Part 12

What a series of misfortunes Plantin endured! Stabbed by a miscreant who mistook him for some one else; hampered by censorship in spite of previous assurances of liberty in publications; his property wiped out again and again by the clashes of arms which finally cost Antwerp her pre-eminence; forever in debt, and having to sell his books below cost, and to sacrifice his library to meet pressing financial obligations;--yet always rising above his calamities, he carried on his printing office until his death in 1589, when he left a comfortable fortune of above $200,000.

Historically, Plantin’s contribution to the art of printing can scarcely be overestimated, yet technically he should be included in the second rather than the first group of early master-printers. The century that had elapsed since Gutenberg had removed many of the mechanical difficulties which had been obstacles to his predecessors. The printer could now secure printed copy to be edited and improved. Scholars were easily obtainable from the universities for editing and proofreading. Printing machinery could be purchased instead of being manufactured from original models. The sale of books had been greatly systematized. A printer could now devote himself to his art without dividing himself into various semi-related parts. Plantin proved himself a business man. Who else ever established a printing or publishing business on such an enduring basis that it continued for three hundred years! In bequeathing it to his daughter and his son-in-law, Moretus, Plantin made the interesting injunction that the printing office was always to be maintained by the son or successor who was most competent to manage it. If no son qualified, then the successor must be selected outside the family. Fortunately, however, there were sons who, each in his generation but with diminishing ability, proved his right to assume the responsibility, and the business was actually continued in the family down to 1867. A few years later the property was purchased by the city of Antwerp for 1,200,000 francs, and turned into a public museum.

I never visit the Plantin Museum at Antwerp without feeling that I have come closer to the old master-printers and their ideals. Here is the only great printing establishment of the past that time and the inroads of man have left intact. The beauty of the building, the harmony of the surroundings, the old portraits, the comfort yet the taste shown in the living-rooms,--all show that the artist-printer sought the same elements in his life that he expressed in his work. Entering from the Marché du Vendredi, I find myself face to face with a small tablet over the door on which is the device of Christophe Plantin, “first printer to the King, and the king of printers.” Here the familiar hand, grasping a pair of compasses, reaches down from the clouds, holding the compasses so that one leg stands at rest while the other describes a circle, enclosing the legend _Labore et Constantia_. Within the house one finds the actual types, and presses, and designs by Rubens and other famous artists, that were employed in making the Plantin books. The rooms in which the master printer lived make his personality very real. In those days a man’s business was his life, and the home and the workshop were not far separated. Here the family life and the making of books were so closely interwoven that the visitor can scarcely tell where one leaves off and the other begins.

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In the vocabulary of booklovers, the name _Elzevir_ suggests something particularly choice and unique in the making of books. These volumes cannot compare favorably with many products of the press which preceded and followed them, yet the prestige which attended their publication has endured down to the present day. The original popularity of the Elzevirs was due to the fact that after a century of degradation, some one at last undertook to reclaim printing from the depths.

Printing, after reaching such heights so soon after its beginnings, had steadily declined. The art may really be said to have had its origin in Italy, as the work from Gutenberg’s office, while extraordinary and epoch-making, could not rank with the best of the fifteenth-century Italian productions. The French volumes of the early sixteenth century were splendid examples of typography and presswork, but they did not equal those of their Italian predecessors. Christophe Plantin’s work in Antwerp was typographically unimportant except for his _Biblia Polyglotta_; and after Plantin, which takes us to the end of the sixteenth century, printing passed from an art into a trade. The Elzevirs were craftsmen rather than artists, but the best craftsmen of their period.

All this was a natural reaction. The book-buying public had come to demand the contents of the book at a cheaper price rather than volumes of greater technical excellence at a correspondingly higher cost. As we have seen, Sweynheim and Pannartz had ruined themselves by their experiments in Greek; the Aldine Press was saved from bankruptcy only by the intervention of Grolier. Henri Étienne, son of the great Robert Étienne, who endeavored to emulate his father’s splendid work, came to financial grief in producing his _Thesaurus_; and Plantin could not have withstood the drain of his _Biblia Polyglotta_ had it not been that he was commercially far-sighted enough to turn his plant over to the manufacture of inexpensive and less carefully made books.

By the end of the sixteenth century cheaper paper, made in Switzerland, came into the market, and this inferior, unbleached product largely replaced the soft, fine paper of Italian and French manufacture which had contributed in no small part to the beauty of the printed pages. Ink manufacturers had learned how to produce cheaper and poorer ink, and the types themselves, through constant use, had become worn down to such an extent that real excellence was impossible.

