Part 3
At Brentford I secured my skins; and here I learned something that interested me exceedingly. Owing to the oil which remains in the parchment after it has been prepared for use, the difficulty in printing is almost as great as if on glass. To obviate this, the concern at Brentford, in preparing parchment for the Kelmscott volumes, filled in the pores of the skins with chalk, producing an artificial surface. The process of time must operate adversely upon this extraneous substance, and the question naturally arises as to whether eventually, in the Kelmscott parchment volumes, the chalk surface will flake off in spots, producing blemishes which can never be repaired.
For my own purposes I purchased the skins without the artificial surface, and overcame the difficulty in printing by a treatment of the ink which, after much experiment, enabled me to secure as fine results upon the parchment as if printing upon handmade paper.
The volumes were to be printed in the two humanistic colors, black and blue. In the original manuscript volumes this blue is a most unusual shade, the hand letterer having prepared his own ink by grinding _lapis lazuli_, in which there is no red. By artificial light the lines written in blue can scarcely be distinguished from the black. To reproduce the same effect in the printed volume I secured in Florence a limited quantity of _lapis lazuli_, and by special arrangement with the Italian Government had it crushed into powder at the Royal mint. This powder I took home to America, and arranged with a leading manufacturer to produce what I believe to be the first printing ink mixed exactly as the scribes of the fifteenth century used to prepare their pigments.
The months required to produce the _Triumphs_ represented a period alternating in anxiety and satisfaction. The greatest difficulty came in pressing upon the typesetter the fact that the various characters of these letters could not be used with mathematical precision, but that the change should come only when he felt his hand would naturally alter the design if he were writing the line instead of setting the type. The experiments required to perfect an ink that should successfully print on the oily parchment were not completed without disappointments and misgivings; the scrupulous care required in reading proofs and perfecting the spacing, was laborious and monotonous; the scrutinizing of the sheets as they came from the press was made happier when the success of the _lapis lazuli_ ink was assured.
The rewards came when Professor Norton gave the volume his unqualified approval--“so interesting and original in its typography and in its illustrations, so admirable in its presswork, its paper, its binding, and its minor accessories, ... a noble and exemplary work of the printers’ art”; when George W. Jones, England’s artist-printer, pronounced the Humanistic type “the most beautiful face in the world,” and promised to use it in what he hopes to be his masterpiece, an edition of Shakespeare’s _Sonnets_; when the jury appointed by the Italian Government to select “the most beautiful and most appropriate type face to perpetuate the divine Dante” chose the Humanistic type, and placed the important commission of producing the definitive edition of the great poet, to commemorate his sexcentenary, in the hands of that splendid printer, Bertieri, at Milan. Such rewards are not compliments, but justification. Such beauty as the Humanistic type possesses lies in the artistic ability and the marvelous skill in execution of the scribes. My part was simply seizing the development of a period apparently overlooked, and undertaking the laborious task of translating a beautiful thing from one medium to another.
The Quest of the Perfect Book must necessarily lead the seeker into far varying roads, the greatest rewards being found in straying from the main street into the fascinating bypaths. My quest has resulted in giving me greater appreciation of the accomplishments of those who successfully withstood opposition and persecution in order to make the printed book a living vehicle to convey the gems of thought from great minds to the masses, never forgetful of the value of beauty in its outward aspect. I believe it possible today to perpetuate the basic principles of the early artist master-printers by applying beauty to low-cost books as well as to limited _editions de luxe_. The story of the printed book itself is greater than that contained between the covers of any single volume, for without it the history of the world would show the masses still plodding on, swathed in theological and encyclopædic bonds, while the few would still be jealously hoarding their limited knowledge
II
THE KINGDOM OF BOOKS
A paraphrase of, “Would that mine adversary had written a book,” might well be, “Would that mine enemy had _printed_ a book”; for the building of books has always yielded smaller financial returns for the given amount of labor and ability than is offered in any other line of intelligent human effort.
“Are all the workmen in your establishment blank fools?” an irate publisher demanded of a printer after a particularly aggravating error.
“If they were not,” was the patient rejoinder, “they would not be engaged in making books!”
There is an intangible lure that keeps all those associated with the book under subjection. There is a mysterious fascination in being a party to the perpetuation of a human thought that yields something in addition to pecuniary returns. To the author, the inestimable gratification of conveying a message to the world makes him forget the tedious hours of application required before that message can be adequately expressed. To the publisher, the satisfaction of offering the opportunity for occasional genius to come into its own more than balances the frequent disappointments. To the book architect, the privilege of supplying the vehicle for thought, and of creating the physical form of its expression, yields returns not altogether measurable in coin of the realm.
* * * * *
In 1891, during my apprenticeship at the old University Press, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, John Wilson, its famous head, permitted me to sit in at a conference with Eugene Field and his friend and admirer, Francis Wilson, the actor, booklover, and collector. The subject under discussion was the manufacture of a volume of Field’s poems, then called _A New Book of Verses_, which later became famous under the title of _Second Book of Verse_.
Field’s personal appearance made a deep impression that first time I saw him. I was then an undergraduate at Harvard, and this was a live author at close range! He entered the office with a peculiar, ambling walk; his clothes were ill-fitting, accentuating his long legs and arms; his hands were delicate, with tapering fingers, like a woman’s; his face was pallid; his eyes blue, with a curiously child-like expression. I remember my feeling of respect, tinged somewhat with awe, as I saw the pages of manuscript spread out upon the table, and listened eagerly to the three-cornered conversation.
In considering the manufacture of his book, Eugene Field had clearly defined ideas of the typographical effect he wished to gain; John Wilson possessed the technical knowledge that enabled him to translate those ideas into terms of type. The examination of the various faces of type, the consideration of the proportions of the page, the selection of the paper, the plan for the design of the cover and the binding,--all came into the discussion.
As I listened, I was conscious of receiving new impressions which gave me a fuller but still incomplete understanding. Until that moment I had found little of interest in the adventure of making books. Now came a realization that the building of a book, like the designing of a house, offered opportunity for _creative_ work. This possibility removed the disturbing doubts, and I undertook to discover for myself how that creative element could be crystallized.
Years later came an unexpected echo to the Field episode. After the publication of the _Second Book of Verse_, the manuscript was returned to Field, who had it bound in half leather and placed it in his library. Upon his death many of his books went by bequest to his life-long friend, Horace Fletcher, the genial philosopher and famous apostle of dietetics. When Fletcher died, he bequeathed Field’s personal volumes to me. By this curious chain of circumstances, thirty-three years after I had seen the manuscript spread out upon the table at the University Press, it came into my possession, bearing the identical memoranda of instruction made upon it by John Wilson, whose large, flowing hand contrasted sharply with the small, copper-plate characters of the author’s handwriting.
The present generation of booklovers would think themselves transported back ages rather than decades were they to glance into a great book-printing office of thirty-five years ago. The old University Press at that time acknowledged competition only from the Riverside and the De Vinne Presses, and conditions that obtained there were typical of the times. The business office was called the “counting-room”; the bookkeeper and the head-clerk were perched up on stools at high, sloping desks, and wore long, linen dusters and black skull caps. John Wilson sat at a low table desk, and his partner, who was the financial executive, was the proud possessor of the only roll-top desk in the establishment. Near him, perhaps because of its value as a novelty and thus entitled to the same super-care as the cash, was installed the telephone. Most of the letters were written by Mr. Wilson in his own hand. One of my first responsibilities was to copy these letters on the wetted tissue pages of the copy-book with the turn-screw press.
There was no particular system in effect, and scientific management was unknown. Mr. Wilson used to make out his orders on fragments of paper,--whatever came to hand. When the telephone was first installed he refused to use it, as he considered this method of conducting business as “sloppy” and even discourteous. To employ a stenographer would have been an evidence of a lazy disposition, and a dictated letter was an offence against dignity and decorum.
* * * * *
A week’s work at that time consisted of fifty-nine hours instead of the present forty-eight. Hand composition and electrotyping were figured together as one process and charged at from 80 cents to $1 per thousand ems. Changes required in the type by authors cost 50 cents an hour. An author could afford in those days to rewrite his book after it was in type, but today, with alterations costing five times as much, it is a different proposition!
The wages were as ridiculously low as the prices charged to customers. The girls in the composing room made from $9 to $12 a week, and those receiving the maximum considered themselves potential Hetty Greens. Today, receiving $40 to $45 a week, they find difficulty in making both ends meet. The make-up man, with the “fat” he received in addition to his wage of $16, actually earned about $20 a week, as against $50 to $60 a week now. The foreman of the composing room, with more than two hundred employees under him, received a weekly return of $23, as against $75 to $100 now.
