Chapter XIX: The Revival of Printing

The revival of the art of printing began when Messrs Charles Whittingham revived Caslon’s famous founts at the Chiswick Press in 1844. The first volume of the revival was the _Diary of Lady Willoughby_, printed for Messrs Longmans. Before that date, and for a period covering something like a century and a half, a process of degeneration had been at work in the craft of bookmaking, which, towards the close of the eighteenth century, had reached a degree of positive ugliness as supreme in its own way as the positive beauty of the books by the great presses of the past. This is all the more remarkable when it is remembered that the materials with which the revival was begun existed so far back as the year 1720, when Caslon set up his type foundry in London and commenced casting those “old-faced” alphabets which had been drawn from the seventeenth-century Elzevirs and Plantins.

But although the revival of printing began so far back as 1844 with the work of the Chiswick Press, the revival of the personal note in printing did not come about until a half-century later, when, during the Eighteen Nineties, suddenly, with few obvious preliminaries, we found ourselves in the midst of the Golden Age of what may be termed subjective printing. The revival appeared to be extemporaneous, but, like all such occurrences, it was founded on a succession of real if imperceptible circumstances, not least of which were the existence of ugliness and lack of individuality which sooner or later will, in any age in which it occurs, provoke the finer and more impressionable minds to protest. The protest in this instance took, in the productions of the Vale, Kelmscott, Eragny, Essex House, and Doves presses, a creative and positive form, as natural as the foliation and fruition of plants. The tastes of such men as William Morris, Emery Walker and Charles Ricketts were revolted at the vulgar, tawdry and expressionless books of the time and, being masters of practical imagination, their protest was creative. They wanted beautiful books, and instead of grumbling with what existed, they set to work and made what they could not buy. They were moved again by that vital form of atavism which, by throwing back to an earlier period, picks up the dropped thread of tradition, and so continues the process of evolution; their protest therefore became, in the best sense of the word, a revolution: a turning round to the period when craftsmanship, imagination and life were one and indivisible.

In the making of books the first and most essential demand is for legibility. The printing must be readable. To this end must type be fashioned and page built. Charles Ricketts, with those two other masters of the revival of great printing, William Morris and Emery Walker, realised this need, and in their founts they aimed at clarity and utility combined with personal expression. The commercial tradition of the oblong letter, with its false utility, was abandoned, and the dignity of the square and round types of Jenson restored, possible loss of space by such a proceeding being obviated by greater care in the building of the page and in the setting of the lines.

The Arts and Crafts movement had, as we have seen, set people of taste hunting for the lost threads of good craft tradition, and the _fin de siècle_ revival of printing as an art-craft was one of the most successful results of its efforts. The study of well-printed books of the past led William Morris and Emery Walker towards what may be called a new ethic of good printing. They set forth their ideas in a joint essay forming one of the _Arts and Crafts Essays_ of 1893. “The essential point to remember,” they said, “is that the ornament, whatever it is, whether picture or pattern-work, should form _part of the page_, should be a part of the whole scheme of the book. Simple as this proposition is, it is necessary to be stated, because the modern practice is to disregard the relation between the printing and the ornament altogether, so that if the two are helpful to one another it is a mere matter of accident. The due relation of letters to pictures and other ornaments was thoroughly understood by the old printers; so that, even when the woodcuts are very rude indeed, the proportions of the page still give pleasure by the sense of richness that the cuts and letters together convey. When, as is most often the case, there is actual beauty in the cuts, the books so ornamented are amongst the most delightful works of art that have ever been produced. Therefore, granted well-designed type, due spacing of the lines and words, and proper position of the page on the paper, all books might be at least comely and well-looking; and if to these good qualities were added really beautiful ornament and pictures, printed books might once again illustrate to the full position of our Society that a work of utility might be also a work of art, if we cared to make it so.” This passage contains the germ idea of the return to fine printing.