Holland was the natural successor to Belgium in the supremacy of printing. The devastations of war had brought trade to a standstill in the Netherlands, while the city of Leyden had won the attention and admiration of the world for its heroic resistance during the long Spanish siege. To commemorate this event, William of Orange, in 1575, founded the University of Leyden, which quickly took high rank among scholars, and became the intellectual and literary center of Europe.

Thither the battle-scarred Plantin betook himself at the suggestion of Lipsius, the historian, who was now a professor in the new University. In Leyden, Plantin established a branch printing office. He was made Printer to the University, and for a time expected to remain here, but the old man could not bring himself to voluntary exile from his beloved Antwerp. Plantin’s Leyden printing office had been placed in charge of Louis Elzevir, and when the veteran printer determined to return to Antwerp it would have seemed natural for him to leave it in Louis Elzevir’s hands instead of turning it over to his son-in-law, Raphelengius. This Elzevir, however, although the founder of the great Elzevir house, was not a practical printer, being more interested in bookselling and publishing; so distinction in printing did not come to the family until Isaac, Louis Elzevir’s grandson, became Printer to the University in 1620. Fifteen years later, Bonaventura and Abraham Elzevir made the name famous through their editions of _Terence_, _Cæsar_, and _Pliny_.

Up to this time the favorite _format_ had been the quarto volume, running about 12 by 18 inches in size. The Elzevirs boldly departed from the beaten path, and produced volumes running as small as 2 by 4 inches. They cut types of small size, showing no special originality but based on good Italian models, and issued editions which at first met with small favor. “The Elzevirs are certainly great typographers,” the scholar Deput wrote to Heinsius in 1629. “I can but think, however, that their reputation will suffer in connection with these trifling little volumes with such slender type.”

Contrary to this prediction, the new _format_ gradually gained favor, and finally became firmly established. The best publisher-printers in France and Italy copied the Elzevir model, and the folios and the quartos of the preceding ages went entirely out of style.

The _Terence_ of 1635 is the volume I selected for my collection (_page 242_). While not really beautiful, it is a charming little book. The copper-plate title (_page 241_) serves not only its original purpose but is also an illustration. The Elzevirs were wise enough to go back a hundred years and revive the practice of the copper-plate title, which had been discarded by intermediate printers because of its expense. The types themselves, far superior to other fonts in use at that time by other printers, were especially designed for the Elzevirs by Christoffel van Dyck. The interspacing of the capitals and the small capitals, the arrangement of the margins, and the general layout all show taste and knowledge of typographical precedent. The presswork would appear to better advantage except for the impossibility of securing ink of consistent quality.

The Elzevirs showed a great advance in business organization over any of their predecessors. Freed from oppressive censorship, they were able to issue a long list of volumes which were disposed of through connections established in the principal book centers of Italy, France, Germany, and Scandinavia, as well as throughout the Netherlands themselves. There is no record of any Elzevir publication proving a failure; but, by the same token, one cannot say that the Elzevirs accomplished as much for the art to which they devoted themselves as did the master-printers in whose steps they followed.

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Curiously enough, it was not until the eighteenth century that England produced volumes which were pre-eminent in any period. Caxton’s work, extraordinary as it was, competed against books made at the same time in Venice by Jenson, and were not equal to these Italian masterpieces. I have a leaf from a Caxton volume which I often place beside my Jenson volume, and the comparison always increases my wonder and admiration for the great Italian printer. Caxton’s work was epoch-making, but until John Baskerville issued his _Virgil_ in Birmingham, in 1757, England had not produced a volume that stood out, at the moment of its publication, as the best of its time.

John Baskerville is one of the most unique characters to be found in the annals of printing. He had been in turn a footman, a writing teacher, an engraver of slate gravestones, and the proprietor of a successful japanning establishment. He showed no special interest in types or books until middle age, and after he had amassed a fortune. Then, suddenly, he designed and cut types which competed successfully with the famous Caslon fonts, and produced his _Virgil_, which, as Benjamin Franklin wrote in presenting a copy to the Harvard College Library, was “thought to be the most curiously printed of any book hitherto done in the world.” Macaulay called it, “The first of those magnificent editions which went forth to astonish all the librarians of Europe.”

