Printers as Men of the World

EVELYN HARTER

Copyright 1947 by The Typophiles. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Printers are usually judged as printers, and there are those who hold that this is as it should be, that the printer should stick to his pica rule and follow copy out the window. But in their spare time printers also eat, vote, marry and go to war. It would therefore be possible to look at them from various points of view, as, for instance, how many were vegetarians, anarchists, bigamists and top sergeants. This could be so of any group of craftsmen. If we look at printers from another viewpoint, as to whether they were men of the world, it is because of the nature of the stuff with which they work.

I should like to begin obliquely by speaking first of an approach to the history of printing. Probably the history of printing is more limited, definite and easy to encompass than that of almost any subject. That is not to say that anyone can ever learn all of it, or that we cannot go on learning something new about it all our lives. But printing started fairly recently in time; it is its own record. Excluding the science of bibliography, the literature is not large compared, for example, with that of art or philosophy or geology. Yet few people know as much of it as they might know with pleasure, and perhaps the reason for that might be a faulty approach. It is customary to send beginners to study Updike, but it is easy for beginners to get bogged down in Printing Types, particularly if they start to read it from the beginning. Updike's magnificent work is, in its writing and its outline, gratifying to the student whose basic knowledge has been fixed and matured. Beginners move more freely in the pages of George Parker Winship, possibly because he related printing events to world events to a greater extent than does Updike. Usually the person who wishes to learn more about printing has already at hand a lot of names and dates and places vaguely relating to world events of the past. To such a person printing history lends itself readily to the method of study by association. It can be a good game to find out what was happening in printing when Napoleon was looking at the Pyramids, or when Charles I was beheaded. If one is interested in art, he can correlate artists and printers, and find that Leonardo was born about the same time that printing was born in Europe, or he can correlate printing with advances in the knowledge of medicine or agriculture. There are small but interesting links between the history of printing and that of music. For instance William Caslon the elder loved music, and it is possible that the composer Handel sometimes played his new pieces at the concerts held in Caslon's organ room, since the two men had mutual friends in the musical world of London.

There have been printers who were interested in other worlds. The Dutch printer Blaeu studied astronomy under Tycho Brahe, and himself produced in 1600 a celestial globe. The Scottish type-founder Alexander Wilson, although educated as a doctor, became interested in type and left a considerable foundry to his sons before he himself moved on to become professor of astronomy at the University of Glasgow.

If you wish to make the most of this method, you must do it yourself. Then it is you who will have the fun, and then what you learn will stick. What follows illustrates the method briefly by looking at a number of printers in the past five hundred years from one angle, judging them not simply as printers but as men of the world.

It would be nice if we could start with a definition of "man of the world" and a definition of "printer" but actually this small investigation is an attempt at definition. We cannot mean "man of the world" in the Chesterfieldian sense, although there have been many printers who knew how to dress and carry themselves in court and salon, notably Aldus, Caxton and members of the Didot family. Chesterfield would be obliged to allow some of our printers in his company, but I doubt if we could allow him in ours, for in one of his letters to his son he says, "Due attention to the inside of books and due contempt for the outside is the proper relation between a man of sense and his books." Perhaps he was thinking of the vanity of fancy bindings, though it is more likely that he was beguiling himself into one of those untruths common to aphorizers. However that may be, our man of the world does not mean gentleman of the world as Chesterfield thought of gentleman, although there are printers who are both—not all dead.

If we were to speak of the printer as a citizen of the world, we would be coming a little closer to it, but citizen implies being at home in the geographical world, whereas we are thinking of him being at home in the world of ideas. When we say "of" the world, we mean that he knows that he belongs to his contemporary world, that the people and events are of interest to him, the politics, art, science and poetry—not only some particular dexterity, professional specialization or money-making device of his own.

