Part 1 — CHAPTER XXI FOR PRINTERS, BINDERS AND PAPER-MAKERS AND ALL WHO LOVE BOOKS

From Manuscript to Book

Supply and Demand Interacting

“An author, even an immortal genius, is, from the economic point of view, a producer of raw material,” says the Britannica article Publishing, and from the educational point of view, his product, until it has undergone the industrial and commercial processes of reduplication and distribution, is as undeveloped as the seed lying hidden in the winter soil. The history of civilization might, indeed, be divided into four stages: the period before writing; the period before printing, when libraries of manuscripts were almost exclusively the property of kings and priests; the period of costly, hand-printed books; and the period of the power-press, which began less than a hundred years ago. Of these four periods, the first is almost unimaginable. You are sometimes brought into contact with absolutely illiterate people. But they live in shadow, not in total darkness; they get the diffused light of our age of culture. The second period, the era of books in manuscript we can, however, to some extent reconstruct; and by one fantastic supposition we can even bring it into the focus of our 20th century. Let it be assumed that for some reason the printing of the new Britannica had been enjoined by the law courts, but that the original typoscript was available for consultation—say in a public library at New York or Chicago. Instead of your 29 volumes, weighing only 80 lbs. and occupying only about two cubic feet of space, the walls of a large room would be lined with partitioned shelves on which the 300,000 typed sheets and the 7,000 illustrations, on cardboard, would be ranged. What a mob of students there would be, waiting their turns to read the 40,000 articles, what a mass of notebooks would be filled each day! The impossibility of accomplishing, without the use of printing, all that the Britannica does, will present itself very forcibly to your mind, in another aspect, if you try to imagine 1,500 separate audiences, assembled each day to listen to lectures by the 1,500 contributors to the book. Any attempt to imagine the Britannica doing its work in any way but the way in which it does makes you realize, too, that if it were not for modern methods of spreading knowledge, there would be no such system of assembling and co-ordinating knowledge as finds its fullest development in the Britannica. It is not only for commercial reasons that the demand must be sufficient to justify the supply; the 1,500 specialists who laid aside their usual work in order to write these articles would never have combined their efforts if this vast public of all educated English speaking people 110were not to have been enabled to avail themselves of the result.

The industrial arts which make it possible to produce books swiftly and to sell them at low prices are obviously subjects of interest not only to those who do the producing and selling, but to all who profit by the use of books. And, as the articles mentioned in this chapter show, these arts are in themselves among the most ingenious and curious of all processes; so that in a double sense they merit the attention of everyone to whom the chapters on Literature in this Guide would appeal. As the warp of cloth carries the weft, so the raw material of printers’ paper and printers’ ink carries the “raw material” of the writer’s thoughts.

The article on Paper (Vol. 20, p. 725) is equivalent to 35 pages of this Guide and is illustrated with 15 diagrams. The article is divided into three parts: History, by Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, director of the British Museum; Manufacture, by J. W. Wyatt, author of The Art of Making Paper; and India Paper, by W. E. Garrett Fisher.

History of Paper

The history of paper, like that of so many other great inventions, dates back to an early period in China; and, as is the case with almost every great contribution to civilization which came from China, paper came to the Western world only after many years and only by chance. In the 8th century of the Christian era, when paper had been made in China for 1000 years, some Chinese paper-makers were taken captives in Samarkand by Arabs, who thus learned the methods of its manufacture. The Arabs and the Persians used linen as a base for the paper instead of the cotton the Chinese used; and the name “paper” was transferred from the Egyptian rush and the writing material made from its fibres to the new product. Paper was manufactured in Europe first by the Moors in Spain at Xativa, Valencia and Toledo in the 12th century; and into Italy also it seems to have been brought by the Arab occupation of Sicily. Among other interesting points in regard to the history of paper are: water-marks as a sign of age; old papers; variation in prices of paper; blotting-paper, wrapping paper, etc. The articles Papyrus (Vol. 20, p. 743) and Parchment (Vol. 20, p. 798), both by Maunde Thompson, deal with these earlier writing materials. Palimpsest (Vol. 20, p. 633) describes the processes by which writings which have been scraped or washed from sheets of vellum, so that the material might be used again, can sometimes be chemically restored and deciphered.

