The Ideal Book

White characters, black characters

Now, then, let us see what this architectural arrangement claims of us. First, the pages must be clear and easy to read; which they can hardly be unless, Secondly, the type is well designed; and Thirdly, whether the margins be small or big, they must be in due proportion to the page of letters.

For clearness of reading the things necessary to be heeded are, first, that the letters should be properly put on their bodies, and, I think, especially that there should be small whites between them: it is curious, but to me certain, that the irregularity of some early type, notably the Roman letter of the early printers of Rome, which is, of all Roman type, the rudest, does not tend toward illegibility: what does do so is the lateral compression of the letter, which necessarily involves the over-thinning out of its shape. Of course I do not mean to say that the above-mentioned irregularity is other than a fault to be corrected. One thing should never be done in ideal printing, the spacing out of letters, that is, putting an extra white between them; except in such hurried and unimportant work as newspaper printing, it is inexcusable.

This leads us to the second matter on this head, the lateral spacing of words (the whites between them); to make a beautiful page great attention should be paid to this, which, I fear, is not often done. No more white should be used between the words than just clearly cuts them off from one another; if the whites are bigger than this it both tends to illegibility and makes the page ugly. I remember once buying a handsome fifteenth-century Venetian book, and I could not tell at first why some of its pages were so worrying to read, and so common-place and vulgar to look at, for there was no fault to find with the type. But presently it was accounted for by the spacing; for the said pages were spaced like a modem book, i.e., the black and white nearly equal. Next, if you want a legible book, the white should be clear and the black black. When that excellent journal, the Westminster Gazette, first came out, there was a discussion on the advantages of its green paper, in which a good deal of nonsense was talked. My friend, Mr. Jacobi, being a practical printer, set these wise men right, if they noticed his letter, as I fear they did not, by pointing out that what they had done was to lower the tone (not the moral tone) of the paper, and that, therefore, in order to make it as legible as ordinary black and white, they should make their black blacker—which of course they do not do. You may depend upon it that a grey page is very trying to the eyes.

The importance of typographic choices

As above said, legibility depends also much on the design of the letter: and again I take up the cudgels against compressed type, and that especially in Roman letter: the full-sized lower-case letters a, b, d, and c, should be designed on something like a square to get good results: otherwise one may fairly say that there is no room for the design; furthermore, each letter should have its due characteristic drawing; the thickening out for a, b, e, g, should not be of the same kind as that for a d; a u should not merely be an n turned upside down; the dot of the i should not be a circle drawn with compasses, but a delicately drawn diamond, and so on. To be short, the letters should be designed by an artist, and not an engineer. As to the forms of letters in England (I mean Great Britain), there has been much progress within the last forty years. The sweltering hideousness of the Bodoni letter, the most illegible type that was ever cut, with its preposterous thicks and thins, has been mostly relegated to works that do not profess anything but the baldest utilitarianism (though why even utilitarianism should use illegible types, I fail to see), and Caslon’s letter, Fig. 1 and the somewhat wiry, but in its way, elegant old-faced type cut in our own days, has largely taken its place. It is rather unlucky, however, that a somewhat low standard of excellence has been accepted for the design of modern Roman type at its best, the comparatively poor and wiry letter of Plantin, and the Elzeviers, having served for the model, rather than the generous and logical designs of die fifteenth-century Venetian printers, at the head of whom stands Nicholas Jenson; when it is so obvious that this is the best and clearest Roman type yet struck, it seems a pity that we should make our starting point for a possible new departure at any period worse than the best. If any of you doubt the superiority of this type over that of the seventeenth century, the study of a specimen enlarged about five times will convince him, I should think. I must admit however, that a commercial consideration comes in here, to wit, that the Jenson letters take up more room than the imitations of the seventeenth century; and that touches on another commercial difficulty, to wit that you cannot have a book either handsome or clear to read which is printed in small characters. For my part, except where books smaller than an ordinary octavo are wanted, I would fight against anything smaller than Pica; but at any rate Small Pica seems to me the smallest type that should be used in the body of any book. I might suggest to printers that if they want to get more in they can reduce the size of the leads, or leave them out altogether. Of course this is more desirable in some types than others; Caslon’s letter, e.g., which has long ascenders and descenders, never needs leading, except for special purposes.