It might be argued that the bulk of printing has not now, and never has had, much relation to ideas, that in the early days its chief business was dubious theological disputes and that its chief business now is advertising soap flakes and the like. But printing, in its entirety, is a description of the world, and if a great deal of print is devoted to murder cases, toothpaste ads and income tax blanks—well, that must be the kind of world we have. However, when new ideas have been advanced, they have been advanced in print, so that the printer has never been safe from them. Even now, in the event that they be promulgated by radio, they must be fixed in print in order to stick and sink in. Let us only say then that with regard to gaining knowledge of the world in which we live, the printer is in an exposed position—nothing more.

Although we do not know much about Gutenberg,[22] the first

printer, we doubt that he was a man of the world in our sense. How could he have been? For the preceding four or five hundred years to be a man of the world was to be unworldly; people had been concerned with building cathedrals, making religious paintings, going on crusades. Printing was the chief factor in making the man of the world in our modern sense. Printing enabled him to know what was going on so that he might take part in it, although printers did not realize this during the cradle days of printing. Great events were occurring then; the Turks captured Constantinople; the Hundred Years' War came to an end with the English driven off the continent of Europe; the Portuguese sailed to the Canaries and the Azores; but these events found little mention in early printing. The Nuremberg Chronicle, as Helen Gentry and David Greenhood point out in their Chronology, made no mention of Columbus' discovery of America in the previous year. First came religious books, then school books, law books and classics. It is true that Fust and Schöffer printed proclamations and information for the archbishop, but it was not until Von Olpe at Basle printed The Ship of Fools in 1494 that we have "a book dealing with contemporary people and their exploits instead of with historical accounts of the past."

Although Gutenberg had been involved in the politics of Mainz in his youth, probably he thought of nothing but printing after he began work on his invention. We have an old book of stories for children which describes Gutenberg in a dream: "He thought of the great harm which might be done through the printing of bad books—how they would corrupt the minds of the innocent, how they would stir up the passions of the wicked. Suddenly he seized a heavy hammer and began to break his press in pieces. But then a voice seemed to come from the press itself saying, 'Hold your hand, John Gutenberg. The art of printing will enlighten the world.'" I have no idea where the author could have found source material for this little fantasy, for we can feel quite sure that Gutenberg had little conception of the influence of his invention. He was all craftsman and inventor and carried his world in his head. His financial reverses alone would indicate that.

The word "printer" has been an elastic word from the very beginning, including scholars and artists, businessmen and craftsmen. If we were to consider the term "printer" narrowly in the sense of a typesetter or a pressman or a man who supervises these operations, we should still have to make room in our history for men like Jean Grolier, the patron, and Geoffroy Tory, the artist. We know of many printers who were first and last businessmen. Johann Fust was a banker until he put money in Gutenberg's project. The first English printer, Caxton, was a retired wool merchant who liked to translate French romances for his friends and became tired of writing them out in longhand. Anton Koberger, who was Dürer's godfather, the publisher of The Nuremberg Chronicle and a great entrepreneur in his day, began as a printer; he printed books in various languages, did sub-contracting and printed advertising circulars. Probably if the plain motives of most printers could be discovered, making a living would loom large.

There have been many printers who were also scholars, beginning with Aldus and including the Estiennes and the Didots. And there are the typecutter-printers who combined letter-founding and printing—Nicolas Jenson, Giambattista Bodoni, John Baskerville, as well as the names equally brilliant in printing history of those who devoted themselves to founding—Claude Garamond, William Caslon and the Fourniers. A general haze surrounds the subject of the contribution of less well-known type-cutters to printing. Although the use of a distinguished type may be one of the chief reasons for the printer's success, compare the fame of the printer Aldus with that of his type designer, Francesco da Bologna, of John Bell with that of Richard Austin, of Thomas Bensley with that of Vincent Figgins, of Bulmer with William Martin, of Elzevir with Christoffel van Dyck, of François Ambroise Didot with that of Waflard. On the subject of the share which these printers had in suggesting the nature of the type to the men who cut it, typographical writers are almost consistently inexplicit, although we do know that William Martin brought his types with him when he started work for Bulmer. Even Updike, who gives credit to the type designer and cutter wherever he is known, says, "At first the best printers were often type-founders too, although Garamond merely (sic!) cut and cast type for the use of others." Binders and papermen, ink-makers and machinery manufacturers have always had an affectionate and proprietary air about printing. Rather than try to define "printer" strictly, it may be truer to say that printers are an adjectival lot, and that printing can honorably be a very inclusive term, but that we might have a new printing terminology which would better define the various contributions.