Paper Manufacture

In taking up the study of paper manufacture, the first article to be read is Fibres by C. F. Cross, the well-known analytical and consulting chemist, and especially the section in it on Paper-making (Vol. 10, p. 312). This describes the treatment of cotton and flax for writing and drawing papers, wood pulp, esparto, cellulose and cereal straws for printing-paper, etc. See also the article Cellulose (Vol. 5, p. 606) by C. F. Cross. The section on Manufacture in the article Paper, already mentioned, should next be read. Here it is stated that rags, linen or cotton, were the principal materials used for paper in Europe until the middle of the 19th century; and then when prices rose, because the necessarily inelastic supply was no longer sufficient, esparto-grass, wood and straw began to be used as substitutes. The change from hand-making to machinery began in France in 1798 and was accomplished in England in 1803, with the result that hand-made paper is now used only where great durability is the chief requisite, as for bank-notes and drawing paper.

Actual paper manufacture may be divided into two processes: the preliminary cleaning and reduction to pulp; and 111the methods of converting pulp to paper—including beating, sizing, colouring, making the sheet or web, surfacing, cutting, etc. Reduction to pulp is described in the treatment of esparto, straw and wood, and there are cuts showing rag-boiler, rag-breaking engine, esparto boiler, press-pâte or half-stuff machine, esparto bleaching and beating plant, and the Porion evaporator and the Yaryan multiple-effect evaporator for soda recovery.

Paper-making proper, after the pulp has been prepared, is next described. The first process is beating; and besides the esparto bleaching and beating plant, described under bleaching, there are drawings of the Taylor and Jordan beaters and a description of them and of the Kingsland beater. Sizing, loading and colouring are then explained. The other main topics of the section on manufacture are: hand manufacture (with two illustrations), paper machine, with pictures of the paper machine, of the dandy roll, of super-calender and of reel paper cutters, and paragraphs on straining, forming the sheet, shake, water marking and couching, pressing and drying, surfacing, machine power, tub-sizing, glazing or surfacing for better grades, cutting, sheeting, sizes (with table), standards of quality, the paper trade, and a list of the best books on paper.

India Paper

The article Paper closes with a brief history and description of India paper, which is of particular interest because of the adoption and successful use of this paper in the new Encyclopaedia Britannica. In this true India paper, “the material used is chiefly rag,” but “the extraordinary properties of this paper are due to the peculiar care necessary in the treatment of the fibres, which are specially beaten in the beating engine.” The first India paper was brought to England from the Far East in 1841 by an Oxford graduate, and the name India was used merely to express this Oriental origin, as in “Indian ink” or in the name “Indians” as applied to the American aborigines when their home was thought to be a part of the East. Just where the paper came from is not known. It was given to the Oxford University Press and was used in printing a very small English Bible in 1842. This book was only one-third the usual thickness, and attracted much attention by its lightness and by the opacity of the thin tough paper.

In 1874 a copy of this Bible fell into the hands of Henry Frowde, and experiments were instituted at the Oxford University paper mills at Wolvercote with the object of producing similar paper. On the 24th of August 1875 an impression of the Bible, similar in all respects to that of 1842, was placed on sale by the Oxford University Press. The feat of compression was regarded as astounding, the demand was enormous, and in a very short time 250,000 copies of this “Oxford India paper Bible” had been sold. Many other editions of the Bible, besides other books, were printed on the Oxford India paper, and the marvels of compression accomplished by its use created great interest at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. Its strength was as remarkable as its lightness; volumes of 1500 pages were suspended for several months by a single leaf, as thin as tissue; and, when they were examined at the close of the exhibition, it was found that the leaf had not started, the paper had not stretched, and the volume closed as well as ever. The paper, when subjected to severe rubbing, instead of breaking into holes like ordinary printing paper, assumed a texture resembling chamois leather, and a strip 3 in. wide was found able to support a weight of 28 lb. without yielding. The success of the Oxford India paper led to similar experiments by other manufacturers, and there were, in 1910, nine mills (two each in England, Germany and Italy, one each in France, Holland and Belgium) in which India paper was being produced. India paper is mostly made upon a Fourdrinier machine in continuous lengths, in contradistinction to a hand-made paper, which cannot be made of a greater size than the frame employed in its production.

