Part 2

Since the “old-style” founts were designed about the middle of last century, what new book types have been cast by the founders for use by the printing trade generally have as a rule been mere variations of letter already in vogue. The founders have drawn but little on the wealth of beautiful book types which in the early printed books of Italy are offered to anyone who has the good taste and the skill to adapt them to modern needs. Messrs. Shanks and Sons, the type-founders of Red Lion Square, have, however, gone to this source for their “Dolphin” series (p. 41), which has many features of beauty to commend it. It is based on Jenson’s Roman letter, somewhat thickened in the line. The punches were cut by Mr. E. P. Prince, who also cut the Kelmscott type and many others of the private founts.

Intelligent study of Italian models also gives us the “Kennerley” type (p. 39), designed by the American Mr. Goudy, which Messrs. Caslon will shortly put on the English market. This type is not in any sense a copy of early letter—it is original; but Mr. Goudy has studied type design to such good purpose that he has been able to restore to the Roman alphabet much of that lost humanistic character which the first Italian printers inherited from their predecessors, the scribes of the early Renaissance. Besides being beautiful in detail his type is beautiful in the mass; and the letters when set into words seem to lock into one another with a closeness which is common in the letter of early printers, but is rare in modern type. The “Kennerley” type is quite clear to read and has few features which by their strangeness are likely to waken the prejudice of the modern reader. Since the first Caslon began casting type about the year 1724, no such excellent letter has been put within reach of English printers.

So large is the proportion of books which are now set in type by machinery that, however much our sympathies may make us prefer the hand-set book, we cannot but be concerned for the characters used in machine composition. Type set by machinery generally seems to be inferior in design to that set by hand; but the inferiority is in the main accidental, and is probably due to a lesser degree of technical skill shown either in the designing or in the process of punch-cutting, which is itself done by machinery. One or two admirable faces of type have, however, been produced by the Lanston Monotype Company for setting by the monotype machine. One of these is the “Imprint” type, adapted from one of the founts used by Christopher Plantin, the famous printer of Antwerp, in the late sixteenth century. The letters are bold and clear, and pages set in them are both pleasant to look at and easy to read. At the same time the type is sufficiently modern in character not to offend by any features unfamiliar to the ordinary reader.

No art can live by merely reviving and reproducing past forms, and in reviewing the share taken by the type-founders of the past and of the present in the art of the book one cannot help considering by what means and from what quarter good types are to be designed and cut in the future. We have seen that the early printers took their inspiration from the best of the contemporary book-hands. The invention of printing, however, killed the art of the scribe, and with it perished the source whence during the ages past life and beauty had been given to the letters of the alphabet and to the pages in which they were gathered. Henceforth the letters were cast in lead, and there was no influence save the force of tradition to make or keep them beautiful. Whatever change they underwent was for the worse, unless indeed it was a mere reversion to forms or features which for a while had been abandoned.

Conscious of this downward tendency, which he seems to look upon as inevitable and irresistible, Mr. Guthrie, of the Pear-tree Press at Bognor, has renounced type altogether, and now prints books, like William Blake, from etched plates inscribed with his own fine book-hand. Such a method is, of course, not practicable for the vast majority of books, even if we were willing to forgo the many fine qualities which are presented in a well-printed book. Neither is any such counsel of despair warranted, for of late years the art of the scribe itself has been renewed; and most readers of The Studio know something of the fine work done by the school of calligraphy established some ten years since by Mr. Edward Johnston, and still carried on by his pupil Mr. Graily Hewitt at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in Southampton Row, London. May not the printer look to that school as the source whence the type-designer and type-founder shall learn to design and cut beautiful letter for his books? Not indeed that type-letter should be a mere reproduction of any written hand; rather must it bear nakedly and shamelessly all the qualities which the steel of the punch-cutter and the metal from which it is cast impose upon it. It must be easy to read as well as fair to look on, and besides carrying on the traditions of the past must respect the prejudices of the present. But only a calligrapher whose eye and hand have been trained to produce fine letter for the special needs of the printed book can have knowledge of the manifold subtleties of such letter and power to provide for them in the casting of types. If the writing schools can turn out such men, they will deserve well of all those who are interested in the art of the book. That our hope need not be vain is shown by the fact that calligraphers trained in the methods of the school have gone to Germany, and have there profoundly influenced the production of modern types; and the supreme irony of it all is that German type-founders are sending to England new types which draw their inspiration from a London school of which the English and Scottish type-founders seem never even to have heard.

_Note_—In the course of the preceding article the writer has had occasion to refer frequently to the type of Nicholas Jenson in its relation to the modern British founts. The Editor has therefore included amongst the examples shown a page from the “Pliny,” printed by Jenson in 1476, for purposes of comparison and reference. It will be found on page 21.

