Art of the Book

ART OF THE BOOK Though the book throughout its history has tended to become more and more a personal possession, until it is now a necessary adjunct to the ordinary man's life instead of being the semi magical weapon of the few who could read, it depends, as a thing of beauty, on the fact that it is an inscription, a thought written down. From the Babylonian clay amulet with its charm in writ ing, as old as civilization, to the modern "book oath" of the law courts, we find this reverence f or "frozen thought" persisting in men's minds. From the impulse of reverence sprang religion, and from religion art, which grew at first in order to make sacred objects more potent. The craftsman of older days took his inspira tion directly from the fundamental human emotions of awe and curiosity instead of from the theories of professors, and by direct ing his reason upon an emotional state of mind was able to explore the technique of his craft, and, quite incidentally, to achieve beauty independent of the whims of aesthetic fashion-mongers. No art is the worse for being criticized with an eye to the purpose and state of mind in which it was produced; but in considering the book we are forced into such an attitude, because we are dealing first and foremost' with an instrument of thought, and only secondarily with an object of art. We must keep in mind not only the fact that every rule for the beautiful book arises from some practical need for lucid exposition, but, more important still, we must remember the almost superstitious reverence with which the craftsman regarded man's unique gift of ciphering and deciphering thought. The modern "fine book" is the direct descendant of the sacred book of the past, but any inscription at all has a peculiar relation to the intellect. The gramophone record is not an inscrip tion, because it is deciphered not by the intellect but by merely mechanical devices; hence no embellishment will ever be lavished upon it. But when a message directly enters the mind through the eye, it must be clothed in relation to its importance.

Ancient Books.

The hieratic books of ancient Egypt furnish an early example. The famous surviving ms. of the "Book of the Dead" has called on the utmost resources of calligrapher and illuminator. It is a long roll of papyrus, the early equivalent of paper (q.v.). Although this was made of the inner bark of Nile reeds, beaten flat, it seems to have been produced in qualities of extreme fineness and flexibility. Pliny mentions a roll containing the entire Iliad, which could be enclosed in a nut-shell. This may be a myth, but at least it was not considered beyond belief. Parch ment was introduced as an expensive substitute in the 2nd century B.C.; but despite its more enduring qualities not a single complete parchment book from the golden age of Roman or Greek litera ture has survived to our day. Our earliest Latin ms. is possibly of 4th-century origin. The roll form of book, whether of parch ment or papyrus, measured often 16 ft. and sometimes far more in length, and was well adapted to the needs of important texts, sacred or profane. In its original form, reading down (or up) from one scroll rod to the other, it keeps nearest to its parent, the inscribed stone tablet, and may have been hung banner-wise in Egyptian temples. An interesting survival of this use of books for exhibition is found in the "Exsultet" rolls of the mediaeval church. The deacon read or sang the tract Exsultet iam angelica turba at the Easter vigil, unrolling as he did so a long scroll which hung down from over his lectern. This was painted with illustrative miniatures, upside down from the text he read, so that they were revealed to the congregation as he proceeded.

When, however, the writing was arranged long-wise on tne roll it had to be broken up into blocks or sections, the length of the line being governed by ease in reading. These blocks of text then took the familiar rectangular form of our own book page. Merely folding the roll back on itself would convert it into a modern book of leaves as long as the edges were not cut. But the roll was regarded, because of its solemn uses, as a single object rather than as a collection of pages for easy reference ; hence it was generally wound, not folded, from one end-rod to another—whence our word volume (from volvere, to roll). The end-rods were furnished with bosses and the rolls were enclosed in scrinia, cases. Both of these were elaborately worked by craftsmen when the value of the book demanded it, so that Seneca could accuse certain wealthy bibliophiles of paying more attention to their elaborate titlings and cases than to the literary worth of the contents of their libraries. This satire still has point.

