Henri Bouchot

“ Long before printing appeared, the Dances of Death took the lead; they were some consolation for the wretched against their powerful masters, the revenge of the rabble against the king; they may be seen painted, sculptured, illuminated, when engraving was not there to multiply their use; they may be seen largely displayed on walls, sombre, frightful, at Dresden, Leipzig, Erfurt, Berne, Lucerne, Rouen, Amiens, and Chaise-Dieu. It was the great human equality, attempted first by the French, then by the inimitable Holbein.
Fig. 32.—Dance of Death, said to be by Verard. ”

“ We have now seen the history of the Book and its decoration in the sixteenth century in France: at first French epics in Italy, books of hours, romances of chivalry; then about 1550, with the reign of Henri II., the religious pamphlets commenced, bookselling spread itself; the strife between illustrations on metal plates and those in relief assumed shape, it continued under Henri III., and terminated abruptly by the victory of the first at the extreme end of the century. With political passions, printing had become a weapon of warfare, which it will never cease to be. ”

“ Now in the books published at this epoch in France we meet with vignettes which so very nearly approach miniatures, that we can easily recognise in them French taste and finish. Such are, for example, the illustrations of the Mer des Histoires, printed by Le Rouge in 1488, where suppleness of design is blended in some parts with extraordinary dexterity in engraving. Nevertheless, others leave something to be desired; they maim the best subjects by their unskilful line and their awkwardness of handling. ”

“ The immense artistic advance made in France in the eighteenth century in the manufacture and illustration of the Book made itself felt throughout Europe. In Germany, Chodowiecki, born at Dantzic of a family of apothecaries, developed his talent from ornamenting the boxes of his father, and from 1758 to 1794 he designed numerous plates for books and almanacs, a little heavy in engraving, but singularly clever in composition. ”

“ The reign of Louis XIV. saw the zenith of engraving with the burin, but not that of printing or illustration. Doubtless it would be puerile to pretend that typography had not made any material progress; it had done so in engraving and in composition; work was done more quickly, because the presses had been made more perfect. But the wise harmony of the old printers, their sure taste, even in their old irregular [175] blocks, was no longer there to form a graceful and charming whole, which is to modern precision as a picture by Van Eyck is to a chromo-lithograph. ”

“ As to those whose specialty is handsome books with figures by contemporary artists, those who always are in the front, as the Mames, Quantins, Hachettes, Plons, Jouausts, of France; the Longmans, Murrays, Macmillans, Kegan Pauls, Cassells, and Chattos of England; the Harpers, Scribners, Lippincotts, and Houghtons of the United States, they are to us what the ancients of whom we have spoken were to their contemporaries. Now the processes of illustration are without number: wood, metal, heliogravure, phototype, and others. ”

“ If Pasdeloup had discovered these mediocre combinations, he could not be proclaimed the regenerator of a fallen art. The bastard style of these works may be compared to their mosaics, constructed of pieces; it is a little of everything, and together it is nothing. However, in the midst of the quantity of mediocre things, some pleasing decoration is from time to time met with; the design of a volume with the arms of the Regent and his wife, Mademoiselle de Blois, wants neither elegance nor taste; without being perfection, it has better proportion and balance. ”

“ Up to this time Germany had not, in its school of painters or miniaturists, men capable of giving a personal impulse to ornament. In the German editions of the block books the influence of Van Eyck had made itself felt very sensibly, and the Flemish had preserved their supremacy on this point; on the other hand, the German printers who went to seek their fortune in Italy fell into the middle of a circle admirably prepared to receive them and to communicate their ideas to them. ”

“ In our days it has a little recovered. Amateurs have found new names, and often artists, to patronise: Trautz-Bauzonnet, Capé, Duru, Lortic, Marius Michel, in France; Bedford, Rivière, Zaehnsdorf, Pratt, in England; Matthews, Bradstreet, Smith, in the United States; and many others. Unhappily, fortune does not permit every one to furnish his library luxuriously; the true connoisseur searches rather for Groliers, Eves, and Le Gascons, than concerns himself about modern workmanship. Whatever may be its value, it is only fit to clothe the works of the time. ”

“ Numerous and charming ornamented letters, heads of pages, and tailpieces appear. There are few artists that have done so much as he for graceful illustration and harmony between the vignette and the printed page. His prodigious fecundity made him attempt every style; and after the gaieties of the print in which he laughed with his contemporaries, he adopted a grave air to trace more severe subjects on copper. ”

“ Besides the publications of Sebastian Cramoisy and Chevallier, Leonard Gaultier adorned also those of Nicholas Buon and many other publishers of the time in Paris and Lyons. With such a profusion of works emanating from a single artist, without reckoning those which were produced in great quantity by men of less note, wood engraving was dead. At most it dared to put a wood block of a printer's mark on a title; more ordinarily this mark was not alone sufficient, and showed the disdain in which taste then held wood-cutting. ”

“ It is nearly always the same with men who have occupied a large place in the history of art; posterity only knows of their genius at the time when no one knows anything of them. For Gutenberg the situation was still more terrible; a rival, Peter Schoeffer, survived him, and he did not for his own reputation care to preserve his rival's memory; and if, as is believed, Gutenberg left pupils and heirs, Henry Bechtermuncze, Ulrich Zell, and Weigand Spyes, his misfortune is crowned by Bechtermuncze being now reputed to be the printer of the Catholicon, of which we have just given the history. ”

“ But in order to present, as in a synoptical table, an essential and abridged sketch of the Book in all European countries, it appeared to us more [99] convenient to begin with the confused and tangled notions by centuries and to unfold in our review the characteristic facts of each country conjointly. Moreover, after the sixteenth century neither Italy nor Germany could compare with France, which, less fortunate, perhaps, at the beginning than her neighbours, surpassed them in all the pride of her genius. ”

“ Eisen has a simplicity, a good taste, and a special and singularly perfect economy of artistic effect combined with typography. It appears hard that the designer had no consultative voice in the choice of impression and disposition of the Book. The union of the two forces, the vignette and the composition, is so close that it may be believed one was made for the other, neither venturing to assert itself. ”

“ If we add to this primitive workshop the matrix in which the types are cast, the box in which they are distributed, the forme on which they are arranged to compose the pages, and a small hand-press, with blacker ink and paper damped to permit the greasy ink to take better, [32] we have a picture of the work-room of Gutenberg, Fust, and Schoeffer, and of the first printers with movable types.
Thus typography was born of painting, passing in its infancy through wood-cutting, revolutionising ideas and somewhat the world. But the mighty power of the new art was not confined to itself ”

“ In the search for harmony between the text and engravings of this curious work, we shall find grace [61] and gaiety laid aside, on the other hand a freedom and boldness that interest and permit us to appreciate at their value the Nuremberg artists and Koburger, the printer. In fact, the German artists are more individual, each one taken by himself, than the Italian illustrators could be, condemned as they were to the hierarchical commonplace and to a certain form of idealism into which the art of Italy entered little by little. ”

“ We are tempted to see in certain shapeless work the hasty and light labour of an artisan hurried in its execution. As mentioned above, the part taken by the booksellers in the making of the plates does not make our supposition in itself appear inadmissible.
Printing had been established about twenty years in Paris when Philip Pigouchet, printer and engraver on wood, began to exercise his trade for himself or on account of other publishers. Formerly bookseller in the University, he transported his presses to the Rue de la Harpe, and took for his mark the curious figure here reproduced. ”

“ By the middle of the eighteenth century literature held a strong position in the colonies, the greater part of it being, as might be expected, English; but the revolution and subsequent establishment of the United States created a national American literature, which has flourished to this day. Among the printers of North America in the eighteenth century, the most famous was the celebrated philosopher Dr. Benjamin Franklin, who served his apprenticeship to the printing press in London. He returned to America in 1726, and worked as a printer with his brother at Philadelphia. ”

“ At first it was Watteau who influenced all the engravers in the pretty and the smart; Boucher did the rest; and fatally the Book followed, and followed impetuously, surpassing, if possible, the painted works. If the severe poses, the grave touch, of the preceding century are no longer found, they often go a little far in the contrary sense. It may be well said here that the arts are ordinarily the result of the manners of an epoch. ”

“ The curious part of the enterprise was that a war treasurer, a financier, employed by the French kings in these expeditions, through his relations of taste and friendship with the Alduses of Venice, brought [258] to France the love of sumptuous bindings, of editions superbly clothed. He was named Jean Grolier, that bibliophile of the sixteenth century, who was, above all others, even King Francis, the first to appreciate the art of binding. It is not too much to say art, for if better had not been done before, it may safely be said that nothing better has been done since ”

“ It is not that artists were wanting at the opening of the seventeenth century who could, in giving scope to their talent, show themselves worthy successors of those who went before them. Unhappily the booksellers no longer had a loose rein; they had the rope, for they were hung or burned at the least infraction of political or religious propriety. Yet the reign of Henri IV. was relatively an easier period for the artisans of the Book, in which they were less confined to the strict terms of excessive regulations ”

“ The splendid execution of this book, in three large folio volumes, was a true typographical revolution. Never in any country had scrupulous perfection of detail been joined to so masterly a knowledge of disposition and form of characters. The great artists of the Davidian school had the honour of seeing their drawings reproduced as illustrations, and those named above designed the fifty-seven plates with which the edition was adorned. ”

“ John Baptist also published in 1766 a theoretical treatise on wood engraving, abounding in historical errors, but in which something to learn may be found if taken with discernment. He says in his preface, "Now that excellent work is done on copper, wood engraving is neglected, and the use lost of designing and cutting the shadows of the pencil on the wood block; most of those who work in it have neither design nor taste, and only follow their own ideas; it is not astonishing that only very mediocre pieces come from their hands, to say nothing stronger ”

“ In the beginning, as we have seen, the cutters of wood blocks and the printers were often the same people, preparing their characters or their blocks, and afterwards putting them under the press. Large printing offices had very quickly changed that. Each particular work had its special workman. Typography had its type-founders, compositors, forwarders, inkers, and pressmen. In the eighteenth century this was complicated by designers, engravers, plate-printers, and these different professions occupied themselves on the Book in manipulating the sheets in their turn. ”

“ At Venice the German inventors had reaped their harvest. At the end of the fifteenth century, fifty years after the invention of typography, the printing offices and booksellers' shops were counted by hundreds. It was in this city that for the first time a title with frontispiece carrying indication of the contents, the place, the date, and the name of the printer, was given to the Book. We give here this ornamental title, placed before a Calendario of John de Monteregio, printed by Pictor, Loslein, and Ratdolt in 1476, folio. ”

“ As to Fust, we believe his only intervention in the association of printers of Mayence was as a money-lender, from which may be comprehended the unlikelihood of his having been with Coster, the more so as we find Gutenberg retired to Strasbourg, where he pursued his researches. There he was, as it were, out of his sphere, a ruined noble whose great knowledge was bent entirely on invention. Doubtless, like many others, he may have had in his hands one of the printed works of Laurent Coster, and conceived the idea of appropriating the infant process. ”

“ As we have said, the relation of letters among themselves in the composition of a language is called the "fount." For example, it is certain that the Italian employs the letter a more than b, the letter a appearing in nearly every word; a compositor to compose in this language should therefore have more of a than of b. The relation between these two letters and all the others is the "fount." In French the proportion of a fount is about 5,000 a for 800 b, 3,000 c, 3,000 d, 11,000 e, etc. The fount varies with the languages. In English the proportion is 8,500 a to 1,600 b, 3,000 c, 4,400 d, etc. ”

“ Callot was the model chosen by the young Italian artist, and this choice might have been less happy. Della Bella took from his master the philosophic vein, the drollery of design, which he exercised at first in humorous frontispieces, among others that of Scarron's works, where nine fish-women, taking the place of the Muses, dance around the poet. But he passed from gay and pleasant to severe, and made large pages of architecture for serious titles. ”