Over the course of the nineteenth century, the quality of book design and production declined, with a few notable exceptions, such as the books by the English publisher William Pickering (1796–1854). At age fourteen Pickering apprenticed to a London bookseller and publisher; at age twenty-four he established his own bookshop specializing in old and rare volumes. Shortly thereafter, Pickering, with his deep love of books and outstanding scholarship, began a publishing program. Pickering played an important role in the separation of graphic design from printing production. His passion for design led him to commission new woodblock ornaments, initials, and illustrations. He maintained control over the format design, type selection, illustrations, and all other visual considerations.
Pickering’s books were produced by printers who worked under his close personal supervision. A cordial working relationship between publisher/designer and printer was established by Pickering and Charles Whittingham (1795–1876) of the Chiswick Press. Whittingham’s excellent craftsmanship complemented Pickering’s demands for quality. In books of prose and poetry, such as Pickering’s fifty-three-volume series Aldine Poets, his designs moved toward classic simplicity. In collaboration with Whittingham, Pickering revived Caslon types, which he loved for their straightforward legibility. The Diamond Classics, a series of miniature books produced by Pickering from 1820 to 1826, were set in the minuscule Diamond type produced by Charles Corrall (Fig. 10–1).
Pickering’s edition of Oliver Byrne’s The Elements of Euclid (Figs. 10–2 and 10–3) is a landmark of Victorian book design. Diagrams and symbols are printed in brilliant primary colors with woodblocks; color replaced traditional alphabet labeling to identify the lines, shapes, and forms in the geometry lessons. The book’s author claimed that with his approach, geometry could be learned in one-third the time needed with traditional textbooks, and that the learning was more permanent. The dynamic color and crisp structures anticipate geometric abstract art of the twentieth century.
In spite of the efforts of Pickering and others, the decline in book design continued until late in the century, when a book-design renaissance began. This revival—which first treated the book as a limited-edition art object and then influenced commercial production—was largely a result of the Arts and Crafts movement, which flourished in England during the last decades of the nineteenth century as a reaction against the social, moral, and artistic confusion of the Industrial Revolution. Design and a return to handicraft were advocated, and the “cheap and nasty” mass-produced goods of the Victorian era were abhorred. The leader of the English Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris (1834–96), called for a fitness of purpose, truth to the nature of materials and methods of production, and individual expression by both designer and worker.
The writer and artist John Ruskin (1819–1900) inspired the philosophy of this movement. Asking how society could “consciously order the lives of its members so as to maintain the largest number of noble and happy human beings,” Ruskin rejected the mercantile economy and pointed toward the union of art and labor in service to society, as exemplified in the design and construction of the medieval Gothic cathedral. He called this the social order that Europe must “regain for her children.” According to Ruskin, a process of separating art and society had begun after the Renaissance. Industrialization and technology caused this gradual severance to reach a critical stage, isolating the artist. The consequences were eclectic borrowing from historical models, a decline in creativity, and design by engineers without aesthetic concern. Underlying Ruskin’s theories was his fervent belief that beautiful things were valuable and useful precisely because they were beautiful. In addition, Ruskin became concerned for social justice, advocating improved housing for industrial workers, a national education system, and retirement benefits for the elderly.
Among the artists, architects, and designers who embraced a synthesis of Ruskin’s aesthetic philosophies and social consciousness, William Morris is a pivotal figure in the history of design. The eldest son of a wealthy wine importer, Morris grew up in a Georgian mansion on the edge of Epping Forest, where the near-feudal way of life, ancient churches and mansions, and beautiful English countryside made a profound impression on him. In 1853 he entered Exeter College, Oxford, where he began his lifelong friendship with Edward Burne-Jones (1833–98). Both planned to enter the ministry, and their wide reading included medieval history, chronicles, and poetry. Writing became a daily activity for Morris, who published his first volume of poems at age twenty-four. Throughout his career he produced a steady flow of poetry, fiction, and philosophical writings, which filled twenty-four volumes when his daughter May (1862–1938) published his collected works after his death.
While traveling in France on a holiday in 1855, Morris and Burne-Jones decided to become artists instead of clergymen. After graduation Morris entered the Oxford architectural office of G. E. Street, where he formed a close friendship with his supervisor, the young architect Philip Webb (1831–1915). Morris found the routine of an architectural office stifling and dull, so in the fall of 1856 he left architecture and joined Burne-Jones in the pursuit of painting. Because Morris’s family estate provided an ample income of nine hundred pounds a month, he could follow his ideas and interests wherever they led. The two artists fell under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82). Morris struggled with his romantic paintings of medieval pageantry but was never fully satisfied with his work. He married his hauntingly beautiful model, Jane Burden, daughter of an Oxford stableman, and during the process of establishing their home, began to find his design vocation.
Red House, designed for them by Philip Webb, is a landmark in domestic architecture. Instead of featuring rooms in a rectangular box behind a symmetrical façade, the house had an L-shaped plan that grew out of functional interior space planning. When it came time to furnish the interior, Morris suddenly discovered the appalling state of Victorian product and furniture design. Over the next several years he designed and supervised the execution of furniture, stained glass, and tapestries for Red House.
