Fine Printing and Private Presses 9780712363945, 9780712347228

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The British Library Studies in the History of the Book

FINE PRINTING & PRIVATE PRESSES

Fine Printing and Private Presses Selected Papers This volume brings together for the first time some of the important and thoughtprovoking lectures and articles by Roderick Cave, whose The Private Press (1971, revised edition 1983) remains a standard history in the field. Several of these essays have previously appeared only in American or Australian publications, and many only in very limited editions. Several of the papers included here have not before been published.

The selection of papers for this volume ranges over forty years of Cave's writing, and draw on his archival research in several countries. The book starts with articles surveying the broad field from an historical. or marketing perspective, and includes several studies based on interviews with those who were working at the Boars Head, Gregynog and Golden Cockerel Presses in the years between the world wars. Other articles on individual presses range from those of a French schoolboy in the 1790s, through modern American, Australian and British private presses, to that operated by the remarkable Count Potocki de Montalk, who claimed to be Wladislas V, King of Poland. The volume also includes articles on a Victorian book collectors' club, the Philobiblon Society, and on high quality commercial printing at the Folio Society and the Grey Wall Press.

,

The British Library Studies in the History of the Book

FINE PRINTING AND PRIVATE PRESSES

Fig. I . Will R;msom ot case in his printing shop in Chicago, c. 19z,z, at about the time he was working with the Golden Cockerel Pres ', and a little before his co-operation with Dal'd lIuntcr.

FINE PRINTING AND

PRIVATE PRESSES Selected Papers by Roderick Cave

THE BRITISH LIBRARY 2001

© 2001 Roderick Cave First published 2001 by The British Library 96 Euston Road London NWI 2DB British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP record for this book is available from The British Library ISBN

0712347224

Designed by John Trevitt Typeset by Norman Tilley Graphics, Northampton Printed in England by St Edmundsbury Press, Bury St Edmunds

CONTENTS

Introduction Acknowledgements

page ix Xl

GENERAL

1 Aspects of British Private Presses: a View from 1970

1

The annual 'Taste in Typography' lecture at UCLA, 1970; hitherto unpublished 2

3

4

'Peculiaria ac privata': the Historiography of Private Presses, & the Bibliographical Description of Fine Printing Originally published in Counter 6, 1997

9

Privish and Perish? a Case Study of Pressbook Production in Britain between the Wars Originally published in Counter 8, 1998

19

'Printing at Home'; an un-Common Press in the Canterbury Museum, New Zealand Revised from a paper originally published in An Index to Civilization: Studies of Printing and Publishing History in Honour of Keith Maslen

29

(Clayton, Victoria, 1993)

INDIVIDUAL PRESSES AND PRINTERS

Marquis de Bercy, France 5

An Amateur Printer of the French Revolution

35

Originally published in The Prirate Library, Winter 1968

Boar's Head Press, England 6

A Printer's Apprenticeship: Reminiscences of Christopher Sandford Abridged from an article originally published in Matrix 6, 1986

v

38

Contents Brewhouse Press, England 7 Printing at the Brewhouse Originally printed in The American Book Collector, May 1966

55

Press of Ralph Chubb, England 8 Blake's Mantle: the Press of Ralph Chubb Originally published in Book Design (5 Production, vol. 3, 1960

62

Doves Bindery, England 9 T. J. Cobden-Sanderson as Bookbinder Originally published in The Private Library, Winter 1968

67

Gogmagog Press, England 10 Gogmagog: the Press of Morris Cox Originally published in The American Book Collector, May 1962

74

I I

'Driven by a Lively Spontaneity': Gogmagog and Morris Cox

80

Originally published in Matrix 12, 1992

Golden Cockerel Press, England/USA 12 The Beginnings of a Co-operative Venture: the Forgotten Years of the Golden Cockerel Press Revised from an earlier article published in Printing History no. 7/8,1982

13

An Experiment with Fairer Terms for Authors: Some Letters from Hal Taylor to Louis Golding

89

105

Not previously published

Ink Well Press, USA 14 At the Sign of the Ink Well Originally published in Book Design

113 (5

Prot/uction, vol. 4, 1961

Keepsake Press, England 15 The Keepsake Press of Roy Lewis and Daughters Originally published in The American Book Collector, April 1964 Latin Press, England 16 Forging Links at the Latin Press: Some Letters between Guido Morris and Will Ransom Originally published in Matrix 18, 1998

17 A Letter from Guido Morris Originally published in COllnter,

117

122

131 2000

Montalk Press, England, France, New Zealand 18 Portrait of I lis Majesty as Printer ,

137

Not previously published

Mountain I louse Press, USA 19 A Cordial Correspondence: Collahoration he tween Dard llunter and Will Ransom, 19 2 3-5 Originally published in Matri.\' 16, 1996 VI

147

Contents

Nag's Head Press, New Zealand 20 Nag's Head: a New Zealand Private Press Originally published in Matrix 5, 1985 Pontine Press,Jamaica 21 The First Jamaican Private Press

161

168

Originally published in The Private Library, Autumn 1975

Signet Press, Scotland 22 Thomas Rae: a Modern Scottish Printer

173

Originally published in The American Book Collector, April 1961

Alberto TaBone Editore, Italy 23 One Day in Alpignano: a Visit to Alberto Tallone Editore

180

Originally published in Matrix 14, 1994

Wattle Grove Press, Australia Rolf Hennequel: a Tasmanian Printer

24

190

Originally published in The American Book Collector, November 1965

Zauberberg Press, USA Damping, Dwell, and Bite: Advice from WiII Ransom on Good Impression

25

194-

Originally published in Counter, 1996

OTHER FINE PRINTING

The Philobiblon Society 26 Monckton l\li1nes and the Philobiblon Society

199

Originally published in The Private Library, Summer 1969

Publishers' Series Some Well-Designed Publishers' Series

27

212

Not previously published

28

The Grey Walls Press Crown Classics

225

Originally published in The Prirate Library, 1989

Folio Society 29 Folio: a Cockerel's Fledgling Originally published in Matrix 17, 1997 Notes

235

242 257

Index

Vll

INTRODUCTION"

Many people interested in fine printing can identify whatever it was that first attracted their interest. For some, a sight of a book from the Kelmscott Press or the Doves Press in a bookshop window or on display in a library; for others an article or book they have read. Ward Ritchie used to say that it was reading T. J. Cobden-Sanderson's Journals which pushed him towards printing; for others, John Ryder's persuasive Printillgfor Pleasure provided the impetus. In my own case, it was Martyn Goff's suggestion, while I was still a schoolboy, that I read Eric Gill's Autobiography, which marked the turning point. I was earlier interested in calligraphy, to the extent of seeking leave from my headmaster to go to London to attend meetings of the Society of Scribes and lIIuminators (he agreed, somewhat reluctantly; it was clear that if I had been the Right Sort I would have preferred to cheer on the First XV from the touchlines). Gill led me to incised lettering, then to type design. By the time I Was eighteen I had acquired a reader's ticket for the Victoria and Albert Museum library, where I consumed the Fleuron as fast as I could. Rugby never got a look-in. At one time I dreamed of making my career in book design; instead, I moved into working with books as a librarian .... Later, I was fortunate enough to work with those setting up the Private Libraries Association, and to be able to persuade the young Association to start publication of its annual bibliography Private Press Books. Through the contacts that brought me, while I was joint editor, my own informal education in fine printing was accelerated. A visit to New York in 1962 allowed me to meet Ben Lieberman and many others interested in fine printing there. A lecture tour in 1970 took me to New York again, and then to other printing centres. In Chicago, James M. Wells introduced me to the treasure-trove lying in the Will Ransom archive in the Newberry Library. On the same trip I was able to meet such printers as Sherwood Grover, Jack Stauffacher, and Adrian Wilson in San Francisco, Will Cheney and Ward Ritchie in Los Angeles, and to sample the rich collections of fine printing on the US West Coast. Subsequent visits to the USA have enabled me to meet and talk to many more of the printers of whom I knew only through their books, and to see a much wider range of private printing and fine press work than I had ever hoped. IX

Introduction Though 1 had started doing some printing myself, and still enjoy comping, 1 soon became aware that my presswork left a lot to be desired. On the other hand, 1 derived a lot of pleasure from writing about private presses and other fine printers. 1 had sometimes found it very hard to find out about some of the private presses which interested me, and in the early articles I wrote 1 was often just trying to draw other book collectors' attention to presses which interested me. 1 would write about American presses for British journals, British presses for American, German, Swedish journals.... A few of these early articles about individual presses have been included in this selection, particularly when my paper was the first or an early account of a press which later became well known, or is (I feel) still under-appreciated, but most of such 'consciousnessraising' articles have been left out. My career at times has taken me to places which are not renowned for their collections of fine printing, but it has also sometimes given me unusual opportunities to spend time working in museums, libraries, and archives which have very important collections for the history of the private press. Years ago John Randle suggested that 1 might like to edit some of John Buckland Wright's letters for an article in Matrix, using microfilm provided by the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles; this really was the trigger for many of my more recent articles on the history of particular private presses. I have been lucky enough to become a frequent user of the Clark; and have also been able to spend substantial time working through the Ransom papers and other collections in the Newberry, the very rich resources of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin, the Rijkmuseum-Meermanno-Westreenianum in The Hague, and other collections, as the many references to 'Clark', 'Newberry', 'HRC', and '~1cerman' will show. The enormous debt lowe to Will Ransom, the debt which is owed by anyone writing about private presses, will be very clear. A few of the papers included here have never been published before. The selection of reprinted or revised articles deliberately excludes most of those 1 have written about aspects of the Golden Cockerel Press, as a fuller history of that Press now in preparation will soon supersede them. It hasn't always been easy to decide which other papers to exclude, but among those included 1 have attempted to cover a range of presses, not only those trying to produce fine printing in the grand manner; but also those who have no message and few artistic pretensions; presses whose owners have just enjoyed working with letterpress and simply printed for their own pleasure. One might think that with the demise of commercial letterpress printing) these last are representatives of a group which will disappear rapidly, but 1 am confident that the amateur printers are here for a long time to come, and that their work will give as much pleasure to future collectors as I have gained from looking at books from presses discussed in this volume.

x

ACKNO\VLEDGEMENTS

Most private printers, most collectors of fine printing, and most rare book librarians are enthusiasts in the best sense, and generous in the help they give. I have gained greatly from the assistance given me by many people over a period of over forty years of writing about private presses, or attempting to record their output, and I am aware that lowe gratitude to far more people than I can acknowledge here. They include all those owners of presses I have described from first-hand contact, and to those who allowed me to interview them, or to bombard them with questions by letter, I am most grateful. Special thanks are due to others as well. Because of the passage of time, some are now dead, but I prefer to keep in a single alphabet the names of all those people who have made writing these papers easier and pleasurable. These thanks are due to Sara Ayad, Timothy Barrett, Terry Belanger, Alexander Cave, David Chambers, Lawrence and Ralph Chubb, Michele Cloonan and Sid Berger, Stephen D. Corey, l\lorris Cox, Don Drenner, John Dreyfus, Charles Ede, Paul Gehl, Bob Gormack, Rigby Graham, Sherwood and Katherine Grover, Trevor Hickman, Andrew H. Horn, Dard Hunter Jr., Dorothy Hunter, Kenneth Ingram, Robert Leslie, Roger Levenson, Roy Lewis, J. Ben Lieberman, D. F. MacKenzie, Stephanie l\liller, Guido Morris, James Mosley, Paul R. Nash, Jean Peters, Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, Lawrence Clark Powell, John and Rose Randle, Thomas Rae, the Rae family and especially Lexie Foulds, R. T. Risk, Warde Ritchie, Christopher and Lettice Sandford, Roy Stokes, Bianca and Enrico Tallone, Vincent Torre, Geoffrey and Frances Wakeman, Adrian Wilson, Beatrice Warde, and James M. Wells. In addition some libraries (in addition to those named below) have given great help, particularly the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington (New Zealand) and the National Library of Australia. In several cases my visits to archives and libraries which led to these articles being written were materially assisted by fellowships and grants, and (though not often undertaken specifically for research on the topics covered by these articles) simply being there often allowed me to work on private press or fine printing topics as well. It is a pleasure as well as duty to acknowledge the Xl

Acknowledgements assistance received from the Fulbright Foundation, the Bibliographical Society of America, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library UCLA, the Rijksmuseum Meermanno-Westreenianum van het Boek in The Hague, and the Newberry Library, Chicago. To the Rockefeller Foundation, which enabled me and my sternest critic to spend time at the Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, particular thanks are due - as they are to my wife for her support and help with my work on private presses over so many years and in so many places.

Roderick Cave September 2001

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XII

I

ASPECTS OF BRITISH PRIVATE PRESSES A View from 1970

In the late 1960s, I was fortunate in many ways. I was lucky enough to renew my acquaintance with Beatrice Warde, and persuade her to give some lectures at Loughborough School of Librarianship where I was then teaching. Another visitor to the School, also a visiting lecturer, was the American librarian and typophile Lawrence Clark Powell, and listening to the two of them talk about Eric Gill or Stanley Morison or some of the American printers and bibliographers improved my education a great deal. It was through Powell that I was invited to give the annual 'Taste in Typography' Lecture at UCLA in 1970; and during this trip to the United States I was able to meet many printers with whom I had previously only corresponded, and to visit several libraries with fine printing material. 'Doc' Leslie at Gallery 303 in New York provided the entree for me to meet printers and collectors in the New York area. Through James M. Wells I was introduced to the riches of the Wing Foundation at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and my brief foray into the papers of WiII Ransom there laid the foundation for my studies of the early days of the Golden Cockerel Press, in Ch. 12 below. In Los Angeles, what I saw then of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library showed that I would have to spend much more time there to research the history of British private presses thoroughly. But I was also attempting to persuade American book collectors and librarians that the newer British private presses starting to emerge in the 1950S and 1960s were worth collecting. This paper is an edited (but not updated) version of the talk given in New York and Los Angeles in 1970. MMI

The Irish contribution to fine printing has been little considered. To be sure, in the post-William 1\ 10rris period of private presses, it is hard to think of many presses beyond the Dun Emer/Cuala Press run by the Yeats sisters, or Colm 0 Lochlainn's work at the Sign of the Three Candles in Dublin; and perhaps the work of the Dolmen Press as an attempt to keep the tradition alive. However, when one considers that one of the most important English private presses, Golden Cockerel, was under the direction of men from County Cork from 19 24 to 1933 (Robert Gibbings) and from 1933 until the late 1950S (Christopher Sandford) - and when one remembers the role George Bernard Shaw played 1

Aspects of British Private Presses in seeing that his books were presented in beautiful dress, the Irish contribution becomes more significant. Shaw was a good critic of typography. And so was Oscar Wilde: his was one of the most percipient reports' of the famous lecture given by Emery Walker to the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society, the lecture which inspired Morris to commence his 'little typographical adventure' at the Kelmscott Press - and of course he also worked closely with Shannon and Ricketts. But there is also another Irish critic who deserves attention: Patrick Nolan, alias Flann O'Brien, alias Myles na Gopaleen. On several occasions his column in the Irish Times contained reference to book collecting, fine editions and the like, and on one occasion he discussed the topic of limited editions at some length. You know the limited edition ramp. If you write very obscure verse (and why shouldn't you, pray?) for which there is little or no market, you pretend that there is an enormous demand, and that the stuff has to be be rationed. Only 300 copies will be printed, you say, and then the type will be broken up for ever. Let the connoisseurs and bibliophiles savage each other for the honour and glory of snatching a copy. Positively no reprint. Reproduction in whole or part forbiddcn. Three hundred copies, of which this in Number 4,312. Hand-monkeyed oklamon paper, indigo boards in interpulped squirrel-toe, not to mention twelve point Campile Perpetua cast specially for the occasion. Complete, unabridged, and positively unexpurgated. Thirty-five bob a knock and a gory livid bleeding bargain at the price. Well, I have decided to carry this thing a bit further. I beg to announce respectfully my coming volume of verse entitled 'Scorn for Taurus'. We have decided to do it in eight point Caslon on turkey-shutter paper with covers in purple corduroy. But look out for the catch. When the type has been set up, it will instantly be destroyed and No COpy WHATEVER WILL llE PRINTED. In no circumstances will the company's servants be permitted to carry away even a rough printer's proof. The edition will be so utterly limited

that a thousand pounds will not buy even one copy. This is my idea of being exclusive. The charge will be five shillings. Please do not make an exhibition of yourself by asking me what you get for your money. You get nothing you can see or feel, not even a receipt. But you do yourself the honour of participating in one of the most far-reaching experiments every carried out in my literary workshop:

If you are a collector of fine printing - even more if you attempt to print finely yourself, and set (and state) a limit on the size of your editions - this probably makes you feel a little uneasy. It certainly does me: the shaft is a little too well aimed. Our fondness for statements of limitation, our devotion to the use of special materials, the self-conscious and almost self-congratulatory tone of the colophons in many private press books, makes it easy for those who are not devotees of fine printing to find it all a little ridiculous. This is of course nothing new, and private printers have often countered by exaggerating their own amateurism. We all remember that Ilorace Walpole said 'present amusement is all my object', and if we go back to Dulau's 1932 Catalogue ji}r Typophiles we find a charming expression of the same sort from Francis ~leynell: 2

Aspects of British Private Presses In a letter from Vienna in 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writes of Prince Eugene's library that it is 'tho' not very ample, well chosen; but as the Prince will admit into it no editions but what are beautiful and pleasing to the eye, and there are nevertheless numbers of excellent books that are yet indifferently printed, this finikin and foppish taste makes many disagreeable chasms in the collection'. Bless the Prince! Bless the Lady Mary! They should be the patron saints of the Nonesuch Press - for has it not always tried to meet tastes finikin and foppish like his, studious like hers?3

The Depression, alas, made the production of books for the finikin and foppish decidedly difficult; the years of the Second World War, and even more of the austerity which followed in England, made many people question whether there was any more a role for the private press. Its lessons, they smugly observed, had already been learned. Presses like Nonesuch and Gregynog did disappear; though Golden Cockerel survived, and continued to produce some magnificent books in the Forties, the basis on which presses of this kind could operate seemed increasingly insecure. What characterized these presses? Of course there were differences, but generally it's the case that they were owned by wealthy men and women people who (even if they were nominally running them as a business) had enough money to carry a few expensive failures in their lists [see Ch. 3, 'Privish and Perish?' below]. The books they chose to print were often exemplary editions of a fairly limited range of classical texts, though there were sometimes new translations of relatively little-known works, and there was often a mild eroticism about the titles chosen. Despite Flann O'Brien's suggestion about the limited edition ramp, contemporary verse was seldom on their lists; indeed a criticism which could be launched against them was that they were very little interested in modern literature at all. [Continental presses often took a different stance; cf. Ch. 24 'One Day in Alpignano']. The owners might very well order special makings of paper from British mills, or import unusual and expensive papers from abroad. They might have their own proprietary typeface, even if they often also used founders' faces or Monotype as well. And if they used Monotype, they would normally afterwards have it put through the stick by hand to improve the word-spacing. I say 'have it put through the stick' deliberately, for these Presses were run on the scale where the owners regularly employed compositors, and pressmen, to produce the books they published. If illustrated, they were probably going to be decorated with woodengravings, typically from members of the Society of Wood Engravers, or more rarely with intaglio plates from a handful of artists favoured for bookwork in Britain. The illustrations might be hand-coloured; equally possibly, the presswork on the wood-engravings (when the wrong artist was commissioned, or the pressman was less skilled than usual) might not bring out every line intended by the artist because the toothy papers the Press owners preferred were not very sympathetic to fine-line wood-engravings [see below in Ch. 6 'A Printer's Apprenticeship' for a discussion of this].