What was happening in the world about the year 1500 when Aldus Manutius[23] had his great printing shop in Venice working at its peak? Columbus had made several voyages, and the Portuguese had been around the tip of Africa although Magellan had not yet sailed around the world. Leonardo da Vinci had left Milan for political reasons, and was working in Venice, as was Giovanni Bellini and his pupils Titian and Giorgione. Northern Italy was the scene of much brawling between rival princes, with Emperor Maximilian I stepping in now and then to make things worse. The battles were nuisances to Aldus, for they interfered with the production and distribution of his books. I do not know how much he knew about the geographical discoveries of his time, but we can be sure that a man of his cultivation knew about the great painting and sculpture being done. Ralph Roeder says of this time that its "triumphs are preserved in art, its reverses in its spiritual story, and both are the result of the same cause—its supreme vitality."

It is one more indication of that vitality that Aldus at the age of forty embarked on a project which was to bring about a tremendous enlargement of the conception of the purpose of books. Many printers in history have drifted into printing or its allied trades by chance, but there seems to be no doubt that Aldus knew exactly what he was doing all the time. He was a man who knew what he wanted. He had been a scholar and tutor to Alberto and Lionello Pio, princes of Carpi, when he first saw printed books and realized what could be done to make classical manuscripts generally available. With the aid of the Pio family he went to Venice, which, since the fall of Constantinople, had been the richest repository of manuscripts and a residence of Greek scholars. In order to have reference books available for his proof-readers and editors, he first printed a Greek dictionary and a Greek grammar and himself prepared a Greek-Latin dictionary. He gave Venice a university when he started the New Academy of Venice. For his press he hired the finest scholars of the day—Bembo and Reuchlin, Musurus and Erasmus. We, in the twentieth century, have a tendency to think of scholars as removed from the affairs of life. Aldus was a scholar who was also in the midst of life, because scholarship was an important affair in the world of Renaissance man. He must have been a true cosmopolitan as well, commanding, as he did, the friendship of men as different as Erasmus of Rotterdam and Jean Grolier of France, from whom he had a commission to print special copies of his books on vellum.

The 1500's were a time of religious bickerings and of religious wars, of Henry the VIII's break with Rome, of the German wars following the death of Martin Luther, and the Inquisition in Spain. In the early part of the century there was working at Lyons, which was then second only to Paris as a printing center in France, a young scholar and printer named Etienne Dolet.[24] There is a story that he was the illegitimate son of Francis I, but at any rate he came of a wealthy family, having been to Venice as secretary to the French Ambassador and to Toulouse to study law. By the time he was twenty-seven he had published a Latin Dictionary which was "one of the most important contributions to classical scholarship in the century" and was given a license by Francis I providing that Dolet might print for ten years any books written or supervised by him. His great range of taste and interests may be judged by the fact that he printed the New Testament in Latin and Rabelais in French.

He had met Rabelais when he first went to Lyons to work under Sebastian Gryphius as proof-reader, and there gained his practical knowledge of printing under the foreman, Jean de Tournes. E. D. Christie, Dolet's biographer, says that Dolet, arriving in Lyons with a fever, may have been taken directly to Rabelais, who was at that time practising medicine, with the position of Physician to the Great Hospital. Christie also thinks it possible that Dolet may have seen Rabelais perform a dissection on a man's body ten years before Vesalius. Everything Dolet did shows him to have been a man with lively fearless intellect and no talent for playing safe and keeping out of trouble. He spent several terms in jail for lack of orthodoxy on religious questions, was pardoned by Francis I for killing a man, and was denounced by Rabelais for printing an unexpurgated edition of Pantagruel after Rabelais had fixed it up to suit the Sorbonne.

