Chapter C: R. Ashbee, of the Essex House Press, stated in The Private Press (2)

No book-producing of our kind can subsist without sales in America. It was our good fortune to ally ourselves in 1927 with Random House of New York. No collaboration could be more satisfactory from a technical or a personal point of view. It survived the get-rich-quick temptations of 1929; it has survived the difficulties of the depression. New blood and money entered the Press two years ago when Cecil Harmsworth, Desmond Harmsworth and Eric Harmsworth joined our board. But they belong to our Second Century, not to our first.

We have avoided antagonisms, even avoided competition. My friend Osbert Sitwell suggested that we should publish a satire on Noel Coward; Coward that we should publish his satire on the Sitwells. To both we said "no." How pleasant it would have been to issue them together in a single book! When I found that Peter Davies and the Nonesuch were both planning to reissue Cobbett's _Rural Rides_, we met and tossed for it. He won; and our editorial work was made over to him.

Of all Nonesuch books that by which I should best like the venture to be judged is our Shakespeare, edited by Herbert Farjeon. It brought us, among other things, a characteristic contact with T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence had written a letter of fervent praise of the Shakespeare to David Garnett; and I sought permission to use it. David Garnett was himself our ambassador. Lawrence appealed to the group of friends with whom he happened to be. "I don't want my letter to be reprinted. I hate the advertising of my name and opinions," he protested. To his obvious chagrin (for Lawrence had a passion for publicity as great as his passion against it) his friends supported his view. "After all," said they "you are not a Shakespeare expert." That decided Lawrence. "I think it is my duty to give permission," he said. This was his letter:

"We turn over to the Nonesuch Shakespeare. There you have created a most marvellous pleasure. I have handled it ever so many times, and read THE TEMPEST right through. It satisfies. It is final, like the Kelmscot Chaucer or the Ashendene Virgil. And it is a book which charms one to read slowly, an art which is almost gone from us in these times. Every word which Shakespeare uses stands out glowing. A really great edition. The tact and grace of your editor have been surpassing. I think I like the size and shape and binding almost as much as the text. The paper, too, is just right. Altogether a triumph. One of the best things is that it can be done again. Nobody will ever dare to produce the old type of edition now, while your text stands there to reproach them. It means a permanent improvement in Shakespeares."

"There they are, my fifty men and women." They must speak for themselves, and I have almost silenced them with my chatter. For their successors I can say only this: that it remains the ambition of the Press to make a worthy edition, textually and typographically, of every major English writer who has not already been appropriately served. It will make these books for money, and has no shame in that. We are not "Gentlemen Farmers" but workers at our trade. But we are enthusiasts also, even in our middle years; and still propagandists. Every well-designed book or advertisement or prospectus is the begetter of others; and good printing is one of the graces of life even where life is ungracious.

In a letter from Vienna in 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writes of Prince Eugene's library that it is "though not very ample, well chosen; but as the Prince would admit into it no editions but what are beautiful and pleasing to the eye and there are nevertheless numbers of excellent books that are but indifferently printed, this finikin and foppish taste makes many disagreeable chasms in this collection!"

I should like to make Prince Eugene patron saint of the Nonesuch. And dear Lady Mary as well; for it remains the object of the Nonesuch Press to meet tastes finikin and foppish like his, studious like hers.

COMPOSED IN POLIPHILUS AND BLADO TYPES

FOOTNOTES:

[34] When we published the Compendious _William Morris_ I sent copies to G. L., to Ramsay MacDonald and to Mr. Baldwin--the last a stranger to me. Their replies make almost a résumé of their political characters. G. L. saw in the social essays a conscience-pricking reproach about things left long undone. J. R. M. saw in them a cause for self-congratulation. Mr. Baldwin did not answer for nearly two years: the book had been mislaid. But when he did answer he covered two pages with his close hand-writing to apologise and explain. The Perfect Gentleman!

CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD

_Printing for Love_

From _Cockalorum_: A Bibliography of the Golden Cockerel Press, June 1943-December 1948. (An address to the Art Society, University of the South West of England in Exeter, June, 1947.) Copyright 1950 by the Golden Cockerel Press. Reprinted by permission of author and publisher.

I have called this talk "Printing for Love." I have not come to preach a gospel to you, but, as I proceed to discuss printing and publishing and book-illustration, it will be apparent to you that one of the tenets of my religion is that we workers should do our job, whether it be farming, or gardening, book-keeping or building, hewing coal or engineering, _with a will_. In Ecclesiastes the Preacher advises us: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." (Ch. 9, v. 10.) You may say that my job is a nice job; that it is all very well for me to talk. I can assure you that book-manufacture is a most intricate process. Things tend to go wrong at every stage of production. Of worries we printers have no end.

