The Machine as Servant
Printing of To-day. Edited by Oliver Simon and Julius Rodenberg. (Peter Davies. 21s.)
IF William Morris were alive to-day—as his friend and printing instructor, Mr. Emery Walker, happily is—he would be much heartened by the spread of the varied and distin- guished progeny of that stimulating mustard seed sown at Kelmscott in the active 'nineties. It is the plain fact that the revival of fine printing was the work of amateurs, working apart and influencing the printing trade from without, not of the men making their living by that honour- able service, who were for the most part scornful or at best indifferent. Even to this day you will find a prominent technical instructor of youthful printers sedulously denouncing Morris and all his works and followers as a mischievous influence. The antidote to this eccentric opinion is contained in this handsome folio from a young and enterprising publishing house.
The significant fact, stressed by the editors and hinted at in a perceptive and, in the best sense, scholarly preface by Mr. Aldous Huxley, is that fine printing is no longer mainly the business of the private hand presses, though these still play their part ; that it has freed itself from the mediaevalist complex which in the eyes of the aspiring modernist was the chief taint of Morris's work—that it is fact of its own time, not dedicated to mere pastiches however admirable ; that, moreover—and this is the comforting thought for people of taste with shallow purses—it is no longer solely concerned with the production of limited editions for collectors, set and printed by hand on hand-made paper from hand-cut type, but with those books, printed by machine on machine-made paper, set by machine in type produced by a machine, which are issued by the publishing trade to be sold wholesale to booksellers in common shops and retailed by them to common people. No perceptive person can have failed to notice the steady output to-day of ordinary books—novels, biographies, poetry, plays, and even text-books—which make mere handling and skimming at the booksellers' a new delight to eye and heart.
Indeed, I think the Master himself who inspired and, more than any other one man, has indirectly directed this improve- ment, would recant much of his mediaevalist or Renaissance doctrine and be now more inclined to compromise with the machine, realizing that it was now intelligently controlled by that new breed of artist, his direct descendant, the typo- grapher. I venture this opinion because I think that the ardent Socialist Morris who cared so much for beauty and wanted to share it with the common people would see the humour of confining the partaking of that great sacrament in this field to the unto' rich. Printing of To-day is a repre- sentative record of distinguished achievement mainly " in the ordinary way of business of the printing machine and its machine allies in England, the United States, and the Continent, and, itself beautifully designed and produced, is a monument to the work of those new artists the typo- graphers among whom the two editors, Mr. Oliver Simon and Herr Julius Rodenberg, hold so distinguished a place. The manifest improvement in the ordinary " commercial " output of our English publishing houses—one may instance Cape, Chatto, Constable, Wishart, Knopf, Nonesuch—is due to their typographers who control the book production, and the significance of this for the future of our printing is that the printers are gradually trained in appreciation of the aesthetic possibilities of their noble craft, however indifferent they may have been to other than mere business considerations at the outset of their connexion with such houses.
Let me add that the low cost at which this admirable folio is produced sets a new standard in happy contrast with certain other volumes of this general order issued of late years which have angled for the monies of the confirmed and affluent collector. Probably the market is breaking— no bad news for the struggling bourgeois !
JOSEPH THORP.
Previous page
