Printers and Printing [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674432505, 9780674431607

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PRINTERS AND PRINTING

L O N D O N : HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINTERS AND PRINTING By DAVID POTTINGER

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1941

COPYRIGHT, 1941 B Y THE PRESIDENT A N D FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE

PRINTED B Y THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U.S.A.

To MILDRED AND ANN

TO THE READER B E F O R E we settle down to our discussion of typography, you are entitled to know something of what you may expect in these pages. I imagine you are like one of the many people — book collectors, librarians, young men and women in publishing houses, and many alert readers — who from time to time have asked me various questions about printing. These inquirers have had little interest in minute points; they have really been searching for the means to increase their appreciation of typography and their enjoyment of books as works of art. Accordingly, in answering them I have had to simplify what is really a very complicated subject and to provide, as it were, a series of pegs on which they could later hang more detailed information. Although these chapters will not tell you how to become a printer, I hope they will partially satisfy your layman's curiosity. It may seem odd that I have not included any reproductions of pages from masterpieces of printing. The reason is that facsimiles are all too often poor makeshifts, to be discouraged in a land where originals are so abundant and so easily accessible. And in the search for the real thing you will develop your serendipity!

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You may also be surprised at the lack of foot-notes. It would have been extremely easy to add these appurtenances of scholarship, but they would have destroyed the simplicity and directness I have striven to impart to my pages. The historical facts can be verified with little labor by reference to the books cited on pages

131-134.

I wish to thank Mr George Macy for allowing me to reprint, with a few slight changes, the article I contributed to the first number of THE DOLPHIN; it appears here as my fifth

Chapter.

Finally I must record my gratitude to Mr Herbert Farrier, Mr Parker B. Allen, Mr David W. Bailey, and Miss E. Louise Lucas, who have done much to make this book better than it would have been without their help. D. T. P. Cambridge, Massachusetts April

ig,

CONTENTS I. T H E I N V E N T I O N OF P R I N T I N G

.

.

3

II. T H E D E V E L O P M E N T OF P R I N T I N G

.

14

III. THE PRINTER'S T O O L S

40

IV. THE E V O L U T I O N OF T Y P E D E S I G N

.

64

V. C H A R A C T E R I S T I C S OF A GOOD B O O K TYPE VI. T H E D E S I G N OF B O O K S

93 .

.

.

.

109

FURTHER READING

131

INDEX

135

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. D I A G R A M O F A P I E C E O F T Y P E

.

.

.

44

From T. L. De Vinne, Plain Printing Types; courtesy of the Robbins Publishing Co. 2. M E A S U R E S H O W I N G P I C A D I V I S I O N S

.

3. A T Y P E M O U L D

45 48

From T. L. De Vinne, Plain Printing Types; courtesy of the Robbins Publishing Co. 4. A N E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y

COMPOS-

ING ROOM

50

From A. Momoro, VArt de l'Imprimerie 5. A F I F T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y P R I N T I N G S H O P

58

From "The Dance of Death," Lyons, 1499; enlarged from a reproduction in Bibliographica, vol. 3 6. A S I X T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y P R I N T I N G S H O P Reproduced by courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from its copy of Nova Reperta

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CHAPTER I

THE INVENTION OF PRINTING VI

" ^ J J R I N G the year 1940 the United States cele) 1 brated the five hundredth anniversary o f the

J ^ J /

invention of printing. Speeches were deliv-

ered at innumerable meetings of public as well as trade interest. Exhibitions illustrating the progress o f the art were held by the great libraries and many o f the smaller ones too. Numerous pamphlets and books on the subject were published, some o f them making real contributions to our knowledge o f the earliest days. The celebrations would have been world-wide if it had been possible to carry out the program contemplated by the Gutenberg Society o f Mainz, the organization which has for many years maintained a museum of printing material in Gutenberg's native town and which has done much to foster the study of typographical history. W h a t was to have been a triumphant salvo to the chief instrument making for human liberty and for the recognition o f the brotherhood of man, was drowned by the roar o f cannon and the zooming o f war-planes. The plans centered about St. John's Day, June 24th. June 22 saw the fall of France! The contrast was about as tragic a one as the

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mind can conceive, and the blackness of it is not lightened by remembering that the centenary in 1540 and the bicentenary in 1640 were also marked by devastating wars. There is, it is needless to say, no possibility of proving that on a given day in the year 1440 the art of printing was "discovered"; discovered, in the sense that at a certain moment you find a piece of money on the sidewalk. The experiments and disappointments and hesitant steps which finally gave men the ability to do the kind of work that results in a page of printing, had extended over a considerable number of years. The date 1440, however, is definitely mentioned in the Chronicle of Eusebius, which was printed in Venice in 1483, and also in the Cologne Chronicle, which was printed in 1499, a time when there must have been first-hand knowledge of the fafts. Evidently on the authority of the Cologne Chronicle, the centenary was observed in 1540 with some sort of ceremony by four printers in Wittenberg. In 1640, despite the ravages of the Thirty Years War, at least five cities in Germany called attention to the event. In 1740 the celebration was general throughout Germany and there may even have been a small notice of the anniversary in London. More than a hundred and twenty publications of one sort and another were issued. There were still more festivities in 1840, both in Germany and

THE I N V E N T I O N OF PRINTING

5

elsewhere in Europe. It is a strange fate that the only noteworthy observances in 1940 were in a land unknown and undreamed of in Gutenberg's day. The year 1440 is, then, a date fixed within the lifetime of men who knew, or who might have known, the first printers, and it has by now gained the added sanction of nearly five centuries of tradition. In the Cologne Chronicle and about fifteen other references between 1458 and 1506, it is said that the inventor or discoverer was John Gutenberg of Mainz. On this point a storm of controversy has raged for many years, but at present, scholars have no doubt that credit for the invention is due almost solely to Gutenberg even though we do not have any autograph or contemporary portrait with which to fill in the shadowy outlines of his personality and even though much of our knowledge of him is based on fragmentary notes once contained in the archives of Strassburg and Mainz but now for the most part destroyed. What we know of Gutenberg is gathered largely from court records. He was born at some time between 1394 and 1399 in Mainz, an important city on the Rhine at the point where it is joined by the River Main. His father, who died in 1419, and his mother, who died in 1433, had at least one other child, a son named Friele. They were people of some social rank and not at all of the lower or poorer classes in the

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town. He probably became familiar in his youth with the technique of various metal trades and understood the work of the goldsmith and the silversmith. For unknown reasons, possibly conne&ed with local politics, he left Mainz sometime before 1430. In 1437 he was in Strassburg, where he was defendant in a breach of promise suit brought by a wealthy young lady named Emmeline Isenpforr. About two years later he was engaged in another law suit which, since it involved the closely guarded secret of an invention on which he was working, may well have caused him still more anxiety. A year or so before this he had taken into partnership, along with another man, a former associate of his named Andreas Dritzehn. The latter's contribution to the capital of the organization was to be 125 guilders. It was also provided that in case a partner should die, "all his tools and finished work and the art" should belong to the remaining partners who, on their part, should pay the heirs of the deceased one hundred guilders in 1443. Andreas Dritzehn died at Christmas time of 1438, just a few months after the agreement went into effeft. He had paid only forty guilders of his subscription. His two brothers now demanded that Gutenberg either take them on as partners or else refund all of Andreas's money. In his defence Gutenberg declared that he was willing to cancel the eighty-five guilders

THE INVENTION OF PRINTING

7

due him from Andreas or his estate, to deduft this sum from the hundred guilders due in 1443, and to pay fifteen guilders at once. He was firm in his refusal to admit the plaintiffs into his business or to reveal its nature to them. On December 12, 1439, judgment was passed in his favor so that he managed to get by without letting the cat out of the bag either for his contemporaries or for future investigators. The records of the case, however, contain the first known references to printing, a press and tools, implements and "materials pertaining to printing." There can be no doubt that in the summer and autumn of 1439 John Gutenberg knew that he was on the right track. After this law suit was settled, he seems to have remained in Strassburg until February or March, 1444. From then until the 17th of Oftober, 1448, we lose sight of him. On that day — he was now back home in Mainz — he obtained a loan of 150 gold guilders at five per cent interest from his rich kinsman Arnolt Gelthuss. This transaction would indicate that he was then in the full swing of setting up a printing establishment and that he had gone far enough to be able to convince Gelthuss of the practicability of his schemes. Although the sum he borrowed was not large, it was sufficient to promote his work to a point where he could interest the wealthy Mainz citizen John Fust in lending him still more capital to complete his endeav-

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PRINTERS A N D PRINTING

ors. From the latter he obtained, at two separate times, loans of eight hundred guilders. Unfortunately he could not in the next few years meet the conditions of interest and other payments. Fust therefore brought suit against him on November 6, 1455, when the total debt amounted to 2026 guilders. In this aftion the court records are incomplete and, as in the 1439 case, the principals are very careful to avoid any diredt and complete description of the business for which the money was used. We know, however, that Gutenberg lost; and we can surmise rather surely that Fust gathered into his own possession all the fruits of the luckless inventor's vision, knowledge, and skill. The partners must have had more or less work in hand. Indeed it may well be, as Mr Winship suggests, that the bringing of the suit was caused by their impatience to finish this work and get some return on their investment, whereas Gutenberg was preoccupied in further tinkering with the means of production. At any rate within a year of this time there appeared copies of a folio Bible, now commonly known as the Gutenberg Bible. It was issued in two volumes, with two columns to the page and forty-two lines to the column. So far as we can tell, the edition was 150 copies on paper and thirty-five on parchment. At present forty-four copies are known to survive, thirty-two on paper and twelve on parchment. Of these ten are on

THE INVENTION OF PRINTING

9

this Continent. The Pierpont Morgan Library possesses one on paper and one on parchment. The Library of Congress has one on parchment". Several months after the Bible there appeared a magnificent Psalter, in which the decorative initials are printed in red and blue and the text in black and red. In this there is a colophon which Mr Fuhrmann translates as follows: "The present book of the Psalms, decorated with beautiful capital letters and profusely marked out with rubrics, has been thus fashioned by the added ingenious invention of printing and shaping of letters without any exertion of the pen, and to the glory of God has been dili gently brought to completion by Johann Fust, a citizen of Mainz, and Peter Schoeffer of Gernzheim, in the year of the Lord 1457, on the eve of the Feast of the Assumption [i.e., August 14]." Thus to be robbed of the labor of years was a fate that Gutenberg has shared with all too many inventors. We are not absolutely certain that we have any book actually printed by him, although his name is connected with another Bible of thirty-six lines to a column and with a Latin dictionary, the Catholicon. In later life he seems to have wandered to Bamberg and to Frankfort and to have borrowed money again. He died on February 3, 1468. Whether Gutenberg ever suspeited the revolution-

10

PRINTERS A N D

PRINTING

ary character of his work is doubtful. His wildest dreams could scarcely have mirrored in his mind the complicated, swiftly-moving printing machinery of our day. Nor could he have appreciated the fad: that with the first impression of metal type on paper by means of a torsion press, the modern world was born. In the last analysis he was the child of his time driven by one of those mysterious surges that overwhelm the human spirit now and again, propelling first individuals and then great masses out of the paths of long familiar custom into strange new regions. Such a period of restlessness, such a turning-point in human history, fell in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. John Gutenberg was followed by Christopher Columbus, and after Columbus came Martin Luther and John Calviru If those who participated in the four hundredth anniversary a century ago could have come to life for the semi-millennium, they would have rubbed their eyes in astonishment. When they were alive, the printing art or the printing industry was to all intents and purposes much what it had been at Gutenberg's death. Type-casting, type-setting, the press — practically every operation was altered only in details and not in principle. Fundamental changes did not come until towards the middle of the nineteenth century when the cylinder press, driven by steam power, was per-

THE INVENTION

OF P R I N T I N G

II

fedted for newspaper use and later for book work. The monotype and linotype machines, which now are used for all general book composition, were not invented until just about sixty years ago and did not come into wide-spread use until the time of the World War. The printing office of to-day is the creation of the first decades of the twentieth century. The most noticeable chara&cristic of the industry is the intense conservatism that marked its history up to that time. This fad: has its advantages, of course, because one can talk of printing processes without much need of qualifying one's statements by references to dates. What is true of the manufacture of Caxton's edition of Malory's Morte d' Arthur holds pretty accurately for the Shakespeare quartos and folios, and for the first editions of Milton, Johnson, Wordsworth, Keats, and Macaulay. Contemporary printing, on the other hand, is a matter for technical engineers who understand complicated machinery. It cannot be explained simply or briefly, and in the later chapters of this book I shall not attempt any such task. If one understands what went on in a printing shop up to about 1900, one can seethatmodern processes, although performed by intricate mechanical devices, are fundamentally the same". Consideration of the accomplishments of Gutenberg and his contemporaries is accordingly no academic delving into the dust-heaps of antiquity. First,

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PRINTERS A N D PRINTING

however, let us be sure we realize what these men did not do. Gutenberg did not invent paper; and yet his discovery would have been relatively useless if he had not been able to count upon large and comparatively inexpensive supplies of material such as paper rather than being limited to the use of parchment. Again, Gutenberg did not invent the printing press; similar devices were used in every mediaeval household for making cheese, and they had been further developed by the early papermakers. Nor did Gutenberg invent the idea of engraving metal or casting it in a mould or taking an impression from a raised surface. All this was common praftice. Furthermore, he did not invent printing ink, although he must have spent considerable time in adapting well-known formulae to his purposes. Finally, he did not invent the forms of letters or the shape and binding of books. What then did Gutenberg actually do? He was evidently the first man who looked with creative eyes at a manuscript book, saw dynamically that letterforms were repeated again and again, and then set about to devise a method of producing any desired quantity of letters uniform in shape, regular in their alignment, and adapted to making a legible impression on a plane surface. In other words he invented the mechanism for casting movable type and the combination of metals that would make this type workable.

THE I N V E N T I O N OF PRINTING

13

His purpose was to duplicate the manuscript book as closely as possible and to supply copies in greater quantity and at a lower price than the calligraphers could. As in other cases where a machine displaces manual labor, the advent of printing caused wide loss of employment, physical resistance, and real economic suffering. And yet, though the thousands of copyists and writing-masters did not yield easily, the new industry soon absorbed a good many of them and gave employment to great numbers of other peopled

CHAPTER II

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRINTING O L O N G as printing adhered closely to the traditions of the manuscript, marvelously beautiful ' books came from the press. Early in the sixteenth century a decline set in when the younger men forgot ancient models; and this decline was accentuated by the demand for cheap, rapid production of countless pamphlets in the theological disputes of the time. Much of the seventeenth century was equally unfavorable to good work: the Thirty Years War in Germany and the Civil War in England disrupted orderly life for a long period, and once again the main produft of the press was ephemeral argumentative pamphlets of a political and religious nature. The eighteenth century, with its increasing urbanity and refinement, brought higher levels of accomplishment, but the nineteenth century was again a pretty dull time because printing had to adapt itself to the new mechanical inventions that changed it from a craft to an industry. The last fifty years, however, have been a Golden Age of typography, when printing has once more assumed the place it originally held as one of the fine arts.

S

THE D E V E L O P M E N T OF PRINTING

15

T H E C A P T U R E and sack of Mainz by the Swedes in 1462 may be considered the main occasion for dispersal of the new art beyond the confines of its birthplace, first into other sections of Germany and then into Italy. It naturally began by following the course of the Rhine, which has always been one of the world's chief highways. Eltville, a little town a few miles down the river that had been for two centuries a residence of the Archbishops of Mainz, was the first stopping-place. Then came Basle, Strassburg, Bamberg, Cologne, Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Speier. Italy, France, and the Low Countries followed. "During the fifteenth century," says Mr Pollard, "presses were set up in more than fifty places in Germany, in more than seventy in Italy, in nearly forty in France, in more than twenty in the Netherlands, in twentyfour in Spain, in only three in England." The first printing done outside of Germany was carried on in a Benedi&ine monastery at Subiaco, about thirty miles east of Rome, by two men from Mainz named Conrad Sweynheim and Arnold Pannartz. Here and in Rome they produced twenty-eight books, in editions of three hundred copies each. T w o other Germans, John and Wendelin of Speier, carried the invention to Venice and issued their first book in September, 1469. Soon afterwards a Frenchman, Nicolas Jenson, who made some of the most beauti-

l6

PRINTERS A N D PRINTING

ful books of this early period, began printing there-'. For a long time Venice kept the lead in Italian printing, its fame being largely due, after Jenson's work, to that of Aldus Manutius and his descendants. Aldus introduced many novelties, among them a font of greek type that turned out to be enormously successful. In addition to being a printer, he was an accomplished classical scholar and editor. To make the Greek and Latin authors more accessible he issued a series of them in small pocket volumes, an undertaking that may well be compared with the Loeb Classical Library of to-day. As a help in compressing his material into these handy volumes, he cut close-fitting sloping letters based on the cursive penmanship of the time. This sort of type has ever since been known as italic. After Aldus's death his work was carried on during his son's minority by his father-in-law, Andreas Torresano, himself an enterprising printer who had bought Jenson's types after the latter's death. In 1533 the son, Paolo, resumed his father's business, and the grandson, the second Aldus Manutius, managed it from 1565 to about 1576, thus rounding out nine decades since his ancestor had arrived in Venice. The second Aldus married one of the Giuntas, another long-lived printing "dynasty," which was established in Venice in 1482, maintained branches at Florence and at Lyons, and lasted till 1642, a total span of 160 years.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRINTING

17

While printing was making great strides on the Continent, it was rather indifferently practiced in England by William Caxton, who learned it in Cologne and brought it back home in 1476. The amateurish quality of his work is atoned for by his service to literature in bringing out the first edition of that gorgeous book, the Morte d'Arthur, written by Sir Thomas Malory, and also the first edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Before his death in 1491 he had issued a hundred different titles, the work of his last ten years showing much improvement in equipment and technical skill. His successors were not Englishmen: one was an Alsatian, Wynkin de Wörde; the other a Norman, Richard PynsorL. D U R I N G T H E sixteenth century Italy maintained its primacy until about 1530. Then France took the lead until about 1570. For the last thirty years the finest work was done in the Netherlands. Spain, England, and Scandinavia need scarcely be considered. Such a limitation of the field makes it rather easy to keep the main lines of printing history during this century straight in one's mind. A further aid to the memory lies in the faft that printing organizations have always been remarkably stable, tending to remain for generations under the control of a founder's family or partners. M r Updike points out that the