In addition to technical information in regard to paper the student of the manufacture of books must know something about ink.

Ink

112The necessary information he will find in the article Ink (Vol. 14, p. 571) with special descriptions of writing inks, tannin inks, China or Indian ink, logwood ink, aniline ink, copying ink, red and blue ink, marking ink, gold and silver inks, indelible or incorrodible ink, sympathetic ink, and, of the most importance for our present purpose, printing inks.

The process of putting ink on paper is a subject which in the Britannica takes much more ink and paper than the subject of ink or of paper.

Printing

This topic is treated in two main articles: one dealing with type and the other with presses. The former, Typography (Vol. 27, p. 509), is a good sized treatise in itself, being equivalent to more than 135 pages of this Guide. It is divided into two parts: The History of Typography, by John Henry Hessels, author of Gutenberg: an Historical Investigation; and Modern Practical Typography, by John Southward, author of A Dictionary of Typography and its Accessory Arts, and Hugh Munro Ross, editor of The (London) Times Engineering Supplement.

The former part of the article, and the longer, is a very important and elaborate contribution to the knowledge of early printing. On these first developments the student should read the same writer’s article Gutenberg (Vol. 12, p. 739) and should notice the great difficulty surrounding the whole question of the “invention,” obscured by the fact that so many of the documents on Gutenberg exist only in copies, while others seem to be forgeries by two librarians of the city of Mainz who were eager to prove the claims of their fellow citizen Gutenberg to be the inventor of printing with movable metal types. See also Mr. Hessel’s article on Johann Fust (Vol. 11, p. 373). The honour of the invention of typography, Mr. Hessels decides, belongs to Lorens Janszoon Coster of Haarlem and its date was somewhere between 1440 and 1446. In Mexico printing was established in 1544, in Manila in 1590, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1638 or 1639. The early printers had only a few types of each character in a fount, and they printed books, even small quartos, page by page.

This whole treatment of the history of typography is too elaborate to be summarized here, but it is interesting to note that the article gives information about the history of the earliest types—Gothic, Bastard Italian, Roman, Burgundian, etc., with fac-similes of 13 different and characteristic faces between 1445 and 1479; and of different styles and alphabets—Italic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic, Coptic, Samaritan, Slavonic, Russian, Etruscan, Runic, Gothic, Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon, Irish, Music, Characters for the Blind, Initials, Ornaments and Flowers.

Practical Typography

The second part of the article Typography, on Modern Practical Typography, will be of more value, probably, to most students of printing and book-making. It deals with the following topics:—

Material characteristics of Type. Fount may consist of 275 “sorts” or characters. Numbers of sorts vary with different languages—and with different styles and writers; Dickens draws heavily on vowels, Macaulay on consonants. Bill of type or scheme—how computed.

Logotypes or word character as distinct from letters.

Parts of a type—face, stem, serif, beard, shoulder, shank, belly, back, counter, nick, kern, feet, burr and batter.

Species of letter—short, ascending, descending, long, superior, inferior, fat-faced, lean-faced, bastard.

Sizes: classification by names and by point-system.

Varieties of face: Roman, sanserifs or grotesques; black; script; old style; Caslon; influence of William Morris and the Kelmscott Press; Vale Press.