Still, although so much research and good work was done by William Morris and Emery Walker, the desire to produce books of dignity and beauty inspired more than one group of enthusiasts, and the founders of the Kelmscott Press were not the first in practical results. _The Hobby Horse_ (1886–1892), edited by Herbert P. Horne and Selwyn Image, with its carefully built pages, was an earlier intimation of coming developments, and Hacon & Ricketts devised a new typographical beauty by the publication of _The Dial_, in 1889. The revival, however, began to find itself at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition of 1888, when Emery Walker contributed an essay on printing to the catalogue. In the years 1889 and 1890 Morris made a definitely practical move by superintending the printing of three books, _The House of the Wolfings_, _The Roots of the Mountains_ and the _Gunnlang Saga_, at the Chiswick Press. All this time he had been brooding upon the idea of a Press of his own, and he made his first experiments towards the foundation of the Kelmscott Press in 1889 and 1890. “What I wanted,” he wrote in the _Note_ on his aims in founding the Kelmscott Press, “was letter pure in form; severe, without needless excrescences; solid, without the thickening and thinning of the line which is the essential fault of the ordinary modern type, and which makes it difficult to read; and not compressed laterally, as all later type has grown to be owing to commercial exigencies. There was only one source from which to take examples of this perfected Roman type--to wit, the works of the great Venetian printers of the fifteenth century, of whom Nicholas Jenson produced the completest and most Roman characters from 1470 to 1476. This type I studied with much care, getting it photographed to a big scale, and drawing it over many times before I began designing my own letters; so that though I think I mastered the essence of it, I did not copy it servilely; in fact, my Roman type, especially in the lower case, tends rather to the Gothic than does Jenson’s.” The desire thus embodied in words became a living fact. During 1890 Morris was experimenting with his types, and on the 31st January in the following year the first trial sheet was printed on the Kelmscott Press, which had been set up in a cottage close to Kelmscott House on the Upper Mall, Hammersmith.

_By William Morris_]

The first book printed was Morris’s own romance, _The Story of the Glittering Plain_; it was finished on 4th April, and in the same year _Poems by the Way_ was set up and printed. For the next five years, and to the end of the great craftsman’s life, books were printed at the rate of about ten each year, and in all fifty-three works were issued during the life of the Press (1891–1897), which together stand unique among books both for honesty of purpose and beauty of accomplishment. The books published naturally reflect Morris’s own literary taste. The act of printing was with him an act of reverence, and all of the volumes issued were printed in the spirit of love of fine literature and his own work. Three founts of type were created by Morris. The first, called the “Golden,” was a Roman type inspired by Jenson but having a Gothic appearance, which makes it unlike any other type in existence. This fount has extremely beautiful letters, solid and clear, making a page of vivid blackness combined with absolute legibility. The next, called the “Troy,” was a large Gothic type, beautiful in its way, and quite legible, but archaic in effect and unsuitable for general printing. The last type to be cast was the “Chaucer”; this was simply the “Troy” type reduced for the purpose of printing the noble folio edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. With these three founts books of several sizes were produced with equally good results. There were delightful 16mo’s, such as _The Tale of the Emperor Coustans_, _The Friendship of Amis and Amile_ and Morris’s own lecture on _Gothic Architecture_, which was printed by the Kelmscott Press at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition of 1893. The octavos covered a wide field, and included some of the masterpieces of the Press, notably the _Poems_ of Coleridge, Tennyson’s _Maud_, _Hand and Soul_, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and _The Nature of Gothic_, by Ruskin. The quartos contain several of Morris’s own works, notable examples being _News from Nowhere_ and _The Wood Beyond the World_, and Caxton’s _Historyes of Troye_, _The Golden Legend_ and George Cavendish’s _Life of Cardinal Wolsey_. Nine books were issued in folio--namely, _The History of Reynard the Fox_ (1892), _The History of Godfrey of Bologne_ (1893), _Sidonia the Sorceress_, by William Meinhold, translated by Lady Wilde (1893), _The Story of the Glittering Plain_,[8] by William Morris (1894); _Atalanta in Calydon_, by Swinburne (1894), _The Tale of Beowulf_ (1895), _The Life and Death of Jason_, by William Morris (1895), and _The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer_ (1896).