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reason was probably an economic one, since "the amount to be had by the sale of the equipment of a printing-house was, as in our time, by no means commensurate with the money value of the business if it could, be carried on.." In Italy, as we have just seen, Aldus Manutius and his descendants made up a family that remained in business for the greater part of a century. In France their counterpart was the Estienne, or Stephens, family. The organization was founded by Henri Estienne in 1500, continued by Simon de Colines, and developed still further by Robert Estienne and by the latter's two sons, Henri II and Robert II. Associated with them were Geofroy Tory, the book decorator, and Claude Garamond, the type-designer. Garamond's greek and roman types set the style for practically two centuries, and Tory's exquisite decoration and illustration became the model for French Renaissance printing. Robert Estienne was a noted classical scholar, compiling a standard Latin dictionary, writing a series of grammars, and editing a number of texts. As a matter of faft, in those early days many scholars got so much interested in printing that they learned the art, and most printers were forced by circumstances to become rather learned men. The scholarly traditions of the family were carried forward by Robert's son Henri, who was a famous editor of Greek texts

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRINTING

19

and the author of a Greek dictionary. Although other members of the family continued the business for some years after his death in 1598, it ceased to be of much significances In the Netherlands there were two great houses, the Plantins and the Elzevirs. The former, established at Antwerp in 1555 by Christopher Plantin, a Frenchman from Tours, lasted for over three hundred years — until 1876, when the original building and all its wealth of accumulated equipment was sold to the nation as a museum. Since then it has been a priceless monument, visited every year by thousands of people. Presses, types, wood-blocks, and all sorts of material have been on view, and the records have been published with scarcely a gap. Plantin's greatest work was a polyglot Bible, begun in 1568 and completed in 1572. His device was a compass, one leg of which is fixed, symbolizing Constancy, while the other symbolizing Labor, describes an arc. The house of Elzevir was founded at Leyden in Holland by Louis Elzevir in 1583. Fourteen members of this family were printers or publishers, the height of their glory coming about 1635. They, somewhat like Aldus, popularized small books, especially pocketsized editions of the Latin classics. To tell the truth, they were not remarkably good printers but their name has become associated in the mind of many ama-

20

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PRINTING

teurs with a sentimental quaintness and bookisliness. In England John Day is the only sixteenth century printer who can lay any claim to distinction. Censorship and other governmental restrictions brought about conditions in which no art or trade could possibly flourish, and at the same time there was little general interest in the subjects that occupied continental scholarship. Day's earlier period, from 1546 to 1558, evinces no great ability. After that time he produced important work, much of it with the encouragement of Archbishop Parker, and he also became a leading figure in the newly incorporated Stationers' Company. Among the works he printed were the first English edition of Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1563), several volumes in a new font of anglo-saxon type, Norton and Sackville's Tragedy of Gorboduc, Roger Ascham's Scholemaster (1561), Parker's De Antiquitate Britannicae Ecclesiae (1572), Asser's Life of Alfred the Great (1574), and the writings of John Caius on the history and antiquities of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. On the title page of many of his books Day used a punning device: a man is starting up from sleep as the sun peeps over the horizon, and in the sky appear the words, "Arise! for it is d a y ! " Alertness characterized him all through his busy life, as it naturally should have marked a man who was twice married and is said to have had twenty-six children,!

THE D E V E L O P M E N T OF PRINTING

21

O N E OF Day's late contemporaries was Christopher Barker, who in 1569 started a business that was continued by his descendants for nearly a century. They held in succession the post of Royal Printer and so most of their work consisted of official documents, Bibles, and Testaments. Christopher's son, Robert, printed the "authorized" or King James version of the Bible in 1 6 1 1 . This is not an especially attractive book. The title-page, like many others of the time, is an intricate and over-elaborate piece of engraving. The text is in black-letter, which is extremely difficult for us now to read. Robert Barker also printed the 1631 edition that is known as the "Wicked Bible" because it omits the important word not from the seventh commandmenr. Along with the 1 6 1 1 Bible in the traditions of the American people stands the B a y Psalm Book, the earliest survivor of the work produced in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the widow Glover's press. Since it came out in 1640, its three hundredth anniversary coincided with the five hundredth of Gutenberg's invention and was also marked with appropriate celebrations in many parts of the country. Curiously enough, still another centenary fell in the same year; that marking the production, in Mexico in 1540, of the first book printed in the western hemisphere. Typographically the B a y Psalm Book is a poor piece

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PRINTING

of work. The printer, Matthew Day, knew little about the trade and had still less equipment, and yet it is an honest piece of work, done as well as it could be in the face of great handicaps. Evidently it satisfied its public because out of the edition of seventeen hundred copies, only eleven are now in existence after years of constant use by frugal congregations. As time went on, however, better work was turned out in Cambridge; John Eliot's Indian Bible of 1663 shows such a mastery of technical details that it was a veritable triumph for the printers. Returning now to the main stream of printing history in Europe, we find that if the sixteenth century is most easily remembered through the names of its great families, the seventeenth can be simplified by calling it the century of great corporations or foundations. In England the two university presses, at Oxford and at Cambridge, became really strong organizations. In France, the Imprimerie Royale was founded. In Italy the Tipografia Camerale and the Stamperia Vaticana were united in 1610, and the press of the Congregation of the Propaganda was established in 1626. Printing had come to Oxford in 1485, when Theodoric Rood from Cologne set up a short-lived press. In the early sixteenth century a second press had issued twenty-three books. Nearly seventy years later Joseph Barnes was appointed University Printer;

THE D E V E L O P M E N T

OF PRINTING

23

among his books was Captain John Smith's Map of Virginia. In 1636 Archbishop Laud procured for the University a Royal Charter granting it the privilege to print "all manner of books." The Stationers' C o m pany, however, was so jealous of its o w n prerogatives that it actively combated all such possibilities o f competition and after much dispute forced the University temporarily to surrender its right to print Bibles, grammars, and almanacs. The most famous books issued during this era of Laud's patronage were Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Bacon's Advancement of Learning. A t last, in 1671, D r John Fell, Dean o f Christ Church and later Bishop o f Oxford, took over the management o f the Press. He then sent to Holland for a supply of new types, punches, and matrices; he recovered for the University the privilege of printing Bibles and prayer-books; and he persuaded his friend Archbishop Sheldon to give a building that housed the Press for many years. During his time a number o f learned folios were printed, and also Anthony W o o d ' s important history o f the University. W i t h this fresh start the O x f o r d University Press went on to become eventually one of the greatest printing and publishing organizations o f the world. A t Cambridge the first press was established b y John Siberch, a friend o f Erasmus, in 1521. As at O x f o r d , printing was more or less spasmodic during

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PRINTERS A N D PRINTING

the rest of the century and marked throughout by disputes with the Stationers' Company. Since the appointment of Thomas Thomas as University Printer in 1582 the long line of these officials has been unbroken. In 1628, when Charles I confirmed the Charter granted by Henry VIII, the Press finally settled its differences with the Stationers and began its modern career. The seventeenth century output, as might be expefted, favored the Puritan authors, among w h o m we find George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Fuller, and John Milton. Science is represented by Harvey's Circulation of the Blood and by Ray's Index Plantarum. In 1645 appeared Thomas Shelton's manual of shorthand, the system Samuel Pepys used for writing his Diary. John Field, who was appointed Printer in 1655, eredted a new building, which remained in use until 1827; his printing room was "sixty feet by twenty, held six presses, had paper windows and a pleasant garden." At the very end of the century the learned and vigorous Richard Bentley, Master of Trinity College, emulated the work done at the sister University with activities that resulted in new additions to the buildings, the purchase of new presses, the importation of large supplies of type from Holland, and the appointment of a Board of Syndics. Cornelius Crownfield was made Inspector of the Press, an office that seems to have been practically the same as that of

THE D E V E L O P M E N T

OF PRINTING

25

the Printer. T h e famous London publisher, Jacob Tonson, ordered editions o f Vergil, Horace, and other classics; Bentley's o w n editions o f Vergil and Terence were printed; and Suidas' Lexicon, one o f the most ambitious typographical enterprises o f the period, was issued in three folio volumes. T h e third great foundation o f the seventeenth century, the Imprimerie Royale, or Imprimerie N a t i o nale as it is n o w called, was established b y Cardinal Richelieu in N o v e m b e r , 1640, with Sebastian Cramoisy as Diredtor. It immediately became busy and important. In 1692 Louis X I V decided that an entirely n e w series o f types should be designed for the exclusive use o f the Press. A committee o f the Academie des Sciences presented an elaborate mathematical scheme for the construction o f each letter, a large square subdivided into 2304 smaller squares. T h e royal typefounder, Philippe Grandjean, followed the general design thus w o r k e d out and produced the romain du roi, which is distinguished b y a tiny beak on the lefthand side o f the lower-case 1 and b y a flattening and sharpening o f the serifs. It was the first step away f r o m traditional forms towards what w e call modern face type. T y p o g r a p h y was, after t w o hundred and fifty years, shaking o f f the last trace o f connexion w i t h the hand-written book.

26

PRINTERS A N D

PRINTING

IT IS M O S T interesting that this important step should have been made exactly at the end of the seventeenth century, for the eighteenth is truly a modern age not only in life but in printing. Before further progress was made in this direction, however, the work of the past was consolidated and perfected in the beautiful types of William Caslon. For his models he took the ordinary Dutch types, the only ones to be found in the English printing houses of the time. He made his letters more uniform and better proportioned, and by his superior craftsmanship turned out fonts that have been among the most satisfying ever cut. John Selden's Works, in which they were first used (by William Bowyer in 1726), is one of the monuments of typographical history. About the middle of the century John Baskerville undertook to modify and improve Caslon's types. He had followed a good many trades — that of writing-master among others — before he took up typefounding and printing. In 1757 he produced an edition of Vergil and in 1758 an edition of Milton that astonished and dazzled his contemporaries. As one of the official printers at Cambridge University he issued four prayer-books there in 1760 and an imposing folio Bible in 1763. Dibdin called the latter "one of the most beautifully printed books in the world." Baskerville relied for his typographical effects on perfeit

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRINTING

27

paper, improved press-work, and graceful letterdesign, almost completely abandoning ornaments, borders, and decoration. The result was pure typography of a magnificence that was not duplicated until M r Updike did the Book of Common Prayer in 1930 and M r Rogers the Oxford Ledern Bible in 1935. Baskerville, however, was ahead of his times; for when he died, no English type-founder cared enough for his material to buy it, and it was sold in France. There it was lost during the Revolution, and very little of it has ever been recovered. The designs, recut within recent years for the monotype and linotype machines, are only now gaining real appreciation.. Part of the reason for the long negleit of Baskerville's types lies in the fadl that his striving for a letter of clear, sharp design was developed to the limit by the Didot family in France and by Bodoni in Italy. The Didot letter is familiar to everyone who has seen a typical modern French novel; it is, for our eyes, rather too sharp and narrow, but the French admire it greatly. In fact, the Didots have had so strong an influence on printing history that, whether we care for their work or not, we must rank them along with the other great printing families. The Didots have been called the French Bodonis, a silly characterization that has only the merit of indicating the fame of the Italian Giambattista Bodoni „

28

PRINTERS A N D

PRINTING

"the typographer of kings and the king of typographers." His typical books were great folios, with excessively wide margins, much white space between the lines, and almost no ornament. The style is as cold and unreadable as one can well imagine, suited only to monumental editions of the classics intended for the private library of a prince or a king. The charming little volumes that he could print on occasion are exceptions to his general practice-'. Dutch printing of the time pursued a vigorous course. In 1703 the foundry of Enschede en Zonen, still a flourishing concern, was established at Haarlem. They not only designed their own types but bought the punches and matrices of a great many older establishments that came onto the market from time to time. Among their material are certain matrices cut in the fifteenth century itself, a black-letter by Henric the type-cutter in Delft from 1490 and a roman asserted to have been owned by Peter Schoeffer of Gernsheim, the partner of Gutenberg and Fust. Within recent years types cast from both these sets of matrices have been used for modern books. Germany in the meantime adhered stubbornly to its own provincial use of the modified "gotliic" known as fraktur and schwabacher. Although there was, it is true, a strong attempt to cast these aside in favor of roman, it was effectively squelched by J . G. I.

THE D E V E L O P M E N T OF PRINTING

29

Breitkopf, of the important firm of type-founders and and printers, Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig. This establishment, which goes back in its origins to the late sixteenth century, is still aCtive. Its fame rests mainly upon its music printing, a department in which it has no rival. One must also mention among the great German printers of the century Johann Friedrich Unger and Georg Joachim Göschen, who not only printed and published the writings of the classical German authors but were also their intimate friends. If we were to attempt to characterize in one word the aftivities of eighteenth century type-founders and printers, we might well call them self-conscious. The freedom and naturalness of the earlier days were replaced by such experiments as those of the French to produce a mathematically perfeCt letter. The work of Baskerville, Didot, and Bodoni is artificial, cold, the produCt of sophisticated thinking. What had once been done with the simple purpose of communicating an author's ideas now became an objeCt of theoretical contemplation in and for itself. A most striking evidence of the new attitude toward typography is to be found in the appearance throughout the century of a number of instruction books or "grammars" of printing. Late in the preceding century there had been two or three small German manuals with instructions to pressmen on how to lay the

30

PRINTERS A N D

PRINTING

pages correctly in the forms and w i t h brief notes on the invention and history o f printing. In 1683 the E n g lish printer Joseph M o x o n brought out a complete, detailed description o f the equipment o f a shop, w i t h suggestions to the master, instructions for the w o r k men, and an account o f traditional customs. From this b o o k w e gain much o f our knowledge o f early conditions. In 1723 Martin Dominique Fertel o f St O m e r issued his Science pratique de Γimprimerie, w h i c h is as complete as M o x o n but was certainly an independent piece o f w o r k . M o x o n and, to some extent, Fertel w e r e the sources for several later manuals in English, b y John Smith (1755), b y Philip Luckombe (1770), b y Caleb Stower (1808), b y John Johnson (1824), and b y Thomas Curson Hansard (1825). Fertel seems to have remained in print throughout the century and to have satisfied all the needs o f the French printers. Fournier lejeune, the type-founder, projected a n e w treatment but did not get beyond a discussion o f type. A t the end o f the period, w h e n Fertel's book was hard to get, it was replaced b y the grammars o f Antoine-Fran £ois M o m o r o (1796), Bertrand Quinquet (1799), and B . Vin^ard

(1806). In Germany,

Christian

Friedrich

Gessner brought out his t w o - v o l u m e Die so nöthig als nützliche Buchdruckerkunst und Schriftgiesserey in 1740, as a contribution to the observance o f the three hundredth anniversary, and he followed it b y t w o further

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRINTING

31

volumes in 1742 and 1745 that gave full accounts of the celebration. This great work ranks with Moxon and with Fertel as an independent source-book of information on early printing practice. Other German manuals followed later in the century. In every country, too, there were histories of printing but they are of little value now except as they preserve traditional notions and contemporary side-lights. B O D O N I A N D the Didots set the style for printing during a large part of the nineteenth century. Not much can be said for the artistic side of the craft during that time. Book-collefting, it is true, became a hobby not only among rich men but among those of more moderate means; but when even such a society of connoisseurs as the Roxburghe Club issued a publication of its own, it was a poor thing compared with the best books of a hundred years before. On the mechanical side there was great progress: machinery was invented for casting type and, eventually, for most of the work of setting it up; the cylinder press, first driven by steam and later by gas or electricity, was invented; the manufacture of paper was completely revolutionized. With all the difficulties involved in changing from a handicraft to a mechanized industry, it is little wonder that the history of printing during the nineteenth century makes little claim on

32

PRINTERS A N D PRINTING

our interest until the very last decade. Then, like the century plant that concentrates a hundred years of growth into a gorgeous blossom, printing burst forth with some of the loveliest books ever made. The leader in the new movement was William Morris. Morris, like Leonardo da Vinci, has been called the greatest man ever endowed with diversity of genius. His tremendous physical and mental vitality lured him from one art to another: architecture, furnituremaking, weaving, the writing of poetry and novels, and finally to printing. Becoming dissatisfied along in the eighties with the way his own books were being printed, he began a thorough study of typography, which aroused him to the possibility of making books that would be as beautiful as his wall-papers and textiles. In 1891, after a good deal of experimenting, he set up the Kelmscott Press, near London, and equipped it with a stock of hand-made papers, old hand presses, and types he had himself designed on the model of Jenson's. He drew borders and initials, and his friend Edward Burne-Jones made illustrations for various books. In all, fifty-three volumes were printed at the Kelmscott Press, many of them written by Morris himself. When the over-ornamented, heavy style of these books first struck eyes accustomed to the anemic printing of the time, there was a great outcry; but it was not long before it became the fashion..

