ART.
TWENTIETH CENTURY PRINTING.
Tan Medici Society, at its galleries in Grafton Street, has arranged a singularly attractive exhibition of British and foreign books produced in this century, mainly with the object of showing what modern printers can do in the ordinary way of business. Intelligent readers must be dimly conscious that there has been, in the last twenty or thirty years, a Printing Renascence. The exhibition, bringing together many excellent books from different presses, shows that the Renascence has gone farther and done more than some of our pessimistic friends might suppose. At all periods it has been possible to point to an occasional well-printed book, however degraded the art might be. But the most gratifying feature of this twentieth-century collection is the high standard of work. The luxurious editions, the privately-printed volumes, no longer stand out as exceptional and uncommon in the beauty of the type or the care bestowed upon the ordering of the page. Many cheap books, even two or three novels, to be seen in the exhibition are admirably produced ; it is clear that machine-setting, by a competent operator, provided that an artist-printer has designed or selected the fount of type, may now yield as good a result as the old hand-setting. While there is no finality in any form of art, it may be questioned whether much remains to be done in type-designing ; new efforts seem to spend themselves unprofitably in mere eccentricities, which have the fatal defect of making the text less legible. But there is plenty of scope for the ambitious printer in planning the page, or rather the two facing pages ; in devising the ornaments, if any ; in securing ink of a uniform colour and density ; in choosing the right paper and in improving the press-work, which is still too often hurried and soulless because it is assumed that the machine . cannot err ; no good etcher would let his plates be printed save under his close supervision, if not by his own hand, and no good printer can trust blindly to the machinist or to the press that he tends. The production of a fine book is a complex task, and success is not easily to be attained. Those who know most about printing will be readiest to praise and slowest to find fault with this instructive display of modern work. Where so many British printers have done well, it seems almost invidious to single out any books for special notice. Yet one cannot refrain from men. tinning the magnificent folio of Mr. Baddeley's Russia,
Mongolia and China, in a Caslon fount, as one of the finest books ever produced ; the printer's name is not given but it is, we think, the work of Messrs. R. and R. Clark, of Edinburgh. The University Presses are well represented. Of the London printers the Chiswick Press, the Cloister Press, the Westminster Press and the Curwen Press, among others, show originality, good taste and good workmanship.
The exhibition includes some American and Continental books, too few to be representative but interesting none the less. One need not share the unqualified enthusiasm of the unnamed author of the catalogue for American printing ; the best is undoubtedly of high quality—'witness, for instance, the John Carter Brown Library Catalogue by the Merrymount Press, or the Grolier Club folio by the De Vinne Press—but these, after all, are very rare exceptions, and the example of Mr. Bruce Rogers is being followed but slowly by American printers in general. There are some admirable German books, verging at times on the fantastic, perhaps, but full of ideas, and the French printing shown is on the whole very attractive. But the foreign books of most interest to the student of printing are, curiously enough, two little books in Catalan by Messrs. Henrich, presumably at Barcelona, and a wonderful Spanish quarto from Montserrat ; the type and the arrangement of the page are particularly beautiful.
E. G. IL
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