Part 5

During the years that followed I served as his typographic mentor. He was eager to try weird and ingenious experiments to bring out the various points of his theories through unique typographical arrangement (see _opp. page_). It required all my skill and diplomacy to convince him that type possessed rigid limitations, and that to gain his emphasis he must adopt less complicated methods. From this association we became the closest of friends, and presuming upon this relation I used to banter him upon being so casual. His copy was never ready when the compositors needed it; he was always late in returning his proofs. The manufacture of a Fletcher book was a hectic experience, yet no one ever seemed to take exceptions. This was characteristic of the man. He moved and acted upon suddenly formed impulses, never planning ahead yet always securing exactly what he wanted, and those inconvenienced the most always seemed to enjoy it.

“I believe,” he used to say, “in hitching one’s wagon to a star, but I always keep my bag packed and close at hand ready to change stars at a moment’s notice. It is only by doing this that you can give things a chance to happen to you.”

Among the volumes Fletcher had with him on board ship was one he had purchased in Italy, printed in a type I did not recognize but which greatly attracted me by its beauty. The book bore the imprint: _Parma: Co’tipi Bodoniani._ Some weeks later, in a small, second-hand bookstore in Florence, I happened upon a volume printed in the same type, which I purchased and took at once to my friend, Doctor Guido Biagi, at the Laurenziana Library.

“The work of Giambattista Bodoni is not familiar to you?” he inquired in surprise. “It is he who revived in Italy the glory of the Aldi. He and Firmin Didot in Paris were the fathers of modern type design at the beginning of the nineteenth century.”

“Is this type still in use?” I inquired.

“No,” Biagi answered. “When Bodoni died there was no one worthy to continue its use, so his matrices and punches are kept intact, exactly as he left them. They are on exhibition in the library at Parma, just as the old Plantin relics are preserved in the museum at Antwerp.”

I immediately took steps through our Ambassador at Rome to gain permission from the Italian Government to recut this face for use in America. After considerable difficulty and delay this permission was granted, with a proviso that I should not allow any of the type made from my proposed matrices to get into the hands of Italian printers, as this would detract from the prestige of the city of Parma. It was a condition to which I was quite willing to subscribe! Within a year I have received a prospectus from a revived Bodoni Press at Montagnola di Lugano, Switzerland, announcing that the exclusive use of the original types of Giambattista Bodoni has been given them by the Italian Government. This would seem to indicate that the early governmental objections have disappeared.

While searching around to secure the fullest set of patterns, I stumbled upon the fact that Bodoni and Didot had based their types upon the same model, and that Didot had made use of his font particularly in the wonderful editions published in Paris at the very beginning of the nineteenth century. I then hurried to Paris to see whether these matrices were in existence. There, after a search through the foundries, I discovered the original punches, long discarded, in the foundry of Peignot, to whom I gave an order to cast the different sizes of type, which I had shipped to America.

This was the first type based on this model ever to come into this country. The Bodoni face has since been recut by typefounders as well as for the typesetting machines, and is today one of the most popular faces in common use. Personally I prefer the Bodoni letter to that of Didot (see _opp. page_). The Frenchman succumbed to the elegance of his period, and by lightening the thin lines robbed the design of the virility that Bodoni retained. I am not in sympathy with the excessive height of the ascending letters, which frequently extend beyond the capitals; but when one considers how radical a departure from precedent this type was, he must admire the skill and courage of the designers. William Morris cared little for it,--“The sweltering hideousness of the Bodoni letter,” he exclaimed; “the most illegible type that was ever cut, with its preposterous thicks and thins”; while Theodore L. De Vinne, in his _Practice of Typography_, writes:

_The beauty of the Bodoni letters consists in their regularity, in their clearness, and in their conformity to the taste of the race, nation, and age in which the work was first written, and finally in the grace of the characters, independent of time or place._

When authorities differ to such a wide extent, the student of type design must draw his own conclusions!

* * * * *

Fletcher’s idea of an appointment was something to be kept if or when convenient, yet he never seemed to offend any one. He did nothing he did not wish to do, and his methods of extricating himself from unwelcome responsibilities always amused rather than annoyed. “If you don’t want to do a thing very badly,” he confided to me on one such occasion, “do it very badly.”

On board the _Canopic_ Fletcher was surrounded by an admiring and interested group. General Leonard Wood was on his way to study colonial government abroad before taking up his first administration as Governor of the Philippines. On his staff was General Hugh Lennox Scott, who later succeeded General Wood as Chief of Staff of the United States Army. The conversations and discussions in the smokeroom each evening after dinner were illuminating and fascinating. General Wood had but recently completed his work as Governor of Cuba, and he talked freely of his experiences there, while General Scott was full of reminiscences of his extraordinary adventures with the Indians. He later played an important part in bringing peace to the Philippines.

