Nice Ass, Great Binding

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1904, publisher George Bell and Sons issued a beautifully designed and printed edition of the ancient classic The Golden Ass, aka Metamorphosis, by Apuleius in its 1566 English translation by William Adlington. Published in an edition of 200 numbered copies for sale, it was printed by the Chiswick Press.

In 1960, a copy of the Chiswick Golden Ass received fine binding treatment.  It was bound by Bernard Kiernan.

Now, in 2012, that copy is the subject of a Booktryst post with teasing headline of dubious taste. Aim high, swing low.

Title-page.

Kiernan bound the copy in full light brown morocco with fifteen onlaid deep purple morocco medallions with a radiating sun motif in gilt to the upper and lower boards, each medallion encircled by a black morocco border. Six compartments with onlaid gray morocco hexagons and black morocco label lettered in gilt grace the spine. Inside, burnt orange morocco doublures with gilt rays emanating from a plain central oval stagger the eyes when the book is opened. All edges are gilt.

Few are aware of master bookbinder Bernard Kiernan (1922-1967). Bernard Henry Kierman  took up bookbinding as a hobby in 1954 at age thirty-two. He was largely self-taught and became a member of the Guild of Contemporary Binders in 1958 and exhibited at Foyles in the same year. He was elected a Fellow of the Guild but, alas, died in 1967 at age forty-five. Bibliographer J.R. Abbey had a number of books bound by him, one of which is illustrated in The Anthony Dowd Collection of Modern Bindings (John Rylands University Library, 2002, pp. 106-7). He also bound a copy of Craig's Irish Bookbindings 1600-1800 which was in William Foyle's collection. A copy of Charles Holme's The Art of  the Book bound by Kiernan is found in the British Library. Many volumes in the Gutteridge collection of books on cricket were bound by Kiernan. He was held in high regard for his original designs and tooling skills, as splendidly displayed here. His career was short, his work distinguished.

Cover detail.

Few, if any, care about publisher George Bell and Sons. But The Chiswick Press is another matter entirely. Peel back the skin of the Private Press movement and the enormous influence of the Chiswick Press lies exposed.

Woodcut historiated initial.

"Chiswick Press was established in the printing shop of Charles Whittingham (1767-1840) in 1787. Although the press moved on a few occasions, it operated for the most part in London, England. Chiswick Press became influential in English printing and typography and, most notably, published some of the early designs of William Morris. The press continued to operate until 1962" (Special Collections, University of Missouri Libraries).

Front doublure.

In 1811, Whittingham began printing inexpensive editions of the classics. In 1838, his nephew and apprentice of the same name, Charles Whittingham (1795-1876), assumed control of Chiswick, and under his stewardship the press revived old typefaces and made a concerted effort to improve the quality of typographical design and printing in England, which had fallen low.

Historiated initial.

The high quality that Chiswick Press brought to English printing became the craft's gold standard in the U.K. Chiswick Press was a trade printer - Great Britain's finest -  servicing publishers (it became the most in-demand print shop of nineteenth century England), but its influence extended beyond job work. It played an important role in the development of the Private Press movement, which strove to meet and exceed the mastery of the Chiswick Press. They printed many of William Morris's early books, and the great printer and designer, Emery Walker, a founding father of the Arts & Crafts movement who established the Doves Press with T.J. Cobden-Sanderson in 1900, used the Chiswick Press to print  an edition of  Burns' The Pied Piper  of Hamelin in 1889. The Chiswick Press printed books for the Riccardi Press, the Folio Society, Boar's Head Press, etc.

Stamped signature to rear doublure.

I don't pretend to know all there is to know about rare books; I only became aware of the Chiswick Press a few months ago yet I consider it an embarrassing lacuna in my knowledge. Now, as if seeing a previously unknown consumer product or car for the first time, I  find references to it all over the place. And this copy of The Golden Ass bound by Kiernan holds a place of honor.

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Frontispiece.

[KIERNAN, Bernard, binder]. APULEIUS. The Golden Ass. Translated by William Adlington. London: Chiswick Press for George Bell and Sons, 1904.

One of two hundred numbered copies, this being copy no. 195, out of a total edition of 220. Quarto (13 1/8 x 8 in; 335 x 203 mm). [17, blank], [1, limitation], [1, half-title], [1, blank], [6], 226, [1, colophon], [11 blank] pp. Frontispiece and title page by W.L. Bruckman; title page in red and black. Rubricated headlines and running heads, text in black. Historiated woodcut initials in black. Shoulder notes in red and black.

