Chapter 4

The great constructive feature of Mr. Stevens's address, which is one that brings it absolutely up to date, is his call for a school of typography, which shall teach a recognized grammar of book manufacture, especially printing, a grammar as standard as Lindley Murray's. He believes that the art of bookmaking cannot be held to the practice of the laws of proportion, taste, and workmanship, which were settled once for all in the age of the scribes and the first printers, without the existence and pressure of some recognized authority. Such an authority, he holds, would be furnished by a school of typography. This, as we interpret it, would be not necessarily a school for journeymen, but a school for those who are to assume the responsibility too often thrown upon the journeymen, the masters of book production. With a large annual output of books taken up by a public none too deeply versed in the constituents of a well-made book, there would seem to be much hope for printing as an art from the existence of such an institution, which would be critical in the interest of sound construction, and one might well wish that the course in printing recently established at Harvard might at some time be associated with the name of its prophet of a generation ago, Henry Stevens of Vermont.

BOOKS AS A LIBRARIAN WOULD LIKE THEM

The librarian is in a position more than any one else to know the disabilities of books. The author is interested in his fame and his emoluments, the publisher in his reputation and his profits. To each of these parties the sales are the chief test. But the librarian's interest in the book begins after the sale, and it continues through the entire course of the book's natural life. His interest, moreover, is all-round; he is concerned with the book's excellence in all respects, intellectual, esthetic, and physical. He is the one who has to live with it, literally to keep house with it; and his reputation is in a way involved with its character. He may, therefore, be allowed for once to have his say as to how he would like to have books made.

If a book is worth writing at all, it is worth writing three times: first to put down the author's ideas, secondly to condense their expression into the smallest possible compass, and thirdly so to arrange them that they shall be most easily taken into the mind, putting them not necessarily into logical order, but into psychological order. If the author will do this and can add the touch of genius, or--shall we say?--can suffuse his work with the quality of genius, then he has made an addition to literature. That, among all the books which the librarian has to care for, he finds so few that he can call additions to literature is one of his grievances. The three processes may, indeed, by a practiced hand be performed as one. The librarian is only anxious that they be performed and that he have the benefit.

With the publisher the librarian feels that he can speak still more bluntly than with the author, for it is against the publisher that the librarian cherishes one of his greatest grievances, the necessity of supplying four times the amount of storage room that ought to be required. I have before me two books, one larger than the other in every way and four times as thick. Yet the smaller book is printed in larger type, has twice as many words on a page, and has twice as many pages. This is, of course, an exceptional contrast, but a difference of four times between the actual and the possible is by no means unusual. When one considers that in most of our libraries it costs, all told, a dollar to shelve a volume, one realizes that the librarian has against the publisher a grievance that can be put into the language of commerce. If every book is occupying a dollar's worth of space, which ought to accommodate three others, then, gentlemen publishers, in swelling your books to catch the public eye, you have taken from us far more than you put into your own pockets from your sales to us. You have made our book storage four times as costly and unwieldy as it ought to be; but you have done worse than this, you have sold us perishable instead of durable goods. You have cheapened every element of the book--paper, ink, and binding--so that, while we begin the twentieth century with some books on our shelves that are over four hundred years old and some that are less than one, the only books among them that have any chance of seeing the twenty-first century are those that will then be five hundred years old; the books that might have been a century old will then, like their makers, be dust. It seems to the librarian that you, who have taken it upon yourselves to direct the service to be rendered to men by the "art preservative of all arts," have assumed very lightly your responsibility for the future's knowledge of our time. You may and do answer that, as the records begin to perish, the most important of them will be reprinted, and the world will be the better off for the loss of the rest. To this it may be rejoined that you give the distant future no chance to revise the judgments of a rather near future, and that vast quantities of material which would be read with eagerness by future generations and which would be carefully preserved if it were durable, will not be reprinted, whatever its value. We may be sure that the daily papers of the present year will never be reprinted; the world of the future will be too busy, not to speak of the cost; yet what a series of human documents will disappear in their destruction! If a part of the professional obligation which you assumed in making yourselves responsible for the issues of the press is to transmit the record of this generation to later time, then it seems to me that you have in great measure betrayed your trust and have so far brought to naught the labors of your comrade, the librarian, in the conservation of literature. Also you compel him to pay for unnecessary rebindings which can hardly be made, so poor is the stock you furnish the binder; yet on this point you have shown some indications of a change of heart, and I will pass it over. Perhaps you have finally come to realize that every cent paid for rebinding is taken out of your gross receipts. I will not speak of the books that you ought never to have published, the books that are not books; most of these the librarian can avoid buying, but sometimes a book is just "ower gude for banning," and he has to take it and catalogue it and store it, and take account of it and rearrange it, and, after all, get scolded by his authorities or ridiculed by the public for housing so much rubbish. The author is responsible with you here, but your own individual responsibility is enough for any shoulders to bear.