113Manufacture of type: type metal; punch, drive and matrix (with illustrations); type-casting—by hand and machine; inventions of Bruce, Barth, Wicks, with description and picture of the Wicks rotary type-casting machine.

Type-setting by hand. Type case, with illustration. Composition, justifying. Imposition. Signatures. Forme, quoin, side-stick, foot-stick, shooting-stick. Distributing.

Type-setting by machine. Linotype and Monotype. Earlier machines—the Paige (in which Mark Twain lost a fortune). Distributing machines—Delcambre, Fraser, Empire, Dow, Thorne, Simplex (with cut). Linotype—with diagrams and description. Monotype (the machine used for the Encyclopaedia Britannica) with illustrations of perforated strip.

Electrotyping and Stereotyping. Shells. Turtle, Flong. Wood’s Autoplate process. See also the articles Electrotyping (Vol. 9, p. 252) and Electroplating (Vol. 9, p. 237).

The reader should next turn to the articles Engraving (Vol. 9, p. 645), Line-Engraving (Vol. 16, p. 721), Wood-Engraving (Vol. 28, p. 798)—special reference to America where this method is still used for some book and magazine illustration—to Lithography (Vol. 16, p. 785) including offset printing; and Process (Vol. 22, p. 408), for further information in regard to “printing” apart from (and before) actual press work. The last-named of these articles is by Edwin Bale, art director of Cassell & Company, Ltd.; it would occupy about 20 pages of this Guide; and it is illustrated by a plate showing the three-colour process. The article describes:

(1)—relief processes, line blocks, swelled gelatin process, typographic etching, halftone processes, three colour blocks, colour filters;

(2)—intaglio processes, monotype, electrotype, steel-facing, blanketing, changes in machinery;

(3)—planographic processes, including woodburytype, stannotype, collotype or phototype, heliotype and photolithography. In relation to lithography there is further information in the biographical sketch of Senefelder, its inventor.

Press-Work

The article Printing (Vol. 22, p. 350) deals entirely with the subject of press-work, thus using printing in the narrower and more correct sense of the word. In length this article is equivalent to 25 pages of this Guide; and it contains 9 illustrations of presses. The article is by C. T. Jacobi, author of Printing, and The Printer’s Handbook of Trade Recipes. The article gives a history of the printing press, which was practically unchanged for a century and a half, until the Dutch map-maker Blaeu greatly simplified it. The first important metal press—earlier ones were of wood—was invented by Lord Stanhope nearly two hundred years later. It had greater power with smaller expenditure of labour, and its workings, as well as that of the Blaeu press, and of the Albion, which was used by William Morris at Kelmscott, may be readily understood from the illustrations in the article. Another hand press is the Columbian, invented in 1816 by a Philadelphian, George Clymer, and still in use for heavy hand work. Power presses began to be made at the end of the 18th century, but the presses invented by William Nicholson (1790) and Friedrich König (adopted by the London Times in 1814) printed only on one side at a time, as did the “double platen” machine of a little later date. The cylindrical eight feeder built by Augustus Applegath in 1848 for the London Times and the Hoe Type Revolving Machine are described in the section on the history of power presses, which closes with the story of Bullock’s machine (1865) for printing from a continuous web of paper.

Modern Presses

114The closing section of the article on printing is devoted to a description of modern presses. It opens with a list of the principal types of presses still in use, which are classified under the following seven heads:—

(1)—iron hand-presses like the Albion or Columbian, for proof-pulling or limited editions;

(2)—small platen machines for job or commercial work;

(3)—single cylinder machines (“Wharfedales”) printing one side only;

(4)—perfecting machines, usually two cylinder, printing both sides, but with two distinct operations;

(5)—two-revolution machines with one cylinder;

(6)—two-colour machines, with one cylinder usually, but two printing surfaces and two sets of inking apparatus;

(7)—rotary machines for printing from curved plates upon an endless web of paper—principally for newspapers or periodical work.

