Chapter XVI Modern Fine Printing
After the Restoration, printing and the book trade generally in England became definitely modern in their character, and the printer practically disappears from view, his work, with here and there an exception, as in the case of Robert Foulis or John Baskerville, being altogether hidden behind that of the publisher, so that it is of Herringman and Bernard Lintott and Dodsley that we hear, not of Newcomb and Roycroft.
Notwithstanding this decline in the printer’s importance, there was a steady improvement in English printing. As an art it had ceased at this time to exist. If a publisher wished to make a book beautiful he put in plates. If he wanted to make it more beautiful he put in more or larger plates. If he wanted to make it a real triumph of beauty he engraved the whole book, letterpress and all, as in the case of Sturt’s Prayer Books and Pine’s Horace. That a printer by the selection and arrangement of type, by good presswork and the use of pretty capitals and tailpieces, could make a book charming to eye and hand, without any help from an illustrator—such an idea as this had nearly perished. There was little loss in this, since if any artistic work had been attempted it would assuredly have been bad, whereas the craftsmen, when set to do quite plain work, gradually learnt to do it in a more workmanlike way. In this they were helped by certain improvements in printing which rendered the task of the pressman less laborious. In the middle of the seventeenth century William Blaew, of Amsterdam, invented an improved press, “fabricated nine of these new fashioned presses, set them all on a row in his Printing House and called each Press by the name of one of the Muses.” Clearly Blaew was an enthusiast. His chronicler, Joseph Moxon, was a fairly good English printer, and his description of the equipment of a printing house in the second part of his Mechanick Exercises (1683) contains much information still interesting. We gather from Moxon that Blaew’s improvements were slowly copied in England, and we know that the English printers still continued to buy their best founts from Holland. Thus when Bishop Fell, about 1670, was equipping the University Press at Oxford with better type, he employed an agent in Holland to purchase founts for him. English founts of which we have any reason to be proud date from the appearance about 1716 of William Caslon, who established a firm of type founders which has enjoyed a long and deservedly prosperous career.
The next move came from the north. Robert Foulis (the name was originally spelt Faulls), born in 1707, the son of a Glasgow maltster, had been originally apprenticed to a barber. He was, however, a man of bookish tastes, and, when already over thirty years of age, was advised to set up in business as a printer and bookseller. With his brother Andrew, five years younger than himself and educated for the ministry, he went on a book-buying tour on the Continent, and on his return started book-selling in 1741, and printed in that year Dr. William Leechman’s Temper, Character, and Duty of a Minister of the Gospel, and four other books, including a Phaedrus and a volume of Cicero. In March, 1743, he was appointed Printer to the University of Glasgow, and his edition of Demetrius Phalerus de Elocutione in Greek and Latin was the first example of Greek printing produced at Glasgow. A Horace which was hung up in proof in the University, with the offer of a reward for every misprint detected (in spite of which six remained), followed in 1744, an Iliad in 1747, an edition of Hardyknute in 1748, and a Cicero in 1749. In 1750 as many as thirty works were printed at the Foulis press. The next two years were mainly spent in touring on the Continent, and on his return Robert Foulis unhappily started an Academy of Art at Glasgow, which he had neither the knowledge nor the taste to direct successfully, and which sapped his energies without producing any valuable results. An edition of the Greek text of Callimachus in 1755 was rewarded by an Edinburgh society with a gold medal, and other Greek and Latin texts followed, including the Iliad in 1756, Anacreon in 1757, Virgil and the Odyssey in 1758, and Herodotus in 1761. Among the more notable later books of the firm were an edition of Gray’s Poems in 1768, and a Paradise Lost in 1770. The younger brother died in 1775, and Robert, after a mortifying experience in London, where he sold the “old masters” he had bought as models for his Academy for less than a pound over the expenses incurred in the sale, followed him the next year. The two brothers had raised printing at Glasgow from insignificance to an excellence which equalled, and perhaps surpassed, the standard attained at London, Oxford or Cambridge, or, indeed, for the moment, anywhere in Europe. This was no small achievement, and their compatriots and fellow citizens may well show them honour. But they were content to work according to the best standards set by other men without making any positive advance upon them or showing any originality. They avoided the snare of bad ornaments by using none; their Greek types were modelled on the French royal types associated with the name of the Étiennes; their roman types exhibit no special excellence. Historically, their chief importance is that they proved that care and enthusiasm for fine printing was re-awakening, and that printers with high ideals would not lack support.