As the book grew away from its original function in the temple and became the property of private owners, the needs of con venience altered its appearance. The book of leaves or pages existed as an informal contemporary of the roll, not only in the primitive diptychs, or wax-coated folding tablets, which formed the ancient note-book, but by the first century, in genuine pub lished works. Possibly the difficulty of binding papyrus by pierc ing it through with threads hindered the development of such books. Certainly parchment, better for this purpose, was more costly; but already in the st century Martial was unconsciously sounding the knell of the roll in his line (Epigr. I., ii.) "Let the great folk have their scrinia; my book can be held in one hand." Martial also mentions (I., lxvi.) "virgin sheet" (charta) being soiled by rough chins; which gives us a picture of the difficulty with which a long roll was held open while the reader searched for a particular passage. He also tells of a friend who returned one of his books unrolled to the end rod (exp/icitum . . . ad sua cornua librum) as a proof that it had been read. These cornua would seem to have been fashioned of bone or ivory, perhaps for greater flexibility. The roll was held in the left hand and unrolled with the right ; many grave-monuments show sculptures of readers holding rolls so that the final page hangs down: "the book is ended." Parchment, which was less brittle at the edges than papyrus, seems to have been specially destined for the codex or leaf book, which has three free edges instead of two, and these three multiplied by the number of pages in the book. It also withstood corrections and expunging better than papyrus, and gave a freer surface to the illuminator. Magnificent Greek mss. from mediaeval times were sometimes written in gold upon purple stained skins. What illumination there was in ancient books would seem to have been more like the modern, straightforward illus tration of our own books than like the work of the mediaeval artists, who made decoration spring naturally from the writing of the text. Surviving mss. of Terence, for example, which seem to have been copied from late classic books, show that the pic tures were really needed to illustrate the positions of the actors on the stage. Massive initial letters were known, and a rudimen tary title-page appears in the inscription of the first leaf of some early Greek manuscripts.

Although the codex was dependent on parchment for its de velopment, the latter material was used for writing in Greece from the earliest times. The codex originated, it would seem, in Greece or Asia Minor as a form specially suited to books of law (whence our word "code"), in that pages could be excised or added after statutory changes without destroying the continuity of the volume. It may also have perpetuated (for law is conservative) the primi tive tables of stone or wood on which decrees were first inscribed. The single pages could, like these tables, be first exhibited and then piled together. But works of literature were soon issued in codices, although the fine book as we are considering it was not affected at once by the innovation. As late as the 3rd century of our era the jurist Ulpian defined "books" as rolls to the seeming exclusion of codices, although this definition was soon extended to the humbler form.

Though Christianity did not noticeably stay the destruction of ancient books inevitable after the barbarian invasions of Rome, the church of the 3rd to 5th centuries rendered a distinct service to the physical arts of the book by sharply reviving the idea that only sacred writings are worthy of preservation in a beautiful form. A secular author, however great, is at the mercy of the mere literary tastes of subsequent generations; but revealed or pious writings depend on no such whims. Hence a tradition of copied texts was possible. Had there been no church, the fine book might have disappeared entirely in the West ; as it was, the codex, which gradually superseded the roll, became a far more reasoned and workable thing in daily use in the churches than it could have become on the shelves of rich amateurs in imperial Rome, who—like ourselves—had lost sight of the motives that inspire true craftsmanship. The Gospels were often bound in jewelled cases because they were used in public rituals.

The Early Mediaeval Book.

