Wiebking, Robert, 254, 273, 414

Wight, John, 50

Williams, Iolo, _Elements of Book-Collecting_, 36

Willoughby, Edwin Eliott, 45

Wilson, Alexander, 89

Winship, George Parker, 88-89 _Sailor Narratives_, 291

Winterich, John T., xiv, 176 _Early American Books and Printing_, 352

Wolff, H., Co., 165

Wolgemut, Michael, 41

Wollaston, William, _Religion of Nature Delineated_, 358-59

women, as bibliophiles, 103-8

wood-block printing Chinese origins, 21 _Heiligen_, 25 playing cards, 21-22

Worde, Wynkyn de, 57, 58

Wordsworth, William, _Prelude_ (1850), 157

World Publishing Co., xv _World_ Bible, 302-4

Wroth, Lawrence C., 65

Yeats, W. B., 192

Young, Thomas, 3

_This book was composed in twenty-two different type faces by Westcott & Thomson, Inc., Philadelphia. Typography and design by Jos. Trautwein._