FINE BOOKBINDING IN ENGLAND.

BY DOUGLAS COCKERELL

Fine or “extra” binding as it is called in the trade implies that the craftsman has done his best with the best materials. It may be plain or decorated, but whatever work there is should be the best of which the craftsman is capable. Printed books are largely machine-made productions, and it would seem reasonable that machine-made books should have machine-made covers, and it is in such covers or “cases” that most of our books are issued. There is a general feeling that the cost of the binding should bear some relation to the cost of the book; but since books are turned out by the thousand from the printing press, and fine bindings can only be made singly and laboriously by hand, it is inevitable that in most cases such a binding costs much more than the book it covers. This has probably been the case since the invention of printing cheapened books, and yet there have always been people who valued certain books highly enough to have them well bound and decorated. For a true book-lover does not value a book at the price it costs, and he may wish to have the words of a favourite author enshrined in a precious cover. Some books by their nature and use call for lavish treatment. Books used for important ceremonies, such as altar books or lectern Bibles, can quite well be covered with ornament, provided this ornament is good. They will be but a spot of gorgeousness in a great church or cathedral, and should be judged in relation to their surroundings and not as isolated articles.

There is a fashion now to value decoration in inverse ratio to its quantity, and demand that it should be concentrated on spots, leaving the greater part of the surface of articles bare. This is quite a reasonable way to treat a binding, but it is not the only way. A satisfactory binding can be made with little or no ornament, and there is then little fear of a disastrous failure. To cover a book all over with gold-tooled decoration is a more difficult thing to do satisfactorily, but it can be done, and, if well done, is well worth doing.

At the present time there are many binders working in England who are capable of turning out work of the highest class, and fortunately there are book-lovers here and in America with the taste and means to commission such work. Probably, if a man were bold enough to spend five or ten thousand pounds on binding the finest books that are being produced at the present time, he would find, if the money were wisely spent, that he had got a library that would be celebrated all over the world. There is an interesting revival in the use of arms-blocks on bindings, and when certain modern libraries come to be dispersed their owners will be remembered by their books in the same way as are the original owners of the many armorial bindings that have come down to us from the past.

There are some qualities that are common to all well-bound books. Of course abnormal books have to be treated specially, but it may generally be said that every leaf of a book should open right to the back. This means that all single leaves and plates should be attached by guards, and that no overcasting or pasting-in should be allowed, and it also means that the back should be truly flexible. The sections should be sewn to flexible cords or tapes, the ends of these should be firmly attached to the boards, and the back should be covered with some flexible material, such as leather, which, while protecting the sewing-thread or cord, shall itself add to the strength of the binding. A fine binding will have many other features added by way of refinement or elaboration, but unless it has these qualities it is likely to be an unsatisfactory piece of work. A well-bound book should open well and stay open, and shut well and stay shut. The binder can bind any book so that it will not open, but there are some books that he cannot bind so that they will open and shut “sweetly.”

Bookbinding is only one part of the larger craft of book production, and to obtain a perfect book it is necessary that the workers in each branch of the craft should have a common ideal of what a book should be, and that each should do his part in such a way that this ideal may be attained. Unfortunately it too often happens that the printers are quite content if their printing looks perfect as it comes from the press, with the result—through errors in the choice of paper or the number of leaves to a section—that the bookbinder has unnecessary and sometimes unsurmountable obstacles put in his way. A book that will not open freely and that gapes like a dead oyster when it ought to be shut is not pleasant to use, and when these faults are noticed the binder generally gets the blame. Sometimes he deserves the blame, for the fault may be his, but more often than not the fault lies with the paper. To open a book a certain number of leaves of paper must be bent, and if the paper is so stiff that a single leaf will not fall over by its own weight, the book cannot be made to open quite satisfactorily if bound in the ordinary way. By swinging each leaf on a guard it is possible to bind a pack of playing-cards into something like a book which will open and shut freely, but that this _can_ be done is no excuse for the production of books which necessitate this drastic treatment before they can be bound satisfactorily.

William Morris, when he founded the Kelmscott Press, did more than revive fine book-printing; he established a tradition for books that were eminently bindable, and the presses that followed his lead kept up the tradition; so that we have in England a large number of beautifully printed books that are worthy of the best binding, and that impose no unnecessary difficulties on the binder.

Mr. Cobden-Sanderson did much to revive the use of the tight or flexible back. In this style the leather is attached directly to the back of the sections, and so helps to hold them firmly together. All leather-bound books had tight backs until about a hundred years ago, when the hollow back came into general use. A tight back should throw up when the book is opened; that is to say the back, convex when the book is shut, should become concave on the book being opened. This causes a certain amount of creasing in the leather, and this creasing is not good for gold tooling; but with a well-bound book the damage is not serious, and important constructional features must not be sacrificed for the sake of the decoration.

The hollow back does not crease the leather, and so is preferred by finishers, and besides it is easier to cover a hollow back neatly than a tight one; but the strain of opening and shutting, which should be distributed evenly across the back, is in the hollow back thrown on the joints, with the result that the leather is apt to break at these places unless specially strengthened, as is the case with well-bound account books.

While “flexible” backs that are truly flexible are undoubtedly the best, some binders line up their backs so stiffly under the leather as to allow little or no movement when the book is opened. This avoids the creasing of the leather and leaves the decoration uninjured, but the book will not open freely, and there is no virtue in such a tight back. Leather is chosen for binding because of its toughness and flexibility, yet binders deliberately sacrifice this last quality in order to obtain extreme neatness or to hide faults in the forwarding.

It is the fashion in some quarters to admire as the perfection of craftsmanship an exact and hard square edge to the boards of a book. This can only be got by paring the leather down till it is as thin as paper and has consequently very little strength. A softer, rounder edge is natural to a leather-covered article, and it is unreasonable to expect the qualities of a newly planed board in a material so wholly different in character. The edges of the leather-covered board should have a distinctly flat face, and clumsiness will be avoided by any good craftsman. It is only the extreme sharpness, so much admired by unknowing people, that is objectionable.

In the treatment of the edges of the leaves fashion has gone to two extremes: some book-lovers demand that the edges should be entirely uncut, while others require them to look like a solid piece of metal. The rough edges, or “deckle,” on handmade paper is a necessary defect due to the way the paper is made. These rough edges were always trimmed off by the early binders because they were unsightly, difficult to turn over, and harboured dust. Some of the shorter leaves would usually be left untrimmed. Such short leaves are known in the trade as “proof,” _i.e._ proof that the book has not been unduly cut down. To gild a book-edge absolutely solid the binder must cut down to the shortest leaves and so often has to reduce the size of the book unreasonably; but an acceptable compromise between entirely uncut edges and solid gilding can be arrived at if the sections of a book to be finely bound are trimmed singly and gilt “in the rough” before sewing. This enriches the edges but does not disguise their nature nor necessitate their being unduly cropped.

In recent times there has been much good work done in England in the investigation of bookbinding materials. The Royal Society of Arts Committee on “Leather for Bookbinding” has established standards of leather that have made it possible for binders to procure skins that are uninjured in the process of manufacture, and bookbinding leather of the very highest class is now being produced in England. The leather manufacturers are able to dye leather any reasonable shade without the use of sulphuric acid, and it is only some of the lighter fancy colours that are unprocurable in “acid free” leather. That these “fancy” shades are unprocurable in uninjured leather is a distinct gain, as they mostly fade, and books bound in such leather seldom look as if they were intended to be used.

There are various ways by which leather-bound books may be decorated, but tooling, either in gold or blind, is by far the commonest, and it is tooled bindings that we are considering here. “Blind” tooling is the impression of hot tools on the leather. The most satisfactory tools for blind work are those cut die-sunk like a seal. These, by depressing the ground, leave the ornament in relief. Tools for gold work are cut so that the ornament with the gold is depressed below the surface of the leather. These tools may be used without gold, but blind tooling produced in this way has little of the character associated with this work when it was at its best, _i.e._ up to the end of the fifteenth century. Gold-tooling came to Europe from the East, and preserved a tradition of Eastern design for a very long period. The English gold-tooled bindings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are often strangely Eastern in the style of the decoration.

The ornamentation of fine bindings reached almost its lowest ebb in England about the middle of last century. Of technical skill there was never any lack, but decoration had lost vitality, and the ornamental bindings of this time are for the most part copies or parodies of the work of earlier binders. William Morris designed a few very beautiful gold-tooled bindings which were covered all over with the impressions of tools, each one of which represented a complete plant. His friend, Mr. Cobden-Sanderson, who gave up the practice of the law to learn the binder’s craft, produced books that are unsurpassed in the delicate beauty of their decoration. Before his time there had been few attempts to combine tools to form organic patterns. Mr. Cobden-Sanderson’s tools were very elementary in character, each flower, leaf or bud being the impression of a separate tool. These impressions were combined in such a way as to give a sense of growth, and yet in no way overlapped the traditional limitations and conventions of the craft. Mr. Cobden-Sanderson got his results by sheer genius in the right use of simple elements. He used inlays very sparingly, and his finest bindings depend entirely on the effect of gold on leather. The style of design which he founded has spread throughout the trade, mainly through the teaching at the various technical schools, and it is now comparatively rare to find an elaborate binding of recent date without some attempt having been made to connect the tools so that they together form an organic whole.