At Lyons in the months of April and May, 1539, there occurred the first large organized printers' strike. It was no wonder, for Updike says that it was not unusual for the printers' day to begin at two in the morning and last until eight or nine at night. The workmen said that the masters did not supply sufficient food, that wages had been reduced, that there were too many compulsory holidays. The Seneschal of Lyons was empowered to meet a committee of journeymen and one of masters; at this conference rules were drawn up. But the trouble spread to Paris, and as a result of arbitration there, the working day was set from five in the morning till eight at night. Then there was a flare-up at Lyons again because the master printers threatened to move away; this was some years in settlement.

Of all the master printers of Lyons, the only one who sided with the strikers was Dolet. This was held against him later when he was imprisoned on a charge of atheism, tortured, hanged and finally burned on his thirty-seventh birthday. (See Chronology of Books and Printing.) On his way to his death he made a Latin pun on his name. If we speak of him as a man of the world, the accent is on man.

It is said that it was this event—the burning of Dolet—which decided Christopher Plantin[25] to leave France in 1548 for Antwerp, though Plantin never exhibited the uncompromising attitude of Dolet; rather he showed a business toughness and adaptability which enabled him to survive and stay in this world, which was no small feat for a printer in the sixteenth century. It was a time when empires and ideologies were in tremendous conflict; the period of the German religious wars following the death of Martin Luther; of Spain and England in unrelenting struggle for control of the sea, culminating in the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Antwerp itself was a focal point of disorder after Philip II sent the Duke of Alba to subdue the Netherlanders. Plantin had built up a good printing and publishing business when, in 1562, it was liquidated because of his alleged unorthodoxy. Within a few years he had recovered to the extent that he was made Printer to the King of Spain, from whom he received assurances of help on his Polyglot Bible. Again, in the sack of Antwerp by Spanish soldiers in 1576 his business was all but ruined; he went to Leyden for a few years, but returned to finish his days at Antwerp. To a man living in those times, the issues must have seemed even more confused and difficult than ours do now. Recent investigations indicate that Plantin belonged to a sect of heretics for which he printed books secretly, while also doing books for the church.

Another sixteenth-century printer who could hardly be oblivious to the events of his time—he was so knocked about by them—was Robert Estienne.[26] Even though he was at one time Royal Printer, liked and respected by Francis I, he sometimes had to seek the sanctuary of the King's court to escape the King's censors. Robert must have been a man of stature, for he published his New Testament in defiance of the Sorbonne, and only after Francis I died did he leave Paris for Geneva. He was a believer in one of the springs of Renaissance thought—that through scholarship it is possible to come to the truth, and through printing all men may recognize and know the truth.

It would be possible for a man of the world to be so without ever stirring from the town of his birth, yet oftener than not the man with breadth of interest is a cosmopolitan and a traveller. Such cosmopolitans were fourteen members of the Elzevir[27] family, who, over a period of one hundred and thirty years, engaged in printing and selling small books chiefly intended for poor scholars. This Dutch family of practical internationalists established their bookshops and printing offices in nearly every large city on the continent, from Denmark to Italy, printing their books in Latin and Greek, French and Arabic, on subjects ranging from medicine to political science. All this in spite of the Thirty Years' War, which was to bring about the decline of the artificial internationalism of the Hapsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire, and in spite of similar disturbances before and after.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the geographical boundaries of printing were extended vastly outside of Europe. The colonization of North and South America was going forward. The first press in America had been established at Mexico City in 1539 by agents of Kromberger of Seville. European printing was carried to India in 1561, to China in 1589, and to Japan in 1591. The first printing was done in Russia in 1563.