Meanwhile, in the English Midlands an interesting and creditable, though wrong-headed, attempt to improve on existing founts had been made by John Baskerville, a Worcestershire man, born in 1706, who worked at Birmingham, and in 1757 printed there in his own types a quarto edition of Virgil which attracted considerable notice. The merit of Baskerville’s type is its distinctness; its fault is the reappearance in a slightly different form of the old heresy of Aldus, that what is good, or is thought to be good, in penmanship must necessarily be good in type. In imitation of the Writing-Masters Baskerville delighted in making his upstrokes very thin and his downstrokes thick, and his serifs—that is, all the little finishing strokes of the letters—sharp and fine. It is probable that his ideals were influenced in this direction by books like Pine’s Horace (1733-7), in which, as already noted, the letterpress as well as the illustrations and ornament is engraved throughout. These contrasts of light and heavy lines would naturally please an engraver; but they have no advantage when transferred to type, only making the page appear restless and spotty. Contemporary opinion in England was no more than lukewarm in their favour. The Virgil procured Baskerville a commission from the University of Oxford to cut a Greek fount, but this was generally condemned, though it had the merit of being free from contractions. Editions of Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained (1758), and other classics, were more successful, and Baskerville was appointed printer to the University of Cambridge for ten years; but his profits were small, and when he died in 1775, in default of an adequate English offer, his types were sold to a French society for £3700, and used in printing a famous edition of the works of Voltaire (1785-9).
The most conspicuous exponent of Baskerville’s methods was an Italian, Giovanni Battista Bodoni, born in Piedmont in 1740. Bodoni settled at Parma, and it was at Parma that he did most of his printing. Even more notably than Baskerville, he tried to give to the pages which he printed the brilliancy of a fine engraving. He used good black ink (which is to his credit), exaggerated the differences between his thick strokes and his thin, and left wide spaces between his lines so as to let the elegance of his type stand out as brilliantly as possible against the white paper. The judgment of the best modern printers is against these vivid contrasts and in favour of a more closely set page, the two pages which face each other being regarded as an artistic whole which should not be cut into strips by a series of broad white spaces. Bodoni’s books, which used to be highly esteemed, are now perhaps unduly neglected, for his work in its own way, whether he used roman type, italics, or Greek, is very good, and his editions of Virgil, Homer, and the Imitatio Christi are very striking books, though built on wrong lines. Bodoni died at Padua in 1813.
While the names of Caslon, the brothers Foulis, and Baskerville in Great Britain, and of Bodoni in Italy, stand out from amid their contemporaries, the premier place in French book-production was occupied by members of the Didot family. The first of these was François Didot (1689-1757); his eldest son, François Ambroise (1730-1804), was a fine printer; his younger son, Pierre (1732-95), was also a typefounder and papermaker. In the third generation Pierre’s son Henri (1765-1852) was famous for his microscopic type, while Pierre II (1760-1853), the eldest son of François Ambroise and nephew of Pierre I, printed some fine editions of Latin and French classics at the press at the Louvre; and his brother Firmin Didot (1764-1836) won renown both as a typefounder and engraver, and also as a printer and improver of the art of stereotyping, besides being a deputy and writer of tragedies. In the fourth generation, the two sons of Firmin Didot, Ambroise (1790-1876) and Hyacinthe, carried on the family traditions. Incidentally, Ambroise wrote some valuable treatises on wood-engraving and amassed an enormous library, which, when sold at auction in 1882-4, realized nearly £120,000.
With the names of Bodoni and the Didots we may link that of the German publisher and printer Georg Joachim Goeschen, grandfather of the late Viscount Goschen. He was born in 1752, died in 1828, and worked the greater part of his life at Leipzig. He brought out pretty illustrated editions, made experiments with Greek types, much on the same lines as Bodoni, and devoted his life to the improvement of printing and bookmaking and the spread of good literature, enjoying the friendship of Schiller and other eminent German writers.
Coming back to England, we may note the beginning of the Chiswick Press in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. Charles Whittingham was then only twenty-two (he had been born at Coventry in 1767), and for his first years as his own master he was content to print hand-bills and do any other jobbing work that he could get. He began issuing illustrated books in 1797, and after a time the care he took in making ready wood-blocks (the use of which had been revived by Bewick) for printing gained him a special reputation. From about 1811 to his death in 1840 he left one branch of his business in the city under the charge of a partner, while he himself lived and worked at Chiswick, whence the name the Chiswick Press by which the firm is still best known.
His nephew, Charles Whittingham the younger, was born in 1795, was apprenticed to his uncle in 1810 and worked with him until 1828. Then he set up for himself at Tooks Court off Chancery Lane, and came rapidly to the front, largely from the work which he did for William Pickering, a well-known publisher of those days.
On his uncle’s death in 1840 the younger Whittingham inherited the Chiswick business also. Four years after this, in 1844, he led the way in the revival of old-faced types. The examples of Baskerville at home and of Bodoni and other printers abroad had not been without effect on English printing. Brilliancy had been sought at all costs, and in the attempt to combine economy with it the height of letters had been increased and their breadth diminished so that, while they looked larger, more of them could be crowded into a line. The younger Whittingham had the good taste to see that the rounder, more evenly tinted type, which Caslon had made before these influences had come into play, was much pleasanter to look at and less trying to the eyes. He was already thinking of reviving it when he was commissioned by Longmans to print a work of fiction, So much of the Diary of Lady Willoughby as relates to her Domestic History and to the Eventful Period of the Reign of Charles the First, and it occurred to him that the use of old-faced type would be especially in keeping with such a book. A handsome small quarto was the result, and the revival of old-faced type proved a great success.
Not content with reviving old type, the younger Whittingham revived also the use of ornamental initials, causing numerous copies to be cut for him from the initials used in French books of the sixteenth century. Some of these are good, some almost bad, or while good in themselves, suitable only for use with black-letter founts and too heavy for use with roman letter. Still the attempt was in the right direction, and the books of this period with the imprint of the Chiswick Press are worth the attention of collectors interested in the modern developments of printing. During the succeeding forty years there is little by which they are likely to be attracted save the issues of the private press kept and worked by the Rev. C. H. O. Daniel of Worcester College, Oxford, of which he is now Provost. While he was yet a lad Mr. Daniel had amused himself with printing, and a thin duodecimo is still extant entitled Sir Richard’s Daughter, A Christmas Tale of Olden Times, bearing the imprint “Excudebat H. Daniel: Trinity Parsonage, Frome, 1852.” In 1874 Mr. Daniel resumed his old hobby at Oxford, printing Notes from a catalogue of pamphlets in Worcester College Library, and in 1876 A new Sermon of the newest Fashion by Ananias Snip, of which the original is preserved in the library of Worcester College. It was, however, in 1881, by an edition of thirty-six copies of The Garland of Rachel “by divers kindly hands,” that the Daniel Press won its renown. Rachel was Mr. Daniel’s little daughter, and the eighteen contributors to her “Garland” included Frederick Locker, Robert Bridges, Austin Dobson, Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse, John Addington Symonds, Lewis Carrol, W. Henley, and Margaret Woods. Each poet was rewarded by a copy in which his name was printed on the titlepage, and the “Garland” soon came to be regarded as a very desirable possession. Mr. Daniel subsequently printed numerous little books by interesting writers (Robert Bridges, Walter Pater, Canon Dixon, and others), and while neither his types nor his presswork were exceptionally good, succeeded in investing them all with a charming appropriateness which gives them a special place of their own in the affections of book-lovers.
Another venture in which a high literary standard was combined with much care for typography was The Hobby-Horse, a quarterly magazine edited by Herbert P. Horne and Selwyn Image between 1886 and 1892, after which it appeared fitfully and flickered out. The change in the type, the setting it close instead of spaced, and the new initials and tailpieces which may be noted at the beginning of Vol. III (1888), constituted a landmark in the history of modern printing of an importance similar to that of the return to old-faced type in Lady Willoughby’s Diary. The progress of the movement can be followed (i) in the catalogue of the Exhibition of Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, held at the New Gallery in the autumn of 1888, with an article on printing by Mr. Emery Walker; (ii) in three books by William Morris, viz. The House of the Wolfings, The Roots of the Mountains, and the Gunnlaug Saga, printed under the superintendence of the author and Mr. Walker at the Chiswick Press in 1889 and 1890. In 1891 William Morris gave an immense impetus to the revival of fine printing by setting up a press at No. 16 Upper Mall, Hammersmith, close to his own residence, Kelmscott House. “It was the essence of my undertaking,” he wrote subsequently, “to produce books which it would be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing and arrangement of type,” and no one will be inclined to deny that the Kelmscott Press books fulfil this aim. The gothic type, whether in its larger or smaller size (the Troy type designed for the reprint of Caxton’s Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, and the Chaucer type designed for the great Chaucer), will hold its own against any gothic type of the fifteenth century. The Golden type (designed for the reprint of Caxton’s Golden Legend) cannot be praised as highly as this. “By instinct rather than by conscious thinking it over,” Morris confessed, “I began by getting myself a fount of Roman type,” and it is no unfair criticism of it to say that it betrays the hand of a man whose natural expression was in gothic letter forcing roman into yielding some of the characteristic gothic charm. The Golden Legend would have been a far finer book if it had been printed in the Chaucer type, and the Shelley, Keats, Herrick and other books which Morris printed in it to please F. S. Ellis or other friends cannot stand the test of comparison with The Wood Beyond the World and the other romances which he printed entirely to please himself. But whether he used his roman or his gothic type the exquisite craftsmanship which he put into all his books enabled Morris to attain his aim, and his wonderful borders and capitals crown them with the delight which this king of designers took in his work. No other printer since printing began has ever produced such a series of books as the fifty-three which poured from the Kelmscott Press during those wonderful seven years, and no book that has ever been printed can be compared for richness of effect with the Chaucer which was the crowning achievement of the Press.
Morris’s example brought into the field a host of competitors and plagiarists and a few workers in the same spirit. By his side throughout his venture had stood Mr. Emery Walker, who had no small part in starting the whole movement, whose help and advice for more than twenty years have been freely at the service of any one who has shown any inclination to do good work, and who, whenever good work has been achieved, will almost always be found to have lent a hand in it. After Morris’s death Mr. Walker joined with Mr. Cobden Sanderson in producing the Doves Press books, printed, all of them, in a single type, but that type a fine adaptation of Jenson’s and handled with a skill to which Jenson not only never attained but never aspired. The first book printed in it was the Agricola of Tacitus, and this and Mr. Mackail’s lecture on Morris and other early books are entirely without decoration. Woodcut capitals and borders, it was thought, had reached their highest possible excellence under the hand of William Morris, and since not progress but retrogression would be the certain result of any fresh experiments, decoration of this sort must be abandoned. The reasoning was perhaps not entirely cogent, since the decoration appropriate to the Doves type would hardly enter into any direct competition with Morris’s gothic designs. Later on, however, it was more than justified by the use in the Paradise Lost, the Bible, and most subsequent books (these later ones issued by Mr. Sanderson alone) of very simple red capitals, which light up the pages on which they occur with charming effect.
