ABOUT TECHNICALITIES

O drown in easy narrative a mass of dry technicalities, and yet permit definitions to keep their heads clear above the flood, so that he who wishes may use them as guiding marks, is a leading purpose of these chronicles. If something more than common is said from the printer's point of view the excess may find excuse in this: that artists, engravers, authors, and enthusiastic collectors have hitherto monopolized the literature of book-making. We may fairly give the craftsman a turn, and with an exhibition of his "art and mysteries" lend a word of guidance to the appreciative.

We have seen that when Whittingham the elder began business in his London garret in 1789, the art of printing was in a low condition in Great Britain. Good work, to be sure, had been well done by Foulis and Baskerville; it was even then well done by Bulmer and Ritchie; but their honest workmanship, and the much-admired books of Bodoni at Parma, and of Didot at Paris, did not impel the average English printer to rivalry, nor even to feeble imitation. For apathy the Briton had a ready excuse. The implements of his craft were defective.

The bad workman blames his tools; the bad printer therefore blames his types, paper, and presses. It is easier to put irresponsive materials in fault than to confess to carelessness or incapacity. Yet why should good impressions, or exact register, have been expected from shackly presses of wood? Why look for black ink or clear print on paper that was coarse, grimy, knotty, badly cleansed, or stuffed with clay? How could any one have made a pleasing page from old-fashioned, angular, awkward, and meager types with faces that were too small for their bodies? But there were men who succeeded with these odds against them, or who, at any rate, reduced the odds.

Types were held to be most in fault. There seems to have been a tacit agreement between readers and printers that the bad printing of England was due chiefly to bad types, and that any reform in printing must begin with some new and more pleasing style of roman textletter. The Baskerville style had been condemned at its introduction. After years of unquestioned supremacy, the Caslon style had been put aside as antiquated. Younger type-founders, Martin, Fry, Jackson, Cottrell,