Bound in 1960 by Bernard Kiernan.

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Many thanks to Edward Bayntun-Coward for information about Bernard Kiernan.

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Images courtesy David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.

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Breaking News from the Sixteenth Century: Typography Takes Off

by Alastair Johnston

Stan Knight, Historical Types (From Gutenberg to Ashendene), Oak Knoll Press, 2012, 104 pp., hardback in dust-jacket, $39.95

Historical Types is based on a smart concept: an annotated picture book of enlargements of typefaces to show how they really look. After all, type is that tiny code we look at without really seeing it: it gives meaning to thoughts, but we rarely give it a thought.

Obviously this approach -- enlarged images of letterforms with commentary -- has been a key part of modern typographic education. A lantern slide show by Emery Walker in 1888, given to the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society in London, where he projected blown-up images of Jenson, Ratdolt and Rubeus pages, inspired William Morris to start his own press. Walker, a commercial photo-engraver, went into partnership with T J Cobden-Sanderson to start the celebrated Doves Press after Morris' death. Bruce Rogers, who also knew Walker, had photo-enlargements of the Jenson pages made to draw his Centaur type.

As a teacher I rely on large projected letterform details to explain their subtleties. I often use images from a wonderful article, "Photographic enlargements of type forms" by Philip Gaskell, that was published in the Journal of the Printing Historical Society, no 7, 1972 (and is missing from Knight's bibliography). Gaskell's photos, which were printed 5 times actual size, have proven enormously useful in discussing type design and its evolution and are a significant precursor to what Knight has done.

Two gros romain romans attributed to Claude Garamont, from Gaskell's article in Journal of the PHS, 1971. The top type, from 1530, has since been identified by Dr Vervliet as the work of Maître Constantin (from Virgil, Opera, Paris: Robert Estienne, 1532 [R115]); the lower type, from 1549 (as seen in Dionysius Halicarnassus, Scripta Omnia, Frankfurt: Andrea Wechel's heirs, 1586) is by Garamont [R118]

However didactic his aim, Knight has not achieved the same compression and intensity that Gaskell did (in 11 pages!), perhaps because his book is aimed halfway between scholars or students and a general audience. But Knight has provided accurate information on these typefaces. This may sound odd, given that so much has been written over the last five centuries about the legacy of Gutenberg, Fust & Schoeffer, Jenson, and so on.

Faustus and Chauffeur (dubious attribution)

But we have discovered a lot of it is speculative or inaccurate and we can no longer rely on Stanley Morison, Beatrice Warde and D B Updike for facts about the design of type. In discussing Ratdolt's work, Knight cites studies from 2009 and 2011 (showing how type scholarship is constantly evolving). Fortunately we have James Mosley, who teaches at Reading, Charlottesville (Virginia) & London Universities, formerly the Librarian of Saint Bride's in London, as a guiding light in the search for typographic truth. Mosley has been blogging about such matters since 2006. His "typefoundry" blog has been a great resource for Knight, particularly in the untangling of Jannon versus Garamond, the actual spelling of Garamont's name, and other details.

Many documents have appeared to further the historical discussion, from the series of Type Specimen Facsimiles (under the editorship of John Dreyfus from 1963 onward), to the exemplary Enschedé (1993) & Plantin-Moretus (2004) facsimiles edited by John Lane. Some of the older facsimile works could be revisited with the new approach heralded by Knight, for example the 1592 Egenolff-Berner specimen sheet which was reproduced in 1920 by Gustav Mori in collotype. That sheet was the first specimen broadside to clearly identify Garamond and Granjon as cutters of their types and, as it was printed from newly cast type, was the best possible source for modern interpretations: Adobe Garamond by Robert Slimbach (among others) was drawn from it.

But for most of the twentieth century Garamond revivals (and there have been roughly a zillion of them) were based on the wrong type: a poor imitation cut by Jean Jannon in the French province of Sedan in the 1620s. This typographic Lady Gaga, a tragi-comic homage to classic typefaces, should have been left in the dustbin of history but accidentally gained an important place in the story of type development, so Knight has included it. Also included is a text debunking many of the myths about Jannon and Garamond (thanks to Mosley's research). One of the most fanciful stories has Cardinal Richelieu's troops looting Jannon's types to bring them back to the Imprimerie nationale in Paris. This yarn was first spun by Beatrice Warde in 1926 and picked up by Warren Chappell in his Short History of the Printed Word. As late as 1999 Canadian poet Robert Boringhurst was embroidering the fable in his edition of Chappell's book (p. 148), saying that after Richelieu’s armies seized Jannon’s type they felt bad about it so they reimbursed him for them!