Similar capitals on a less bold scale, some in gold, others in red, others in blue, are a conspicuous feature in the masterpieces of the Ashendene Press belonging to Mr. St. John Hornby. This was started by Mr. Hornby at his house in Ashendene, Herts, in 1894, and was for some time worked by Mr. Hornby himself and his sisters, with, as at least one colophon gratefully acknowledges, “some little help of Cicely Barclay,” who subsequently, under a different surname, appears as a joint proprietor. The early books—the Journals of Joseph Hornby, Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, etc.—are not conspicuously good, but in 1902, in a type founded on that used by Sweynheym and Pannartz at Subiaco, Mr. and Mrs. Hornby produced the first volume of an illustrated Divina Commedia which cannot be too highly praised. Its story is told in the red-printed colophon, the wording of which is very prettily turned:
Fine della prima Cantica appellata Inferno della Commedia di Dante poeta eccellentissimo. Impressa nella Stamperia Privata di Ashendene a Shelley House, Chelsea, per opera e spesa di St. John & Cicely Hornby coll’ aiuto del loro cugino Meysey Turton. Le lettere iniziali sono l’opera di Graily Hewitt, le incisioni in legno di C. Keates secondo disegni fatti da R. Catterson Smith sopra gli originali dell’ edizione di 1491. Finita nel mese di Dicembre dell’ anno del Signore MCMII, nel quale dopo dieci secoli di bellezza cadde il gran Campanile di San Marco dei Veneziani.
The third type happily inspired by the example of Morris was the Greek type designed by Robert Proctor on the model of that used for the New Testament of the Complutensian Polyglott in 1514, with the addition of majuscules and accents, both of them lacking in the original. An edition of the Oresteia of Aeschylus in this type was being printed for Mr. Proctor at the Chiswick Press at the time of his death, and appeared in 1904. In 1908 it was followed by an edition of the Odyssey printed at the Clarendon Press. Like Morris’s gothic founts, this Greek type may or may not be admired, but that it attains the effects at which it aims can hardly be denied. No page of such richness had ever before been set up by any printer of Greek.
To write of books printed in types which for one reason or another seem less successful than those already named is a less grateful task, but there are several designers and printers whose work approaches excellence, and who worked independently of Morris, though with less sure touch. Foremost among these must be placed Mr. Charles Ricketts,70 whose Vale type, despite a few blemishes, is not very far behind the Golden type of the Kelmscott Press, and whose ornament at its best is graceful, and that with a lighter and gayer grace than Morris’s, though it cannot compare with his for dignity or richness of effect. In a later type, called the Kinge’s Fount from its use in an edition of The Kinges Quair (1903), Mr. Ricketts’s good genius deserted him, for the mixture of majuscule and minuscule forms is most unpleasing.
The Eragny books printed by Esther and Lucien Pissarro on their press at Epping, Bedford Park, and the Brook, Chiswick, were at first (1894-1903, Nos. 1-16) printed by Mr. Ricketts’s permission in the Vale type. In June, 1903, a “Brook” fount designed by Mr. Pissarro was completed, and A Brief Account of the Origin of the Eragny Press printed in it. Mr. Pissarro’s books are chiefly notable for their woodcuts, which are of very varying merit.
In the United States, in addition to some merely impudent plagiarisms, several excellent efforts after improved printing were inspired by the English movement of which Morris was the most prominent figure. Mr. Clarke Conwell at the Elston Press, Pelham Road, New Rochelle, New York, printed very well, both in roman and black letter, his edition of the Tale of Gamelyn (1901) in the latter type being a charming little book. Mr. Berkeley Updike of the Merrymount Press, Boston, and Mr. Bruce Rogers during his connection with the Riverside Press, Boston, have also both done excellent work, which is too little known in this country. The artistic printing which Mr. Rogers did while working for the Riverside Press is especially notable because of the rich variety of types and styles in which excellence was attained.
Notes
70 Like Proctor, Mr. Ricketts had no press of his own. His books were printed for him by Messrs. Ballantyne.