Abstract
Some months ago I changed my Kindle's type font to Baskerville from Amazon's default Bookerly. Recently, I’ve noticed that I am reading longer and with greater ease using Baskerville, making the experience more pleasurable. As well as a small footnote to McLuhan's maxim that ‘the medium is the massage’, I am conscious that I prefer a font developed in the mid-eighteenth century by John Baskerville to one designed with computer-aided digital technology and, no doubt, a good deal of market research. As Adam Smyth discusses, Baskerville began as a writing master teaching good handwriting, moved into ‘japanning’ (the lacquering of metal goods and furniture to produce hard tortoiseshell surfaces for decoration), and then used this expertise to develop both type and the overall quality of the books printed from it. ‘Having been an early admirer of the beauty of Letters’, Baskerville wrote, ‘I became insensibly desirous of contributing to the perfection of them…according to what I conceived as their true proportion’ (quoted on p. 113).
Baskerville's is one of Smyth's remarkable lives. In truth, however, this rich and fascinating book reveals that print culture has largely evolved through co-operative efforts, with both men and women working in often noisy workshops. Baskerville created the detailed drawings of his fonts, but turning the letters into useable forms relied on the expertise of his punch cutter, John Handy. Unsurprisingly, many involved in making type had roots as goldsmiths. An expert punch cutter might still only complete a letter a day and the processes involved were closely guarded, handed down from master to apprentice. The quality of the books Baskerville printed relied, too, on the paper-maker James Whatman's development of wove paper, whose smoothness enabled far less force to be used in making a printed impression, aiding the production of clearer, sharper images. Then there were those employed as type casters – pouring the molten metal into matrices and dressing the cast letters into useable sorts – as well as the paper makers, the typesetters, ink makers, and finally, usually operating in different workshops and sometimes in different countries, those binding the printed leaves into what we recognise as a book. As the title of this journal recalls, Elizabethans would frequently experience literature either in fragmented forms transcribed into a commonplace book, or as a gathering of printed sheets (cahier from the Middle French quaer and the Latin quaternus or fourfold: originally a small book or pamphlet of four sheets folded in two).
The Book Makers reflects a recent trend in which academics seek to combine depth of scholarship and original research with a more open presentational format addressed as much to non-specialists as scholarly readers. Smyth's title pays quiet tribute to a pioneer of this style of writing: Christopher de Hamel's Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (2016). Following a broadly chronological approach from Wynkyn de Worde in the late fifteenth century to twenty-first century self-published non-commercial little magazines, artist books, and do-it-yourself print boxes which invite readers to reorder the unbound materials in a virtually infinite number of combinations, Smyth guides us to appreciate newly how those involved in the making of books and other printed formats have decisively shaped our experience of what we read and literary culture generally.
Focusing on English materials, The Book Makers accomplishes far more than delivering a new way of introducing a bibliography. One of Smyth's earliest examples, a fragment of A Lytyll Treatyse Called the Book of Curtesye printed by de Worde in 1492, was intended to guide children to virtuous conduct and is directed to a universal ‘John’. This John is instructed to read abundantly in English – John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate – and he is obviously imagined as an English everyman (or boy) rather than an aristocrat seeking a polite education in Latin or French. De Worde's workshop published virtually the entire canon of Middle English literature. Smyth's felicitous mixing of detail about printed production, the sociology of literary culture, and changing reading relation with texts is one of the absorbing qualities of The Book Makers.
While some of Smyth's makers are focused on the production of expensive (or even eccentric) books designed for elite readers, others are concerned with developing wider access to print culture, especially from the nineteenth century. There are often crossovers among them. If de Worde's productions spurred on a readership for native literature in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, small presses like the Woolfs’ Hogarth or Nancy Cunard's Hours in the early and mid-twentieth century introduced writers including T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf whose work rapidly became a touchstone of literary canonical experience for readers across the globe. In helping us understand where such texts emerged from and how they were first encountered, Smyth's book provokes a reconsideration of the writing itself. This can prompt fascinating ideas about how literary culture develops. For example, de Worde's workshop – as was the common practice of the day – illustrated texts with woodcuts whose images, typically drawn from Biblical or Classical figures and narratives, were constantly reemployed across a range of publications, the images suggesting links among varied texts that likely created the effect of an imaginative field among otherwise diffuse materials.
Another important reminder that emerges from The Book Makers is the international dimension to the development of English literary culture. De Worde, as William Caxton's direct successor – he took on Caxton's workshop, The Red Pale in Westminster, after Caxton's death in 1496 – solidified a tradition through which English books relied on continental expertise (de Worde was a German immigrant). Caxton's Canterbury Tales (1476), the first book he printed in England after training in Cologne, was made from paper imported from France, type from Louvain, and bound by skilled immigrant bookbinders. The early printed history of English was a pan-European affair. But so was a significant amount of twentieth-century writing. Cunard printed her texts in rural Normandy, James Joyce's Ulysses first met its readers in Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Co edition in Paris, printed by Darantiere in Dijon.
On a grander scale, the advent of mass circulation newspapers, cheaply produced books, and even advertising posters and wallpaper effectively began with the Frenchman Nicolas-Louis Robert's development of a machine that mechanised the production of paper at the start of the nineteenth century. But it was rapidly industrialising Britain that refined and developed the technology, along with the advent of wood-based pulp to make paper from the 1840s, that created the printing environment still recognisable today. In 1800 all paper was made by hand in sheets the size of a mould that two workmen or women could handle. With enormous effort and skill, they might produce 2000 sheets a day. With early mechanisation, this jumped to up to 50 metres of paper a minute whose size was dictated by the width of the machine. Current machines easily produce 1800 metres of paper a minute, running for 24 hours a day. As Smyth notes, though, it was not without a cost. If you look at a well-kept Gutenberg Bible today, its appearance is more or less as it would have looked to Gutenberg 575 years ago. This is in stark contrast to the now yellowed, brittle, crumbling Penguin Classics from my student days 50 years ago.
By 1900, 99 per cent of all paper was machine-made from wood pulp, so it was perhaps not surprising that figures such as William Morris at the Kelmscott Press or Thomas Cobden-Sanderson at Doves Press deliberately sought to resurrect the hand-printed book as an apparently timeless object, whose designs worked with the author's word to further ‘swiftness of apprehension and appreciation’ as T. J. Cobden-Sanderson's The Ideal Book or Book Beautiful (1900) put it. The perfect book is imagined as possessing the capacity to slow down time or to seemingly occupy different historical moments simultaneously, a mingling of both late medieval/early modern and current print environments to further the reading experience.
Smyth does not explicitly address how digital print technology transforms reading, but his considerations of how book makers engaged with the aesthetics of reading is provocative for our current milieu. Kelmscott or Doves Press books were expensive and produced in limited editions, but like Baskerville's type, they draw attention to questions of how medium affects both massage and message. The quality of a book's production affects our reading experience; but it may also fundamentally influence our understanding of what we are reading. If students of English debate the quality of what they are reading, they infrequently consider the quality of how they are reading. Looking at students attempting to negotiate Paradise Lost on their phones, I am not surprised that many find the swiftness of their apprehension and appreciation thwarted. Smyth's The Book Makers should be read by all who engage with texts.