As technology improves it greatly assists us in seeing what we are looking at (though collotype mentioned above is hard to beat). Up to now many books on type have used small illustrations of large pages shrunk down, printed from line blocks. In the end you cannot see any details. So the next step is to do more books of this kind that show, as closely as possible, the impression and the texture of the paper, and more specialized books. Knight's previous book was Historical Scripts (also from Oak Knoll) with a similar hyper-visual approach to the history of calligraphy.

Hendrik Vervliet's recent three volumes on the Paleotypography of the French Renaissance have illustrations from Xerox copies and photostats. [Aside: I published Vervliet's monograph on Robert Granjon: Cyrillic & Oriental Typography in Rome at the End of the Sixteenth Century in 1979. We relied on Velox photostats from the Vatican for illustrations, which were so poor, some were even out of focus, but how do you tell the Vatican their reproductive services are lacking?] Vervliet's images (many composites to show full character sets) were painstakingly assembled over decades and often Xerox was the only service available. It would be a useful task for someone to give the blow-up treatment (shot in high resolution with raking light to show the impression, as well as the paper surface) to his studies (now that we have the key data assembled), and then move into the following centuries. 

Garamont's gros romain roman [R118] from the 1599 Le Bé-Moretus specimen shown in Vervliet, French Renaissance Printing Types, 2010, p. 193

Nevertheless Vervliet's work is the major contribution to the field in the last half century. So it's great to see late-breaking news from the sixteenth century when Knight reproduces a page of revolutionary new type from Henri Estienne (previously attributed to Garamond [see top illustration]) and, thanks to Vervliet, we now have to acknowledge the shadowy Maître Constantin for this massive step-forward in the Aldine style which revolutionized roman letterforms across Europe.

Claude Garamont's gros romain roman as seen in Les Vies des hommes illustres, Paris: Vascosan, 1559, shown in Knight (p. 41)

I myself have done a little work in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but that indicated to me how much more needs to be done. Knight himself admits this is just a start: "Some worthy type designers like Pierre Haultin, Hendrik van den Keere, and Antoine Augereau are missing. But as well as the more famous names of Gutenberg, Granjon, and Bodoni, I have been able to include some lesser-known designers like Erhard Ratdolt, Simon de Colines, Johann Fleischman, and Alexander Phemister."

While to me there seem to be some close calls on who got omitted versus who got in, I think the general reader will enjoy the familiar mixed with the more exotic. The reader may balk at the name Miklós Tótfalusi Kis and be unaware that they have been lôôking at his type and versions of it all their lives.

I am sorry there is such a sadly inevitable bias towards the private press movement at the end of this study. There is certainly enough about William Morris, Cobden-Sanderson and St John Hornby out there in bibliomundo. A page on their cutter Edward Prince could have covered all of them (and freed up two pages). The Ashendene Subiaco type is a joke, or at best a footnote to the Sweynheym & Pannartz page; Eric Gill's Golden Cockerel type would have made a nicer terminus to the work. Otherwise, moving from Fournier to Bodoni is a big leap without including both Bodoni's early types that were imitation Fournier and the truly revolutionary types of Firmin Didot (which were cut by Pierre Wafflard). There is no easily accessible text in English which covers these most important steps forward in type design. William Martin (1757–1830) and Vincent Figgins (1766–1844) would have been solid inclusions and, despite most modern typographers' disdain for the excesses of the Victorian period, it cannot be ignored, but Phemister is the sole representative. (However, he and 26 other nineteenth-century type-cutters are covered in William Loy's book Nineteenth-century American Designers & Engravers of Type [Oak Knoll Press, 2009].)

In compressing info Knight has mixed up the legacy of Caslon: Mrs Elizabeth Caslon did not start the H W Caslon Foundry, that was 30 years later, and I really don't agree with using italic parentheses! For the most part the photos are excellent and give us true insight into the intricacies of these typefaces.

For all of its superficial appearance as a "coffee-table" book on printing types with pretty pictures, Knight's work is a solid piece of scholarship and corrects a lot of misconceptions found in "standard" texts that give a resumé of the development of printing types.
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Typographical Dingbats Explored: Raising a Glass to the Sixteenth Century

by Alastair Johnston
 
Hendrik D. L. Vervliet, Vine Leaf Ornaments in Renaissance Typography. A Survey. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press and Houten, NL: Hes & De Graaf, 2012. 416 pp., hardback.