I often feel like an Irish farmer driving his pig to market. In one hand he holds a stick to prod the pig. In the other a string tied to the pig's leg. The pig goes to the right and then to the left and the countryman wonders will he ever get that pig to the market. Many of my books are like that pig. They drive me to despair. And yet I love my printing like a mountaineer loves his mountains, which he climbs arduously with sweat and aching limbs. He has his reward when he reaches the summit and enjoys a fine view, much as I enjoy the appearance of a book which I have made with infinite pains. For both of us there is the joy of achievement--of something attempted, something done.

"Oh, but," you may expostulate, "supposing you were a sewer-man, could you bring love into your work?" I am sure I would. In fact this case in point was quoted recently on the wireless. If I remember rightly, a speaker had referred with commiseration to the lot of the sewer-man working underground among the rats in the muck and stench of drains. He was called to task by a most insulted sewer-man, who explained that his was a good job--as good as any other. All the artists and the craftsmen who co-operate with me--the paper-makers, the cloth-makers, the tanners, the brass-cutters, the illustrators, the compositors, the pressmen, the binders--aye, and the authors too, who write and rewrite their text until it seems to me just right for the Golden Cockerel--all of them have their worries and their toil, but their work for me is done with love.

This is a question you might ask yourselves: can a beautiful thing be made cynically? The dice is loaded against the unwanted child of a loveless marriage. You cannot divorce your work from your life. The two are parts of a whole. My religion is that love should be the basis of all one's living and all one's work. In so far as my books have been successful as works of art, it is because they have been made with love.

Only with great self-restraint can I refrain from reading you again that beautiful thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians on Faith, Hope and Love--you remember "Love suffereth long and is kind, love envieth not, love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up." Please read it now and then. It is so important.

Perhaps, when you heard my talk was to be called "Printing for Love," you thought, "Oh, he means printing without financial reward." Believe me, love, too, hath its reward. Make what you have to make, and do what you have to do, the way I advocate, and you will have your reward. You must have _faith_ in this. We have got to fight our battles against obstructions, but, if we fight well, and do what we are intended to do, everything is made possible for us: the most miraculous things happen in their due time.

At the Golden Cockerel I never choose a book because I think it a good seller. Publishing friends are astonished when I admit that quite recently I refused books offered to me by Evelyn Waugh--one of the best selling novelists of today--and Sir Osbert Sitwell. Of course I do not disapprove of the authors. I admire them greatly. But in each case the manuscript submitted was not one I wanted for the Cockerel.

I choose those books which I believe are _right_ for this gay, mirthful, versatile bird. At times he likes to play, at times to be serious. He is interested in genuine old tales of adventure written by explorers and missionaries, who may have travelled in birch-bark canoes or quaint unwieldy ships. He is interested in old peoples and their poetry. At present he is printing a translation of the epic of Gilgamesh preserved on stone tablets. It is at least six thousand years old and refers to a flood--like Noah's Flood--which was recent history to people then. They were either more or less civilized then than we are now, according to your view of what constitutes civilization. They appear to have had more to eat than we have now; they spent more time in making life beautiful, and in thoughtful enquiry into spiritual things, such as survival after death. They had libraries of books, not printed like Golden Cockerels, but inscribed on series of stone tablets. There were several "copies" of the epic of Gilgamesh in the library at Nineveh.

To return to the Golden Cockerel, he also loves the masterpieces of English and French literature and classical literature. He is really a very human bird, kind and sometimes very amorous, never spiteful, never morbid, never cruel. I personally pretend to run this Press, but you know this chimeric cockerel really rules the roost. When I and two friends took over the Press in 1933, I had quite different ideas for it from those I had accepted a few months later. This Cockerel had his own personality and traditions. I have rather enjoyed following his gaudy plumage along the aerial avenues in which he seems to want to fly.

This has not always been easy for me. From time to time I had partners to help me. Their ideas and mine naturally did not always coincide. They gave in to me so often that just occasionally I had, in common charity, to print and publish some book favoured by one of them and which I did not myself like. Usually on such occasions the finished book was to me abortive--a baby cuckoo among my own fledglings. And they usually did not sell well. Try as you may, you cannot do quite as well for someone else's offspring.

It has always been of paramount importance that my books should sell. As a husband and a father of three children, I have had to make the Cockerel pay. Otherwise I should have had to work at something else. Obviously you cannot make a large income from the sale of, say, half a dozen books a year in small limited editions. But the Cockerel has never let me down and always made it possible for me to keep on with this work. The late St. John Hornby, who used to publish those monumental Ashendene Press books at prices in the neighbourhood of 100 gns. has said that, taken all over, he would just approximately cover his costs. No profit! He was in a financial position to ignore costs and the necessity to make his books pay. In theory that is good. In practice I think it is wholesome that the products of your labour should be commercially right. The absolute necessity for you to sell what you produce makes you take notice of the reactions of your patrons, keeps you from being too personal, too idiosyncratic, too precious, shall I say too amateurish? Here I am on difficult ground. It depends what you mean by amateurish. I think of myself as a professional, but, to the trade publishers (who would not dream of rejecting a manuscript from Evelyn Waugh), I, and others like me, are looked on as amateurs, because we do what we like.