THE D E V E L O P M E N T OF PRINTING

33

The Kelmscott Press was the first modern "private" press; that is, a shop where printing is practiced as a fine art in the narrow sense, without regard to its cost either to the printer or to the ultimate purchaser. Its books were issued in very small editions which commanded, and still do command, extremely high prices. Though it was all pretty far from the Socialism that Morris preached, yet the Press exerted a far-reaching and a salutary effeft. It demonstrated what could be done if only a printer used his brains, and it gave printing a new dignity comparable with what it enjoyed in the fifteenth century. Coming at the moment when machinery seemed to have completely conquered the old handicraft spirit, it proved that machinery cannot do everything, that there are great areas of human life that cannot be mechanized and regimented. Fortunately the printing industry learned the lesson and it has spent the past fifty years in putting its machines into their proper place as servants, instead of masters, of creative artistic endeavor. The aesthetic and financial success of the Kelmscott Press had immediate repercussions. Some of these were deplorable, as in the case of the pretentious books that Elbert Hubbard unloaded upon the American market. On the other hand, there sprang up in England, America, Germany, Holland, and Italy a great number of presses whose work has equalled and even

34

PRINTERS A N D PRINTING

surpassed Morris's accomplishment. Among them were the Vale Press, the Doves Press, the Ashendene Press, the Eragny Press, the Essex House Press, the Insel Verlag, and the Cranach Press. Books printed by these establishments are so expensive that they can be bought only by wealthy people, but they have maintained standards that have readied favorably upon all printing. Shortly after the World War the impulse was spread to broader fields by the formation in New York of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, an organization which sponsors such nation-wide exhibitions as the annual "Fifty Books of the Year." Through these means there has been a decidedly successful attempt to make ordinary trade-books better in design and in details of manufacture. There is no doubt that at the present time the book-buyer is, to speak commercially, getting more for his money than his predecessors ever did. Among the printers who have been, and are, aftive in this modern movement, it is of course difficult to pick out those marked for permanent fame and those for eventual oblivion. There is no doubt, however, that the two whom all of us now consider greatest will maintain their pre-eminence for many generations. They are two Americans, Daniel Berkeley Updike and Bruce Rogers. Which is the greater, is hard to say; but one is safe in asserting that both repre-

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRINTING

35

sent a level of typographical excellence that has not been surpassed since the fifteenth century. M r Updike was born in Rhode Island, worked for several years at Houghton Mifflin's Boston office and at their Riverside Press in Cambridge, and then in 1893 established the Merrymount Press in Boston. His tastes and standards were fixed before William Morris began work as a printer; but he was affe&ed by Morris's influence as everybody was at the time. Nevertheless he was not overwhelmed by this influence as so many others were. He has been his own honest self, doing each day's task to the best of his ability, serene in the midst of conilifting movements. Those who wish to see him at his job through the years will get an unconsciously faithful picture in the pages of his book, Notes on the Merrymount Press. During the past forty-eight years the Press has turned out a body of work of the highest quality and of a surprisingly uniform aesthetic efFeft. This has been due in great measure to M r Updike's personal supervision of each job; his attention to detail has been tireless, and his adherence to sound tradition unfaltering. Although many of the books have been privately printed for individuals, the greater number have been done for regular publishers like Crowell and Scribner. The great masterpiece is the Standard Edition of the revised Book of Common Prayer, which was begun in

36

PRINTERS A N D PRINTING

1928 and completed in 1930. It represents an understanding not only of typography but of liturgiology, for many of the pradtical details of arrangement could have been solved only by a man thoroughly versed in ecclesiastical requirements. As a matter of fail M r Updike is a very learned man, a true successor to the scholar-printers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He has written extensively on typography, the chief of his works being the authoritative two volume study, Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use. This has set in motion the important investigations into the history of printing that have been carried on during the past eighteen years, notably by M r Stanley Morison of Londoru Bruce Rogers, too, is a learned man, who knows his typographical history from the ground up. This is only one of the many points of resemblance between M r Rogers and M r Updike that cannot be adequately treated in brief space. The points of contrast, however, are equally strong, and the most salient one of them largely explains the difference in the work of the two men. M r Updike has lived and worked in Boston for over sixty years, responsible for a settled and growing business establishment. M r Rogers has spent the past fifty years in Boston, London, N e w York, and elsewhere, never settling permanently in one place and never working in a shop of his own. He has the rest-

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRINTING

37

lessness — and the abiding charm — of the true artist. M r Updike's habit of life shows itself in the solid quality of his printing; it is sure-footed, somewhat sedate, the work of one who knows and accepts the limitations of type. M r Rogers's work has airiness, gracefulness, dazzling lightness; he knows the limitations of type but he will not accept them.. In 1896, three years after M r Updike left the Riverside Press, M r Rogers began his work there. He remained until 1912, designing a large number of regular trade books but responsible chiefly for a group of limited editions which finally came to nearly a hundred different titles. Among the handsomest of them are Oliver and Arthur, Geofroy Tory, Ecclesiastes, 18 J2, Montaigne's Essays, Fifteen Sonnets of Petrarch, and Pan's Pipes. In 1935 the Oxford University Press issued his Leitern Bible, set in the Centaur type designed by M r Rogers himself. This will take its place high among the great series of Bibles issued by the printers of the world during the past five centuries. There is no ornament, nothing to catch the reader's momentary admiration, nothing to take one's mind from the book itself. It is a work of pure typography, a sheer masterpiece of the printer's art. M r Rogers's Bible and M r Updike's Prayer Book are worthy companions; and they are also worthy companions of that great Bible of John Gutenberg's which stands at the begin-

38

PRINTERS A N D

PRINTING

ning of typographical history. The circle has swung complete, in a strangely literal fashion.. B E T W E E N the Gutenberg Bible and the Rogers Bible stand five hundred years of printing. The first half century or so represents the infancy of the art, and the books of the time are known as incunabula or cradle books. In the next century, the sixteenth, we recall the great printer-families — Aldus, Estienne, Plantin, and Elzevir. Although the last two continued their activities far into the next period, the seventeenth century may be called the era of the great foundations, the Imprimerie Nationale, the Stamperia Vaticana, and the University Presses at Oxford and Cambridge. The eighteenth century saw great advances in typedesign and is to be remembered through its typefounders, Caslon, Baskerville, Fournier, Didot, and Bodoni. During the nineteenth century printing, like all other crafts, was undergoing the process of industrialization and was hard put to it to absorb the multitude of new mechanical inventions in every department. This process, however, was practically over early in the twentieth century so that during the past four decades printing has been able to go forward to greater triumphs than ever. In these centuries there have been, as in all human life, good days and evil days. At the worst of times

T H E D E V E L O P M E N T OF PRINTING

39

printing has been a trade that enabled men to get words onto paper. At the best of times it has been an art practiced by scholars and by men sensitive to beauty. It is well for us to realize that quite apart from the thought contained in books, the books themselves are worthy of consideration. Even the cheapest and poorest of them are the work of human hands, while the best are among the greatest treasures one can possess. In fine, a book is, in more ways than one, "the life-blood of a master-spirir."

CHAPTER III

THE PRINTER'S TOOLS ^ V E R Y printing establishment has two main functional departments : the composing room, Μ J where an author's manuscript is composed or set in type, and the press room, where the adtual printing is done. Two other important processes, the making of type and the binding of books, are so highly specialized that they are usually performed by independent establishments. Until a few decades ago, all the type in a shop was purchased from a foundry and set by hand. Nowadays both the making and the composition of the type are done either by the monotype machine or by the linotype machine. Each of these looks like an enormous typewriter keyboard with various attachments standing high at the back. The operator strikes the keys much as the ordinary typist does. When the monotype keys are struck, a plunger released by compressed air makes perforations in a roll of paper, which at the end of the work somewhat resembles the roll of paper used in player-pianos. The roll is then transferred to the caster room, where it is fed into the casting machine, the central part of which contains a small square frame

THE P R I N T E R S TOOLS

41

holding the matrices of all the letters in the font. The movement of the matrix box is controlled by the perforations in the roll of paper in such a way that the mould for each required letter comes in turn to the point where molten lead is forced into it and the letter is cast. The pieces of type then move out automatically into lines on a long shallow tray called a "galley." Each piece is separate, and corrections are made in the composing room by hand. In the linotype, the striking of the keys releases matrices from a magazine at the back of the machine. When the operator has assembled enough for a full line, he pulls a lever that forces the molten metal against the whole line and casts it all in one slug or line o' type. Here the letters are not separate, and corrections can be made only at the machine, by assembling the matrices all over again and casting a new line^. If it were not for the incredible speed in casting and setting type that these two inventions have made possible, modern civilization would be seriously handicapped. Our newspapers, for instance, could not present their material so promptly and in such detail. Books and pamphlets designed to sway popular opinion would lose much of their effectiveness through unavoidable delays. The situation, whether one thinks it good or bad, can easily be imagined. There is still, however, a large, and it would seem

42

PRINTERS A N D PRINTING

an almost undiminished, need for foundry type and for hand composition. Much correcting is done by hand as it always was. Title-pages and chapter headings in books and display lines in advertisements are most conveniently set in the traditional way. The initial letters or decorative units that a printer wishes to use, may not be available for machine composition. It is indeed hard to imagine such perfecting of machinery that it will completely supplant human labor and skill. After the type comes from the machines, a proof of it is taken on long strips of paper. Proof-readers go over these so-called galley proofs to deteCt errors and then send them out to the author for further changes and corrections. When they are returned to the printer, they are sent back to the composing room so that the alterations can be made in the type itself. Generally the type is divided, or "made up," into pages at this time, and page proofs are sent to the proof-reader and the author. If the corrections are few and unimportant, the author sees no more proof. Several sets of galley proofs and page proofs may, however, be required, especially if the work is complicated or the correftions are numerous. When this part of the work is finished, the pages of type are brought together in groups on the "stone," a metal table with an absolutely flat, smooth top. They are then arranged in a large iron frame, separated by

THE PRINTER'S TOOLS

43

strips of metal, and wedged in so tightly that even the smallest piece of type cannot fall out as the frame is transferred to the bed of the press. This frame is called a "chase" and the pages locked up in it are called a " f o r m . " The number of pages in the form differs with the size of the press; it is usually eight, sixteen, or thirty-two. When the form is secured on the press and various adjustments have been made for the purpose of securing an even impression, the press-work begins. The printed sheets of paper are finally sent to the bindery for folding, assembling, sewing, and casing. With this very hasty survey in mind, we shall now turn to a more detailed consideration of certain processes up to the time, along in the middle and latter part of the nineteenth century, when printing ceased to be a craft. Some of these processes, it will be understood, are still carried on, the methods of casting type and of printing the sheets of paper being the main points of difference. THE SIZES OF T Y P E IF Y O U examine a piece of type, you see at once that like all other objects of cubical content it has three dimensions. The longest represents the distance from the surface of the press on which the type rests to the surface of the paper that is to be printed. This dimension, known as height-to-paper, is invariable for all

44

PRINTERS A N D PRINTING

sizes of type whether they be the large capitals at the top of a poster or the small type used in foot-notes. In England and America the standard is 0.918 inches. On the Continent it varies from 1.006 inches to 0.9274

View of body inclined to show the face.

Face of the letter on the body.

1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10

counter. hair-line. serif. stem, or body-mark. neck, or beard.

shoulder. pin mark. nick. groove. feet.

DIAGRAM OF A PIECE OP TYPE

inches. Accuracy in this measurement is obviously most important; for type that is a trifle too short will either give a faint impression or none at all, and type that is a trifle too long will either punch through the paper or be broken off. The second dimension is the width, which varies from a narrow one for such a

THE PRINTER'S TOOLS

45

letter as i or 1 to the widest for the letter m. This is known as the "set." The third dimension is the "body." The letter-shape itself, the only part of the metal that receives the ink, is cut on the " b o d y " and is known as the "face" of the type. When you look at a page, you are aware that the capitals and the ascending letters (b, d, f, h, k, 1) rise above the top of such letters as m and s, while others (g, j , p, q, and y) extend below the bottom of the m and s. Nevertheless, in spite of these variations, the whole line gives an impression of uniformity. The reason for this is that although the "body" is uniform in the casting of any one size of type, each individual "face" is so placed on its "body" as to insure even alignment". Various names were long in use to indicate the size of the type body. The standard has always been called pica. In De Vinne's words, "All the larger sizes of type Picas

5

10

15

20

M E A S U R E S H O W I N G PICA DIVISIONS

above four-line, and all the more important widths of furniture, are made to bodies that are regular multiples of pica; all thicknesses of leads, and sometimes of brass rules, are graduated to divisions of pica." The word is the Latin name for "the Pie," which was "a table showing the course of the services of the Church.

46

PRINTERS A N D PRINTING

. . . It was called the Pie because it was written in letters of black and red." Canon, four times the height of pica, was so named from its use in the leading lines of the printed canons of the Church. Great primer, half as large again as pica, was used in the "Primer," a devotional book authorized by Henry VIII. English was so called from its extensive use by English printers. Bourgeois, three quarters the size of pica, was frequently used in small books made for the bourgeoisie. The names in other European countries were also derived from similar ecclesiastical and typographical origins. Type sizes were by no means uniform from one country to another nor, indeed, from one foundry to another within the same country. The resultant confusion was so great that Fournier le jeune proposed a more accurate mathematical system, first in 1737 and in its perfected form in 1764. Later in the century Fran$ois Ambroise Didot made still further improvements. In 1886 the United States Type Founders' Association adopted a variation of these two systems, and since that time all American and English type has been made to its specifications. In this system the picturesque old names have been dropped. The unit of measurement is named the "point," which is, roughly speaking, one seventysecond of an inch. Pica is now called twelve-point type; there are six lines of pica to the inch. Of course

THE P R I N T E R S

TOOLS

47

this does not mean that any foundry makes seventytwo sizes of type, each a tiny fraction larger than the preceding. Sizes have become so much a matter of tradition that they are practically the same as they have always been. N o one casts twenty-three point type, for instance, or fifteen point. The usual range is 48 point (the old canon), 42 point, 36 point, 24 point, 22 point, 20 point (paragon), 18 point, 14 point (English), 12 point (pica), 11 point (small pica), 10 point, 9 point (bourgeois), 8 point (brevier), 6 point (nonpareil). The only one of the old names still in common use is pica. Nonpareil is heard now and again from an older compositor, but the others would scarcely be understood in any shop to-day. EARLY METHODS OF CASTING TYPE Gutenberg's invention for producing type was a mould fixed for the thickness of all sizes ("height-topaper"), fixed for the length ("body") of the particular size the founder might decide to cast, but adjustable in width ("set") according to the letter he was making. In simplest terms the mould consisted of two L-shaped pieces which, when put together, left a cavity into which the type metal was poured. In addition to these three adjustments, which took care of the cubical content of the piece of type, there had to be some way of producing on the end of the

48

PRINTERS A N D

PRINTING

metal a raised surface representing a chara&cr of the alphabet. In order to do this, the type-founder first engraved on the end of a piece of soft iron the letter he wished to make; it was a long and extremely difficult task, especially for the smaller sizes where differences are almost infinitesimal but absolutely essential. This iron, called the punch, was now hardened in fire and then driven into the surface of a piece of highly polished brass. The result was that a reversed incised letter appeared in the brass. This was known as the matrix. The matrix was now fastened into the mould in such a way that it closed the bottom of the cavity, with the letter exaftly in the center. The founder poured in his molten metal — a mixture of lead, tin, and antimony —, gave the mould a shake to get the metal evenly distributed, held it a moment to take shape, snapped it open to let the piece of type fall out, and repeated the process. This slow, crude hand-work was superseded early in the nineteenth century by casting-machines. The earliest printers cut their own punches and cast their own type. It was not until the sixteenth century that type-founding became a trade distinft from printing. With the foundry right next to the composing room there was no need of large supplies of type, and when type became worn or broken it could be quickly replaced. For many years the printer did not set more

TYPE-MOULD WITHOUT MATRIX, AND WITH A TYPE OF THE LETTER Η IN THE MOULD

ONE HALF OF THE MOULD

THE OTHER HALF OF THE MOULD

THE PRINTER'S TOOLS

49

than four pages at once and for this reason also the supply did not need to be large. As time went on, however, and the demands of the trade increased, the amount of type in an ordinary shop grew to be enormous. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, eight hundred pounds of each of the most commonly used sizes was considered a fair amount; by the end of the nineteenth century ten thousand pounds of any one size was thought to be only moderate. Even that was barely sufficient for five ordinary novels such as Ivanhoe or A Tale of Two Cities. THE COMPOSING OF T Y P E W H E N T H E type arrives from the foundry it is "laid" in cases, the case being a shallow tray two feet eight and a quarter inches long, one foot four and three-quarters inches broad, and one inch deep. We have good reason to think that the same dimensions were used in the fifteenth century. Down the middle of the case runs a partition three quarters of an inch thick. Cross partitions of thinner wood subdivide it into a series of small compartments or boxes. One letter or charafter goes in each box. All the small letters are in one case, which is placed nearest the workman and is known as the lower case; the capitals are in another case set at an angle behind the lower case and known as the upper case^.

50

PRINTERS A N D

PRINTING

When the compositor begins to work, he stands in front of his case with his manuscript or "copy" propped up at the left. In his hand he holds a composing-stick, a shallow metal box with one side open. He knows the arrangement of the letters in the case just as a typist using the touch system knows the position of the typewriter keys. Like a typist reading her shorthand notes, he begins to pick up the letters one by one from the cases and arrange them in his composingstick. When the line is full, it is transferred to a long metal tray called a galley, and then another line is set. B y this patient method of picking millions of tiny bits of type from boxes and arranging them in order, all books up to 1900 or so were composed. The first printers did their work page by page. Later, they set the type in continuous lengths on the galleys, corrected it, and then at last divided it into pages. This practice makes it easier to corredl mistakes and to put in new matter that the compositor may have overlooked or the author may wish to add. THE EARLY PRINTING PRESS W I T H A light jump over the anxieties of an author in reading his proof and over the labors of the printer in correcting the type, we now come to the point where the material is ready to go on the press. Regarding this part of the printer's work there is a good deal

THE

PRINTER'S

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51

of mistaken enthusiasm on the part of amateurs, who talk with bated breath about "hand-printed" books as though they had some artistic value that raises them above books printed by machinery. All this is nonsense; there is nothing about a modern press driven by eleftric power that robs a book of any of its beauty. Even William Morris, who in the 1890's started this talk, did not print his books on a wooden press such as was used in the sixteenth century; he used a piece of machinery, an iron press worked by a series of levers, an invention of the early nineteenth century. The truth is that the printing-press has gathered to itself all the romantic aura we have come to associate with "hand-made" as distinguished from "machine-made" products, and so the crudities of early books, which are largely due to poor press-work, are exalted into quaintness and attractiveness. W e do not know what Gutenberg's press looked like, but it must have closely resembled those shown in a large number of illustrations in sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century books. Here in America we have at least eight of these old wooden presses: the Isaiah Thomas press in Worcester, Massachusetts, the Furber & Russell press at the Harrison Gray Otis house in Boston, the James Franklin press in Boston, the Benjamin Franklin press in the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, the so-called "Stephen Daye"

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press in Montpelier, Vermont, the Peter Edes press in Bangor, Maine, an Ephrata Monastery press in the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, and another Ephrata press in the Ford Museum at Dearborn, Michigan,. The framework consists of two strong perpendicular posts called the cheeks, which are fastened to a base and still further supported by another lighter frame called the hind-posts and the rails, which are also fixed into the base. The cheeks are joined by four cross pieces. The upper one, called the cap, is to keep the cheeks apart. The next is the head; on the under side of it is fixed a brass nut that holds the top of the screw by which the pressure is produced. The third cross piece, the till, is pierced by a square hole, into which is fitted the hose or box enclosing the spindle of the screw. The fourth cross piece, the winter, is a massive piece of timber which supports the type and offers the counter-resistance to the pressure of the screw. The hose is a long square box which helps to steady the screw; to the bottom of it is hung the platen, a piece of mahogany four inches thick, in the top of which is fixed a small steel center hole in which the toe of the screw works. The whole length of the spindle, from the head of the press to the top of the platen, is one foot nine inches. Near the top of it is a hole in which is inserted the bar or lever that the pressman pulls to lower the platen onto the type and get

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the impression from the type onto the paper. The winter supports one end of a horizontal wooden frame, the carriage, the other end of which is held up by a prop. On top of the carriage are two rails along which the plank slides. Underneath the carriage is the spit by means of which the plank is slid back and forth. On the plank is a square frame, forming the coffin, into which the form of type is laid. Coming down over the type are two parchment-covered frames or tympans fitting tightly together and holding a cloth padding that helps to make the impression into the paper and also to prevent letters from being broken. Hinged onto the tympan is the frisket, a parchment- or paper-covered frame which folds down on the tympan and holds the sheet of paper fast between them. The type is inked by two leathercovered balls. As one pressman inks the form, the other flips out the printed sheet, inserts a new sheet between tympan and frisket, and, at just the moment the inking is finished, turns the frame down on the coffin. With a turn of the spit he rolls the coffin under the platen, then pulls the bar and releases it, rolls the coffin the rest of the distance and pulls the bar once more, runs the plank back out again, raises tympan and frisket, takes off the printed sheet, and so on. After a certain amount of work has been done, the two men change places.