When Charlemagne sent to Rome for a copy of the Gregorian sacramentary, with an idea of establishing a standard of worship as well as of language, the fine book profited by the new script invented for this purpose no less than by the added vigour and realism of decorations inspired by the tastes of the imperial court. Under CALLIGRAPHY there is noted the discrepancy between national styles of writing which made this standardization so necessary; but whereas the hands of early mediaeval France, Italy and Spain were degenerate growths from the writing in capital letters of the classic period, there existed a very important school of fine book-making in Ireland from the 6th century which continued the finest style of Roman 4th-century writing and added to it an original and power ful system of decoration. One of the most pretentious and suc cessful books of all time is the "Book of Kells," a book of the Gospels produced in Ireland in the 7th century. On seeing the curiously sophisticated and intricate embellishments of this ms. one realizes that the "spark of civilization," almost extinguished in Western Europe at this time, was well guarded in the Irish monasteries. The Irish sacred book, with its somehow rigid per fection, influenced English work from 664 on, but became more fluid and casual in Saxon hands. Alcuin of York, who was one of the greatest figures of Hiberno-Saxon book work, was called in by Charlemagne to direct the deliberate revival of book production at the end of the 8th century. The so-called carolingian minuscule thus evolved allowed a page of great lightness and crispness, due to the simplicity of the letters used; this in turn produced a freer style of illumination. The bold, outstanding initial letter (which, brightly painted, served as a useful "pointer" in finding pas sages) comes into a closer relation to the text; vines descend from it until they cover the margin, and finally a whole illustrative scene is incorporated within a large initial. From the middle of the 13th century we are able to see what magnificent unity was achieved by the mediaeval book, not through any self-conscious canons of "taste," but because the craftsmen concerned were all imbued with the same set of ideas, indeed the same pictorial tradi tions. The binding of the kind of book we are considering, i.e., the "fine" book, was often of gold or silver set with the unfaceted precious stones of the day, each one of which had a spiritual and medicinal value to the mediaeval mind. There are crucifixion scenes in repousse metal or ivory. Occasionally an older ivory diptych would be mounted to serve as a binding; but in general the pages themselves (in such copies as remain unaltered) show the same grouping of figures and stylish treatment as do the covers. Respect for older texts made the miniaturists conservative, and many illustrative scenes can be traced back, by their grouping and costumes, through a chain of earlier mss. to a presumptive original, now lost, such as the copy of the Vulgate written for St. Jerome, which would itself have been an object of reverence.

The Late Mediaeval Book.

The increased sprightliness of decoration, approaching sheer naturalism, was counterbalanced as time went on by the formalizing of script. The final formalization was the angular letter which, at the dawn of the renaissance, was contemptuously nicknamed "gothic" (much as we said "hun nish" in the World War). The "gothic" page is as near as we have come to an abstract form of beauty in writing, because it is rigidly consistent and links each letter into a rich, massive text page. But "abstract" beauty will not do for the book, however little it be meant for reading and however much for a display of magnificence : and the scholars who revived the Carolingian letter in the i 5th century rightly forsook optical consistency for prac tical legibility, which is a very different thing. Still, whatever its demerits as a readable text, the formal letter attributed to Guten berg (the supposed perfectos if not the inventor of printing, c. is aesthetically as much a monument to the age that was passing as it was historically a presage of the future. Before dealing with the changes brought about by the printing press it would be well to note how books were affected, during the middle ages, by the purpose for which they were made. Liturgical, legal and other books differed widely and imposed definite rules on the craftsman. Just as portability distinguishes the book itself from the inscription, so the small book became roughly differentiated from the large one. The latter, comprising the volumes regularly used in churches as well as most of the secular romances which delighted the nobility, were kept on shelves and transferred for reading purposes to a lectern; in some libraries books were even chained down to baffle thieves. Of the many liturgical books of this character the most important is the missale or mass-book. Such reverence was felt for this rite that craftsmen soon evolved special rules for its written text. The Canon, for example, was in larger letters than the rest of the text, and was placed in the middle of the book, a necessary thing in days when *end-leaves were often in danger. The music-books of the liturgy had to be large in order that a choir might read from one page ; books of lections could be propped up and read to a community. But with the practice of reciting the hours arose the breviarium, a book definitely intended to be carried about. Indeed, in England it was known as a porti f orium. The book of hours plays a long and im portant part in the history of the book arts. It was the intimate companion of lay folk as well as of the clergy, and its compara tively small size admitted of its being lavishly decorated by wealthy owners. The Little Hours of the Virgin, in particular, offered the scribe a relatively short text and the illuminator a charming series of subjects. Books of hours made for important personages show more and more response to the layman's desire for show and splendour; and it is difficult to think how this desire could be better gratified than by the glowing blue of powdered lapis that shone on the Virgin's cloak in painted miniatures ; by the glint of gold-leaf in the marginal vines, raised by sizing, the better to catch the light; by the rubrications of pure vermillion (now become so rare) interspersed among the lines of text, or the binding, often worked in embroidery by pious hands or intricately tooled. A book like this might well be treasured by queens : it was a unique and intensely personal work of art.