Typesetting, thirty-five years ago, was almost entirely by hand, as this was before the day of the linotype and the monotype. Thorne typesetting machines, which then seemed marvels of mechanical ingenuity, failed to prove economical because they required two operatives and so easily got out of order. The composing room itself was laid out with its main avenues and side streets like a well-ordered town, divisions being marked by the frames bearing the cases of type in various faces and sizes. The correcting stones ran down the center.
The foreman of the composing room was the king of his domain and a power unto himself. Each side street was an “alley,” in which from four to eight typesetters worked, back to back. These were sometimes boys or men, but usually girls or women. The “crew” in each alley was in charge of an experienced typesetter. It was he who received from the foreman the manuscript to be put into type; who distributed the copy, a few pages at a time to each of his subordinates; who supervised the work, and arranged for the galleys to be collated in their proper order for proofing; and who was generally responsible for the product of his alley. As was characteristic of the times in well-conducted industrial plants, the workers in this department, as in the others, were simply a large family presided over by the foreman, who interpreted the instructions from the management; and by the heads of the crews, who carried out the detailed instructions of the foreman.
There was a pride in workmanship that is mostly lacking in manufacturing plants today, due largely to the introduction of labor-saving machinery, and again to the introduction of efficiency methods. Both were inevitable, but the price paid for the gain in production was high. I am old-fashioned enough to hope that modern ideas of efficiency will never be applied in the printing industry to the extent of robbing the workman of his individuality. Books are such personal things! I am in full sympathy with that efficiency which cuts out duplication of effort. I believe in studying methods of performing each operation to discover which one is the most economical in time and effort. I realize that in great manufacturing plants, where machines have replaced so largely the work of the human hand, it is obviously necessary for workmen to spend their days manufacturing only a part of the complete article; but when the organization of any business goes so far as to substitute numbers for names I feel that something has been destroyed, and that in taking away his individuality from the workman the work suffers the same loss.
I have even asked myself whether the greatest underlying cause of strikes and labor disturbances during the past ten years has not been the unrest that has come to the workman because he can no longer take actual pride in the product of his hand. Years ago, after the death of one of my oldest employees, I called upon his widow, and in the simple “parlor” of the house where he had lived, prominently placed on a marble-top table as the chief ornament in the room, lay a copy of Wentworth’s “Geometry.” When I picked it up the widow said proudly, “Jim set every page of that book with his own hands.” It was a priceless heirloom in which the workman’s family took continued and justifiable pride.
The old University Press family was not only happy but loyal. When the business found itself in financial difficulties, owing to outside speculations by Mr. Wilson’s partner, the workmen brought their bankbooks, with deposits amounting to over twenty thousand dollars, and laid them on Mr. Wilson’s desk, asking him to use these funds in whatever way he chose. The sum involved was infinitesimal compared to the necessities, but the proffer was a human gesture not calculable in financial digits.
* * * * *
Proofreading was an art in the eighteen-nineties instead of an annoying necessity, as it now seems to be considered. The chief readers were highly educated men and women, some having been clergymen or schoolteachers. One proofreader at the University Press at that time could read fourteen languages, and all the readers were competent to discuss with the authors points that came up in the proof. The proof was read, not only to discover typographical errors, but also to query dates, quotations, and even statements of fact. Well-known authors were constantly running in and out of the Press, frequently going directly to the proofreaders, and sometimes even to the compositors themselves, without coming in touch with the counting-room. Mr. Wilson looked upon the authors and publishers as members of his big family, and “No Admittance” signs were conspicuous by their absence.
The modern practice of proofreading cannot produce as perfect volumes as resulted from the deliberate, painstaking, and time-consuming consideration which the old-time proofreaders gave to every book passing through their hands. Today the proof is read once, and then revised and sent out to the author. When made up into page form and sent to foundry it is again revised, but not re-read. No proof used to go out from a first-class printing office without a first and a second reading by copy. It was then read a third time by a careful foundry reader before being made into plates. Unfortunately, with labor at its present cost, no publisher could produce a volume at a price that the public would pay, if the old-time care were devoted to its manufacture.
* * * * *
Time was when a reputation for careful proofreading was an asset to a Press. One day the office boy came to my private office and said that there was a man downstairs who insisted upon seeing me personally, but who declined to give his name. From the expression on the boy’s face I concluded that the visitor must be a somewhat unique character, and I was not disappointed.
As he came into my office he had every aspect of having stepped off the vaudeville stage. He had on the loose garments of a farmer, with the broad hat that is donned only on state occasions. He wore leather boots over which were rubbers, and carried a huge, green umbrella.
