Part 3

The use of composite tools (that is, tools which form a whole design in themselves and do not bear any definite relationship to one another) is now restricted to cheap bindings. The corners and centres on the backs of school prizes are familiar, if degraded, examples of the use of such tools. Together with the Cobden-Sanderson style of decoration there has been a marked revival of the use of interlacement in gold-tooled designs. Interlaced gold lines, if not so intricate as to be bewildering, may be very beautiful, but in this, as in most other crafts, the highly-skilled workman loves to attempt the almost impossible, and some of the recent interlaced patterns fail on account of their over-elaboration and consequent restlessness.

Mr. Charles Ricketts designed some very notable gold-tooled bindings for the Vale Press. These bindings have hardly received the attention they deserve, and the style has not spread to any extent, possibly because Mr. Ricketts’ refinement and delicacy in the use of fine lines are not easy to acquire. These bindings have an architectural quality that places them in a class by themselves. Mr. Cobden-Sanderson and Mr. Ricketts, in their entirely different styles, have shown that gold-tooling may be extremely beautiful as decoration without overstepping the traditional limits of the craft, and in the case of the most successful bindings now being produced these traditional limits have been recognised. Gold-tooling is by its nature a limited means of expression, though exactly where the limits lie must be a matter of feeling and taste rather than of knowledge. Certainly in some of the elaborate bindings now being produced the limits of the craft have been passed, and while serving to show amazing dexterity on the part of the finisher, these bindings are less successful artistically than many that are less ambitious in technique.

There is no clearly marked school of blind-tooling at present, though here and there the method has been used with success. Mr. William Morris designed a notable binding in white pigskin for the Kelmscott “Chaucer.” Many copies were so bound at the Doves Bindery, but most of the attempts that have been made to carry out work in the same style have been comparatively unsuccessful.

There have been a good many efforts made to revive modelled leather-work as a means of decorating books, but although this method is capable of producing very fine results, most of the binding in modelled leather shown in recent exhibitions cannot be said to be successful. Any work that has to be done on the leather before the book is bound is almost doomed to failure, because leather which is modelled before binding cannot be handled by the binder with the freedom that is necessary if he is to make a workmanlike job of the covering. It is, however, possible to put quite sufficient relief in modelled leather after a book is bound, if the leather be reasonably thick; indeed high relief for most books is objectionable.

Many of the old bindings had fine metal mounts and clasps. If clasps are used on modern books, as a rule they should be flush with the sides, so as not to scratch their neighbours when taken in and out of shelves. Raised clasps and bosses are only suitable for books that are expected to stand permanently on a lectern.

In criticising decorated bindings there is a danger of falling into the common error of generalising from isolated instances. You cannot put too much ornament on a thing as small as a bookcover if the ornament is good enough. A book well bound in beautiful leather may be perfectly satisfactory and beautiful by virtue of good workmanship, fine material and colour. A binding covered with fine gold-tooling may be just as restful and far more beautiful, but while there is comparatively little scope for failure in the plain binding, there are appalling pitfalls if the cover be lavishly decorated. There are, of course, all sorts of degrees of decoration between an absolutely plain binding and one covered entirely with gold, but there are some qualities common to most successful tooled ornament.

There are few bindings that are quite successful unless the ornament is arranged on a symmetrical plan. Any attempt to portray landscape, human figures or naturalistic flowers is almost doomed to failure. Gold-tooling is not a suitable medium for rendering such subjects.

Lettering should be well designed and free from eccentricities. The problem of lettering a long title across a narrow back may necessitate ungainly breaking of words, but where this is done it should only be done from obvious necessity, and the reasonable necessity for this fault should be apparent. To letter books in type so small as to be quite illegible, lettering that looks from a short distance like a gold line, is more unreasonable than almost any breaking of words that allows the use of letters of a larger size.

