English printers' ornaments

Preceding chapters of this book have dealt with the various kinds of printers’ ornaments met with in English books down to the end of the eighteenth century. We have now reached our last port of call on this eventful voyage of discovery, viz., Modern Work, which may be said to have taken its rise from the nineteenth century and the Whittingham Press. Although many fine books have been printed by William Bulmer, Archibald Hamilton, and others at the close of the eighteenth century, and by Charles Whittingham the elder during the early part of the nineteenth century, their attraction lay chiefly in the clearness of the type with which they were printed and the beauty of the illustrations, for they were wholly devoid of printers’ ornaments of any kind, so that when in 1844 the Diary of Lady Willoughby made its appearance, it may be said to have swept away all the preconceived notions as to book decoration that had been in vogue before its advent.

Charles Whittingham the younger, the printer of this book, was the nephew and successor of Charles Whittingham, the founder of the Chiswick Press in 1809, at which a library of pretty books had been printed before Charles Whittingham the younger was out of his apprenticeship.

For a time the two men were in partnership, but their natures differed so widely that in 1828 they dissolved partnership, and while the elder Whittingham continued to print at Chiswick, Charles Whittingham the younger came to London and started as a printer in Tooks Court, Chancery Lane, where the business is still carried on under the same title, though no Whittingham is now connected with it. At the same time he was ready to help his uncle in emergencies and was frequently at Chiswick. But it was while he was at Tooks Court that Charles Whittingham the younger was introduced to William Pickering, the publisher. They quickly became friends. Pickering, to quote from Mr Warren’s book,[11] was one of the very first publishers of his century to make the production of fine editions a particular branch of enterprise. “He was not only a bookseller, but a book lover. He had a taste for old books.” And again, to quote from Mr Warren, “He had a notion that if an old author were a good one, he deserved to be dressed well.” Pickering was a well-read man, of good judgment and rare taste.

Charles Whittingham the younger was a man of ideas. Liberally educated, he turned his education to good account. He also was a book lover as well as a printer, and consequently there sprang up a life-long connection between the two that resulted in the production of some notable books. Whereas Whittingham the elder had been noted for his printing of pictures, Whittingham the younger made it the peculiar “grace of his craft to bedeck books with borders, comely head-pieces, and other alluring devices. He carried this branch of his work to such an extent that you shall find nothing lovelier between book-covers until you turn back to the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.” For these ornaments for his books Charles Whittingham the younger went back to the printers of the eighteenth century—to Geoffrey Tory of Paris, to Henry Bynneman and Henry Denham of London. He taught his family to appreciate their beauty and to perpetuate it, and his daughters Charlotte and Elizabeth copied and designed head and tail pieces, borders and initial letters, while another lady, Mary Byfield, who came of a family of engravers, engraved them. It is said that Pickering and Whittingham would spend their Sunday afternoons studying sixteenth century books, and the ornaments to be found in them which they afterwards adapted for the decoration of their publications.

But the Diary of Lady Willoughby was as remarkable for the type as its ornaments. Whittingham the younger wanted something better than the founts of type then in vogue, and he found it in the old face type of the Caslon foundry, i.e. the beautiful fount that had been cut by the elder Caslon more than a hundred years before, and which had aroused the admiration of that generation. It was no easy task to find the matrices, and this caused some delay in the publication of the book; but when it appeared about the middle of 1844 the Diary of Lady Willoughby was hailed as one of the best specimens of typography seen in England since the days of Baskerville and the elder Caslon. From that day to the present old face type has retained its popularity, and has been adapted by many other modern firms. Both the type and ornaments designed by Whittingham the younger are still largely used by the present proprietors of the Chiswick Press, and may be seen in two notable books published during the year 1923. The first is the fine edition of the Works of William Blake, printed for the Grolier Club of New York, in itself a testimony of the high position gained in the printing world by this press, while the collotype reproductions throughout the work are excellent. The other book is the History of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, issued to commemorate the foundation of that institution. The Whittingham ornaments and old face type are especially suitable to the character of the work.

The influence exercised by the Chiswick Press was continued until there arose on the horizon of the book world one greater than either of the Whittinghams—William Morris. Educated at Marlborough School and Exeter College, Oxford, this gifted man became a weaver of wonderful tales in prose and verse, a painter of pictures and frescoes, a designer of art tapestries, the founder of a decorating firm in which artists such as Rossetti and Burne-Jones were partners. Towards the close of his life he turned his attention to the art of printing, and founded, in the Upper Mall, Hammersmith, the Kelmscott Press.

The first book that came from that press was The Story of the Glittering Plain, one of his own writings, which appeared on April 4, 1891. It was a small quarto printed with the Golden Type, and the issue was limited to 200 ordinary copies and six on vellum.

It was at once evident that Mr Morris had gone back to the fifteenth century for both his type and ornaments. The first page of the text was surrounded by a border designed by Mr Morris himself and showing traces of the Venetian school. It was printed in a specially cast fount of Roman letter, modelled on that of Nicholas Jenson, the printer in Venice, in the fifteenth century. It was not quite rigidly Roman, some of the letters showing a trace of Gothic.

On September 24, 1891, another quarto was issued, Poems by the Way, and during the next twelve months five more books from the Kelmscott Press made their appearance—Love-Lyrics and Songs of Proteus, and other Poems, by Wilfred Blunt; Of the Nature of Gothic, by John Ruskin; William Morris’s Defence of Guenevere, and other poems, followed by the same author’s Dream of John Ball, and in September Caxton’s edition of the Golden Legend, in three large quarto volumes, with woodcuts by Burne-Jones. This was intended to be the first issue of the Press, but was delayed by an accident. The initial letters, which in the earlier books appeared to be somewhat too large for the page, were exactly right in this. Here, too, appeared for the first time the woodcut frontispiece title that afterwards became a feature of the Kelmscott Press. Sometimes these were printed in white letters on a ground of dark scroll-work, sometimes in black letters on a lighter ground, and they were surrounded by a border of the same design as that to the first page of the text, it being William Morris’s principle that the unit, both for arrangement of type and for decoration, is always the double page. The type used in this was the same as that seen in the first production of the Press: but from its use in this book it was afterwards distinguished as the Golden type.

Beautiful as the Golden Legend was as an example of the printer’s craftsmanship, it was immediately followed by another book that eclipsed it, a reprint of Caxton’s Recuyell of the Histories of Troy in two volumes in large quarto. For this Morris had designed a new fount of type, a handsome Gothic letter, which recalled that of the fifteenth century printer, Anton Koberger of Nuremberg, and was not unlike a fount of type used by Thomas Berthelet. This type came to be known as the Troy types; but it was not alone the type that attracted attention. The decoration of these two volumes was equally remarkable.

Another book printed in the Troy type was Godefrey of Bologne, and by the courtesy of the Trustees of the Kelmscott Press, one of the borders designed by Morris for this book is here reproduced. The boldness of execution no less than the simplicity of the design and its uniformity with the text, show the skill of the woodcutter. Another notable departure from stereotyped pattern was introduced by Morris. His fleuron became a perfect leaf—a black leaf with white ribs, which took the place of the reversed P or D used for paragraph marks.

The type in which these books were printed was afterwards recut in a smaller size for the folio edition of the works of Chaucer, which issued from the Kelmscott Press in 1895, and with its magnificent illustrations by Burne-Jones, is its crowning glory.

William Morris died in 1896 after he had printed fifty-three books. Short as his career as a printer was, his influence spread in ever-widening circles and still remains with us. In a few words, which cannot be too often quoted, he set out his ideal of what a printer should do and what a printed book should be: “The whole duty of Typography is to communicate to the imagination, without loss by the way, the thought or image intended to be conveyed by the author. And the whole duty of beautiful typography is not to substitute for the beauty or interest of the thing thought and intended to be conveyed by the symbol a beauty or interest of its own, but on the one hand to win access for that communication by the clearness and beauty of the vehicle, and on the other hand to take advantage of every pause or stage in that communication to interpose some characteristic and restful beauty in its own art.”

In this spirit William Morris’s immediate disciples—Mr Emery Walker, Mr Cobden Sanderson, and Mr St John Hornby—founded the Doves Press and the Ashendene Press.

