Title: The ideal book or book beautiful : A tract on calligraphy printing and illustration & on the book beautiful as a whole
Author: Cobden-Sanderson, T. J. (Thomas James)
Language: English
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                    THE IDEAL BOOK OR BOOK BEAUTIFUL
                    A TRACT ON CALLIGRAPHY PRINTING
                     AND ILLUSTRATION & ON THE BOOK
                          BEAUTIFUL AS A WHOLE


                            THE DOVES PRESS
                     No. 1 THE TERRACE HAMMERSMITH
                                 MDCCCC



THE IDEAL BOOK OR BOOK BEAUTIFUL is a composite thing made up of many
parts & may be made beautiful by the beauty of each of its parts--its
literary content, its material or materials, its writing or printing,
its illumination or illustration, its binding & decoration--of each
of its parts in subordination to the whole which collectively they
constitute: or it may be made beautiful by the supreme beauty of
one or more of its parts, all the other parts subordinating or even
effacing themselves for the sake of this one or more, & each in turn
being capable of playing this supreme part and each in its own peculiar
and characteristic way. On the other hand each contributory craft may
usurp the functions of the rest & of the whole and growing beautiful
beyond all bounds ruin for its own the common cause. I propose in
this brief essay, putting aside for the moment the material, paper or
vellum, the binding & decoration, & the literary content of the Book
Beautiful, to say a few words on the artistic treatment of the vehicle
of expression--Calligraphy, Printing, & Illustration--and on the Book
Beautiful as a whole.


CALLIGRAPHY

HANDWRITING and hand decoration of letter & page are at the root of the
Book Beautiful, are at the root of Typography & of woodcut or engraved
Decoration, & every printer, & indeed every one having to do with the
making of books should ground himself in the practice or knowledge of
the Art of Beautiful Writing or Calligraphy, and let both hand and
soul luxuriate and rejoice for a while in the art of Illumination. Such
practice would keep Type alive under the influence of an ever living &
fluent prototype. It would supply a stock of exemplars & suggestions
from which the Typographer might cautiously borrow, converting into his
own rigid stock such of the new beautiful growths of Calligraphy as
commended themselves to him for the purpose.

¶ In the making of the Written Book, moreover, in which various modes
of presentment are combined, symbolical and pictorial, the adjustment
of letter to letter, of word to word, of picture to text & of text to
picture, and of the whole to the subject matter & to the page, admits
of great nicety and perfection. The type is fluid, and the letters
and words, picture, text, & page are conceived of as one and are all
executed by one hand, or by several hands all working together without
intermediation on one identical page and with a view to one identical
effect. In the Printed Book this adjustment is more difficult. The
type is rigid and implacable. The labour is divided and dispersed:
the picture or illustration, for example, is too often done quite
independently & at a distance, without thought of the printed page,
& inserted, a stranger, amid an alien type. Yet in the making of the
printed book, as in the making of the written book, this adjustment is
essential, & should be specially borne in mind, and Calligraphy and
immediate decoration by hand and the unity which should be inseparably
associated therewith would serve as an admirable discipline to that end.

