Part 4

The very fact that we now have windows brings into focus that we have an emergent class of semi-literate and relatively prosperous merchants and craftsmen, a class which is beginning to send its sons to grammar schools to get a smattering of reading and of the art of cyphers. This consideration prompts reflection upon the almost ubiquitous association of the goldsmith as the patron, partner or financier of the earliest master printers of books. There is now a wealthy craft of jewellers and armourers skilled in the art of using punches and dies to make patterns in relief on a metal surface, with a secure trade among the nobles and the wealthier merchants; and there are already the beginnings of a new trade in pictorial reproduction fostered by artists seeking patrons among them. Before printing by movable type begins, the wood-block illustration is competing with a better technique. Instead of smearing a sticky ink on a raised surface, it is now possible to achieve the same end by filling the crevices in a metal plate wiped clean; and who should be more concerned with promoting the use of pictorial reproduction by engraving than goldsmith and jeweller well versed in the uses of impressing a pattern in relief or intaglio?

What is happening in the fifteenth century is not the outcropping of inborn genius. Contrariwise, we should regard it as the confluence of a large number of new techniques, individually of little import to human advancement, collectively with a new momentum. Nor need we pride ourselves on the fact that European civilisation proved equal to exploiting to greater advantage what it had thanklessly received from the Eastern world. Paul Pelliot has discovered wooden types attributed to Wang Cheng in the beginning of the fourteenth century, well over a hundred years before the first dated printing from movable type in Germany; and if this invention came to nothing, have we far to seek the explanation? With twenty-six pigeonholes for a box of letter type at his elbow, the European compositor of the fifteenth century enjoys an immeasurable advantage over his fourteenth-century fellow craftsman who has to manipulate several thousand Chinese characters. Korea took up movable type, probably through Chinese influence, about fifty years before Europe.

No intelligent Anglo-American needs to be told at length how printing contributed to the diffusion of knowledge previously transmitted by oral tradition, how much more the master printers and book-makers from Gutenberg to Benjamin Franklin contributed to the making of our language habits than all the professors of their time, how much the trade in reading matter contributed to the great enlightenment of the four centuries which followed, how it also contributed to the liberation of Christendom from papal authority, what it bestowed on the age of Galileo and Newton, how it catalysed man's thought about human dignity and fundamental human rights. What we are prone to forget is how much water had to pass under the bridges before the homeland of Caxton or that of Franklin could assert the ability to read and to transcribe the written word as the birthright of every citizen.

In North America and in Northwestern Europe, literacy is today a medical diagnosis. That a person cannot read or write is now a sufficient criterion of mental defect; and this is so in a sense which would have been utterly false of Britain or the United States alike when Charles Dickens wrote an uncharitable record of his transatlantic itinerary. Until the middle of the nineteenth century there was everywhere a large underprivileged class cut off from the possession of books and without the incentive to purchase reading matter....

By attaching a cast of the hand-set type to cylinders it was possible to take advantage of the introduction of steam power with considerable economy of time entailed in running off the printed sheet; but it was impossible to reap the harvest of this economy while it was still necessary to set type by manual extraction from a box of each die for a letter, cypher or punctuation mark. Also, the manufacturer of paper from rag was a relatively costly process by modern standards; and the discovery of a cheaper source of raw material was a precondition of expanding trade in the printed word. Rag, be it said, is simply woven fibre of cotton or flax; and any vegetable fibre is good enough for the work of the wasp. It was therefore a great advance, when it was possible to use the by-products of the lumber camps for paper manufacture. Wood pulp as a source of paper came into its own in the eighties, though its use goes back to a German patent about 1840. In 1857 Routledge had introduced, as an alternative source of raw material, esparto grass from Spain and North Africa; and there had been notable advances in the mechanics of paper production during the preceding fifty years.

In 1803 the French printer Didot brought into England a device which took advantage of steam power by running wet pulp on to a moving, endless belt of wire mesh through which the water drained off. It could run off in a day six miles of paper of uniform width. In 1821 Crompton invented the process of drying by steam-heated rollers. Between 1803 and 1815 König in Germany and Cowper in Britain had perfected power-driven machinery for printing off a continuous roll of paper from cylinders carrying the type cast. The four-cylinder machine patented by Cowper and Applegarth in 1827 ran off 5,000 sheets per hour of the London _Times_ simultaneously printed on both sides. The Walter Rotary of 1866 appears to have been the first cylinder machine to print on both sides of an unwinding roll of paper with a power-driven mechanism to cut the sheets, previously fed to the machine by hand. By that time a cheaper source of paper was available.

