Let's take a quiz:
1. What two things do each of these
words represent:
-
Baskerville
-
Bodoni
-
Caslon
-
Garamond
-
Gill
-
Goudy
-
Jenson
-
Zapf
[Answer: 1. A man, more specifically a man who is a
punch cutter and type designer; and 2. a typographic font.]
2. Define these terms:
- charioscuro
- grisaille
- intaglio
- rotogravure
- mezzotint
- textura
- planographic
- versal
[Answers: a: shaded picture; b: monochrome illustration representing
relief; c: printing from an incised plate from which ink is drawn; d:
intaglio printing process in a rotary press; e: intaglio etching in which a
metal plate is roughened evenly and then smoothed to bring out an image; f:
a calligraphic form of blackletter; g: printing from a flat surface, as in
lithogrpahy; h: large decorative initial letter; ]
3. With what better known historical figure were the following printers
or publishers associated?
- Wynkyn de Worde
- Richard Field
- Nicholas Jenson
- Jean Jannon
- George Cruikshank
- Giambattista Bodoni
- Henry Jarvis Raymond
- Johann Froben
[Answers: a: Caxton; b: Shakespeare; c: Eusebius; d: Richelieu; e:
Dickens; f: Carlos III; g: Mark Twain h: Erasmus]
4. Match these inventors with their inventions.
- Ottmar Mergenthaler
- Tolbert Lanston
- Friedrich König
- Nicolas Louis Robert
- William Nicholson
- Giovanni da Spira
|
- paper roll making machine
- monotype machine
- page numbers
- linotype machine
- curved stereotypes
- cylinder power press
|
[Answers: 1-d; 2-b; 3-f; 4-a; 5-e; 6-c]
4. Explain the difference between the monotype and linotype machines.
[Answer: Monotype casts individual letters and assembles them in lines,
Linotype casts type line by line in slugs.]
5. Essay question: Discourse on the techniques and importance of
the history of the Printed Word, emphasizing Western civilization.
If
you did not score 100% on the objective portion of the quiz, AND if
your answer to number 5 did not extend to 300 pages, lavishly illustrated,
touching on the tools, techniques, inspiration, uses, principal figures,
historical trends, and future of printing as an artistic and popular means
of communication and expression, then
click over to Amazon and purchase A Short
History of the Printed Word by Warren Chappell and Robert Bringhurst.
The book was originally written by Chappell (1904-1991) in 1970 and
published by Alfred Knopf, to whom it is dedicated. It was revised and
republished by Bringhurst, well known (in typographic circles) author of
The Elements of Typographic Style, in 1999. Bringhurst
memorializes Chappell in his Preface by saying:
"Chappell spent his whole life designing and illustrating books, and
making texts and blocks and metal type and other components, out of
which to make the books he made. There was, in 1970, no process of
type manufacture, no medium of illustration, and no technique of
printing with which he was not personally and viscerally familiar."
The reason for the revision and republication of a classic work was
twofold, first "...procedures and techniques that had been current for half
a millennium when he [Cappell] was writing...have all but disappeared in the
last three decades" and "Chappell's original plan...was to make this book a
collaboration. It is now, in its second life, exactly that" (x).
With that brief introduction we are launched, no, immersed, in the world
of typography, presses, printing surfaces, inks and papers, fonts and
punches. The most honored here are the punch cutters, not the authors,
but the authors are not forgotton, and are memorialized throughout in the
book's numerous illustrations. This is a show me, tell me, explain to
me, move me to thought book. Definitely not for dummies, but neither
is it a tedious technical treatise.
The
book begins by touching on the Chinese and Korean origins of printing,
but this is very much a book about printing in the Western tradition.
Think France, England, the low countries, Germany, Italy and,
eventually, America, and you will have compassed the reach of this
short history. We early learn the techniques of printing: letterpress,
intaglio, planographic; and then begin our march from Gutenberg to
Adobe Systems. Little time is spent contemplating why, exactly,
technologies proliferated when they did, even though they had been
known (often) long before they spread. It is enough to say, for
example, that "Europe was not, evidently, ready for printed books
before Gutenberg appeared" (p. 14). It is a book more about the how
and when of typography and printing, not so much about the why, or why
not.
