letter-founders, and for many years have successfully used "revived old style" and also characters of the modern face family.' Constable employed an interesting Scotch modern face for David Nutt's distinguished series of Tudor Translations. The fine revived old style or (as I should prefer to call them) modernized old style fonts were used by the same printer in the three volumes of Bibliographica (1895); and Mr. J. P. Morgan's monumental Catalogue of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books from the Libraries of Morris, Bennett, etc. (1907), is a magnificent example of the skilful use of these types by the Chiswick Press. In smaller sizes this type was delightfully employed by the same press in their reprint of Sir Henry Wotton's Elements of Architecture, issued by Longmans in 1903 (fig. 344).

But the early and “classic” use of this type was in Herbert Horne's periodical, The Century Guild Hobby Horse (1886-92). Its later volumes (beginning in 1888), printed in a large size of the "modernized old style" character, with delightful decorations drawn by Mr. Horne, are most distinguished pieces of typography (fig. 345). Of The Hobby Horse not many volumes were issued, but they will always hold a place in the annals of the revival of printing at the end of the last century.

In Mr. Horne's typographical venture, William Morris had a hand; but as Morris rode a very Gothic hobbyhorse of his own, and Mr. Horne's charger was much more Italian than Gothic in its behaviour, it is easy to see why Morris soon turned his attention to printing in a way more to his mind. His endeavours, their results, and the influence they have had on modern printing have now to be considered.

'In England Caslon types are called "old face"; what we call "modernized old style" is there termed “revived old style”—a type designed about 1850.

CHAPTER XXII

ENGLISH AND AMERICAN REVIVAL OF EARLY TYPEFORMS AND ITS EFFECT ON CONTINENTAL TYPES

ILLIAM MORRIS was born in 1834

W

the son

of prosperous middle-class people, who lived freely and pleasantly. He was educated at Marlborough School and Exeter College, Oxford, where he formed a lasting friendship with Burne-Jones. Originally intending to take Holy Orders, he changed his mind, and studied architecture for a year or two under Street; then, between 1857 and 1862, through Rossetti's influence, he took up painting. Meanwhile he had begun to write-his Defence of Guenevere appearing in 1858. From then until his death he wrote many volumes of poetry and prose, most of it of a very high order. Painting proved unsatisfactory, so he began about the year 1870 to work as a decorator, eventually turning his hand to illumination,-in which he was expert,-to the making of wall-papers, rugs, hangings, and stained glass, and to house decoration. It was an era of pattern, and though in Morris's hands the pattern was often magnificent, houses decorated or furnished by him would now appear rather tiresome and affected.

In socialism Morris was seriously interested. It was the somewhat romantic socialism of a well-to-do, fastidious man, which had the added attraction of placing him in the opposition; for he somewhat enjoyed "otherwise-mindedness." Morris never went into the slums and lived with the people -indeed, he gave scant attention to the particular individual in his large and roomy movements - it was not the manner of his time. He desired with great desire to see the life of workmen improved by being made more like his own, rather than to get nearer the workmen's point of view

by making his life more like theirs. Yet he was thoroughly in earnest about his socialism. That the workman's life was so sordid made him miserable. He loved mediaevalism because it appeared to him—I think rather unhistorically

a close approach to the life he wished to see commonly lived in the world. None the less, he had sometimes impossible manners, often a furious temper, always short patience with fools, and there was a bit of pose and "bow-wow" about his daily walk and conversation. In his character, as in his wall-papers, one was a little too conscious of the pattern, but the pattern was fine, and there was lots of it! Over and above all this he was an educated, cultivated man, tremendously observant and shrewd, and his driving power was enormous. Like Bodoni (whose work Morris detested), no man knew better what he wanted to do. Morris's motto was "If I can," and by hard work, enthusiasm, and we must admit a fixed income and a good deal of incidental prosperity, he usually "could."

Morris's style of printing, therefore, may be partly explained by the interiors of his own houses or those he decorated; and its motive by his idea of socialism, which, through a kind of Religion of Beauty, was to produce the regeneration of a work-a-day world. It was to be a wonderful world, and it was, potentially, very real to him. His printing was for it, or was to help to its realization by others. If his decorations now appear a bit mannered and excessive, and his socialism somewhat romantic and unreal, it is because Morris was very much of his period. Thus (again like Bodoni, though from diametrically opposite theories) Morris made magnificent books, but not for ordinary readers-nor, for the matter of that, for ordinary purses-but only for a certain fortunate group of his own time.

To understand the work of the Kelmscott Press we must

understand this much of the environment and ways of thinking of a man as forcible and sincere as he was manysided.

Some years before Mr. Morris set up any press of his own, he had made a few essays in printing. The Roots of the Mountains, which was issued in 1889, was printed for him at the Chiswick Press in a character cut some fifty years earlier, belonging to the Whittinghams, and modelled on an old Basle font; and in 1890, the Gunnlaug Saga was printed in a type copied from one of Caxton's fonts. In 1891, almost fifty years after the Whittinghams' revival of Caslon's type, and some fifteen years after the Fell types were resuscitated, Morris established the Kelmscott Press, named after Kelmscott Manor House (on the upper Thames, about thirty miles from Oxford), which Morris acquired in 1871. The first "Kelmscott" book that he issued was The Story of the Glittering Plain, and its effect upon lovers of fine books was instantaneous. Opinion was at once divided about Morris's printing. To a limited public, the Kelmscott editions opened the millennium in book-making. Others were irritated at what they considered their affectation and faddishness, and condemned them utterly, as unreadable-which was only a half-truth. The effect on printing in general that Morris was to have through his types and type-setting entirely escaped most printers, as did the sources from which he derived his methods. Because they knew very little about early manuscripts or early books, about the characters of the one or the types of the other, the Kelmscott books appeared to them to have fallen from the sky-either very new and wonderful or else very freakish and senseless-just as they would to anybody who knew nothing whatever about it! On the great English public, or the majority of English print

ers, Morris's books had-at that time-scarcely any effect at all. Indeed, Mr. Morris was a much more widespread popular force in America and Germany than in England, where his work was known only to a comparatively small

artistic group.

"I began printing books," said Mr. Morris, "with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty, while at the same time they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye, or trouble the intellect of the reader by eccentricity of form in the letters. I have always been a great admirer of the calligraphy of the Middle Ages, and of the earlier printing which took its place. As to the fifteenth century books, I had noticed that they were always beautiful by force of the mere typography, even without the added ornament, with which many of them are so lavishly supplied. And it was the essence of my undertaking to produce books which it would be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing and arrangement of type. Looking at my adventure from this point of view then, I found I had to consider chiefly the following things: the paper, the form of the type, the relative spacing of the letters, the words, and the lines; and lastly the position of the printed matter on the page....

"Next as to type. By instinct rather than by conscious thinking it over, I began by getting myself a fount of Roman type. And here what I wanted was letter pure in form; severe, without needless excrescences; solid, without the thickening and thinning of the line, which is the essential fault of the ordinary modern type, and which makes it difficult to read; and not compressed laterally, as all later type has grown to be owing to commercial exigencies. There was only one source from which to take examples of this perfected Roman type, to wit, the works of the great Venetian