The advent of cheap paper accommodated the purchase of reading matter to the purse of the poorer classes in the community; but it did not bring into their lives a daily stimulus to read. While type-setting remained a manual operation, the maintenance of a daily press was beset by many difficulties and possible only because it did not as yet aspire to the topical immediacy which could coax a large semi-literate section of the population into the habit of daily reading. What made possible a truly popular press was an invention thus described by McMurtrie:

Setting extensive manuscripts by hand is, of course, a very slow and laborious process, and as the printing industry grew in extent and importance it was only natural that efforts should be made to devise a means of setting type mechanically at greater speed and less cost.... The failures were myriad. All efforts to take the foundry type used by the compositor and set it up mechanically came to naught. Finally, however, Ottmar Mergenthaler invented a machine which, by the action of a keyboard somewhat resembling that of a type-writer, assembled not type but matrices and, when a whole line was set and spaced, cast this line in one piece, or "slug," of type metal. This machine, which was first put into practical use in 1886, and appropriately christened a "linotype," gave a revolutionary impetus to the printing industry ... as with all new inventions of importance it was expected that thousands of compositors would be thrown out of work. But, again as usual, the industry grew so fast that more men were employed than before.

This device is not the only machine which sets type. On its heels came the monotype which employs the pianola principle for power transmission and is for some purposes preferable. The technical advantages of one or the other are irrelevant to our theme. What makes printing by linotype an outstanding achievement of nineteenth-century technology is that it permits type-setting to keep pace with the tempo of topical affairs at a time when a railroad schedule co-ordinated by telegraphy has made man minute-conscious for the first time in history. It is at once a new goad to the new social discipline of punctuality and a new means of satisfying an appetite for sensation among a section of the population not as yet attuned to habitual reading....

That the Moslem world of Omar Khayyam and Alkarismi transmitted so many of the benefits of Chinese civilisation to the West, reaping themselves no advantage from the invention of printing, illustrates a truth which Marxist dogma ignores. Fruitful innovation is, as the Marxist rightly asserts, the result of interplay between human needs and natural resources; but the triple formula of means, motive and opportunity suffices to account for the vagaries of man's history only if we recognise the inherent inertia of human motivation. Beliefs do not come from heaven; but they have a remarkable tenacity in the teeth of worldly profit, a tenacity forcefully illustrated by two facets of the Moslem creed. In the racy, though none the less scholarly, account of the history of printing already cited several times in this chapter, McMurtrie states:

The Koran forbade games of chance.... The Koran had been given to the Moslems in written form, and writing, therefore, was the only means by which it might ever be transmitted. To this day the Koran has never been printed from type in any Mohammedan country; it is always reproduced by lithography.

One consequence of this is that Moslem countries, and African communities which have received their script from Moslem missionaries, suffer from the educational disability of a cursive style which is ill-suited to easy reading. If we are tempted to ascribe this to defective hereditary equipment of peoples whose culture was the inspiration of Europe in the Middle Ages, we may well reflect with moral and intellectual benefit to ourselves on the complacency with which western scholars disown the constructive tasks of language-planning at a time when scientific journals embodying new discoveries are appearing in twenty or more languages.

Statistics which convey a clear picture of the mounting volume of printed matter issued annually during the four centuries of European printing are hard to come by. The number of editions printed in England increased from 13 in 1510 to 219 in 1580, to about 600 a year in the first two decades of the nineteenth century and 12,379 in 1913. Unhappily, an edition is a grossly misleading index of production, even of new books. What we call a modern best seller signifies a first edition of over 25,000 copies. In the fifteenth century, the average edition was about 300 copies. Till the middle of the eighteenth, an edition rarely exceeded 600; but there were notable exceptions. There were 34 editions of the _Adagia_ of Erasmus, each of a thousand copies, in the first few decades of the sixteenth century, and 24,000 copies of his _Colloquia Familiaria_ came out in the same author's lifetime. Of Luther's tract _To the Christian Nobility_ 4,000 copies were sold within five days. The Bible Society, founded in 1711 by Baron von Canstein in Halle, printed within a short space of time 340,000 copies of the New Testament and 480,000 copies of the Scriptures as a whole. The British and Foreign Bible Society, founded in 1804 by Thomas Charles of Bala as an incident in his crusade against Welsh illiteracy, was responsible for the issue of 237 million copies in the three decades 1900-1930....