It was at one of these four-cornered sessions in the smokeroom that we first learned of Fletcher’s ambition to revolutionize the world in its methods of eating. That he would actually accomplish this no one of us believed, but the fact remains. The smokeroom steward was serving the coffee, inquiring of each one how many lumps of sugar he required. Fletcher, to our amazement, called for five! It was a grand-stand play in a way, but he secured his audience as completely as do the tambourines and the singing of the Salvation Army.

“Why are you surprised?” he demanded with seeming innocence. “I am simply taking a coffee liqueur, in which there is less sugar now than there is in your chartreuse or benedictine. But I am mixing it with the saliva, which is more than you are doing. The sugar, as you take it, becomes acid in the stomach and retards digestion; by my method, it is changed into grape sugar, which is easily assimilated.”

“To insalivate one’s liquor,” he explained to us, “gives one the most exquisite pleasure imaginable, but it is a terrific test of quality. It brings out the richness of flavor, which is lost when one gulps the wine down. Did you ever notice the way a tea-taster sips his tea?”

As he talked he exposed the ignorance of the entire group on physiological matters to an embarrassing extent, clinching his remarks by asking General Wood the question,

“Would you engage as chauffeur for your automobile a man who knew as little about his motor as you know about your own human engine?”

No one ever loved a practical joke better than Horace Fletcher. I was a guest at a dinner he once gave at the Graduates’ Club in New Haven. Among the others present were President Hadley of Yale, John Hays Hammond, Walter Camp, and Professor Lounsbury. There was considerable curiosity and some speculation concerning what would constitute a Fletcher dinner. At the proper time we were shown into a private room, where the table was set with the severest simplicity. Instead of china, white crockery was used, and the chief table decorations were three large crockery pitchers filled with ice water. At each plate was a crockery saucer, containing a shredded-wheat biscuit. It was amusing to glance around and note the expressions of dismay upon the faces of the guests. Their worst apprehensions were being confirmed! Just as we were well seated, the headwaiter came to the door and announced that by mistake we had been shown into the wrong room, whereupon Fletcher, with an inimitable twinkle in his eye, led the way into another private dining room, where we sat down to one of the most sumptuous repasts I have ever enjoyed.

Today, twenty years after his campaign, it is almost forgotten that the American breakfast was at that time a heavy meal. Horace Fletcher revolutionized the practice of eating, and interjected the word _fletcherize_ into the English language. As a disciple of Fletcher Sir Thomas Barlow, physician-in-chief to King Edward VII, persuaded royalty to set the style by cutting down the formal dinner from three hours to an hour and a half, with a corresponding relief to the digestive apparatus of the guests. In Belgium, during the World War, working with Herbert Hoover, Fletcher taught the impoverished people how to sustain themselves upon meager rations. Among his admirers and devoted friends were such profound thinkers as William James who, in response to a letter from him, wrote, “Your excessive reaction to the stimulus of my grateful approval makes you remind me of those rich soils which, when you tickle them with a straw, smile with a harvest”; and Henry James, who closes a letter: “Come and bring with you plenary absolution to the thankless subject who yet dares light the lamp of gratitude to you at each day’s end of his life.”

* * * * *

My acquaintance with Henry James came through my close association with the late Sir Sidney Lee, the Shakesperian authority, and Horace Fletcher.

“Don’t be surprised if he is brusque or uncivil,” Sir Sidney whispered to me just before I met him at dinner; “one can never tell how he is going to act.”

As a matter of fact, I found Henry James a most genial and enjoyable dinner companion, and never, during the few later occasions when I had the pleasure of being with him, did he display those characteristics of ill humor and brusqueness which have been attributed to him. It may not be generally known that all his life--until he met Horace Fletcher--he suffered torments from chronic indigestion, or that it was in Fletcherism that he found his first relief. In a typically involved Jamesian letter to his brother William he writes (February, 1909):

_It is impossible save in a long talk to make you understand how the blessed Fletcherism--so extra blessed--lulled me, charmed me, beguiled me, from the first into the convenience of not having to drag myself out into eternal walking. One must have been through what it relieved me from to know how not suffering from one’s food all the while, after having suffered all one’s life, and at last having it cease and vanish, could make one joyously and extravagantly relegate all out-of-door motion to a more and more casual and negligible importance. To live without the hell goad of needing to walk, with time for reading and indoor pursuits,--a delicious, insidious bribe! So, more and more, I gave up locomotion, and at last almost completely. A year and a half ago the thoracic worry began. Walking seemed to make it worse, tested by short spurts. So I thought non-walking more and more the remedy, and applied it more and more, and ate less and less, naturally. My heart was really disgusted all the while at my having ceased to call upon it. I have begun to do so again, and with the most luminous response. I am better the second half hour of my walk than the first, and better the third than the second.... I am, in short, returning, after an interval deplorably long and fallacious, to a due amount of reasonable exercise and a due amount of food for the same._

My one visit to Lamb House was in company with Horace Fletcher. The meeting with Henry James at dinner had corrected several preconceived ideas and confirmed others. Some writers are revealed by their books, others conceal themselves in their fictional prototypes. It had always been a question in my mind whether Henry James gave to his stories his own personality or received his personality from his stories. This visit settled my doubts.

The home was a perfect expression of the host, and possessed an individuality no less unique. I think it was Coventry Patmore who christened it “a jewel set in the plain,”--located as it was at the rising end of one of those meandering streets of Rye, in Sussex, England, Georgian in line and perfect in appointment.

In receiving us, Henry James gave one the impression of performing a long-established ritual. He had been reading in the garden, and when we arrived he came out into the hall with hand extended, expressing a massive cordiality.

“Welcome to my beloved Fletcher,” he cried; and as he grasped my hand he said, as if by way of explanation,

“He saved my life, you know, and what is more, he improved my disposition. By rights he should receive all my future royalties,--but I doubt if he does!”

His conversation was much more intelligible than his books. It was ponderous, but every now and then a subtle humor relieved the impression that he felt himself on exhibition. One could see that he was accustomed to play the lion; but with Fletcher present, toward whom he evidently felt a deep obligation, he talked intimately of himself and of the handicap his stomach infelicities had proved in his work. The joy with which he proclaimed his emancipation showed the real man,--a Henry James unknown to his characters or to his public.

* * * * *

If William James had not taken up science as a profession and thus become a philosopher, he would have been a printer. No other commercial pursuit so invited him as “the honorable, honored, and productive business of printing,” as he expressed it in a letter to his mother in 1863. Naturally, with such a conception of the practice of book manufacture, he was always particularly concerned with the physical _format_ of his volumes. He once told me that my ability to translate his “fool ideas” into type showed the benefit of a Harvard education! He had no patience with any lapse on the part of the proofreader, and when the galleys of his books reached this point in the manufacture even my most experienced readers were on the anxious seat. On the other hand, he was generous in his appreciation when a proofreader called his attention to some slip in his copy that he had overlooked.

After his volume _Pragmatism_ appeared and created such universal attention, a series of “popular” lectures on the subject was announced at Cambridge. The Harpers had just published a novel of mine entitled _The Spell_, in connection with which I had devoted much time to the study of humanism and the humanists of the fifteenth century. Because of my familiarity with a kindred subject, I must confess to a sense of mortification that in reading _Pragmatism_ I found myself beyond my depth. A “popular” presentation appealed to me as an opportunity for intellectual development, so I attended the first lecture, armed with pencil and notebook. Afterwards it so happened that Professor James was on the trolley car when I boarded it at Harvard Square, and I sat down beside him.

“I was surprised to see you at my lecture,” he remarked. “Don’t you get enough of me at your office?”

I told him of my excursions into other philosophic pastures, and of my chagrin to find so little in pragmatic fields upon which my hungry mind could feed. He smiled at my language, and entered heartily into the spirit.

“And today?” he inquired mischievously.--“I hope that today I guided you successfully.”

“You did,” I declared, opening my notebook, and showing him the entry: “Nothing is the only resultant of the one thing which is not.”

“That led me home,” I said soberly, with an intentional double meaning.

Professor James laughed heartily.

“Did I really say that? I have no doubt I did. It simply proves my contention that philosophers too frequently exercise their prerogative of concealing themselves behind meaningless expressions.”

Two of Professor James’ typographic hobbies were paper labels and as few words as possible on the title page. In the matter of supplying scant copy for the title, he won my eternal gratitude, for many a book, otherwise typographically attractive, is ruined by overloading the title with too much matter. This is the first page that catches the eye, and its relation to the book is the same as the door of a house. Only recently I opened a volume to a beautiful title page. The type was perfectly arranged in proportion and margin, the decoration was charming and in complete harmony with the type. It was set by an artist-printer and did him credit; but turning a few more pages I found myself face to face with a red-blooded story of western life, when the title had prepared me for something as delicate as Milton’s _L’Allegro_. A renaissance door on a New England farmhouse would have been equally appropriate!

I commend to those who love books the fascinating study of title pages. I entered upon it from curiosity, and quickly found in it an abiding hobby. The early manuscripts and first printed volumes possessed no title pages, due probably to the fact that the handmade paper and parchment were so costly that the saving of a seemingly unnecessary page was a consideration. The _incipit_ at the top of the first page, reading “Here beginneth” and then adding the name of the author and the subject, answered every purpose; and on the last page the _explicit_ marked the conclusion of the work, and offered the printer an excellent opportunity to record his name and the date of the printing. Most of the early printers were modest in recording their achievements, but in the famous volume _De Veritate Catholicæ Fidei_ the printer says of himself:

_This new edition was furnished us to print in Venice by Nicolas Jenson of France.... Kind toward all, beneficent, generous, truthful and steadfast in the beauty, dignity, and accuracy of his printing, let me (with the indulgence of all) name him the first in the whole world; first likewise in his marvelous speed. He exists in this, our time, as a special gift from Heaven to men. June thirteen, in the year of Redemption 1489. Farewell_

* * * * *

Bibliographers contend that the first title page was used in a book printed by Arnold Ther Hoernen of Cologne in 1470. In this volume an extra leaf is employed containing simply an introduction at the top. It has always seemed to me that this leaf is more likely to have been added by the printer to correct a careless omission of the introduction on his first page of text. Occasionally, in the humanistic manuscript volumes in the Laurenziana Library, at Florence, there occurs a “mirror” title (see _opp. page_), which consists of an illuminated page made up of a large circle in the center containing the name of the book, sometimes surrounded by smaller circles, in which are recorded the titles of the various sections. This seems far more likely to have been suggestive of what came to be the formal title page.

By the end of the fifteenth century the title page was in universal use, and printers showed great ingenuity in arranging the type in the form of wine cups, drinking glasses, funnels, inverted cones, and half-diamonds. During the sixteenth century great artists like Dürer, Holbein, Rubens, and Mantegna executed superbly engraved titles entirely out of keeping with the poor typography of the books themselves. In many of the volumes the title page served the double purpose of title and full-page illustration (see _pages_ 228 and 241). What splendid examples would have resulted if the age of engraved titles had coincided with the high-water mark in the art of printing!

As the art of printing declined, the engraved title was discarded, and the printer of the seventeenth century seemed to feel it incumbent upon him to cover the entire page with type. If you recall the early examples of American Colonial printing, which were based upon the English models of the time, you will gain an excellent idea of the grotesque tendency of that period. The Elzevirs were the only ones who retained the engraved title (_page_ 241). The Baskerville volumes (_page_ 247), in the middle of the eighteenth century, showed a return to good taste and harmonious co-ordination with the text; but there was no beauty in the title until Didot in Paris and Bodoni in Parma, Italy, introduced the so-called “modern” face, which is peculiarly well adapted to display (_page_ 253). William Morris, in the late nineteenth century, successfully combined decoration with type,--over-decorated, in the minds of many, but in perfect keeping with the type pages of the volumes themselves. Cobden-Sanderson, at the Doves Press, returned to the extreme in simplicity and good taste (_page_ 265), excelling all other printers in securing from the blank space on the leaf the fullest possible value. One of Cobden-Sanderson’s classic remarks is, “I always give greater attention, in the typography of a book, to what I leave out than to what I put in.”

* * * * *

The name of William Morris today may be more familiar to booklovers than that of Cobden-Sanderson, but I venture to predict that within a single decade the latter’s work as printer and binder at the Doves Press at Hammersmith, London, will prove to have been a more determining factor in printing as an art than that of William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, and that the general verdict will be that Cobden-Sanderson carried out the splendid principles laid down by Morris more consistently than did that great artist-craftsman himself.

The story of Cobden-Sanderson’s life is an interesting human document. He told it to me one evening, its significance being heightened by the simplicity of the recital. At seventeen he was apprenticed to an engineer, but he worked less than a year in the draft room. He disliked business as business, and began to read for Cambridge, with the idea of entering the Church. While at Trinity College he read for mathematical honors, but three years later, having given up all idea of going into the Church, he left Cambridge, refusing honors and a degree, which he might have had, as a protest against the competitive system and the “warp” it gave to all university teaching. Then, for seven or eight years, he devoted himself to Carlyle and the study of literature, “Chiefly German philosophy,” he said, “which is perhaps not literature,” supporting himself by desultory writing and practicing medicine. When he was thirty years old he was admitted to the Bar, which profession he abandoned thirteen years later to become a manual laborer. The following is quoted from notes which I made after this conversation: