Henry R. Plomer

“ CHAPTER XI THE PRESENT CENTURY
t has been said that printing sprang into the world fully armed. At least this is certain, that for nearly four centuries after its birth the printing-press in use in all printing-houses remained the same in form as that which Caxton's workmen had used in the Red Pale at Westminster. There had been some unimportant alterations made in it by an Amsterdam printer in the seventeenth century; but until the year 1800 no important change in the form or mechanism of the printing-press had ever been introduced. ”

“ Time has not dealt kindly with some of these specimens of what was called 'fine' printing. After the lapse of a century, we begin to see that though the type and press-work were all that could be desired, and placed the English printers on a level with the best of those on the Continent, there was something radically wrong with the production of illustrated books. ”

“ In America the progress of printing was very slow throughout the seventeenth century. Until 1660, Samuel Green, at Cambridge, Massachusetts, remained the only printer in the colony. But in that year the Corporation for the propagation of the Gospel in New England among the Indians sent over from London another press, a large supply of good letter, and a printer named Marmaduke Johnson, for the purpose of printing an edition of the Bible in the Indian tongue. ”

“ Andrew Borde spoke of his Introduction of Knowledge as printing at 'old Robert Copland's, the eldest printer in England.' Whether he meant the oldest in point of age or in his craft is not clear; but it may well be that, seeing that De Worde, Pynson, and the two Faques were dead, this printing house was the oldest then in London. ”

“ No more is heard of a press at Oxford until nearly the close of the sixteenth century, a gap of nearly seventy years, and a strange and unaccountable interval. At any rate, the next Oxford printed book, so far as is at present known, was John Case's Speculum Moralium quaestionum in universam ethicen Aristotelis, with the colophon, 'Oxoniæ ex officina typographica Josephi Barnesii Celeberrimae Academiae Oxoniensis Typographi. Anno 1585.'
Joseph Barnes, the printer, had been admitted a bookseller in 1573, and on August 15th, 1584, the University lent him £100 with which to start a press. ”

“ As regards type, there is very little to choose between Caslon's Roman and that of Baskerville, while the italic of Baskerville was unquestionably the most beautiful type that had ever been seen in England; and the ridiculous criticism passed on it that its very fineness was injurious to the eyesight, was shown to be utterly worthless by Franklin's letter to the printer, which is printed in Reed's Old English Letter Foundries. But there are also other features of excellence about these books of Baskerville's. They are simplicity itself. ”

“ When an ancient printer died, and his copies were exposed to sale, few or none of the young ones were of ability to deal for them, nor indeed for any other, so that the Booksellers have engross'd almost all.' The petitioners show also that the Company of Stationers was grown so large that none could be Master or Warden until he was well advanced in life, and therefore unable to keep a vigilant eye on the trade, while a printer did not become Master once in ten or twenty years. ”

“ Robert Barker, John Bill, and Bonham Norton, should exercise the craft of printing in the city of London. There is nothing in the work of these men, judged as specimens of the printer's art, to interest us, but there were some whose work was of very much better character than others. ”

“ Another point upon which his biographers are silent is the place where he learnt the art of printing. For we know that the punches of his foundry were not cut by himself, and that he was not in any sense a practical printer; yet he must have obtained some knowledge of the rudiments of the art before taking over the responsibilities of a foundry of his own. Baskerville appears to have employed the most skilled artists he could obtain, and it is said that he spent upwards of £600—some say £800—before he obtained a fount to suit him. ”

“ On the other hand, it cannot be denied that type No. 1 is totally unlike any type that we know of as used by a Cologne printer, and, moreover, Caxton's methods of working, and his late adoption of spacing and signatures, point to his having learnt his art in a school of printing less advanced than that of Cologne. In the face of the statements of Caxton himself and Wynkyn de Worde, we seem bound to believe that Caxton did study printing at Cologne, but the inexpertness betrayed in his early books proves conclusively that his studies there did not extend very far. ”

“ The history of the best work in the trade in London is practically the history of three men—John Haviland, Miles Fletcher, and Robert Young, who joined partnership and, in addition to a share in the Royal printing-house, obtained by purchase the right of printing the Abridgements to the Statutes, and bought up several large and old-established printing-houses, such as those of George Purslowe, Edward Griffin, and William Stansby. ”

“ But it was not until 1559 that his books began to show that excellence of workmanship that laid the foundation of his fame. In that year he issued in folio The Cosmographicall Glasse of William Cunningham, a physician of Norwich. As a specimen of the printer's art this was far in advance of any of Day's previous work, and, moreover, was in advance of anything seen in England before that time. The text was printed in a large, flowing italic letter of great beauty, further enhanced by several well-executed woodcut initials. ”

“ Nicholls was the founder of the Greek type used in the new office of Blackfriars, and his experience was certainly not likely to encourage other men to set up in the same trade. At the time when he was appointed one of the four founders under the decree, he could not make a living by his trade, and though he does not expressly state the fact, his evidence seems to imply that English printers at that time obtained most of their type from abroad, and it is beyond question that they had long since ceased to cast their own letter. ”

“ As far as permanent influence is concerned Mr. Morris's Roman letter, the 'Golden type,' as it was dubbed, from its use in the Golden Legend, is the most important of the three founts which he employed. His own sympathies, however, were too pronouncedly mediæval for him to be satisfied with it, and for the next large book which he took in hand, a reprint of Caxton's Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, the first work printed in the English tongue, he designed a much larger and bolder type, an improvement on one of the 'Gothic' founts used by Anton Koberger at Nuremberg in the fifteenth century. ”

“ In fact, so far as printing with English types was concerned, the first twenty years of the eighteenth century was the worst period in the history of printing in this country. With the exception of the University of Oxford, which, owing to the generous bequests of Bishop Fell and others, was well supplied with good founts, the printers of this country were compelled to obtain their type [Pg 229] from Holland, and all the best and most important books published in Queen Anne's days were printed with Dutch letter, as it was called. ”

“ Upon the advent of machinery and cylinder printing, the use of movable type for printing from was supplemented by quicker and more durable methods, and William Ged's long-despised discovery of stereotyping is now an absolutely necessary adjunct of modern press-work. This, again, was in some measure due to Earl Stanhope, who in 1800 went to Andrew Tilloch, and Foulis, the Glasgow printer, both of whom had taken out a patent for the invention, and learnt [Pg 288] from them the process. ”

“ The idea was not a new one, for sixteen years before an Englishman, named William Nicholson, took out a patent for a machine for printing, which foreshadowed nearly every fundamental improvement even in the most advanced machines of the present day. But from want of means, or some other cause, Nicholson never [Pg 284] actually made a machine. Nor did Kœnig's project meet with much encouragement until he walked into the printing-house of Thomas Bensley of Bolt Court, who encouraged the inventor to proceed, and supplied him with the necessary funds. ”

“ The name of the printer, the author, and the publisher was to be placed in every book, and, with a view to encouraging English printing, it was decreed further that no merchant or bookseller should import any English book printed abroad. No person was to erect a printing-press, or to let any [Pg 179] premises for the purpose of carrying on printing, without first giving notice to the Company, and no joiner or carpenter was to make a press without similar notice. ”

“ One of the founts of type used by Machlinia is of peculiar interest, by reason of its close resemblance to Caxton's type No. 2*, and its still greater similarity to the type used by Jean Brito of Bruges.
Machlinia's business seems to have been taken over by Richard Pynson. There is no direct evidence of this, but like Machlinia he took up the business of printing law-books (being the first printer in this country to receive a royal patent) ; he is found using a woodcut border used in Machlinia's Horæ; and, in addition to this, waste from Machlinia books has been found in Pynson bindings. ”

“ Nor was he content with this, but he devoted all the time that he could spare to editing and translating for his press, and according to Wynkyn de Worde it was 'at the laste daye of his lyff' that he finished the version of the Lives of the Fathers, which De Worde issued in 1495. His work as an editor and translator shows him to have been a man of extensive reading, fairly acquainted with the French and Dutch languages, and to have possessed not only an earnest purpose, but with it a quiet sense of humour, that crops up like ore in a vein of rock in many of his prologues. ”

“ Paul's Churchyard. Much as we have to regret the scantiness of all material for a study of the lives of the early English printers, it is doubly felt in the case of Reginald Wolfe. The little that is made known to us is just sufficient to whet the appetite and kindle the curiosity. It reveals to us an active business man, evidently with large capital behind him, setting up as a bookseller, under the shadow of the great Cathedral, and rapidly becoming known to the learned and the rich. ”

“ Festivalis, the Ars Moriendi, and the Fifteen Oes, his only extant book printed with borders, and it was afterwards used by Wynkyn de Worde.
Caxton died in the year 1491, after a long, busy, and useful life. His record is indeed a noble one. After spending the greater part of his life in following the trade to which he was apprenticed, with all its active and onerous duties, he, at the time of life when most men begin to think of rest and quiet, set to work to learn the art of printing books. ”

“ In 1844 Pickering and Whittingham were in consultation as to the production of an edition of Juvenal to be printed in old-face great primer, and the foundry of the latest descendant of the Caslons was ransacked to supply the fount. The edition was to be rubricated and otherwise decorated, and this, or the printer's stock trouble, 'lack of paper,' occasioning some delay, the revived type first appeared in a fiction entitled Lady Willoughby's Diary, to which it gave a pleasantly old-world look in keeping with the period of which the story treats. ”

“ Andrew Spottiswoode, who died in 1866 at the ripe age of seventy-nine, had a large printing business apart from the office of Queen's Printer, and his imprint will be found in much of the lighter literature of the period. His son, William Spottiswoode, after a distinguished career at Oxford, ultimately attained high rank as a mathematician, and in 1865 became President of the Mathematical Section of the British Association. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1853, and became its President on 30th November 1878. ”

“ Among other Scottish firms who are doing [Pg 311] excellent work mention may be made also of Messrs. R. and R. Clark of Edinburgh, who tread very closely on the heels of the Clarendon Press, and Messrs. Maclehose, the printers to the University of Glasgow. In America also there is much good work being done, that of Mr. De Vinne and of the Riverside Press, Cambridge, being of the very highest excellence.
In the history of English printing, the close of the nineteenth century will always be memorable for the brilliant but short-lived career of the Kelmscott Press. ”

“ The first Cambridge printer was John Siberch, whose history, like that of so many other early [Pg 126] printers, is totally unknown. Nine specimens of his printing during the years 1521-22 are extant. The first is the Oratio of Henry Bullock, a tract of eight quarto leaves, with a dedication dated February 13, 1521, and the date of the imprint February 1521, so that it probably appeared between the 13th and 28th of that month. The type used was a new fount of Roman. The book had no ornamentation of any kind, neither device nor initial letters. ”

“ As we have already noted, the aim of the Corporation of the Stationers' Company was not primarily the promotion of good printing or literature. Printers were looked upon by the authorities as dangerous persons whom it was necessary to watch closely. Only six years after coming to the throne, Elizabeth signed a decree [Pg 97] passed by the Star Chamber, requiring every printer to enter into substantial recognisances for his good behaviour. ”

“ Ballantyne's work, as shown in these volumes, was equal in every way to the best work done by Bensley and Bulmer at this time. Good type and good paper, combined with accuracy and clearness, at once raised Ballantyne's reputation. Longman and Rees, the publishers, declared themselves delighted with the printing, and Scott urged his friend to remove his press to Edinburgh, where he assured him he would find enough work to repay him for the removal. ”