3

Aspects of British Private Presses After printing, the sheets would be passed to the best binders in England to be dressed in a binding comparable to the quality of the book's other materials and methods, and distribution would then be through Bumpus's or the halfdozen other bookshops who regularly carried a range of these expensive books. Naturally, not all private presses between the wars were of this kind. There were true Arts & Crafts printers like James Guthrie or Hilary Pepler who were different, and there were the individualistic printers difficult to fit into any classification, like Ralph Chubb [see Ch. 8, 'Blake's Mantle'] and Guido Morris of the Latin Press [whose work is described in Ch. 16 and 17]. Count Potocki de Montalk, the subject of Ch. 18, started work in the 1930S and has continued on his own eccentric course through to the present day. In the 1940S and 1950S, while the 'great' presses (and the clients for books of the kind I have described) were still dying, another breed of private press using more modest equipment and with more modest aims was coming into its own once more. These are more like the presses run by were enthusiastic amateurs long before William Morris - remember (as an example) that Dr Daniel and his brothers had a small press at Frome long before 'the Daniel Press' at Oxford came into being in the 1870s. People from inside and outside the printing industry today have looked at examples of fine printing from the past, and have thought they would try to emulate it by printing themselves. Many of these new post-war printers were inspired by John Ryder's splendid little manual Printingfor Pleasure, and operate using the simple, modest, and portable equipment of the kind described in Ryder's book. One Press which set itself different aims was the Vine Press at Ilemingford Grey, lIuntingdonshire. John Peters (a typographer at Cambridge University Press, and designer of the handsome Castellar titling fount) and his architect friend Peter Forster set themselves a different task entirely. They knew how much of the effect of books from Kelmscott or Doves had been dependent on the pressmen, those forgotten tradesmen 4 whose skills in make-ready and presswork were all important in fine printing. They knew, too, that the last of such men familiar with the problems of printing dampened hand-made paper had already disappeared from the trade - and so they set out to discover for themselves how it could be done. And so, with an Albion Press, and a lot of weekends, they learned the skills of the pressman and established how it could be done, in such books as The Cave (1957) with woodcuts by Frank Martin, or The Parliament of Women (1960) with illustrations which combined colour (through Ii no cut) and wood-engraving. Unlike many of the earlier English private presses, they felt no need for a proprietary type, nor indeed were they such purists as to eschew machine setting, a poini'which is sometimes regarded as essential. The Vine Press was not typical. Nor was the Stanbrook Abbey Press, which under the direction of Dame I lildelith Cumming produced a range of printing of exquisite quality. All set by hand of course, and showing Jan van Krimpen's Cancellaresca Bastarda type extraordinarily well. s But a press run by an

4

Aspects of British Private Presses enclosed monastic order is very different indeed from the generality of private presses in Britain. Another fine printer much truer to the 'printer for pleasure' model is David Chambers at the Cuckoo Hill Press. Like the owners of the Vine Press, Chambers set out to learn the skills of printing on an Albion, and how to dampen paper, but he has also built his own small press, and the books that he has printed have mostly been on subjects connected with printing. Many years ago, Dard Hunter demonstrated that for a press to have a special field on which it published was more likely to make it successful than 'literature', particularly if that field was linked with the book arts [see Ch. 19 'A Cordial Correspondence' below] and several of the other new private presses in Britain have done this. My friend Geoffrey Wakeman [I wrote in 1970] has started on these lines at the Plough Press in Loughborough, one of the few private presses in Leicestershire which has no overt links with Rigby Graham in Leicester. Tom Rae's Signet Press at Greenock is another case in point [but as its work is described in Ch. 22 'Thomas Rae; a modern Scottish printer' further discussion is omitted here]. There are some presses which have tended to specialize in modern poetry in limited editions but Flann O'Brian's mockery would not (I feel) have been directed at the weekend printing of Roy Lewis, his daughters and their friends, at the Keepsake Press in Hammersmith [see below, Ch. 15]. He might have been more critical of another poetic press (that run by Morris Cox) but Cox's genius is of a different kind entirely from that of most private printers. In some ways Cox's work is like that of William Blake in that he writes, illustrates, and prints the text of most of his books according to an individual aesthetic; and it is clear that he often feels restricted by what can be done with conventional letterpress printing, and (if he paid any attention to them) would feel equally constricted by the typographic tenets of Morison or Oliver Simon. He has therefore devised his own printing methods, and extended the range of relief and offset printing in some rather interesting ways. In many hands, this would result in some disastrously misbegotten volumes, but in Cox's case he has thought out his own tenets rather well, censors his own production rather severely, and the books which have been published from his Gogmagog Press are marvellous, exciting fresh contributions to the book arts [but as they are discussed at more length in Ch. I I and 12 below, no more need be written here]. It would be easy to go on enumerating examples of modern English private printers producing interesting work. Consultation of the collection of samples assembled by John Ryder 6 shows that there are a lot of people keeping the black art alive. None have any staff, or can afford to pay for special makings of paper, or have proprietary faces cut. l\lost of them have no room in their houses for an Albion Press; they will perhaps have an Adana flatbed; or if a little more ambitious have squeezed a treadle press into the corner of their garage, as [I wrote in 1970] Geoffrey Wakeman and I have a Golding Pearl in his garage, on

5

Aspects of British Private Presses which we print the work of the Plough Press. 7 They will be users of founders' type, or of Monotype faces, of which they hold only enough to print a few pages at a time. Wood-engravings will seldom be the chosen illustration medium; partly because wood-engraving is taught in so few schools of art these days - though many of the printers enjoy the challenge of finding out how to print engravings with really fine lines. Linocuts, often in colour, or line-block reproductions of drawings (sometimes coloured by hand), are frequently to be seen, particularly from the private presses connected with the Leicester-based artist Rigby Graham, who has been so important a figure in much private press work of recent years [The Brewhouse Press, whose work is discussed in Ch. 7, is one of these]. Except in the the case of Presses whose owners have a particular interest in bookbinding (like Trevor Hickman at the Brewhouse Press) the bindings put on their books will be of the simplest, and the prices at which they are sold will also be very modest; often no more than covering the production costs with a little over for the occasional bottle of wine, or a few more printers' flowers ... One way in which these private presses really lose is that they lack most of the publicity, and many of the means of distribution, available to the pre-war private presses. Small books of the kind produced today are not going to be featured respectfully in the centre pages of The Times Literary Supplement; indeed, although the TLS isn't too bad about giving brief notices to a few of the contemporary private press books sent to it, it doesn't seek them out. After the demise of Book Design fS Production, in which James Moran often arranged for modern work of merit to be noticed, the only places in which one is likely to be able to find out much about what it being produced by private printers is in the short notices in The Private Library, and the listings in Private Press

Books. This lack of critical attention, the extreme unlikeliness that any private press is going to make a lot of money, has its disadvantages, of course: the number of substantive books which people can print on weekends and in their other leisure time is limited. It's clear that only a tiny proportion of the reading population will ever see books from today's private presses, and their potential for influencing commercial book production is nil. On the other hand, there is not the posturing, the striving for market share, the commercial operations masquerading as private presses that there were in the 1920S and 1930S: there are not many items coming from private presses which make one hope that Flann O'Brien's experiment had been applied to them, and no copy whatsoever had been printed of them. And one hopes that among today's presses there are enough to meet Lady Mary Wortley Montague's studious tastes, as there are certainly for the finikin and foppish among us.

6

Aspects of British Private Presses POSTSCRIPT

This talk was given in 1970, and shows how poor my prospects as a futurologist would have been! At the time, although commercial letterpress printing was already on the way out, I certainly didn't appreciate how rapidly it would disappear, nor the implications of this for amateurs in letterpress. Just as one reads of people like Guido Morris being able to buy Albions for a fiver in the 1930s, so there has since been a period (now over) in which those who could find space for Heidelbergs, Monotype Casters, Vandercook proofing presses, and so on could get them for a very modest outlay indeed. Those whose interest in private printing is mainly in the act of publishing texts important to them probably no longer take up letterpress printing at all. The development of the photocopier, and the more recent introduction of the personal computer equipped with powerful and simple software for desk-top publishing, plus laser-printer output of high quality, has enabled such people to print and publish the things they want to see in print far more easily than they ever could using letterpress. Of course, sometimes their output is poorly designed (but often their letterpress printing was pretty poor too); but sometimes they achieve results which are very good indeed, even if far from what the private press enthusiast would regard as fine work. The change in the kinds of private press, the numbers once more attempting fine work on a lavish scale, and the improvement in the market for fine printing, was also something I did not expect to happen so quickly. Although the market is still limited, presses like Simon Lawrence's Fleece Press, or the Whittington Press run by John Randle, are back in the business of producing much more substantial books at much higher prices - doing the work themselves in the way Guthrie or Peters and Forster did, and often using powered presses in a way earlier generations of private printers might have wondered about. They and other private printers are once more using wood-engravings from a younger generation of artists, and also employing other illustration methods (such as pochoir) which were formerly a bit outside the scope of presses of the Arts & Crafts kind - and doing so very well. At the Whittington Press, too, in Matrix John Randle has created and maintains a journal devoted to the cause of fine printing, of a kind which has never before existed. Even the Fleuron did not manage coverage of this kind. (The recent formation of the Fine Press Book Association and its production of Parenthesis is another good sign.) With the death of commercial letterpress printing, buying new type (even Monotype) now presents problems that were not there in 1970. To be sure in the United States there are those like Stan Nelson who can cut punches, and there are quite a few whose interest is in keeping casting machines in use, but it's a little more difficult than it once was. 1\lost of today's private presses will use Monotype-set material perfectly happily (except among those for whom the pleasure in private printing is in composition) and the old insistence on hand setting has gone. The dcbate now is whether it is acceptable to use photo-polymer plates made from computer-set digital designs. On the one hand, this breaks away from the disciplines of mctal type, and those

7

Aspects of British Private Presses who feel the skills of letterpress printing are dependent on the skillful manoeuvering of type will have nothing to do with it. Others will argue that some type designs created especially for the computer (such as Galliard, or Minion) are very attractive; and if the pleasure of a private printer is in presswork and the nice bite of a relief printing surface into a damped hand-made sheet, whether that relief surface is metal or photopolymer will make no difference to them.

"

8

2

'PECULIARIA AC PRIVATA'

The Historiography of Private Presses, and the Bibliographical Description of Fine Printing

Through editing Private Press Books I became very interested in definitions of a private press, and noting the range of definitions became more curious about the context in which earlier writers had discussed the subject. I first tackled the book by A. H. Lackmann (discussed below) in the early 1960s, and made some limited use of these early writers when preparing The Private Press (1971). This paper (here abridged and altered) was written much later for the University of Iowa Center for the Book, and published in its journal Counter in Spring 1997.

MMI

I. THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF PRIVATE PRESSES

Not until the printing craft was well into its second century did historians started to take it seriously. Admittedly some scholars in the fifteenth century glimpsed its potential, and commented on its marvels in fine phrases fuller of optimism than of real understanding. They were rather like the up-beat reports we read everywhere today about the information age and the tremendous things we'll encounter on the information superhighway. Writers on the superhighway often gloss over small matters, like copyright and freedom of access. Those writing about printing in the fifteenth century paid no attention to the technical aspects of the craft. It was almost a century after Gutenberg's invention that Biringuccio gave his brief account of typefounding in 1540. I It was exactly a hundred years after Fust and Schoeffer's marvellous Mainz Psalter was published that Christopher Plantin described printing in his Dialoguesji-anrois pour lesjeunes enfans (1567). Not until 1683-4, did somebody in the printing trade gave a full account of its procedures and try to describe the history of the craft, as Joseph Moxon did in his marvellous Alechanick Exercises. a From the 1680s we can read printers writing about their craft. Long before Moxon's day, the history of printing had fallen into the hands of scholars who were not printers. One of the more interesting was Bernard von Mallinckrodt, Dean of ~lunster. For the second centennial of the invention of printing (in 1640, as printers traditionally reckoned it) the German

9

The Historiography of Private Presses book trade made quite a celebration - as they did again in 1740, 1840, and had planned for 1940.3 Mallinckrodt may have become interested in the history of printing because of the dispute between those who said it was Gutenberg's invention, and those in the Netherlands who claimed it for Laurens Janszoon Koster at Haarlem. Whatever the reason, Mallinckrodt's very handsome book De Ortu ac Progressu Artis Typographicae 4 was published in Cologne in 1639/40, just at the right time to provide scholarly backing for the printers' bicentennial celebrations. Like any other scholar, Mallinckrodt was bound by the conventions of his time. He was more interested in finding and reporting what previous scholars had written about printing, than in making first-hand inspection of copies of early printed books. He didn't attempt real bibliographical investigation, and he wasn't interested in talking to people who actually printed books. His main aim was to present all the evidence he could find on either side in the Gutenberg-Koster controversy.s He then wrote briefly about other printers who were famous for the beauty of their typography or for the accuracy of their texts, so one can say he provided a sort of model for many later writers on printing history, from McMurtrie to Blumenthal. Mallinckrodt is important in the historiography of printing - but that's not the only reason. He was the first writer to single out PRIVATE PRESSES as worthy of mention. His reference was very brief; but in the context of what his book was attempting, even a passing reference attached importance to the topic. The passage is at the end of a section in which he discussed the work of printers famous for the quality of their work. As what he had to say about private presses has never been published in English translation, I quote it in full. Mallinckrodt's book was of great interest to his ncar-contemporary the London book-collector and antiquary Richard Smyth (1590-1675). But the aesthetic quality of printed books was an aspect of printing history Smyth didn't understand, or found of little interest, so when he translated a lot of Mallinckrodt's work 6 Smyth left out the passages in which Mallinckrodt wrote enthusiastically about the beauty of Nicholas Jenson's typefaces, and other such things. It's a marvel that he didn't leave out the references to private presses as well, but he didn't: so here, in Smyth's rather crabbed Restoration English, is his version of what Mallinckrodt had to say: Private men also had sometimes their hired Printers and set up their peculiar & private presses: for it appeares that lIen: Stephanus in certain volumes wch he printed acknowledged himself to be the printer of Ilulricus Fuggerus; as he did in his Edition of the antient Physitians, which he printed AO. 1567. And the nohle Knight & Poet of Franconia, I luldricus Iluttenus, caused his peculiar Pri-nting Shop to be employed in his own Castle of Stockelherg; from whence came forth those reprehensorie Orations of his against the Duke of Wittenberg, A°.1520. I leer to pcrhaps may be referred the Cortesianum Praelum, where A°.15 IO. were Printed the .3. Bookes of Paulus Cortesius de Cardinalatu, by Simeon Nicho\aus Nardus Senensis in castro Cortesio.

According to modern ideas about private presses Mallinckrodt got it all wrong. 10

The Historiography of Private Presses The book printed at Ulrich Fugger's expense by Henri Estienne 7 was perhaps what we would call 'privately printed', though I'm inclined to think that it was really much more like modern books whose production costs are born by a sponsor. De Cardinalitu seems to have been another special commission. 8 We would possibly count von Hutten's Super InterJectione Ioannis Hutten; Deploratio 9 as a genuine private press book (as it bears the imprint 'In arce Stekeberk' and for generations librarians and bibliographers believed that von Hutten had a press in Stekelberg castle) but patient research by the bibliographer Josef Benzing showed that wasn't true; it was simply an early example of the use of a fictitious imprint, not the production of a private press. A hit rate of zero is pretty poor. Mallinckrodt could have done better, and there are instances of books printed in a 'peculiar and private' way which he could (and probably would) have known about. For example, Friedrich Wilhelm (one of the rulers of Saxony) had a press in his castle at Torgau, from which some twenty different books were issued between 1596 and 1601, under the direction of a schoolmaster and a printer. Or there was the work of the great astronomer Tycho Brahe at Uraniborg. 10 Mallinckrodt must have known about them, so why did he not include them in his section on private presses? Did he think of Brahe and Duke Friedrich Wilhelm as public men and therefore keep silent, because theirs were not 'private presses'? Later in the seventeenth century there were occasional references to princely printing-houses which were closer to private presses perhaps than anything else, for instance in Johannes Rist's Depositio Cornut; Typographic; (Luneburg, 1654) in which he mentioned the ruler of Saxony again: Frederick William, he, of Saxony the Lord A private press maintain'd, with printers round his board."