He nodded pleasantly as he came in, and sat down with great deliberation. Before making any remarks he laid his umbrella on the floor and placed his hat carefully over it, then he somewhat painfully removed his rubbers. This done, he turned to me with a broad smile of greeting, and said, “I don’t know as you know who I am.”
When I confirmed him in his suspicions, he remarked, “Well, I am Jasper P. Smith, and I come from Randolph, New Hampshire.”
(_The names and places mentioned are, for obvious reasons, not correct._)
I returned his smile of greeting and asked what I could do for him.
“Well,” he said, “my home town of Randolph, New Hampshire, has decided to get out a town history, and I want to have you do the printin’ of it. The selectmen thought it could be printed at ----, but I says to them, ‘If it’s worth doin’ at all it’s worth doin’ right, and I want the book to be made at the University Press in Cambridge.’”
I thanked Mr. Smith for his confidence, and expressed my satisfaction that our reputation had reached Randolph, New Hampshire.
“Well,” he said, chuckling to himself, “you see, it was this way. You made the history of Rumford, and I was the feller who wrote the genealogies. That’s what I am, a genealogy feller. Nobody in New Hampshire can write a town history without comin’ to me for genealogies.”
After pausing for a moment he continued, “It was your proofreadin’ that caught me. On that Rumford book your proofreader was a smart one, she was, but I got back at her in good style.”
His memory seemed to cause him considerable amusement, and I waited expectantly.
“It was in one of the genealogies,” he went on finally. “I gave the date of the marriage as so and so, and the date of the birth of the first child as two months later. Did she let that go by? I should say not. She drew a line right out into the margin and made a darned big question mark. But I got back at her! I just left that question mark where it was, and wrote underneath, ‘Morally incorrect, historically correct!’”
* * * * *
When the first Adams flat-bed press was installed at the University Press, President Felton of Harvard College insisted that no book of his should ever be printed upon this modern monstrosity. Here was history repeating itself, for booklovers of the fifteenth century in Italy for a long time refused to admit that a printed volume had its place in a gentleman’s library. In the eighteen-nineties one whole department at the University Press consisted of these flat-bed presses, which today can scarcely be found outside of museums. If a modern publisher were to stray into the old loft where the wetted sheets from these presses were hung over wooden rafters to dry, he would rub his eyes and wonder in what age he was living. The paper had been passed through tubs of water, perhaps half a quire at a time, and partially dried before being run through the press. The old Adams presses made an impression that could have been read by the blind, and all this embossing, together with the wrinkling of the sheet from the moisture, had to be taken out under hydraulic pressure. Today wetted sheets and the use of hydraulic presses for bookwork are practically obsolete. The cylinder presses, that run twice as fast, produce work of equal quality at lower cost.
* * * * *
In those days the relations between publishers and their printers were much more intimate. Scales of prices were established from time to time, but a publisher usually sent all his work to the same printer. It was also far more customary for a publisher to send an author to the printer to discuss questions of typography with the actual maker of the book, or to argue some technical or structural point in his manuscript with the head proofreader. The headreader in a large printing establishment at that time was a distinct personality, quite competent to meet authors upon their own ground.
* * * * *
One of my earliest and pleasantest responsibilities was to act as Mr. Wilson’s representative in his business relations with Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, which required frequent trips to “Pleasant View” at Concord, New Hampshire. Mrs. Eddy always felt under deep obligation to Mr. Wilson for his interest in the manuscript of _Science and Health_ when she first took it to him with a view to publication, and any message from him always received immediate and friendly consideration.
In the past there have been suggestions made that the Rev. James Henry Wiggin, a retired Unitarian clergyman and long a proofreader at the University Press, rewrote _Science and Health_. Mr. Wiggin was still proofreader when I entered the Press, and he always manifested great pride in having been associated with Mrs. Eddy in the revision of this famous book. I often heard the matter referred to, both by him and by John Wilson, but there never was the slightest intimation that Mr. Wiggin’s services passed beyond those of an experienced editor. I have no doubt that many of his suggestions, in his editorial capacity, were of value and possibly accepted by the author,--in fact, unless they had been, he would not have exercised his proper function; but had he contributed to the new edition what some have claimed, he would certainly have given intimation of it in his conversations with me.
The characteristic about Mrs. Eddy that impressed me the first time I met her was her motherliness. She gave every one the impression of deepest interest and concern in what he said, and was sympathetic in everything that touched on his personal affairs. When I told her of John Wilson’s financial calamity, she seemed to regard it as a misfortune of her own. Before I left her that day she drew a check for a substantial sum and offered it to me.