These seven classes are next described in detail and the article illustrates them all. A cut of an Albion press is given in an early part of the article, and the other six presses shown in the cuts are:

The Golding jobber platen machine

Payne & Sons’ Wharfedale stop-cylinder machine

Dryden & Foord’s perfecting machine

The Miehle two-revolution cylinder machine

Payne & Sons’ two-colour single cylinder machine

Hoe’s double-octuple rotary machine

The article closes with a discussion of the following very practical topics: the preparation or “make ready” for printing; recent development in printing with cross references to the article Process; and a paragraph on the management of a printing house.

Proof-Reading

From this closing paragraph and the article on Printing, the student is referred to the article Proof-Reading (Vol. 22, p. 438) which is by John A. Black, head press reader of the 10th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and John Randall, sub-editor of the Athenaeum and of Notes and Queries and former secretary of the London Association of Correctors of the Press, so that this article, like all the other articles on the subject of book-making, is written by eminent practical authorities on the subject.

Bookbinding

The same is true of the article Bookbinding (Vol. 4, p. 216), which naturally follows in a systematic course of study. This is by Cyril J. H. Davenport, assistant keeper of books in the British Museum and author of History of the Book, etc. This article is illustrated with 14 figures, including 8 in halftone, showing typical fine bindings. The other illustrations show machines and processes used in binding. Besides a historical sketch of book-binding the article treats of the following topics:

Modern methods and modern binding designers; machine binding, machine sewing, rounding and backing, casing, wiring, and blocking. A case-making machine, a casing-in machine and a blocking machine are shown in the illustrations.

A bookbinder or a student of the subject will find a great deal of very valuable information elsewhere in the book, particularly in the article Leather (Vol. 16, p. 330) by Dr. J. Gordon Parker, principal of the Leathersellers Technical College, London, and author of Leather for Libraries, etc. The article occupies the equivalent of 55 pages of this Guide; and the possessor of the Britannica will be interested to know that the leather bindings used for its volumes were all made according to specifications drawn 115up by Dr. Parker, the greatest authority in the world on tanning, curing and dyeing leather for book-bindings.

Publishing and Book-Selling

The last stages in getting the author’s raw material “from him to the ultimate consumer” are those in which the publisher and bookseller play their part; and for a description of their functions the student should refer to the articles on publishing and book-selling in the Britannica. The article Publishing (Vol. 22, p. 628) explains that publishing and book-selling were for a long time carried on together since “booksellers were the first publishers of printed books, as they had previously been the agents for the production and exchange of authentic manuscript copies.” The separation of publishing from book-selling is due to “the tendency of every composite business to break up, as it expands, into specialized departments.” As publishers became a separate class the work of their literary assistants also broke up into specialized departments—proof-reading and the reading of manuscripts submitted by authors—or the work of printers’ readers and publishers’ readers.

The importance of the work of the publisher’s reader is dwelt upon in this article which sketches besides the growth of the Society of Authors in England and of the formation there of the Publishers’ Association and the Booksellers’ Association. The article also outlines the methods of publishing in the United States and gives particular prominence to the effect on the British market of the introduction of American books and of American book-selling methods.

Historical and Miscellaneous Articles

Among other articles of interest to the manufacturer of books are the following: Book (Vol. 4, p. 214) by Alfred William Pollard, assistant keeper of books in the British Museum, gives a general historical description of books and in particular calls attention to the great change in book-prices in the last thirty years. “About 1894 the number of medium-priced books was greatly increased in England by the substitution of single-volume novels at 6s. each (subject to discount) for the three-volume editions at 31s. 6d.... The preposterous price of 10s. 6d. a volume had been adopted during the first popularity of the Waverley Novels and had continued in force for the greater part of the century.” To-day, well printed copies of these novels sell for 1s. in England and for 35 cents in the United States.