¶ Perhaps the most interesting things to note historically in this
connexion are (1) that all Calligraphy in Italy, Spain, France, Germany
& England would seem to be a development, with many subdivisions,
of Roman Calligraphy, itself a development of Greek, and that the
beautiful formation of the letters and their orderly placement in
sequence upon the rectangular page are but modes of that general
delight in the making of order and beauty which is the note of unity
throughout all the arts: and (2) that in Calligraphy, as in all the
arts, a beauty of decoration once started on its way, proceeds to
throw off the conditions of its birth and where it was meant to be
only a minister to make itself master. The stages in this usurpation
in the case of Calligraphy are singularly well marked & apparent. At
the outset, Calligraphy was uniform writing only, a succession of
SQUARE CAPITALS all of equal value. Then came the enlargement of the
sphere of action, so to speak, of letters in prominent positions, of
initial letters & their decorative treatment: then, in consequence of
this very enlargement, a further enlargement or emphasis which ended
in ceasing to be adjective decoration & becoming a substantive beauty,
as of a picture, framed by the adjacent illumination & writing, but
superior to them as the flower to the leaf. Each of these stages has
a beauty of its own, and each in its turn constitutes a Book in some
sense a Beautiful Book. But in the passage from the image created in
the mind by abstract symbolism to the image expressed on the page by
verisimilitude, the book itself underwent a change & became in the
process, not a vehicle for the conveyance of an image, but itself the
image, to be appreciated not so much by the imagination, the inner eye,
as directly by the outer eye, the sense of sight itself; just as on the
stage the scenery created at first imaginatively by the spectators, in
obedience to the influence of the actor, is now presented externally by
the scene painter & costumier in simulated reality. I apprehend that
when the illuminator, passing on from the decoration of significant
or initial letters, took to the making of pictures in this fashion
within the folds of them, he was pressing his art too far. He was in
danger, as the event showed, of subordinating his Text to himself, of
sacrificing the thing signified to the mode of its signification, for
in the end the written communication became as it were nothing, or but
the framework or apology to support a succession of beautiful pictures,
beautiful indeed, but beautiful at the expense of the Text which they
had set out to magnify.

¶ And we may in this connexion safely moralize & say that when many
arts combine, or propose to combine, to the making of one thing, as
the process continues, & the several arts develop, each will attempt
to assert itself to the destruction of the one thing needful, to the
making of which they at first all combined in a common subordination.
Thus in our own case the illuminator destroyed by over relative
development the purely written text, & the moral is that every artist,
in contributing to the Book Beautiful, must keep himself well in hand
and strictly subordinate both his art and his ambition to the end in
view. He must remember that in such a case his art is a means only &
not itself an end.

¶ It is worthy of remark that the Church fought against the idolatry
of its Scribes, & sought to curtail the too exuberant beauty of their
illuminators, & a similar attempt was made to keep down the idolatry
of the Binder. The Church has perhaps lost all pretension even to
influence in this respect. But artists should not need the guidance
of anything outside themselves as artists. They should, as artists,
realise that the world of art is a commonweal, and that the most
beautiful art is a composite work, higher than the art of each, and
that the art of each is contributory, only to be exercised in due
subordination to the ideal which is the creation of all.


TYPOGRAPHY

THE PASSAGE from the Written Book to the Printed Book was sudden
& complete. Nor is it wonderful that the earliest productions of
the printing press are the most beautiful & that the history of
its subsequent career is but the history of its decadence. The
Printer carried on into Type the tradition of the Calligrapher &
of the Calligrapher at his best. As this tradition died out in the
distance, the craft of the Printer declined. It is the function of
the Calligrapher to revive & restore the craft of the Printer to its
original purity of intention & accomplishment. The Printer must at the
same time be a Calligrapher, or in touch with him, & there must be
in association with the Printing Press a Scriptorium where beautiful
writing may be practised and the art of letter-designing kept alive.
And there is this further evidence of the dependence of printing upon
writing: the great revival in printing which is taking place under our
own eyes, is the work of a Printer who before he was a Printer was a
Calligrapher & an Illuminator, WILLIAM MORRIS.

¶ The whole duty of Typography, as of Calligraphy, is to communicate to
the imagination, without loss by the way, the thought or image intended
to be communicated by the Author. And the whole duty of beautiful
typography is not to substitute for the beauty or interest of the thing
thought and intended to be conveyed by the symbol, a beauty or interest
of its own, but, on the one hand, to win access for that communication
by the clearness & beauty of the vehicle, and on the other hand,
to take advantage of every pause or stage in that communication to
interpose some characteristic & restful beauty in its own art. We thus
have a reason for the clearness and beauty of the text as a whole,
for the especial beauty of the first or introductory page and of the
title, and for the especial beauty of the headings of chapters, capital
or initial letters, & so on, and an opening for the illustrator as we
shall see by and by.

