THE BOOK MAGNIFICENT.
Four Centuries of Fine Printing. By Stanley Morison. (Bonn. Ten and a half guineas.) To those thousands who never give a thought to the manner in which their favourite novelist or poet is printed, it may come as a shock to discover that one of the most sumptuous and magnificent of modern books consists of little more than the reproduction of some six hundred title pages. Modern
printing in the revival that followed on William Morris's lielmscott Press is one of the fine arts, but Mr. Stanley Morison is anxious to remind us that the past four centuries have also produced their masterpieces. No one can pass through the manuscript show-cases of the British Museum without a thrill, and connoisseurs of fine printing recognize that the excellences of the best modern books partake of the same canons of beauty. Modern artists seem often to have a morbid horror of beauty ; the great painters of the past found it difficult to keep their hands off anything that might possibly be turned into beauty. To that end Darer and Leonardo da Vinci made special efforts to show how beautiful typography might be produced, and the famous press of Aldus Manutius worked with types designed by Francesco Raibolini (Francis), while some of the most pleasing of modern types come from the artist, Lucien Pissarro, and the late exquisite scholar, Herbert P. Home. The earlier scholars were sentimental about printing. Jenson's types were even regarded as of divine inspiration, and for many years we have toyed with the comforting legend that the Aldine Italic was based on the handwriting Of Petrarch, but that, with the tradition that Hogarth designed Baskerville's types must go into the vast limbo of happy falsehoods that have dignified mere history into triumphant romance.
Those who have seen serious and bowed students in the National Gallery measuring the proportions of beauty in Botticelli with a more or less clean handkerchief will not be surprised to fmd that the Golden Section, pursued through the ages from the Pyramids to Praxiteles, has also been applied to the Mysteries of book production. That these researches emanate from Germany does not prevent German printing of to-day:from being often of the first rank. There are family trees of printing, and though the existence of dynasties of printers is due more often to the economic- desirability of marrying the widow or daughter of a famous printer, and with her the business that otherwise would fade into poor design and wretched craftsmanship, Mr. Morison makes out a good lineage for modern typography with Aldus, Garamond, Tory, Plantin, Baskerville and Bodoni as progenitors, though one is a little suspicious of a certain pedantry that often accompanies an insistence on pedigree. It is a pity that Mr. Morison does not find worthy of reproduction any English book before the eighteenth century. This prejudice, it can scarcely be anything else, even prevents him recording Whit- ney's Choice of Emblems of 1586, the only English book printed in Christopher Plantin's house.
Early English printing leaves much to be desired in its presswork and paper, but John Day's work in the sixteenth century can scarcely be neglected, while Shakespeare's Lucrece and Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie, both printed by Richard Field, would present no mean appearance beside much that Mr. Morison has included. And to choose only the more blatant omissions, Thomas Vantrollier, who printed North's Plutarch in 1579 and Beza's New Testament in 1574, Christopher Barker, the Bible printer, the widow Orwin, who gave us Griffin's Fidessa in 1596, William Ponsonby, the printer of Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Poesie and Spencer's Cohn Clout; the Cambridge edition of Herbert's Temple, and the famous border to Fairfax's Tasso, are all familiar to those who have envied the American owners of our English libraries.
Those same readers of novels will also search in vain for reproductions of the " priceless Elzevirs " that line the heroes' shelves. Mr. Morison, alas ! thinks them dull, and no more than a poor Everyman Library of the seven- teenth century. Even the Foulis Press is omitted, despite the glory of the folio Pope of 1785 ; and when again we regret the omission of some of the noble Spanish printing of the sixteenth century, we are perhaps pitting taste against taste, but when a book contains so much beauty as this volume, our standards are raised immeasurably and we crave a perfection that perhaps cannot be supplied for the paltry sum of ten and a half guineas prix de faveur.
It was perhaps unkind of me, but I thought of the poor man who loves books and can never possess Mr. Morison's volume, and with that thought strolled along the book barrows in Farringdon Road, and there for never more than a shilling and often for a few coppers I saw offered a Venetian sixteenth- century book, a Plantin, a Didot, a Foulis, a Jouast, a Bensley, a Pickering and even a battered Elzevir, and some anonymous eighteenth century odd volume with an engraving by Eisen. I bought only the Elzevir, so the field is still open for those who wish to start a collection. Mr. Updike of the Merry- mount Press suggests that printing reflects the taste of the age, Caslon like Early Chippendale or the architecture of Vanbrugh, Baskerl. ilia like Robert Adam, William Morris like mission furniture. If this is so, we have some ground for judging of the future of an art that is even affecting those who read books for their contents, and after the Georgian period of William Pickering we can hope for work of the quality of the new Criterion additions in Piccadilly Circus or the Shelton Hotel in New York, and trust in the powers that print to avoid the Lutetia styles. of France or the " homeliness " of Bush House. I envy the three hundred aad ninety persons who can afford to possess Mr. Mai ism's landmark, and those who will surely companion it with his forthcoming survey of modern printing.
J. ISAACS.
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