We
learn, therefore, about papermaking, punch cutting, calligraphy, nibs
and wood block cutting. We learn much about the aesthetics of the
alphabet as expressed in type over the course of western history. We
learn of such formal intricacies as "transitive italic serifs" and
"half unicals," "Carolingian miniscules" and the development of
fifteenth century textura (blackletter) which sounds pretty obscure,
but is delivered gracefully and with full illustrations. The narrative
never veers too far to the technical, and is always supplemented by
examples from well known works to help us relate to the technical
discussion.
Consider this from the discussion of fifteenth century printing:
"Another major step [in the history of human civilization] was the
division of the stream of writing into standardized units of
transmission. That is a fancy way of saying chopping the text up
into pages. Simple as it sounds, this step was slow in coming.
Cutting up the scroll into uniform but arbitrary portions, and sewing
them down the side to make a codex—a
manuscript book—must at first have seemed a leap into arid technological
abstraction" (p.39).
Did it? We who stand at the other end
of that abstraction, who are in the process of abandoning pages for
continuously scrolling computer screens and the arbitrary units of eInk on
the screen of a Kindle or other eReader would like to know.
Unfortunately, the authors are more intent in keeping the discussion tied to
the concrete historical technologies—though they can hardly be blamed for
this—and only tantalize us with speculations
like the one above. It's too bad, because I would be keen to know what
experienced typographers think of the end of the print era. We get
some of that in Bringhurst's discussion of digital fonts in the books
closing chapter, but surprisingly little. This is very much a book
rooted in paper-ink-press, and mostly handpress, technology.
The general story of the early chapters is
the development of blackletter (think Gutenberg's Bible and the other
masterpieces of European incunabula) and the ultimate ascendancy of roman
type. The heroes of the book are its punch cutters, who in nearly
every case are font designers, cutters, casters, printers and publishers
rolled into one—though publishers early on were often divorced from the more
technical (and laborious) aspects of printing. Men like Johann van
Speyer, printer of St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei, the first book in
Europe printed with page numbers; Nicolas Jenson, first to produce a Greek
type; Lambert Palmart, first printer in Spain; William Caxton, printer of
the first book in English, his own translation of Raoul Le Févre's Le
Recueil des histoires de Troyes; Erhard Ratdolt, first to print a
decorative title page to his edition of Euclid's Elements,
printed in Venice; the great Albrecht Dürer, perfecter of amazingly
intricate woodcutting techniques; Aldus Manutius, founder of the Aldine
press and practical patron of Renaissance humanism. These men, mostly
of the Mainz diaspora, in the latter half of the fifteenth century are
the book's early subjects and soul.
From its beginnings in Mainz printing spread
to more than 1,100 print shops in 200 cities by 1500, but it retained a
surprising connection to handwriting. In fact, this is one of the book's
interesting observations. Bringhurst explains it by paraphrasing
Marshal McLuhan, "...the primary content of any new medium is usually
a form made familiar by the medium that immediately precedes" (p.
280). It is unfortunate he does not go on to extend the idea to the
digital age, but a little reflection will confirm the notion. This
review is densely textual. It uses hyperlinks and a few graphical
illustrations, imitating a book's index and printed illustrations, but it
could as easily, using the available technology, be audible, or a video with
audio narrative, or a series of illustrations in an animated flash presentation, but
the computer and eReader age is still young enough to be fully imitative of
its predecessor age of print and paper. We see this change gradually
emerging in the digital age, but we hearken back to our bookish roots, like
children snuggling beneath our comforting blankets.
Later in the book Chappell especially, but Bringhurst too, have some fairly
negative things to say about "flatland" as Bringhurst calls digital "print,"
but I believe their remarks proceed more from snobbery and nostalgic
connections to the old technologies than from clear-eyed reason.
