Chapter I: , attempted to copy some font, and that, not following any

special method, he found it pretty tedious work: that he then read Chapters II, III and IV, and found, with the help of our information about the Latin capitals in a square, and about the Gothic letter being dependent upon the spreading of a quill pen, that things seemed clearer, more intelligible. But we think that, with the help of the present chapter, he will make still more progress. If he, fully appreciating our reference to the quill pen, procured one, and set to work studying the Grasset letters {198} he must have made rapid progress; for it is only by using the quill pen that the Grasset and Auriol letters can be understood. So we say that if a printer will procure one and practice the Caroline alphabet given in the last chapter, next the Burgomensis, next the Minnesinger, and then the Stimmel and Rogel alphabets, he will find that he has a solid foundation on which to study lettering, and a clear idea of the genius of letters. He will begin to realize that the Caroline is the simplest, the Burgomensis and Minnesinger the more complex, but not very ornamental, though in them the caligrapher had begun to assert himself, using a flourish from time to time to ornament the letters. And he will notice that these flourishes are such as are made naturally with a quill or reed pen, and that upon these curves and swellings are based not only the Gothic capitals, but also what are known as lower-case letters.

It so happened that most of the southern scribes (Italians and Spanish) confined themselves to a very simple letter, while the northern ones took pleasure in variety. The southern style is called the Italian, or italic; the northern, the Gothic. There are many historical instances, however, where northern manuscripts are simple; and on the other hand, the letters of Visigothic and Lombardic writers, though southern, were more ornamental than those of their Roman and Venetian brethren; and our Burgomensis specimen we call Gothic, though it was originated in Italy. The true southern ornamentation was originated under the Arabic influence in Spain (at the time of the Saracenic conquest), and traveled up to France, where it is found in the elongated d, s and f in the French diplomatic hand.

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You, of course, know that when the art of printing was invented the types had to be cast, and the dies were naturally cut in the form of the letters of the manuscript of the country in which the printing was done. Caxton imitated the manuscript of the Low Countries and not that of England, when he printed the first book printed in English movable type. So, too, Gutenberg’s type imitated the German manuscript, while that of Aldus, tradition says, was cast after the manuscript of Petrarch, and that form has been called Italian or italic ever since. We give a specimen of Aldus’ “Horace”: copy with a quill the lower case in it till you can write with ease, and you will be able to write as Petrarch did. It is harder to associate it with quill pen writing than to associate the Gothic with the pen letter. Nevertheless, if you will write for a little while with an old quill, lettering like the Minnesinger, and then with a new quill imitate the Aldus italic, you will soon see that the italic character depends upon the pressure of the quill pen, just as the Gothic does, though not to such a degree. Make lower-case _a_, _d_ and _s_, or an _m_ several times, and you will see what I mean. The other Italian form, which printers do not call italic, is like the Lucidario, which is less cursive than the Petrarchian form. When modernized, the Lucidario becomes the “Jenson” and Morris type (while the Aldus is our italic); it only needs a little investigation to realize how easily it became the French Old Style and English Old Style, and then our modern, roman lower case.

It will not be difficult for you, if you will really obtain the quill pen and practice as I propose, to realize the truth of the following suggestions:

A printer should show an educated taste in his {201} designs. Few people know this, and your fight will be continually against this ignorance, both in yourself■

■and your customers. You will think that anything you like is artistic and appropriate and you will be tempted {202} to undertake it. Your customers will say that they “know nothing about art” but they “know what they like”; so they will pick out some ill-executed and inappropriate job and insist upon your following it. But my business is simply with that which is established as standard, and not with what people like or dislike. Now, historic association plays an important part in designing for printers. The first page of the Larousse dictionary is a superb example of historic association introduced into a design. Here, to illustrate the letter A we have letters from many different periods, but they are all harmonious because of their ornament and their execution. And they are appropriate because they are historical. So if you are designing an announcement of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a prospectus of a genealogical society, a book of early English poetry (earlier than the tenth century) you could use the sixth or seventh century A because that belongs to the very best Irish-English lettering used between the sixth and tenth centuries. The other letters that go with the Larousse sixth century ornamented A specimen you will find in an example from the “Book of Kells,” given in Strange’s “Alphabets,” and perhaps in the “Durham Book.” This identical A is probably from “The Rule of St. Benedict.” Now, if you should obtain an Anglo-Saxon alphabet and master its style and apply it as we have suggested, it would be properly associated with these historic subjects; so you, as an educated printer, would know that you were right, and any criticism would not deter you from using it.

I take it for granted, however, that you use such letters as this A only as initials, or in designing a title {203} of a line or two; and that you would not let it occupy too much of the page: for it is not only necessary that a letter should be associated historically with a subject and that it be well designed, but it must also be associated with printing or bookmaking. It is true that some introductory pages in the sixth and seventh century Irish-English manuscripts were sometimes very ornamental, but the reading pages were, as a rule, quite■

■simple. The good bookmaker never forgets his pages are for reading. So, a Gothic ornamental letter that might be appropriate in a stained glass window or on a hand-painted testimonial might be offensive throughout a printed book. I know of nothing more inartistic, more nauseating to critics, than the millions of lithographed mottoes, Christmas cards, etc., that the English lithographic publishers have put out for the last decade—overburdened with ornament that should be painted and not printed. And so the whites in this sixth century A, and the dotted outline around it, make {204} it in a way less appropriate for general printing than the solid black, twelfth century A.

The middle A is in the style of the wood-cut Venetian letter of the sixteenth century; and while on general principles a gray background like this is not so satisfactory as a black one, yet this is not a bad specimen of designing, for the stipple could be punched into the wood very deeply, and is so near together that if one hole did fill up it would not be missed. However, it, too, must not be used for general printing, but only as rich ornament. It is well balanced, mind you, and therefore the detail is not so worrying as would be as much detail put in freehand, aimlessly and unbalanced.

If you will now turn to the cover design of the Larousse given in the August number, you will find it a beautiful production by Grasset, wherein we see also some decorative elements that may be studied in conjunction with what we have written in this and preceding chapters about letters. For example, the use of line with silhouette—we find a dandelion leaf reduced to silhouette, and another laurel wreath like the one pictured on the head of Goethe’s mother. But the lettering of the title is the most interesting part of it. Grasset has studied the Caroline letter, and reproduces it with very scholarly fidelity. Only when you have studied an example like the Caroline alphabet we give from Strange’s book can you appreciate the workmanship and good taste in the Grasset. A companion piece to this is the heading by Auriol where we see a modification of the monumental letter and the uncial as in the d and the r. Here the initials J J and the initial L are Gothic in principle, and you will not fail to see how■

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■{206} harmoniously the L below the leaves extends the spirit of the plant design, so that if you have ever read essays upon Gothic art, like the writings of Ruskin, you will readily see the plant form is here built upon, as in Gothic architecture. What we have said so far ought to have prepared you for a historic survey of the topic of lettering. Our space is much too limited to make such a survey very extensive, but what we shall give in the next chapter will serve as a foundation on which you can build, by reading, a much more exhaustive study of the subject.

{207} CHAPTER VII.

THE GROWTH OF WRITTEN LANGUAGE — SIGNS AND SYMBOLS BECOME HIEROGLYPHS — EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHS BECOME HIERATIC OR CURSIVE — THE HIERATIC BECOMES ANGULAR IN THE PHŒNICIAN — PHŒNICIAN ALPHABET A MONUMENTAL ONE AND THE LETTERS LIKE OURS — FROM THE PHŒNICIAN COME THE GREEK AND LATIN ALPHABETS, WHICH ARE USED THROUGHOUT EUROPE TODAY.