The Baskerville types were at first received with scant praise, although even the severest critics admitted that the Italic characters, from which was eliminated that cramped design seen in the Italics of other foundries of the period, were essentially beautiful. A letter written by Benjamin Franklin to Baskerville in 1760 is of amusing interest:

_Let me give you a pleasant instance of the prejudice some have entertained against your work. Soon after I returned, discoursing with a gentleman concerning the artists of Birmingham, he said you would be the means of blinding all the readers of the nation, for the strokes of your letters being too thin and narrow, hurt the eye, and he could never read a line of them without pain. “I thought,” said I, “you were going to complain of the gloss on the paper some object to.” “No, no,” said he, “I have heard that mentioned, but it is not that; it is in the form and cut of the letters themselves, they have not that height and thickness of the stroke which makes the common printing so much more comfortable to the eye.” You see this gentleman was a connoisseur. In vain I endeavored to support your character against the charge; he knew what he felt, and could see the reason of it, and several other gentlemen among his friends had made the same observation, etc._

_Yesterday he called to visit me, when, mischievously bent to try his judgment, I stepped into my closet, tore off the top of Mr. Caslon’s Specimen, and produced it to him as yours, brought with me from Birmingham, saying, I had been examining it, since he spoke to me, and could not for my life perceive the disproportion he mentioned, desiring him to point it out to me. He readily undertook it, and went over the several founts, showing me everywhere what he thought instances of that disproportion; and declared, that he could not then read the specimen without feeling very strongly the pain he had mentioned to me. I spared him that time the confusion of being told, that these were the types he had been reading all his life, with so much ease to his eyes; the types his adored Newton is printed with, on which he has pored not a little; nay, the very types his own book is printed with (for he is himself an author), and yet never discovered the painful disproportion in them, till he thought they were yours._

The _Virgil_ itself, beyond the interest that exists in its type, shows grace and dignity in its composition and margins. For the first time we have a type title (_page 247_) that shows a printer’s appreciation of its possibilities. Baskerville affected extreme simplicity, employing no head or tail pieces and no ornamental initials to accomplish his effects (_page 249_).

The copy of Baskerville’s _Virgil_ in my library contains a copper-plate frontispiece. The advertisement which particularly emphasized this feature excited my curiosity, as no book of Baskerville’s is known to have contained illustrations. When I secured the copy I found that the frontispiece was a steel engraving stamped on water-marked paper which indicated its age to be at least two hundred years earlier than the publication of the book. The owner of this particular copy had inserted the illustration in re-binding, and it was no part of the original edition!

The glossy paper referred to in Franklin’s letter was an outcome of Baskerville’s earlier business experience. It occurred to him that type would print better upon highly finished paper, and that this finish could be secured by pressing the regular book paper of the time between heated japan plates made at his own establishment. Baskerville is entitled to the credit of having been the first printer to use highly finished paper, and, beyond this, as Dibdin says of him, “He united, in a singularly happy manner, the elegance of Plantin with the clearness of the Elzevirs.”

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Interest in the Baskerville books, and in fact in all books printed in what is known as “old-style” type, ceased suddenly with the inexplicable popularity attained about 1800 by the so-called “modern” face. The characteristics of the old-style letter are heavy ascending and descending strokes with small serifs, whereas the modern face accentuates the difference between the light and the heavy lines, and has more angular serifs. The engraved work of Thomas Bewick, in England, the publication of the _Racine_ by the Didots, and the Bodoni volumes in Italy, offered the public an absolute innovation from the types with which they had been familiar since the invention of printing, and the new designs leaped into such popular favor that many of the foundries destroyed the matrices of their old-style faces, believing that the call for them had forever disappeared. As a matter of fact, it was not until the London publisher Pickering revived the old-style letter in 1844, that the modern face had any competition. Since then the two styles have been maintained side by side.

Thus the second supremacy of France came from a change in public taste rather than from economic causes. For a time there was a question whether Bodoni would win the distinction for Italy or the Didots for France, but the French printers possessed a typographical background that Bodoni lacked, and in their _Racine_ produced a masterpiece which surpasses any production from the Bodoni Press. The Didots were not only printers and publishers, but manufactured paper and invented the process of stereotyping. While Minister to France, in 1780, Benjamin Franklin visited the Didot establishment, and, seizing the handle of a press, struck off several copies of a form with such professional familiarity as to cause astonishment.

“Don’t be surprised,” Franklin exclaimed smiling. “This, you know, is my real business.”

In 1797, the French Minister of the Interior placed at the disposal of Pierre Didot _l’aîné_ that portion of the Louvre which had formerly been occupied by the _Imprimerie Royale_. Here was begun, and completed in 1801, an edition of _Racine_ in three volumes that aroused the enthusiasm of booklovers all over the world, and brought to Pierre Didot the glory of being recognized as a master-printer worthy to assume the mantle of Robert Étienne. This is the typographic achievement I would select as the masterpiece of its period.

The large quarto volumes contain nearly five hundred pages each. The type was designed and cut by Firmin Didot in conjunction with, or possibly in collaboration with Giambattista Bodoni, of Parma, Italy. So closely do the two faces match that the similarity of their design could scarcely have been a coincidence (see _page 81_). There is a peculiar charm in the unusual length of the ascending and descending characters; there is a grace in the slender capitals in spite of the ultra-refinement; there is satisfaction in having the weight of the Italic letter approach that of the Roman, thus preventing the usual blemish which the lighter faced Italic gives to an otherwise perfectly balanced page. The figures, really a cross between the old style and the modern, have a distinct individuality entirely lost in the so-called “lining” figures which those who have copied this face in America have introduced as an “improvement.”

The _Racine_ contains magnificent steel engravings, of which one is reproduced at page 253. The handmade paper is a return to the beautiful sheets of the fifteenth century, and the presswork--the type just biting into the paper without leaving an impression on the reverse side--is superbly characteristic of the best French workmanship. The vellum copies show the work at its best. The engravings stand out almost as original etchings. The ink is the densest black I ever saw. Didot succeeded in overcoming the oil in the vellum without the chalk surface that is given to the Morris vellum, the ink being so heavy that it is slightly raised. I was particularly interested in this after my own experiments in printing my humanistic _Petrarch_ on vellum.

At the Exposition of 1801, in Paris, the _Racine_ was proclaimed by a French jury the “most perfect typographic product of any country and of any age.” Is this not too high praise? To have equaled the Italian masterpieces of the fifteenth century would have been enough glory for any printer to claim!

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The _Racine_ was a step in the direction of reclaiming typography from the trade which it had become, but it was left for William Morris to place printing squarely back among the arts.

Morris was nearly sixty years of age when he finally settled upon the book as the medium through which to express his message to the world. The Morris wall papers, the Morris chair, the Morris end papers, are among his earlier experiments, all sufficiently unique to perpetuate his name; yet his work as a printer is what gave him undying glory. The _Kelmscott Chaucer_ is his masterpiece, and must be included whenever great typographic monuments are named. For this the decorator-printer cut a smaller size of his Gothic font, secured the co-operation of Sir Edward Burne-Jones as illustrator, and set himself the task of designing the initial letters, borders, and decorations. This was in 1892, and for four years they worked upon it, one delay following another to make Morris fearful that the work might never be completed.

The decoration for the first page was finished in March, 1893. Morris was entirely satisfied with it, exclaiming, “My eyes! how good it is!” Then he laid the whole project aside for over a year, while he devoted himself to his metrical version of _Beowulf_. In the meantime Burne-Jones was experiencing great difficulty in having his designs satisfactorily translated onto wood, and Morris dolefully remarked, after comparing notes with his friend and collaborator, “We shall be twenty years at this rate in getting it out!”

It was June, 1894, before the great work was fairly under way. “_Chaucer_ getting on well,” Morris notes in his diary,--“such lovely designs.” At the end of June he records his expectation of beginning the actual printing within a month, and that in about three months more all the pictures and nearly all the borders would be ready for the whole of the Canterbury Tales.

About this time Morris was asked if he would accept the poet-laureateship of England, made vacant by Tennyson’s death, if offered to him, and he unhesitatingly declined. His health and strength were noticeably failing, yet at the beginning of 1895, less than two years before his death, he was completely submerged by multifarious occupations. Two presses were running upon the _Chaucer_ and still a third upon smaller books. He was designing new paper hangings and writing new romances; he was collaborating in the translation of _Heimskringla_ and was supervising its production for the Saga Library; he was engaged in getting together his splendid collection of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century illuminated manuscripts.

It was not all smooth sailing with the _Chaucer_. In 1895 Morris discovered that many of the sheets had become discolored by some unfortunate ingredient of the ink, but to his immense relief he succeeded in removing the yellow stains by bleaching. “The check of the _Chaucer_,” he writes, “flattens life for me somewhat, but I am going hard into the matter, and in about a fortnight hope to know the worst of it.”