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LATER PRESSES

T H E W O O D E N PRESS just described was in general use throughout the first three and a half centuries of printing, and it even maintained its place along into the early nineteenth century. A few slight improvements were made from time to time, most of them for the purpose of keeping the platen steadier as it moved downwards and thus obviating the risk of smudging the ink at the moment of impression. In 1783 a Frenchman, Anisson, strengthened the frame sufficiently to make it possible to utilize a platen the full size of the bed, thus doubling the speed by printing the form in one pull rather than in two. B y this time the industrial revolution was under way and inventors were developing the engineering sciences in every department of human activity. The increased tempo of living brought about a demand for greater speed with less effort. The first answer, so far as the printing press was concerned, lay in the abandonment of the torsion screw and the substitution of levers as the method of lowering the platen. Some twenty-five or thirty inventions were applied to this problem but only a few such presses came into general use-'. We must, however, pause a moment to consider the initial step away from the old wooden press. In 1800 Lord Stanhope, a cultivated and ingenious Brit-

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ish nobleman, brought out the first all-iron press printing a full-sized form. The iron frame, cast in one piece, corresponded to the cheeks, cap, head, till, and winter of the old presses. The form was run in and out on the carriage as before. The principal new feature consisted in a second or multiplied lever for turning the screw. The additional pressure thus gained was enormous, but the pressman's physical exertion was so much diminished that it took the old-line workman some little time to get accustomed to the change-". The Stanhope press still employed a screw. The next step was to dispense with the screw altogether and depend entirely upon levers. This was done by George Clymer, a native of Philadelphia, in 1816. The Columbian press, as he called it, was an amazing affair to look at, well deserving the ridicule of his perhaps envious British contemporaries. The sides were ornamented with the caduceus in low relief, the ends of the levers were fashioned into "alligators and other draconic serpents," and surmounting the whole was a huge American eagle with a cornucopia in one claw and an olive branch in another! In spite of these flights of fancy, it was practical and found immediate success in America, in England, and on the Continent. Careful calculations of the strains involved in working it and proper strengthening of the necessary parts helped make it unusually easy to keep in order, and all in all

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it must have seemed a miracle of ease in operation,. A much simpler machine was the Albion press invented by R. W . Cope of London. Still simpler was the Washington press, which continued to be manufactured and sold well into the twentieth century. It utilized a toggle-joint afted upon by a curved lever in place of a complicated system of levers. With these two, the Albion in England and the Washington in America, the evolution of the Gutenberg press may be said to have reached its end. B y this time wood had been replaced by iron, the torsion screw and hose were superseded by the lever and the toggle-joint. In almost every other respect, however, there was little change; the form was still covered by a tympan and frisket and rolled by hand under the platen, and the platen brought down onto the type by manual power. Further progress could come only with the application of the third principle of mechanics, the principle of the wheel, by which alone the power of the steam engine could be utilized. The theory of the steamdriven cylinder press was worked out in 1790 by William Nicholson of London, but the practical invention was the work of Friedrich König, a German printer who had settled in London early in the nineteenth century. After several years of experimentation his press was tried in adlual work during April, 1811. Soon afterwards he gained the support of John

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Walter, the owner of the London Times, and during the night of November 28-29, 1814, the first issue of any newspaper printed by power on a cylinder machine was run off. From that day to this there has been a succession of improvements: locking the type on curved cylinders, curved stereotype plates, continuous rolls or webs of paper, cutting and folding devices, and so on. Nowadays paper is fed into one end of these enormous presses and the completely printed, folded, and wrapped newspapers come out at the other end. N o books, however, are printed on such machines except perhaps the cheap ones sold in the chain-stores. Books are printed on flat-bed presses on which the sheets of paper are fed in one by one and carried around over cylinders to the surface of the type, thence out to the delivery board over another cylinder. But the point to remember is that even this sort of press was not in use till the fifties and sixties of the last century. It is safe to say that every book printed up to 1800 was turned out on an old-fashioned or wooden press and that for the next sixty years or so every book came off one or another of the improved iron presses such as the Stanhope, Albion, Columbian, or Washington. In spite of our progress and sophistication we are remarkably close to Gutenberg, Fust, Schoeffer, and the men of the fifteenth century!

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PAPER T H E C Y L I N D E R PRESS and the iron hand-press, with the increased pressure, did away with the necessity of wetting the paper. Most of the paper we now use is made of woodpulp by a process invented in 1844 and developed during the next quarter of a century; the better grades contain some proportion of rags, but not any great quantity. Up to that period all paper was made solely of rags and was too hard to admit of a good impression until it was wet. The wetting was usually done the last thing in the day so that the paper would be ready for the morning. The pressman would take a few sheets at a time, draw them through a trough of clean water, and then lay them back in piles covered with a thick board and held down with heavy weights. After printing, the paper was dried again over poles fixed high enough in the room to be out of the workmen's way. STANDARDS OF PRODUCTION J U S T H O W M U C H work one of the first wooden presses could turn out in a day is problematical. One authority estimates that the rate in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was a maximum of three hundred sheets in a fourteen hour day; that is, twenty an hour, or one every three minutes. Another writer

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puts it at not more than five hundred sheets in a twelve hour day. B y 1571 the press had been so much improved in construction that the master printers at Lyons expefted a rate of two hundred sheets an hour. In Frankfort in 1573 the expectation was 240 sheets an hour. That was the same rate that was required of pressmen in colonial America. In 1786 the rate in France was 250 sheets an hour. E A R L Y P I C T U R E S OF PRINTING SHOPS A S A HELP in visualizing the earliest shops we have about thirty-five pi&ures from the sixteenth century. T w o general observations may be made regarding all of them: first, they are in most cases intended as decorations on title-pages and not as accurate drawings; second, although the furniture of the shops is crude in delineation, the workmen are well drawn and all are working adroitly at familiar tasks. The first sketch comes from a Dance of Death printed at Lyons in 1499. Here you see the compositor sitting before the case, his copy stuck up in front of him and his composing-stick in his hand. The pressman and his helper are busy, the form just on the point o f being pulled out after the impression. In the next room we see the printer's stock of bound volumes neatly arranged on the shelves or on the counter ready for customers. This indicates that the earliest printers

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not only manufactured but also sold their books. In modern terms, they were both printers and publishers. A more detailed picture comes from about 1590 in an engraving by Philippe Galle after a painting by the Flemish artist, Jan van der Straet (Stradanus). Here we see the master-printer, a dignified gentleman who is issuing directions to his pressman. The latter, in shirt sleeves and leather apron, is giving the final pull to his press with such a mighty heave that his tongue sticks out between his hps. At the second press the man is inking a form. Over the master's head and between the presses, the finished sheets are hung up to dry. Behind the first pressman is an ink ball and a pot of ink. In the background the warehouse man is bringing in a new supply of paper on his head. Over on the left under the windows two compositors are at work, and there is a third one — notice the cushion under him! — in the middle foreground. Beside him is a proof-reader taking a hasty glance at some corrections, and behind him again is a little apprentice boy laying a sheet on the heap. On the post over his head is a crucifix. Conveniently near is the compositor's sword, and in his belt is his dagger — both weapons forbidden by a law that we know was more honored in the breach than in the observance. But why the caps and the heavy coats? The truth is that a sixteenth century printing shop was a cold and

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draughty place: the windows were small, entirely open in summer and closed only with oiled paper in the winter. For heat there was, even down into the nineteenth century, only a little open fire in one corner of the room. It was a dark place, too, and candles provided the only light in the early morning, in the late afternoon, at night, and during the long winter days. In earliest times the working day was sixteen hours long but this was later reduced to fourteen and then to twelve. Even forty or fifty years ago, and in this country, the day was ten or eleven hours long. THE W O R K M E N IN THE SHOP

THE PRESENCE of candles led to many regulations designed to guard against fire and to economize on what must have been a costly item. There was a heavy fine if a workman left his candle burning while he was away from his case or his press. One of the favorite tricks was to send an apprentice running to a man with the message that the master wanted to see him at once in the next room. Most likely the fellow would rush off, leaving his candle lighted. On his return from his wild-goose chase he would have to pay a fine, which was added to the common fund for beer. Jokes like this were continually played in the shop, or the "chapel" as the printing-house was called in England, and there was plenty of talk and laughter and

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singing. A French manual of the early eighteenth century solemnly warns the master about the sad effefts of too much laughter and inattention during working hours. It contains a warning, too, about allowing the men to eat at their work, for the crumbs falling into the type cases would make the type too dirty for use until type and cases were thoroughly cleaned. So it seems that printers were a jolly lot on the whole. And they were a kindly lot, too, keeping on hand a shopfund to take care of old hands and to bury them in the end — long before the days when savings banks promoted individual thrift and still longer before any paternalistic government devised old-age pensions for everybody. Furthermore, printers were an intelligent lot; to advance to the journeyman's status one had to know the mother tongue and, in addition, Latin and Greek. On the other hand, their very intelligence led them, more than workmen in most other trades, into brawling and fighting and into long-continued strikes and walk-outs. ECONOMICS may be the dull science, but the economics of the printing industry is anything but dry. Printing by its very nature was always a rather aristocratic trade and engaged the attention of the nobility in all ages. Significantly, too, it was the first trade that made use of the principle of the division of labor and

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of scientific management. But always, from the days five hundred years ago when John Gutenberg guarded the secret of his invention, it has been a craft and mystery, a continual challenge both to the practical and to the artistic side of everyone who engages in it".

CHAPTER IV

THE EVOLUTION OF TYPE DESIGN ^ v R I N T I N G is not only a trade but an art, and in L - ^ t h e hands of great printers the production of books becomes one of the fine arts. While books are primarily useful for preserving or extending knowledge and for a certain form of entertainment, they are also collected as objedts of beauty. They may satisfy man's aesthetic needs as completely as graceful furniture, delicate porcelain, shimmering glassware, or masterpieces of painting and sculptured It is fairly obvious that the total impression made by a book is dependent both upon the arrangement of type on a page and, almost as much, upon the types themselves. That there are differences in types can be seen at once. Some are heavy, some light; others graceful, still others uncompromisingly rugged. Since each piece, however, is a relatively small unit, the variations are so minute that they may well escape casual observation-. To simplify this very complex subject of typedesign I shall avoid as much detail as possible and point out merely its broad divisions and the main lines of development. After all, the ordinary printer

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does not have or need to have any tremendous assortment of type-faces; and by the same token the student does not need at first to bewilder himself by trying to remember and identify the two thousand or so typedesigns that have been put on the market in the past thirty years. Many of these, since they could not possibly be used in book work, are of little value to anyone except advertising men. For posters, display lines, labels, and the like some have attained well justified success and have performed an honorable part in modern commerce. But advertising typography is an art in itself with rules and practices utterly unlike those which interest the designer and the amateur of books. Besides this limitation of the material, I shall apply a second: we shall here consider only modern revivals and recuttings of older types. Although photography now makes it possible to get faithful reproductions of pages from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, those pages are likely to be full of distortions of the individual letters. When looking at all old books we must remember that some of the irregularity of the types is due not so much to the poor cutting of the types themselves as to the imperfed presswork and the blurring and thickening of the letters caused by the practice of wetting the paper. For these reasons, reproductions from old books are less suited to the beginner's needs than sharp impressions from new types.

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In saying this I do not minimize the disadvantage arising from the faft that even the most faithful reproduction cannot avoid some deviation from the original; nor do I forget that many current renderings of older faces do not pretend to exaftness at all. To show specimens of various types, I have chosen a sentence from Holbrook Jackson's admirable volume The Printing of Books; the use of the same material throughout will, I hope, facilitate comparisons and emphasize differences. This sentence will be given twice; first, in eleven or twelve point type, the sizes commonly used for book-work; and second, in twenty-four point, which is large enough to bring out details. Then will come certain characteristic letters of the face that may be useful in identifying it elsewhere. Modern letters used in books printed in the Latin tradition are divided into three classifications: blackletter, roman, and italic. The first of these is so rare nowadays that we may conveniently ignore its variations. We must, however, examine at some length the three subdivisions of roman: Venetian, old style, and modern face. Italic, which was originally a distinft genus, has been since near the end of the sixteenth century assimilated to roman and used merely for purposes of emphasis, quotation, and the like. Modern italic is therefore often dismissed as a subsidiary ren-

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dering in slanted letters of the roman it accompanies. Even though this summary and quite inaccurate judgment ignores a fascinating realm of type history, we shall bow to it in our endeavor to keep striftly on the main path towards simplification.. To understand why the letters of the English alphabet and the German alphabet have their present shapes, we must go back to the Romans, the fountainhead of so much of our civilization. Our capital letters ("caps" in the printer's jargon) are pradlically the same as those used by the Romans on their monumental inscriptions and in their manuscripts. Our small ("lower case") letters are based upon the less formal hand customary in their everyday writing. B y the year 800 writing had become so chaotic that Charlemagne devoted much attention to it in his great series of educational reforms. With the help of Alcuin of York he put through changes that have lasted ever since. In the course of time, however, the rounded penmanship taught by Alcuin became more and more angular, with the effedl, when written in whole pages, of great blackness and heaviness. This was the model the earliest printers had before them when they set out to make books more cheaply and quickly than the calligraphers could produce them by hand. The printers were obliged to imitate the model or they would not have been able to get anyone to

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buy or to read their wares. Thus it happens that all the earliest books are printed in black-letter. BLACK-LETTER I N G E R M A N Y this tradition has been stronger than in any other country so that the ordinary German book has always been printed in the forms of blackletter known as fraktur and as schwabacher. In England, another form became so much at home that it has always been called "English" or " O l d English." With it, Caxton printed Malory's Morte d'Arthur. It was also used in the first English Bible, printed in 1535; in the first Prayer Book of Edward V I (1549); and in the first edition of the Authorized or King James Bible ( 1 6 1 1 ) . It was regularly used in A6ts of Parliament, law books, and legal printing until late in the eighteenth century, and is seen even to-day on printed legal documents in certain phrases such as K n o w All Men by these Presents and Whereas. Although this type is familiar enough from its use in engraved work, the following specimen will remind the reader of its illegibility to modern eyes as well as its weight and beauty of coloring. JUijat malted printing goob in neither tfje ritualism of fjanbicraft nor tfje metijobtem of tfje macfjtne, hut tije accordance of tfje besign tottfj tfje totefjeä of tfjc reaber tofjo toante to get boton to tfje busineöä of reabtng.

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OTPfjat m a t e printing goob tö nether tfje ritualism of ijanbt= craft nor tije metfjobtöm of tije macijtne, but tije accorbance of tije beötgntottil tijetotöijeöof tije reaber toijo toantö to get boton to tije imötness of reabtng.

99&&Φ abrät ROMAN VENETIAN

E A R L Y IN T H E fifteenth century, as a sign of the coming Renaissance, we find that Italian scholars and scribes had gone back to the ninth century forms of Alcuin and were writing a very beautiful Carolingian hand. This was the model for the earliest roman type, cut about 1463 by Adolf Rusch of Strassburg. In 1470 Nicolas Jenson, a Frenchman working in Venice, cut a roman that was praised by his contemporaries and is still regarded as one of the most beautiful and legible

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of all types. From Venice, roman spread over Europe, speedily displacing black-letter except in Germany and in England. This earliest roman, which we classify as a Venetian face, was relatively wide and heavy. A favorite modern reproduction of it is known as Cloister: What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading.

What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading.

AGMNTW bdhegy You will notice the so-called slab serifs — the finishing strokes — on the capital M, the serifs on the Τ

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both sloping in the same direction, the beak serif on the ascenders (b, d, h, etc.), the slanting cross-bar on the e, and the straight right-hand stroke of the y. These char after is tics are even more noticeable in another modern version, Italian Old Style, where the designer, Mr Frederic Goudy, has gone further and retained slab serifs on the A and N : What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading.

What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading.

A G M N T bdhey

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Jenson's roman is best represented to-day by the lovely Centaur face, designed by Bruce Rogers. This, you will notice, is rather more delicate and graceful than Cloister or Italian Old Style and yet it also preserves details that place it among the Venetians: What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading.

What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading»

A G M T W bdhegy OLD STYLE

A B O U T T H E year 1495 the Venetian printer, Aldus Manutius, who had gained an enormous reputation through his Greek texts, turned his attention to Latin.

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His punch cutter, Francesco GrifFo, designed for him a roman that was markedly different from Jenson's. It was first used by way of experiment in a traft of sixty leaves written by the humanist scholar and poet Pietro Bembo.When it was revived some twelve years ago, it was named " B e m b o " for this reason. T o Aldus and GrifFo, however, belongs the credit for this departure from precedent that gave rise to the second group of roman types known as old styled What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance o f the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading.