The growth of written language is briefly recorded as follows. Primitive man used signs and symbols, as does the North American Indian. Noah understood the symbol of the dove with the olive branch. Had he wished to record the event of the flood he would probably have drawn several waved lines to represent water, and a mountain peak underneath, to show that the water rose above the mountains. A second picture of a dove with an olive branch would have indicated that the waters had subsided. This method of writing was used by the Assyrians and Egyptians 5000 B. C. With the Assyrians the symbols developed into “cuneiform,” or wedge-shaped signs, stamped on clay. With this form we have nothing to do, as it never influenced our writing; but with the Egyptians (as with the Chinese) the symbols soon took a written form called hieratic (used by the priests), which is the direct parent of our own handwriting. In hieroglyphs on monuments in Egypt, the sign for water was a horizontal zigzag, and for a mountain a silhouette of hill-like form. These {208} were painted, and sometimes partly incised on soft stone or stucco, and had a pictorial character. But when the priests had to write voluminous rituals, they used a reed pen on papyrus, and reduced the silhouette pictures to shorthand-like marks. The first example in the Larousse Dictionary (page 201), represents the hieratic shorthand of the hieroglyph of a bird. But not only did the Egyptians use their signs as hieroglyphic word symbols, but they also used them as phonetic signs, so that the sign for water stood for both water (_mu_) and the sound _n_. The Phœnicians and Hebrews are supposed to have borrowed their alphabet from the Egyptian hieratic writing; and in the transition the irregular character of the markings of the reed pen on papyrus disappeared and monumental regularity took its place, as nearly all of the early Phœnician and Hebrew writing was in the form of inscriptions on stone and metal. But in this transition the letters did not revert to the Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol, but simply became an angular, simplified form of the hieratic, so that the A became a V or caret-like form with a line crossing it.

With the Phœnicians and Hebrews the signs were never used for word signs, but for syllabic (or letter) forms, so that with them N was simply a phonetic sign (plus variable vowel accompaniments).

This alphabet was used by the Phœnicians, Hebrews, Moabites and other Semitic inhabitants of Palestine. It is supposed to have been carried by the Phœnicians to Greece, and possibly to countries farther west, but until investigation throws further light upon the subject it is well to suppose that all the other countries of Europe {209} received their alphabets from Greece, so that, virtually, all the alphabets of Europe—Latin, English, German and Russian-are simply modifications of the Greek (see the succeeding specimens in the Larousse Dictionary page). The Greek alphabet was modified in two ways: first, in the monumental form it became more regular—more right-angled—than the Phœnician; secondly, in the manuscript it became much more irregular—cursive in general, with angles not at right angles (see cursive examples, third row of Larousse Dictionary page)—so that in some third century manuscripts there is as much irregularity as in the Egyptian. This character, however, is more apt to be found in the late Greek manuscripts—that is, those written during the Christian era—than in classic Greek manuscripts where simplicity and regularity prevail. It is particularly interesting to the printer to realize this fact: for when he sees a difference in European lettering—as, for instance, the difference between Russian and German text on the one hand, and English on the other—he must remember that Russian and German are outgrowths of the late Greek or ornamental lettering; while English, Italian, Spanish and French are the outgrowths of the simpler classical Greek forms. To distinguish the two we have called the first (most of which is irregular) Gothic, the second (which is generally regular) Latin. But many an irregular manuscript was written by other than Gothic scribes, and there are some Latin manuscripts that are as irregular as the Gothic.

No matter how a letter may vary in ornamentation in a German, Russian, or English book, it is an outcome {210} of a Greek original. In the Russian, in one or two cases, a sign is a compound of two Greek letters, but in English each letter has its Greek prototype. Now anyone who stops to think will notice that monumental letters on stone are about the same in all countries. (The letters on Gothic brasses, however, are dissimilar to the usual monumental letters.) For the monumental letter is usually made by measuring, as in the first Bauernfeind alphabet, and is cut by an ordinary workman who follows a pattern, which should be simple. Therefore, an A is nearly always two oblique uprights and one horizontal crosspiece, like the sixth Larousse example. The two uprights are not always at the same angle, but they are nearly always oblique, though one may be very near the perpendicular. The crosspiece is sometimes oblique, but rarely at an angle greater than fifteen degrees. So a monument erected in Greece 600 B. C., one in Rome 60 B. C., one in Italy in 1400 A. D., and one in Paris today, have virtually the same letter A upon them as one written in Paris today, and a child who had just learned its letters could recognize it in each.

It must not be expected that in a short treatise of this kind we can cover the whole field of paleography, but our few notes on the subject may indicate to some readers a line of study that will repay anyone who undertakes it. The easiest method is to examine manuscripts of Bible text, where the subject matter is pretty well known, and, following the different styles of writing, acquaint oneself with the development of writing in different centuries and in different countries. A valuable handbook giving facsimiles of many Bible pages is “Bible Illustrations,” published by Henry Frowde, New York—it costs but $1.

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Headpiece for a French periodical.]