The Doves Press was founded in 1900 and closed its doors in 1916. In that time was produced a Bible in five quarto volumes, as well as plays of Shakespeare, poems of Milton, Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, and others, and prose works by John Ruskin and Emerson.

Mr St John Hornby attained success at his Ashendene Press with a fount of Greek adapted from the fount used by the first printers in Italy, but the books produced at these two presses contribute nothing to the history of English Printers’ Ornaments. Apart, however, from the work of the private enthusiasts, the trade as a whole was purified and immensely improved by their example.

In the early part of the present year the Directors of the Medici Society arranged an exhibition of Twentieth Century Books at the Grafton Galleries in London. More than half the exhibits were from English presses, and the general impression conveyed by that exhibition was, that a great improvement in craftsmanship had taken place all round in the last five and twenty years. What our printers and type-founders can do at the present day in the way of book decoration will be seen by a study of the following pages, in which, by the kindness of the various firms, we are able to bring together a representative collection of modern Printers’ Ornaments.

The modern Caslon foundry still carried on by H. W. Caslon & Co. in Chiswell Street, to which William Caslon the first transferred his business in 1734, is still one of the leading foundries in this country. After his death his son William the second reigned in his stead and carried on the traditions of the foundry, and was in due course succeeded by his son William the third, who in 1792 gave up his interest in the business to his mother and his brother Henry’s widow. On the death of Mrs William Caslon her will was disputed, and as a result the business was put up to auction and secured by Mrs Henry Caslon for the modest sum of £520. Seven years before a one-third share in the business was worth £3000. The cause of this drop was, says Mr J. F. McRae, in his Two Centuries of Type-founding: (1) Depreciation in the value of the stock; (2) competition; (3) a reluctance to run up the price against a widow.

Undoubtedly the main cause was a change in public taste. Even beauty palls after a time, and the public had taken up with Bodoni and other much inferior faces, and this neglect lasted for nearly a century.

In 1844 Messrs Charles Whittingham the younger and Thomas Longman brought about a revival of interest in the Caslon Old Face type by their publication of The Diary of the Lady Willoughby. To quote again from Mr Warren’s book: “Matrices that had been reposing in the vaults of the Caslon foundry for nearly three generations were refitted to moulds, and made to serve for the casting of type” (p. 238).

But the firm was not yet through its difficulties. In 1865 a strike of some of the workmen, on a question of wages, was followed by a lock-out that lasted for eight months and brought its fortunes to their lowest ebb. Then in 1872 Mr Thomas W. Smith, who had for some years acted as traveller to the foundry, was asked to take over the management. His position was a difficult one. Old fashions die hard, and the foreman and many of the workmen had been with the firm all their lives and resented change. But Mr Smith persevered, his object being, as he himself declared, to work up arrears of production and to rescue the Specimen Book from the miserable and degraded state to which it had fallen.

His success was complete, and the firm to-day stands as high as ever it did, thanks mainly, no doubt, to the great popularity of the Caslon Old Face. In the matter of ornaments it is only necessary to compare the Specimen Book of 1842 with that of 1910 to show how great had been the improvement in the interval, an improvement that the examples have shown of the firm’s work at the present day fully bear out.

Between the years 1883 and 1900 the English Illustrated Magazine made a feature of its ornaments. These included reproductions of famous head and tail pieces and initials by various foreign masters of the sixteenth century belonging to the French, German, and Dutch schools, the work of Aldus, Theodoric de Bry, and Holbein; nor were native artists neglected. Between 1883 and 1887 we find some excellent head-pieces by A. P. Hughes. In July 1889 appeared a tail-piece from the pencil of Sir E. Burne-Jones, followed by a good decorative head-piece by Matilda Stokes. In 1893–94 the work of Lawrence Housman begins to appear. The initials used in Bibliographica and in the various monographs, etc., of the Bibliographical Society down to the present time were designed by him, and are worthy to rank with the best art work of the early Italian school.

Walter Crane and Emery Walker were other well-known contributors to the English Illustrated Magazine, and by the kindness of Messrs R. & R. Clark one of Mr Crane’s decorative blocks is here reproduced.