As private presses became more common, such references multiplied. The recommendation in the London newspaper The Craftsman in 1731 to the English nobility and gentry that they should set up their own private presses as 'more polite [and] instructive amusement ... than billiard tables and foxhunting' was really a vain hope. Horace Walpole may have been the only one influenced by it, but at least it reflected an increased awareness of printing as a hobby rather than a trade. However, my own forays into the undergrowth of the literature of printing suggest it was the tercentennial of printing in 1740 that persuaded somebody else to make the attempt to discuss the history and nature of private presses. In 1639 ~lallinckrodt had included the few lines quoted above; a century later Adam Heinrich Lackmann wrote a whole chapter on 'Typographia domestica et typi privatorum' in his Amwlium Typographicorum (Hamburg, 1740). When I first looked at Lackmann's book thirty years ago, I thought I had found an invaluable source on early private presses, one to flesh out the brief references and allusions in Will Ransom and the few other writers who acknowledged that there was life before William Morris. But it was not. II

The Historiography of Private Presses Mallinckrodt's book was handsome to look at, and was the work of a scholar of breadth and understanding. He was also something of a stylist - and on the many occasions his Latin defeated me, at least I could turn to Smyth's translation as a sort of crib! Lackmann's book," by contrast, has little to commend it. Unpleasing typographically; it was the work of a pedant who seemed concerned more to display his own wide reading than to give useful information. Worst of all, he wrote abominable Latin for which I had no crib. Thirty years ago a friend and I wasted a summer in attempting a joint translation of his chapter on private presses, before we decided that Lackmann's concept of history was too far from what's acceptable to the contemporary reader to put into shape for publication. Even self-indulgent publication by a private press was unthinkable, unless you like the old tradition of copious footnotes filled with references to texts now superseded and hard to find! And yet - his chapter is the earliest extensive study of private presses. A couple of the briefer entries will probably convince modern readers that they have not been missing much: PETER KIRSTE."I of Bratislava, a doctor of medicine and a professor, who owned founts of Arabic type.· This equipment he brought with him to Uppsala, and on it he spent whatever resources, whatever faculties and whatever sums of money he was able to collect. • See 1\1. Fabian Torner's history of the typographic art in Sweden, page 96; and the footnotes made by Moller to Schoffer's Literary JIistory, page 449. OLAV RUOBECK the elder, the most learned researcher into the antiquities of the north. He set up a press in his house in 1686, from which he is known to have produced various books until the year 1702, when it was burned in the fatal fire which destroyed Uppsala (thus the famous Torner, /oc.cit. P.53). Reflecting on this overwhelming loss, and reviewing the second volume of the Campi Ef;ysii, a volume brought out by the effiJrts of the Rudbecks, father and son, the most learned editors of Ljppsjensis Latina (1702, page 375) rightly exclaim '0, the too-great inconstancy of human affairs! 0 the unhappy fates of letters and literary men! Scarcely had this book seen the light than in that fatal conflagration of 16 May (old style) of this year, the flourishing city ofUppsala - its churches, castles, houses - was all consumed, and with it the printing equipment and the book of this botanist were lost in the flames and ashes.'

This is heavy going! I have not investigated Kirsten's work as an Arabist, but maybe somebody who has could tell us more about it than Lackmann does. The Rudbecks' very substantial printing operation certainly seems interesting. Their book Campi Elyssii was planned to include illustrations of every plant then known to science, and is a work well known to those interested in botanical books. But it's not one at all well known to the private press fraternity, and Lackmann's very dry account will hardly change things. Lackmann had no obvious connection with printing; perhaps the reason for his book was that the J lamburg printers wanted somebody to survey their craft for the tercentennial, and he was available. By the early nineteenth century, the Germans no longer had a monopoly on 12

The Historiography of Private Presses producing lists of privately-printed and the work of private presses. Just as the 1890S were a period of wide awareness of private printing, so bibliographers in pre-Victorian times paid attention to them. Auguste Voisin and Pierre-Gustave Brunet in Belgium, Gabriel Peignot in Paris, and John Martin in London all contributed to the total record of what private presses had existed, and what books they had printed. [3 Their record was necessarily fairly formal and dry, but the same period saw a start to the much more anecdotal account, which could be gushingly romantic, for instance in Thomas Frognall Dibdin's description[4 of Alexander Boswell's Auchinleck Press. II. THE DESCRIPTION OF PRIVATE PRESS BOOKS

Writers like Brunet, Martin, or Dibdin sometimes included anecdotes about the owners of the presses, or the circumstances in which their books were printed, and these are useful. But like Mallinckrodt and Lackmann before them, these writers' bibliographical description of the books produced is very meagre. Often all they do is to tell us that a certain book by a certain author was printed in a given year. We must feel grateful if they also give format and the number of pages. If they say how many copies were printed, or anything else about its production, we are unusually lucky. Of course, such writers cannot be blamed for telling us less than we would like, because they were following the standard conventions of their times, and they were only providing a signal that a particular book had existed. Their cataloguing conventions sometimes (often) make it hard to locate these books in such tools as the National Union Catalog or the British Library Catalogue, but that's our bad luck. I have devoted much time to looking for and at private press books, and these writers often fail to satisfy me. They don't provide effective surrogates. If! find an entry in l\1artin, I still need to look at the book he describes to establish if it's of interest. That is not a problem limited to these early writers: the records provided in the twentieth century, by such bibliographers as Geoffrey Tomkinson, Will Ransom, Irvin Haas, and William Ridler - or in the descriptions of books included in Private Press Books, Fine Print, Matrix, or Bookways - are sometimes not very much better, because the conventions followed have often not been designed with the needs of typophiles in mind. As more of the mainstream bibliographic record of what is published is prepared according to international conventions and codes which concentrate on the information content rather than on the package containing that information, it is a problem which is perhaps becoming more important. These conventions and codes use methods which allow the information to be keyboarded and stored in a computer database, and leave out things which would interfere with this. Back in 1960, we were working to collect the entries to go into the first issues of the Private Libraries Association's Pri7:ate Press Books. In those days entries 13

The Historiography of Private Presses in the British National Bibliography were often annotated, so I regularly scanned the BNB weekly issues, to see whether any of the books and pamphlets it recorded 'seemed' to be from private presses we did not know about. It was laborious, but at a time the private press movement was less active, and less networked than today. The search netted us some important (and genuinely private) presses such as the Gogmagog Press [discussed in Ch. 10 and I I below] which would otherwise have taken longer to track down. I doubt if scanning BNB today would help. The need for mainstream bibliography to create machine-readable records which enable access via author, title, subject, keywords, and whatnot is naturally the preoccupation of those who need to know about the mass of publications produced through conventional book-trade channels. They need different records from the records of fine printing and private press work which we want, but this isn't a cause for worry. Nobody saw anything wrong with the way Fine Print or Bookways recorded the details of the books discussed or reviewed in their columns simply because. their details had not been prepared according to AACR2 or ISBD(M); nobody needs Private Press Books to be MARCcompatible. Those interested in fine printing want different sorts of information, differently presented. The group of those interested is now large enough, and strong enough, to see that such information is provided in the way we would like. The question is, What sort of injiJrmation do llJe mant about private presses, and the

books they produce? Can we even agree on what actually constitutes a private press? In the 1950s, John Ryder prepared a useful classification of private presses;15 a classification which was then applied to the presses listed in The Book of the Private Press. 16 This little directory was really the inspiration for those in Britain in the newlyformed Private Libraries Association, who wanted to know more about the books being produced by contemporary private presses. \Ve wanted to start production of the annual Private Press Books. But Ryder's classification was not used in it - and some of the presses which had been included in The Book of the Private Press were omitted from PLA's work, because the members of the Editorial Board (and the PLA Council) tended towards a purist approach and saw them as outside our terms of reference. In the boom years for fine printing of the 1920S plenty of imprints and advertising claimed private press status for some very commercial operations. To satisfy us completely, we expected a 'Press' normally to have its own letterpress equipment, and that its type would be largely hand-set. '7 Printing by lithography, or reproducing an author's manuscript by any means other than moveable type, was suspect. We were not such purists as to disallow any commercial element, but heavy emphasis on sales and marketing was a worry: how 'private' were some of those whose work we were recording? To be sure, our specifications only very uneasily fitted some of the longestablished Presses, whose work self-evidently needed to be recorded if the lists

14

The Historiography of Private Presses were to be useful to collectors. Presses like Shakespeare Head, Golden Cockerel, Nonesuch and Officina Bodoni, for instance: by the late 1950S, the extent to which Golden Cockerel and Nonesuch books were produced by the hand-printing methods characteristic of the private press had diminished to vanishing point. Their books were often still very agreeable books to handle and read, they used materials often of higher quality than was typical of trade book production of the period, but were they really different in kind from the well-designed trade books which came from Faber & Faber or the Folio Society? But in the past these presses had shown all the features of true private presses, and for the sake of completeness we decided to record them in our annual lists. \Ve were less likely to be so tolerant to books from newcomers. The general vagueness over definitions meant that we were often approached by owners of printing outfits who saw advantage in having their books listed alongside the books from these famous older presses in a checklist which was used by collectors. To reduce our (self-imposed) labour, we decided to exclude the many presses whose work concentrated solely on producing amateur magazines, interesting though some amateur journalism is. In addition, presses publishing literary work, for which the act of publication was more important than the mode of production (already starting to be called 'little presses'), were excluded. If we thought, when reading the information sent us, that a particular press was a commercial operation using (or misusing) the cult of the limited edition to increase interest in its work, we excluded it. The work of artists using the book form to produce artworks which were in book form, but were not books to be read - what a few years later would figure much more frequently as 'book works' or 'artist's books' - was also likely to be omitted, depending on the extent of the text and the size of the edition. IS These decisions were not arbitrary. No doubt they seemed so to some, whose work we decided was not the product of a private press, and to be excluded from our lists. Richard-Gabriel Rummonds - to take one example - seemed not at all happy that we decided in 1970 that his Plain Wrapper Press was not a private press in our terms, but a well-planned commercial operation producing fine editions. The exceptionally high prices which Rummonds set on his books, though intended to signal to potential collectors that these were significant works of art, also suggested a professionalism about the operation which was poles apart from private presses as we saw them. However much one might admire some of his Plain Wrapper books, I am still inclined to think we were right. But from his point of view, understandably anxious to build up the reputation of his Press, and to establish his very expensive publications were indeed items which should interest collectors, the PLA decision to exclude his books must have been irritating - particularly since Prirate Press Books listed many from amateur printers who made no claim to be fine printers, indeed who would have derided the idea. Debates on definition tend to be unproductive, and boring. I laving spent a 15

The Historiography of Private Presses lot of time thinking about fine printing, private presses, and books produced by amateurs, I am now very reluctant to advance any simple definition. All those I have seen, or have attempted, exclude (as we excluded Plain Wrapper) some presses which are interesting or important or collectable. Any definitions accidentally exclude presses which have produced work which is textually valuable; others which are important or interesting, or which just produce uncommonly attractive books. To an individual book-collector this doesn't matter very much, as of course he can work out what he wants to collect, whether that be Golden Cockerel 'specials', West Coast ephemera, or amateur journalism. He won't worry very much about breaking his own rules to allow in other material which he likes. But for the bibliographical record it is more important, if we are to include different, fuller information from that given in other sorts of bibliography. When the second edition of The Private Press was published in 1983, as I expected I was blamed for giving too little or no attention to this or that press, for which the reviewer's fondness was greater than my own. Some wished to limit the term to its contemporary manifestations in a particular geographical area, ignoring the amazing variety of private presses which have existed, and for which their recommended definition was far too narrow. And some seeking to be regarded as Artists (a status subtly flattering, incidentally, to the patrons of such printers) wish to deny the name of Private Press to those who do not set out to produce Fine Printing in the grand manner. Though my preface explained why some important modern continental presses were left out, one reviewer soundly admonished me for failing to discuss them, on the grounds that their owners were 'all serious printers with professional attitudes who bring to printing their personal conviction which is essential to any definition of a private press. Yet Cave seems to find ample space for such dribbles as Count Potocki and his ilk, self indulgent dilettantes who, for the most part, are also bad printers'.'9 The phrases 'serious printers', 'professional attitudes', and 'personal conviction' were used to indicate desirable characteristics. And so they often are - though the spectre of T. J. Cobden-Sanderson's destruction of the Doves type, deep personal conviction at work, might make some of us pause. The negative phrases were equally revealing: 'dribble', 'self-indulgent dilettante', 'bad printers'. 'Dilettante' used to be a term of praise, indicating a high level of connoisseurship; and the personal presses owned or operated by such people as I lor ace Walpole, Frederick the Great, Madame de Pompadour and the Prince de Ligne were all very much in the European dilettante tradition. Walpole's phrase describing the purpose of the Strawberry Ifill Press, 'present amusement is all my object', sums it up perfectly. Readers of Ch. 18 can decide whether 'dribble' is an appropriate way to describe Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk. nut however self-indulgent or bad a printer you may judge him, viewed hist(Jrica/~y Potocki's claim to be a private printer was and is far better than that of, say, the Plain Wrapper Press. The

16

The Historiography of Private Presses reviewer's search for a definition better than my own rule of thumb merely produced one which would rule out most of the historically-interesting presses of the eighteenth century and arguably also exclude William Morris and the Kelmscott Press.· o The term 'private press' is in itself no indicator of quality, and all attempts to make it so produce absurd results. A private press may be good or bad in its choice of texts to print, inspired or stumbling in its design, amateur or professional in its execution, serious or frivolous in attitude. To try to reserve the phrase to describe only finely-printed editions is flying in the face of history. To stick to 'fine press' as a description for such work is more accl'rate, more scholarly, more desirable. But today, pes and Macs have made desk-top publishing simple and cheap, and it is possible to get good-quality laser-printed output which is often far superior to the presswork achieved by many amateurs on their Golding Pearls or their Adana flatbeds. With the quality of xerographic printing also high, other questions on methods of printing have to come in. The current editors of Private Press Books, understandably daunted by the task they would let themselves in for if they were prepared to consider such things, have resolutely decided that for their purposes only books printed by letterpress or offset will count. DTP output is excluded. Private Press Books has long included books with electrostatically-printed illustrations, and also books printed by letterpress or litho from plates prepared from computer-generated text. But lists are created to be useful to collectors and bibliographers: excluding all DTP output will be a hard position for them to hold for long. The question remains, how do we describe the books produced by private presses and fine presses? The descriptions of books given by twentieth century bibliographers like Ransom, llaas, or Tomkinson were better than those given by Mallinckrodt or Lackmann, but still don't tell us enough. The Private Press Books formula developed in the 1960s was better - and for those who (like myself) are interested in presswork, to be told whether the paper was damped before printing is very useful. But that formula was still woefully inadequate to give much of the flavour of, say, Walter Hamady's Perishable Press books. The PPB formula had merits, but is laborious and a little rigid. The practice developed in Fine Print and followed in Bookways avoided some problems by extensive quotation from the books' colophons. It's a method which conveys more of the flavour of the book, perhaps, and may show the 'personal conviction' of the Press's owner. But it is still defeated by a Hamady; it invites self-indulgence, and certainly promotes self-advertisement. In mainstream publishing we may easily decide that we want to order a book on the basis of a press notice we have read. Others seem to share my feeling that reviews of fine printing (in contrast) seldom provide help in deciding whether to buy or not, even when the reviews include substantial description. I suspect many collectors still decide whether to purchase more happily on the basis of prospectuses, than from reviews. Are our reviews worthwhile, in fact? Or is the

The Historiography of Private Presses objective the review itself, and whether it is actually useful, or not, of little importance? Perhaps we don't need more information, but better information and comment. More pictures, perhaps: the possibilities of web pages on the internet are now being exploited rather well by several private presses and those who produce artists' books. And in other studies of fine printing and private presses, we certainly need the anecdotal accounts, the quotations from letters and contemporary comment; we need whatever the authors, illustrators, pressmen, and binders said about their involvement in making a fine edition. If Mallinckrodt and Lackmann had given this sort of information, their names would not have been forgotten.

18

3 PRIVISH AND PERISH?

A Case Study of Pressbook Production in Britain between the TVars

The privacy of some private presses is almost legendary, but most of them attempt to have their books distributed, however differently this may be done from normal publishers - David Godine's use of 'privish' to describe the ways some set about it was inspired. Over the years, I became more interested in how those presses which did attempt to have their books widely distributed set about it. An earlier version of this paper, which explores some of the problems in persuading the public that expensive limited editions were worth buying, was presented at a conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, held at Cambridge inJuly 1997, and is now reprinted from the University ofIowa's Counter no. 8, 1998. MMI

The role of the normal commercial publishing firm is to publish; to make public the contents of a book - it's so obvious as to be absurd to state it. The success or failure of the book, the health of the firm's bank balances, depend entirely on how widespread the publication is - how many copies are sold, discussed and read. What then is the role of a private press? In Ch. 2, I noted that the publishers of the annual Private Press Books used a definition which made them decide that the Plain \Vrapper Press was not a private press, but a money-making commercial venture. Whether they were right or not, both Plain Wrapper's owner and the Private Libraries Association were concerned with organizations which do not publish in the normal sense: to use David Godine's nonceword, the individuals and firms which issue press books often do not publish, they prit·ish. To cover your production costs appear superficially more difficult when you deliberately restrict the number of copies you publish, though many years ago G. P. Winship demonstrated that this is a simplistic way of considering it, and a statement of limitation can improve sales. I By looking at some of the problems encountered by certain private presses of the 1920S and 1930S, it is possible to identify some of the implications of 'privishing' - many of which are still relevant today for those who print or publish fine editions. 19

Privish and Perish? Of the private presses founded in Britain between the World Wars, three were of special importance. Francis Meynell's Nonesuch Press in London was one, but because its mode of working, the types of books it published, the sizes of its editions and its pricing policy were all different in various ways, I concentrate on the two others: the Gregynog Press at Newtown, Montgomeryshire, in Wales; and particularly on the Golden Cockerel Press in the Thames Valley near Henley. A generation earlier than these presses of the period between the Wars, in his The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) Thorstein Veblen had used William Morris's work at the Kelmscott Press to refine his well-known theory of conspicuous consumption: I Iere we have a somewhat cruder type, printed on hand-made, deckle-edged paper, with excessive margins and uncut leaves, with bindings of a painstaking crudeness and ineptitude. The Kelmscott Press reduces the matter to an absurdity - as seen from the point of view of brute serviceability alone - by issuing books for modern use, edited with obsolete spelling, printed in black-letter, and bound in limp vellum fitted with thongs. As a further characteristic feature which fixes the economic place of artistic book-making, there is the fact that these more elegant books are, at their best, printed in limited editions. A limited edition is a guarantee - somewhat crude, it is true - that this book is scarce and that it therefore is costly & lends pecuniary distinction to its consumer:

The printers and publishers of private press books are seldom concerned with 'brute serviceability alone'. Because of this they often have to seek ways of attracting attention to their wares (and selling them) which are remote from those of the commercial publisher. An example is in the work of the New Zealand-born wood-engraver John Buckland Wright. Going through his correspondence some years ago in the Meerman Museum in The Ilague - that splendid museum of the book, whose collections forcefully remind one of the importance of the Dutch contribution to book design and production - I came across letters written to 'JBW' in the early thirties by A. A. M. Stols, whose Ilalcyon Press at Maastricht was one of the more interesting fine publishers of the time. 3 At the time JBW's work was much better known on the Continent than in Britain. For a while their correspondence revolved around their attempts to place a particular copy of the Ilalcyon Press edition of Keats' Sonnets, illustrated by Buckland Wright, which Stols had published a little earlier. The reason so much fuss was being made soon became obvious: they were hoping to sell this rather special copy to an American'mllector, for the very high price of one hundred guineas} Quite apart from the oddity of a Dutch printer pricing things in guineas, this was three hundred times the average price of novels in England at that time. It would have bought eight hundred copies of Keats's complete works in Everym.m's Library, or any other of the many publishers' 'libraries' of the 20

Privish and Perish? time. Clearly Keats's text was merely the vessel, not the cargo; whatever the cargo was, it was pretty valuable. Their correspondence subsequently established that what was being sold was a unique copy, specially bound, including all the artist's own preliminary sketches and other roughs for his engravings, along with the text of the book. With some justification, it was being presented as an artistic treasure, bringing with it the cachet of exclusivity. In some other cases of the distribution of Buckland Wright's work, and that of other engravers like Robert Gibbings, Blair Hughes-Stanton, and particularly Eric Gill, there was often a hint (if not actually an explicit promise) of slight wickedness. It's hard to remember in these days, when hard-core pornography is thrust on us from every side, that in the 1920S and earlier the production of a 'topshelf book' with mildly erotic engravings was in itself an important attraction for some collectors. 5 Stols and the Halcyon Press did not make a big feature of erotica. The various owners of the Golden Cockerel Press were however very well aware of the potential in erotic books. As Ch. 12 shows, the Press had started in a village in the Thames Valley near Henley in 1920 as a sort of hazy left-wing arts-andcrafts co-operative venture, intent on issuing new literary work. The original young partners intended the Press to be an idealistic challenge to the normal processes of publishing; believing that 'normal' publishing commodified literature and separated writers from the production and distribution of their books. They planned that they as printers, and the writers who joined them, should live in a sort of commune and share their labour for the common good. In the 1960s such schemes were to become commonplace, but in the England of the early 1920S, so thoroughly half-baked an idea never had a chance, and it lost the founders much of their money, their health and mental equilibrium. 6 The lucky chance that the first book they published (A. E. Coppard's Adam (S Eve (S Pinch Me) was a runaway winner which brought in much more than it cost to produce - and that they switched in 1922 to producing limited editions, better printed and at much higher prices - was all that saved them from total rum. At first sight, to abandon publishing unlimited editions at a relatively modest price, and go instead for more expensive finely printed editions, seems a recipe for disaster. This was particularly when standards of production are as low as surviving copies of the earliest Cockerels suggests theirs were, for fine printing produces some peculiar problems of its own. Publishers of 'fine editions' on the Kelmscott model mocked by Veblen shared many of the same challenges in production as those facing commercial publishers. But they also had some different problem areas. Private press books were almost always issued in severely limited editions, so the unit cost of publicity, composition, illustration (and even such minor aspects as cutting the binding brasses) was commensurately much higher per copy than for books in large editions. Because these were fine editions, their production called for the use of more expensive materials than those employed in the normal book trade. The hand-made 21

Privish and Perish? paper cost far more, and was considerably more difficult to print on, calling for highly trained and skilled (and relatively expensive) pressmen. The illustrators, who were also relatively highly paid, in the 1920S at any rate, often had to learn to adapt their engraving technique to the toothy hand-made papers used by the private presses, because the aesthetic of the English Arts & Crafts Movement made some 'easy' surface like Japanese vellum totally unacceptable. There were other difficulties to face. Nobody ever bought the Halcyon Press Keats as the cheapest way to get a volume of his work, but they had to find Keats's work sufficiently to their taste to buy it in this more expensive form. The publishers had to find the right books to publish for this special market, and to engage the 'right' artists for these special books. Without much money to spend on advertising, they had to secure publicity for their publications - for (unless they worked very hard) not many booksellers would stock them, nor would many journals review them. As their books came into the class of luxuries, other things were needed to persuade purchasers. Convincing potential buyers that these expensive books would give an exclusive or aesthetic or erotic or cultural experience - or all of these - called for marketing skills of no ordinary kind. Sometimes it could be done; but often more easily by the suggestion that buying a private press book at (say) ten times the price of an 'ordinary' new book was a sound investment in fiscal terms as well. Inspiring confidence that their books would go up in value, while flattering the clients that they were people of taste and discrimination, often underpinned private printing. The world-wide market for such expensive editions was always very small. Many fine printers believed there was a larger market to be tapped, if only they could find the way; but getting satisfactory overseas distribution was also of real importance. Quick sales of a few copies in France, the Netherlands, Australia, etc. - to say nothing of the USA - could make all the difference between cost recovery and a loss for a press in Britain. An efficient agent abroad, guaranteeing to take a stated number of copies, could result in a comfortable profit and allow the fine printer to take more risks in selection of titles, artists, and formats. (Robert Gibbings enjoyed this situation in the late 1920S, but it lulled him into a false sense of security.) Just before it switched from being a writer's co-operative producing new literature at low prices, the owners of Golden Cockerel were quite cynical about what they could do to make more money, fast. Their formula included all the features mocked by Veblen (the use of hand-made paper, the unopened leaves, the limitation of the edition, the artistic bindings) and it it also included the deliberate production of erotica. "Gay Taylor (one of the original partners) recorded her husband Ilal's suggestion: Suddenly he said, 'Why shouldn't you and [Coppard, her lover] go to Italy and publish, and then I'd only be liable as printer, and we could puhlish anything we liked? Why not?' In the afternoon I went to see [Coppard] ... and we began to plan. We all went up 22

Privish and Perish? to London and talked to ... the London traveller. He scented money and was interested. We talked of publishing Brantome, the Celestina, the Liber Amoris, and so on, and indulged in dreams of an opulent future.'

Golden Cockerel never became a forerunner of Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press, but it is a fact that private presses were very seldom the subject of the obscenity prosecutions which were very much a part of the English literary scene in the years between the wars. Golden Cockerel did issue Brantome's Lives of Gallant Ladies, and made money from it, but it's also worth noting that the Press took precautions,S so that if prosecuted it would be difficult to prove that they were its publishers. The Brantome was the first Golden Cockerel book that Robert Gibbings illustrated, and its success had a marked influence on him. Early in 1924 he bought Golden Cockerel from its founders, and for the next ten years he directed its fortunes. In these ten years there were several other books which were decidedly sexy in a 1920S way, notably those written or translated by his friend Powys Mathers and those illustrated by another friend, Eric Gill. In the case of one book written by Powys Mathers, Procreant Hymn, described by the author (for the Press's prospectus) as 'a lyrical exultation in praise of the generative principle in man, in nature, and in deity', Gill's wish was to portray vigorous copulation. It had to be censored, Gibbings decided. One consequence was that the published book contains less energetic, less rampant copper engravings than Gill had intended - and another, that the Press never issued Mathers' sequel, Also Our Bed is Green. But Gill had the last laugh: sets of his 'unexpurgated' engravings were advertised separately by Gill, and distributed for him through Bumpus's bookshop, itself perhaps the most • 9 Important bookshop selling Golden Cockerel books. There was a marked difference at Gregynog. This was a mansion in Montgomeryshire belonging to Gwen and Margaret Davies, two very wellconnected and extremely wealthy Welsh ladies who owned substantial parts of the Rhondda coalfields and Barry Docks, but had a typical guilt about their wealth. 10 To relieve it they wanted to 'do good' with their money in Wales. One method they adopted was to try to encourage the arts and the applied arts - which in the end meant a very strong patronage of music at Gregynog, and establishing the Press at which books were printed and finely bound. Being in Wales, there was special attention to books about the principality or by Welsh authors. However, the artists who were put in charge of developing the crafts side seldom had special \\'e1sh connections, but were chosen as 'the best' by advisers in London, Oxford, and Cambridge. By consulting the most eminent typographers in Britain at the time, the Davies sisters did their best to ensure that what was done at Gregynog was to the highest possible standard. The Controllers that the Davies sisters then appointed to run the Gregynog ~ress seldom had an easy time. They were responsible to a demanding managIng committee, which had little understanding of artists or the book trade. In addition, the sisters' munificence was accompanied by a contradictory mean-

23

Privish and Perish? ness in small things, which could be hard to take - but (although the sisters from time to time said that they wanted the Press to be profitable) Gregynog never had to depend on sales for survival, and in fact never was profitable. This 'featherbedding' encouraged attitudes to what to publish, and how to design the books, which were poles apart from those at Golden Cockerel, let alone those of the ordinary commercial publisher. At Golden Cockerel, Robert Gibbings had an enormous advantage: unlike Gregynog, where there was often mutual misunderstanding between the owners (or the committee) on one side and the artists they brought in as Controllers on the other, Gibbings' partners were worldly as well as (relatively) wealthy. These partners, virtually ignored by historians of the Press, came from the same background as Gibbings - the Anglo-Irish gentry of County Cork. They shared his values, and trusted him enough to give him his head. While he was funded by such friends - and while there was a booming market for fine printing - it worked well. Once Gibbings turned to banks instead of friends for funding, and the assured sales he had enjoyed throughout the 1920S declined, the Press got into trouble. II • In 1925, Gibbings agreed that the Press should publish Powys Mathers' story Red Wise; a charming fable very much in the spirit of The Thousand and One Nights, which Mathers had translated. The sparkling, light-hearted engravings by Gibbings complemented the mood of its text admirably. A favourable review in the Times Literary Supplement commented how effectively Mathers had caught the manner of oriental literature in his story, and how beautifully Golden Cockerel had produced it. The reviewers in the Manchester Guardian and the New Statesman were equally complimentary in their reception of the story and its presentation. Beyond doubt, these favourable reviews in influential journals helped to draw attention to the book and the Press. But I suspect in fact that more copies were sold as a result of a very different notice in the London Mercury (usually a good friend to Cockerel books) in which Robert Herring was much more damning: 'Red Wise reminded me [he wrote] of a Beardsley hag rigged out as a fairy godmother. It is a well-done book, of slight indecency almost hidden beneath the decoration; but the mere ingenuity of the disguise shows the author has spent more time on it than is either healthy or profitable.' 12 This comment would certainly have made both Gibbings and Mathers shout with laughter. Like the 'banned in Boston' wrappers put on books in New York, Ilerring's review was one which sent positive signals to those wanting to buy 'warm' books. Naturally erotica of this kind were not produced at Gregynog, though its committee was from time to time troubled by the way its artists tried to persuade local girls to act as mod~ls, and at the extent of nudity in some of the engravings produced for its books. Golden Cockerel did not produce only these sexy trifles. It is best known for its editions of Chaucer, and famous for its Bible texts, with The Four Gospels

24

Privish and Perish?

of 1931 as its undoubted masterpiece. Its later owners added a handsome Greek Anthology, an exemplary Endymion, and a monumental Mabinogion. If Gibbings had been able to persuade George Bernard Shaw, it would also have produced a monumental folio edition of Shaw's plays, as later it produced a superb Twelfth Night, for plays were of real interest to the Press. Gibbings sought advice from a friend on whether to publish Pietro Aretino's I Ragionamenti in translation and was told clearly that he should not: he must avoid getting a name for pornographic stuff, or 'catering for the News of the World Public'. But Aretino's plays, his friend advised, were possible: 'They are very fine & amusing & contain no real impossibilities.' [3 This was a sensible suggestion; and could have been a success for Golden Cockerel. But Gibbings didn't consider it seriously for a moment: undertaking the volume called for a long-term editorial commitment to scholarly editing of scholarly texts, which he would not make. An anti-professional stance does not necessarily predicate poor texts, of course. However, under Gibbings, Golden Cockerel was determinedly unscholarly, in a way which frustrated production of several promising books. [4 He summed up his policy on several occasions, for instance when turning down a translation of the Agamemnon offered by a classical scholar, E. H. Blakeney (whose translations had graced the lists of several private presses), saying that Cockerel readers demanded 'standard texts', and that they preferred a text without editing. Gibbings advanced the unbelievable explanation that his customers were presumed to be 'so well acquainted with the original work that they only buy our version so as to have it in beautiful form'. 'Now in your suggestion [he continued] the introduction and notes would take up at least one third of the book and this I fear puts it outside our market.' [S Even if Gibbings was right that his customers wanted minimal apparatus (and I think he was mistaken), the market for the sorts of book he chose to produce rapidly disappeared. Almost every other private press except Gregynog ceased in the 1930s. Though the Depression defeated Gibbings, Golden Cockerel did not have to close, because the people who bought it from him were wealthy enough to be in it for the long haul. They agreed that they would pump more money in, and take none out, until the Press was once again selling its books better, which could happen only with the passing of the Depression. Gregynog did not need to sell its books (and slowly-moving stock was much more a matter to be minuted at Board meetings, rather than life-ordeath as it was for Golden Cockerel) but the mid- and late-1930s brought both presses a major problem. This was quite different from any encountered by commercial publishers, and much closer to difficulties faced by artists and art dealers. The prices of private press books were 'artificial' prices, kept up partly by the very small numbers published, so that demand would exceed supply. When a press was lucky (as Gibbings was for most of the 1920S), on publication day

25

Privish and Perish? the number of copies already subscribed would exceed the number printed which tended to make prices appreciate immediately: this was one of the attractions of private press books as investments. Even when a book was a slow seller, there was a tacit guarantee it would never be remaindered;16 and it was in the interests of the press owners to see that the number of copies of their books actually on the market was never enough to soak up the demand. So in the 1930S, both Gregynog and Golden Cockerel regularly used to buy back second-hand copies of their books which came up at auction, so that the market value for these titles would not be depressed. Even the Davies sisters grumbled a little about the necessity for this; and to the much poorer Golden Cockerel partners it was very frustrating to see their small receipts from sales swallowed up in this way, rather than being available for producing the new books they planned. They never found a solution: it was only the changed demand for fine editions during the Second World War that removed the need to buy back. While the Golden Cockerel partners waited for the end of the Depression, and for sales once more to approach the level enjoyed by Gibbings when he was running the Press, they tried various strategies to increase turnover. Like him, they tried producing cheap unlimited editions of some of their more 'popular' titles, but this proved a disaster. Like Gibbings, they produced erotica, with prospectuses which promised much - and (improving on the past) their editions often included 'specials'. These were a few specially-bound copies which had an extra unbound suite of engravings (including one or two 'warmer' prints which were not in the 'ordinary' edition) which were sold at much higher prices. 18 The monumental editions idea surfaced again. It worked magnificently for their editions of Crusader Castles 19 and various other books by Lawrence of Arabia, once they had been able to sweet-talk the Lawrence trustees into being allowed to produce them. One of the new partners had attracted critical acclaim for the Press's books on Bligh and the Bounty, and so (though the financial returns were disappointing) they tried tapping further new markets for Golden Cockerel, with a series of books commemorating important happenings. It had some success (though less than they had hoped) with books on the Pilgrim Fathers, Catholic missionaries in Canada, and the settlement in Sydney Cove: books planned to appeal to American, Canadian, and Australian buyers who might not otherwise have considered buying Golden Cockerel books. These were intended to be followed by further books on Tasman's voyages, which they thought might be subsidiz~d by the Dutch, Australian, or New Zealand governments. Similarly for a Sarawak centenary volume, Rajah Brooke's administration was expected to pay the costs of production. Less certain (but potentially far more profitable if it had come about) was a book or books on Ilungarian dance, for which the State Bank in Budapest was

