Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 136.djvu/813

 that the type, the illustrations, the decorations, the paper, the binding, simply combine to form the vehicle to convey that expression to the reader. When, however, this fact is once absorbed, one cannot fail to understand that if these various parts, which compositely comprise the whole, fail to harmonize with the subject and with each other, then the vehicle does not perform its full and proper function.

I wondered afterward if I had not been a bit too superior in my attitude toward my friend. As a matter of fact, printing as an art has come into its own only within the last quarter-century. Looking back to 1891, when I began to serve my apprenticeship under John Wilson at the old University Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the broadness of the profession that I was adopting as my life’s work had not as yet unfolded its unlimited possibilities. At that time the three great American printers were John Wilson, Theodore L. De Vinne, and Henry O. Houghton. The volumes produced under their supervision were perfect examples of the best bookmaking of the period, yet no one of these three men considered printing as an art. It was William Morris who in modern times first joined these two words together with the publication of his magnificent Kelmscott volumes. Such type, such decorations, such presswork, such sheer composite beauty!

This was in 1895. Morris, in one leap, became the most famous printer in the world. Everyone tried to produce similar volumes, and the resulting productions, made without appreciating the significance of decoration combined with type, were about as bad as they could be. I doubt if, at the present moment, there exists a single one of these sham Kelmscotts made in America that the printer or the publisher cares to have recalled to him.

When the first flare of Morris’s popularity passed away, and his volumes were judged on the basis of real book-making, they were classified as marvelously beautiful objets d’art rather than books—composites of Burne-Jones, the designer, and William Morris, the decorator-printer, co-workers in sister arts; but from the very beginning Morris’s innovations showed the world for the first time that printing belonged among the fine arts. The Kelmscott books awoke in me an overwhelming desire to put myself into the volumes I produced. I realized that no-man can give of himself beyond what he possesses, and that to make my ambition worth accomplishing I must absorb and make a part of myself the beauty of the ancient manuscripts and the early printed books. This led me to take up an exhaustive study of the history of printing.

Until then Gutenberg’s name, in my mind, had been preminent. As I proceeded, however, I came to know that he was not really the ‘inventor’ of printing, as I had always thought him to be; that he was the one who first foresaw the wonderful power of movable types as a material expression of man, rather than the creator of anything previously unknown. I discovered that the Greeks and the Romans had printed from stamps centuries earlier, and that the Chinese and the Koreans had cut individual characters in metal.

I well remember the thrill I experienced when I first realized—and at the time thought my discovery was original!—that, had the Chinese or the Saracens possessed Gutenberg’s wit to join these letters together into words, the art of printing must have found its way to Constantinople, which would have thus become the centre of culture and learning of the fifteenth century. ''VOL. 136—NO. 6 ''