What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading.

AKMOT

bdetgy

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Since the present book is printed in Bembo, the reader has an opportunity to examine this beautiful type in detail. One of its peculiarities is that the capitals are shorter than the ascenders of the lower case letters, and the page consequently has a charming evenness of color and a noticeable restfulness. In general the type is, like all old style faces, more compaft and legible than the Venetian school. The serifs are more delicate and more closely bracketed to the main strokes. It is, in fact, a rendering of the work produced by the penman's quill rather than by the stone-cutter's chisel. In the capitals, the Κ has an interestingly curved upper arm; the Ο and the C are well-rounded, almost circular; the A has a flat apex without serif; the upright strokes of the Μ are inclined; the serifs of the Τ are slightly inclined to the left and the right, and have a sharp upper terminal. In the lower case, the e has a horizontal cross-bar, a point which clearly differentiates all old style types from the Venetians; the b has no serif at the foot; the foot of the d is turned up; the g has a large bowl and a short, heavy ear. Aldus was evidently not quite satisfied with this first roman and therefore he had Griffo make certain slight alterations. The new type was used in 1499 for one of the most beautiful books of all time, an edition of Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The older and heavier Venetian faces —Jenson's among them —

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were immediately relegated to the discard and the new one became the model of all romans cut during the next two hundred and fifty years. This development ran somewhat different courses in France, Holland, and England that may be attributed to the variations in native artistic feeling. First we must consider the French. In the early part of the sixteenth century the leading French typecutter was Claude Garamond, who worked in close touch with the artist Geofroy Tory and with the Estienne family of printers. For the latter Garamond cut a roman that eventually came into possession of Christopher Plantin, the great Flemish printer. The modern version of it has been called Plantin to distinguish it from another series of types that have long borne Garamond's name". What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading.

What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance of the design with the

ηβ

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wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading. AMTKPW

egjkwy

(These letters and the sentence immediately above are 18 point in size.)

No one can mistake the close resemblance between this A, M, and Τ and those in Bembo. The tail of the Κ has a broad, calligraphic sweep; the bowl of the Ρ is open; the middle strokes of the W are crossed. Once more the e has a horizontal cross-bar; the bowl of the g is flattened, but the ear is still short and heavy; the j is tapered off; w has a center serif; the tail of the y is strong and well-rounded. Early in the seventeenth century Jean Jannon, a type-founder and printer of Sedan, brought out a design which, through a strange series of accidents, has until recently been attributed to Garamond. The various modern versions of it, all of them called Garamond, are among the most popular types now in use^. What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading.

What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handi-

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craft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading.

A D K M T W egjmr B y now the apex of the A has become pointed instead of flat, and the right-hand serif of the Τ is vertical. The M, however, is still widely splayed, and the inner strokes of the W crossed. The Κ is a beautiful wide letter, with the join of the right-hand strokes coming at the center of the upright. The curve of the bowl in D rises gracefully before it takes the downward turn. In the lower case, the cross-bar of the e is horizontal, the bowl of the g is slightly tilted, the j is tapered, the upper serifs of the m and r are sharply pointed. Although at first sight the heavy Dutch types of the seventeenth century may seem to have little in common with these sharp, brilliant designs of their French contemporary, careful analysis shows they also are descended from Griffo's roman. Dirck Voskens of Amsterdam and Christopher van Dijk of Haarlem

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were the creators of a vigorous and beautiful roman, the punches and matrices for which were purchased by Dr John Fell for the Oxford University Press in 1671. Known since that time as the "Fell types," they have remained the exclusive possession of the University. Within recent years the Press has used them with delightful effeft in the Collected Works of Robert Bridges, in the Collected Poems of Andrew Lang, and in the Oxford Book of English Verse. A series of very beautiful late seventeenth century types that have many of the characteristics of the Fell types, has recently become available for machine and hand composition. The original matrices, now in Frankfurt, have been attributed to the Dutch founder Anton Janson. Mr Morison, who doubts the validity of this tradition, suggests "some such general but authentic description as 'Dutch Old Face' " instead of the present trade-name JansorL. What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading.

What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine,

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but the accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading.

AGMTW

gjw

Here again we have a sharp apex on the A, well defined serifs on the T, and a splayed M; but W is more like that of the Venetian group. The G is easily recognized by the spur under the vertical. The bowl of the g has little slope, the j is tapered, and the w resembles the capital. Even though some of these characteristics are shared with the French models, Janson is sturdier and not so restless as Garamond. Dutch types such as these were the ones ordinarily used in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. Pynson's early attempts (1518 and 1519) to use roman were overwhelmed by the English preference for black-letter. It was not until 1572 that the first roman was cut in England, — by John Day. Almost immediately thereafter, governmental restrictions drove the typefounders out of business and forced printers to depend upon the Continent for their supplies of type.

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They naturally went to Holland, whence they imported the types in which the books of the Elizabethan dramatists, the Jacobean and Puritan poets and prose masters, and the Restoration authors were printed. Early in the eighteenth century this state of affairs was changed by William Caslon. He was born in 1692, and at the usual age was apprenticed to a London engraver of gun stocks. At the suggestion of William Bowyer, the printer, he made experiments in type designing and cutting and succeeded so well that he went into the business of type-founding in 1720. The firm he established has been one of the greatest foundries in the world, with a continuous existence of over two centuries. Only a few years ago it was amalgamated with Stephenson, Blake & Co., which has had an almost equally long history. Of Caslon's types Mr Updike justly says, "While he modelled his letters on Dutch types, they were much better; for he introduced into his fonts a quality of interest, a variety of design, and a delicacy of modelling, which few Dutch types possessed. Dutch fonts were monotonous, but Caslon's were not so. His letters when analyzed, especially in the smaller sizes, are not perfeft individually; but in mass their effeft is agreeable. That is, I think, their secret — a perfection of the whole, derived from harmonious but not necessarily perfect individual letter-forms. To say pre-

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cisely how Caslon arrived at his effects is not simple; but he did so because he was an artist. He knew how to make types, if ever a man did, that were (to quote once more Bernard's phrase) 'friendly to the eye,' or 'comfortable' — to use Dibdin's happy term. Furthermore, his types are thoroughly English. There are other letters more elegant; for the Caslon characters do not compare in that respect with the letters of Garamond or Grandjean. But in their defeats and qualities they are the result of a taste typically AngloSaxon, and represent to us the flowering of a sturdy English tradition in typography. . . . Caslon types are, too, so beautiful in mass, and above all so legible and 'common-sense,' that they can never be disregarded, and I doubt if they will ever be displaced." W h a t makes printing good is handicraft nor the methodism accordance of the design with who wants to get down to the

neither the ritualism of of the machine, but the the wishes of the reader business of reading.

W h a t makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance of the design with the wishes

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of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading.

A C M T W cetw The reader will notice that the apex of the A projects like a beginning of the heavy right-hand stroke over the light stroke; the C has two serifs in some sizes; the legs of the Μ are vertical; the serifs of the Τ are less angular than in Janson. In the lower case, the c and e are well-rounded, and the t has a long cross-bar, and the center strokes of the w meet in a point which is smoothed off with a serif. It seems almost incredible, in view of the present reputation of Caslon's types, that they could ever have become old-fashioned and finally neglected for many decades. The eighteenth century, however, was not merely the period in which British sturdiness settled into the mellow tradition of Dr Johnson; it was also the time when the English, reaching out to France and Italy, developed the graciousness of the Adam brothers and of Chippendale. As in the case of the old school-mate whom Johnson met one Sunday on his way home from church, the nation tried to be philosophical but somehow cheerfulness kept creeping in.

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The exponent of this spirit in typography was John Baskerville, an amateur who diverted his attention to type-founding and printing rather late in life^. To understand Baskerville's types, we must go back for a moment to the history of handwriting. Mediaeval and renaissance scribes wrote with a quill cut down to a broad edge, an instrument that may be compared to our stub pens. The shaft of the pen was pointed away from the right shoulder, and the paper was placed squarely before the writer on a slightly inclined table. The pen was sidled or pulled, never pushed. The result is a series of letters in which the axis is inclined to the left, as one becomes aware in examining round characters such as o, e, and c. This method of writing is the basis for both Venetian and old style types. B y the end of the seventeenth century penmanship had begun to feel the influence of the copperplate engravers, who, working with a sharp pointed tool and on a flat surface, made their letters with a vertical axis and with delicate serifs. The writing masters now taught an entirely different way of holding the pen, which could not produce the effedt of humanistic writing. Such a hand was taught by John Baskerville in his writing-school at Birmingham. Then when he turned to designing type, about 1750, he carried this same calligraphic feeling over into his new medium. His letters are much more delicate than Caslon's;

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they represent the modeling and shading of the engraver rather than the penman's free movements. What makes printing good is handicraft nor the methodism accordance of the design with who wants to get down to the

neither the ritualism of of the machine, but the the wishes of the reader business of reading.

What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading.

ACMQTW cego To heighten the effect of his letters, Baskerville adopted a wove paper (some authorities maintain that he invented it), a paper with a smooth surface, and furthermore he took each printed sheet as it came from the press and inserted it between hot copper

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plates. In this way a glossy surface was obtained, the impression was ironed out, and the paper was prevented from absorbing and dulling the ink. MODERN FACE

BASKERVILLE found little appreciation among his own countrymen; in faft he himself once wrote, " M y labours have always been treated with more Honour abroad than in my native Country." His books had a tremendous effeft in France and Italy, where they reinforced native tendencies in the same direction. Philippe Grandjean, type-cutter to the Imprimerie Royale, Pierre Simon Fournier le jeune, a member of an important family of type-founders aftive throughout the eighteenth century, and Louis Luce, also of the Imprimerie Royale, had developed types that were lighter and more condensed than Garamond's and that were distinguished by sharper, less heavily bracketed serifs. Printers accustomed to such types found Baskerville's letters and especially his method of laying out his pages a real incentive to further developments. In the end there emerged the designs we know as modern face'. O f these the best French examples Firmin Didot, member of another founders who were aftive for over a the style was carried even further

are the work of family of typecentury. In Italy in the types of

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Giambattista Bodoni. His early work is more or less in the traditional manner; but after he came under the influence of the Didots, he adopted a frigid, monumental styled What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading.

What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading.

ACMNTW acegtw These letters are about as far removed as can be from the manuscripts on which printing types were first

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modelled. Here is no sign of the scribe's quill nor even of the engraver's burin; only the draughtsman's straight-edge and compass seem to be in evidence. It is drawing, not calligraphy. The effedt is largely due to the use of straight, almost unbracketed serifs, and to the contrast between the thick and the thin strokes. In the mass and when used, as they should be, with wide leading between the lines, they produce a cold, brilliant page which is extremely difficult to read. The Didot and Bodoni types have never found much favor in England or America. For us the characteristic modern face has been Scotch, a design brought out in 1833 by Alexander Wilson of Glasgow. As Mr Updike says, "It is the best English variant of this form of letter that we have. It is sturdier and pleasanter to read than parallel French types, and we are much more at home with it. It is not as good a type as the Caslon character, but as produced by Wilson it is a very handsome and serviceable letter." What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading.

What makes printing good is neither the ritual-

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ism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading.

ACMNTW acegtw The "modern" contrast between thick and thin strokes is quite evident here, but the serifs are stubby and well-bracketed. It is a stronger, more vigorous letter, both singly and in the mass, than Bodoni. B y the beginning of the nineteenth century the vogue of the modern face types had carried all before it, and even the Caslons ceased showing their beautiful old types in their specimen books. It was not until the 1840's that old style began to come back into favor, and its hold was precarious for many decades after that. Printers who wanted variation from the

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prevalent modern designs turned to the "revived old style" or "modernized old style," which was cut about 1850. What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading.

What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, but the accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading.

ACFMTW aberw This type has, to my mind, little distinction; but if properly used it can produce a tidy, legible page. Perhaps it owes its popularity to its very lack of obtruding details. At any rate, it is widely used in all

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kinds of books at the present time and for this reason one should be in a position to identify it readily. ITALIC ITALIC W A S first cut for Aldus Manutius and used by him for whole books as an independent form of letter. There is accordingly no italic for black-letter nor any ancient one for the Venetian faces of roman. When a printer using black-letter or modern German types wishes to secure emphasis, his only method is to space out the letters in the word or words. As for modern recuttings of the Venetian romans, our typefounders have designed accompanying italics based upon early independent models. In his italics Aldus had no capital letters. For these he used his roman capitals, separating them from the lower case letters by a narrow space. Sloping capitals were soon cut, however, by his French imitators. Another Italian printer, Ludovico degli Arrighi, a late contemporary of Aldus, also cut italics. His designs, based upon his own beautiful handwriting, were strikingly different. His work, however, was quite neglected until some fifteen or sixteen years ago Mr Morison brought it to light again and the late Frederic Warde cut a font based upon it. This design, known as Arrighi, has been adopted with some modifications as the italic to accompany Mr Rogers's Centaur type-".

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What makes printing good is neither the ritualism handicraft

91

of

nor the methodism of the machine} but the

accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading. A rather stronger design, which also goes back to the originals of Ludovico, has been cut to go with Bembo.

What makes printing good is neither the ritualism of handicraft nor the methodism of the machine, hut the accordance of the design with the wishes of the reader who wants to get down to the business of reading. There is no need in this place to follow the complicated history of the development of italic at the hands of the French and Dutch designers. M r Morison notes, "The problem was to design within the conventions of time and place, two complementary letter forms, roman and italic, which would line and would allow words composed in the one to harmonize in a line composed in the other." The solution of this problem was not approached successfully until the work of Fournier le jeune in the middle of the eighteenth century; and it was finally reached by Francois Ambroise Didot later in the same century.

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" T h e essential quality o f italic," says M r Morison, "is a certain informality." Its close adherence to cursive rather than to formal penmanship is responsible for several calligraphic letters that delight the eye and add much to the beauty o f the page if properly used. These are k n o w n as swash characters and they are to be found, with variations, in many series o f italic.

c^ eg y^x^*^

ψ ^Ί^Τ ν w τ ζ

In the lower case there are certain joined letters or ligatures such as as, is, us,

j?, and j i T h e s e swash

and ligatured letters, o f course, are the most obvious reminders our books contain o f the faft that all books were once written b y the pen..

CHAPTER V

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF A GOOD BOOK TYPE O N C U R R E N T L Y with the revival of interest in typography — which may briefly be defined as the designing of pages and books — there has been a marked stimulation of interest in the designing of type. During the past twenty years the foundries have poured forth such a flood of new faces that printers may well be confused by the very wealth of material now at their command. During the nineties, it is true, there were numbers of new types, but most of them were proprietary. Each "private press" had a "private" type and made its appeal to the public through that almost as much as through other means. Now, however, the humblest printer has at his disposal the great range of designs offered by the monotype and the linotype corporations and by the American Typefounders Company.

C

A glance at the specimen-books issued by these manufacturers is sufficient to indicate the problem before the printer who is starting to equip a new shop or who is forced by competition to enlarge his com-

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posing room. Moreover, if he has anything more than a journeyman's knowledge and parochial ambitions, he must be aware of still further possibilities of choice. The English monotype specimen-book, for instance, shows many faces unknown to this country. The last two numbers of The Fleuron quite logically included a series of type reviews along with the book reviews. French, Italian, and German printing magazines display still further resources. The Continental Typefounders Association has exercised a fine discrimination in the selection of foreign types and has brought the best of the new European designs to our own doors. Everywhere we find revived faces from older periods — Baskerville, Bell, Garamond, Janson — jostling such newcomers as Lutetia, Pastonchi, Weiss Antiqua. H o w is anyone to reduce this chaos to order and seled: those faces which will be just as useful and acceptable thirty years from now as they are to-day? H o w can modern printers perform something like the miracle that Pickering and the Whittinghams performed when they revived the long-neglefted CasloiL? It is, from one point of view, the old economic question of how the printer will get most for his investment, and yet it is also the artistic one of what types most nearly approach an undefined but longsought ideal. If one writer could answer it definitively, he would need to be endowed with the gift of proph-

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ecy as well as a number of other heaven-sent powers; but now that our bankers and investment counselors have so disastrously failed, prophecy seems, as Max Beerbohm once remarked about himself, a trifle outmoded. I can only point out, from what I confess is a conservative standpoint, some of those characteristics which tradition has decreed to be essential to a good type-face. Someone with more daring may be the Lenin of twentieth century type-founding. As in any other craft, the master can produce a superb variety of work with comparatively few tools while the uninspired man can show only mediocre results from his clutter of material. The Merrymount Press equipment consisted for many years of Caslon, Scotch, Oxford, and the face that Mr Updike called Mountjoye, Mr Rogers called Brimmer, and Mr Morison has recently proved to be a product of the Bell foundry. More lately the Press has added Lutetia andjanson. "A departure [from these]," says Mr Updike, "is desirable only when a new type performs the task to be done better than these types can." Such a departure was obviously indicated for the printing of Pope Pius XI's encyclical on Christian Marriage, for which Bodoni roman and italic were used. What differing effedts can be produced by a master employing the same type under other circumstances is evident from a comparison of this book

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with M r Caspar Whitney's life of his father-in-law, the late M r Charles A . Canfield. Neither o f these depends on the adventitious aid o f ornaments or initials for the variety attained. Both books, as well as the Merrymount edition o f the Book of Common Prayer and M r Rogers's Leitern Bible, illustrate the current tendency toward the suppression of ornament. After decades o f DeVinne headpieces, Morris borders, and more or less successful combinations o f flowers, w e seem to be going back to the unadorned pages o f Baskerville and the early nineteenth century. Type, presswork, and paper have formed a typographical triumvirate. There is the real danger in this situation that designers may attempt to cover lack o f skill by unintelligent resort to bizarre type faces, to conceal their o w n inadequacy b y the distracting novelty o f their material. In that direction lies degeneracy; for even the best new types can be thrown into disrepute by being forced to compete with faces that have no recommendation but novelty. Such statements may seem like begging the whole question. B y the time a printer has attained the mastery and precision that M r Updike and M r Rogers exhibit, is he not likely to k n o w by a sort o f intuition just what types he wants to use without basing his choice upon any minute investigation o f their characteristics? O f course he is! But intuition, or taste, or

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inspiration, it cannot be too often said, is disciplined intelligence, the fine flower of long and attentive application to the matter in hand. One must become familiar with type by looking at it continually, both in the single letter and in the mass, until one can visualize effefts with considerable accuracy before a page or a line is set in the composing room.. The first step for anyone who wishes to make a serious study of type is to go back to the foundations of all printing. Fortunately this is easy and inexpensive. Let him buy a few broad-edge pens of varying thicknesses and learn how to use them from some such manual as Edward Johnston's Writing and Illuminating, and Lettering or Graily Hewitt's Lettering. He will obtain, from his struggles to make a smooth, well-balanced page, valuable lessons about spacing, proportion, and the forms of letters. He will learn how length of line and spacing between lines can alter the total effedl of his work. He will observe the difference between short and long ascenders and descenders. He will become sensitive to the contrast between thick and thin strokes, and above all to the variations caused by making serifs in one way or another. The amateur calligrapher will have it most strongly borne in upon him that what Mr Johnston calls the "essential forms" of our English alphabet have been pretty rigidly fixed by tradition. Just as the typog-

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rapher is hemmed in by conventions regarding the shape of books, the size of pages, and the width of margins, the type-designer is even more limited by boundaries within which he must stay if his work is to be beautiful or intelligible. The moment he attempts a radical departure from the traditional forms that represent our speech-sounds, he approaches the realm of the maker of phonetic alphabets and shorthand systems; and his work has lost its general appeal. Still, even within these rigid grooves marked out by the centuries, he need never worry about originality. Scarcely any two people write exaftly alike, and the laws of the land rush to defend every man's unregistered copyright in his own penmanship. No type designer, however much burdened by knowledge of the history of his craft, is going to escape putting some measure of himself into his completed font. It is these subtle evidences of personality that make the final combination of individuality. When the student of type has gained some practical familiarity with the formation of the alphabet, he will take the next step by considering carefully five striking examples of related type faces. The first is a page from Eusebius's De Prceparatione Evangelica, printed by Nicolas Jenson in 1470 and reproduced in Mr Updike's Printing Types. Unless he has access to a good Italian manuscript of the fifteenth century, he may

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rest assured that this face is closely related to the calligraphy of the time. Now let him compare pages printed in Morris's Golden type, in Cloister, in Sir Emery Walker's Doves type, and in Centaur. All alike have such details as the long upper curve of the lower case a, the rather unbending right-hand stroke of the y, the sloping cross-bar of the e, the beaked serifs of b, h, d, and 1. But what a difference in feeling, not only of the individual characters but of the words in the mass! Jenson went to the best calligraphic models of his time and evidently tried to reproduce them; with what success or improvement may be judged from the fad: that, as Mr Updike says, his roman types have been the accepted models for roman letters ever since he made them. William Morris considered him the "one only source from which to take examples of perfected roman type. This type I studied with much care, getting it photographed to a big scale, and drawing it over many times before I began designing my own letter; so that though I think I mastered the essence of it, I did not copy it servilely." In designing the Centaur face, Mr Rogers followed much the same path: "When portions of the clearest page in my copy were enlarged to about five times the original size I was at once struck by the pen-like characteristics of the lower case letters; so with a flat pen cut to the width of the heavier lines, I wrote over the

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photographic print as rapidly as I could, thus preserving the proportions, at least, ofJenson's own charafters. Being but an indifferent calligrapher many of my letters were rather crudely done, but I selected those that seemed to be the most successful and touched them up somewhat with pen and brush; and these, with capitals drawn with a pointed pen over photographs of the originals, served as models for the first cutting of the Centaur type. The close approximation to Jenson's type attained by these means leads me to hazard the theory that Jenson, having been director of the mint at Tours, was probably quite conversant with the roman capital forms; but when he embarked in the printing business at Venice and needed a model for his lower case letters he selefted what seemed to him the finest humanistic writing at hand and copied it as faithfully as possible with graver and punch. It will be seen that no claim for originality can be put forward for my type; neither is it an accurate reproduction of Jenson's letter. Having no reputation to maintain as a designer of types I have endeavored only to produce a clear and legible letter that may be used in printing either ancient or modern works without attracting undue attention to itself." In these last words, Mr Rogers has given by implication, at least, the goal toward which every designer of a new type, apart from those who consciously seek

CHARACTERISTICS OF A G O O D B O O K TYPE

ΙΟΙ

a peculiar effeft, is striving — clearness, legibility, usefulness, and unobtrusiveness. Like any other ideal, it cannot possibly be attained, and it may be said at once that there never can be one absolutely perfect type suitable, with appropriate variations of ornament, for every book a printer takes in hand. For type is, first of all, suggestive. The sharp angularity of Scotch adapts it to the brisk, forthright character of the text in a w o r k on history or economics; the round and pleasant curves of Caslon are best employed in a book of essays or poetry; the formal stiffness of Bodoni recommends it for books that demand dignity and even grandeur of treatment; the gracefulness of Lutetia can emphasize the lightness of many smaller works in the field of belles-lettres. I hasten to say that this quest for an esoteric suggestiveness may be pushed to absurd limits. I recall a questionnaire on this subjeft which was sent me a few years ago by a student in some university working up a thesis in psychology. T o his mind, it seems, Bodoni was most useful for advertisements of certain large manufacturing concerns because he was familiar with it in the notices of a prominent coal mining company. Bodoni to him suggested coal; to me, with m y evidently smaller knowledge of psychology, it suggested the Lord's Prayer — which Bodoni used as the text for a magnificent display of his types. It is foolish to

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allow any employment of a type for advertising purposes to limit its use for book work. Some of the heavier faces used for display lines are obviously restricted in this way, but in general there is no sharp division between advertising faces and book faces. Eve Italic is none the sweeter through its vise in announcing the services of Elizabeth ArderL. Within the limits dictated by common sense, then, the printer will find that generally speaking the Venetian and old style faces — Caslon, Janson, Centaur, Baskerville, the Old Style of Miller and Richard (the monotype series 31), and the recently cut Bembo font — produce an effedl that best comports with the text of essays, poetry, and belles-lettres, while the sharper modern faces such as Scotch are most useful in books of a technical nature. There is danger, of course, that one may fall into the error of straining to reproduce an atmosphere by a slavish imitation of older models; and there have been some grievous sins committed by way of period typography. The intelligent printer need not avoid that Scylla by refusing to avail himself of every bit of suggestiveness that characterizes his type. He will, in other words, see that his type and his use of it have significance and appropriateness. By this time our types inherited from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have become so familiar to

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our eyes that it would be idle to ask whether one is more legible than the other. A new face, however, must be prepared to meet this fundamental test. It seems a truism to say that a type is good only if it is good for reading, but that test must be applied with the striftest severity. A single letter may arrest attention because of its individual grace, a word or two made up of such letters may convey their meaning instantly; and yet a whole page or a book set in that font would be intolerable. The sans serif types, which have recently enjoyed so much popularity, for instance, conform to many of the requirements of a good font. They adhere to the essential forms of the alphabet, they display no attempts at adornment, they are evidently the expression of this generation's zeal for directness and simplicity. When used for chapter headings, the type is often agreeably sharp, vivid, and legible. But when it is used for a whole book, it becomes tiresome, irritating to the eye, and positively illegible. Fortunately there have been few attempts to employ it in this way, and so the reader is not likely to need to exercise his patience over much more than its use in an occasional advertising pamphlet". The reason why this face fails so completely to qualify as a suitable one for book work is suggested by its name. It lacks serifs, those tiny additions to the essential forms which make all the difference between a good type and

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a poor one. They probably originated in the slight thickening at the beginning and end of a stroke made with a flexible quill pen; later, as the scribes became aware of the variations in effeft that could be produced in this way, the thickening was made more deliberately and consciously. An experiment with a broadedge pen will immediately indicate what I mean,. A careful observation of serifs is important in any study of letter-forms, if only because they are in themselves so slight but in the aggregate so very revealing. They are, in fad:, one of the surest means by which a font may be identified. An examination of the serifs in upper case A, E, G, N , and Τ will usually enable the student to spot the type at once. Just as the method of making them was a conscious variation in the scribe's handwriting, so it is in the type-designer's drawing; and when they have become fixed in cold metal, they form the distinctive detail in a face. They must be graceful and harmonious to be pleasing. If legibility is so greatly affedted by this unobtrusive matter of the serifs, it is more obviously dependent upon the proportioning of the letters. One can recognize immediately the unpleasing appearance of the traditional French novel, set (as it usually is) in the thin, anemic Didot type. To my mind the Elzevir, although admirably used on occasion by the late Walter Gilliss, suffers from the same defeft of an

C H A R A C T E R I S T I C S OF A G O O D B O O K TYPE

IO5

undue narrowness as compared with the height of the letter. There is something very pleasant about the well rounded sturdiness of Caslon and Janson, and even about the angularity of Scotch; the eye at once recognizes that these faces are rightly proportioned, being neither "condensed" nor "extended." There are on the market various "condensed" and "expanded" fonts, which show how thoroughly bad a type can become through any tampering with the normal proportions. Exigencies of casting on the monotype and linotype, when the machines were first invented, led to another sort of tampering with the proportions of letters — the ascenders and descenders in the lower case were shortened so that the lines of type might be set close. The result was as displeasing as any distortion inevitably must be. In similar fashion, the gracefully designed numerals of the older fonts were replaced by the ugly "lining figures." From these horrors we may recover since we now have new moulds with long descenders and ascenders. The more recent machine faces, moreover, frankly discard any fear in this direction and obtain all the fine proportions of hand-type. If the result is an open page, that is probably what the designer wanted to achieved In the matter of proportions as well as in the handling of serifs, a good font must be harmonious within itself. An unexpectedly short h would offend the nor-

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mal proportions of a d; straight Bodoni serifs cannot appear in the same font with the round Caslon serifs; old style and modern characteristics cannot be mixed; the relations of thick strokes and thin strokes must be the same throughout. To obtain this inner harmonymay not be difficult for a designer who produces only one or two fonts; but Mr Goudy or Professor Tiemann, with numerous fonts to their credit, must have found a real problem in keeping a trait that was successful in one font from obtruding itself into another related font". All the details thus far considered have to do mainly with the shapes and peculiarities of individual letters, but the question of satisfaCtoriness in a type face does not end there. For a letter, except the upper case I, rarely stands alone and is practically never the objeCt of isolated attention. Letters naturally join to form words, words to form lines, and lines to form pages. The only pleasing page, apart from initials and other decoration, is one that is homogeneous. Whether closely or widely leaded, it has evenness of texture and color, and that quality is obtained only when the individual characters fit snugly, without gaps of white between one another and without any detail obtruding itself on the reader's attention by reason of its peculiarity, exaggeration, or discordant character. All the minute elements, each distinctive and yet harmoni-

C H A R A C T E R I S T I C S OF A G O O D B O O K TYPE

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ous, unite to produce an effeft that we recognize as different from the effeft of the same page set in another font. Whether it is equally clear or beautiful or suggestive or appropriate, it is different just as a musical air is different if played on the violin, the piano, the flute, or the corner. One of the greatest obstacles to securing a page of evenly distributed color and proper subordination of characters is the fad: that in most fonts the capital letters range with the top of the ascenders in d and h. Accordingly, when an upper case W and a lower case h, for instance, come together, there is an undue amount of blackness; and when, conversely, there is such a combination as an upper case W and a lower case o, the former stands out in isolated prominence. This point has been considered at some length by Mr Morison in his article "Towards an Ideal T y p e " that appeared in the second number of The Fleuron. There he has shown that both in eighth century Caroline writing and in the fourteenth century Italian hand there was a precise relation between majuscule and minuscule and that in neither period did the capitals as a rule rise to the height of the ascending characters. This practice was followed by such early type-cutters as Francesco Griffo, who worked for Aldus; but the bad practice, begun by John and Wendelin of Speier, was confirmed by Garamond, and by the end of the

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sixteenth century no roman types made according to ancient tradition were in use. Since 1924, however, there have become available several new faces that observe the true relations between capital and lower case letter — Deepdene, Poliphilus, Centaur, and Bembo. These last two are, indeed, so thoroughly satisfactory in a multitude of other details that they may well prove to be the permanent contribution of our era to the world's stock of good roman type faces. That stock, it must be evident, cannot ever be unmanageably large; for however much a particular type may appeal to the taste of the moment, it must satisfy the test of time as dictated by the preferences of centuries of readers of books. As the poetry of a whole period may come at last to be represented by only half a dozen specimens in the anthologies, our type faces tend to be reduced to a minimum that measures up to our unexpressed but inexorable standards — Janson from the seventeenth century, Caslon and Baskerville from the eighteenth, Scotch from the nineteenth. Each will be found to embody an interpretation of traditional and essential forms that is clear, beautiful, unified, strong, and suggestive; interpretations that are so flexible in the hands of a master craftsman that they are subtly appropriate for carrying the thought or emotion of his time over from the solitary writer to a multitude of readers.

CHAPTER VI

THE DESIGN OF BOOKS

M

ANUSCRIPT traditions underlie not only the forms of our letters but many details in the arrangement of our books as well. Like the volumes turned out by the mediaeval scribes, the earliest books had no title-page, table of contents, or page numbers; and a statement about the date and the printer appeared in a colophon on the last page. Calligraphers and illuminators were still needed; for after the printer finished his job, he turned his sheets over to them for putting in decorative initials, marginal ornamentation, paragraph rubrication, and the other customary details. At the beginning of the chapters in early books we often find a large space left for the illuminator's work, with a very small capital to indicate to him what letter he should place there. In such cases the purchaser was left free to have his own decorator put in the kind of lettering he might wish, but for one reason or another the work was never done". Printers continued another tradition that has by now settled into an unbreakable rule; namely, the unit of design in a book consists of two facing pages. The type matter is placed on these pages in such a way

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that the bottom margin is about twice the width of the top margin, and the three equal spaces — left, middle, and right — on the sides of the type areas are about one-quarter more than the top. Since some of the inner margins is concealed by the folding and sewing, these margins appear to be narrowest. How disagreeable a page may look if these proportions are not observed, may be seen in most of the books printed along in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a period when the single page was often considered the unit and the margins were made equal all round. THIS IS PERHAPS the only detail in which a welldesigned modern book adheres striftly to earliest practice. Others changed more or less rapidly as printing established its independence and squarely faced its own problems of new materials and new economic demands. This is nowhere more true than in the size of books. Early books are big because the sheets made by the early paper-makers conformed to the sizes of parchment. Aldus Manutius, at the end of the fifteenth century, was the first printer to make small, convenient books. Nowadays, when paper is made not in single sheets but in long rolls, it may be cut into a great variety of sizes, and the page-size is determined by considerations that the older printers never needed to observe. One of these is the desire on the part of many

THE DESIGN OF BOOKS

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publishers to issue large volumes that can be sold at a higher price than small books containing the same amount of text. It is unfortunate that bulk is so often the buyer's criterion of his money's worth. Because we are not willing to pay for little books, we have forgotten how pleasant and comfortable they can be; such volumes, for instance, as those issued in the 1890's by Stone & Kimball and by Copeland & Day. A large page-size is of course justified when a designer has material that lends itself naturally to a rather sumptuous treatment. Illustrations, especially those made by a competent artist for the work itself, must be reproduced on a suitable scale. Even the more humble photograph or chart, on which an author depends for giving increased clearness to his discussion, may call for more room than can be found on small or medium pages. Indeed, the designer starts his work only after careful inspection of all the material that must be included by means of the various photoengraving processes. He is in much the position of the commercial designer, who habitually considers the envelope before the enclosure^. O N C E T H E SIZE of the page is determined, the next step concerns the size of the type. Small books may be set in ten point, ordinary novels and works of non-fiction are usually set in eleven point, and

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twelve point may not seem disproportionate for a somewhat large page. Wide pages present more or less of a problem, for the eye gets tired in following too long a line and on the return may skip or repeat. The remedy is to use a large size type, fourteen or sixteen point, with plenty of leading between the lines, or else to divide the page into two columns. The designer must train his eye to recognize fitness of proportions so that his types will not seem to bulge off the page nor, on the other hand, to fade weakly from the surfaced As to the choice of old style, a transitional type, or modern, little need be said. Type design, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, has no esoteric significance, and there is not much beyond convention to suggest the aesthetic superiority of one face over another for a particular job. Of course, if one is trying to recreate the atmosphere of a period with which the text is concerned, he must be careful to keep his history straight. Bodoni and Scotch do not evoke the seventeenth century, for they are distinctively nineteenth century faces; but Caslon can do so because it closely resembles the type used everywhere in the seventeenth century. The only general rule is to be sure that the face is of good design and not conspicuous enough to irritate the reader by obtruding itself on his noticed

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Regular text-pages offer little scope for variety. The page number — the folio, as printers call it — is normally placed in the top outer corner, where indeed it is most convenient for the reader. It may be slightly indented from the outer margin at the bottom of the page. If it is centered in the top or the bottom margin, it may be set off by parentheses or dashes or some unobtrusive ornament. The running-head may be set in small capitals or else in capitals not larger than the size of the text type. It is better practice to center the running-head rather than to line it with the inner margins. If the page is decidedly large, the running-head may be in upper and lower case considerably larger than the text type. Italics, once rather popular for runningheads, are not used so much now, for they tend to give a tilted, disturbing motion to the whole page. Present-day convention also dislikes any extremely wide space between the running-head and the first line of text; there should be only enough to make the running-head a clearly distinguished reference line^. Long quotations and extracts from poems are generally set one size smaller than the text; and foot-notes two sizes smaller. The right treatment of notes is, as every reader probably knows, a matter open to much difference of opinion. In a reference or text book or in a work of severe scholarship they should of course be placed at the bottom of the page even though this