To the printer the librarian would say: since wishing is easy, let us imagine that what ought always to happen is happening regularly instead of rarely, namely, that the author produces a book worth printing and that the publisher leaves you free to put it into a worthy form. This is the opportunity that you have always been looking for. How are you going to meet it? Do you know all the elements that you deal with and can you handle them with a sure touch practically and esthetically? If so, you will not need any hints from the librarian, and he will order your book "sight unseen." But still, among the good and right ways of making books, there may be some that he prefers, and he will ask you, when you are making books for him and not for private buyers, at least to give his preferences a hearing. He wants his books no bigger physically than they need be, and yet he would like to have them of a convenient height, from seven to nine inches. He would rather have their expansion in height and width and not in thickness, for the former dimensions up to ten and a half inches by eight mean no increased demand upon shelf room, while the thickness of every leaf is taken out of his library's capacity. He would like to have no wasteful margins and no extreme in the size of type. If it is too large, the book takes up too much room; if it is too small, his readers will ruin their eyes over it or, what is more likely, refuse to read it and so make its possession a useless expense. For the sake of rapid reading he would like to have every wide page printed in columns. For the same reason he would like to have every possible help given to the eye in the way of paragraphs, headlines, and variation of type, so far as it can be given in consonance with the esthetic rights of the book. With these points observed, and the book printed on paper as thin and as light in weight as can be conveniently used and is consistent with opacity and strength, with clear type, clear and durable ink, and good presswork, the printer will have done his part, and a book will go to the binder that is worthy of his best treatment.

What that treatment is the binder knows better than I can tell him. When he has applied it, the book will come out of his hands at once solid and flexible; unmutilated, either on the outer edges where mutilation can be seen, or at the back where it cannot be seen, but where it nevertheless hurts the integrity of the book; covered with honest boards that will stand use, and clad with a material, cloth or leather, that is both strong to resist wear and also contains within itself no seeds of deterioration. Besides this let it have a character, however unobtrusive, befitting the contents of the book, and the binder will have paid his full debt to the present and the future.

While the librarian's ideals of bookmaking are not the only ones, they are in harmony with the best, and there cannot be progress in bookmaking without approaching his ideals. He is, therefore, by his very office committed to every undertaking for the improvement of the book, and because of the efforts of librarians and other booklovers there is ground for belief that the books of the present decade will be better than those of the last.

THE BOOK BEAUTIFUL

We who use books every day as tools of trade or sources of inspiration are apt to overlook the fact that the book, on its material side, is an art object. Not, indeed, that it ranks with the products of poetry, painting, sculpture, and other arts of the first grade; but it has a claim to our consideration on the level of the minor arts, along with jewelry, pottery, tapestry, and metal work. Moreover, its intimate association with literature, of which it is the visible setting, gives it a charm that, while often only reflected, may also be contributory, heightening the beauty that it enshrines.

Using the word beauty for the result of artistic mastery, we may say that in the other arts beauty is the controlling factor in price, but in the book this is the case only exceptionally. As a consequence beautiful books are more accessible for purchase or observation than any other equally beautiful objects. For the price of a single very beautiful rug one can obtain a small library of the choicest books. Except in the case of certain masterpieces of the earliest printing, in which rarity is joined to beauty, high prices for books have nothing to do with their artistic quality. Even for incunabula one need pay only as many dollars as for tapestries of the same grade one would have to pay thousands. In book collecting, therefore, a shallow purse is not a bar to achievement, and in our day of free libraries one may make good progress in the knowledge and enjoyment of beautiful books without any expense at all.