Many of the volumes have woodcuts, chiefly from drawings by Burne-Jones, and Morris designed all the elaborate initial letters, borders, title-pages and other decorations. It would not be easy in the ordinary way to single out any book for special notice among so many masterpieces of printing, each possessing characteristics of its own worthy of individual praise, but one book, and as it happens the one that Morris printed with his fullest reverence, does actually stand out from among the rest with distinction. That book is the noble folio containing the works of Chaucer enshrined in type cast for the purpose, with Morris’s own superb and appropriate decorations, and eighty-six illustrations by Burne-Jones. Never was author paid so handsome a tribute as by this book, and when it is in its complete form, with Cobden-Sanderson’s binding, one is surely in the presence of the most beautiful and the best designed book the world has ever seen.

William Morris was essentially a decorator; he would have had every one of the fine products of his amazing vitality burst into flower and leaf, into wondrous device and every beauty of form. Yet in everything he did the fine simplicity of his nature was a saving grace. But with the books designed by Charles Ricketts we find the expression of an entirely different temperament, or a temperament which was assertively personal and essentially individual, as against the democratic and communal sense of Morris. This individuality is seen in most of the books of the Vale Press, and in those beautiful volumes, _The Dial_ and Oscar Wilde’s _The Sphinx_ and _The House of Pomegranates_, which were the immediate forerunners and first causes of that Press.

Both William Morris and Charles Ricketts, however, were inspired in their first founts by the classical types of Jenson, in whom the Roman letter had its consummation, although the deep-rooted Gothic spirit of Morris was naturally not to be tied to that particular form. The significance of this adoption of the Roman type lies in the fact that although the first movable types were a standardisation of the written missal of the Middle Ages, and essentially Gothic in character, lettering itself was of Greek and Roman origin. Indeed, where the Teutonic designers departed most from the Roman standard, as they did in their capital letters, they were not nearly so successful as when they adhered more strictly to the earlier forms, as they did in their superior “lower cases.” Morris, in spite of his intense love of Gothic, fully realised this, and although the Kelmscott books in the mass reveal beauties suggesting Caxton and Wenkyn de Worde, it will be found on a more intimate acquaintance with them that the Renaissance has contributed in no small way to their final charm.

Just as William Morris, in Charles Ricketts’s words, derived inspiration from the “sunny pages of the Renaissance,” and finally made books equal to, and in some cases better than, the best books of the Gothic printers, so Ricketts took inspiration from the same source, and although the volumes of the Vale Press never quite resemble the Gothic books, he has admitted the value even to him of the products of the Kelmscott Press. Speaking of the books made under his supervision before the establishment of the Vale Press, he wrote, in his _Defence of the Revival of Printing_: “I regret that I had not then seen _The House of the Wolfings_ or _The Roots of the Mountains_, printed for Mr Morris as early as 1888[9]; these might have initiated me at the time to a better and more severe style, and I am now puzzled that my first impression of _The Glittering Plain_, 1891 (the first Kelmscott book), was one of disappointment.”

The earliest of the Ricketts books were inspired but not printed by the founder of the Vale Press. They were and are a standing example of what can be done through the ordinary commercial medium when taste is in command. The illustrations, cover designs, end-papers, and general format of these books were the work of Ricketts; and the type was the best that could be found in some of the more responsible printing houses. The first example of this work is to be found in _The Dial_--a sumptuously printed quarto magazine first published at the Vale, Chelsea, in 1889; No. 2 appeared in February 1892; No. 3 in October 1893; and No. 4, which bore the imprint, “Hacon & Ricketts,” in 1896; the fifth and last number appearing in 1897. _The Dial_ was issued under the joint editorship of Charles Ricketts and Charles H. Shannon. The first number contained an etching by Ricketts and a lithograph in colours and gold, and twelve other designs by him. The cover was designed by Shannon, but was discarded in subsequent issues, its place being taken by a superior design, cut as well as drawn by Ricketts. In the second number the latter also makes his first appearance as an engraver on wood, one of the main features of the volume being his series of initial letters, ornaments, head-pieces, and _culs-de-lampe_. In No. 4 of _The Dial_ appeared two specimen pages of the Vale Press, then being formed.

Before the Press was established, however, other important books had been issued under his supervision. One of the earliest of these, _Silverpoints_, by John Gray, was published by Elkin Mathews and John Lane in 1893. A few of the initials of this uncommon but elegant volume are decorated, but the majority are simple Roman capitals, the text of the volume being in italics. Earlier even than this the two artists had collaborated in the production of Oscar Wilde’s _House of Pomegranates_, published by Messrs Osgood, M’Ilvaine & Co. in 1891. The result was less a success than a curious attempt at decorated bookmaking; the most successful parts being the vignettes by Ricketts. Among other books of this period are the _Poems_ of Lord de Tabley and _In the Key of Blue_, by John Addington Symonds, the former with illustrations and cover, the latter with cover only, by Ricketts.

All these books were more or less tentative. The road towards perfection was being made; something very like perfection was reached, however, in the _Daphnis and Chloe_ (1893), the _Hero and Leander_ (1894) and _The Sphinx_ (1894)--the two first published by Ricketts & Shannon at the Vale Press, the last by Mr John Lane. The _Daphnis and Chloe_ is a quarto volume printed in old-faced pica type and profusely and beautifully illustrated with designs and initial letters from woodcuts. It is said to be “the first book published in modern times with woodcuts by the artist in a page arranged by himself.” _Hero and Leander_ (Marlowe & Chapman’s version) is an octavo; it is conceived in a more restrained key, and the result is altogether more satisfying, in spite of a formal hardness in the setting of the decorations. Theme may have something to do with this, just as it has in _Daphnis and Chloe_, where the lightness of the subject carries triumphantly the luxuriance of the decorations. _The Sphinx_, by Oscar Wilde, is the most remarkable of the books of this period. It is a small quarto in ivory-like vellum, with a rich design in gold, printed and decorated throughout in red, green and black. The exotic mind of Wilde is revealed in the decorations of this volume more than in any other: the strange vision of things, the imagination that moulds passionate ideas into figures which are almost ascetic, and into arabesques which are in themselves glimpses and revelations of the intricate mystery of life.

_By Charles Ricketts_]

The first book printed in the Vale type was _The Early Poems of John Milton_, a quarto decorated with initials and frontispiece, cut by the artist on wood. Speaking of the frontispiece of this volume, H. C. Marillier says: “It is interesting to compare this with one of the Kelmscott frontispieces, in order to realise how completely individual is each case, and how different is the design of the borders. There is nothing in all the flowing tracery of William Morris which remotely resembles the intricate knot-work and geometrical orderliness of the Milton borders.” This is true, and a further glance at the Vale Press books reveals also that the inventiveness of Charles Ricketts is much greater than that of William Morris, though it is not so free and, paradoxically, not so formal. But, unlike those of Morris, the Vale designs do not convey a sense of inevitability, a feeling that the design is the unconscious blossoming of the page.

The Kelmscott books not only look as if letter and decoration had grown one out of the other; they look as if they could go on growing. The Vale Press books, on the other hand, have all the supersensitiveness of things which have been deliberately made according to a fastidious though eclectic taste and a strict formula. It is the difference between naturalness and refinement. Yet at the same time, although Ricketts does not suggest organic growth in his decorated books, he suggests growth by segregation--by a rearrangement of parts which seem to have come together mathematically, or which are built up in counterpoint like a theme in music. Particularly do we get this effect from the decorations of the Vale Shakespeare and from many of the minor decorated leaves throughout all the volumes. In the use of leaf figures as a kind of super-punctuation, an intellectual process seems to have taken the place of the subtle and indefinable taste which dominates matters of art. The leaves seem to have been _thought_ into their places, and the result is not always happy.

The books of the Vale Press have other qualities which distinguish them from those of other similar presses. The Kelmscott Press, in the matter of bindings, for instance, confined itself to vellum and plain grey boards. The Doves Press, established in the next decade, adhered to a fine and peculiar kind of vellum. The Vale Press books made a departure in several instances by appearing in daintily decorated paper boards of various colours, the designs having a pleasant chintz-like effect, more often to be met with in the end-papers of some modern books, but an obvious development of the Italian decorated paper cover. Again colours, red and sometimes blue and green, play a large part in the pages of the Vale Press books, blending with the black in many cases most satisfactorily.