I have hitherto had a fine and generous Roman type in my mind, but after all, a certain amount of variety is desirable, and when you have once got your Roman letter as good as the best that has been, I do not think you will find much scope for development of it; I would, therefore, put in a word for some form of Gothic letter for use in our improved printed book. This may startle some of you, but you must remember that except for a very remarkable type used very seldom by Berthelet, English black-letter, since the days of Wynkyn de Worde, has been always the letter which was introduced from Holland about that time (I except again, of course, the modern imitations of Caxton). Now this, though a handsome and stately letter, is not very easy reading, it is too much compressed, too spiky, and, so to say, too prepensely Gothic. But there are many types which are of a transitional character and of all degrees of transition, from those which do little more than take in just a little of the crisp floweriness of the Gothic, like some of the Mentelin Fig. 2 or quasi-Mentelin ones (which, indeed, are models of beautiful simplicity), or say like the letter of the Ulm Ptolemy, of which it is difficult to say whether it is Gothic or Roman, to the splendid Mainz type, of which, I suppose, the finest example is the Schoeffer Bible of 1462, and which is almost wholly Gothic. This gives us a wide field for variety, I think, so I make the suggestion to you, and leave this part of the subject with two remarks: first, that a good deal of the difficulty of reading Gothic books is caused by the numerous contractions in them, which were a survival of the practice of the scribes; and in a lesser degree by the over abundance of tied letters, both of which drawbacks I take it for granted would be absent in modern types founded on these semi-Gothic letters. And, secondly, that in my opinion the capitals are the strong side of Roman, and the lower-case of Gothic letter, which is but natural, since the Roman was originally an alphabet of capitals, and the lower-case a gradual deduction from them.

The materiality of books

We now come to the position of the page of print on the paper, which is a most important point, and one that till quite lately has been wholly misunderstood by modern, and seldom done wrong by ancient printers, or indeed by producers of books of any kind. On this head I must begin by reminding you that we only occasionally see one page of a book at a time; the two pages making an opening are really the unit of the book, and this was thoroughly understood by the old book producers. I think you will very seldom find a book produced before the eighteenth century, and which has not been cut down by that enemy of books (and of the human race) the binder, in which this rule is not adhered to: that the hinder edge (that which is bound in) must be the smallest member of the margins, the head margin must be larger than this, the fore larger still, and the tail largest of all. I assert that, to the eye of any man who knows what proportion is, this looks satisfactory, and that no other does so look. But the modern printer, as a rule, dumps down his page in what he calls the middle of the paper, which is often not even really the middle, as he measures his page from the head line, if he has one, though it is not really part of the page, but a spray of type only faintly staining the head of the paper. Now I go so far as to say that any book in which the page is properly put on the paper is tolerable to look at, however poor the type may be (always so long as there is no “ornament” which may spoil the whole thing), whereas any book in which the page is wrongly set on the paper is intolerable to look at, however good the type and ornaments may be. I have got on my shelves now a Jenson’s Latin Pliny, which, in spite of its beautiful type and handsome painted ornaments, I dare scarcely look at, because the binder (adjectives fail me here) has chopped off two-thirds of the tail margin: such stupidities are like a man with his coat buttoned up behind, or a lady with her bonnet put on hind-side foremost.

Before I finish this section, I should like to say a word concerning large paper copies. I am clean against them, though I have sinned a good deal in that way myself, but that was in the days of ignorance, and I petition for pardon on that ground only. If you want to publish a handsome edition of a book as well as a cheap one, do so; but let them be two books, and if you (or the public) cannot afford this, spend your ingenuity and your money in making the cheap book as sightly as you can. Your making a large paper copy out of the small one lands you in a dilemma even if you re-impose the pages for the larger paper, which is not often done I think. If the margins are right for the smaller book, they must be wrong for the larger, and you have to offer the public the worse book at the bigger price: if they are right for the large paper they are wrong for the small, and thus spoil it, as we have seen above that they must do; and that seems scarcely fair to the general public (from the point of view of artistic morality) who might have had a book that was sightly, though not high priced.

As to the paper of our ideal book we are at a great disadvantage compared with past times. Up to the end of the fifteenth or, indeed, the first quarter of the sixteenth centuries, no bad paper was made, and the greater part was very good indeed. At present there is very little good paper made, and most of it is very bad. Our ideal book must, I think, be printed on hand-made paper as good as it can be made; penury here will make a poor book of it. Yet if machine-made paper must be used, it should not profess fineness or luxury, but should show itself for what it is: for my part I decidedly prefer the cheaper papers that are used for the journals, so far as appearance is concerned, to the thick, smooth, shamfine papers on which respectable books are printed, and the worst of these are those which imitate the structure of hand-made papers.

But, granted your hand-made paper, there is something to be said about its substance. A small book should not be printed on thick paper, however good it may be. You want a book to turn over easily, and to lie quiet while you are reading it, which is impossible, unless you keep heavy paper for big books.

And, by the way, I wish to make a protest against the superstition that only small books are comfortable to read; some small books are tolerably comfortable, but the best of them are not so comfortable as a fairly big folio, the size, say of an uncut Polyphilus, or somewhat bigger. The fact is, a small book seldom does lie quiet, and you have either to cramp your hand by holding it, or else to put it on the table with a paraphernalia of matters to keep it down, a table-spoon on one side, a knife on another, and so on, which things always tumble off at a critical moment, and fidget you out of the repose which is absolutely necessary to reading; whereas, a big folio lies quiet and majestic on the table, waiting kindly till you please to come to it, with its leaves flat and peaceful, giving you no trouble of body, so that your mind is free to enjoy die literature which its beauty enshrines.

For architectural ornamentation

So far then, I have been speaking of books whose only ornament is the necessary and essential beauty which arises out of the fitness of a piece of craftsmanship for the use which it is made for. But if we get as far as that, no doubt from such craftsmanship definite ornament will arise, and will be used, sometimes with wise forbearance, sometimes with prodigality equally wise. Meantime, if we really feel impelled to ornament our books, no doubt we ought to try what we can do; but in this attempt we must remember one thing, that if we think the ornament is ornamentally a part of the book merely because it is printed with it, and bound up with it, we shall be much mistaken. The ornament must form as much a part of the page as the type itself, or it will miss its mark, and in order to succeed, and to be ornament, it must submit to certain limitations, and become architectural; a mere black and white picture, however interesting it may be as a picture, may be far from an ornament in a book; while on the other hand, a book ornamented with pictures that are suitable for that, and that only, may become a work of art second to none, save a fine building duly decorated, or a fine piece of literature.

These two latter things are, indeed, the one absolutely necessary gift that we should claim of art. The picture-book is not, perhaps, absolutely necessary to man’s life, but it gives us such endless pleasure, and is so intimately connected with the other absolutely necessary art of imaginative literature that it must remain one of the very worthiest things towards the production of which reasonable men should strive.