Fine binding is an expensive luxury but not an unreasonable one compared with many others. We have now in England a school of really fine binding, and the most reasonable and unobjectionable form that luxury can take is the use of beautiful things in everyday life. If a book is well bound and well decorated it is fit to use, and in choosing a book to be expensively bound it would be better to choose the book most often used than one which would be put away unopened. Most fine bindings would be greatly improved by use, and the reasonable using of them would give immense pleasure, a pleasure that would justify the binder’s care and trouble and the purchaser’s outlay. The use of a beautiful thing gives a far higher form of pleasure than does the mere sense of ownership.

GERMANY

THE ART OF THE BOOK IN GERMANY. BY L. DEUBNER

“Letterpress printing, even in the edition de luxe, is not an art, and neither the compositor nor the printer is an artist.” This is what was written in the year 1887 by Ludwig Nieper, at that time Director of what is now the Royal Academy of the Graphic Arts and Book Industry at Leipzig, a city which in the present year has in its International Exhibition, embracing every conceivable aspect of the industry as well as the arts most closely bound up with it, furnished such a convincing and impressive demonstration of the culture uniting the nations as perhaps has never been offered before. The conviction expressed in the passage just quoted, repudiating the existence of any influence of art on industrial labour, belongs to a period bereft of any real feeling for art and content with the imitation and repetition of historic styles while eschewing any contact with the practical requirements of the industry. Nowadays we know how beneficial and fruitful for both has been the reciprocal influence of art and industry in every sphere of activity, and that only by this means have we been able to proceed from mere external embellishment to artistic form, from book adornment to a true art of the book. Thus in the space of barely twenty-five years our views of what art really is and what are its functions have radically changed, and it must be left to those who come after us to estimate more correctly than we are able to at the present day, the immense labour which has been accomplished in the space of a generation. The incipient stages in the growth of the new movement in Germany date back some twenty years. At that time we looked with envy at the publications which issued from the private presses of England, and could boast of nothing that could compare with the far-famed “Faust” of the Doves Press; and if to-day we are at length able to stand on our own feet, it would yet be false to assert that the modern art of book production in Germany has developed from within, and to disavow the valuable stimulus and knowledge we owe especially to the English books of that period. And clearly as we perceived that the book in its entirety, with its harmonious co-ordination of type, decoration, composition, paper and binding, should form a work of art, yet only after many mistakes and deviations have we arrived at the goal. Thus nowadays no one would seriously seek to defend such a production as the official catalogue of the German section at the Paris Exhibition of 1900; and so, too, the so-called “Eckmann” type, which at one time was taken up with unexampled enthusiasm—a type in which the designer had contrived to adapt the ancient forms of the “Antiqua” type to the sinuous lines of modern ornament—is now almost completely forgotten. These and many other things which at that time were acclaimed as creative achievements, belong to that class of errors which are really nothing but exaggerated truths. But in the absence of such excesses and that exuberance of feeling which was so violently manifested, it would have been quite impossible to accomplish in so short a time what as a matter of fact was accomplished, and in spite of shortcomings has even now lost none of its importance in the history of the development of a new art of the book.