This type of amateur, who does what he likes, scientifically, is, I believe, very important. Into this category would fall research students, and poets, and scholars, and inventors, and all sorts of people. Has a scientific study ever been made of the amateur throughout the ages and his influence on our life? If not, _there_ is a noble thesis for a research student, and he could make of it a most interesting and I think saleable book. Perhaps _one of you_ will do it!

Now you may be thinking, "here's this chap and they tell me he has a certain reputation as a printer. We get him down here to talk to us about printing, and off he goes gassing about love, and Noah's flood, and how to make money without trying to."

Please forgive me! You see I started as a printer and taught myself how to dress a book according to my tastes. Then I became a publisher. Let us make no mistake: the important thing is the literary content of the book. How it is dressed is only of secondary importance. It _can_ be dressed any old how. Obviously it is better when it is suitably dressed. But the dress, that is, the printing and binding, must not be accorded _too_ great importance--it must not _vaunt_ itself. If you ask a book-seller who has built up a circle of people who collect "cockerels" _why_ they like cockerels, he will answer "because they are _cockerels_." By this he does not, I hope, mean "because they wear cockerel dress"--or, shall I say, "plumage"?--but rather that they are, in their literary content, in their dress, and in their illustration, examples of the cockerel idea of what a book should be.

Of course it is no good the author thinking he has done everything--it is the composite whole which is so engaging. I have known some illustrators who think the author doesn't count. And authors tend to think the artist a hack who should do what he is told. Both may think that my own small contribution, as the architect of the whole structure, is unimportant. Quite the greatest joy for me in publishing is being in constant delightful intercourse with these beautiful authors and artists. Beautiful is the right word. I don't mean physically, of course, but in their natures. Compare them if you like, to the most sensitive instruments designed by man and you behold these God-made beings a hundred-fold more sensitive. Go to the races and delight in the controlled nervousness and the pent-up fire of enthusiasm in those beautiful thoroughbred horses, and yet these dreamers of dreams, these passionate romancers, these scholars, in all the controlled exuberance of their knowledge and their zeal for research, these drawers of pictures, who "see the light that never was on sea or land": the horses are as nothing beside them!

Now, who are these authors and scholars and artists? Well, some are, of course, professionals, in the sense that they live by their art, and others, a lot of them, are civil servants, or architects, or even prime ministers, who make their art a hobby. But can we end there? Is not every roadman tidying his road, every thatcher on the roof, or every good accountant neatly writing his accounts, and every worker planting his allotment of a summer's evening, an artist to a greater or less degree? He seems to me, watching him, to be working for love. And so with those of us who make seemly books.

Normally you have the publisher who chooses what books he will publish, and contracts with the author to produce and sell his work in book form. You have also the paper-maker, the ink-maker, the type-founder, the maker of printing machinery and plant. You have the printer, with his compositors who prepare the type for press, his proof-readers, his pressmen who print the corrected type on the paper, and his warehousemen, who deal out the paper, and pack the printed sheets. You have the binders and manufacturers of material and machinery used in binding. Normally a host of people have taken their part, however small, in processes which go to the making of the finished book.

In a "private press" a very great deal of the work is concentrated in the hands of its owner. In certain cases the owner himself has set the type and printed it on a hand-press. His output has thus been severely limited to the productivity of one single pair of hands. This is not practical politics today--one's turnover is too small to cover overheads. An alternative is to employ skilled help with the type-setting and presswork. This was the method employed by the Golden Cockerel up to 1933. For reasons I need not go into, this method does not now pay.

The survival of the Golden Cockerel, since I and my friends took it over in the midst of the great depression, has been due in large measure to the method of production which we adopted. By working in with the Chiswick Press, a famous old firm of trade printers, we arranged that the Cockerel should have the use of their plant and their skilled labour precisely as and when we wanted it, without the necessity for capital expenditure on plant or of providing the wages of skilled craftsmen, week in week out, whether or not fully employed. Those were terrible times, and our solution was the only one practicable. It was a great experiment, but it worked. Of all the important private presses in this country, the Cockerel alone has carried on--and right through the war. In the books of the Golden Cockerel a great tradition survives.

But the survival of the Golden Cockerel, and of the tradition which it holds dear, is not achieved solely by its method of production. On the contrary, there are other prime factors. I have said that in my view the literary content of the book is more important than its dress. We must not print for the sake of printing. Firstly then I only print what I greatly desire to publish--something that is really good. I think I have been successful in finding a lot of new literary material which a sophisticated section of the community does enjoy to read. Of course some of my book-seller friends often beg me to print the old favourites, for which there is such a great demand. Occasionally I oblige. I have a Gray's _Elegy_ at the binders now and a Keats' _Endymion_ in the press. But generally the Cockerel prefers to be more enterprising. Look at all the literature we unearthed and published on the subject of the Mutiny on the Bounty--book after book. And then those volumes of Shelley's letters to Hogg. We found and published the journal kept by the Pilgrim Fathers when they went to America. Then there were the four previously unpublished books by that legendary character, Lawrence of Arabia, and so on. These are typical of the sort of thing we've found and published for the first time. Not the old favorites, but, because they add to literature and knowledge, so well worth making known.