I,

Privish and Perish? to pick up the bills. The Second World War, alas, put an end to all those plans, which would have extended the scope of English fine printing in some unusual ways. The Press's Canterbury Tales had been a great success in the 1920S. In the years just before the War, getting subsidies or guaranteed sales for 'monumental editions' of some other national classics in English translation seemed promising. Two of these got close to publication. One was Camoens' Lusiads, which was to have been funded by the Luso-Brazilian Council, but was abandoned when a new translation was announced by an American university press - the sort of mischance which hits many publishers, commercial as well as private. The other was equally unlucky. The Spanish ambassador in London had almost guaranteed that his government would pay the cost of Golden Cockerel's edition of The Cid - but he was the republican ambassador, and when General Franco's troops swept the republican administration away, the Golden Cockerel hopes went too."o Quite apart from complex schemes like these, which took the Press into the rarefied atmosphere of international diplomacy, subsidy publishing proved the only way Golden Cockerel could proceed for a time in the late 1930S, because the partners' capital in the venture was tied up in a long string of books which were selling far too slowly for them to venture on more without some guarantees. Sometimes these came from authors, who underwrote production costs to enable the books to be issued more quickly than would otherwise have been the case; or even from the artists, who agreed to waive fees for engraving their blocks (normally paid in advance of publication) and received instead a larger royalty on the copies as they were sold. ZI But the idea of monumental editions did not disappear from the owners' minds: in the enormously profitable years of the early 1940s, when the Press's stock of unsold books vanished in the dearth of other luxury goods which could make gifts, they embarked on their lavishly-illustrated Endymion, and rather later on their Mabinogion, two of the finest British books of the twentieth century. Both were funded entirely from their own resources: Golden Cockerel Was back in the business of making the most handsome books it could, as well as it could. It was by a strange irony that the Mabinogion was published by Golden Cockerel, an English press (though run by Irishmen). Why did the Greynog Press, set up in Wales especially to foster Welsh arts and crafts, and with the avowed intention to 'unlock the treasure house of \Velsh literature, romance and legend, and make it accessible to the English-speaking public' 22 never attempt to produce this classic Welsh text? There is nothing to tell us, though one would think the idea must have been Considered. Perhaps it was simply a result of the featherbedding mentioned earlier: Gregynog was a very paternalistic enterprise, and market need was never considered. Gregynog produced some very handsome books, but in the

27

Privish and Perish? eighteen years before it ceased publishing in 1940 there were only forty-two of them. In the same period Golden Cockerel, with far fewer resources and subject to commercial considerations, put out one hundred and thirty-eight. The majority were of comparable quality, and the best undoubtedly were of more importance than any which came, subsidized, from Gregynog. Market forces in publishing, even publishing of fine editions, have something to be said for them.

"'

4

'PRINTING AT HOME' An un-Common Press in the Canterbury Museum, New Zealand

MMI Like many schoolboys, I became interested in printing, and in the possibilities of printing at home. I longed to own an Adana machine of the kind a neighbour showed me, but it was not until (following the advice of John Ryder, in his Printingfor Pleasure) I acquired an Adana quarto flatbed press that I had equipment of my own. Possibly because this went with me on my travels, to Jamaica, Trinidad, and Nigeria, and then back to England, I became particularly interested in the sort of printing equipment used by pioneers in different parts of the Commonwealth, as well as in the machines aimed at the Victorian amateur printer. James Mosley's paper on this, and subsequently David Chambers' work on the Parlour Printing Press (and then his reprint of Holtzappfel's Printing Apparatus for the Use of Amateurs) informed my interest, so that when many years later I chanced on the press described in the paper which follows, I knew how to set about finding out more about it. For early printing in the South Island of New Zealand, one of the authorities was Keith Maslen, and this paper is a much-rewritten version of one originally published in An Index to Civilization: Studies of Printing and Publishing History in Honour of Keith Maslen (Clayton, Victoria: Centre for Bibliographical and Textual Studies, 1993). Some crafts are more transportable than others. Printing is one which usually calls for a considerable amount of equipment, some of it very heavy. Until well into the eighteenth century, the man who wished to take a press where no press had been before had little choice. Either he took or built a Common Press of the old English fashion (as did most of the pioneer printers in North America and the West Indies) or a B1aeu Press, the 'new fashion'd Dutch Press [which] is worth a score of such' as James Watson put it in 1713.1 Even in pioneering societies, there were carpenters and smiths with the skills needed to build such presses, though if the printer wished to start work quickly he was prudent to take his press with him. The first press to be introduced to New South Wales was a Common Press, and though with hindsight we ~ay think these wooden presses were rapidly superseded by the superior Iron presses which came into manufacture early in the nineteenth century - the Stanhopes, Columbians, Albions - in fact wooden presses continued in use in

29

'Printing at Home'

printing shops in Europe and her colonies for a surprisingly long time" Indeed as late as 1840 a Common Press which the printer Poisson at Caen (Normandy) found superfluous to his needs was shipped out to the Bay of Islands, for use by the Roman Catholic Mission in New Zealand. They used it alongside their new iron Gaveaux Press, and ten years later this long-obsolete wooden press was sold off to a printer in San Francisco and used to print the Journal of Commerce there. 3 The amateur printer in the eighteenth century was, by and large, in the same situation as the trade printer. If he wanted a press, he had to install a Common Press. At Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole was compelled to provide the same sort of equipment as would have been found in the Bowyers' premises or used by Strahan - though as Edward Rowe Mores reminds us in a memorable passage, the really determined amateur could get by with much less: Mr Stevens was a gentleman of a typographical turn but no great adept. he purchased some letter at The Hague, and when he came home he printed for his recreation, he used wooden chases nailed upon planks: no composing stick: no headsticks, foot-sticks, sidesticks, gutter-sticks or other furniture, but nails only with which he pegged his matter together: his balls were a bunch of waste paper: his tympans and frisket a dirty handkerchief: his press for small work the ball of his thumb; for larger a rolling-pin and old. rags ... the greatest of his performances was the epitaph of Dr IIolmes late Pres. of S. John's coli. Oxon. which he conceived himself in honour bound to print ... it makes a whole half-sheet, and for work of this bulk wooden chases may suffice. - Sutler's portables are little more.... 4

'Sutter's portables' were perhaps the earliest attempt to market presses suitable for small work, which would also (as the name suggests) be easy to move from one site to another. The potential market for a really reliable light and portable press was considerable, and with the coming of the iron press, the nineteenth century was to see many attempts to produce light printing machines aimed specifically at persons outside the ordinary printing trade. S It's possible that the first printer in Wellington (New Zealand) carried one of Cowper's Parlour Printing Presses along with him, and in Christchurch a small machine has survived which gives tangible evidence of an attempt by the Canterbury Provincial Council to produce documents in-house, and bypass the commercial printers of the settlement. This press is now in the Canterbury Museum. The earliest of these small portable cast-iron presses which were aimed at the growing amateur market - Cowper's Parlour Press - was publicized in such a way that it's clear that at first the manufacturers aimed at the educational market. The manual sold with the press 6 declared that Cowper had devised it 'for the amusement and education of youth, by enjbling them to print any little subject they had previously written', To declare a preceptive purpose was quite shrewd policy in early Victorian England, but by the 1870S the way such machines were advertised had often changed - just as the nature of the printing trade had changed with the advent 30

'Printing at Home'

Fig.

2.

A highl)-idcalizcd \ iC\1 of amateur printing, from Jabez Francis's Pril1ling III Home (1870).

of modern idea of management and of adverti ing. In 1872, for example, the merican' illiam . Kel ey (inventor of the very successful Excelsior Press) advertised for the fir t time: ' 5 Printing Pre s! pelfect Press at the right price. Bu inc men sa\'e expense and increase busine by doing their own printing and ad\'erti ing. For Boy, delightful, malley-making amusement.' 7 In Britain, there wa Ie empha is on profit, but the adverti ing of new presses usually indicated their alue for a different purpose as well as the educational benefit of printing at home. Even the manufacturers of the Parlour Pres pointed out how useful it could be for the well-run office: 'Companies, Institution and Individuals, have found it convenient for ... [printing] papers sub ervient to the de patch and methodical arrangement of business . ... ' nother manufacturer in London, D. G. Berri, in his The Art ojPrinting (3rd edn, 1871), urged the commercial and administrative advantages of his own 'People's Printing Pre s' in clear terms: 'men in business could print more rapidly than can be done by an) other pre or hand machine now in use, and at a tithe of a printer' charges, their circular, cards, handbills, invoice . ... ' and in a fine imperiali t \'ein, Berri ugge ted that 'those pioneers who daily I ave our hor to e tabli h a home mid t the pathle s forests and the rolling prairie, and to perpetuate our indu tr) with our language on the continents of A ia and Africa, and the di tant i land of Polyne ia' would find it advantageou to include a People' Printing Pre in their baggage.

31

'Printing at Home '

Fig. 3. Franci~'s prcss, now in the Canterbury Muscum, New Zealand. With the platen raised, sho\\ ing the bed of the press and (behind it) a cloth-covered t'riskcl which has padding bchind it. This press could just lake a sheet lIf nbout eight by twelve inches, bUl itlVould have been very hard to get a good impression if the type area was much morc th11l1 half thaL

32

'Printing at Home' Possibly some of Berri's machines made the way easy for settlers in New Zealand, but there is no evidence of their use. But other machines of the same kind did come to New Zealand: the press in Christchurch is a rare survival of a machine made by one of Berri's rivals: the Everybody's Press, which was manufactured and sold by Jabez Francis & Son of Rochford, Essex. The pedagogic advantages of these presses was emphasized by Francis in his booklet Printing at Home, with Full Instructionsfor Amateurs, of which a second edition was published in 1873. The wood-engraved frontispiece to this booklet is rather attractive, and has been reproduced frequently.s It shows an idealized family in their parlour in a prosperous middle-class home (seascapes hanging on the wall, cat playing with a ball of wool under the table). By the fireside, Papa and Mama sit in armchairs reading proofs; one daughter is seated at case setting type, while in the centre their son, a young man in immaculate get-up, is operating the Press assisted by a second daughter who is apparently piling the printed pages as they come from the press. It makes printing at home look very attractive, very pleasant, very easy. I can imagine that many young Victorians would have fallen for this deceptive and dishonest advertising - for though the Everybody's Press was neatly constructed and simple to use, I can't believe that even in the best regulated Victorian household printing was ever quite so clean and tidy a process as this picture suggests; nor that the unprotected polished mahogany dining table was going to suffer no damage from the press (weighing fifty pounds or more) which had been placed on its surface. But it was persuasive stuff, and there is evidence from a trade comment thirty years later that Francis's press was highly regarded Q by those who sought to print well using a press aimed at the amateur market. Quite closely related in its action to the earlier Parlour Press, or indeed to the twentieth century Adana Q!.!arto Flatbed press which was recommended by John Ryder in Printingfor Pleasure (the little manual used by most operators of bibliographical presses to teach themselves not only how to print but to do so with some sense of style), the Francis press has an ingenious mechanism. This applies pressure from below the bed of the press, raising the forme into close contact with the frisket and platen, and avoiding many of the difficulties often experienced in getting the platen exactly on a plane with the printing surface. The Francis Press which is now in the Canterbury Museum was apparently obtained so that agendas and minutes of meetings of the Canterbury Provincial Council could be produced with the secrecy in-house printing facilitates. It is a handsome example of Victorian cast-iron manufacture, quite heavily decorated on top of the platen, but essentially a plain engineering design of compact, solid, and no-nonsense construction. This ought to have assisted the preservation of such presses, but they are very rare indeed: the only other Francis press to have survived (as far as I am aware) is one of slightly different size and construction which is now in the St Bride Printing Library in London. JO

33

'Printing at Home' When the press was purchased for the Canterbury Provincial Council (some time before 1876, as that body then ceased to exist) it would no doubt have come with its own rollers and a miniature type-cabinet containing mini-cases with enough of the various sorts to print one or two quarto pages. Almost all manufacturers of presses for the amateur market bundled them with the type, chases, and other printing equipment. The types they supplied usually included a range of two or three sizes of a modern-face roman and its accompanying italic; perhaps with a small fount of black-letter, and a couple of grotesque or tuscan founts for display purposes I l - all that the amateur could be expected to need. The types were almost always bought from standard founders like Caslon, Figgins, or the Fann Street Foundry, though the prices charged to the amateur often show a considerable mark-up from the founders' prices. It is not clear how or when this interesting little machine passed into the care of the Canterbury Museum, and its survival there was by the greatest of luck. A former member of the Museum's staff, Huia Beaumont, recalled for me an amazing day in 1955 when I intercepted a procession of trolley-loads of obsolete gear destined for the dump. There were piles of printers' paraphernalia, one large press and on top of a pile one small, old press [the Francis press] which the Director gave me permission to take. I assured him that, when the new display area was ready, I would return it to the Museum." The Museum's new display area took time to appear, and for five years Mr Beaumont had the Francis press at home. He used it for the range of jobbing printing undertaken by so many amateur printers: invitations, programmes, Christmas cards, and so forth - precisely the kind of work for which the press had been marketed eighty years earlier. llis recollection was that once he had mastered the rhythm of hand-inking, and of positioning each sheet as he fed it into the press, it was thoroughly satisfactory and satisfying to use. But (in common with many purchasers of the later Adana flatbeds) he also found that it was slow. Like many another amateur who becomes hooked on printing, he wanted something faster which would allow him to print a larger area, so it was not entirely with regret that he returned the Francis press to the Museum. The individual Francis press now in the Canterbury Museum may not have produced much of lasting significance, but it is interesting as a rare example of the type of printing equipment designed for amateur use which is half-way between the kind of press and printing methods used in the eighteenth century, and the modern word-processors, laser-printers, and copiers likely to be employed today by those whose interest is in home-publishing. And unlike the word-processors, whose versatility enables people to use a range of design possibilities too large for most of us to employ them effectively, the discipline of setting type and the simple design of the press automatically guided the user towards design which was at least functional.

34

5 AN AMATEUR PRINTER OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Because a promised article had failed to arrive, I wrote this as a 'filler' for the Winter 1968 issue of The Private Library, and because I had been publishing more than I thought wise, it originally appeared it under a pseudonym. Studies of early private presses are still very uncommon, and the rather romantic story of the young Marquis de Bercy printing against the backdrop of the French revolution bears repeating. MMI

It is unusual to find much interest today among the many enthusiasts of the private press for the work of the presses which the French aristocracy kept as playthings in the half-century before the Revolution. Their books were those of owners who could have said with Horace Walpole that present amusement was all their object (and with more truth than he), and they have none of the fanaticism of the school of .Morris or Cobden-Sanderson with their affected and self-conscious dreams of The Book Beautiful. But they are hardly ever to be seen outside the largest libraries - and not often in them - and with the fall of the ancien regime this type of press disappeared for ever. That at any rate is the general opinion, and for those who like the present writer have a confused picture of the revolutionary period in France - by Edmund Burke out of the Baroness Orczy - the idea that aristocratic presses could have continued work in the 1790S, and that their owners might have received the protection of some of the Jacobins, seems an utter impossibility. Nevertheless, there were at least two such presses at work in this period. At the Chateau de Dampierre the Duchesse de Luynes occupied her time in printing translations of Robinson Crusoe and other works. The other press was that of the young Marquis de Bercy. The Malon family was an old one: Jacques l\lalons having become possessor of the Seigneurie de Bercy in 1522. In 1658 one of his descendents, CharlesHenri de l\lalon, demolished the old house and employed the architect Fran~ois Le Vau to build a new chateau on the old site. But as with so many of such undertakings, the house was not completed until the time of CharlesHenri's grandson in 1714. The estates extended a considerable way around the

35

An Amateur Printer of the French Revolution western end of Paris; an area now completely built over between the Bois de Vincennes and the Seine at the Quai de Bercy-Charenton, with the chateau itself standing close to what is now the Porte de Charenton. The house has of course long since disappeared, and its contents, its large library and collections of pictures, have been dispersed or destroyed. But in 1790 it was still in its prime when Maximilien-Emmanuel-Charles de Malon, Marquis de Bercy, died. His heir, Nicolas-Charles de Malon, his only son, was aged only ten years when he succeeded to the title. The young Marquis seems to have been lucky in his tutor. For their New Year's gifts in 1791 his friends M. de Praslin and M. de Montesquiou were given little imprimeries anglaises, small bellows presses with toy cases of type and other equipment of the sort sold by the Breitkopf Foundry in Leipzig, and no doubt also made in France. These remote ancestors of the John Bull printing sets so many of us played with in childhood delighted their recipients, and the young Marquis was very envious. So enthusiastic did he become about printing that his tutor secretly had miniature cases and other equipment made for him. His joy when he received these must have been beyond bounds, and as soon as he had mastered the use of the press he set to work on producing a book of fables written by his father, and dedicated to his godfather, Aymar-CharlesMarie de Nicolay. Because of the small scale of his press, and the small amount of type which he possessed, he was able to print only four pages at a time. In his preface, which gives the account of how he acquired his press, he apologized to his godparents for the slowness with which he would be able to complete the book to send to them. His father's fables show plenty of good sense, but are scarcely to be ranked in the highest class as poetry. A single specimen will suffice: LE cOQ ET LES ANIMAUX D'UNE BASSE COUR

Dans une basse-cour ou tout etoit tranquille, Le Maitre suit un Coq qu'i1 venoit d'acheter; C'etait garnement ase masquer habile, Un esprit inferncl, sans qu'on put s'en douter. Ses turbulents conseils sou dement circulerent; Les Vaehes, Ies Taureaux soudain se revolverent Sans raison, sans st;avoir pourquoi; Les Canards, les Cochons, les Poulets s'en mclerent Jusqu'aux Dindons se mutinerent; Aucun ne voulut plus reconnoitre de loi. Cct exemple est frequent parmi les Notres: Un homme dangereux pervertit tous.Jes autres.