Akin to the Caslon Foundry, and also linked up with that of John Baskerville of Birmingham, is the firm of Stephenson, Blake & Co., of Sheffield, Manchester, and London, which had its origin in the firm of Blake, Garnett & Co., founded in 1819. It was from the office of Stephenson, Blake & Co. that Mr T. W. Smith passed to the Caslon Foundry, and it was on his suggestion that a branch of the firm was established in London. The firm has to-day a large assortment of flowers, borders, and ornaments, both well designed and well cast. Many of the old forms are retained and some variations of the fleuron introduced.

Messrs Shanks, of Red Lion Square, have sent some head and tail pieces shown in their most recent specimen. These, both in design and treatment, recall French work of the sixteenth century, while the Cubist idea that marks their Athenian border brings us back to the twentieth century.

The productions of the Curwen Press are well known to all bookmen. Much of its art work came from the pencil of the late Claude Lovat Fraser, who also designed many of the ornaments and tail-pieces. His successor, Mr P. J. Smith, was the designer of the conventional fleurons, here reproduced.

The Morland Press in Ebury Street is another of the modern presses whose craftsmanship is highly esteemed, and much of its art work is by the well-known artist F. Brangwyn.

The specimen sheet of the Pelican Press, which was established in 1917, is an ambitious one. It reproduces for the consideration and choice of its customers borders designed after those of Ratdolt of Venice, Geoffrey Tory of Paris, and some of the printers of Lyons.

In ornaments it produces a large selection modelled on the old forms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one of which resembles very closely an ornament used on the title-page of John Bodenham’s Garden of the Muses, printed in 1610, and in addition to all kinds of fleurons, they reproduce the fleur-de-lys, the acorn, and various stars. They also show a fine collection of initials, French and Italian, that they claim are modelled on the best work of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

No account of Modern Printers’ Ornaments would be complete without a record of the work done by the University Presses. Marching with the times the Oxford University Press, still familiarly known as the Clarendon Press, has long since relegated the once famous Fell and Junius types to the vaults as curiosities, and has availed itself of the best founts that a modern foundry can produce. In 1766 the University had an account with William Caslon, from whom it bought both English and Foreign sorts, and at the present day no firm in England can show better craftsmanship. Whether in its many editions of the Bible and Prayer Book, its classical books, or the great dictionaries, its work in all departments—composition, excellence of spacing and presswork, and in clearness of type—is beyond all praise. Book-lovers were at one time known to complain of it as uninteresting, but under Mr Horace Hart the work of the Press became distinctly richer and more individual.

As regards ornaments the Clarendon Press still retains in use those that have served it so well. The Phœnix is one of the original Fell ornaments, as are also the following units, which are seen in a little book printed in 1922, called Some Account of the Oxford University Press. Amongst these is the triple flower, which had its origin in Augsburg in the sixteenth century. In this book also some of M. Burghers’ head-pieces are seen in a reduced form.

In 1923 Cambridge celebrated its fourth centenary of printing. Its development has been slower, perhaps, than that of the sister University. It has been hampered largely by its constitution, but in the early nineteenth century many improvements were carried out, including the erection of the Pitt Press in 1833, and to-day its work is in every way worthy of its great traditions. In the foregoing pages we have watched the growth of endeavour on the part of the printers of England to reach the highest standard in the art of book-decoration. We have seen the small printers’ ornaments grow, not only in variety of design, but also in regularity of face and clearness in reproduction. The ugly ornament, like the old-fashioned, fat-faced type, has given place to artistic and tasteful designs, coupled with growing knowledge on the part of the printers of the present day as to how they should be used, and it is a notable thing how one printer is vying with another, not only in reproducing ‘old face’ type, but in seeking their ornaments in the best productions of the fifteenth and sixteenth century presses.

Boswell was once arguing with Dr Johnson on Goldsmith’s merit as an author, and in the course of the argument Johnson said:

“Besides, Sir, it is the great excellence of a writer to put into his book as much as his book will hold....”

If English Printers’ Ornaments is not as full as it might be, we hope the reader will find enough in it to please his eye and feed his mind.