The second important feature of Cockerels is their illustration with engravings. More than any other process, engraving harmonizes with type. Engraved wood-blocks and copper-plates are very difficult to print as they should be printed, especially on a durable rag-paper. They are therefore little used in these days of mass-production. In the hands of the team of artists who work for the Golden Cockerel, engraving as an artistic medium is flowering as never before. By the enthusiasm and _love_ which these artists bring to their work, they advance their techniques year by year, always improving on their own previous best, or the previous best of their competitors, till there sometimes seems to be no limit to the new effects they will obtain in their illustrations. It is an undying satisfaction to the Golden Cockerel to be able to encourage and advise talented engravers, and, by displaying their work to the best advantage, to build up for them the reputations they deserve. In the twenties it was Eric Gill, Robert Gibbings, Eric Ravilious, David Jones, Blair Hughes-Stanton, Agnes Miller-Parker and John Nash. In the thirties, and more recently, other engravers like Clifford Webb, John Buckland-Wright, Reynolds Stone, Gwenda Morgan, Peter Barker-Mill, and John O'Connor have come to the fore. You have seen a few examples of my own wife's work among the books I have brought along. And now we have others too, of an astonishing brilliance, like Dorothea Braby, coming on. It is impossible for me to be sufficiently grateful for the privilege of being able in my small way to nurture this flowering and progressive art.

After their literary content and their illustration, the third feature of Cockerels which has sustained the Press, when other presses have fallen out, is my policy of co-operating with the buying public--of producing books which they can afford to buy. Obviously the very rich men who can pay 100 gns. for a book are now very few and far between. I have resisted the temptation to compete with the 100 gn. books--the "museum pieces." I have resisted the temptation to spend so much on the production of my books that they are inaccessible. With the levelling of incomes there is now a considerable public, which, if it appreciates them, can buy Cockerels at the 2 guineas or 4 guineas which their production necessitates.

Those, then are the particular features of Cockerels which have maintained the Press through difficult years. That they are works of art--the conceptions of a book-architect--would not have sufficed, but, since they are expressions of the art of the book, let us consider them architecturally for a few minutes. The subject is vast: I must try to epitomise it....

COCKEREL DEVICES BY MARK SEVERIN

ARTHUR W. RUSHMORE

_THE FUN AND FURY OF A PRIVATE PRESS. Some Voyages of The Golden Hind_

From _Bookmaking and Kindred Amenities_ edited by Earl Schenck
Miers and Richard Ellis. Copyright 1942 by Rutgers University Press.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

"It's fun, isn't it?" said my wife. "I've gotten so that I can recall whole sonnets just by reading these first lines." We were sitting in a patch of warm September sunshine under the walnut, trimmed high like a giant umbrella, over the terrace back of the press. Proof and copy of the long Contents of Edna Millay's new volume of collected sonnets lay on the table between us as we idled, savoring the first signs of Fall in the yellow leaves that the breeze scattered about the gray flagstones. The air was spicy and the ageratum and marigolds in the border matched the autumn colors of the goldenrod and wild asters by the roadside. "I love gardening, too," she said loyally. "I must pot those double begonias before the frost gets them." I lit my pipe again and we went on with the proofs. One hundred ninety-two pages set in Bruce Rogers' beautiful Centaur, corrected, tied and wrapped, lay in neat piles waiting to be taken to Camden for printing. We had worked at it off and on all summer--painstaking work, but as rewarding, in our eyes at least, as any labor we could think of--interesting copy, lots of problems to argue over, the excitement of watching the author's mind at work as proofs came back with alterations, changes that in some miraculous way always added clarity or cadence to the lines; reading and re-reading proof until the sonnets became part of us. Now it was finished, and we had added one more book to the world's store and to our little shelf of Golden Hind Press imprints. This book will be published by Harper & Brothers in an edition which would take us the rest of our lives to print by hand. The design, the whole format and all the composition is ours. The printing and binding will be done elsewhere. Thousands of people will share our pleasure (or brand us failures). We feel that books of this type offer golden opportunities for the private press. We are not selling them, we are making them our way for someone else to sell. However, most of our books are printed on an old hand press, and given to our friends. So far we still have our friends.

As a hobby, a private press may be as extravagant, or as inexpensive, as one chooses to make it. It's fun and hard work and a challenge to all the intelligence one possesses.

We started our press in 1927, named it The Golden Hind after Drake's flagship that went on adventures no more hazardous than ours. Elmer Adler called it "A Busman's Holiday" for a publisher's production man. Perhaps he was right. At that time we knew little about the problems--about as much as parents do about the first baby. We don't know much yet, but we've had a swell time and through it have made a jolly lot of friends which in itself is reward enough.