Public taste is probably as advanced in the appreciation of the book beautiful as of any other branch of art, but it is active rather than enlightened. This activity is a good sign, for it represents the first stage in comprehension; the next is the consciousness that there is more in the subject than had been realized; the third is appreciation. The present chapter is addressed to those--and they are many--who are in the second stage. The first piece of advice to those who seek acquaintance with the book beautiful is: Surround yourself with books that the best judges you know call beautiful; inspect them, handle them; cultivate them as you would friends. It will not be long before most other books begin to annoy you, though at first you cannot tell why. Then specific differences one after another will stand out, until at last you come to know something of the various elements of the book, their possibilities of beauty or ugliness, and their relations one to another. No one should feel ashamed if this process takes a long time--is indeed endless. William Morris pleaded to having sinned in the days of ignorance, even after he had begun to make books. So wide is the field and so many and subtle are the possible combinations that all who set out to know books must expect, like the late John Richard Green, to "die learning." But the learning is so delightful and the company into which it brings us is so agreeable that we have no cause to regret our lifelong apprenticeship.

The first of all the qualities of the book beautiful is fitness. It must be adapted to the literature which it contains, otherwise it will present a contradiction. Imagine a "Little Classic" Josephus or a folio Keats. The literature must also be worthy of a beautiful setting, else the book will involve an absurdity. Have we not all seen presentation copies of government documents which gave us a shock when we passed from the elegant outside to the commonplace inside? But the ideal book will go beyond mere fitness; it will be both an interpretation of its contents and an offering of homage to its worth. The beauty of the whole involves perfect balance as well as beauty of the parts. No one must take precedence of the rest, but there must be such a perfect harmony that we shall think first of the total effect and only afterwards of the separate elements that combine to produce it. This greatly extends our problem, but also our delight in its happy solutions.

The discerning reader has probably noticed that we have already smuggled into our introduction the notion that the book beautiful is a printed book; and, broadly speaking, so it must be at the present time. But we should not forget that, while the printed book has charms and laws of its own, the book was originally written by hand and in this form was developed to a higher pitch of beauty than the printed book has ever attained. As Ruskin says, "A well-written book is as much pleasanter and more beautiful than a printed book as a picture is than an engraving." Calligraphy and illumination are to-day, if not lost arts, at best but faint echoes of their former greatness. They represent a field of artistic effort in which many persons of real ability might attain far greater distinction and emolument than in the overcrowded ordinary fields of art. Printing itself would greatly benefit from a flourishing development of original bookmaking, gaining just that stimulus on the art side that it needs to counterbalance the pressure of commercialism. At present, however, we shall commit no injustice if, while remembering its more perfect original, we accept the printed book as the representative of the book beautiful; but, as a matter of fact, most that we shall have to say of it will apply with little change to the manuscript book.

A final point by way of preface is the relation of the book beautiful to the well-made book. The two are not identical. A book may be legible, strong, and durable, yet ill-proportioned and clumsy, ugly in every detail. On the other hand, the book beautiful must be well made, else it will not keep its beauty. The point where the two demands tend most to conflict is at the hinge of the cover, where strength calls for thickness of leather and beauty for thinness. The skill of the good binder is shown in harmonizing these demands when he shaves the under side of the leather for the joint. Let us now take up the elements of the book one by one and consider their relations to beauty.

To one who never had seen a book before it would seem, as it stands on the shelf or lies on the table, a curious rectangular block; and such it is in its origin, being derived from the Roman codex, which was a block of wood split into thin layers. When closed, therefore, the book must have the seeming solidity of a block; but open it and a totally new character appears. It is now a bundle of thin leaves, and its beauty no longer consists in its solidity and squareness, but in the opposite qualities of easy and complete opening, and flowing curves. This inner contradiction, so far from making the book a compromise and a failure, is one of the greatest sources of its charm, for each condition must be met as if the other did not exist, and when both are so met, we derive the same satisfaction as from any other combination of strength and grace, such as Schiller celebrates in his "Song of the Bell."