Credit for doing the first printing in the American colonies, The Freeman's Oath, was once given to Stephen Daye, is sometimes latterly given to his young son, Matthew Daye. Were they more than mechanic, compositor and pressman? Who chose the copy, proofread it, set policies, pushed the work along? Possibly some of the founders of the new Harvard College, or possibly Mrs. Glover, the widow of the man who originated the idea of the press. She was probably a woman of education, since she settled in Cambridge to be near the new college and later married the President, Henry Dunster. She undoubtedly shared her first husband's independent views—he had been suspended from his parsonage in Surrey because of his nonconformity; she might have picked The Freeman's Oath for the first copy. She may have been more of a printer and more of a woman of the world than the fragments of knowledge which we have about her disclose.... Whoever guided the destiny of the first press, it was a person not completely confined by dogma, for the books included almanacs, law books and college thesis lists, as is pointed out by Carl Purington Rollins, himself perhaps our best example of a modern fine printer conscious of what is going on around him.

During the late 1700's the Industrial Revolution began, but its implications were not guessed by artisan or statesman, and the best printers were still in the age of elegance. Baskerville was businessman, eccentric, free-thinker, but his printing, as much as that of Bodoni who was employed by the Duke of Parma, was regal.

Probably Horace Walpole,[28] more than any other printer, felt that the world was his house, in which he could move about freely from room to room, always at ease. He had the wit and manners to be an ornament to French salons, the originality to introduce a new brand of literature in his Castle of Otranto—the forerunner of our mystery novel of today, the personal force to influence the trend of English architecture with his "little Gothic castle" at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham. In one of his letters to the artist Richard Bentley he says that he can't resist going to fires, and there is something of this spirit in his activities. The collector W. S. Lewis says, "He was not only, in his own word, a 'gazetteer' but the historian of English painting and gardening, an essayist, poet, novelist, pamphleteer, dramatist, printer, antiquarian, and arbiter elegantiarum and in the modern sense and phrase a 'debunker' of historical figures.... It was his main purpose in life to be the official historian of his time."

Although he had a seat in Parliament, he paid little attention to the nation's business. He represented those parts of life in the eighteenth century which had natured and were drawing to a close, as Fielding and Goldsmith, the American Revolution and the French Revolution represented things to come. Printing being one of his minor activities, he is of more interest as a human being than as a craftsman.

If Walpole was a man of the world and man of letters, John Bell[29] was man of the world and man of business. During a lifetime of eighty-six years he was, as Stanley Morison pictures him, book-seller, printer, publisher, type-founder and journalist. Like a lesser Franklin—he had not Franklin's scientific interest, integrity, or vision—he was endowed with the ability to grasp the salient facts of a trade or profession, and a wealth of exuberant interest in life around him. At the beginning of his career as a book-seller, he published a sort of early version of Wilson's Cumulative Book Index, a list of current books for the use of the trade. As type-founder (and introducer of the short "s") he employed the talent of the punch cutter Richard Austin to produce the first English "modern" type. In addition to a successful fashion magazine, he published at different times four newspapers. At one time he even made himself a war correspondent, when he visited the British Army then fighting the French Revolutionaries in Flanders. He reported the action at Ypres, made a march with the troops from Courtrai to Tournai and pursued his object of finding "active and well-informed persons in different parts of the continent" who would act as regular correspondents for his paper, The Oracle. The books he published included law books, Shakespeare, a series of the poets of Great Britain; he engaged members of the Royal Academy to illustrate the plays of a series called The British Theatre and hired the best engravers of the day to copy the paintings. He knew the literary men of the day—Sheridan wrote for his World—and even had a balloonist for a friend—Lunardi, who made the first ascent in London. Compared to his contemporary Bulmer, who could be called a printer's printer, Bell was a promoter whose medium was printing.