En 1891, après s’être mis tardivement, en 1888, à l’apprentissage de la typographie, William Morris monte la Kelmscott Press, une imprimerie, maison d’édition et fonderie typographique qu’il nomme d’après sa maison de campagne située à Kelmscott, le Kelmscott Manor Fig. 3. Il installe sa presse près de l’atelier de gravure d’Emery Walker à Hammersmith en banlieue ouest de Londres. Sa rencontre avec Walker, qui rejoint la Typographic Etching Company en 1871, est décisive dans la formation et dans le développement de la Kelmscott¹. Le 15 novembre 1888, Morris assiste à la conférence de Walker intitulée « Letter Press Printing and Illustration » à l’issue de laquelle il décide « de lancer une petite imprimerie où il pourrait publier des éditions limitées de ses propres œuvres² ». En sept ans d’activité (Morris meurt en 1896), la presse édite 53 ouvrages de natures diverses (fables, littérature médiévale et des textes contemporains) à partir des caractères typographiques que Morris dessine, le Golden Type, le Troy Type et le Chaucer Type Fig. 4³. La typographie et plus généralement l’imprimerie deviennent avec cette entreprise un terrain d’investigations pratiques et théoriques pour Morris. Bien qu’Emery Walker refuse d’être partenaire au sein de la Kelmscott, il participe à ces questionnements sur la mise en pages, le développement du papier, le dessin des caractères typographique et sera co-auteur avec Morris de la section sur l’imprimerie dans l’ouvrage Arts and Crafts Essays⁴.

Le 19 juin 1893, Morris donne aussi une conférence devant les membres de la Bibliographical Society réunis à l’université de Londres [London University]. Son texte, intitulé The Ideal Book Fig. 5 sera publié la même année dans le journal Transactions of the Bibliographical Society. Morris esquisse dans sa déclaration une sorte de modèle exemplaire du livre fondé sur son « arrangement architectural⁵ », lui-même reposant sur trois points. La clarté des pages, le dessin des caractères typographiques employés et la proportionnalité des espaces – notamment des marges – sont pour lui les garants de la qualité esthétique du livre. Il déplace les critères de beauté traditionnellement associés à la place des ornements et à leur caractère illustratif pour envisager l’agencement typographique comme une forme ornementale en soi. Il suggère ainsi que le travail de composition dans ce qu’il a de plus élémentaire répond à des fonctions esthétique et sémantique qui suffisent au texte. De cette manière il laisse entrevoir dans son exposé appliqué au livre les éléments fondamentaux d’une esthétique fonctionnelle qui sera développée et théorisée tout au long de la première moitié du xx^e siècle, notamment dans l’architecture et l’objet (J. Hoffmann, A. Loos, P. Berhens), la typographie (J. Tschichold, B. Warde, M. Bill) et plus largement dans l’ensemble des domaines de la création.

Morris consacre ensuite une partie de son analyse au dessin des lettres à partir duquel les espaces de composition (noir et blanc) se définissent au sein de la page. À ce titre, l’évolution du dessin des caractères typographiques et en particulier le travail des imprimeurs Bodoni Fig. 6 et Elzevir Fig. 7 fait l’objet d’une vive critique. À l’inverse, Morris trouve dans le dessin de certains caractères du xv^e siècle (gothique ou romain) tels que le caractère de Mayence dans la Bible de Schoeffer Fig. 8 ou le romain de Nicolas Jenson Fig. 9 des modèles précieux. C’est d’ailleurs à partir de ces exemples et en étroite collaboration avec Emery Walker que Morris dessinera les trois caractères qui serviront au sein de l’imprimerie⁶.

Il ajoute que l’ornement émanant de la page et de la typographie ne peut découler que d’un travail purement artisanal et maîtrisé dans son ensemble par l’homme. En plus de la gravure des caractères et de la composition, l’imprimerie s’engage dans la fabrication du papier⁷ et le façonnage des livres (reliure et coupe). Les choix esthétiques défendus par Morris ne sont donc pas seulement au service d’une qualité visuelle, mais permettent aussi de garantir un bon usage du livre d’une part et des conditions de travail qui n’asservissent pas l’homme à son outillage productif d’autre part. Derrière les questionnements formels de ce document, se dessinent des revendications idéologiques qui s’inscrivent dans la continuité des réflexions déjà développées par Morris dans ses écrits⁸ et héritées des mouvements de contestation des ouvriers anglais du début du xix^e siècle, qui prirent notamment forme avec la révolte des Luddites⁹. En somme, on trouve dans le Livre idéal la formalisation de l’engagement théorique et pratique de Morris et un nouvel élan de modernité typographique qui préfigure les grandes transformations qui seront apportées dans la première moitié du xx^e siècle.