Design and Illustration IN these days, when the price of
any book containing illustrations is apt to be prohibitive to the pockets of art students, it is a relief to be able to recommend two books on the two important counts of contents and cost. First, Mr. McLean's book. Here, in 48 pages of text and sixteen pages of half-tone illustrations, the author has done a lively job of compression _with a history of British book design from Kelmscott to Curwen. Very sensibly he has made his history a tale of persoalities—printers and typographers—rather than a catalogue of prinling types and papers. Here we meet again the well-known (but still too little-known) members of a redoubtable gallery: Morris, Cobden-Sanderson, St. John Hornby, the brothers Meynell, Simon, Morison, Tschichold el at. Of course, the reader with his own quirks and prejudices will fall out with the author. For instance, Mr. McLean is far too kind to the memoryof Morris, surely one of the most lamentably well-intentioned but misguided book-designers in the history of the craft. " The Kelmscott Press Chaucer," writes Mr. McLean, "made possible the Penguin Shake- speare. The world needs both." Now this is hollow word-banging. Shakespeare, the inventors of the two-revolution " Perfector" machine and Mr. Allen Lane made possible the Penguin Shakespeare. Morris need never have lived, for all the impression he made on the contemporary cheap book. He never tried to print a volume a poor man could buy. He hated-machines for mass markets. And as a book-degigner he was amongst the century's worst Anyone who is kind to. Morris is almost invariably unkind to . Cobden-Sanderson, and:'‘vice versa. Mr., McLean carries on the tradition. He reproduces no Doves Press page or binding, yet Cobden-Sanderson's influence upon book design (or perhaps, more correctly, Emery Walker's influence upon C-S) was far more revolu- tionary than that of Morris. Morris, like Ruskin, always seemed to be fighting Victorian complacency and-hypocrisy- in reality he was part of it, with his sentimental philosophising, his love of mock- antiquity and his reverence for a private income. The books from the Doves Press were the true prototypes for the sound design of the mass-produced books Of our own time. C-S might have his own pet ideas about the life beautiful (he did, of course, and they were as grim as Morris's), but he didn't allow these ideas to get between him and his-attempt to evolve a splendid yet readable book-page. Placed against the aesthetic background of that era, the Doves book's are seen to be the truly revolutionary achievements, not the Kelms- cott volumes. One day somebody ought to try to sort out the full influence of Emery Walker, that Sickert of the applied arts. Well, it is a measure of the interest and liveliness of Mr. McLean's text that it provokes just such digressions and disagreements. For the rest he is admirably laudatory about the latter-day work of Harold Curwen, Mr. Stanley Morison, Sir Francis Meynell and Mr. Oliver Simon. He manages a breathless but adequate review of the typographical standards of the leading publishers. He justi- fiably praises the Monotype machine, but is perhaps less than fair to recent technical advances in the Linotype machine in book work. (Are not these machines now firmly installed at the Oxford Univer- sity Press and doing excellent work ?) His choice of illustrations is unusual but pertinent. Altogether, a readable, informative and praiseworthy monograph. Next, Mr. Bland's book. If there is criticism here, it is that Mr. Bland and his publishers have pared the price of.the book too keenly. Mr. Bland tries a disarming introductory note. " A book on the illustration of books," he writes, " ought itself to be lavishly illus- trated. But I have written -chiefly for students and my aim has been to keep the cost of this volume as low as possible." A laudable object, but would an extra two bob a copy, plus another 50 line illustrations, have dissuaded the art student from investing in such a first-rate book as this ? Not a chance. It is to be hoped that for future editions Mr. Bland will persuade his publishers to add to the cost and the number, of illustrations. (Not such an arduous task in this instance, presumably, for Mr. Bland, as production manager of Faber's, need only walk along the corridor to harangue Messrs. Faber, Eliot and de la Mare !) The book deserves success, and ought to be on any art student's bookshelf. Mr. Bland's text deals easily and authoritatively with the long line of English book-illustrators, with occasional digressions towards Continental influences. He has packed an extraordinary amount of information into his 160 pages, but how one yearns for graphic examples to accompany his references to Kauffer's drawings for the Nonesuch Anatomy of Melancholy, Bawden's Death and the Dreamer, Farleigh's Black Girl, which could all have been repro- duced by inexpensive line blocks. He could also have brought his book more up to date by reference to the younger illustrators— Minton, Rosoman, Ayrton and one or two others—and surely Topolski deserves a mention. Mr. Bland speaks, too, of the lack of good half-tone book illustration, but Mr. Lionel Edwards has shown how deep-etched half-tones can be well reproduced on normal book papers without recourse to that hideous coated art paper.
The final chapters of the book deal too cursorily with the highly complex problem of the make-up of illustrated books. Mr. Bland, who is as knowledgeable as anybody on the subject, might well have expanded this section into another monograph, for it is a divi- sion of book production which has not been adequately examined. These, however, are personal quibbles. The main thing is that the book is a notable half-guinea's-worth of instruction and information, and should be bought immediately by anybody persuaded that he (or she) is interested in the making of books. ROBERT HARLING.
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