We started with an ancient hand press of unknown vintage that had been in use in the cut-room at the old Harper plant in Pearl Street since before the knowledge of any man now living. I've an idea that it may have come from England when Harpers started in 1817. Until the 1830's all their books were printed on hand presses--so close are we to the beginnings of the art of printing.

Later, in Philadelphia, we found a big Washington hand press in perfect condition that was going out as old metal. The bed was smooth though the edges showed the nicks of hard wear from the endless up-ending of the forms of some country newspaper. With decent treatment it will be just as good a hundred years from now.

We made up in enthusiasm what we lacked in knowledge. It's not always wise to know too much--it's a great damper on ambition. Shortly after we started, a chance came to do a proposed definitive edition of a well-known poet's works. It was to be in seven folio volumes on handmade paper and no effort was to be spared to make it right. Six hundred pounds of 18 point Lutetia and weight fonts of the smaller sizes were ordered cast at the Enschedé Foundry in Haarlem, Holland, for the job. The type duly came, pages were set, and sample forms printed and bound--and then the project was withdrawn! In the light of accumulated experience I still break out in a cold sweat at the thought of our colossal nerve to have taken on such a task. Anyhow we had the type, and have used it many times. With it we have set the limited editions of each new book of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poems as they have come along, since 1928.

The status of a private press is difficult to define. As far as we are concerned it is to make as well as we can only those books that we want to do and to turn down all else; to have no "help," no payroll, keep no books; to care not a hoot about a balance sheet which has no column for satisfaction; and to take all the time we want to do the job the way we want it. From the standpoint of factory speed we are nothing to write home about--but we are not a factory and have no ambitions in that direction. Ours is a private press and we work as we please: that is where the fun comes in. We can work hard if need arises; then hours have no meaning, and we work till we get exhausted, fed up, and solemnly vow that we'll never do another book. But we have been at it nearly fifteen years and we still think, even though composition is exacting work, that such congenial labor is the best fun in the world. Sometimes we have furious arguments over punctuation, as though life depended on it. It is surprising how much warmth can be generated over the position of a comma. When we set _Shakespeare's Sonnets_ we had at least six different sources to work from, including a facsimile of the first edition. A single punctuation mark will completely change the meaning of a sonnet, so condensed is the wording to fit the mould. No two sources agreed throughout--who were we to put in Shakespeare's points for him--so the smoke got pretty thick sometimes, and the result was still another reading of the sonnets embodying those details we preferred from each: that's the fury of it.

The dream of every private press is to own its own private face. We had our chance but didn't know what to use for money so we let it go. One of the best presses in the United States now owns that type--alas! We have many, too many, faces and borders and florets collected from Europe when the world was sane, yet every new volume seems to need something we do not have. Fred Goudy cast for us at his shop at Marlboro two sizes of Mediaeval. We did Mrs. Browning's _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ in it. That type is precious now since the matrices were lost in the fire that destroyed all his equipment at Deepdene. Long before the Monotype cut the Deepdene face, Fred cast it for us. We used it for Dr. North's _Hymns_. Then along came a book my wife wanted to do. Two hundred and eighty-eight pages of 14 pt. A.T.F. Garamond all standing in galleys made a lot of type for us to store. We used it again for Frederic Prokosch's _The Assassins_ and later for _The Carnival_. Gradually the metal has crept into the house until scarcely a room is spared. We sleep with 60 cases of type in stands on our sleeping porch. We should be safe in a tornado--we have plenty of ballast.

A couple of years ago we did a group of Edmund Spenser's _Amoretti_ for Christmas. The lines breathe the spirit of another day and we wanted to preserve, if we could, the romantic atmosphere. I remembered that for the titles of the poems in _The Queen's Garland_, printed for R. H. Russell in 1898, D. B. Updike had used an odd Italic which he told me was Original Old Style cast by the old Farmer foundry in 1854. Some one had had fun with the 18 point size--it had a swell set of oversized vowels and all the long ſſ ligatures. The resulting effect looked much like very early printing. The mats were in the possession of the A.T.F. though they seemed never to have heard of them and were a bit annoyed by my insisting on seeing their file copy of the Farmer type book. There it was, and eventually they dug them out and cast them for us. We printed the book on our old Hoe hand press on Arak Ash white paper. For a frontispiece we used Virtue's beautiful engraving of Spenser. It was bound in tan boards with dusty rose cloth spine and a bright yellow label. In many ways it is our favorite book.