As a result of this experience, Morris joined with six friends in 1861 to establish the art-decorating firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company. Growing rapidly, the firm established London showrooms and began to assemble teams of craftsmen that eventually included furniture and cabinetmakers (Fig. 10–4), weavers and dyers, stained glass fabricators, and potters and tile makers. Morris proved to be a brilliant two-dimensional pattern designer. He created over five hundred pattern designs for wallpapers, textiles, carpets, and tapestries. His 1883 fabric design “Rose” (Fig. 10–5) demonstrates his drawing fluency and close study of botany; his willowy patterns wove decorative arabesques of natural forms. A similarly large number of stained glass windows were created under his supervision. Medieval arts and botanical forms were his main inspirations. The firm reorganized in 1875 as Morris and Company, with Morris as the sole owner.
Deeply concerned about the problems of industrialization and the factory system, Morris tried to implement Ruskin’s ideas: the tastelessness of mass-produced goods and the lack of honest craftsmanship might be addressed by a reunion of art with craft. Art and craft might combine to create beautiful objects, from buildings to bedding; workers might find joy in their work once again, and the man-made environment—which had declined in industrial cities of squalid, dismal tenements filled with tacky manufactured goods—could be revitalized.
A moral concern over the exploitation of the poor led Morris to embrace socialism. Dismay over the wanton destruction of architectural heritage motivated him to found the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, also called Anti-Scrape. Disgust at the false and misleading claims of advertising caused him to become involved in the Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising, which confronted offenders directly.
During the 1880s and 1890s the Arts and Crafts movement was underpinned by a number of societies and guilds that sought to establish democratic artistic communities united for the common good. These ranged from exhibition cooperatives to communes based on socialist and religious ideals.
The Century Guild
A twenty-six-year-old architect, Arthur H. Mackmurdo (1851–1942), met William Morris and was inspired by his ideas and accomplishments in applied design. On trips to Italy in 1878 and 1880, Mackmurdo filled his sketchbooks with studies of Renaissance architectural structure and ornament in addition to extensive drawings of botanical and other natural forms. Back in London, Mackmurdo led a youthful group of artists and designers who banded together in 1882 to establish the Century Guild. The group included designer/illustrator Selwyn Image (1849–1930) and designer/writer Herbert P. Horne (1864–1916). The goal of the Century Guild was “to render all branches of art the sphere, no longer of the tradesman, but of the artist.” The design arts were to be elevated to “their rightful place beside painting and sculpture.” The group evolved a new design aesthetic as Mackmurdo and his friends, who were about two decades younger than Morris and his associates, incorporated Renaissance and Japanese design ideas into their work. Their designs provide one of the links between the Arts and Crafts movement and the floral stylization of art nouveau.
Featuring the work of guild members, the Century Guild Hobby Horse began publication in 1884 as the first finely printed magazine devoted exclusively to the visual arts. The medieval passions of the Arts and Crafts movement were reflected in the graphic designs of Image and Horne. However, several designs contributed by Mackmurdo have swirling organic forms that are pure art nouveau in their conception and execution. The 1883 title page for his book Wren’s City Churches (Fig. 10–6) was followed by fabric designs (Fig. 10–7), the Century Guild trademark (Fig. 10–8), and Hobby Horse graphics (Fig. 10–9). In retrospect, these look like seminal innovations that could have launched a movement, but the designs were born before their time. Mackmurdo did not explore this direction further, and art nouveau did not explode into a movement until the following decade.
Hobby Horse (Figs. 10–10 and 10–11), which sought to proclaim the philosophy and goals of the Century Guild, was produced with painstaking care under the tutelage of Sir Emery Walker (1851–1933), the master printer and typographer at the Chiswick Press (Fig. 10–12). Its careful layout and typesetting, handmade paper, and intricate woodblock illustrations made it the harbinger of the growing Arts and Crafts interest in typography, graphic design, and printing. Mackmurdo, in addition to anticipating art nouveau, was a forerunner of the private press movement and the renaissance of book design. This private press movement should not be confused with amateur or hobby presses. Rather, it was a design and printing movement advocating an aesthetic concern for the design and production of beautiful books. It sought to regain the design standards, high-quality materials, and careful workmanship of printing that existed before the Industrial Revolution.
Hobby Horse was the first 1880s periodical to introduce the British Arts and Crafts viewpoint to a European audience and to treat printing as a serious design form. Mackmurdo later recounted how he showed William Morris a copy of Hobby Horse and discussed with him the difficulties of typographic design, including the problems of proportions and margins, letterspacing and leading between lines, choosing paper, and typefaces. Reportedly Morris was filled with enthusiasm about the possibilities of book design as he admired the well-crafted typographic pages, generous margins, wide line spacing, and meticulous printing alive with hand-cut woodblock illustrations, head and tailpieces, and ornamented capitals. Original etchings and lithographs were printed as fine plates and bound into the quarterly issues.
In an article entitled “On the Unity of Art” in the January 1887 issue of Hobby Horse, Selwyn Image passionately argued that all forms of visual expression deserved the status of art. He suggested that “the unknown inventor of patterns to decorate a wall or a water-pot” who “employs himself in representing abstract lines and masses” deserves equal claim to being called an artist as the painter Raphael, who represented “the human form and the highest human interests.” He chided the Royal Academy of Art by recommending that its name be changed to the Royal Academy of Oil Painting because it was so limited relative to the total range of art and design forms. In perhaps the most prophetic observation of the decade, Image concluded, “For when you begin to realize, that all kinds of invented Form, and Tone, and Colour, are alike true and honorable aspects of Art, you see something very much like a revolution looming ahead
of you.”
Although it received ample commissions, the Century Guild disbanded in 1888. Emphasis had been upon collaborative projects, but the members became more preoccupied with their individual work. Selwyn Image designed typefaces, innumerable illustrations, mosaics, stained glass, and embroidery. Mackmurdo focused on social politics and the development of theories to reform the monetary system, and Herbert Horne designed books with classic simplicity and restraint (Fig. 10–13). His educational background had included typesetting, and his layouts have a precise sense of alignment, proportion, and balance.
The Kelmscott Press
A number of groups and individuals concerned with the craft revival combined to form the Art Workers Guild in 1884. The guild’s activities were expanded in 1888, when a splinter group formed the Combined Arts Society, elected Walter Crane as its first president, and planned to sponsor exhibitions. By the October 1888 opening of the first exhibition, the name had been changed to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. Early exhibitions featured demonstrations and lectures. In 1888 these included William Morris on tapestry weaving, Walter Crane on design, and Emery Walker on book design and printing. In his lecture on 15 November, Walker showed lantern slides of medieval manuscripts and incunabula type design. Advocating a unity of design, Walker told his audience, “The ornament, whatever it is, picture or pattern-work, should form part of the page, should be part of the whole scheme of the book.” Walker considered book design similar to architecture, for only careful planning of every aspect— paper, ink, type, spacing, margins, illustration, and ornament—could result in a design unity.
As Morris and Walker, who were friends and neighbors, walked home together after the lecture that autumn evening, Morris resolved to plunge into typeface design and printing. This was a possibility he had considered for some time, and he began work on his first typeface design that December. Incunabula typefaces were photographically enlarged to five times their original size so that he could study their forms and counterforms. His decision to tackle graphic design and printing is not surprising, for he had long been interested in books. His library included some magnificent medieval manuscripts and incunabula volumes. Earlier, Morris had made a number of manuscript books, writing the text in beautifully controlled scripts and embellishing them with delicate borders and initials with flowing forms and soft, clear colors.
Morris named his first typeface Golden, because his original plan was to print The Golden Legend, by Jacobus de Voragine, as his first book, working from William Caxton’s translation. Golden was based on the Venetian roman faces designed by Nicolas Jenson between 1470 and 1476 (see Fig. 7–2). Morris studied large photographic prints of Jenson’s letterforms and then drew them over and over. Punches were made and revised for the final designs, which captured the essence of Jenson’s work but did not slavishly copy it. Typefounding of Golden began in December 1890. Workmen were hired, and an old handpress rescued from a printer’s storeroom was set up in a rented cottage near Kelmscott Manor in Hammersmith, which Morris had purchased as a country home. Morris named his new enterprise Kelmscott Press (Fig. 10–14), and its first production was The Story of the Glittering Plain, by William Morris, with illustrations by Walter Crane (Fig. 10–15; see also Fig. 10-20). Initially, twenty copies were planned, but as word of the enterprise spread, Morris was persuaded to increase the press run to two hundred copies on paper and six on vellum. From 1891 until the Kelmscott Press disbanded in 1898, two years after Morris’s death, over eighteen thousand volumes of fifty-three different titles were produced (Fig. 10–16).
Careful study of the incunabula Gothic types of Peter Schoeffer (see Fig. 5–16), Anton Koberger (see Figs. 6–9 through 6–17), and Günther Zainer (see Figs. 6–3 and 6–4) informed Morris’s design of Troy, the remarkably legible blackletter typeface designed for The Story of the Glittering Plain. Morris made the characters wider than most Gothic types, increased the differences between similar characters, and made the curved characters rounder. A smaller version of Troy, called Chaucer, was the last of Morris’s three typeface designs. These stirred a renewed interest in Jenson and Gothic styles and inspired a number of other versions in Europe and America.
The Kelmscott Press was committed to recapturing the beauty of incunabula books. Meticulous hand-printing, handmade paper, handcut woodblocks, and initials and borders similar to those used by Ratdolt turned the picturesque cottage into a time machine swinging four centuries into the past. The book became an art form.
The Kelmscott design approach was established in its early books. William H. Hooper (1834–1912), a master craftsman lured from his retirement to work at the press, engraved decorative borders and initials designed by Morris on wood. These have a wonderful visual compatibility with Morris’s types and woodblock illustrations cut from drawings by Burne-Jones, Crane, and C. M. Gere (1869–1957). Morris designed 644 blocks for the press, including initials, borders, frames, and title pages. First he lightly sketched the main lines in pencil; then, armed with white paint and black ink, he worked back and forth, painting the background in black and, over it, the pattern in white. The entire design would be developed through this fluid process, for Morris believed that meticulous copying of a preliminary drawing squeezed the life from a work.
The outstanding volume from the Kelmscott Press is the ambitious 556-page Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Figs. 10–17, 10–18, and 10–19). Four years in the making, the Kelmscott Chaucer has eighty-seven woodcut illustrations from drawings by Burne-Jones and fourteen large borders and eighteen smaller frames around the illustrations cut from designs by Morris. In addition, Morris designed over two hundred initial letters and words for use in the Kelmscott Chaucer, which was printed in black and red in large folio size, 425 copies on paper and 13 on vellum. On 2 June 1896, the bindery delivered the first two copies. One was for Burne-Jones, the other for Morris. Four months later, on 3 October, William Morris died at age sixty-two.
The paradox of William Morris is that as he sought refuge in the handicraft of the past, he developed design attitudes that charted the future. His call for workmanship, truth to materials, making the utilitarian beautiful, and fitness of design to function are attitudes adopted by succeeding generations who sought to unify not art and craft but art and industry. Morris taught that design could bring art to the working class, but the exquisite furnishings of Morris and Company and the magnificent Kelmscott books were available only to the wealthy.
The influence of William Morris and the Kelmscott Press upon graphic design, particularly book design, was evidenced not just in the direct stylistic imitation of the Kelmscott borders, initials, and typestyles; Morris’s concept of the well-made book, his beautiful typeface designs based on earlier models, and his sense of design unity, with the smallest detail relating to the total concept, inspired a whole new generation of book designers (Fig 10–20). Early in his career, the American printer and type historian Daniel Berkeley Updike (1860–1941) was an ardent admirer of the Kelmscott Press. This is apparent in the 1896 Merrymount Press edition of the Altar Book (Fig. 10–21). The typeface (which Updike named Merrymount, after his press), initials, and borders were all designed by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (1869–1924). Published in 1922, Updike’s Printing Types: Their History, Forms and Use continues to be one of the primary sources on this subject.
Ironically, Morris, the crusader for handicraft, became the inspiration for a revival of fine book design that filtered into commercial printing. The complexity of Morris’s decorations tends to draw attention away from his other accomplishments. His books achieved a harmonious whole, and his typographic pages—which formed the overwhelming majority of the pages in his books—were conceived and executed with readability in mind. Morris’s searching reexamination of earlier typestyles and graphic design history touched off an energetic redesign process that resulted in a major improvement in the quality and variety of fonts available for design and printing.
One final irony is that while Morris was returning to printing methods of the incunabula period, he used initials, borders, and ornaments that were modular, interchangeable, and repeatable. A basic aspect of industrial production was applied to the printed page.
The private press movement
Architect, graphic designer, jeweler, and silversmith, the indefatigable Charles R. Ashbee (1863–1942) founded the Guild of Handicraft in 1888 with three members and only fifty pounds British sterling as working capital. Although William Morris was dubious and threw “a great deal of cold water” upon Ashbee’s plan, the guild met with unexpected success in its endeavors. Its School of Handicraft unified the teaching of design and theory with workshop experience. Ashbee sought to restore the holistic experience of apprenticeship, which had been destroyed by the subdivision of labor and machine production. About seven hundred students received a dualistic education with practical skill development supplemented by readings from Ruskin and the study of the application of art principles to materials. Able neither to secure state support nor to compete with the state-aided technical schools, the School of Handicraft finally closed on 30 January 1895. The Guild of Handicraft, on the other hand, flourished as a cooperative where workers shared in governance and profits. It was inspired by both socialism and the Arts and Crafts movement. In 1890 the guild leased Essex House, an old Georgian mansion in what had declined into a shabby and desolate section of industrial London.
After the death of William Morris, Ashbee opened negotiations with the executors of his estate to transfer the Kelmscott Press to Essex House. When it became known that the Kelmscott woodblocks and types were to be deposited in the British Museum with the stipulation that they not be used for printing for a hundred years, Ashbee resolved to hire key personnel from the Kelmscott Press, to purchase the equipment that was available for sale, and to form the Essex House Press (Fig. 10–22). A psalter published in 1902 was the design masterpiece of the Essex House Press (Fig. 10–23). The text is in vernacular sixteenth-century English from a translation made in about 1540 by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury. Ashbee developed a graphic program for each psalm consisting of a roman numeral, the Latin title in red capitals, an English descriptive title in black capitals, an illustrated woodcut initial, and the body of the psalm. Verses were separated by woodcut leaf ornaments printed in red.
In 1902 the guild moved to the rural village of Chipping Campden and began the ambitious task of turning the village into a communal society for guild workers and their families. The large costs involved, combined with the expenses of maintaining the guild’s retail store on Brook Street in London, forced the guild into voluntary bankruptcy in 1907. Many of the craftsmen continued to work independently, and the undaunted Ashbee returned to his architectural practice, which had lain fallow during his experiments over two decades. Although he was a leading design theorist and followed the ideals of Ruskin and Morris at the turn of the century, after World War I Ashbee questioned whether industrial manufacturing was inherently evil, and formulated a design policy relevant to the industrial age. Thus, the Ruskin follower who went furthest in establishing an idyllic workshop paradise became a major English voice calling for integration of art and industry in a later era.
In 1900 the bookbinder T. J. Cobden-Sanderson (1840–1922) joined Emery Walker in establishing the Doves Press at Hammersmith. They set out to “attack the problem of pure Typography” with the view that “the whole duty of Typography is to communicate to the imagination, without loss by the way, the thought or image intended to be conveyed by the Author.” Books from the Doves Press, including its monumental masterpiece, the 1903 Doves Press Bible (Fig. 10–24), are remarkably beautiful typographic books. Illustration and ornament were rejected in the approximately fifty volumes produced there using fine paper, perfect presswork, and exquisite type and spacing. The five-volume Bible used a few striking initials designed by Edward Johnston (1872–1944), a master calligrapher of the Arts and Crafts movement who had been inspired by William Morris and abandoned his medical studies for the life of a scribe. Johnston’s study of pen techniques and early manuscripts, as well as his teaching activities, made him a major influence on the art of letters.
Established in 1895, the Ashendene Press, directed by C. H. St. John Hornby of London, proved an exceptional private press (Fig. 10–25). The type designed for Ashendene was inspired by the semi-Gothic types used by Sweynheym and Pannartz in Subiaco. It possessed a ringing elegance and straightforward legibility with modest weight differences between the thick and thin strokes and a slightly compressed letter.
A curious twist in the unfolding of the Arts and Crafts movement is the case of the American Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915), who met William Morris in 1894. Hubbard established his Roycroft Press (printing) and Roycroft Shops (handicrafts) in East Aurora, New York. The Roycroft community became a popular tourist attraction where four hundred employees produced artistic home furnishings, copperware, leather goods, and printed material. Hubbard’s books (Fig. 10–26), inspirational booklets, and two magazines had the appearance of Kelmscott volumes.
Although Hubbard died in 1915 aboard the ill-fated Lusitania, the Roycrofters continued until 1938. Hubbard’s critics claim he tarnished the whole movement by commercializing it, while his defenders believe the Roycrofters brought beauty into the lives of ordinary people who otherwise would not have had an opportunity to enjoy the fruits of the reaction against industrialism’s mediocre products. His detractors included May Morris, who declined an invitation to visit “that obnoxious imitator of my dear father” during her American visit.
An additional example of the commercial application of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic in the United States can be seen in the Craftsman magazine, published by Gustav Stickley (1858–1942), an entrepreneur who offered a different and more accessible version of Morris’s emphasis on craftsmanship (Fig. 10–27). In his own furniture designs, Stickley advocated the use of plain and unadorned surfaces that emphasize the construction process.
Lucien Pissarro (1863–1944) learned drawing from his father, the impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, and then apprenticed as a wood engraver and illustrator under the renowned book illustrator Auguste Lepère. Disillusioned with the response to his work in France, and learning of a revival of interest in wood-engraved illustrations in England, Pissarro moved to Wiltshire, England, to participate in this movement. In 1892 Lucien married Esther Bensusan (1870–1951). Captivated by Kelmscott books, Lucien and Esther established the Eragny Press (named after the Normandy village where Lucien was born and studied with his father) in 1894.
Lucien and Esther Pissarro collaborated on designing, wood engraving, and printing Eragny Press books; many had three- and four-color woodblock prints produced from his artwork. He designed his Brook typeface for their press, drawing inspiration from Nicolas Jenson. Unlike older members of the Arts and Crafts movement, the Pissarros were inspired by both the past and the present; their books (Fig. 10–28) combined the traditional sensibilities of the private press movement with an interest in the blossoming art nouveau movement (discussed in chapter 11) and expressionism.
A book-design renaissance
The long-range effect of Morris was a significant upgrading of book design and typography throughout the world. In Germany, this influence inspired a renaissance of arts-and-crafts activities, wonderful new typefaces, and a significant improvement in book design.
In the Netherlands the traditional vanguard was led by Sjoerd H. de Roos (1877–1962) and the brilliant Jan van Krimpen (1892–1958). They were followed by Jean François van Royen (1878–1942) and two master printer-publishers from Maastricht, Charles Nypels (1895–1952) and A. A. M. Stols (1900–1973). They too wanted to foster a renaissance in Dutch typography, and, like Morris, they did not consider the Industrial Revolution a blessing. On the contrary, mass production was viewed as a necessary evil, cautiously tolerated, principally for economic reasons.
They sought to revive the printing arts through a return to traditional standards. Their guidelines included symmetrical layouts, tranquil harmony and balance, careful margin proportions, proper letter and word spacing, single traditional typefaces in as few sizes as possible, and skillful letterpress printing. They believed a typographer should serve the text first and otherwise stay in the background.
First trained in lithography, De Roos took a general course in art at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam from 1895 to 1898. At the age of twenty-three he was hired as an assistant draftsman by Het Binnenhuis, a progressive industrial and interior design firm. It was during this period that he became aware of the low level of contemporary Dutch typography, and reviving book design soon became his lifelong passion.
De Roos left Het Binnenhuis in 1903, and that same year he was asked to design the book Kunst en maatschappij (Art and Society), a translation of a collection of essays by William Morris. Legibility was a top priority, and the book was set in the relatively new face designed by and named for the Swiss-French architect and typographic designer Eugène Grasset (1845–1917). This was the only book designed by De Roos in the art nouveau style, and because of its simplicity it was unique for Dutch book design at that time. This was a watershed in De Roos’s career and resulted in his being hired as artistic assistant for the Type Foundry Amsterdam, where he would remain until 1941.
De Roos was convinced that the typeface was the foundation of sound book design and that ideally it should be practical, beautiful, and easily readable. In his opinion no indigenous typeface in the Netherlands satisfied these requirements, and in January 1912, the Type Foundry Amsterdam issued De Roos’s Hollandsche Mediaeval, a text face in ten sizes based on fifteenth-century Venetian types. This was the first typeface designed and produced in the Netherlands in over a century, and for at least ten years was one of the most popular faces available there. This was followed by eight more type designs from which De Roos derived considerable status. A prolific writer, he published 193 articles on type design and typography between 1907 and 1942. One of his exceptional designs was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Hand and Soul for De Heuvelpers (Hill Press) in 1929 (Fig. 10–29). For the book he designed the layout, the typeface Meidoorn, and the initial letters. An important client from this period was the progressive Rotterdam publisher W. L. and J. Brusse, who asked De Roos to give its publications a new look.
Jan van Krimpen, who was born in Gouda and attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, soon became the preeminent book designer of his generation in the Netherlands. In 1920 he inaugurated the twenty-one-book Palladium series dedicated to contemporary poets. Het zatte hart (The Drunken Heart), by Karel van de Woestijne, demonstrated Van Krimpen’s deft drawing and use of initial letters and is the only book in the Palladium series set in his own face, Lutetia (Fig. 10–30). Cut in 1923–24, this was the first typeface Van Krimpen designed during his thirty-five-year association with the Haarlem printer Enschedé. For Van Krimpen, typography existed only for the book, and all of his typefaces were designed for this purpose. He viewed advertising and the people connected with it with contempt. For him, the reader should never even be conscious of typography; the designer’s one purpose was to make reading as pleasurable as possible and never come between the reader and the text. Fortunately, he usually broke away to some degree from his own rules, and each of his books has something subtly different to offer. Until his death in 1958, the fiery Van Krimpen would continue to relentlessly oppose anything and everyone that, in his opinion, was harmful to book typography.
Charles Nypels’s ties to the printing profession in Maastricht spanned several generations. In 1914 he began working as an apprentice to De Roos at the Type Foundry Amsterdam, and in 1917 he was officially hired by his family firm Leiter-Nypels, becoming a partner in 1920. Nypels had a fresh approach, evidenced by his title and text pages, his use of color, and his initial letters. The finest example of his earlier work is the 1927 Constantijn Huygens’s Het Voorhout ende ’t kostelijke mal (The Voorhout and the Delightful Comedy) (Fig. 10–31). De Roos’s red and blue initial letters turn many of the pages into scintillating typographic symphonies of color. Published in four sections between 1929 and 1931, Don Quichotte shows Nypels at his elegant best, and the exceptional initials by De Roos added the finishing touch (Fig. 10–32). This book was considered far too costly and eventually resulted in Nypels having to leave the firm. Afterward he worked as a freelance designer for firms such De Gemeenschap in Utrecht.
Like Nypels, A. A. M. (Sander) Stols was born into a Maastricht printing family. While Stols was studying law in Amsterdam in 1921, he and his younger brother Alphonse decided to enter the family publishing business, Boosten & Stols. Both were critical of the firm’s past quality and were committed to high design standards. Stols’s doctrine was simplicity and maximum legibility, and his work was noted for its constrained classical typography and craftsmanship (Fig. 10–33). He preferred typefaces such as Garamond and Bembo, but on a number of occasions he used De Roos’s typefaces Hollandsche Mediaeval and Erasmus Mediaeval. Like Van Krimpen, Stols described the designer’s role in terms that were clear and to the point:
Providing the form in which a book will be printed . . . the designer must never-the-less satisfy a number of requirements for the book, knowledge of its history and technology, artistry and taste, and insight as to production costs. In short, all those factors which make it possible to make a written text into a printed book that satisfy the greatest demands of legibility.
Jean François van Royen was born in Arnhem in 1878 and died at the German concentration camp in Amersfoort in 1942. Although a book designer and private publisher, Van Royen made his principal contribution to graphic design in the Netherlands through his position as general secretary of the Dutch PTT (Post, Telephone and Telegraph), and it would be impossible to evaluate his contribution outside this context. His own book designs were limited in quantity, and he probably would not have been remembered beyond a small circle for this role alone.
After receiving his doctorate in law from the University of Leiden in 1903, Van Royen worked for a year with the publishing firm of Martinus Nijhoff at The Hague before assuming the minor position of clerical aide in the legal section of the PTT in 1904. In 1912 Van Royen joined De Zilverdistel (the Silver Thistle), a private press at The Hague. Two typefaces were specifically commissioned for De Zilverdistel. The first was De Roos’s Zilvertype, basically an updated version of Hollandsche Mediaeval. The second, Disteltype—a modern interpretation of the Carolingian minuscule—was designed by Lucien Pissarro.
In 1916 Cheops, designed by Van Royen, was printed in Zilvertype with the initial letters and titles cut by De Roos following Van Royen’s suggestions (Fig. 10–34). Van Royen had an exotic side, and his easily distinguishable titles, initials, and vignettes are far more extravagant than those of Van Krimpen and De Roos. In 1923, Van Royen changed the name of De Zilverdistel to De Kunera Pers (Kunera Press), and it continued until his death in 1942.
The most important German type designer in the Arts and Crafts movement was Rudolf Koch (1876–1934), a powerful figure who was deeply mystical and medieval in his viewpoints. A devout Catholic, Koch taught at the Arts and Crafts School in Offenbach am Main, where he led a creative community of writers, printers, stonemasons, and metal and tapestry workers. He regarded the alphabet as a supreme spiritual achievement of humanity. Basing his pre–World War I work on pen-drawn calligraphy, Koch sought the medieval experience through the design and lettering of handmade manuscript books. But he did not merely seek to imitate the medieval scribe; he tried to build upon the calligraphic tradition by creating an original, simple expression from his gestures and materials. After the war, Koch turned to hand-lettered broadsides and handicrafts and then became closely associated with the Klingspor Type Foundry. His type designs ranged from original interpretations of medieval letterforms (Fig. 10–35) to unexpected new designs, such as the rough-hewn chunky letterforms of his Neuland face (Fig. 10–36).
In America, the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement on the revitalization of typography and book design moved forward in the hands of two young men from the Midwest who fell under the spell of the Kelmscott Press during the 1890s. Book designer Bruce Rogers (1870–1956) and typeface designer Frederic W. Goudy (1865–1947), each inspired for a lifetime of creative work, had long careers filled with diligent work and a love of books. They carried their exceptional sense of book design and production well into the twentieth century.
Even as a boy in Bloomington, Illinois, Goudy had a passionate love of letterforms. He later recalled cutting over three thousand letters from colored paper and turning the walls of the church he attended into a multicolored environment of Biblical passages. Goudy was working in Chicago as a bookkeeper in the early 1890s when he embraced printing and publicity. Books from the Kelmscott Press, including the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, as well as books from other private presses represented in the rare book department of the A. C. McClurg Bookstore, fired Goudy’s imagination. He became interested in art, literature, and typography on “a higher plane than mere commercialism.”
In 1894 Goudy started the Camelot Press with a friend, but he returned to bookkeeping the following year when disagreements developed. In 1895 he set up the short-lived Booklet Press and then designed his first typeface, Camelot, during the period of unemployment that followed. His pencil drawing of capitals was mailed to the Dickinson Type Foundry of Boston with an offer to sell the design for five dollars. After a week or two, a check for ten dollars in payment for the design arrived. In 1899 Goudy became a freelance designer in Chicago, specializing in lettering and typographic design. Goudy and book designer Will Ransom (1878–1955) started the Village Press, a printing venture modeled on the private-press handicraft ideal (Fig. 10–37), in 1903. They moved the press first to Boston and then to New York, where a terrible fire completely destroyed it in 1908. That same year marked the end of Goudy’s efforts as a printer; he turned his energy to the design, cutting, and casting of typefaces and began a long association with the Lanston Monotype Company, which commissioned some of his finest fonts. Goudy designed a total of 122 typefaces by his own count (he counted roman and italic variations as separate faces), including a few faces that were never produced. A staunch traditionalist, Goudy based many of his faces on Venetian and French Renaissance type designs (Fig. 10–38).
With an amiable and witty personality and wonderful writing ability, Goudy linked everyday printers to William Morris and his ideals. His readable books include The Alphabet (1908), Elements of Lettering (1921), and Typologia (1940). The two journals he edited, Ars Typographica and Typographica, impacted the course of book design. In 1923 Goudy established the Village Letter Foundry in an old mill on the Hudson River, where he became a successful anachronism—an independent type designer who cut matrixes and then cast and sold type. In 1939 a second disastrous fire burned the mill to the ground, destroying about seventy-five original type designs and thousands of matrixes. Undaunted, Goudy continued to work until his death at age eighty-two.
A student of Goudy’s at the turn of the century named William Addison Dwiggins (1880–1956) proved a highly literate book designer who established a house style for the Alfred A. Knopf publishing company and designed hundreds of volumes for this firm. During the early 1920s Dwiggins first used the term graphic designer to describe his professional activities. In 1938 he designed Caledonia, one of the most widely used book faces in America.
Albert Bruce Rogers (1870–1957) of Lafayette, Indiana, evolved from his Kelmscott roots in the 1890s into the most important American book designer of the early twentieth century. After graduating from college, where he was active as a campus artist, Rogers became a newspaper illustrator in Indianapolis. Dismayed by the ambulance-chasing school of pictorial reportage, with its frequent trips to the local morgue, Rogers tried landscape painting, worked for a Kansas railroad, and did book illustrations. After a close friend, J. M. Bowles, showed Kelmscott books to Rogers, his interest immediately shifted toward the total design of books. Bowles was running an art supply store and editing a small magazine called Modern Art. Louis Prang became interested in this periodical and invited Bowles to move to Boston and edit what then became an L. Prang and Company periodical. A typographic designer was needed, so Rogers was hired at fifty cents an hour with a twenty-hour-per-week guarantee.
Rogers joined the Riverside Press of the Houghton Mifflin Company in 1896 and designed books with a strong Arts and Crafts influence. In 1900 Riverside established a special department for high-quality limited editions, with Rogers designing sixty limited editions over the next twelve years. Beatrice Warde wrote that Rogers “managed to steal the Divine Fire which glowed in the Kelmscott Press books, and somehow be the first to bring it down to earth.” Rogers applied the ideal of the beautifully designed book to commercial production, becoming very influential and setting the standard for the twentieth-century book. He has been called an allusive designer, for his work recalls earlier designs. For inspiration, he shifted from the sturdy types and strong woodblock ornaments of Jenson and Ratdolt to the lighter, graceful lettering of the French Renaissance.
In 1912 Rogers left the Riverside Press to become a freelance book designer. In spite of some difficult years, he needed freedom to be able to realize his full potential as a graphic artist. Originally designed for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his 1915 typeface design Centaur is one of the finest of the numerous fonts inspired by Jenson. The last typeface Rogers designed, he first used it in The Centaur, by Maurice de Guerin, one of his most elegant book designs (Fig. 10–39). In 1916 he journeyed to England for an unsuccessful effort to collaborate with Emery Walker, then stayed on as a consultant to the Cambridge University Press until 1919. Rogers worked in England again from 1928 through 1932; his design commissions included the monumental Oxford Lectern Bible.
Very much an intuitive designer, Rogers possessed an outstanding sense of visual proportion and of “rightness” (Fig. 10–40). Design is a decision-making process; the subtle choices about paper, type, margins, leading between lines, and so on can combine to create either unity or disaster. Rogers wrote, “The ultimate test, in considering the employment or the rejection of an element of design or decoration, would seem to be: does it look as if it were inevitable, or would the page look as well or better for its omission?” So rigorous were Rogers’s design standards that when he compiled a list of successful books from among the seven hundred he had designed, he selected only thirty. The first book on his list was predated by more than a hundred earlier ones. While Rogers was a classicist who revived the forms of the past, he did so with a sense of what was appropriate for outstanding book design (Figs. 10–41 and 10–42). Like Frederic Goudy, he lived a long life and was honored for his accomplishments as a graphic designer.
Morris, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the private presses inspired a vigorous revitalization of typography. The passion for Victorian typefaces started to decline in the 1890s, as imitations of Kelmscott typefaces were followed by revivals of other classical typeface designs. Garamond, Plantin, Caslon, Baskerville, and Bodoni—these typeface designs of past masters were studied, recut, and offered for hand and keyboard composition during the first three decades of the twentieth century.
In the United States, the American Type Founders Company (ATF) established an extensive typographic research library and played an important role in reviving past designs. Its head of typeface development, Morris Fuller Benton (1872–1948), designed important revivals of Bodoni and Garamond. Benton’s collaborator on ATF’s Garamond (Fig. 10–43) was Thomas Maitland Cleland (1880–1964), a designer whose borders, type, and images were inspired by the Italian and French Renaissance. Cleland played a major role in making Renaissance design and its resource, the design arts of ancient Rome, dominant influences on American graphics during the first three decades of the twentieth century.
Benton’s revival of Nicolas Jenson’s type was issued as the Cloister family. From 1901 to 1935 Benton designed approximately 225 typefaces, including nine additional members of the Goudy family and over two dozen members of the Cheltenham family, which began as one typeface by architect Bertram Goodhue. Benton carefully studied human perception and reading comprehension to develop Century Schoolbook, designed for and widely used in textbooks. One of his first typefaces after becoming head of the type design section at ATF was the sans-serif of Franklin Gothic. With a large range of weights and italics, this typeface became widely popular. Figure 10–44 shows examples from seven of Benton’s type families.
The legacy of the Arts and Crafts movement extends beyond visual appearances. Its attitudes about materials, function, and social value became an important inspiration for twentieth-century designers. Its positive impact on graphic design persists a century after William Morris’s death through the revivals of earlier typeface designs, the ongoing efforts toward excellence in book design and typography, and the private press movement that continues to this day.