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may cause trouble when a note is so long as to necessitate carrying it over onto the next page. Then there are books — Birkbeck Hill's edition of Boswell, for instance — in which the notes are as entertaining as the text and cannot be held an impertinence at the foot of the page. Many authors and readers, however, are bothered by notes, on the ground that they take one's attention from the text itself and give an impression of dullness. The typographer agrees with the desire to get rid of notes since he on his part finds them an obstacle to the neatness and unity of the page. In many cases, therefore, it is better to place all notes at the end of the book, an arrangement that has the further recommendation of a good deal of saving in manufacturing costs. Troublesome as all such questions are, it is upon their proper solution that much of the typographical success of a book depends. Less difficult are the chapter openings, which are among the few spots where a designer can exercise ingenuity and taste to produce beautiful effects. The most obvious decorations are border headings and initials. W e can still find value in some of the lovely old initials that have come down to us from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the type-founders' specimen books show a wide range of more recent ones, from the stiffly formal to those that have a sweeping calligraphic line. During the seventeenth

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and eighteenth centuries the founders supplied ornamental head-pieces, and so did their successors in the latter part of the nineteenth century. But all these stock patterns are open to the ο bj eft ion that they are generalized and do not necessarily harmonize with the rest of the book, or they become banal through unintelligent use by careless printers. On the other hand, a good typographer can always make up his own individual headbands by combining various ornamental units, as Bruce Rogers has done again and again with brilliant success. Chapter endings are now almost completely disregarded. There is, however, no good reason for not using more frequently the old custom of tapering them off either with a vignette or an ornament or by successively shortening the last five or six lines of text to make an inverted pyramid. Designers have found in the title-page the spot where they have been most at liberty to display their skill. Every title-page, in faft, is a challenge. It should be dignified or playful, to suit the nature of the book it introduces. It should be in keeping with the rest of the layout, not like a Georgian doorway stuck onto a mansard roof house. Now that the day of long descriptive title-pages is gone, a great deal of cleverness is needed to give body and cheerfulness to our fashion of brevity. One may adopt the traditional scheme of a

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border, provided it is appropriate in weight and design, thus making the page a decorated tablet. Or one may get the effeit of panels by a combination of rules. An attractive device or coat-of-arms, if the publisher has one, is obviously suitable for a spot of decoration and it can be made even more effektive by printing it in color. Although we can no longer use engraved title-pages such as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries favored, we can use hand-lettering to impart an atmosphere not so easily obtained with regular types. In this connexion there is an exercise that I recommend to everyone interested in book-designing, whether he intends to engage in adtual printing or is anxious to stimulate his appreciation of the work of others. This exercise was used by Mr Updike when he gave his famous printing course at Harvard many years ago. He had his students trace in pencil, on ordinary tracing paper, the title-pages of a number of books, preferably large ones so that the eye would not be subjected to too much strain. As a result the men got considerable insight into sizes and forms of type, the arrangement of type on a page, the value of spacing, and the like. In the absence of a fully equipped shop where one can copy such originals in type, there is scarcely a better introduction to some of the typographer's problems. The value of the work is increased if one selects an author like Vergil and follows him

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along in editions of various countries and centuries, for as Mr Morison has said, "the history of printing is in large measure the history of the title-page-'." The other pages in the "front matter," or "prelims" as the English phrase goes, offer many nice problems. Half-titles are to a book what margins are to a page. There should be one before the title-page and another before the beginning of the text. The latter should contain nothing but the title itself or, if that is a long one, an abbreviated form of it; the first may be a convenient place for a series title, a general editor's name, the volume number, and other material that would otherwise clutter the title-page itself and make it difficult to arrange in orderly fashion. The verso of the title-page is the place where the law requires not only the copyright notice but a statement of the country of manufacture, a statement that may properly be expanded to include the name of the printer or of his establishment. Certain other information regarding the publication or the manufacture of the book may also be placed here. But the more material there is on the first half-title and on the copyright page, the more difficult it is to give them an arrangement that shows adequate attention. The Table of Contents and List of Illustrations must also give evidence of skilled thought, for they vary so much from book to book that no hard and fast rules can be laid down. The

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Preface will generally conform to the typography of the text itself, but sometimes it may be set wholly in italics or in slightly larger roman than the text or in the same size with more leading. The printer can, if he will, aftually entice readers to this neglected but often valuable section of the book. T H U S FAR we have been considering the matter of type and its arrangement on the page; now we must turn to the important question of paper. To the student of book-making, paper is in itself a source of keen aesthetic pleasure. The texture and weight and color of a well made sheet are a satisfaction to the eye as well as to the fingers, and the distinctive rustle or crackle of hand-made papers is decidedly pleasant to the ear. Beyond this, the typographer is aware that the right choice of paper can enhance the effect of all his other materials, that it can even go far to cover up unavoidable deficiencies elsewhere^. Paper, it is perhaps needless to say, was once made entirely of rags in small moulds operated by hand. Since the middle of the nineteenth century less and less rag paper has been made and it is now so expensive that its use in books is confined chiefly to small special editions where cost need not be taken into account. On the other hand, the exclusively wood-pulp papers are too cheap and impermanent to be of interest to the

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makers of good books. All papers that we need consider here contain some percentage of rags and they will probably last for an indefinite length of time-". In the earliest days the paper-maker ladled his pulp from the vat into a shallow tray which he shook in various directions until he had a thin, even mass of interlacing fibres. When this was turned out of the tray and dried, it was the usable sheet. Along the sides of the mould the pulp would thin out, leaving irregular edges known as the deckle. Machine-made papers do not have a true deckle, only a simulated one. In binding a book this rough edge was usually trimmed off, but nowadays is often retained. The bottom of the tray was covered by a mesh of wires through which the water could drain from the pulp; the small wires running lengthwise were held together at intervals by heavier cross wires called the chains. The finished sheet, when held up to the light, showed these wire and chain marks distindlly, and the surface was somewhat rough. The same effeft is gained by other means in some of our modern papers. All of these are known as "laid" papers. About the middle of the eighteenth century John Baskerville, in his attempts to get smoother printing surfaces for Iiis delicate types, hit upon the idea of making the mesh at the bottom of the tray a continuous weaving of uniformly small wires, something like

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a fine sieve. The paper he produced in this sort of mould showed no wire and chain marks and had a relatively smooth surface. It is known as "wove" paper. Baskerville gained further smoothness by pressing his sheets between hot copper plates; our own papermakers apply the same principle in the production of what are known as "plate" papers, in which the surface is smooth, hard, and glossy. The necessity for providing a surface on which modern half-tone plates could be satisfactorily printed, led to the invention some fifty years ago of "coated" paper. In this a foundation of very thin paper is loaded on both sides with China clay, which produces an extremely smooth surface. Such papers are probably the least permanent of all those now in use. They cannot be avoided, however, if illustrations are to be reproduced by the half-tone process, as so many of them necessarily are. There is the further disadvantage that they do not combine well with a laid or wove paper used for the letter-press. Of course if half-tone illustrations are inserted in the text, there is no other recourse than to use coated paper throughout. How well this can be done is proved every day in advertising work, and it has also been done with entirely dignified success in the field of books. This is perhaps the only instance where the typographer's choice of paper is absolutely limited. Other-

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wise his first consideration should, as always, be the reader's comfort. Most people's eyes seem to be tired quickly by a sheer white paper or a noticeably blue one. All light browns, including "India" tint, are unpleasant. Surprisingly enough, a light grey can be suitable in a rather short book as it was in Mr Rollins's edition of Thoreau's essay On the Duty of Civil

Disobedience

and in Mr Rushmore's printing of Mr Warren Chappell's The Anatomy of Lettering. Greatest ease is found with something "off the white" or "natural" or with the slightest yellowish or creamy tinge. One can hardly go wrong with such a trace o f color. It has recommended itself to the human eye for thousands o f years in papyrus, in parchment, and in hand-made papers. Next comes the decision between a laid and a wove paper. Here, I think, the safest guide is indicated by history; that is, laid papers are best for Venetian and old style types, wove for modern faces. Bembo, it is true, looks well on almost any surface, but the distinctive sharpness o f Baskerville, Bodoni, and Scotch is blurred and thickened by the roughness of a laid paper. Conversely, the slight irregularity of Venetian and old style is unpleasantly emphasized by the smoothness o f wove or plate paper. There is no doubt that the older type-founders kept in mind the papers on which their types were to be used and made subtle adaptations which we cannot wholly ignored

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THE DESIGNER'S work is not completed until he has made provision for the binding of his book, a step where carelessness or inattention may seriously harm all his preceding good work. Since our current taste will not tolerate elaborate designs stamped on the spine and on the front cover, we are dependent upon the color and texture of the cloth or upon a combination of cloth for the spine and a figured or marbled paper for the sides. Yet our paucity of means is not a serious handicap, for the cloth and paper manufacturers supply a bewildering variety of materials on which to exercise ingenuity and taste. In spite of the thousands of new books issued each year, there is surprisingly little repetition in cover designAs for the edges, only the top should be trimmed if the book is designed for leisurely reading. Books for reference or for continued study must be trimmed all round; but the device of opened though untrimmed edges, such as one often sees in popular non-fiction, is one more indication that mass production finds it sometimes worth while to offer the flattery of imitation. We cannot, unfortunately, have much gold for our trimmed tops but there is no reason why we should not brighten them by painting with a color harmonizing or contrasting with the cover cloth.

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IN GENERAL, the fundamental principles of bookdesigning are those of all the fine arts. I have already alluded to the principle of proportion. It demands that the dimensions of a book shall seem suitable to its purpose, not too thick in relation to its width and height, not mean if it is to be for legitimate show rather than for intimate reading, and with types and ornaments that satisfy the trained eye as fitting justly on the page^. Then there is the principle of vigor, which demands that the page shall be clear, legible, purposeful. There is no more pleasure in reading an anemic page than in shaking a limp hand, though by the same token there is no more pleasure in reading an assertive page than in having one's hand crushed by a giant. In deciding which way clearness and legibility he, a designer cannot wholly escape imparting to his pages some of his own personality or some of the spirit of his times. Seventeenth century English books do suggest the sturdy vigor of John Bull; early nineteenth century German books, with their grey, open pages, cannot evade giving an impression of sentimentality; and the ordinary French book could please only a race of nervous, frugal peopled The third principle of design is unity; to observe it, the designer must grasp his problem as a whole and work out his details with his general conception firmly

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in mind. For instance, if ornaments are used, they must carry a single feeling from beginning to end and they must be suitable to the author's material. In the chapter headings and in the text pages there must be no confusing shifts of arrangement or treatment. The press-work must be of even color throughout. There must be no change of paper except for some perfectly obvious and accepted reason, as when one uses a coated paper for illustrations in a book printed on laid or wove stock. With these three principles subconsciously guiding one's hand and with a thorough knowledge of technical practice, one may hope to produce respectable, satisfactory books. Although such advice may sound simple, it implies a vast deal of work, not all of which is pleasant; and it does ignore the supreme necessity of some innate flair for the happy arrangement of unalterable units of design. Some people, I fear, think that the making of beautiful books is easy in comparison with the creation of a beautiful painting or piece of statuary; and they are willing to trust their fancy to contemplate success in a supposedly minor art while they shrink from aspiring to real accomplishment in the conventional fine arts. Yet whether printing be minor or major, a craft or an art, it is indisputable that the greatest typographers have had a large endowment of the indefinable familiarity with beauty that

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characterizes every artist, and the aspiring amateur should note that Berkeley Updike, Bruce Rogers, and William Morris have been as much at home in other arts as they have been in their own special field. U N T I L R E C E N T L Y no one has challenged the traditional scheme of book-design, which goes back in its essentials to the late mediaeval calligraphers and manuscript books. At the present time, however, the exponents of the modernistic school are trying to apply to typography the ideas they have worked out in connection with architecture, sculpture, painting, and design in general. They have, I think, been more successful in advertising than in book work, and I do not believe their theories will ever make much impression on the latter. Nevertheless, there may be some momentary interest in considering these attempts. Modernism developed in Germany out of the upheaval caused by the World War. Imagism, dadaism, funftionalism, suprematism, constructivism, and a dozen other crack-pot notions gripped the humorless German youth as strongly as Scott Fitzgerald's sentimentality did our frivolous American youth. The world was to be made all over, without any reference to the past. In fact, the less one knew about the history of art, the more likely he was to achieve something fresh and original.

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After a good deal of the sound and fury had subsided, it became evident that one young leader had accomplished something rather important. This was Walter Gropius, an architect who in 1919 had established at Weimar a school of design known as the Bauhaus. It was later moved to Dessau and finally, in 1937, to Chicago, where it is under the direction of L. Moholy-Nagy. Dr Gropius has in the meantime come to Cambridge and is Professor of Architecture in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. The Bauhaus, denying the traditional distinction between the fine and the applied arts, conceived mass production by machinery to be the great reality of our time. It worked out a machine aesthetic, which it applied not only to architecture but to every branch of design. Herbert Bayer, Jan Tschichold, and Karll Teige have been the members most prominently connected with its expression in printing. Their work is sometimes called "The New Typography" and sometimes "Functional Typography." Tschichold has written a good deal on his theories, but little of it has been translated into English. The American inquirer who does not understand German has few opportunities to get information on the subjedt except by examining "functional" books themselves. If he is able to read the sources, he will be rather puzzled by the contrast between Tschichold's restrained statements and

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the monstrosities known as the Bauhaus Books. Any permanent effefts that may come from the movement will not be in the direction of these freakish productions but a perpetuation of the cleanness, orderliness, and clarity of the best that Tschichold has done-". In response to the need for a new type face that would express the revolt from the past and the yearning to get the spirit of machinery onto the printed page, the " n e w " typographers turned to sans serif forms, that is, types without serifs or shading, unadorned, stark outlines of letters. Such types had been cut in the nineteenth century, but these designers made them even more severe. Herbert Bayer laid down the following principles for them: "Geometric foundation of each letter, resulting in a synthetic construction out of a few basic elements. Avoidance of all suggestion of a hand-written character. Even thickness of all parts of the letter, and renumeration of all suggestions of up and down strokes. Simplification of form for the sake of legibility (the simpler the optical appearance the easier the comprehension)." One must admit that the boldness and strength of the sans serif types have made them extremely useful for a number of purposes. On the other hand, experience has proved that they tire the eyes quickly and that they lose much of their advantage in the small sizes. As a matter of faft, Tschichold uses the regular

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traditional types, even such an old favorite as Caslon, but in using them he has applied the principle of contrast. He says, "The great stress on quick comprehension and recognition essential to printed matter to-day, encourages lively contrasts, which may be attained by variation in size or weight such as bold or extra bold, or by strong contrasts such as bold roman script. But just as one has to learn the simplest styles of setting with skill, so there are good and bad, crude and subtle variations in type mixtures. W e cannot remain altogether unconcerned about the juxtaposition which we introduce. The right instinft can only be developed gradually and by persistent practice. . . . The necessity for type mixtures in solid composition arises when words or special passages in the text must be stressed. Here italics should be used. Perhaps a catchword must be emphasized. Use the bold. Perhaps a quick and easy recognition of names is essential. Here small capitals are best"." These devices, it may be said at once, have been employed by printers for generations. Modernism, however, is likely to go farther in using mixtures never tried before, especially on title-pages. The one in Tschichold's latest book, Typographische Gestaltung, shows three faces in combination: Bank Script, City medium, and Bodoni. The strangeness of this page is increased by the method of placing the lines, which

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introduces another basic principle of the New Typography. In the old, the printer would have used a symmetrical arrangement, all the lines balanced on a medial axis. The modernists have thrown symmetry to the winds and have sought to gain balance by opposing a line of heavy type against a large mass of lighter type. Sometimes they frankly invite us to enjoy the effed: of seeing a familiar block of type in an unconventional position. So the margins of pages may be altered, the narrow coming at the fore-edge and the wide in the gutter. Or a heading may be put in the upper right-hand corner. Or the page numbers may come out near the edge of the paper-page instead of lining with the edge of the type-page. Illustrations may be "bled," that is, printed to the edge of the paper with no margins at all. Ornament is abandoned or at least kept to an irreducible minimum and usually consists of nothing but dots and lines. "Through emancipation from ornament," says Tschichold, "all the elements in a piece of printing become effective in a new sense, and their optical relations to one another, which before were seldom observed, gain important significance for the appearance of the whole. The varied optical graces of these relationships give each work an individual appearance resulting from the spirit of the problem. They take the place of the extraneous attractions of ornament and the likeV'

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To the printer brought up in the traditions of his art, all this seems rather outlandish and yet, if he is alive at all in these days, he must be ready to contemplate the possibility of change. The bound book — the codex — must have seemed awkward to men who had always read from scrolls. The printer who first used italic for emphasis must have annoyed his readers more or less. Art never need be afraid of experimenters; for they often hit upon something that proves permanent, and their mistakes are quickly consigned to the rubbish heap of time. It may possibly be that the serious exponents of modernism are working out more natural and more beautiful designs for books and that their simplicity of style will lead to more rapid and more profitable reading habits. On the other hand, the chances are that there will always be a fair number of people who are not in a hurry, who will insist upon owning an easy chair and a paper knife, and who will delight in exercising their own brains. For them, as for their compeers during the past five centuries, books in the traditional formats will be indispensable companions.

FURTHER READING T H E L I T E R A T U R E of typography has grown so much, especially in the last twenty years, that there is an embarrassment of riches from which to make up even a brief list of recommendations for reading. A n excellent guide to the field, annotated by a learned and discriminating scholar, is Seventy Books about Bookmaking,

by

Hellmut

Lehmann-Haupt

(New

York, Columbia University Press, 1940). From 1923 to 1930 appeared seven volumes of The Fleuron edited by Oliver Simon and Stanley Morison; it contains many important studies on all phases of bookmaking. In 1935 Oliver Simon began a smaller publication, Signature: A Quadrimestrial of Typography and Graphic Arts; the final number appeared in December, 1940. In America these two magazines were paralleled by The Colophon: A Quarterly for Bookmen, edited by Elmer Adler and issued from 1929 to 1940. Its place has now been taken, to some extent, by Print: A Quarterly fournal of the Graphic Arts, edited by William Edwin Rudge and published in N e w Haven, Connecticut. Almost indispensable is The Dolphin (New York, Limited Editions Club), three volumes of which appeared in 1933, 1935, and 1938 respectively. The third volume (1938), edited by

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Lawrence C. Wroth, is a compendious history of printing and bookmaking. Beginning with the autumn of 1940 The Dolphin is to be issued in three sections annually. The leading general work is Daniel Berkeley Updike's Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use (SECOND EDITION; Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1937); it is lavishly illustrated and covers far more ground than the title indicates. Its foot-note refences constitute a prolific source of specialized reading. A more limited treatment is Ronald B. McKerrow's An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (Oxford, At the Clarendon Press, 1927). The most complete description of printing practice at the end of the nineteenth century is contained in the four volumes of Theodore Low De Vinne's The Practice of Typography (New York, 1899, etc.). Although this work was designed as a guide for practicing printers, it nevertheless contains a vast deal of information for the general reader. As might be expected, the celebration of the five hundredth anniversary of printing brought forth a number of interesting monographs. In Gutenberg and the Strasbourg Documents of 1439 (New York, Press of the Woolly Whale, 1940), Otto W . Fuhrmann presents an authoritative discussion of Gutenberg's activities. George Parker Winship, in Printing in the

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Fifteenth Century (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940), views Gutenberg and his earliest followers with human warmth as well as expert knowledge. The definitive biography of Gutenberg by Aloys Ruppel, Director of the Gutenberg Museum at Mainz, has not yet been translated into English. Of the many studies of William Morris and his work one can recommend Lloyd W . Eshleman's A Victorian Rebel: The Life of William Morris (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940); H. Holliday Sparling's The Kelmscott Press and William Morris, Master-Craftsman (London, Macmillan and Company, Ltd., 1924); and Holbrook Jackson's William Morris (London, Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1926). For Mr Updike's career one should consult his own Notes on the Merrymount Press and Its Work (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1934). The latest book on Mr Rogers is The Work of Bruce Rogers (New York, Oxford University Press, 1939). The ground covered in our third chapter is treated with much greater detail not only in various articles in The Dolphin but in Lawrence C. Wroth's The Colonial Printer (SECOND EDITION, Portland, Maine, The Southworth-Anthoensen Press, 1938). Although Mr Wroth considers primarily the American printingshop, what he says is applicable in large measure to European conditions. Frederic W . Goudy has ex-

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plained his o w n methods o f designing type in Typologia (Berkeley, University o f California Press, 1940). T h e most complete history o f type design is M r Updike's Printing Types, mentioned above. Other useful works are Stanley Morison's finely illustrated On Type Faces (London, The Medici Society, 1923) and A . F. Johnson's Type Designs: Their History and Development (London, Grafton & Co., 1934). O n the designing o f books, M r Morison has written a charming little essay, First Principles of Typography ( N e w Y o r k , The Macmillan Company, 1936), which originally appeared as an article in the seventh volume o f The Fleuron. In spite o f the brevity o f this list o f books, I think it represents a maximum that the student should not attempt to reach for a long time. M y last word, like m y first, must be that just as w e learn to swim b y going into the water, so w e learn to appreciate typography by looking at books. After one has surveyed the ground and knows in a general w a y where he is going, there is no substitute for the adtual handling o f volumes printed b y the masters.

INDEX

INDEX Acts of Parliament, 68 Adam brothers, 82 Adler, Elmer, 1 3 1 Albion press, 56 Alcuin of York, 67, 69 Aldus Manutius I, 16, 38, 72, 90, no Aldus Manutius II, 16 American Institute of Graphic Arts, 34 Anglo-saxon type, 20 Anisson, his press, 54 Anniversaries of printing, 3 , 4 , 10 Ascham, Roger, The Scholemaster, 20 Ashendene Press, 34 Asser, Life of Alfred the Great, 20 Augsburg, 15 Bacon, Francis, Advancement Learning, 23 Bamberg, 15 Bar of press, 52 Barker, Christopher, 21 Barker, Robert, 21 Barnes, Joseph, 22 Baskerville, John, 26, 29, 38, 85, 119; his influence, 85; methods of printing, 84-85; typography, 27 Bauhaus, 126 Bay Psalm Book, 21 Bayer, Herbert, 126, 127 Bembo, Pietro, 73 Bentley, Richard, 24

of

83, his his

Bernard, Auguste, 81 Bible, Authorized (King James) Version, 2 1 , 68; Baskerville's, 26; first English (1535), 68; Forty-two line (Gutenberg), 8; John Eliot's Indian, 22; Oxford Lectern (Bruce Rogers), 27, 37, 96; Plantin's, 19; Thirty-six line, 9; "Wicked," 21 Binding, 40, 43, 122 Black-letter, 2 1 , 66, 68-69, 7°. 79 Bodoni, Giambattista, 27, 29, 38, 85 Body, of type, 45 Book of Common Prayer, Baskerville's, 26; of Edward VI, 68; Standard Edition (1930), 27, 35, 96 Borders, 96 Bourgeois, 46, 47 Bowyer, William, 26, 80 Breitkopf & Härtel, 29 Breitkopf, J. G. I., 29 Brevier, 47 Bridges, Robert, Collected Works, 78 Bume-Jones, Edward, 32 Burton, Robert, Anatomy of Melancholy, 23 Caius, John, 20 Calligraphy, see Handwriting Calvin, John, 10 Cambridge University Press, 22, 24, 38

138

INDEX

Canon, 46, 47 Cap of press, 52 Capital letters ("caps"), 67, 90,107 Carriage of press, 53 Caslon, William, 26, 38, 80-82 Catholicon, 9 Caxton, William, 17, 68 Chappell, Warren, The Anatomy of Lettering, 121 Chapter endings, 115 Chapter openings, 114 Characteristics of a good book type, 93-108 Charlemagne, 67 Chase, 43 Chaucer, Geoffrey, Canterbury Tales, 17 Cheeks of the press, 52 Chippendale, 82 Choice of type, 96, 1 1 2 Clymer, George, 55 Coffin of press, 53 Colines, Simon de, 18 Cologne, i s Cologne Chronicle (1499), 4, 5 Colonna, Francesco, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 74 Colophon, The, 131 Columbian press, 55 Columbus, Christopher, 10 Composing of type, 49-50 Composing room, 40 Composing-stick, 50 Continental Typefounders Association, 94 Cope, R. W „ 56 Copeland & Day, 1 1 1 Copyright page, 1 1 7 Cramoisy, Sebastian, 25

Cranach Press, 34 Crashaw, Richard, 24 Crownfield, Cornelius, 24 Cylinder press, invention of, 56 Dance ofDeath (Lyons, 1499), 59 Day, John, 20, 79 Day, Matthew, 22 Day, Stephen, press, 51 Design of books, 109-130 De Vinne, Theodore Low, 132 Dibdin, Thomas Frognall, 26, 81 Didot family, 27, 29, 3 8 Didot, Firmin, 85 Didot, Frangois Ambroise, 46, 91 Dolphin, The, 131 Doves Press, 34 Dritzehn, Andreas, 6 Early printers, their purpose, 67 Economics of printing industry, 62-63 Edes, Peter, press, 52 Eltville, 15 Elzevir family, 38 Elzevir, Louis, 19 Emphasis in black-letter, 90 English (type size), 46, 47 Enschede en Zonen, 28 Ephrata Monastery press, 52 Eragny Press, 34 Eshleman, Lloyd W., A Victorian Rebel, 133 Essential forms of letters, 97, 103 Essex House Press, 34 Estienne family, 18, 38, 75 Estienne, Henri I, 18 Estienne, Henri II, 18 Estienne, Robert I, 18

INDEX Estienne, Robert II, 18 Eusebius, Chronicle, 4; De Praeparatione Evangelica, 98 Face, of type, 45 Fell, John, 23, 78 Fertel, Martin Dominique, 30 Field, John, 24 "Fifty Books of the Year," 34 Fleuron, The, 94, 107, 1 3 1 Folio (page number), 1 1 3 Foot-notes, 1 1 3 Form, 43 Fournier, 30, 38, 46, 85, 91 Foxe, John, Book of Martyrs, 20 Fraktur, 28, 68 Franklin, Benjamin, press, 51 Franklin, James, press, 51 Freedom of the press, 20 Frisket, 53 Front matter, 1 1 7 Fuhrmann, Otto W . , 9, 132 Fuller, Thomas, 24 Functional typography, 126 Furber & Russell press, 51 Fust, John, 7, 8, 9 Galle, Philippe, 60 Galley, 41, 50 Garamond, Claude, 18, 75, 76, 81, 85, 107 Gelthuss, Arnolt, 7 Gessner, Christian Friedrich, 30 Gillis, Walter, 104 Giunta family, 16 Göschen, Georg Joachim, 29 Goudy, Frederic W . , 7 1 , 106, 134 Grammars of printing, 29, 30 Grandjean, Philippe, 25, 8i, 85

139

Great primer, 46 Greek type, 16, 72 GrifFo, Francesco, 73, 74, 77, 107 Gropius, Walter, 126 Gutenberg, Friele, 5 Gutenberg, John, birth and ancestry, 5; in Mainz, 6, 7; in Strassburg, 6; lawsuits, 6; death, 9; his accomplishment, 12; his purpose, 13 Gutenberg Society, 3 Half-titles, 1 1 7 Hand composition, 42, 49, 50 Handwriting, 16, 67, 69, 83, 90, 92, 97, 98, 107 Hansard, Thomas Curson, 30 Harvey, Circulation of the Blood, 24 Head of press, 52 Head pieces, 1 1 5 Height-to-paper, 43 Henric the type-cutter, 28 Herbert, George, 24 Hewitt, Graily, Lettering, 97 Hill, Birkbeck, 1 1 4 Hind-posts of press, 52 Horace, 25 Hose of press, 52 Hubbard, Elbert, 33 Illustrations, 1 1 7 Imprimerie Royale (Nationale), 22, 25, 38, 85 Incunabula, 38 Industrial revolution, 31, 54 Initials, decorative, 109, 1 1 4 Ink, 12 Insel Verlag, 34 Invention of printing, 3 - 1 3

140

INDEX

Isenpfort, Emmeline, 6 Italic, 16, 66, 90-92, 128

Jackson, Holbrook, 66, 133 Jannon, Jean, 76 Janson, Anton, 78 Jensen, Nicolas, 15, 32, 69, 74, 98, 99 Johnson, A. F., Type Designs, 134 Johnson, John, 30 Johnson, Samuel, 1 1 , 82 Johnston, Edward, Writing and Illuminating, and Lettering, 97 Keats, John, 1 1 Kelmscott Press, 32, 33 König, Friedrich, 56 Lang, Andrew, Collected Poems, 78 Laud, William, 23 Legal printing, 68 Lehmann-Haupt, Hellmut, Seventy Books about Bookmaking, 131 Leonardo da Vinci, 32 Library of Congress, 9 Linotype, 1 1 ; method of operation, 4; advantages, 41 Loeb Classical Library, 16 Louis X I V , 25 Lower case, 49, 67 Luce, Louis, 85 Luckombe, Philip, 30 Ludovico degli Arrighi, 90 Luther, Martin, 10 Macaulay, Thomas B., 1 1 McKerrow, Ronald B., Introduction to Bibliography, 132

Malory, Sir Thomas, Morte d'Arthur, 1 1 , 17, 68 Margins, 1 0 9 - 1 1 0 Matrix, 48 Merrymount Press, 35, 95 Milton, John, 1 1 , 24, 26 Modern face, 66, 85-90 Modernistic book-design, 1 2 5 - 1 3 0 Moholy-Nagy, L., 126 Momoro, Antoine-Frangois, 30 Monotype, 1 1 ; method of operation, 40; advantages, 41 Morgan, Pierpont, Library, 9 Morison, Stanley, 36, 78, 90, 91, 92, 95, 107, 1 1 7 , 1 3 1 , 134 Morris, William, 32, 35, 51, 99, 133 Moxon, Joseph, 30 " N e w " typography, 126 Nicholson, William, 56 Nonpareil, 47 Norton and Sackville, Tragedy of Gorboduc, 20 Nuremberg, 15 Old style, 66, 72-85, 83 Originality in type design, 98 Oxford Book of English Verse, 78 Oxford University Press, 22, 23, 38, 78 Page size, n o Paging, 42, 50 Pannartz, Arnold, 15 Paolo Manutius, 16 Paper, 12, 58, 84, 1 1 8 - 1 2 1 Paragon, 47 Parker, Matthew, 20

INDEX Pepys, Samuel, 24 Pica, 45, 46 Pickering, William, 94 Pius X I , Encyclical on Christian Marriage, 95 Plank of press, 53 Plantin, Christopher, 19, 38, 75 Plantin Museum at Antwerp, 19 Platen of press, 52 Point system, 46 Pollard, Alfred W . , 15 Prefaces, 1 1 8 "Prelims," 1 1 7 Press, cylinder, 10; iron, 55; later forms, 54-57; method of operating, 53; newspaper, 57; wooden, 50-53; specimens in America, 51 Press of the Congregation of the Propaganda, 22 Press room, 40 Press work, 43 Principles of book-designing, 1 2 3 125 Print, 131 Printing, an aristocratic trade, 62; a scholarly trade, 18; its conservatism, 1 1 ; "dynasties," 16, 1 7 ; first references to, 7; spread of, 1 5 ; in British America, 2 1 ; in Cambridge, England, 23, 26; in England, 17; in France, 18; in Germany, 28; in Holland, 28; in Mexico, 2 1 ; in the Netherlands, 17; at Oxford, 22; in Rome, 1 5 ; in Venice, 15, 16; in 15th century, 1 5 - 1 7 ; in 16th century, 14, 1 7 - 2 0 , 38; in 17th century, 14, 2 1 - 2 5 , 38; in 18th century, 14, 29, 2 6 - 3 1 , 38; in

141

19th century, 14, 3 1 - 3 8 ; in 20th century, 14, 38 Printing machinery, 31 Printing-shop, early pictures of, 59-61 Private press, defined, 33 Production, standards of, 58-59 Proofs, 42 Proportions of letters, 1 0 4 - 1 0 6 Psalter (1457). 9 Punch, 48 Pynson, Richard, 17, 79 Quinquet, Bertrand, 30 Rails of press, 52 Ray, Index Plantarum, 24 Richelieu, Cardinal, 25 Rogers, Bruce, 27, 34, 36, 72, 96, 99. 115, 133 Rollins, Carl P., 1 2 1 Romain du roi, 25 Roman, 66, 69-90 Rood, Theodoric, 22 Roxburghe Club, 3 1 Rudge, William Edwin, 1 3 1 Running-head, 1 1 3 Ruppel, Aloys, 133 Rusch, Adolf, of Strassburg, 69 Rushmore, Arthur W . , 1 2 1 Sans serif types, 103, 127 Schoeffer, Peter, 9, 28 Schwabacher, 28, 68 Screw of press, 52 Seiden, John, Works, 26 Serifs, 70, 7 1 , 74, 77, 79, 82, 85, 87, 88, 97, 103, 104 Set, of type, 45

142

INDEX

Sheldon, Gilbert, 23 Shelton, Thomas, 24 Shorthand, 24, 98 Siberch, John, 23 Signature, 131 Simon, Oliver, 131 Sizes of type, h i , 113 Sizes of early books, n o Small pica, 47 Smith, John, 30 Smith, John, Map of Virginia, 23 Sparling, H. Halliday, The Kelmscott Press and William Morris, 133 Speier, John and Wendelin of, 15, 107 Spit of press, 53 Stamperia Vaticana, 22, 38 Stanhope, Charles, Earl, his press, 54 Stationers' Company, 20, 23, 24 Stephens, see Estienne Stephenson, Blake & Co., 80 Stone, 42 Stone & Kimball, h i Stower, Caleb, 30 Stradanus, 60 Strassburg, 15 Subiaco, 15 Suidas, Lexicon, 25 Swash letters, 92 Sweynheim, Conrad, i j Table of Contents, 1 1 7 Teige, Karll, 126 Terence, 25 Thomas, Isaiah, press, 51 Thomas, Thomas, 24 Thoreau, H. D., On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, 121

Tiemann, Walter, 106 Till of press, 52 Tipografia Camerale, 22 Title page, treatment of, 1 1 5 - 1 1 6 , 128 Tonson, Jacob, 25 Torresano, Andreas, 16 Tory, Geofroy, 18, 75 Tschichold, Jan, 126, 128 Tympan of press, 53 Type, aesthetic significance, xoi, 112 Type case, 49 Type casting, 12, 47-49 Type design, evolution of, 64-92 Type faces, classifications of, 66-67 Type faces Arrighi, 90, 91 Bank Script, 128 Baskerville, 84, 94, 102, 108 Bell, 94, 95 Bembo, 73, 74, 91, 108 Bodoni, 86, 95, 101, 112, 128 Brimmer, 95 Caslon, 80-81, 83, 94, 9 5 , 1 0 1 , 102, 105, 108, 112, 128 Centaur, 37, 72, 90, 99, 102, 108 City, 128 Cloister, 70, 99 Deepdene, 108 Didot, 8j, 104 Doves, 99 Elzevir, 104 English, 68 Eve, 102 Fell, 77 Garamond, 76, 79, 94 Golden, 99

INDEX T y p e faces (cont.) Italian O l d Style, 71 Janson, 78,94,95,102,105,108 Lutetia, 94, 95, 101 Modernized O l d Style, 89,102 M o u n t j o y e , 95 O x f o r d , 95 Pastonchi, 94 Plantin, 75 Poliphilus, 108 Revived O l d Style, 89 Scotch, 87, 95, 101, 102, 105, 108, 1 1 2 Weiss Antiqua, 94 T y p e mould, 12, 47 T y p e sizes, 43-47 T y p e supplies, 49 U n g e r , J o h a n n Friedrich, 29 United States T y p e Founders' Association, 46 Updike, D . B., 17, 27, 34 f f , 80, 87, 96, 99, 133 U p p e r case, 49

I43

Vale Press, 34 van der Straet, Jan, 60 van Dijk, Christopher, 77 Venetian, 66, 69-72, 83 Vergil, 25, 26, 1 1 6 Vingard, B., 30 Voskens, Dirck, 77 W a l k e r , Sir E m e r y , 99 Walter, J o h n , 57 W a r d e , Frederic, 90 W a s h i n g t o n press, 56 W h i t n e y , Caspar, 96 W h i t t i n g h a m s , the, 94 Wilson, Alexander, 87 Winship, George Parker, 8, 132 W i n t e r of press, 52 W o o d , A n t h o n y , 23 W o r d s w o r t h , William, 11 Work of Bruce Rogers, The, 133 W o r k m e n , 61-62 W r o t h , Lawrence C., 132, 133 W y n k i n de W ö r d e , 17