The Art and Craft of Printing
Though William Morris’ attempts to go back to the early days of printing to create the “ideal book” did not bear many fruits, anyone interested in typography, printing or Arts & Craft movement will surely enjoy the few essays collected in The Art and Craft of Printing. If I had to sum up Morris’ contribution to typography, I would say that he had actually identified the flaws of the typography of his time, but, driven by aesthetics more than by a deep-down study of the early printers, the solutions he proposed were more based on copying the old way than on a real understanding of its laws—and that he was far too influenced by his experience as a textile designer (but that’s just my opinion). William Morris’ books were the exact opposite of the later modernists’ ideal of economic design—large books, with dark pages and heavy ornamentation. But I would be unfair if I didn’t mention, on the other hand, that he contributed to the revival of early types, paid extreme attention to word-spacing (words tended to be too widely spaced at the time) and researched the best ways to improve legibility with some success. In any case, something had to be done at the time, and though his way was not followed by many he did a very necessary job. For a sample of Morris’ production and details about his Golden Type, I posted the first page of The Nature of Gothic some time ago.
In three essays—“A note on founding the Kelmscott Press”, “The ideal book” and “An essay on printing”—William Morris explains how he came to define the rules he used at the Kelmscott Press, covering every aspect of printing, including type (he ended creating his own revival of a 15th century type), spacing, composition, margins, illustrations and borders, page size and paper. As his work has a clear historical orientation, he goes through the history of printing since Gutenberg’s Forty-two line Bible with a grave, undisguised bias in favor of the early printers—according to Morris, the decline of the art of printing started as soon as early 16th century. The degradation went apace until printing could not be worsened, at which point the quality of paper began to decline, too. For Morris, typography and printing were an absolute disaster at his time. Though he clearly has a point here, as late 19th century was definitely not the best period of these arts, the way Morris rejects practically everything that was done after the end of the Incunabula era will certainly put a smile on any modern reader’s face:
The Italian, Bodoni, and the Frenchman, Didot, were the leaders in this luckless change, though our own Baskerville, who was at work some years before them, went much on the same lines; but his letters, though uninteresting and poor, are not nearly so gross and vulgar of either the Italian or the Frenchman.
It seems to me that in this utter rejection lies the reason why his work lead to a dead-end; regenerating typography required more than trusting his own taste—or disgust—and implied a careful study of all the avatars of typography in order to uncover the logic behind the “grossness” and “vulgarity” of Didot’s and Bodoni’s characters. Also, his heavy use of borders and illustrations inspired from medieval manuscripts, as beautiful as they may be, prevented his vision of typography from acquiring the universality which is necessary to set long-term bases.
The Art and Craft of Printing is now in public domain and can be freely downloaded in various formats from Project Gutenberg (pick a version with images).
To know more about the various facets of the man (who was also a textile designer, a writer, an artist and a socialist): William Morris page on the Wikipedia.