In my capacity as a typographer, I am often asked, "What are those little doohickeys called?"

 - Dingbats!

 "Hey, who are you calling dingbats?!"

While it may sound like a Yiddish word for a simpleton, dingbat is the technical term for non-linguistic parts of a fount of type, Edith. The great German type designer Hermann Zapf made a whole load of them that, combined, can be used to create wild borders or bring humor or punctuation to typesetting. Of course inventing glyphs yourself with the keyboard is more fun. My best effort at creating an emoticon is the grinning baboon: 8=}

In the manuscript era scribes would add pointing fists for emphasis, pilcrows to indicate a new paragraph, and sometimes fill out a line of their manuscript with curlicues or doodles. They had horror vacui, but vellum was at a premium so they didn't like to leave blank space. Decoration could also be used to mask errors: you could cover your mistake with squiggles and then write the correct text afresh on the next line. In the early days of typewriter some bright spark realized that not everyone could spell accurately so came up with a key that was neither an "a" nor an "e" that you hit for an indistinct character. Progress!

Surprisingly, in the early days of type, before sextiles, octothorps, interrobangs, shnik-signs, lb-signs or other commercial symbols were invented, type-cutters felt a need for and created a purely decorative small heart-shaped device with a stem, called a vine leaf (sometimes erroneously known as an Aldine leaf).

Hendrik Vervliet, Librarian emeritus at the University of Antwerp and former Director of the Plantin-Moretus Museum, has created a visual index to over 200 of these ornamental vine leaves found in Renaissance books. He has also identified most of the cutters and given information as to where they first appeared. It's a staggering task, though perhaps in scholarly terms, just a by-product of his decades of research on the types of the same period.

In the last couple of years Dr Vervliet has published a Conspectus of French Renaissance Printing Types (2010) and two volumes on the Paleotypography of the French Renaissance (2011) which complement his earlier works, including Sixteenth-century Printing Types of the Low Countries (1968). These two recent books finally click into place the whole jigsaw of the spread of roman type after it left Italy in the 1530s and started to move out from Lyons and Paris to Antwerp, Orleans and Geneva, and finally peripheral locations like London and Stockholm.

De Recta Latini & Dialogues of Erasmus, published by Simon de Colines, 1528, and showing his vine leaf on paragon body of 1522 (ex: Bibliothèque André-Desguine, Paris)

In these works, Vervliet identified the roles and work of the major players, Claude Garamont and Robert Granjon, and lesser-known type-cutters Simon de Colines, Pierre Haultin, Guillaume Le Bé, Antoine Augereau and Maître Constantin. Haultin was first to cut small types that were large on the body, therefore more legible in tiny sizes. These were needed for printing the Calvinist Bibles which had to be small enough to be hidden. Well in advance of the Gideons, their promoters would go through Geneva at night and throw their Bibles through open windows! De Colines was a great artist, both as a type-cutter and as a book designer; Le Bé was the go-to guy for Hebrew type; while Constantin and Augereau perfected the Venetian model of Aldus and produced the first families, or graduated series of type sizes that matched.

While Garamont (whose name is still known in its modern form of Garamond) was the technical perfectionist and supreme type-cutter of the Baroque period, Granjon got to play in the margins, cutting lovely types based on his own handwriting (called civilité: also the subject of a major study by Vervliet with Harry Carter in 1966), he refined and realigned italic, putting it into the shape we know today, he cut many non-roman types (Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian, etc), cursive music (thus, it could be argued, paving the way for music to swing and eventually ... to jazz!), and a series of interchangeable abstract designs on type bodies called "arabesques" that could be built up to make patterns and borders. These could be cast fresh and combined to fit any space, unlike woodcuts which wore out or had to be cut down to suit new occasions. These printers' ornaments are distinct from vine leaves though (and were the subject of a 1955 essay by Stanley Morison, called "Venice and the Arabesque Ornament").

Vine leaves had been used as word dividers in the ancient world (seen in Greek and Roman inscriptions of the first century) and continued to be used like this or as a period, new paragraph indicator or line filler in the manuscript era. Vervliet believes the first printer to employ a typographic vine leaf was the great Erhard Ratdolt (1447–1528) who gave us the structural apparatus (title page, page numbers, chapter divisions, and so on) that we still rely on today. The leaf soon evolved into a purely decorative motif.