Last year we had fun (perhaps I should say I did as my wife did not give her fullest sympathy). 1940 was celebrated, and how! as the 500th Anniversary of the Invention of Printing. The whole country broke out in a rash of exhibitions, lectures, special articles and such like, on poor old Gutenberg about whom practically nothing is known to begin with, not even that he invented movable type. If he did, he was only trying to fake manuscript writing and should have been hung as a forger. I got pretty fed up on the tosh that was being handed out. So, to even the score, I "discovered" in a garret in Mainz, Germany, the private diary of Gutenberg's wife (no one but I knew he had one). By quoting from her diary I showed conclusively that all the credit was really hers. I had cuts made of the old leather-bound volumes of the diary (four old volumes from the Harper Medical Library) and a page of the manuscript (translated _into_ German and written in the lovely hand of Dr. Otto Fuhrmann). Dr. Herman Püterschein, that infallible authority on things typographic, wrote a Foreword. It was titled _The Mainz Diary: New Light on the Invention of Printing_ and 200 copies went out for Christmas. Then the unexpected happened. Letters began pouring in showing it was being taken as gospel. Pundits, librarians, experts in the graphic arts, fell for it hard. My wife threatened to disown me. Of course the tale hadn't a word of truth in it. I had been in Mainz and Frankfort a few years before so that the thing started off with some element of reality. A friend in London gobbled it whole--I had to send a letter by Clipper to keep him from showing it proudly to his friends. After all, my yarn had about as much truth in it as most of the hash that I'd been forced to listen to during the year and I'd gotten quite fond of Frau Gutenberg. I felt, too, that I'd done my bit for the cause. Many of the biggest libraries, including the Library of Congress, had requested and received copies. Ten years from now it will pop up in some bibliography of a Ph.D. thesis.

I had my fun all right.

But the boys got even with me. A year later, the editor of a well-known art magazine and his wife, with careful deliberation and much ingenuity, sold me down the river with a hoax that I gobbled whole. So we are even and everybody is happy.

Why are we so cracked about a private press? I often wonder myself. The house smells of printer's ink and type wash. Right now there are eleven metal-strapped type boxes on the sunporch where the expressman left them a week ago; and my wife is to have a luncheon tomorrow. Fine looking mess. I'll get around to them soon. There are piles of printed signatures of our Christmas book all over the place. The composing room is crawling with undistributed type. Can hardly work without spilling it. My pet Vandercook brayer has fallen arches--it was left in the sun yesterday and its insides turned to soup.

Next morning on my desk I found the proof of our new broadside _Emmer Jane_ with the drawing at the top beautifully colored by the artist. It's swell. Presently the messenger brought in the advance copies of the new _Sonnets_ bound in blue natural-finished cloth stamped in gold, just as I wanted it. I can hardly wait to get home to show them to my wife. We must get that new type to use for _The Ghost Ship_. We'll start it this week-end. How slow the days go. Isn't a private press fun!

_Postscript_ 1951:

Still hard at it. We are older but no wiser. Nowadays the grand-children come in the back door and call up the composing-room stairs, "Arthur, may we play type and picture cuts?" They spend hours at it and I spend hours putting things to rights.

The check-list has grown to 186 books and pamphlets. The work is still as exciting as ever, though we try to check the fury a bit. The skipper of the _Golden Hind_ retired in January 1950, which released more time for the press; being in business always was a nuisance.

We spent the summer doing a first edition of a Mark Twain book for Harpers--mixed with a lot of farming. For a retirement occupation we can commend a private press. It keeps up the interest in life.

Offers of work flow in, much more than we care to accept. We are not in business and we have more projects of our own than we shall ever complete.

It's fun to get up with the chickens and work together all morning, spend the afternoon puttering about outdoors, and retire at night dog tired--what my wife calls "nice tired," no nervous tension.

The _Golden Hind_ is twenty-four years old but her seams are tight and she manages nicely--who knows, maybe the voyage is only nicely begun.

COMPOSED IN FAIRFIELD TYPES

EDWIN GRABHORN

_The Fine Art of Printing_

An address before the Roxburghe Club of San Francisco at its meeting in the Allied Arts Guild, Menlo Park, California, May 15, 1933. Fifty copies printed by Edwin and Robert Grabhorn for members of the Roxburghe Club, May 15, 1933. Reprinted by permission of the author.

I know of no better way of beginning this talk to you tonight on PAPER, INK and TYPE than by first sketching a brief outline of the Art of Printing.

Printing in its childhood was an art. The highest period of any art is its childhood, because childhood moves by spontaneous inner urge, not by rules and intellectual bondage that runs all into fixed moulds. It is an accepted truth that as skill and elaboration creep into development of an art, simplicity, feeling and beauty decline. The early printers were not weighed down with rules, formulas and theories which have smothered us today. With but one font of type, a wooden frame with a screw attachment and a crude inking device, they have given us books of strength and beauty that we have never equalled.

We all like to think of the invention of printing as springing Minerva-like from the brain of man. Printing is, of course, the combination of paper, type, ink and the press; and these various elements were some three hundred years in the process of springing. Paper was the cheap substitute for vellum, and type the substitute for hand-writing.

All of us are more or less familiar with the invention of printing and with its God-like first-born, the Gutenberg Bible. Those who have had the thrill of examining the great 42-line Bible have told us that it is the most beautiful book ever printed. This is a magnificent tribute--one that I have never heard contradicted. Just how much of the beauty of this Bible is due to the art of the illuminator and how much to the skill of the printer has never been told by those who represent it to be the most perfect specimen of printing.