¶ Further, in the case of Poetry, verse, in my opinion, appeals by its
form to the eye, as well as to the ear, & should be placed on the page
so that its structure may be taken in at a glance and distinctively
appreciated, and anything which interferes with this swiftness of
apprehension and appreciation, however beautiful in itself, is in
relation to the book as a whole a typographical impertinence.


ILLUSTRATION

ILLUSTRATION, the other expressive constituent of the Book Beautiful,
is a part of the whole subject matter, in process of symbolical
communication, picked out, isolated, & presented pictorially. Besides
its relation in the field of the imagination to the rest of the subject
matter, the thought of the book, it has a relation & a most important
relation, in the field of the senses, to the vehicle of communication,
the immediate typographical environment, amid which it appears. And
here comes in the question, which has sometimes been confused with
the question of relationship, the question of the mode in which the
pictorial illustration may be produced & transferred to the page, by
woodcut, by steel or copper engraving, or by process. But this seems to
me to be an entirely subordinate though important question. The main
question is the aspect which the illustration shall be made to take
in order to fit it into and amid a page of Typography. And I submit
that its aspect must be essentially formal and of the same texture,
so to speak, as the letterpress. It should have a set frame or margin
to itself, demarcating it distinctly from the text, and the shape &
character of the frame, if decorative, should have relation to the page
as well as to the illustrative content; and the illustrative content
itself should be formal and kept under so as literally to illustrate,
and not to dim by over brilliancy the rest of the subject matter left
to be communicated to the imagination by the letterpress alone.


THE BOOK BEAUTIFUL AS A WHOLE

FINALLY, if the Book Beautiful may be beautiful by virtue of its
writing or printing or illustration, it may also be beautiful, be even
more beautiful, by the union of all to the production of one composite
whole, the consummate Book Beautiful. Here the idea to be communicated
by the book comes first, as the thing of supreme importance. Then comes
in attendance upon it, striving for the love of the idea to be itself
beautiful, the written or printed page, the decorated or decorative
letters, the pictures, set amid the text, and finally the binding,
holding the whole in its strong grip and for very love again itself
becoming beautiful because in company with the idea.

       *       *       *       *       *

This is the supreme Book Beautiful or Ideal Book, a dream, a symbol of
the infinitely beautiful in which all things of beauty rest and into
which all things of beauty do ultimately merge.

¶ The Book Beautiful, then, should be conceived of as a whole, & the
self-assertion of any Art beyond the limits imposed by the conditions
of its creation should be looked upon as an Act of Treason. The proper
duty of each Art within such limits is to co-operate with all the other
arts, similarly employed, in the production of something which is
distinctly Not-Itself. The wholeness, symmetry, harmony, beauty without
stress or strain, of the Book Beautiful, would then be one in principle
with the wholeness, symmetry, harmony, and beauty without stress or
strain, of that WHOLE OF LIFE WHICH IS CONSTITUTED OF OURSELVES & THE
WORLD, THAT COMPLEX AND MARVELLOUS WHOLE WHICH, AMID THE STRIFE OF
COMPETITIVE FORCES, SUPREMELY HOLDS ITS OWN, AND IN THE LANGUAGE OF
LIFE WRITES, UPON THE ILLUMINED PAGES OF THE DAYS, THE VOLUMES OF THE
CENTURIES, & THROUGH THE INFINITUDES OF TIME & SPACE MOVES RHYTHMICALLY
ONWARD TO THE FULL DEVELOPMENT OF ITS ASTONISHING STORY THE TRUE
ARCHETYPE OF ALL BOOKS BEAUTIFUL OR SUBLIME.


This Tract, written by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, was printed by him &
Emery Walker at The Doves Press and finished Oct. 19, 1900. Compositor
J. H. Mason. Pressman H. Gage-Cole. Sold at The Doves Press.




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