There were plenty of hommes dangereuses around when this was printed! Four fascicules of the book, a total of 140 pages, were produced in 1791. But the Chateau de Bercy was dangerously close to Paris, and the revolution was at its height. It seems remarkable the young printer was left undisturbed for so

Au All/a teur Prillter of the Fre1lch Revolutiol7

IIl'

,

FABLES ET

QEUVRES DIVERSES, E N

PER S;

PAR MAXIMILIEN-EMANUEL-CUAR..LES

MALON Mil DE BERCY. lmprimks par Jon Fds, tigl tie

M{C 4IU.

• • • • • • • • . • • excmplaria palri, NOClurni versabo manu, verubo diuml.

TOME

A

PREMIER.

P A. R 1 S. I

7 9

I.

Fig. 4. The tirle-page of the book printed by the I I-year-old Marquis at the Chateau de Berey.

long, and it wa due to the fact that he had the protection of Tallien, one of the mo t powerful figure at the time, later to be responsible for the downfall of Robe pierre. Tallien was the son of a former teward of the Bercy household, and had re idualloyalties to the .Malon. s he was a printer himself, it is possible that Tallien knew about the young Marquis's press. One might even conjecture that the Marquis's tutor had consulted him, and that he had been instrumental in the manufacture of the press and cases - but this is to return to history a la Baroness rcz)". In 1792 the protection that Tallien could afford wa no longer enough: the hateau de Bercy wa taken oyer by the State, and the young larqui ' printing brought to an abrupt halt. He himself died, the last of his line, in J 09.'

37

6 A PRINTER'S APPRENTICESHIP

Reminiscences of Christopher Sandford

I first met Christopher Sandford (then owner of the Golden Cockerel Press) in the 1950S, and when editing The Private Library persuaded him to contribute an article to the first volume. Towards the end of the 1960s, when I was starting to collect material for a history of the Golden Cockerel Press, I spent some time with him and his wife Lettice Sandford at Eye Manor in I Ierefordshire, gathering background material on his boyhood and going with him through the books of the Boars Head Press which they had run in the late 1920S and early 1930s. This paper was based on tape recordings of those conversations. Sandford was not entirely at ease with the recording, and our conversations rambled widely and needed much editing when I subsequently transcribed them into a chronological account. Much was left out (sometimes at his request, when he felt he had spoken harshly about people) but I have avoided putting any words into his mouth which he did not speak. The text here is condensed from an earlier, fuller version of the paper published as 'From County Cork to Chiswick and Cockerel: Reminiscences of Christopher Sandford' in Matrix 6, 1986. References in the notes are to David Chambers, 'Boars Head and Golden Hours', Private Library, Spring 1985, pp. 2-33; and to Will Ransom, Selective Checklists of Press Books (New York: Duschnes, 1963), part 10, pp. 315-18.

MMI

As a background to Sandford's account of his childhood, a short note on his parents is helpful. lIis mother Mary (18(q-19+9) T}Jas the second daughter of lIenry Toulmin of Kingsbury, St Albans. In 1890 she married the lIon. Algernon EvansFreke, who succeeded as the ninth Baron Carbery (in the Irish Peerage) in 1894. lIe died in 1898, and their son John (then six years old) succeeded to the title. In 1902 Lady Carbery remarried. lIer second husband was Arthur Wellesley Sandford (1858-1939), son of the Reverend Canon Sandford, Rector of Clo1l1nel. A. Iv. Sandford was an eminent Cork doctor, whose career is outlined in Who was Who. Christopher was the eldest child of their marriage, and spent his childhood in the last years of the Protestant ascendancy in Coun~y Cork. I was born in Cork on 5 December 1902, and I spent my youth there in the south of Ireland. I lalf the year - the summer months - would be in a castle

Reminiscences oJChristopher Sandford forty miles west of Cork, [ a particularly beautiful one on a hill looking out over the Atlantic. From my nursery window you could see the Galley Head lighthouse, and all the great liners sailing out for America came just round the corner of the headland past the Galley Head; the Mauretania, the Lusitania, and so on. At night when one was going to sleep in the nursery, there would be the light twinkling, and my nurse used to sing Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh ... Every fine morning, she and the nursery-maid and myself and my young brother used to get in the donkey cart, with the beautiful black donkey called Egypt, who took us down to the strand, the long strand. It was about a mile long, and the great Atlantic breakers came rolling in. There we played in the pools and the sand, and we had a tin bathing-house there, where my nurse brewed tea for us. This was an idyllic existence. The castle is still there, but it's a ruin now, and the garden a jungle. We went back this summer [1968] and went round, but you look up and there are black holes where the windows of your nursery were.... In the other parts of the year, the winter months, we lived just outside Cork where my father had a pleasant Georgian house with a little estate all round. At a suitable age we were taught to ride; on ponies to start with, and I was terrified at first. We would go into Cork in the car. The car had no windscreen, that first one - I think my father had the second car that came into Ireland, and his first car had P 12 as its registration number! It didn't have a hood which went up and down - if it was going to rain, you put on a huge contraption which was lowered on pulleys from the [garage] roof, which made it into a limousine. And this would go puffing along. And he also had a little three-seater runabout, a Star. There were horses of course, and you did a great deal with horses. I remember friends coming to a party: the children were brought in a coach. My father was a surgeon, an eye, nose, and throat man - he was president of the Opthalmological Society and so on. His family had lived in Ireland as far as we knew from Stuart times, because our family shield is what they would call Stuart period. But in Ireland it's so awfully difficult to establish your descent at all accurately because so often there has been war and the churches burned with their records. And we can go back so far but no further.... My father was not literary, but of course he loved poetry and could quote a great deal, mostly I think Tennyson or Browning at that time. My mother was bookish. She wrote throughout her life, but mostly in an amateur capacity. She wrote beautifully, and one of her books The Farm by Lough Gur published by Longman was quite successful! When my son Ueremy Sandford] began doing programmes for the BBC he found some very sad diaries that she had written after her first husband died, and made them into a programme he called 'Not wishing to return'. It's terribly sad, and brings my mother back so vividly that I'm brought to tears. Latterly in her life she wrote a book called Happy World

39

Reminiscences of Christopher Sandford about her youth and up till just before she was married. It was a very good book too; a beautiful picture of life in Hertfordshire in the latter half of the nineteenth century. My father had another house, a Georgian town house in Cork, up in St Patrick's Place. When staying there, our chief joy on a Sunday morning when my father was free would be to go and walk along the quays, looking at the ships. Of course in those days there were any number of beautiful sailing ships - full-rigged ships, and barques, with grain from the Argentine and everything else. It really was a joy. Then my mother organized a sort of small school in our house. She engaged a very good governess, and the children of some of our neighbours came in and shared it as a school. This was my first education. The next thing was that I was sent to school in England - my mother was English, and was very anxious that I shouldn't grow up with an Irish brogue; rather sad, I adore the Irish brogue and can put it on when I like. I was sent to Cheam, and was relatively happy there because the boys were from more or less the same sort of homes that I was. For instance, there were other boys from the south of Ireland, many of them from country houses who rode ponies and led the same sort of life as I did in the holidays. The war came on soon after I'd gone there, and one of the steamers between Ireland and England was torpedoed. My parents felt they couldn't risk me and my [younger] brother (who joined me at school shortly afterwards) being torpedoed, and so they decided to spend half their lives in England and half in Ireland. During the term-time my father would go back to Cork for his work, and the holidays he would spend in England with my mother and us. We lived first at a beautiful place called Avening Court in Gloucestershire. Our next move was to a beautiful place in Wiltshire, Wooley Park. It actually belonged to a cousin of our who was a minor, and so the house was let to my mother - she had been born there. From there we moved to Devon, near Beer. There was a delightful walk out to Beer llead, with the beautiful white cliffs, and the sea the whole thing was so idyllic really. I've missed out the fact that when I finished at my prep school I was sent to Marlborough. My elder half-brother had been to Eton, but my parents thought it better to send me to Marlborough .... In fact it didn't suit me very well, because I found myself so utterly alien to the other boys there. The large majority of the boys were the sons of clergy: however kind and good their parents were, the sons of clergy are little beasts - sheer little beasts! Anyway, they made my life utterly miserable and took it out of me for living in a grand home and for the form of life I had in the holidays, and so on. The only compensation was that it was in such beautiful surroundings: Savernake Forest, the Downs out to Four Mile Clump, and so on. With everyone so beastly, I tended to be driven in on myself entirely, and to go off alone whenever possible every Sunday afternoon. It was a bad thing: it meant that for the rest of my life I found it difficult really to make friends with people.

Reminiscences of Christopher Sandford

Fig. 5. Christopher Sandford as an undergraduate at Cambridge.

The time came when my parents \ anted me to be sure of getting into uni ersity. They felt I hadn t got high enough in the school at Marlborough to get through Little-Go or whatever it was called, and so they took me away. My mother rented a hou e in London, and had tutors come in, or for instance for science I went off to a tutor to be coached for Little-Go. That was my first real experience of living in London. I'm afraid as a countryman I never got to like it - u ed to go for long walks in the park .... I succeeded in pas ing Little-Go, and went to Corpus in Cambridge. I quite liked Cambridg , and had friends without ever becoming intimate with anybody; and till I'm afi·aid preferring m ' own company to that of anybody else .... \ heneyer po ible, I got into my mall car: I had one of those delightful IGs with a 90° engin which went extremely fa t and made a lot of noi e. I adored it, and either with my elf or \\ith a friend would go driving about the countryside. I think I pent nearly half my time on m back; tinkering, you

.p

Reminiscences oJ Christopher Sandford know, decarbonizing and putting it back together again. I suppose this was a sheer waste of time when I was supposed to be there learning to be a scholar. At the end of three years I scraped through - a pass degree was all I got! My parents felt I hadn't developed sufficiently. During holidays from school I had several times been sent to stay with cousins in Paris, and had learned French fairly well, so my mother thought I should go to the Sorbonne to take a degree there. And so I went off in my little car to Paris, and got digs on the Boul' Mich', quite close to the Sorbo nne, and enrolled myself, and went to the lectures. I was really thrilled by it all. It seemed to me, quite possibly wrongly, that the whole standard of scholarship was so much higher than at Cambridge. (So much so that during my last year at Cambridge I went to my tutor Will Spens and said 'Please Sir, I don't learn anything at these lectures; er, can I cease going to lectures and just concentrate on learning from my books?' And he agreed). When you got to Paris it was different, every lecture a tour de force, something immensely interesting and so well put over that you really learned from it. I loved all that. My French was good, and I was reading French literature which was lovely, but this fear of my fellow men went with me. I lived alone in these digs, and went out and had my meals alone, and just went to the lectures - didn't know anyone at them, didn't get to know anyone .... I came back [to England] for my holidays from time to time, and at the end of the year I should have sat for the License exam. But cut off from everyone, I failed to realise that you're supposed to register for it, and the exam passed without my knowing it had ever taken place! Anyway I wouldn't have passed it, I fear, because I have never been a scholar, although I spent my life trying to learn to be one. I've just not got the scholar's nature. [From the Sorbonne, Sandford went on to spend a summer at Grenoble University, and then spent some months studying Spanish in Madrid.] Then I came back to London. My mother by then [1924/5] had a maisonnette in Victoria Road, and my father used to spend part of his time with her there, part over in Cork. I thought I would write books. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote; but really, having been such a hermit, I didn't know enough to write a book .... Of course I had various friends; girl friends whom I used to take out to lunch and so on. I used to go off for skiing holidays - I was very good; went in for a championship, and that sort of thing. And on one of these skiing holidays, I met my future wife. J Back in England, I used to go to stay with her and her father and sisters at Wilton Court near Dorking. After a while I be'gan trying to persuade her to marry me. She didn't take my writing very seriously, and quite rightly, and she said 'But you have no job... .' We had quite a quarrel about that! However, I thought perhaps I had better get some other work which would bring me in some money.

Reminiscences of Christopher Sandford It was a hectic time trying to find one. Each attempt would be a little story on its own, about everyone trying to get [your] money - you would get in with your money, and when your money was gone, you would be out again .... Eventually a mutual friend, Sir Almroth Wright,4 said that his son-in-law John Romanes was a partner in the Chiswick Press, and that they were anxious to bring in a young man to become a partner, and ultimately to take over the direction of the Press from the existing Managing Director Francis Newbery, who was getting rather elderly. I rather jumped at this, and put some money in, and became a junior partner. The plan was that I should take my coat off (as they put it) and learn all about the business. The Chiswick Press was the ideal place to learn about printing at its best: it had been founded by Charles Whittingham at the end of the eighteenth century and he and his nephew had been the finest publishers' printers of their period. It continued to have this great renown when it was taken over by [Charles] Jacobi. He ran it until some time just after the First World War, and all the comps and pressmen or machine-minders as they were called had been trained by him up to a very high standard. Up until the time when Jacobi gave ups publishers had presented him with a manuscript and said 'Make a book of this' and he would design it, and buy the paper and print it, and he would give them something which would be very beautiful, I think. But early in the 1920S publishers began to have their own typographers, and by the time I joined the Chiswick Press - I suppose about 1927 - there was very little scope for designing anything yourself. The publisher simply sent you the manuscript with instructions how it was to be printed, and you would be told the paper would be delivered to you in due course. There was no fun from the design point of view. For the printer it was awful. Initially I don't think the publishers' typographers were particularly good - quite often the printer could have done it better. Of course there were exceptions, especially Fabers, where Dick de la Mare really revolutionized publishers' printing. He was one of the people we printed for in those days. Besides learning to set type on the shop floor, I spent a great deal of time browsing through the collection - I think there was a complete collection of the Whittingham books that had been printed at the Chiswick Press, which was absolutely thrilling. This for the first time inspired me to wish to make beautiful books. I was told that William Morris had come to the Chis wick Press in the early part of this century, and how he had printed his first book in the Basle type, Howard's small pica. 6 Amongst the books in our shelves were a number of Kelmscott books if I remember rightly - or books printed in his type by the Chiswick Press 7 after the Kelmscott Press had closed down. There they were, and I found all this extremely inspiring. After a little while, I felt I must try to do a little designing and printing on my own. However, my partners felt I must not use their imprint or their address, for fear of antagonizing publishers. They might say 'Oh, the 43

Reminiscences of Christopher Sandford Chiswick Press is going in for publishing; we'll send our books elsewhere.' They wouldn't want us to be in competition with them. So I began in a very small way, with books from what I called the Boar's Head Press - because my family crest was a boar's head. For an accommodation address, I used the little farmhouse which we rented on Dartmoor, near l\1anaton. Under the Boar's Head insignia I did, what, about a dozen books perhaps fifteen or sixteen with those that were commissioned. People would pay me something, and I designed them. In those cases the books weren't chosen by myself, in other cases they were. I suppose one was groping, really, and one made the most extraordinary mistakes that are quite difficult to understand afterwards. For example, with Kleinias, quite an early one, I didn't put a title on the spine or anywhere on the outside, and that didn't seem remotely odd to me. But A. J. A. Symons who ran the First Edition Club, when I showed it to him and asked what he thought of it, said 'Well, the inside is all right, but shouldn't it have a title somewhere on the outside?' 'Oh, should it?' I said - extraordinary! The Cegs 8 was my first book; and I set it up by hand in the composing room at the Chiswick Press. It was great fun there really: it was my first experience of being with artisans, with work people, and they were very helpful and really did try to teach me all about composing. But of course they had lots of fun amongst themselves at my expense. I would be there working at my case, and the others (for there was a great deal of hand-setting in those days), perhaps a dozen of them, would keep a sort of running commentary going along which didn't in the least interrupt their work .... The first thing I set up for myself then was this little book, just a funny little thing I had written myself, a sort of fairy tale. I set it up in this Iloward's small pica, the BasIc type which at that time I thought very pretty. But it's not really a type that should be used for book-work, I think: it has a very nice colour on the page, but doesn't read all that easily. I had no particular reason for using the florid titling type: it was there, and appealed to me. I didn't do any of the printing mysel( There was a hand-press, but for some reason no one wanted to give me any hints9 about using the hand-press. They let me fiddle with the thing without telling me anything about packing; I couldn't get any results and eventually in desperation I got [all the books] actually printed by somebody else. The next one I did, actually setting the type, was The Magic Po"est,'o a fantastical sort of story I had written. I illustrated it with these pretty little cuts out of the Chiswick store; little headpieces and so on, put in just where they seemed to apply to or illustrate what's in the text .... I chose them while I was setting the text. I used Caslon's Old Face great primer, and that of course was a mistake - this was a Crown Q!.Iarto book, and for Crown Quarto one tended to realize later you shouldn't go above the English or I4-point. The type is a little too large for the page, but the margins are nice, and it's printed on a good old-fashioned laid paper. 44

Reminiscences of Christopher Sandford

DESERT NIGHT

l3

Fig. 6. Opening from the Boars Head Press East

r.s West (1932) set rhroughout in Blado italic.