A few years ago a book speculator dissected an incomplete copy, selling the leaves with beautifully hand-illumined initials at twice the price of those pages without decoration. I hope this speculator lost his ill-gotten gains in the stock market.

A thing of beauty stands alone, and I know of no fixed law by which we can judge beauty except through the emotions; and emotions are rather difficult to tabulate. I, myself, can only contemplate the childhood of printing with amazement and admiration. In its youth it exhausted every possibility of type arrangement.

An estimate of the activity of those first wooden frames can only be guessed at. In Venice alone, as early as 1472, over two million separate volumes were printed. By the opening of the sixteenth century the art of printing had spread to every civilized country and the supply of its raw materials became so great that the process of cheapening set in.

The first printers had selected as models for their types the beautiful hand-written books of their day. The second generation of printers modelled their types from those of the first printers. The illuminator gave way to the wood-cutter and the fine art of printing became a science, then a craft, and when William Morris tried to stop its downward slide, in 1891, it was a trade.

During this downward trip through four centuries, weak attempts to restore the art of printing to its first high place in the life of man were made. Benjamin Franklin wrote on the "Improvement of Printing Backwards," protesting the discontinuance of the tall "f." But man was not interested in the intangible influence of art as much as he was in the perfection of the machine.

The ink was hardly dry on the effusions of our modern printing critics, when the collapse of over-production set in and silenced them, I hope, permanently.

Writing about modern books in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Francis Meynell of the Nonesuch Press says: "The type-setting machines used with as much skill as hand-set type will give a better result, and in alliance with fast but very perfect cylinder printing presses, will give this result not to a few, but to a multitude. It has taken us from the day of 'the book beautiful,' and given us the day of the beautiful book."

The fast moving cylinder presses of the Nonesuch Press have slowed up since this was written. And we can thank God that we have some opportunity for reflection.

One of the modern criticisms of William Morris and the private presses that he inspired is that too much stress was placed on method. Method means how a thing is done and how a thing is done is of very vital importance if we want to give our work durability.

I have said before that it was William Morris who attempted to stop the downward slide of printing. He was the leader in the revival of what is known as "modern fine printing." It has been said that Morris was inspired by a lecture of Emery Walker's on the Golden Age of Printing. While not denying Walker's position in this revival, we must admit that there is a vast gulf between talking and doing. Morris's was a very simple yet positive personality. There were no tints in his make-up. When asked if he liked colors, his answer: "blue and red," tells us whole volumes in folio. He had no tolerance for the effeminate printing of his day. He even scorned the sunny pages of the Italian Renaissance printers. It is no wonder that his Gothic books, in violent contrast to the weak old styles and modern type faces of his time--and our time, too--were startling. I have no doubt that some antiquarian hundreds of years hence, delving among musty tomes, will find Morris's books still giants in a land of dwarfs.

Whether you like or dislike Morris's books is of little concern to me. But what is of vital importance to me as a printer, and should be to all printers who are endeavoring to print books that will last, is the honesty of William Morris. Morris knew, because he was a collector of the earliest printed books, that those early printed books could not have descended to him, looking as sparkling and vital as the day they left their makers' hands, without honesty of craftsmanship. It was this craftsmanship that Morris revived, and that we today will have to revive again before our books can have any claims to a long life.

Let me briefly describe to you the various processes used in the making of books, beginning with the paper on which the book is printed. Morris found no paper being manufactured that was suitable for his use. It was only after months of experiment and failure, during which he worked at the paper mill himself, that a satisfactory sheet was made for him. With the closing of the Kelmscott Press after Morris's death, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker used his specifications for this paper at their Doves Press. This mill still manufactures this paper, and it can be obtained easily enough. But it is not popular with the printers of today because its texture is so tough, its resistance to type so great, that we rather choose the short cut to the Royal Road to Fine Bookmaking, using the many counterfeits with their imitation deckle edges and their artificial ageing at the mill. We also like opaqueness in our paper, although transparency is usually a guarantee of its quality. All-linen-rag quality paper can easily enough be printed on if dampened first. By lessening the resistance of the paper through dampening, the type can penetrate its tough fiber, and the ink thus becomes a part of the paper itself. But by taking the short cut and not dampening the paper, at least four times the quantity of pressure and ink must be used. This over-abundance of pressure and ink still does not penetrate the paper but leaves the ink upon the paper's surface so that it looks to me as if printed from an etcher's plate. The excessive amount of ink, because of the heavy varnish used in its manufacture, has a tendency to shine when dry, producing a luster that is hard on the eyes. In time a film of oil will encircle each individual letter, discoloring the paper, and the page will look like those cheaply printed eighteenth-century books do to us today.

I know of no process in the making of a fine book more difficult of perfecting than getting the right amount of pressure and ink into the paper. In hand-made paper there is only an approximate uniformity in the thickness of the sheets, and these variations can be overcome by using a hand-press. The sense of touch must be developed until you can feel the right amount of pressure through the lever. The mechanical press is so regulated that it cannot control the variations of the paper's thickness. The right pressure can, of course, be applied to the average sheet--the heavier and lighter sheets can be sorted out before printing. However, this is seldom done. The paper is usually sorted when the finished book is being collated.