In the book's chapter on the seventeenth
century it departs from the strictly technological and illustrative and
engages in a discussion of censorship in England which is very interesting
(and atypical of the rest of the book). Milton's Areopagitica
is quoted at length:
"...We should be wary, therefore,
what persecution we raise against the living labours of public men, how
we spill that seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books;
since we see a kind of homicide may be thuys committed, sometimes a
martyrdom..." (p. 124).
Why the authors chose to use England as
their example is hard to say, since the Catholic Index or Germanic
reformation could have served as better examples, but perhaps the point is
that the age of censorship was also the age of the King James Bible and the
First Folio, though as examples of the printer's art these books are hardly
praiseworthy. Perhaps the point to be taken, also, is that the
seventeenth century was the beginning of the age of the newspaper, which
flourished in spite of, and often because of, official censorship. The
first European newspaper was Avisa Relation order Zeitung published
at Augsburg and Strasbourg in 1609, the first English newspaper Nathaniel
Butter's Corante, in 1621 (Butter is a familiar figure to Shakespeare
students). Whether royalist or protectorate overlords were the
censors, "To be a printer was a dangerous calling, and it continued to be so
even after the relaxed conditions that followed the Declaration of Rights
and the subsequent lapsing of the licensing laws" (p. 156).
The eighteenth century is called the age of
"typographic rationalism," and its heroes are William Caslon and John
Baskerville, in England, the Fournier and Didot families in France,
Giambattista Bodoni in Italy, the Enschedé brothers in Amsterdam, and
Joaquím Ibarra, Gabriel de Sancha, and Francisco Manuel de Mena in Madrid.
It was the age of Steele, Addison and Defoe, and their famous journals; the
age, also, of a wide scale spread of newspapers across England and America.
The principal technological developments of
the industrial revolution and early nineteenth century began to drive
printing. The invention of the all iron press, designed by Earl
Stanhope in 1800, wood engraving techniques invented by Thomas Berwick, the
invention of lithography by Aloys Senefelder (1796)—a failed playwright who
became self published and had to go so far as inventing his own methods of
publication—the invention of the steam powered cylindrical press by
Friedrich König; the Foudrinier paper making machine; and the invention of
stereotype and electrotype all contributed to a breach between what
developed into the worlds of small-scale handpress "fine" printing, and
large-scale, popular, mass-produced commercial printing as exemplified in
the London Times. In 1814 the Times used a modified
double-cylinder steam powered press as invented by König to print 1,100 sheets
per hour. By 1868 the Times was printing 20,000 sheets per hour.
As more developed countries adopted new technologies for printing, their old
equipment migrated to less developed countries. "Printing arrived...in
Uruguy in 1807, Burma in 1816, Costa Rica in 1827, New Zealand in 1830, and
in Thailand around 1836" (p. 212).
The great inventions of the latter half of
the nineteenth century were the Linotype and Monotype machines, which
automated the process of cutting, casting, and setting type. The
linotype casts type in lines as single slugs, which are then
automatically assembled. "With the Linotype, type became disposable,
and every job the printer set was made of fresh, new type, unused, unworn"
(p. 215). From this point, the book becomes less interested in
technology and more interested in its products, the small press magazines;
American periodicals, like Harper's Monthly, the Atlantic,
Century Illustrated, and Scribner's Magazine. It also
discusses the English arts and crafts movement, exemplified in the work of
William Morris and his associates, none too fondly.
The remainder of the sections for which
Chappell is primarily responsible deal with printing in America in the early
and then post-war twentieth centuries. You would expect this to be the
richest in detail, being the period in which Chappell was actively employed
in the field, but it is rather lightly covered. His primary interest
is a nostalgic engagement with the earlier history of printing. The
work of Edward Johnston and his associates are emphasized, as are the type
designers of the 1920s, notably Eric Gill.