The book therefore consists of a stiff cover joined by a flexible back--in the book beautiful a tight back--and inclosing highly flexible leaves. The substance of the board is not visible, being covered with an ornamental material, either cloth or leather, but it should be strong and tough and in thickness proportioned to the size of the volume. In very recent years we have available for book coverings really beautiful cloths, which are also more durable than all but the best leathers; but we have a right to claim for the book beautiful a covering of leather, and full leather, not merely a back and hinges. We have a wide range of beauty in leathers, from the old ivory of parchment--when it has had a few centuries in which to ripen its color--to the sensuous richness of calf and the splendor of crushed levant. The nature of the book must decide, if the choice is yet to be made. But, when the book has been covered with appropriate leather so deftly that the leather seems "grown around the board," and has been lettered on the back--a necessary addition giving a touch of ornament--we are brought up against the hard fact that, unless the decorator is very skillful indeed--a true artist as well as a deft workman--he cannot add another touch to the book without lessening its beauty. The least obtrusive addition will be blind tooling, or, as in so many old books, stamping, which may emphasize the depth of color in the leather. The next step in the direction of ornament is gilding, the next inlaying. In the older books we find metal clasps and corners, which have great decorative possibilities; but these, like precious stones, have disappeared from book ornamentation in modern times before the combined inroad of the democratic and the classic spirit.

Having once turned back the cover, our interest soon forsakes it for the pages inclosed by it. The first of these is the page opposite the inside of the cover; obviously it should be of the same or, at least, of a similar material to the body of the book. But the inside of the cover is open to two treatments; it may bear the material either of the outer covering or of the pages within. So it may display, for instance, a beautiful panel of leather--doublure--or it may share with the next page a decorative lining paper; but that next page should never be of leather, for it is the first page of the book.

As regards book papers, we are to-day in a more fortunate position than we were even a few years ago; for we now can obtain, and at no excessive cost, papers as durable as those employed by the earliest printers. It is needless to say that these are relatively rough papers. They represent one esthetic advance in papermaking since the earliest days in that they are not all dead white. Some of the books of the first age of printing still present to the eye very nearly the blackest black on the whitest white. But, while this effect is strong and brilliant, it is not the most pleasing. The result most agreeable to the eye still demands black or possibly a dark blue ink, but the white of the paper should be softened. Whether we should have made this discovery of our own wit no one can tell; but it was revealed to us by the darkening of most papers under the touch of time. Shakespeare forebodes this yellowing of his pages; but what was then thought of as a misfortune has since been accepted as an element of beauty, and now book papers are regularly made "antique" as well as "white." Even white does not please us unless it inclines to creamy yellow rather than to blue. But here, as everywhere, it is easy to overstep the bounds of moderation and turn excess into a defect. The paper of the book beautiful will not attract attention; we shall not see it until our second look at the page. The paper must not be too thick for the size of the book, else the volume will not open well, and its pages, instead of having a flowing character, will be stiff and hard.

The sewing of the book is not really in evidence, except indirectly. Upon the sewing and gluing, after the paper, depends the flexibility of the book; but the sewing in most early books shows in the raised bands across the back, which are due to the primitive and preferable stitch. It may also show in some early and much modern work in saw-marks at the inner fold when the book is spread wide open; but no such book can figure as a book beautiful. The head band is in primitive books a part of the sewing, though in all modern books, except those that represent a revival of medieval methods, it is something bought by the yard and stuck in without any structural connection with the rest of the book.

It is the page and not the cover that controls the proportions of the book, as the living nautilus controls its inclosing shell. The range in the size of books is very great--from the "fly's-eye Dante" to "Audubon's Birds"--but the range in proportion within the limits of beauty is astonishingly small, a difference in the relation of the width of the page to its height between about sixty and seventy-five per cent. If the width is diminished to nearer one-half the height, the page becomes too narrow for beauty, besides making books of moderate size too narrow to open well. On the other hand, if the width is much more than three-quarters of the height, the page offends by looking too square. In the so-called "printer's oblong," formed by taking twice the width for the diagonal, the width is just under fifty-eight per cent of the height, and this is the limit of stately slenderness in a volume. As we go much over sixty per cent, the book loses in grace until we approach seventy-five per cent, when a new quality appears, which characterizes the quarto, not so much beauty, perhaps, except in small sizes, as a certain attractiveness, like that of a freight boat, which sets off the finer lines of its more elegant associates. A really square book would be a triumph of ugliness. Oblong books also rule themselves out of our category. A book has still a third element in its proportions, thickness. A very thin book may be beautiful, but a book so thick as to be chunky or squat is as lacking in elegance as the words we apply to it. To err on the side of thickness is easy; to err on the side of thinness is hard, since even a broadside may be a thing of beauty.