Of all the Didots, and they seem to have been able men, Firmin Didot[30] is of most interest to us. He taught many of the printers of Greece out of sympathy for the cause of Greek independence, the same for which Byron died. He wrote plays, translated classics, and after he retired from business he entered the Chamber of Deputies; he learned Spanish at the age of sixty-three. Desmond Flower says, in writing of him, "Printing is a curious and perhaps unsatisfactory hybrid between a profession and an art; the men who have caught the sense of it most successfully have been intelligent people who could see it whole—scholar-printer-publishers—for whom some other rivers flowed beyond the simple floods of printing ink." Perhaps when Mr. Flower wrote this he had forgotten how "tacky" printing ink is, but his meaning is a large part of what I am trying to say.

The question of what world one chooses to recognize—that of courts and salons or of slums—arises in connection with the great printer of the nineteenth century, William Morris.[31] He saw what was happening as a result of machinery and large industry, and he did not like it. He must have seen it very plainly in order to revolt against it so strongly. His printing period was the last in his life, following the chintzes, stained glass windows, tapestries, rugs and furniture. He felt that people would be better people if they made and owned beautiful things, and he also saw, like his contemporary, Karl Marx, that the economic structure would have to be changed before the best qualities in people could operate, though he was not willing to follow Marx in his methods. When we think of the William Morris who printed the Kelmscott Chaucer, we do not always remember the William Morris who stood in Hyde Park near the Marble Arch talking to the street crowds about socialism, wondering if the police were coming; who for years travelled about speaking in a thousand stuffy halls in England, Ireland and Scotland. When he was old, tears would come to his eyes when the misery of the poor was mentioned. It is easy to say that his socialism was vague and his desire to return to the methods of the thirteenth century unrealistic, but considering the sincerity of his motives and the breadth of his interests, I think that we must say that he was not so much a man of this world as a man of a better world.

Perhaps we must return to America to find the printer who has made the greatest contribution to political history. We can hardly detail here the cosmopolitan accomplishments of Benjamin Franklin. We might rather examine what right we have to call him a printer, in view of the magnitude of his other accomplishments. He liked to think of himself as a printer, and started his will with the words, "I, Benjamin Franklin, printer." Once when he visited the establishment of the Didots in France he stopped at a hand press and pulled a few proofs. When the workman exclaimed at his dexterity he said, "Do not be surprised. Printing is my real trade." Wherever he went in England or France he corresponded with printers and visited their establishments. We know about his private press at Passy and about his wholesome influence on American printing. Carl Van Doren, in his biography of Franklin, says that when he died the printers of Philadelphia walked in his funeral procession and that the printers of Paris gathered to honor him, listened to a eulogy by one of them while others set it in type as fast as it was delivered and distributed printed copies as souvenirs. If then we can claim him as a printer, we can feel sure that the man who helped draft the Declaration of Independence, who was sent to negotiate the peace and was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention was, more than any other printer, a man of the world.

It could hardly be maintained that being connected with printing makes one a man of the world. It might even be argued and proved by examples past and present that preoccupation with the problems of the craft is a narrowing influence. Since most of the circumstances of our lives are arranged for us when we are born, it is possible to travel through life as on a conveyor belt, having things done to us along the way, and this can be as true of a fine printer as of a bank president. Each can go through life utterly ignorant of the economic and mental processes that bring food to his table and send his son to the wars. It was always a question, now more than ever critical, what part of a man's life must be given to being a citizen against the claims of livelihood, philosophy, family and amusement. The events of the past few years have dramatized the dilemma. Printing has helped bring us to this place in history. And so, although we cannot condemn a good craftsman because he is interested in nothing except shop talk, we might say that printers who are also men of the world realize that they are working in a bigger shop.

WOOD ENGRAVING BY REYNOLDS STONE, 1937.

COMPOSED IN GRANJON TYPES

FOOTNOTES: