“ No one artist-printer has contributed so much to American typography as Bruce Rogers, whose “Montaigne” type is easily the best and most practical of any special face, and whose productions while associated with the Riverside Press are marked by an originality and a consistency of excellence beyond what has been attained by any other [262] American printer. He, better than anyone else, through his knowledge of types and his skill as a designer, has given expression to the basic principles of the old-time master printers awakened by modern conditions. ”

“ The renaissance, which in Sweden burst forth at the beginning of the nineties, originated in a revival of interest in the decorative arts, especially in the textiles of the Viking and Saga periods. The Old Northern spirit ran like an undercurrent through the life of the whole country, and culminated in Artur Hazelius's epoch-making museum work, Skansen and the Northern Museum. Just at the right moment there was added a practical study of modern book-making in England and on the Continent. A whole generation was seized by the new ideas which were proclaimed with such power by William Morris. ”

“ Ricketts, in their entirely different styles, have shown that gold-tooling may be extremely beautiful as decoration without overstepping the traditional limits of the craft, and in the case of the most successful bindings now being produced these traditional limits have been recognised. Gold-tooling is by its nature a limited means of expression, though exactly where the limits lie must be a matter of feeling and taste rather than of knowledge. ”

“ We have seen that the early printers took their inspiration from the best of the contemporary book-hands. The invention of printing, however, killed the art of the scribe, and with it perished the source whence during the ages past life and beauty had been given to the letters of the alphabet and to the pages in which they were gathered. Henceforth the letters were cast in lead, and there was no influence save the force of tradition to make or keep them beautiful. ”

“ When new desires call for satisfaction and new forms begin to develop, it is always those spheres of activity which offer easy and pleasant possibilities of accomplishment that are selected for experimenting. Thus some fifteen years ago the designing of book-bindings was a favourite occupation of the artists who interested themselves in the reform of industrial art, and many who have now attained to clear and definite ideas do not want to be reminded of the sort of work that was done in those days. ”

“ Goudy has studied type design to such good purpose that he has been able to restore to the Roman alphabet much of that lost humanistic character which the first Italian printers inherited from their predecessors, the scribes of the early Renaissance. Besides being beautiful in detail his type is beautiful in the mass; and the letters when set into words seem to lock into one another with a closeness which is common in the letter of early printers, but is rare in modern type. ”

“ But this leads me into an explanatory discussion on the old printer's independence of other craftsmen whose art is now divided into separate and recognised trades. And it is remarkable that it should be so to such a great extent, for fewer places other than Paris are so sympathetically enjoined to their artists. It may be the fault of the artist who is more enwrapped in his craft than the art evolved in its ultimate end.
Within the last few years, however, printing has vastly improved, and this has been due in no small measure to the efforts of MM. G. Peignot and Sons. ”

“ To letter books in type so small as to be quite illegible, lettering that looks from a short distance like a gold line, is more unreasonable than almost any breaking of words that allows the use of letters of a larger size. ”

“ It is the fashion in some quarters to admire as the perfection of craftsmanship an exact and hard square edge to the boards of a book. This can only be got by paring the leather down till it is as thin as paper and has consequently very little strength. A softer, rounder edge is natural to a leather-covered article, and it is unreasonable to expect the qualities of a newly planed board in a material so wholly different in character. The edges of the leather-covered board should have a distinctly flat face, and clumsiness will be avoided by any good craftsman. ”

“ It was the day of Pugin and of the Gothic revival; and the public taste was won by the appearance of this book, printed in old-fashioned guise in the selfsame type which had been cast aside half a century before. Type-founders are generally quick to follow one another's lead in new fashions; and before long every type-founder in England had cut punches and cast letter in that modified form of Caslon's old-faced type which printers call “old-style.” ”

“ A book that will not open freely and that gapes like a dead oyster when it ought to be shut is not pleasant to use, and when these faults are noticed the binder generally gets the blame. Sometimes he deserves the blame, for the fault may be his, but more often than not the fault lies with the paper. To open a book a certain number of leaves of paper must be bent, and if the paper is so stiff that a single leaf will not fall over by its own weight, the book cannot be made to open quite satisfactorily if bound in the ordinary way. ”

“ In criticising decorated bindings there is a danger of falling into the common error of generalising from isolated instances. You cannot put too much ornament on a thing as small as a bookcover if the ornament is good enough. A book well bound in beautiful leather may be perfectly satisfactory and beautiful by virtue of good workmanship, fine material and colour. A binding covered with fine gold-tooling may be just as restful and far more beautiful, but while there is comparatively little scope for failure in the plain binding, there are appalling pitfalls if the cover be lavishly decorated. ”

“ Printed books are largely machine-made productions, and it would seem reasonable that machine-made books should have machine-made covers, and it is in such covers or “cases” that most of our books are issued. There is a general feeling that the cost of the binding should bear some relation to the cost of the book; but since books are turned out by the thousand from the printing press, and fine bindings can only be made singly and laboriously by hand, it is inevitable that in most cases such a binding costs much more than the book it covers. ”

“ Thus in the space of barely twenty-five years our views of what art really is and what are its functions have radically changed, and it must be left to those who come after us to estimate more correctly than we are able to at the present day, the immense labour which has been accomplished in the space of a generation. ”

“ Nothing remained, therefore, but to entrust the designing of new types to artists who had already accomplished good and original work as book decorators; and as none of the numerous German type-foundries desired or indeed could afford to be behindhand in a movement of this kind, it resulted that in the course of a few years the printing presses of the country were inundated with a flood of new “artist” types, of which, nevertheless, only relatively few have been able to survive till now. ”

“ If the writing schools can turn out such men, they will deserve well of all those who are interested in the art of the book. That our hope need not be vain is shown by the fact that calligraphers trained in the methods of the school have gone to Germany, and have there profoundly influenced the production of modern types; and the supreme irony of it all is that German type-founders are sending to England new types which draw their inspiration from a London school of which the English and Scottish type-founders seem never even to have heard. ”

“ In the course of some thirteen years that born architect, Peter Behrens, who began as a painter of easel pictures and a decorator of books, and now builds palaces, factory buildings, and gigantic business-houses, has himself designed four founts in which the whole artistic evolution of this strong-willed nature is reflected, and which yet seem so entirely the product of a natural growth that one is quite unconscious of the years of labour spent on their improvement and perfection in the interval between the preparation of the designs and the actual casting of the founts. ”

“ THE development of art in Hungary reached its highest point in the fifteenth century. The influence of the Italian renaissance made itself felt in this country sooner than anywhere else, for Mathias Corvinus gathered round him at his Court a great many Italian artists and humanists, and acquired numerous finely painted books and manuscripts. The few remaining treasures of his library, called corvinas, are wonderful examples of renaissance book-illustrations, mostly the work of Italian miniaturists, for it would seem that Hungarian artists were not employed by the King. ”

“ Leon Welamson, a young artist, has made for the new edition of this curious old book some simple and vigorous illustrations, which without being imitations are executed in the old style. It is a masterpiece of Swedish typography.
Book illustrations and decoration play an important part in the modern art of the book. Illustrated books have always been popular, and many of our best artists of to-day began their careers as illustrators. Carl Larsson is a typical Swedish illustrator and a distinguished painter. He illustrates, in colour or black-and-white, his own text. ”

“ Unlike England, France expends little additional labour on the lasting, apart from the certain attractive qualities of cloth or paper-covered board casings, while modern end-papers, as known in other countries, have so far found little consideration. Much energy is focussed on the edition de luxe, embodying the work of popular artists, good paper and type, the result being a limited number of paper-covered volumes, all excellently produced, but very often disappointing in their page arrangement and design and the suitability of text to type and type to illustration. ”

“ The monthly issues of these publications have shown ordinary printers how to produce work above the average by placing before them actual examples of the best combinations of type, paper, and colour harmonies. They have been educational in the extreme, teaching buyers of printing as well as printers how to secure the effects desired.
In the matter of domestic production America shows little originality in book-papers, the “Old Stratford” being the only distinctive exception. No hand-made book-paper is now produced in America, owing principally to the high cost of labour. ”

“ Other Italian printers had founts both of Gothic and of Roman types. The great Venetian printer Jenson, for instance, and many of his fellows printed books in both characters; but the Roman gradually prevailed, first in Italy, then in Spain and France, and later on in England. In Germany, on the other hand, the cradleland of the craft, Gothic letter of a sadly debased type has held its own down to this day. Even in Germany, however, the use of Roman type has gained ground of late years, nationalist feeling notwithstanding. ”

“ Prior to that time English printers had gone to Holland for most of their type; but Caslon's types surpassed in beauty any hitherto used in England, and the best English printing had been done from them till near the end of the century, when they were driven out by the “modern” face. Before the Juvenal was issued, a romance entitled “The Diary of Lady Willoughby,” dealing with the period of the Civil Wars, was also printed in old-faced type cast from William Caslon's matrices, so as to impart to the book a flavour of the period at which the diarist was supposed to be writing. ”

“ No art can live by merely reviving and reproducing past forms, and in reviewing the share taken by the type-founders of the past and of the present in the art of the book one cannot help considering by what means and from what quarter good types are to be designed and cut in the future. ”