* * * * *

So far, we have taken no cognisance of the formative role of the master printer _vis-à-vis_ the culture of contemporary western civilisation. We shall now try to get into focus the consequences of something quite new in the history of our species, the emergence of a social personnel with a vested interest in the enlightenment of mankind. Of such was the inventor of the first saleable electrical device, the originator of the very names positive and negative in their now most common technical context, a man who rendered signal service for his country at the court of France and put his signature to the Declaration of Independence, the man whose last will and testament begins "I, Benjamin Franklin, Printer...."

At first, the master printer was also a publisher, till the trade began to expand a book-seller as well, and sometimes, like Caxton, translator or author. Nor is it surprising that printing and bookselling still preserve the professional outlook of the mediaeval craftsman far more than any other contemporary commercial undertaking, with _mores_ peculiar to themselves. Today, as throughout the past four centuries, there is still a place for the small-scale high-quality firm in printing, publishing or bookselling alike. Throughout the five centuries of printing from movable type the small proprietor has ever been the ally of novel thought; and the book trade still thrives on the free expression of views which are anathema to big business, oil politicians and Wall Street tycoons. To say this is not to say that every publisher, every partner in a printing firm or every back-street book-seller is in the vanguard of liberal sentiment and fertile cerebration; but to be blind to their contribution to our common culture is to be blind to one of the burning issues of our age. Even to say that the publisher, the printer or the book-seller is always ahead of his business colleagues in joining the bandwagon of progress is to dispel a miasma of moral indignation which distorts our view of a decision contemporary man has to make wisely or incur the prospect of a dark age of superstition and authority....

Copyright 1930 by _The Colophon_. Reprinted by permission of the author.

The late printer-scholar, Theodore Low De Vinne, was wont to exclaim with regret over a puzzling bookish question, "Alas, bibliography is not an exact science!" Since his day, what with the learned publications of bibliographical societies (first and foremost--that of England), with such scholarly independent productions as Ronald B. McKerrow's _Introduction to Bibliography_ and some of its followers, and with such undertakings as the _Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke_--not to speak of the many masterly library catalogues and bibliographies which these late years have brought us--we are almost tempted to reverse his dictum. We have all these, added to the wealth of pioneer writings of book-lovers like Richard de Bury, Gabriel Naude, Guillaume François De Bure, Gabriel Peignot, Thomas Frognall Dibdin, and the more scientific but no more (nor less) book-loving Panzer, Hain, Brunet, Renouard, Bradshaw, Haebler, Proctor, Claudin, and our own Wilberforce Eames. We pause for breath, but have only picked a few random names from the long roll of those who have loved and worked for the arts that go into the making, and the science that goes into the understanding of a printed book--the vehicle which must continue to preserve and to carry down through the ages the results of men's thoughts and the records of their deeds.

All this is as it should be, but of late, and especially in connection with the present vogue for collecting the works of living authors, a certain quality (shall we call it self-consciousness) has crept in, an undue stressing of small technicalities, and we blush to confess a confused feeling of sympathy for the modern book-hunter, who is having so much of his fun taken away from him by neat little textbooks and articles, bristling with allusions to "points," "right copies," "firsts" and the like (with the inevitable quotation marks) and filled with weighty questions of dollars and pounds--the seemingly all-important matter of the investment value of our treasures. This surely is not the fine frenzy which possessed Charles Lamb when he wrote: "Do you remember the brown suit which you made to hang upon you, till all your friends cried 'Shame upon you!' It grew so threadbare--and all because of that folio 'Beaumont and Fletcher,' which you dragged home late at night from Barker's in Covent Garden. Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of the Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing you should be too late. And when the old book-seller with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedwards), lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures, and when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as cumbersome, and when you presented it to me, and when we were exploring the perfectness of it (_collating_ you called it), and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be left till daybreak--was there no pleasure in being a poor man!"

Where there is much smoke, however, there is fire, and it is assuredly good that this interest in bibliographical things should have swept the country, and incidentally that the joys of the bibliomaniac and the bibliophile are being experienced today by many more than the elect few of the past, on whom we love to dwell. But if we moderns are doomed to buy our first editions ready labelled and to have our equations worked out in advance, if a fine copy must be termed immaculate and the back of a book must be its spine, etc., etc., ad infinitum, let us start with the right premises, and hold on to the terms which were proverbial before we were born. Which brings us to our point--What is a Colophon?