Some fifty books in all were produced, and these covered a wide literary field, including such works as Landor’s _Epicurus_, _Leontion_ and _Ternissa_; _Spiritual Poems_, by John Gray; _Fair Rosamund_, by Michael Field; the poems of Sir John Suckling; Shakespeare’s _Songs and Sonnets_; _Nymphidia_, by Michael Drayton; Campion’s songs; _Empedocles_, by Matthew Arnold; two volumes of Blake, and two of Keats; Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnets; _Dramatic Romances_, by Robert Browning; the _Lyrical Poems_ of Shelley; _The Ancient Mariner_, by S. T. Coleridge; _Sonnets from the Portuguese_, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; _Hand and Soul_ and _The Blessed Damozel_, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Besides these, certain volumes illustrated by Lucien Pissarro were issued under the imprimatur of the Vale although printed on the artist’s own private press, afterwards to be known as the Eragny Press.

The Vale Press books were not presumably the kind of books destined for an immediate and wide popularity. Yet each issue was speedily taken up by the limited public there is for fine examples of art-work, and the fact that almost immediately, and sometimes before the date of publication, the volumes were being quoted in the book markets at a premium would indicate that the books were not above the taste of everybody. Be this as it may, the demand for such books compared with that of the ordinary commercial volume was, and is at any time, a small one. At the same time, the effect of the Vale Press publications upon the general taste in books has been more pronounced than that of any of the other great presses of the Eighteen Nineties. This is probably due to the fact that Charles Ricketts not only at first worked through the ordinary publisher, but that he had his work done by a good trade firm of printers, Messrs Ballantyne & Hanson, and did not own, as William Morris did, his own presses. In the same way Morris himself had a marked effect upon ordinary straightforward printing, by insisting upon an intelligent use of Caslon’s old-faced type when supervising the printing of his own prose works. He knew it was not safe to leave so important a matter to the haphazard of commerce. The supreme result of this concern is to be seen, of course, in the splendid first edition of _The Roots of the Mountains_, issued by Messrs Reeves & Turner and printed at the Chiswick Press. The influence of Charles Ricketts’ books is to be seen in many of the early publications of Mr John Lane and Messrs Dent & Co.; and the latter firm attempted deliberately to follow the Kelmscott tradition with Aubrey Beardsley’s edition of the _Morte d’Arthur_.

After the death of William Morris and the conclusion of the work of the Kelmscott Press, those who acted as Morris’s assistants in the actual work of printing joined C. R. Ashbee of the Guild of Handicraft, who established the Essex House Press, using a fount of type designed by himself. Several well-printed volumes were the result of this enterprise, including the _Treatises of Benvenuto Cellini on Metal Work and Sculpture_, Bunyan’s _Pilgrim’s Progress_, Shakespeare’s _Poems_, Shelley’s _Adonais_, and _King Edward VII.’s Prayer Book_, a noble folio printed in red and black. Some interesting books were also printed by H. G. Webb at the Caradoc Press; and a simple dignity and altogether pleasant result has been achieved by Miss Elizabeth C. Yeats in the books printed on the Dun Emer, later called the Cuala Press, at Dundrum near Dublin.

But the most notable outcome of the revival of printing since the closing of the Kelmscott and Vale presses is the Doves Press, established in 1900 by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson at Hammersmith. A beautiful Roman type was designed by Emery Walker, whose genius for fine craftsmanship in everything associated with the printing arts made for the further success of this venture which has to its credit a series of books of unsurpassable beauty. The Doves Press, although in the direct line of descent from Morris, was to some extent a reaction against decorated page, and by adhering strictly to the formal beauty of well-designed type and a well-built page it proved that all the requirements of good taste, good craftsmanship and utility could be achieved. There is nothing, for instance, quite so effective as the first page of the Doves Bible, with its great red initial “I” dominating the left-hand margin of the opening chapter of Genesis like a symbol of the eternal wisdom and simplicity of the wonderful Book. Neither foliation nor arabesque could better have introduced the first verse of the story of the Creation than this flaming, sword-like initial. This edition of the Bible in itself represents the last refuge of the complex in the simple, and stands beside the Kelmscott _Chaucer_ without loss by comparison in beauty or workmanship.

The Doves Press came nearer than the other private presses towards the realisation of its founder’s axiom of the whole duty of typography, which, he said, was “to communicate to the imagination, without loss by the way, the thought or image intended to be communicated by the author.”

_By Laurence Housman_]