Page:The American Bookmaker - Volume 5-6.djvu/91



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LL through the autumn months, and not infrequently during the early summer, our large printing establishments are apt to be frequented by small parties of young men, each with a book under his arm or in a convenient pocket. With a considerable amount of explanation and discussion among themselves, they ask what it will cost to print a duplicate volume of so many hundreds or thousands of copies. These bevies of young men are the editors of certain college annuals, and as the editorial board is made up from two to nine men, each of whom has his say about the publication, what they think they are going to do in the beginning and what they really accomplish in the end are pretty sure to be two very different things. To expand their embryo ideas into a full-grown book leads them through a path anything but flowery, and one which their publisher generally decides to be very devious in its windings. Yet out of the turmoil comes the finished volume, and it is often very handsome, generally bound in paper, but sometimes in cloth; again it is parchment covered and broad margined and has a very imposing appearance. All of the larger colleges and preparatory schools publish these annuals, the first of which appear early in December, while the last of them may not be out till the end of the school year. They have the characteristics of a record and directory, giving a list of the members of the faculty, of all the students and of the multitudinous societies and their members. Then there are class editorials, grinds, hits, squibs and poetry, or doggerel, good, bad and indifferent, and much besides. Often this matter is very clever, showing considerable talent, and then again it is not infrequently crude and high-flown, and even coarse.

Of late years the annuals have been illustrated very fully, and the quality of work has been constantly improving. It was formerly the custom to depend for drawings wholly on the members of the school, and naturally the work produced was, as a rule, extremely rude. Occasionally there would be a man who made clean, strong pictures, but such a person was rare. Now outsiders are, to a considerable extent, employed to make drawings, and as the best publications bring to their editors a goodly profit they can afford to pay for first-rate work. The call is for sketches, imaginative and strongly comic, usually in pen and ink, one for each of the class editorials, one introductory to the secret societies, or "Greek-letter fraternities," each of which usually has in the volume a steel-plate engraving for itself. There may be ten or a dozen eating clubs or tables, each needing a cut. The annual, too, must have a cover-design, title-page, frontispiece, finis and vignettes, &c. The whole makes a book of from one to three hundred pages, varying in size from a 12mo to a large octavo. Some of these volumes have been beautiful examples of bookmaking, and for printers, designers and illustrators here is a very promising field, a virgin soil which has hitherto received only casual attention.

NYONE who will take up a book printed during the fifteenth century and count the number of "ligatures," that is types consisting of two or more letters, as our æ, œ, ff, fi, fl, &c., will find to his astonishment that they run into the hundreds, and he will wonder why it was that these early printers took so much useless trouble, why they should have been so anxious to make just so many additions to their fonts of type. Possibly it was to show their ingenuity. Or could it have been through motives of benevolence to give the type-founders more to do? An observing and intelligent writer has taken the trouble to count the number of ligatures occurring in type made at the famous foundry of John Enschedé (Haarlem, 1480), and states that they number 210. This seems almost incredible, and can only be accounted for by taking into consideration the fact that the early bookmakers set before them this headline of conduct: "We must imitate the work of the transcribers or perish."

To imitate a man's virtue is well enough; but to set about aping his vices is quite another thing. And yet how often does this occur in the everyday walks of life when self-interest is at stake. But, strangely enough, the early founders out-Heroded Herod. They were not content with the more usual ligatures of the transcribers; they taxed their ingenuity to get up new ones.

St, ct, de, ti, he, te, pp, gi, gu, co, tu, to, i, au, or, ss, po, fa, ca, pe, su, bus, do, cc, fle, are a few of the ligatures one meets with on the folio page of a fifteener. Even these few examples will go to show what is really a fact, that the earliest type-founders were accustomed to cut ligatures of nearly every consonant with the different vowels, as, for instance, ba, be, bi, bo, bu, ca, ce, ci, co and cu, &c. Ligatures of three letters were not infrequent, such as ffi, fi, sti, per, pro, &c. With the introduction of the Roman letter and the consequent return to classic simplicity and severity of style, the craze for ligatures met with such earnest opposition that their number was greatly reduced