The Printed Book.—After contemplating such a masterpiece one is tempted to wonder whether the printed book should strictly be considered as a work of art at all. However beautiful a piece of typography is (and it has unique and subtle beauties of its own), it is in its very nature a replica, a thing produced by a machine. The earliest printed books, by imitating closely every artistic rule of the calligrapher, profited by 14 centuries of pre vious experiment ; type-founders, while they could not equal the nervous fineness of the best writing, certainly attained a new consistency and clarity of letter design ; and yet the lover of written books, fine hand-tooled bindings and original painted illus trations may quite rightly maintain that such original pieces alone deserve the title of works of art, not of reproduction. Collectors and rich patrons, however, could still add a hand-tooled or inlaid binding and make it an individual work of art to that extent; binding, until the introduction of machine stamping and mass pro duction, remained the most personal handicraft connected with typography. Illuminators, too, continued for a while to work on the printed page.

But as soon as printing was generally introduced (after 1456) it became obvious that no mere imitation of ms. style would serve the printed book. The artist's hand, the hand of the creative craftsman, had been transferred from direct writing to the work of designing and engraving the steel punch from which type matrices were made, and to cutting the wood or metal used for illustrations. The printed page is quite literally, the "proof" of the unseen labours of the punch-cutter and engraver. This gives us, inevitably, a new set of artistic rules. An example is found in the "block books" which were sheets of paper "rubbed off" like proofs from engraved planks of wood inked with liquid, not greasy, ink. Whether these "block books" antedated printing or not, they were closely allied to the single xylographic print which certainly did so ; and like the latter, they show how the mechanical prob lems of the cutter on wood forced him to "buttress" one set of lines with another, executing the lettering with the same rugged freedom as the cut and acquiring perfect homogeneity. When the colourist had added the faint glaze of his pigments, the result was of naïve and almost touching beauty—although the Biblia pau perum and the rest were the very opposite of "luxurious" books. The Chinese and Japanese block-book could not, on account of the intricacies of the alphabet, be swept away almost at once by type printing, so that we are able to see, in oriental books of this character, what the block book can attain in technical sophistica tion, when the lettering is done by experts and the colour wood cuts by masters.

The popularization of mechanically produced books was aided, and their appearance greatly affected, by the use of paper. While this substance was being made in France as early as 1189 it was never popular with calligraphers ; the slightly acid ink from the scribe's pen was made so as to "bite" into the smooth surface of vellum without any pressure. But printers, with their oil-and varnish ink, found that the absorbent surface of paper was the perfect medium for receiving pressure, by which ink was actually driven into the substance of the sheet.

Effect of Illustration.—Illustration was seldom used "for art's sake" in the 15th century; but there were many kinds of books that demanded the use of explanatory pictures. The new interest in natural science and the outer world produced herbals, geographies and books of travel like Breydenbach's celebrated Pilgrimage (Mainz, 1486) . The 16th century added the modern text-book, and with the Hypnerotomachia printed by Aldus in began a long line of "emblem books," collections of symbolic pictures dear to the Renaissance mind, which had an influence upon decorative printing. Each of these kinds of books affected the type-page in some way. The "pocket edition" invented by Aldus for the convenience of scholars, offered little opportunity for lavish decoration ; but the book of hours continued, until the 154o's, to call on the resources of the book artist. Music part books appeared at the beginning of the 16th century, in a dis tinctive oblong shape.

Engraved illustration was attempted in books as early as 1477 but it was not until the printer-publisher had tired of the many pos sibilities of wood-cutting that the copper plate came into general use (post 155o). By that time types of almost fragile delicacy were being cut ; with proper inking and press-work they would have rendered discreet typographic support to the engraved title pages and frontispieces which added a magnificent and not too alien touch to the book. Christophe Plantin of Antwerp, in the mid-16th century, was one of the last of his period to attempt unity in fine books. But he naturally gave much attention to engravings, and these had the effect of making patrons think of "fine books" as "fine picture-books" so that the punch-cutter, the ultimate typographic craftsman, lost prestige, save in such exotic efforts as polyglots. The first entirely successful attempt to re store all-round beauty to the book was made at the behest of Louis XIV., when the French national printing office produced its famous folio Medailles (see TYPOGRAPHY) with the newly-cut "King's types" of Grandjean. By this time the printer had learned how to deal with engraved and etched illustration, and the French i8th century produced the brilliant phenomenon of those octavos and duodecimos illustrated by Gravelot, Cochin and other mas ters, which were made for the eternal joy of collectors. Wood en gravers began to imitate the delicate strokes of the burin. There was a general effort toward refinement of the printed page.