The question would seem a reflection upon the intelligence of the average book-lover, at this late day, were it not that there seems to be a growing tendency, shared (even instigated) by lexicographers, to mis-define the word, or to use it out of its truly bibliographical and philological meaning. To book-lovers and collectors of even the preceding generation, acquainted as they were with the niceties of their vocation, or avocation, the suggestion of more than one signification would have seemed well-nigh an insult. Perhaps it is even because we are living in this late day that heresies have crept in. After all, it is nearly a quarter of a century since the Caxton Club of Chicago brought out _An Essay on Colophons_, by Dr. Alfred W. Pollard, later Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, whose word on all bibliographical matters carries the highest authority--the Club thereby performing one of those great services to students of bibliography for which it and similar institutions are acclaimed by an appreciative, if limited, circle. Perhaps the very limits of the circle are accountable for lack of knowledge, and it may be that a book, printed nearly twenty-five years ago in an edition of some two hundred and fifty copies, may never have come within the ken of a writer on bookish things today--even of an earnest one. But that is just where our quarrel begins--ought anyone to write on colophons, or on anything else, without some knowledge of at least the chief literature of the subject, and should the next man, and the next, be allowed to hand on an error, or perhaps a misconception, without a thought of the original sources of information? For that is just what has been happening in America in this matter, and what it seems must also be occurring in greater ones. There is plenty of thorough scholarship here, scholarship that shrinks from no drudgery--then why is it that so much hasty, slipshod work is allowed to pass?

But we were speaking of colophons--a word which, to many people who trouble with it at all, seems to mean almost anything,--for instance the mark or device of a printer or publishing firm, placed anywhere at random in a book, possibly bearing a motto or a name. Indeed, this is the signification which has frequently been given to it of late in print and in common speech by people who should have known better, and whom a little thought or a little more research would have taught better. For instance, a publisher's assistant suggested that a given place upon the title page is the proper location for the colophon; a librarian wrote to request a copy of the "colophon of the Grolier Club" to add to a collection; a book-trade magazine issued an article on devices or trade-marks of publishers of today, appearing on the title pages of their publications, and dubbed them all colophons; a college professor used the term in like manner; and all this occurred within a period of a few months.

The only protest to be raised in print seems to be that of Leonard L. Mackall, in his dependable "Notes for Bibliophiles," a department of the _Herald Tribune's_ Sunday magazine, _Books_. In the issue of March 17, 1929, he wrote: "Right here we must call special attention to the fact that, some modern ignorant or careless misuse to the contrary, notwithstanding, a colophon is not really a colophon at all unless it appears at the end of the book. Most certainly the word does not properly mean merely a publisher's device wherever used, as stated in a [recent] anonymous illustrated article."

No one has heeded him, however, and my own like-minded objections were met with the advice to look in the dictionary, and then the blow fell! It is true that some dictionaries, but by no means all, countenance this usage of colophon as a device upon a title page. Before quoting their definitions, let us look at the Oxford English Dictionary, where we find:

1. "Finishing stroke"; "crowning touch," _obs._

2. The inscription or device, sometimes pictorial or emblematic, formerly placed at the end of a book or manuscript, and containing the title, the scribe's or printer's name, date and place of printing, etc. Hence, _from title page to colophon_.

It may be noted that, of the various examples (1774-1874) quoted by the Oxford English Dictionary, not one refers to the colophon as placed elsewhere than at the end of the book.

Our Century Dictionary is sound on the subject, but we have in Funk & Wagnalls' Standard Dictionary:

1. An inscription or other device formerly placed at the end of books and writings, often showing the title, writer's or printer's name and date and place of printing.

2. An emblematic device adopted by a publisher and impressed on his books, usually on the title page of each volume (accompanied by an illustration of the printer's mark of Nicolas Jenson, inscribed: "Colophon of Nicolas Jenson" [1481]).

The phrase "usually on the title page" (not in the Oxford English Dictionary) seems to us absolutely wrong, and not to be countenanced for a moment by bookmen who have proper regard for the correct usage of words.

The corresponding definition in late editions of Webster's Dictionary is:

An emblem, usually a device assumed by the publishing-house, placed either on the title page, or at the end of a book.

In what subtle way this secondary and inadequate definition has crept into American usage we do not know, and we plead earnestly for its abandonment.

In the encyclopedias consulted, there is nothing disturbing, the definition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, written by Dr. Pollard, being especially clear and concise. It runs in part as follows: