CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD Printing for Love

From Cockalorum: A Bibliography of the Golden Cockerel Press, June 1943-December 1948. (An address to the Art Society, University of the South West of England in Exeter, June, 1947.) Copyright 1950 by the Golden Cockerel Press. Reprinted by permission of author and publisher.

I have called this talk "Printing for Love." I have not come to preach a gospel to you, but, as I proceed to discuss printing and publishing and book-illustration, it will be apparent to you that one of the tenets of my religion is that we workers should do our job, whether it be farming, or gardening, book-keeping or building, hewing coal or engineering, with a will. In Ecclesiastes the Preacher advises us: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." (Ch. 9, v. 10.) You may say that my job is a nice job; that it is all very well for me to talk. I can assure you that book-manufacture is a most intricate process. Things tend to go wrong at every stage of production. Of worries we printers have no end.

I often feel like an Irish farmer driving his pig to market. In one hand he holds a stick to prod the pig. In the other a string tied to the pig's leg. The pig goes to the right and then to the left and the countryman wonders will he ever get that pig to the market. Many of my books are like that pig. They drive me to despair. And yet I love my printing like a mountaineer loves his mountains, which he climbs arduously with sweat and aching limbs. He has his reward when he reaches the summit and enjoys a fine view, much as I enjoy the appearance of a book which I have made with infinite pains. For both of us there is the joy of achievement—of something attempted, something done.

"Oh, but," you may expostulate, "supposing you were a sewer-man, could you bring love into your work?" I am sure I would. In fact this case in point was quoted recently on the wireless. If I remember rightly, a speaker had referred with commiseration to the lot of the sewer-man working underground among the rats in the muck and stench of drains. He was called to task by a most insulted sewer-man, who explained that his was a good job—as good as any other. All the artists and the craftsmen who co-operate with me—the paper-makers, the cloth-makers, the tanners, the brass-cutters, the illustrators, the compositors, the pressmen, the binders—aye, and the authors too, who write and rewrite their text until it seems to me just right for the Golden Cockerel—all of them have their worries and their toil, but their work for me is done with love.

This is a question you might ask yourselves: can a beautiful thing be made cynically? The dice is loaded against the unwanted child of a loveless marriage. You cannot divorce your work from your life. The two are parts of a whole. My religion is that love should be the basis of all one's living and all one's work. In so far as my books have been successful as works of art, it is because they have been made with love.

Only with great self-restraint can I refrain from reading you again that beautiful thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians on Faith, Hope and Love—you remember "Love suffereth long and is kind, love envieth not, love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up." Please read it now and then. It is so important.

Perhaps, when you heard my talk was to be called "Printing for Love," you thought, "Oh, he means printing without financial reward." Believe me, love, too, hath its reward. Make what you have to make, and do what you have to do, the way I advocate, and you will have your reward. You must have faith in this. We have got to fight our battles against obstructions, but, if we fight well, and do what we are intended to do, everything is made possible for us: the most miraculous things happen in their due time.

At the Golden Cockerel I never choose a book because I think it a good seller. Publishing friends are astonished when I admit that quite recently I refused books offered to me by Evelyn Waugh—one of the best selling novelists of today—and Sir Osbert Sitwell. Of course I do not disapprove of the authors. I admire them greatly. But in each case the manuscript submitted was not one I wanted for the Cockerel.

I choose those books which I believe are right for this gay, mirthful, versatile bird. At times he likes to play, at times to be serious. He is interested in genuine old tales of adventure written by explorers and missionaries, who may have travelled in birch-bark canoes or quaint unwieldy ships. He is interested in old peoples and their poetry. At present he is printing a translation of the epic of Gilgamesh preserved on stone tablets. It is at least six thousand years old and refers to a flood—like Noah's Flood—which was recent history to people then. They were either more or less civilized then than we are now, according to your view of what constitutes civilization. They appear to have had more to eat than we have now; they spent more time in making life beautiful, and in thoughtful enquiry into spiritual things, such as survival after death. They had libraries of books, not printed like Golden Cockerels, but inscribed on series of stone tablets. There were several "copies" of the epic of Gilgamesh in the library at Nineveh.

To return to the Golden Cockerel, he also loves the masterpieces of English and French literature and classical literature. He is really a very human bird, kind and sometimes very amorous, never spiteful, never morbid, never cruel. I personally pretend to run this Press, but you know this chimeric cockerel really rules the roost. When I and two friends took over the Press in 1933, I had quite different ideas for it from those I had accepted a few months later. This Cockerel had his own personality and traditions. I have rather enjoyed following his gaudy plumage along the aerial avenues in which he seems to want to fly.

This has not always been easy for me. From time to time I had partners to help me. Their ideas and mine naturally did not always coincide. They gave in to me so often that just occasionally I had, in common charity, to print and publish some book favoured by one of them and which I did not myself like. Usually on such occasions the finished book was to me abortive—a baby cuckoo among my own fledglings. And they usually did not sell well. Try as you may, you cannot do quite as well for someone else's offspring.

It has always been of paramount importance that my books should sell. As a husband and a father of three children, I have had to make the Cockerel pay. Otherwise I should have had to work at something else. Obviously you cannot make a large income from the sale of, say, half a dozen books a year in small limited editions. But the Cockerel has never let me down and always made it possible for me to keep on with this work. The late St. John Hornby, who used to publish those monumental Ashendene Press books at prices in the neighbourhood of 100 gns. has said that, taken all over, he would just approximately cover his costs. No profit! He was in a financial position to ignore costs and the necessity to make his books pay. In theory that is good. In practice I think it is wholesome that the products of your labour should be commercially right. The absolute necessity for you to sell what you produce makes you take notice of the reactions of your patrons, keeps you from being too personal, too idiosyncratic, too precious, shall I say too amateurish? Here I am on difficult ground. It depends what you mean by amateurish. I think of myself as a professional, but, to the trade publishers (who would not dream of rejecting a manuscript from Evelyn Waugh), I, and others like me, are looked on as amateurs, because we do what we like.

This type of amateur, who does what he likes, scientifically, is, I believe, very important. Into this category would fall research students, and poets, and scholars, and inventors, and all sorts of people. Has a scientific study ever been made of the amateur throughout the ages and his influence on our life? If not, there is a noble thesis for a research student, and he could make of it a most interesting and I think saleable book. Perhaps one of you will do it!

Now you may be thinking, "here's this chap and they tell me he has a certain reputation as a printer. We get him down here to talk to us about printing, and off he goes gassing about love, and Noah's flood, and how to make money without trying to."

Please forgive me! You see I started as a printer and taught myself how to dress a book according to my tastes. Then I became a publisher. Let us make no mistake: the important thing is the literary content of the book. How it is dressed is only of secondary importance. It can be dressed any old how. Obviously it is better when it is suitably dressed. But the dress, that is, the printing and binding, must not be accorded too great importance—it must not vaunt itself. If you ask a book-seller who has built up a circle of people who collect "cockerels" why they like cockerels, he will answer "because they are cockerels." By this he does not, I hope, mean "because they wear cockerel dress"—or, shall I say, "plumage"?—but rather that they are, in their literary content, in their dress, and in their illustration, examples of the cockerel idea of what a book should be.

Of course it is no good the author thinking he has done everything—it is the composite whole which is so engaging. I have known some illustrators who think the author doesn't count. And authors tend to think the artist a hack who should do what he is told. Both may think that my own small contribution, as the architect of the whole structure, is unimportant. Quite the greatest joy for me in publishing is being in constant delightful intercourse with these beautiful authors and artists. Beautiful is the right word. I don't mean physically, of course, but in their natures. Compare them if you like, to the most sensitive instruments designed by man and you behold these God-made beings a hundred-fold more sensitive. Go to the races and delight in the controlled nervousness and the pent-up fire of enthusiasm in those beautiful thoroughbred horses, and yet these dreamers of dreams, these passionate romancers, these scholars, in all the controlled exuberance of their knowledge and their zeal for research, these drawers of pictures, who "see the light that never was on sea or land": the horses are as nothing beside them!

Now, who are these authors and scholars and artists? Well, some are, of course, professionals, in the sense that they live by their art, and others, a lot of them, are civil servants, or architects, or even prime ministers, who make their art a hobby. But can we end there? Is not every roadman tidying his road, every thatcher on the roof, or every good accountant neatly writing his accounts, and every worker planting his allotment of a summer's evening, an artist to a greater or less degree? He seems to me, watching him, to be working for love. And so with those of us who make seemly books.

Normally you have the publisher who chooses what books he will publish, and contracts with the author to produce and sell his work in book form. You have also the paper-maker, the ink-maker, the type-founder, the maker of printing machinery and plant. You have the printer, with his compositors who prepare the type for press, his proof-readers, his pressmen who print the corrected type on the paper, and his warehousemen, who deal out the paper, and pack the printed sheets. You have the binders and manufacturers of material and machinery used in binding. Normally a host of people have taken their part, however small, in processes which go to the making of the finished book.

In a "private press" a very great deal of the work is concentrated in the hands of its owner. In certain cases the owner himself has set the type and printed it on a hand-press. His output has thus been severely limited to the productivity of one single pair of hands. This is not practical politics today—one's turnover is too small to cover overheads. An alternative is to employ skilled help with the type-setting and presswork. This was the method employed by the Golden Cockerel up to 1933. For reasons I need not go into, this method does not now pay.

The survival of the Golden Cockerel, since I and my friends took it over in the midst of the great depression, has been due in large measure to the method of production which we adopted. By working in with the Chiswick Press, a famous old firm of trade printers, we arranged that the Cockerel should have the use of their plant and their skilled labour precisely as and when we wanted it, without the necessity for capital expenditure on plant or of providing the wages of skilled craftsmen, week in week out, whether or not fully employed. Those were terrible times, and our solution was the only one practicable. It was a great experiment, but it worked. Of all the important private presses in this country, the Cockerel alone has carried on—and right through the war. In the books of the Golden Cockerel a great tradition survives.

But the survival of the Golden Cockerel, and of the tradition which it holds dear, is not achieved solely by its method of production. On the contrary, there are other prime factors. I have said that in my view the literary content of the book is more important than its dress. We must not print for the sake of printing. Firstly then I only print what I greatly desire to publish—something that is really good. I think I have been successful in finding a lot of new literary material which a sophisticated section of the community does enjoy to read. Of course some of my book-seller friends often beg me to print the old favourites, for which there is such a great demand. Occasionally I oblige. I have a Gray's Elegy at the binders now and a Keats' Endymion in the press. But generally the Cockerel prefers to be more enterprising. Look at all the literature we unearthed and published on the subject of the Mutiny on the Bounty—book after book. And then those volumes of Shelley's letters to Hogg. We found and published the journal kept by the Pilgrim Fathers when they went to America. Then there were the four previously unpublished books by that legendary character, Lawrence of Arabia, and so on. These are typical of the sort of thing we've found and published for the first time. Not the old favorites, but, because they add to literature and knowledge, so well worth making known.

The second important feature of Cockerels is their illustration with engravings. More than any other process, engraving harmonizes with type. Engraved wood-blocks and copper-plates are very difficult to print as they should be printed, especially on a durable rag-paper. They are therefore little used in these days of mass-production. In the hands of the team of artists who work for the Golden Cockerel, engraving as an artistic medium is flowering as never before. By the enthusiasm and love which these artists bring to their work, they advance their techniques year by year, always improving on their own previous best, or the previous best of their competitors, till there sometimes seems to be no limit to the new effects they will obtain in their illustrations. It is an undying satisfaction to the Golden Cockerel to be able to encourage and advise talented engravers, and, by displaying their work to the best advantage, to build up for them the reputations they deserve. In the twenties it was Eric Gill, Robert Gibbings, Eric Ravilious, David Jones, Blair Hughes-Stanton, Agnes Miller-Parker and John Nash. In the thirties, and more recently, other engravers like Clifford Webb, John Buckland-Wright, Reynolds Stone, Gwenda Morgan, Peter Barker-Mill, and John O'Connor have come to the fore. You have seen a few examples of my own wife's work among the books I have brought along. And now we have others too, of an astonishing brilliance, like Dorothea Braby, coming on. It is impossible for me to be sufficiently grateful for the privilege of being able in my small way to nurture this flowering and progressive art.

After their literary content and their illustration, the third feature of Cockerels which has sustained the Press, when other presses have fallen out, is my policy of co-operating with the buying public—of producing books which they can afford to buy. Obviously the very rich men who can pay 100 gns. for a book are now very few and far between. I have resisted the temptation to compete with the 100 gn. books—the "museum pieces." I have resisted the temptation to spend so much on the production of my books that they are inaccessible. With the levelling of incomes there is now a considerable public, which, if it appreciates them, can buy Cockerels at the 2 guineas or 4 guineas which their production necessitates.

Those, then are the particular features of Cockerels which have maintained the Press through difficult years. That they are works of art—the conceptions of a book-architect—would not have sufficed, but, since they are expressions of the art of the book, let us consider them architecturally for a few minutes. The subject is vast: I must try to epitomise it....

COCKEREL DEVICES BY MARK SEVERIN