But it was John Baskerville of Birmingham who, by experiment ing in 1757 not only with type design but with paper, ink and the press, revived the idea of the book as a technical whole, something more important than the sum of fine parts. A Baskerville book in a contemporary English black binding is a thing of the happiest consistency from beginning to end, and shows how little need the intelligent printer has for decoration or plates. Baskerville's fol lowers could hardly improve on this serene style without evolving (as they eventually did) a hard and icy perfection of page, which is not so much tiring to the eye as to the mind. The post-Basker ville style in England was open, serene and friendly; the late Igth century Didot style in France was crisp and magnificently logical; but the books influenced by Bodoni of Italy (d. 1812) had an arbitrary perfection which was ill interpreted by his followers. The reaction, when it came in the 1 gth century, was two-fold. Decoration followed the whimsicalities of the romantic-gothic style with the new technical freedom of lithography and white line wood engraving; typefounders and printers began to "revive" ancient type faces, so that the more pretentiously designed books took on the self-conscious archaisms of museum replicas. But this piracy of the past had at least an educative value, and pre pared the way for the labours of William Morris and the "private presses" at the end of the century. The so-called "crafts" move ment was once more to bring instructed reverence to the task of revising the outworn rules for the making of beautiful books. Our own modern typographic achievements are good inasmuch as we. realize that all standards of craftsmanship depend on knowing, not only how things should be done, but why they are worth doing.

See PALAEOGRAPHY ; CALLIGRAPHY; BOOKBINDING; ILLUMINA TION ; TYPOGRAPHY ; TYPE; PRINTING-PRESS ; ENGRAVING.

(P. BE.) BIBLIOGRAPHY.--General: A. W. Pollard, Fine Books (London. Bibliography.--General: A. W. Pollard, Fine Books (London. 1912) ; H. Bouchot, Le Livre, trans. by Bigmore, The Book: Its Printers, Illustrators and Binders (London, 1890) ; G. H. Putnam, Books and their Makers during the Middle Ages (New York, 1896) ; R. B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford, 1927) ; Sir Frederic Kenyon, Ancient Books and Modern Discoveries (1927) ; M. Audin, Le Livre: Etude technique et historique (Paris, 1927) .

Before printing from type: T. Birt,

Die Buchroll in der Kunst (Leipzig, 1907) ; W. Schubart, Das Buch bei den Greichen and Romern (Berlin, 1907) ; F. Madan, Books in Manuscript (London, 192o) ; H. Guppy, Stepping-stones to the Art of Typography (Manchester, 1928) ; T. F. Carter, The Invention of Printing in China and its Spread Westward (New York, 1925) ; W. L. Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz and Metallschnitte des XV. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1926-27).

Printed books, general and early: T.

F. Dibdin, Bibliotheca Spenceriana, a descriptive catalogue of the books printed in the 15th century, in the library of George John, Earl Spencer (London, 1814-15) ; E. G. Duff, Early Printed Books (London, 1893) ; S. Morison, Four Centuries of Fine Printing (London, 1924) ; A. W. Pollard, Early Illustrated Books (London, 1893) ; "The Art of the Book," Studio, special number (London. 1914) ; Times Literary Sup plement, special printing numbers (London, 1912, 1927) ; Gutenberg Festschrift (Mainz, 1925) ; C. J. Sawyer and F. J. Harvey Darton, English Books, 1475-1900 (1927) .

Printed books to-day: S. Morison,

Modern Fine Printing (London, 1925) ; O. Simon and J. Rodenberg, Printing of To-day (London, 1928) ; L. Pichon, "Modern French Book Illustration," Studio, special number (London, 1927) ; H. Loubier, Die neue Deutsche Buchkunst (Stuttgart, 1925) ; W. Morris, The Ideal Book (London, 1908) ; Modern Book Production, Studio special number (1928) .

Periodical and other publications:

Transactions of the Bibliographical Society (London) ; The Fleuron, a journal of typography, vol. i., 1923 et seq.; The Imprint; Gutenberg Jahrbuch, vol. i. (Mainz, 1926 et seq.) ; Arts et Métiers graphiques, vol. i. (Paris, 1927).