The vine leaves are surprisingly varied in style. I had always thought that there were only one or two forms, but in the end their diversity strikes me like the Bechers' photo documentation of German gasometers, water towers, and half-timbered houses that magnify little differences by juxtaposition.

These symbols form part of a complex vocabulary, encompassing the shapes of the roman alphabet and the ancillary glyphs that we encounter every day. These forms were in flux in the early era of printed books but left the hands of the French cutters in a form still recognized today. In many ways they are the substructure of our written and printed culture for we have never improved on the models of Garamont and Granjon. To see them afresh, five hundred years after they were created, is what Vervliet has done. Though it is a minor part of our culture it is still an important one and these masters need to be celebrated, both for their work and their play.

Last year's harvest was big in France and this has been a bumper year for California's grapes, so let's raise a glass to the punch-cutters of yore who decided to give us the typographic vine leaf.
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The Ice Capades For Printers

by Stephen J. Gertz

On February 5, 1814, a curious broadside, heretofore unrecorded, was published heralding printing on ice. In retrospect and out of context, it appeared as if a new process for printing had been invented, one that allowed for letterpress on sheets of frozen water, rather than sheets of paper, an evanescent endeavor guaranteed to pool into liquid illegibility upon thaw.

No, the announcement was not printed upon ice; it was printed on paper with presses that had been set up on the Thames River to take novel advantage of one of the occasions when the river froze over, allowing Londoners to carnival during these Frost Fairs, which dated back to the reign of Elizabeth I. The old London Bridge had a tendency to dam the river, slowing its current, and allowing it to completely freeze when temperatures plummeted. The Frost Fair was a holiday on ice long before Holiday On Ice.

Frost Fair on the Thames, 1814. Nat'l Maritime Museum, London.

"And this is what they did with the Great Frost. By February, as Lord William Pitt Lennox tells us in his Recollections, the Thames between London Bridge and Blackfriars became a thoroughly solid surface of ice. There were notices at the ends of all the local streets announcing that it was safe to cross the ice, and, as in times of Elizabeth 1, full advantage was taken of this new area and the public interest in it. As before, there now sprang up a Frost Fair. The people moved across the river by way of what was called Freezeland Street. On either side, crowded together, were booths for bakers, butchers, barbers and cooks. There were swings, bookstalls, skittle alleys, toy shops, almost everything that might be found in an ordinary fair. There were even gambling establishments and the ‘wheel of fortune, and pricking the garter; peddlers, hawkers of ballads, fruit, oysters, perambulating pie-men; and purveyors of the usual luxuries, gin beer, brandy-balls and gingerbread" (Priestly, J.B. The Prince of Pleasure and His Regency 1811-20).

Printers, who knew a money-making opportunity when it presented itself, saw action creating souvenirs, as above, for Frost Fair visitors, open-air escapades involving spins, axels, and Choctaw turns ice-blocked in blind.

Nirvana. Print on ice by Eszter Augustine-Sziksz.

Now, however, the Ice Capades for printers has become a reality. Eszter Augustine-Sziksz, a European printmaker, is actually printing directly on ice, resulting in startling imagery that haunts the imagination. 

14 Misremembered. Print on ice by Eszter Augustine-Sziksz.

 "Eszter Augustine-Sziksz...screen-prints photos of old ancestors from her grandmother’s photo collection on ice sheets.  During the printing process the ink freezes to the ice.  When the ice starts to melt under the image, the ink dissolves into water and starts to slowly fade away.  Her process, working and printing on ice allows her to step above everyday physical and chronological limitations.  She can freeze time and control when it starts to unfreeze or thaw" (Thaw to Spring Works, exhibition at Eggman & Walrus Art, Santa Fe, NM, March 16 - April 1, 2012).

Miss Printer, 1943.

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[Thames Frost Fair 1814]. Printed upon the ice, on the River Thames, February 5, 1814. N.P. [London]: n.p., 1814. Small broadside (11.5 x 7.7. cm), printed on card stock with eighteen line of text.

Not in Guildhall Library of London; British Library; or Cohen's The Thames 1580 - 1980: A General Biblioigraphy.

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Broadside image courtesy of John Drury Rare Books, currently offering this item, with our thanks.

Ice images by Eszter Augustine-Sziksz courtesy of Eszter Augustine-Sziksz, with our thanks.

A salute to Jane Austen's World for the Priestly lead. 

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