The first event of significance which followed the renewed recognition of the decorative value of the printed letter was the issue of some new types designed by Otto Eckmann and Peter Behrens respectively, the former slender, delicate, and round, the latter bold, distinguished, and angular, but both alike quite free, natural, and easily legible. It was these founts that really inaugurated the new development; and the foundry of the Gebr. Klingspor which issued them, placed itself by so doing at the head of all those enterprising type-foundries which have since enriched our printing press with a wealth of new and valuable founts. It had come to be recognised that lettering and ornament were closely correlated; that the ornamentation of printed matter could not be regarded as an end in itself, but must be adapted to the character of the lettering in order that the rectangular space of a page should be so filled as to achieve a good general effect and satisfy the sensitive eye. Nothing remained, therefore, but to entrust the designing of new types to artists who had already accomplished good and original work as book decorators; and as none of the numerous German type-foundries desired or indeed could afford to be behindhand in a movement of this kind, it resulted that in the course of a few years the printing presses of the country were inundated with a flood of new “artist” types, of which, nevertheless, only relatively few have been able to survive till now. To design a new type or to re-mould the old forms of “Antiqua” (Roman) or “Fraktur” (German Gothic), so that the new forms should not only have a good black-and-white effect but that the eye should be able to grasp with ease the sequence of “word-pictures” as well as each individual letter and to read the lines quickly and comfortably, is a task of extraordinary difficulty which many who have attempted to grapple with have under-estimated. To obtain an idea of the multitude of difficulties that have to be overcome, one must bear in mind that the fundamental forms of the individual letters are fixed, and that only small changes are possible in the general shape, in the proportions of the component parts, in the alternation of the upright, horizontal, and oblique lines, in the curvature of the so-called “versal” or capital letters, in the serifs, and in the sweep of preliminary or terminal flourishes; that the printed letter, unlike manuscript, is bound up with fixed laws, and that in order to justify its claim to consideration it should, while expressing the artistic individuality of its designer, not be too original and personal if it is to be employed for general use. Further, it should conform to the spirit and ideas of the age, and yet again it ought not to be wholly conditioned by contemporary considerations if it is to survive to a later age, as have many fine founts which the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have bequeathed to us.

As already said, only a few among our modern German designers of printed types have mastered all these difficulties, and among these few the names of Behrens, Tiemann, Koch, Kleukens, Weiss, and Wieynk are pre-eminent. In the course of some thirteen years that born architect, Peter Behrens, who began as a painter of easel pictures and a decorator of books, and now builds palaces, factory buildings, and gigantic business-houses, has himself designed four founts in which the whole artistic evolution of this strong-willed nature is reflected, and which yet seem so entirely the product of a natural growth that one is quite unconscious of the years of labour spent on their improvement and perfection in the interval between the preparation of the designs and the actual casting of the founts. As compared with the architectonic character of the austere, angular forms of the first Behrens type, the italic or “Kursiv” fount (p. 141) which made its appearance six years later looks more decorative with the gentle sweep and uniform flow of its lines, and in the most successful of the Roman founts the full vigour and monumentality of his later period of activity is clearly expressed; while the most recent of all, the “Mediæval” (p. 140), which was only issued a few weeks ago, is again more ornamental with its uniformly fine lines, and admirably answers to its designation as a type embodying the characteristics of the Italian Renaissance script.

Another “Mediæval” type which even excels that just mentioned in clearness and beauty of form has been designed by Walter Tiemann (pp. 146 and 147), who holds the position of instructor at the Royal Academy of Graphic Arts at Leipzig, and devotes himself almost exclusively to the improvement of the art of lettering and book production. Like all the other types designed by this artist, it has less of a personal character about it, and reason more than sentiment has been the guiding motive in the design; but its cool, distinguished reticence gives it a quite exceptional merit. It is, moreover, completely independent of its classical prototypes and their Romanesque imitations; very effective in all its gradations, the use of it is not restricted to the limited editions of our private presses, and in fact it is now one of the most popular founts we have.

The fine Roman types by F. W. Kleukens (pp. 151, 153 and 156) rank among the most gratifying achievements of our new school. They are free from eccentricity of any kind, there is a seductive charm in their unassuming yet distinguished forms, and even the ornamental slender kinds are agreeably clear. In spite of the thinness of their lines the letters belonging to this slender fount combine to make easily legible lines. The Kleukens types are practical as well as attractive, and in conjunction with specially designed borders, initials and decorative devices of all kinds, they are well adapted for the most diverse uses.

Of a far more personal character, but at the same time of a more restricted range of use, are the graceful types by Heinrich Wieynk (pp. 149 and 150). It is the spirit of the Rococo that dwells therein—that epoch to which, with its playful charm and light-hearted grace, we owe so many masterpieces of French typography. Even the superfluous loops and flourishes which were characteristic of that period are encountered again, with many bizarre peculiarities, in the “Kursiv” and “Trianon” of Wieynk, and yet there is a remarkable fluidity and vitality in each stroke; the general effect is highly artistic, and, as the examples now reproduced show, the founts are admirably adapted to numerous purposes.