The emphasis in the latter part of the book
is on fine printing, rather than printing in general. "Four things are
required in a fine book: excellence of writing, editing, design, and
physical production" (p. 246). This will come as a surprise to many
authors, but our authors consider the book in the totality of its historical
import, not just the meaning of the words. This becomes a bit
problematic as the book moves to its conclusion. One gets the sense
that one is overhearing the veteran's trope, rather than a clear headed
analysis. Consider this:
"Trade presses are, by definition, at
the mercy of the market, and it is only in fortunate conditions that the
market knows or cares what quality is" (p. 247);
and this:
"In the age of mass production, books in
which design and production are held to the highest standard have come
almost entirely from the private press" (247-248).
The loss of "three dimensionality" (minimal
as it is) and a "sculptural quality" in printing are lamented and offset
printing and photographic processes in general are criticized, as are the
paper quality used by mass printers, adhesive bindings, and generally
everything about mass produced printing.
"When the only form in which a book
exists is a form that cannot last, then the essence of the form, the
thing that makes a book a book, has been betrayed" (p. 270).
This is a serious criticism of post-war
printing technology, which should be taken even more seriously by those of
us in the digital age, where paper, ink, physical print and binding are
about to disappear. Will we still have books when books abandon their
physicality? The early indication is, yes. Today I purchased the
entire works of Charles Dickens for my Amazon Kindle for just pennies, and
it downloaded within a minute, wirelessly. Bleak House is
still Bleak House, but now I can keyword search the entire text,
annotate and bookmark to my hearts content—and the Kindle automatically
backs up my annotations on the Amazon web site—when my eyes weary may Kindle
will read to me (though the voice is inhuman enough to make this a little
disconcerting), and I can quickly search the web for related documents, all
on the same device. The point is, I can still participate in reading Bleak House on
my Kindle as I have read it in many different physical editions before, with
the added advantages of a digital tool.
It is still a book. A book, contra-Chappell and Bringhurst, is
primarily an artistic vision, not a physical thing.
"It is possible that printed books as
repositories of human experience and creativity may in time be
overshadowed or even replaced by digital replicas. Once made, such
replicas are very quickly copied and easily stored in a small space—but
they cannot be read without a prosthesis. They are invisible and
useless without the intervention of an exceedingly complex, electrically
powered machine. Such a scheme may look good to accountants and to
marketers. But for authors and for readers, there can be no
substitute for a well-designed, well-printed, well-bound book that one
can see and feel as well as read. A tangible, stable, well-made
page is just as desirable, and just as useful, now as it was in the
fifteenth century" (p. 272).
I think not. Before there were books, there
were hand-written symbols on parchment, or stylus on wax, or
chisel on stone, or whatever. Whether the thing be recorded in wax, on
animal skin, on cut paper, or on magnetic or optical media, underlying it
all is a system of symbols, a system of literacy, the vision of an author,
and social conventions that make the interchange of this complex information
system possible. The media is only incidental to the process.
True each media will have its own advantages and disadvantages, claim our
allegiances and hatreds, but they exist only because of the thing
communicated through them. This bit of special pleading at the end of this excellent book spoils it a
bit with the pale cast of fogeyism, but there is a serious warning to be taken
from Chappell and Bringhurst
as we enter the post-print-and-paper age: our systems must insure the permanence
of our works over time. This is the 64,000 dollar question of the digital age
that no one has yet answered. How do we insure that the works we produce
today can be read, or even known to have existed, in future millennia?
In an age where all available information will double every 72 hours, how do
we decide what to archive and how and where? The answer is certainly in not abandoning the advantages of digital media,
or in clinging nostalgically to physical books, but in tempering our
expansive creativity with the archivist's wisdom, wherever that may be found.
In this respect, the warnings at the end of
A Short History of the
Printed Word, are apt.
.
Then sort the search results by price from Low to High. You will find
quite a number of free editions. Surprisingly, you will find quite a
number of old books related to Shakespearean topics, like A. C.
Swinburne's A Study of Shakespeare, Frank Harris' (!) old bio, Shakespeare The Man, or C. M. Ingleby's Shakespeare's Bones, a work that sounds like it will be enormously interesting but is dry as, yes, bones.