Blowing the Crystal Goblet:

Transparent Book Design 1350-1950

A Thesis Submitted to the College of Graduate

Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of

Philosophy in the Department

of English, University

of Saskatchewan

Saskatoon

by Jon Bath

© Copyright Jon Bath, Dec. 2009. All rights reserved. Permission to Use

In presenting this thesis/dissertation in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Postgraduate degree from the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the Libraries of this University may make it freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for copying of this thesis/dissertation in any manner, in whole or in part, for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor or professors who supervised my thesis/dissertation work or, in their absence, by the Head of the Department or the Dean of the College in which my thesis work was done. It is understood that any copying or publication or use of this thesis/dissertation or parts thereof for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. It is also understood that due recognition shall be given to me and to the University of Saskatchewan in any scholarly use which may be made of any material in my thesis/dissertation.

Requests for permission to copy or to make other uses of materials in this thesis/dissertation in whole or part should be addressed to:

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- or-

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i Disclaimer

Reference in this thesis/dissertation to any specific commercial products, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the University of Saskatchewan. The views and opinions of the author expressed herein do not state or reflect those of the University of Saskatchewan, and shall not be used for advertising or product endorsement purposes.

ii Abstract

In 1932 delivered to the British Society of Typographic Designers what has since become one of the most recognizable statements about the design of books: “The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible.” In it, Warde defines good as a crystal goblet, “because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.” Her address argues that the true art of designers is the creation of transparent interfaces which allow readers to imbibe deeply of the intellect captured within the pages of the book without external distractions. Warde’s ‘Crystal Goblet’ is fundamentally contradictory. Typographers must strive to make themselves and their work invisible so that only the voice of the absent author speaks through the text; but there is no voice, only words on page produced through a great deal of human labour at a specific moment in history. But, Warde did not create her metaphor; she adopted existing imagery from the Western tradition. Nor was she the first typographer to do so. The writings and work of those involved with the creation of books has, since before the invention of the printing press, revolved around attempts to create ‘perfect’ communicative interfaces – books which allow the reader an unobscured view into the mind of the author. The resultant page is that with which we are most familiar: a block of black Roman-style text on a white or off-white page with blank margins. This study tracks the rise and influence of the ‘crystal goblet’ motif, the dream of perfect readability, in the discourse of those directly involved with the creation of books: scribes, printers, type-cutters and typographers. It postulates transparency, or perfect readability, to be the primary motive underlying the actions of those making books, but does not assume all printers in all times have been motivated by the same forces or to the same extent. Rather, it traces the thread of transparency through many incarnations and examines the social and political factors underlying each permutation and how new elements are introduced into the discourse without completely erasing all traces of the old. Chapter One studies the and how the writing style of a small group of humanist scholars comes to dominate the printed book of the sixteenth century. Chapter Two begins with an examination of the perceived decline in typographic practice in the seventeenth century and the subsequent emergence of both writings about typography and of a new style of Roman typeface: the Modern. Chapter Three deals with similar events in the nineteenth-century – first there is a perceived decline in and then a revival of printing standards. Chapter Four discusses the reconciliation of machine- production and traditional practices in the early to mid-twentieth century and the unsuccessful challenge to traditional typography posed by the Bauhaus and other Modernist schools of design.

iii Acknowledgements

The writing of this thesis would not have been possible, or at least not nearly as rewarding, if not for the contributions of a great many people, not all of whom I have space to thank here. I’d like to thank Peter Stoicheff for being the best supervisor, mentor, boss and friend that a graduate student could ever hope for. I’m grateful to my examination committee, Len Findlay, Ray Siemens, Eric Neufeld and David Parkinson, for strengthening my argument with their questions and for making my thesis defense a delightful conversation about books. It has been wonderful to be a part of the English Department at the University of Saskatchewan these many years. I’d especially like to thank Ron Cooley for teaching the historical methods class where I first sketched out this project, Lisa Vargo for supplying me with a steady stream of articles about the resurgence of interest in typography, and Doug Thorpe for marking so many of my papers and, in the process, teaching me how to write. I’ve had the great fortune to work out many parts of my argument in papers and conference presentations, and I’d like to thank the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publication (SHARP), the American Printing History Association (APHA), Implementing New Reading Environments (INKE), the Book History program at the University of Toronto, the Humanities Computing program at the University of Alberta and Hyphen for giving a graduate student the chance to test his ideas in front of an audience of experts. Lastly I’d like to thank Brenna, William and Adelaide. Without them I would likely have finished much more quickly, but, as they remind me every day, there are more important things in life than writing your thesis.

iv Table of Contents

Permission to Use ...... i

Disclaimer ...... ii

Abstract ...... iii

Acknowledgements ...... iv

Table of Contents ...... v

List of Figures ...... vi

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1: Castigata et Clara – Humanist Books, Humanist Printers ...... 10

Chapter 2: Regression and Revolution? The Rise of the Modern Typeface ...... 54

Chapter 3: Of Machines and Men: Nineteenth Century Printing and its Discontents ... 125

Chapter 4: Too Much Rule and Too Little Taste: The New Traditionalists vs. The New Typography ...... 173

Conclusion ...... 237

Works Cited ...... 246

v List of Figures

1.1 Humanist manuscript, Livy's History of Rome, 14th century ...... 15

1.2 , Eusebius' De Praeparatione evangelica, 1470 ...... 20

1.3 Nicolas Jenson, Justinian's Institutiones. ca. 1478-80 ...... 23

1.4 Aldine Press, Pietro 's De Aetna, 1495 ...... 25

1.5 Aldine Press, Juvenal and Persius' Satyrae, 1507 ...... 27

1.6 Geoffery Tory, Champfleury, 1529 ...... 46

1.7 Roman, Egenolff-Berner specimen, 1592 ...... 50

1.8 Granjon Italic, Egenolff-Berner specimen, 1592 ...... 51

2.1 Jospeh Moxon, Mechanick Exercises titlepage, 1685 ...... 57

2.2 Elzevir Press, Cicero's Opera, 1642 ...... 72

2.3 Engravings for the Romain du Roi, Imprimerie Royale specimen, 1760 ...... 81

2.4 Detail from William 's 1728 specimen ...... 89

2.5 William , Virgil, 1751 ...... 94

2.6 G.B. Bodoni, Manuale Tipografico, 1818 ...... 110

2.7 F.A. Didot, Pierre Didot's Essai de Fables Nouvelles, 1786 ...... 120

3.1 John Parry, “ Street Scene,” 1835 ...... 133

3.2 Pickering and Whittingham, Thomas Fuller's History of the Holy War, 1840 ...... 139

3.3 Kelmscott Press, Tennyson's Maud, 1893 ...... 152

3.4 Dove's Press, Bible, 1903-5 ...... 156

4.1 Bruce Roger's, Riverside Press, Isaak Walton's Complete Angler, 1909...... 184

vi 4.2 , Fleuron title page, 1926 ...... 199

4.3 Types from the Klingspor foundry, 1900-1914 ...... 212

4.4 , Die Neue Typographie, 1928 ...... 217

4.5 Stanley Morison, “Publicity and Selling,” 1928 ...... 222

4.6 Jan Tschichold, Penguin, Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, 1953 ...... 234

vii Introduction

In 1932 Beatrice Warde delivered to the British Society of Typographic Designers, formerly the British Typographers Guild, what has since become one of the most recognizable statements about the design of books: “The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be

Invisible.” In it, Warde defines good typography as a crystal goblet, “because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.”1 Her address argues that the true art of designers is the creation of transparent interfaces which allow readers to imbibe deeply of the intellect captured within the pages of the book without any external distractions, just as the true purpose of a wine glass is to enable the connoisseur to appreciate a fine vintage wine without having the experience clouded by fingerprints, body heat or coloured glass.

Historical precedents for Warde’s metaphor are not difficult to find. John Milton draws upon similar imagery in Areopagitica, his argument against restrictive licensing of printers in seventeenth century England: “... for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”2 Indeed, the root image of a ‘pure intellect’ which can only be seen through an intermediary screen is fundamental to two of the core philosophies of Western European thought: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the Bible (“For now we see through a glass,

1 Warde, Beatrice. “The Crystal Goblet or Printing Should Be Invisible.” The Crystal Goblet: Sixteen Essays on Typography. Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1956. 11-17. 11. Emphasis in original. For a further examination of Warde, see Chapter 4. 2 Milton, John. Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing . H. B. Cotterill, Ed. Toronto: Macmillan and Co, 1961. 5. For a discussion of Areopagitica and its treatment of authors, see D. F. McKenzie. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. London: British Library, 1986. 24-25. 1 darkly” I Corinthians 13:12).

Given the pervasiveness of this metaphor, on one hand it should not be surprising that

Warde would characterize the book as a ‘crystal goblet,’ or, as she does elsewhere in her essay, a window into the author’s mind. On the other hand, however, Warde is a member of, and talking to, that select group of individuals charged with the task of making books. If anyone should be aware that a book is not a direct portal into the captured essence of a genius and of the role the typographer plays in creating meaning for the reader, one would think it must be this group. Much recent research into bibliography and the history of the book focuses on the influence printers, publishers, illustrators and other persons involved in the book trade have on the creation and reading of texts. In Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, D.F. McKenzie forwards the argument that the different forms of any text are relative to the specific time, place and people that produced that edition of the text. 3 Not only can each of these individual instances of a text differ in content, they may, and most likely do, vary in regards to their physical appearance. These changes in the physical appearance of the text are crucial for the reader for, as Jerome McGann proposes, “the very physique of a book will embody a code of meaning which the reader will decipher, more or less deeply, more or less self-consciously.”4 The words of the author do not exist for the reader without being physically reincarnated by the printer and others, and thus understanding a text is, at least in part, reliant on interpreting the work’s bibliographic codes.

Warde’s ‘Crystal Goblet’ is fundamentally contradictory. Typographers must strive to

3 McKenzie, D. F. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. London: British Library, 1986. 50. 4 McGann, Jerome. The Textual Condition. Princeton, Princeton UP, 1991. 115.

2 make themselves and their work invisible so that only the voice of the absent author speaks through the text; but there is no voice, only words on page produced through a great deal of human labour at a specific moment in history. But, as mentioned earlier, Warde did not create her metaphor; she adopted existing imagery from the Western tradition. Nor was she the first typographer to do so. The writings and work of those involved with the creation of books has, since before the invention of the printing press, revolved around attempts to create ‘perfect’ communicative interfaces – books which allow the reader an unobscured view into the mind of the author. The resultant page is that with which we are most familiar: a block of black Roman-style text on a white or off-white page with blank margins.5

The present study aims to track the rise and influence of the ‘crystal goblet’ motif, the dream of perfect readability, in the discourse of those directly involved with the creation of books: scribes, printers, type-cutters and typographers. It focuses on the book in English but, as will be discussed, for much of their history English printers have relied upon

Continental typographers for their models and fonts. Thus, many of the figures discussed will be German, French or Italian, and English printers will not figure prominently until

Caslon and Baskerville in the eighteenth century. It is also by no means an exhaustive study; rather, it focuses on those figures who are consistently identified by their peers and by those who come after as providing the best models for future books. A canon of the

‘best’ typographers emerges from successive writings on printing: Jenson, Manutius, Tory,

Granjon, Garamond, Grandjean, Caslon, Baskerville, the Fourniers, Bodoni, the Didots,

5 Stanley Morison identifies ’ 1495 edition of Pietro Bembo’s De Aetna as the first “modern” book because of its clear typeface, as opposed to the Gothic used by Gutenberg and his contemporaries, and large margins free of commentary See The Typographic Book 32. 3 Morris, Walker, Cobden-Sanderson, Rogers, de Vinne, Updike, Moris