The binding was done at Ian ells, who were run by a woman, Miss Mansell, and there \Va a very pleasant atmosphere there. I think Mansells did everything for me" at that time. My wife even before I knew her, wa learning to be an artist. She went to Chelsea Polytechnic - I was trying to think who she studied under; there was a man called [Robert] Day, and then someone else who's become very famous since, I've forgotten his name for the moment [Graham Sutherland]. Amongst other things she learned engraving, and I did of course immediately feel I would like to u e her as illustrator for some of these books. The first thing she did for me was simply the title-page of this book . The next one we come to is Cln'vis and Belamie, 12 another mediaeval tale, and for this she upp[ied all the illu trations, although I also used some Chiswick initials which eemed to accord very well with both the illustrations my wife did, and with the type. For thi book I chose to u e ntiquc Old Style; just vaguely similar I uppo e to ~lorri' Golden type .... It seemed to combine very well with my wife' iUu trations, but I was told it was quite the wrong thing, that the type should have died out long ago, by people like Stanley lori on . I et this up by hand too. Like many other press books, I used the convention that in order to get even spacing you could use '&' instead of 'and'. I went

-t-5

Reminiscences of Christopher Sandford

SALOME BEFORE THE

HEAD OF SAINT JOHN Toll voluted pill",. The subtle reek of cloying musk. Paint. the mocking cndence Of t warning drum. StaCCAto. The clink of mettl armlets, IlS wh.ite Limbs jn ~vdte kstlddoscopc., feun, Impassioned, for the 5t:l[i08 hC2d~ Bright teeth reveal the hidden urge of Gynaeci~n pO$ruring5. An:t'is in shrill delighL is there

To wnrch her acolyte. O. John. what speU wove He That you deny

M,.'

Choreograpbic these cffects j T.. ust nccdJ no pul~iog lights, Or util'ice. Wlut I)ower WaJ held by The monaStiC NazareHc,

'fhat thc'Jc . , . these breasts For which punces die, m~n less To you even dun thde Stepa of mille about your Bloody heo.d?

Fig. 7. 'Just a tiny little thin g'; an opening from one of Lhc minor pieces produ ced over the Boars I lead imprint.

on doing this for quite a while, but in fact now I don't approve of it ... and naturally I don't now advocate using this type really for book-work. I certainly hoped to sell these books - I only did a hundred of each, I think, but I certainly hoped they'd sell. I don't think I did anything about advertising them; I think I just went around to a few booksellers like Bumpus and asked them if they would take some. I sent out a few copies for review and the [Times] Literary Supplement was extremely kind to the first one, because it's always been their policy to be kind to a first book . With the second, then they began to say exactly what they thought! The type was all set up before my wife started doing the engravings, I think. The choice of type wasn't influenced by hel' blocks, they came later. I should . ay I had to have a quiet word with the Chiswick pressmen about the printing of wood-blocks: at the time J went there, they had the maxim 'Get the black . solid, and that's all that matters.' f course that was hocking, and I had first of all to tell them what] required, that every bit of white must bc therc. J had to help them in how to get that by less ink and morc impression. J think we tried other inks till we found a suitable one. But having explained, I had to go away and leave them to do

Reminiscences of Christopher Sandford the job: you must never stand over craftsmen when they are doing their job, absolutely fatal! Once they did understand, it was fantastic what they did, printing blocks, delicate blocks, with type and getting a very fine impression from both. Kleinias,'3 the next one I also set up with my own hands, using Baskerville type, and I found a most delightful Van Gelder paper; charming paper they used to make. I was always trying to break new ground, and so decided to print in sepia which went so well with the paper.l\fy wife did a charming little block of the home of the author, Digby Haworth-Booth, the mill house. But I think I was told it was a mistake to print in sepia, black was the only thing you could print in .... But it goes perfectly for this sort of thing: the more one did the more one realized there isn't any very close relationship between this kind of experimental work, and the finding of delightful new effects that could be done with type and illustration, and general printing of a functional kind. Kleinias was the first time I used cloth marbled by Douglas Cockerell - at that time they were marbling on cloth, which I found very attractive. It was bound by Mansells for me. No title on it - extraordinary that I thought you could put a book out without a title on the outside. I can't think how I did that. Perhaps being marbled cloth I felt that just a plain title, a brass on it, wouldn't show very well. Having a label put on would probably have been the correct answer, but I hadn't thought of putting a label on at the time. It looks as if it was issued with the bolts unopened, but undoubtedly I did have it issued already opened by hand. I had discovered early on that press books tended to be sold with their bolts unopened; and if they were opened the book immediately lost value. This struck me as absolutely ridiculous, so I had the book of poems with the bolts thrown out a bit, so the binder could do a minimum trim, enough to open the bolts without [also] removing the deckles. People could read the books perfectly satisfactorily. I didn't like deckles myself, but I was told you must have deckles for the collector. The next one, East and West, '4 was some poems that were sent to me but I published it myself, not at the author's expense. For some reason I decided to print them in italic, B1ado italic - I think it's all right for a poem, but I don't advocate it for prose or general work. It's still a rather feminine or negative title-page - not much bite about it. We got that later, when one began to be inspired by Gibbings's printing. Again I used Cockerell paper on the binding. Maya'S is one I was paid for. Just for a change I did this series of sonnets in Plantin, Mono type Plantin. It's rather a pedestrian type; I don't really like it but I was experimenting with all these different types that were available. And I was beginning to get a bit more confident; the title-page is much bolder. The paper was very nice, Joynson's mould-made; I found a lot of it at the Chiswick Press. Sappho'6 was the next;n chronological sequence, but ffailed to record Sandford's

comments on it. However, ;t was one with which he was well pleased; well proportioned and D'ilh good presswork on Lettice's engrat'ings. Sandford used SdlOlderer's

47

Reminiscences of Christopher Sandford New Hellenic type in combination with Caslon. Once more he used Cockerell cloth on the boards of the quarter binding. For the next book I also used Cockerell's marbling, but this time on brown paper. The brown paper gave a slightly gold effect combining with the brown skiver back; it's rather a pretty book. It was a printing of Shakespeare's Epithalamion and Prothalamion all in one book; I called it Thalamos.1 7 My wife did these delightful engravings, and the Chiswick Press had to be asked to reprint one of them which was too dark. That was supposed to be a lesson for them in what to go for next time! So that leaf was a cancel, and even it is a little dark. I was still using white paper -later on I came to think that black print on white paper is dazzling, and one wants a toned paper. I used the Lyons Titling again - a great temptation to use that because it was a pretty titling face, except for a rather weak 'R'. I don't think I set this myself ... of course this is Monotype Baskerville, which I rather regret; I always think Baskerville's own type was so much more beautiful. Of course it's a perfectly suitable type for book work; nothing in it comes between you and your reading. The Virgin,18 the next one, was a story which was sent in to me; a sort of religious story which I thought very beautiful. My wife did just the one engraving for it. This one I printed in Poliphilus, I6-point; possibly a little bit too large for the page. But it's such a beautiful type, I really enjoyed using it; and the margins are good, you know. In this case too I was able to use more of the [Cockerell] marbled cloth, which was beautifully designed. Of course, ultimately people said, 'Can't you get away from this? Must all your bindings be in marbled paper?' A great shame; there's such a variety in the actual design of the marbling, just like feathers as it were - turkey tails or peacocks' tails or something. Now we come to the First Editions Club. That was really A. J. A. Symons, who had a tremendous influence I think on the improvement of printing before the war. He didn't actually found, but almost immediately he took over, the First Editions Club. As headquarters he chose a chapter house belonging to a church in Bloomsbury,19 and he had rich patrons who put up money to put in beautiful showcases, and they instituted the Fifty Books Exhibition. Later on, when the National Book League took over this exhibition they called it the Fifty Best Books of the Year: Symons would never do that, he said these were the fifty books that appealed to himself and his committee as outstanding.... For many years the Curwen Press used to print the publications of the First Editions Club. There came a time when Oliver Simon, and I suppose his partner Harold Curwen, got tired of printing beautiful books and never being paid. I had been calling on A. J. A. Symons for a time - I was interested in him - and he asked if we would take it on. Well, I said 'Yes~ but we've got to see some means of recovering our money, because I believe you're not awfully good at paying.' Something like that. And he said the one he wanted to do was a translation by Vyvyan IIolland (who was Oscar Wilde's son) of Gerard de Nerval's Rive etla Vie, I think; Dreams and Life. So I said 'Well, if we print this for you,

Reminiscences of Christopher Sandford a copy per member' (which was what he wanted; I forget how many members there were) 'can we do a little edition ourselves? In that way, we'll recover the money for printing your copies.' He entirely agreed. What I have in front of me are the two books: 20 the one he did, in some sprayed cloth that someone had presented him with; and then ours which we bound in a slightly different way. My wife did a couple of engravings, and made the double title-page. We printed on Basingwerk Parchment, which was especially good for these double-opening engravings. We used this strange silvery paper with a design on it to bind our edition, It's been grained to resemble watered silk; I don't really remember where I got it! We used a flat back with this one. It's all right if you know you are going to do it beforehand, because you don't want to put too much centre margin as you will with a round back - because the rounding and backing takes quite a lot out of your margin. I don't remember if I did that. I think this book is twice as high as it is wide, whereas I think the ideal is about five to three, which is a very nice pretty proportion. You can't buy paper in that size; you always have to trim off a bit which is wasteful. But it does make a more charming shape; more like a folio.

It was about this time that (as described at the end of this paper) Sandford and partners bought the Golden Cockerel Press. lIe continued the Boar's Head Press alongside it for some time longer. Then we have Tales ofthe Turquoise for which my wife did a repeat pattern 21

of Indian subjects for the cover. It was written by the daughter of an Indian General, Sir Something Bingley; and these were tales from the Himalayas, for which my wife did a series of engravings. Always wishful to produce every book in a different way, I did this more in the Bodoni style, using Bodoni type widely leaded. My wife did much more black blocks to accord. I put the folio numbers out in the margin for a change (instead of down below or wherever it would be). Almost always I avoided having a running headline, which struck me as such a bore, having to see the title of the book every time you turn the pages. For the binding my wife did one little engraving, and then I stuck them up on a great big sheet and had it reduced photographically to make a block, and then printed the thing on imitation vellum. This was just a tiny little thing. Ha! It's called Salome before the Head of St John," just a little poem. There's a silly tale attached to this. As representative of the Chiswick Press I was asked to go to see if I could get any printing from a particular publisher. Their production manager had written this poem, and he said he might be interested in our doing some printing if I would print this poem of his. So I thought well, I'll try and see - it won't cost me very much. So my wife did an engraving, and I printed it. lie was delighted to have it printed - but they didn't give us any printing in return, which I thought was rather naughty! It was only two leaves, four pages, and I just bound it up in a pretty green paper. I forget what type I used, oh, I8-point Garamond. It's so often 49

Reminiscences of Christopher Sandford these types are more amusing when you get up to 18-point, really to see them. Then I thought I would do two little books of poems I had written myself. One was called Immortality and Other Poems: 3 and the other Few Were Chosen."" I printed these just as cheaply as I could, setting in Caslon's Old Face, on Basingwerk Parchment I think - no, on Antique Laid. Immortality only runs to about eight pages I suppose; I haven't even put page numbers in! I sold them for half-a-crown or something like that. Only a hundred copies were printed, and I don't think there was any great rush to read them! I don't remember why I produced these in a different style. I suppose it was just a matter of printing these things that I had written, and doing it pretty cheaply. But for the next one, Primeval Gods' s - which is also poems I had written, under the influence of D. II. Lawrence of course - I took a lot more trouble about it. I got Blair Ilughes-Stanton to do a series of little blocks which are very good and terribly in keeping with my poems. I printed on this delightful Joynson's hand-made paper of which there was this large stock at the Chiswick Press, which I used again and again: it was admirable for printing delicate blocks. I had a nice spring-green binding with a white vellum spine and sunny, spring-sunny, gold imprint. I like that. Again it had a flat back, and in spite of it being in vellum, which is resistant, it does open well. It's only thirty pages; I'm sure the reviewers described it as 'This slim volume' but I think that's what this sort of little book should be. The Painted CUp.·6 Oh, this same friend that had written these Himalayan stories called Tales of the Turquoise had written a number of very charming poems, and so I made a book of these. I printed in Bembo, 16-point; possibly a little too large but it's right for the page - it isn't a very large face for 16-point of course. It's a very beautiful fount, and it shows up at its best on this lovely mould-made paper. My wife did little medallion engravings; the whole thing is designed by her into the circle as it might be theatre in the round. I printed these on a terracotta background. IIere you find we're still using the Lyons titling, which I used to be very fond of, and which seems to go extraordinarily well with the Bembo. For the outside we had the spine in black morocco, and a pattern design using all these little medallions. I took prints of each one, then stuck them up on a large sheet of paper and this was reduced photographically into a line block of the correct size for the front and back covers. They were printed on a terracotta cloth, so continuing the black and terracotta motif that you had throughout the book. All I have left" [to describe] from the Boar's Head were two little books that I did, that I was paid for. There was a young man by the name of Mr W. A. Younger, and he had just written some poems,·H and his mother asked me if I'd print these for him and so help him. So I did; in Caslon's Old Face, inexpensively. The book runs to about forty pages, bound in Douglas Cockerell cloth. A pretty little book, just crown octavo, unpretentious typographically. The title-page is all right.

50

Reminiscences o/Christopher Sandford The other was verse by Michael Holland."'} He was a hunting type, and he'd written these poems - delightfully of the country, earthy. He wanted them printed and was prepared to pay; and one was always short of money and so I printed them for him again without any pretension at all; just in Cas lon's Old Face. Why I had to stop was because at this time the Chiswick Press was so short of work, with all its employees standing about idle, and seeking turnover. Newbery, the head of the thing, agreed with me that we could provide it with turnover by doing a little publishing under a different name. So we started what we called the Golden Hours Press. You always had to have something golden in your name if you were going to be at all successful; there was already the Golden Cockerel and so on, so it had better be Golden Hours, like happy hours. Newbery wondered what we should do, so I said 'Well, there isn't any really decent complete edition of Marlowe' - I always greatly admired Marlowe 'Let's do a Marlowe.' So I made all the arrangements for the use of texts and so on, at Oxford I think, and we set the whole thing up in type, and gradually began to get the books illustrated. Blair Hughes Stanton did The Tragic Death of Dr Faustus, and my wife did Hero and Leander, and Eric Ravilious did The Rich Jew ofMalta. 30 These were the only three artists I actually commissioned. We printed off these three books and only bound up a small number to start with: very attractively, I think, in natural undyed niger, with the beautiful Douglas Cockerell marbled cloth with a lily design, very pretty. The typography was rather functional: we used 16-point Bembo which was quite nice for the size of the book. But at that time there was no Bembo titling available from Monotype to go with it, so I didn't make the use of titling in these books that I would have done later on, or with other types which had a choice of titling. The illustrations were page illustrations. From time to time you have people saying how much better it is to use an engraver who will illustrate into the type - make his illustrations and titling all part of the printed page, in the way that Gill did in The Four Gospels and The Canterbury Tales, and Robert Gibbings in - oh, I can't think of the title for the moment. [Lamia?] It's all very well from the point of view of the book and absolute mating of type and illustrations. But your illustrator, your artist, may counter by saying 'Look here, you're not giving me a free hand. I'd rather make a picture, and my picture will be complementary to the text. I can do so much more if I'm given a page and told "Do a complementary illustration in this" rather than subject my art to your typography. ' I was awfully keen. I was very fond of artists; my wife was an artist, and I was awfully keen on giving artists their full scope, and this is what they wanted. And so in book after book I have used full-page illustrations (sometimes with little headpieces and other ornaments, tailpieces, as well) but this has been my point of view - that the artist should be given equal value with the author and printer. That's something that hasn't been saidY

51

Reminiscences oj Christopher S andJord

MARLOwt'S TWO LYRICS n~ pwi''1I~lt ~'I'h:l'hrlm{ ttl /,/"",,'f

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And ~ d\()uf~nd rr~8NUl po give the record of a prefs,. which, in a very brief exill:ence, fent forth one work, at leall:, that caufed conliderablt: fenfation at the time. Early in 158 I Father Campion fet up' a Printing-prefs in the houfe of one Stephen Brinkley, fomewhere in the neighbourhood of London.• The following details are taken from Bombinus's Life and Martyrdom of Father Campion, printed at Antwerp, 1618;" Brinc1ei villa guam feptem palfuum millibus Londino procul GuinA:retum (!t.uun Strltt ') dicunt," &c. B.mbinus, p. 152.

Fig. 56. Opening from volume, of (he Philobibloll Misre//at/ies (,854). C hiswick Press typography and presswork at their best (margins reduced).

rich enough to be a book collector, and have been obliged to buy books for use not for rarity.' Would it not be possible, he asked, to regard his entertainment as a sort of picnic to which the other members would bring some of their rarities? Thi novel idea was accepted as very reasonable, and it formed a precedent for members to 'furnish some bookish viand or condiment' to their ho t's board. Even so, by no means all were willing to play their part in the ociet by entertaining their collea gues to Philobiblon break(~lstS. It was noticeable that whenever the matter of a Philobiblon visit came up, Robert llolford , the art collector and MP for East loucestershire, excused himself as his dining rooms or library at orchester I 10 lise were always being redecorated , or were otherwise out of com missio n. In 1869 the famollS book collector Henry lIuth 2 06

Monckton Alilnes and the Philobiblon Society went so far as to resign his membership on the grounds that he found it 'extremely inconvenient' to show his library to eighteen or twenty other collectors. 'The volumes get so disarranged and misplaced,' he explained, 'that it takes me a long time to put them right again.' Any librarian or book collector knows very well what he meant, but one's sympathies for Huth are lessened when one reads in Lord Mersey's The Roxburghe Club: its history and its Members 1812-1927 that as a member of Roxburghe Huth also failed in his obligations, attending no meetings and presenting no book. Huth was almost certainly in both societies only for what he could get out of them. What could one obtain through membership of the Philobiblon Society, apart from the opportunity to attend the breakfasts? As with the Roxburghe Club, the answer is - its publications. Rule 4 of the Society reads that it will print, once or twice a year, as may be found practicable, a volume of Bibliographical Miscellanies, which shall consist of Notices and Analyses of Rare or Curious Books or Manuscripts, Unpublished Documents and Letters,- Biographical Sketches of Persons connected with Literature, from original sources,- Typographical Curiosities, Illuminations, and l11ustrations of Books, and Researches into the connection of Literature with the Fine Arts,- Information respecting the Value, Sales and Publication of Rare Books, and of the contents of Peculiar, Dispersed or hitherto unnoticed Collections,- Accounts of the Productions of Private Presses,- Abstracts of Bibliographical Works Published or Unpublished,- Any matter especially interesting to the Lovers and Collectors of Books,- And the Transactions of the Society.

The scope was wide, and there were to be a number of separate works presented by members at their own expense, in the Roxburghe manner, but Philobiblon's most important published work was to be in its Miscellanies. Fifteen volumes in all of this were to appear between 1854 and 1884 (the original plan of printing 'once or twice a year' proved impracticable). The Miscellanies were edited by the Joint Secretaries, in other words for most of the time by Milnes, Stirling, or Delepierre. They were to be severe editors, taking great care to exclude matter which seemed to them tedious or too unscholarly. Though to a generation used to Haywardian standards of editorial control in The Book Collector their rule seems to have been exercised gently enough, it was certainly exercised. 'I have a nervous dread of inflicting a mare's nest on the Philobiblon' wrote one cowed member in 1855. From the first to the finish the Miscellallies were printed by Charles Whittingham the younger and his successors Whittingham & Wilkins, at the Chiswick Press. In selecting their printers the editors chose wisely, for the Miscellanies are an example of mid-Victorian printing at its best. They were set in Caslon Old Face type, using the long f and its ligatures in the good oldfashioned way. The type had been revived at the Chiswick Press in the 1840s, and in 1854 was still distinctly avant-garde; the impeccable presswork on T. H. Saunders laid paper contrasts startlingly with the average commercial printing of the time. It also compares very well with the contemporary Roxburghe publications: Philobiblon members were receiving the best available at the 20 7

Monckton Milnes and the Philobiblon Society time - while the prestige of being used in its publications also helped to solidify the Cas Ion revival. Unlike Roxburghe Club books, though, very little use was made of illustration in the Miscellanies, and the excellent wood-engravings in volume 6 and the chromolithographs included in volume 9 make one regret their absence from most papers. No doubt it was largely a matter of expense; the annual dues of one to three pounds (which were intended only to defray the costs of printing) can even in those days scarcely have met the printer's charges. One suspects that often Milnes or other members must have subsidized the production. The volumes were bound in brown: the early volumes in fine ripple-grained cloth, the later in dotted-line-ribbed cloth. They were blind-blocked on the boards, and in gold and blind on the spine. It was an adequate covering, but the fact that it was made no more than adequate was due to the intention that it should be only a temporary casing. Volume 2 (1855-6) included a note: In consequence of the inconvenience which may arise from the unequal bulk and miscellaneous character of the volumes issued, and to be issued, by the Philobiblon Society, possessors of them are requested to consider the present arrangement of the contents as provisional, until such time as the Editors shall see fit to group them into new volumes, classified according to subjects, and furnished with new titlepages and tables.

This rearrangement was never to take place, and the temporary bindings are still standing up well. It is not because of their 'unequal bulk and miscellaneous character' that Philobiblon publications are relatively little known today. Rather, it is because of their unfamiliarity. Although extra copies of individual contributions were sometimes printed on various papers, for the author's own use, only one hundred copies of each volume were printed; so one seldom enjoys the opportunity to browse through the volumes as one does with, say, Bibliographica or The Fleuron. (Nor, unlike those, have offset-litho reprints of it been published.) It is only when one is armed with a reference to a particular paper, and has managed to find a set of the Miscellanies, that one comes to realize how much is in them that is still of interest and value. To attempt a survey and assessment of all the papers which Philobiblons contributed to their Miscellanies would be neither practicable nor desirable here. Many of the papers contain the previously unpublished texts of letters mainly of historical or literary interest. Such are - to take two at random some unpublished poems of Donne contributed by Sir John Simeon to the third volume, or the text of a letter from Cardinal llembo to the Doge of Venice which the Rev. Walter Sneyd printed in the first volume. As the Miscellanies went along, the proportion of contributions of this sort increased (no doubt because they were easier for members to prepare) at the expense of the more bibliographical matter which the Philobiblon rules had promised. Nevertheless, the bibliographical content is worth considering in more detail. 208

Monckton Milnes and the Philobiblon Society Volume I included 'Notes sur deux petites Bibliotheques fran-;aises du XVe siecle' by the Due d'Aumale; an account of some of the most celebrated libraries of Italy by Robert Curzon; and Beriah Botfield's proposals, with examples, for reprinting the prefaces to the editiones principes of the classics. Stirling contributed a short note on the first edition of Erasmus's Adagia; Edward Stonor wrote on the clandestine press which the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion had operated at Stonor-on-Thames in 1581; and Botfield, again, gave short descriptive notes on the history and contents of the libraries at Norwich and at Blickling Hall. In the second volume, Walter Sneyd described a rare Greek manuscript; Dean Milman contributed the text of a catalogue of the books belonging to Richard de Gravesend, the Bishop of London who died in 1303 - perhaps the earliest priced catalogue of an English library, and therefore of unusual interest. Botfield had again been active with an account of the Coverdale Bible and a catalogue of early English books printed on vellum. In the third volume as well Botfield was prominent, with a catalogue of the Minister's Lib~ary in the Church at Tong, Shropshire; and Octave Delepierre contributed 'Etudes bio-bibliographiques sur les fous litteraires', a fascinating study. Delepierre, who is one of the most interesting and unaccountably neglected figures in nineteenth-century bibliophily (and one of the few foreigners to figure in DNB), was to become one of the most faithful contributors to the Miscellanies, supplying many articles on unfamiliar topics. These included his account of 'L'Abbaye de l\lelrose et les ouvriers flamands' in volume 5, or 'Le Canard de la Bibliotheque d' Alexandrie' in volume 6. Some of his articles which were to appear in later volumes - accounts of macaronic verse, of centos, of parodies, of books which had been condemned to be burned - hark back somewhat to the manner of Isaac D'Israeli and The Curiosities of Literature, but are by no means without value. Most of his papers were written in French, but one uncharacteristic contribution of his was an English translation of a historical novelette of the worst sort, 'John Gutenberg, first master printer'. One or two of the chapter headings will sufficiently indicate the style of the vile thing: Chapter I. As how John Fust, master printer in the City of Malence, gave his daughter Christine to wife to Peter Schoeffer his partner, and what came of it. Chapter 2. What John Gutenberg, master printer said, and what he did, while Peter Schoeffer was taking to wife the demoiselle Christine; all of which should interest the reader.

It is perhaps just as well that this is not more readily available! Most of the articles, unlike this, had a serious scholarly purpose. Such were Edward Cheney's 'Remarks on the Illuminated Official Manuscripts of the Venetian Republic' in volume 7, and Robert Curzon's 'History of Printing in China and Europe' in volume 6 - essays which today are perhaps more interesting as illustrations of the history of connoisseurship than for the infor20 9

Monckton Milnes and the Philobiblon Society mation they contain. A number were popular (though still scholarly) in tone, an example being Henry Bohn's 'The Origin and Progress of Printing' in volume 4. One very amusing exception to the usual pattern was contributed by Cheney to the 9th volume, in his 'The Lord Mayor's Visit to Oxford July 1829 etc. etc.'. The preface to this reads: As several members of the Philobiblon Society have hitherto been somewhat backward in coming forward with any literary contributions to the Miscellanies, the Secretaries have been led to the consideration of what the causes of these shortcomings can be. Some members of the Society have a good deal to do and have not the leisure time to devote to the subject; others have nothing to do and long practice has rendered them perfect in their usual occupation; these, and others, not having been in the habit of literary Composition, it has been considered that specimens of style, taken from rare and valuable works existing in the libraries of some of the members might be valuable to them as models to be followed in any future contributions. Papers relating to county history and topography might advantageously copy the description of the dignified importance manifested in the pages of the Lord Mayor's Visit to Oxford. Our poet, ['The club keeps a poet' Cheney put as a footnote, in raillery at his friend Milnes] is referred to the stanzas....

What follows in the body of the article is a series of extracts taken from three or four absurd things: a pompous account of the Oxford visit, an appalling poem on Freyberg Cathedral, some pieces of English and French 'as she is spoke', and a Southcottian Indictment against Satan. Despite Curzon's good-humoured mockery, and the admonitions of Milnes and Stirling, members continued to be 'backward in coming forward'. Milnes, Delepierre, the Duc d' Aumale, Curzon, Botfield and one or two others contributed many valuable papers; another score or so of their colleagues one or two essays apiece. The remainder of the Philobiblons were passengers, and as the more lively among the original members died or ceased to take an active part in the affairs of the Society, the new members elected seldom seemed willing to take part as fully as their predecessors. In part this was no doubt due to the fact that Milnes had always been the driving force behind the Philobiblons, and age was telling on him. In more or less constant pain from gout, and greatly hampered by the disabilities of age accentuated by a lifetime of indulgence - he had developed a very quick temper. The Philobiblon breakfasts cannot have been the pleasure that they were in the 1850s. New friendships were not easily formed, and his old friends were dying around him - Curzon in 1873, Van der Weyer in 1874, Stirling in 1878, Carlyle in 1881, and Edward Cheney in '1884. It was really Cheney's demise, coming close to the tragic early death of the Duke of Albany, the Society's Patron, which persuaded Milnes to call a close to the activities of the Philobiblons. lIe was able to do so in the knowledge that the Roxburghe Club 'our estimable rival' was getting clear of the doldrums in which it had languished; for a meeting of that Club called in May 1884 to consider 'whether 210

Monckton Milnes and the Philobiblon Society the Club should continue its operations for the future' had resolved that it was expedient to continue. '9 One can well understand Milnes' reasons for ceasing work. The 15th and final volume of the Miscellanies - which appeared eight years after the previous volume, in itself an indication that the Society had become moribund contains a 'valedictory' dated from Fryston Hall, Christmas Day 1884. In it, Milnes referred to the decline of his own literary faculty, and the diminution of the assistance of his colleagues, which had resulted in making the volume nearly altogether his own work. 'I believe,' he wrote, 'these miscellanies are a valuable addition to our historical and bibliographical literature, and I shall be glad if they remain connected with my name and that of our Society. Nevertheless, the judicious conclusion of its existence may be as opportune as was its foundation, and 1 have come to the conclusion that there are no present materials for its profitable continuance.... ' So ended one of the most interesting, and certainly 'the most select of learned societies.' And its progenitor? 'I am going over to the majority, and you know 1 have always preferred the minority.' Richard Monckton Milnes died suddenly on I I August 1885.

211

27 SOME WELL-DESIGNED PUBLISHERS' SERIES

MMI As a young man, I often bought books in the World's Classics, or Everyman's Library or other series, because these were the cheapest or only editions of books I wanted; and in learning about book design I tried to see how the dictates of Stanley Morison or Oliver Simon applied to them. Over the years I became equally interested in the books selected for series publication as a gauge of literary taste, and in the economics and design aspects of such series. This paper reviews books from a range of interesting British series of the last century, some much less well-designed than my title suggests.

Exhibitions of fine printing, and books about the subject, often limit themselves to expensive books and limited editions; the high-spots of book production. To be sure, the annual exhibitions of book design mounted by the National Book League (which in the 1940S and 1950S, as indeed later, were among the most influential formers of typographic taste) included a fair range of books from Penguin, but in general books in series do not figure largely in studies of effective design. This is a pity, since the publisher embarking on the production of a series is usually wise to consider the different aspects of his trade - design, production, marketing, and publicity - more carefully for a group of books being published in that series than would be necessary for a one-off publication. If well-designed and effectively marketed, the series acquires a momentum of its own, so that potential purchasers will look out for new volumes and be predisposed to buy them just because they are published in that series. If the combination of good editorial judgment, intellectual content, and the books' physical appearance is 'right' (and they are well displayed in bookshops) the publisher has gained enormously. In the past such very different series as the yellow-jacketed Gollancz crime novels and King Penguins managed to strike the right note in this way. King Penguins depended on good production and a diverting range of topics which lent themselves to fine illustration at a time when book illustration was rather poor. Their purchasers, one would judge, were assumed to be alert to 212

Some Well-Designed Publishers' Series

aspects of book design and even to decide whether to buy or not because of the design. The Gollancz novels were presented in a very workaday dress: they were seeking a different form of typographic excellence: their printing was to be invisible. The reader would buy or borrow because he had trust that the publisher's selection of novels was sound. Naturally enough, a good many publishers' series had their foundation in the publisher's own backlists. Chatto & Wind us, or Fabers, or Constable, or Jonathan Cape (to take only four of the 'good' publishers of the 1920S and 1930S) would resort to re-issuing books they had already published, in a dress which would allow them to tap a slightly different market. The difference might be in format, to produce volumes for travellers, more convenient for a coat pocket or bag than earlier forms. Books in some series were relatively expensive, but usually prices of books reissued in series were appreciably lower than at their first publication. Production costs were significant, and designers of the series were often compelled to shave farthings off the cost of setting, paper, or the binding. (The longer print-run of the reprint series helped to reduce the unit cost). In the hands of a good designer, this could result in some very handsome and highly sophisticated designs - though only the most gifted designers were able to produce a formula which could be applied without change to books of very different kinds which might be published in the series. None of this was new, in the inter-war years. Publishers had been producing cheap series for many years, and the volumes in Bohn's Standard Library (which Bell continued to publish well into the twentieth century) showed sound workaday Victorian typography just as the crowded pages and poor paper in the yellowbacks of Routledge's Railway Library make one glad that modern travellers can choose something better. I The publishers of the period from about 1880 until the First World War has some significant advantages not always possessed by their successors. They were working at a time when the material costs of printing and book production were comparatively lower than any time since, at any rate in relation to the skills of the compositors, stereotypers, machine-minders, and binders producing them. They were craftsmen, with a pride in their work. In the 1880s Cassell's National Library, 'edited by Henry Morley LL.D' as the advertising tells us, was a marvel of cheap production, with new volumes being published weekly at 3d. a volume, or 6d. bound. For 6d. the reader got two hundred or so pages of text; it's amazing that the publishers were able to make any profit on books sold so cheaply. The type, margins, and paper of these little sixteenmo volumes are perfectly satisfactory, and in those I have seen the proof-reading has been done with care. The quality of the casing and gold-blocking was also good. Their smooth cloth bindings are often still in good condition one hundred and twenty years on. The structural defect in this series came from an attempt to use 'modern' binding methods: sometimes they were not sewn, but stapled;' and rust from the staples has often spread to the paper around. To the modern reader, the fussy 21 3

Some Well-Designed Publishers' Series design on the front board appears a little overdone, while the advertising on the endpapers and on the back board is rather obtrusive and often out of keeping with the textual content - but for Cassell & Co. to treat the weekly additions to the series as if they were magazine issues was natural enough. Cassell's series was intended for self education. Although the Walter Scott Publishing Company, and a little later J. M. Dent with the Temple Classics and Everyman's Library, were to produce extensive series which also represented excellent value for the autodidact's money, many series had a different purpose. To tap the demand for modestly-priced appropriate gifts for one's aunt, cousin or girl-friend, many publishers have attempted series with more superficial luxury to them, often using the same small formats as used by Cassell. For instance, I have in such a series put out by Collins, an edition of Keats' Isabella from about 1905, which has been provided with four full-page coloured illustrations plus the frontispiece and decorative title-page. One of the illustrations is also used on the stiff paper cover, which has been trimmed flush with the text pages, and (to add the sense of luxury appropriate in a gift) all edges have been gilt. It's hard to judge the typography as a reader of 1905 would have seen it, but the consistent use of a face like Deberny & Peignot's Serie 18 showed some discrimination. Volumes like this competed for the same market as Hodder & Stoughton's 'Little Books for Bookmen' or John Lane's 'Flowers of Parnassus' produced at the same period - and all three series could stand as exemplars of what Morison or Simon told us book designers should avoid. The text of the Isabella volume is on paper so stiff it is almost like thin card, and the contrast between it and the art paper used for the half-tone reproductions of the pen and wash illustrations is disagreeable. The technical quality of the half-tones isn't bad, but they manage at the same time to be muddy and too faint, particularly in contrast with the strength of the facing text pages. The Tennyson volume in Hodder & Stoughton's series again uses an overstiff paper of antique finish for the text; with half-tone reproductions of photographs, oil paintings and prints on art paper. Caslon was used for the text, but so heavily leaded that it would appear weak even if not horridly combined with Cheltenham italic. An attempt was made to design this series in a striking way, but the lack of unity is very marked. John Lane's books had a better reputation for design, and the volumes in the 'Flowers of Parnassus' series show something of this. We may find the typeface, Bookman with heavy leading, to be unpleasing; but at the start of the twentieth century it was usually regarded as acceptable, and the use of Caslon caps on the title-pages was in the best taste of the time. The illustrations were almost always line-block reproductions of work by artists, such as I Ierbert Cole or Philip Connard, who understood what photomechanical reproduction required. Though inside the volumes their pictures could overpower the widely-leaded pages of text, the frontispiece always matches the title-page, and the title-opening is often effective. 214

Some Well-Des£gned Publishers' S eries

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Some Well-Designed Publishers' Series

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Some Well-Designed Publishers' Series

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