I can speak with some authority on the importance of dampening a sheet of fine paper. Such a process takes lots of time, but if you think the time not well spent compare a book from the Kelmscott Press with any of the books of our best machine printers of today. You will see that decay is already beginning to set in in the machine book. The edges of the paper will soon turn yellow and the ink begin to spread.

I hesitate to turn from the processes of making a fine book endure without impressing upon you the importance of using the finest quality of paper. The paper, and the ink that becomes a part of that paper, determines the life of the book, just as stones and mortar do in architecture. No matter how fine the type or how beautiful the decorations, the book must die if quality be lacking in both paper and ink.

And now just a few remarks about the binding of a book. Bindings are the protection for the body of a book. Here permanency decreases as use increases. Only those books that have escaped usage have come down to us with their original bindings, except those bound in limp vellum. Heavy boards encased in leather were the protection of many early books. The swinging of the heavy covers breaks the hinges of the book, and this leads to destruction. William Morris revived the use of limp vellum as a book covering.

Of far more importance than the cover in the making of a fine book is the gathering and sewing. When the printed sheets are folded a trained eye should put them together so that pages either under- or over-inked may be taken out. If there are no extras, then all the light pages can be put into one book, and the dark in another. If this is done, the critic will say that the press work is even.

After the book is assembled the sheets are sewn together by hand, using a strong linen thread. Of course, they can be sewn on a machine, but you might just as well save that expense by gluing the sheets together. If you don't believe me, take a machine-sewn book, before it is glued, pull off the first section, hold it up by the last page and watch the book fall to pieces. Hand-sewn books are sewn on either cords or tapes. Of course, you can have cords and tapes on a machine-sewn book, but they will be false ones, pasted on after the book has been stabbed to death.

I do not want to give you the impression that I am some sort of John the Baptist crying in a wilderness of machines. Machines are designed for special purposes and when we try to use them for a different purpose from that for which they were intended we fail. You would think a carpenter who used a machine that was made to drive nails in an orange box unbalanced if he tried to adjust that machine to build a house. The delicately adjusted printing press that Francis Meynell idealizes was designed for producing our ephemeral printing.

A machine cannot create--it can only assist, directed by the mind and imagination. The more that is left to the machine, the worse the work. The machine can arrive at perfection, perfection that is cold and dead and mechanical. And it is this cold and dead perfection that brings me to the beauty of the book of today.

I would say that "Post-Modern" Fine Printing began in America with Bruce Rogers, at the plant of William Rudge. It was Bruce Rogers' books that have influenced American and English printers more than any other recent single force. It was the "charm" and finish of this man's work that none of us escaped. During the years that Bruce Rogers was designing special editions at the Riverside Press there were few collectors of his books. As late as 1920, I bought some of these books from the publishers. They had been in stock nearly twenty years! Among them was "The Song of Roland" at the publisher's price. When I first started printing I was already an admirer and collector of these Riverside Press limited editions.

Now William Rudge was a better business man than a printer. He recognized the ability of Rogers and engaged him. Then things began to happen to our Fine Art of Printing. The typographical designer came into fashion, the machine was glorified and we all became theorists. Printing was aimed at suitability. The scholar and critic displaced the master craftsman and the advertising artist was added by way of variety.

Each new type face, faithfully re-cut by the aid of the pantograph and resurrected from our admittedly worst periods of printing, was eagerly bought by our typographical experts. The printers who had been quietly producing books, trying to make them a little better than necessary, fell into the hands of the publisher and the publicity agent. And the publisher announced that the next limited edition of 1600 copies was completely over-subscribed--the poor printer got one-third of what you had to pay. It was a Wonderland, indeed, until Alice woke up, and the printer was left with all the cards, and they were all blank.

I am very glad it all happened. I would go through any form of hysteria again, if we could produce another _Leaves of Grass_. Since I am going to talk about type, I know of nothing better than to relate our experience in printing Walt Whitman's masterpiece, for it has shown me the folly of theory and intellect in art.

We accepted this undertaking with enthusiasm. Here was an opportunity to prove that we could print a book. The first deposit had no more than been spent when the publishers announced it as the finest book to be printed in America, and off we started on the wrong track.

Well, the finest book had to have the finest type and the finest type was the latest type. And it had to be a folio in size, because for One Hundred Dollars you had to get a folio. We bought one thousand pounds of the finest type; 18 point Lutetia, fresh from a new designer in Holland. And we hired two printers to set this bright new type and when it was all set, we pulled a proof and started to put grass into it--pale green grass, and it looked like grass and we pulled it out and tried again. Well, every time we tried that bright new type it didn't look right. So we dug up some of the latest theories about suitability, tried again, but it was no use. The brain told us one thing and our eyes another.