It may be added that one of the most striking lessons to be learned from the Britannica, in relation to the improvements and economies effected by the application of the most modern processes to the manufacture of books, is supplied by the consideration of the Britannica itself. The extent of the composition and machinery involved, the accuracy of the proof-reading, the novel employment—upon a large scale—of India paper and flexible bindings, the beauty of the illustrations, and, above all, the low price at which the product is sold, form a combination of the very latest perfections of every department of the industry.

Read too Book-collecting (Vol. 4, p. 221) also by A. W. Pollard; the article Book Plates (Vol. 4, p. 230) by Egerton Castle, illustrated with ten cuts of book plates (which are so well chosen that book plate collectors have not infrequently asked the publishers of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for extra copies so that they might include them in their collections); the article Bookcase (Vol. 4, p. 221) from which the reader may be surprised to learn that “the whole construction and arrangement of bookcases was learnedly discussed in the light of experience by W. E. Gladstone in the Nineteenth Century for March 1890;” and the article Bibliography and BibliOLOGY 116(Vol. 3, p. 908) by A. W. Pollard, supplemented by the article Incunabula (Vol. 14, p. 369).

The following alphabetical list of articles and sections of articles, although it does not profess to be complete, will give the student some idea of the large number of topics connected with the general subject of the manufacture of books:

Albion Press

Aniline Ink

Applegath, Augustus

Autoplate Process

Backing

Barth, Henry

Bastard Letter

Batter

Bibliography and Bibliology

Bill of Type

Binding

Black Type

Blaeu Press

Blanketing

Bleaching

Blocking

Blue Ink

Boiling

Book

Book-Binding

Bookcase

Book-collecting

Book-Plates

Bookselling

Bourgeois

Breaking

Brevier

Bruce, David

Burr

Case-making Machine

Casing

Casing-in machine

Caslon Type

Casting

Cellulose

China Ink

Chinese Paper-makers

Chiswick Press

Clymer, George

Collotype

Colour Filters

Colour Process

Columbian Press

Composition

Copying Ink

Coster

Couching

Cutter

Dandy Roll

Delcambre Machine

Distributing

Distributing Machines

Dow Machine

Drive

Drying

Electroplating

Electrotyping

Empire Machine

English Type

Engraving

Esparto

Evaporator

Face

Flong

Forme

Fount

Fraser Machine

Fust

Glazing

Golding Machine

Gold Ink

Goodson

Gutenberg

Half Stuff

Half-tone

Heliotype

Hoe, Robert

Imposition

Incunabula

Indelible Ink

Indian Ink

India Paper

Ink

Intaglio Process

Italic Type

Jordan Beaters

Justifying

Kelmscott Press

Kern

Kingsland Beater

König, Friedrich

Lanston Monotype

Leather

Line-Engraving

Linotype

Lithography

Logwood Ink

Machine Presses

Marking Ink

Matrices

Miehle Press

Minion

Monoline

Monotype

Morris, William

Nicholson, William

Nick

Nonpareil

Octuple Rotary Machine

Off-set Printing

Old-style Type

Paige Composing Machine

Paper

Papyrus

Parchment

Pearl (type)

Perfecting Machine

Photolithography

Phototype

Pica

Planographic Process

Platen

Point System

Porion Evaporator

Power Presses

Pressing

Press Plate

Press-work

Primer

Price of Paper

Printing

Printing Ink

Process

Proof-reading

Publishing

Pulp

Punch

Quality, Standards of Paper

Rag

Red Ink

Reel Paper Cutter

Relief Process

Roman Type

Rotary Presses

Rounding

Ruby

Scheme of Type

Senefelder

Serif

Sewing

Shake

Sheeting

Shells

Signature

Silver Ink

Simplex Machine

Sizes of Paper

Sizing

Soda Recovery

Stanhope Press

Stannotype

Steel-facing

Stem

Stereotyping

Straining

Super Calender

Surfacing

Swelled Gelatin Process

Sympathetic Ink

Tachytype

Tannin Ink

Thorne Machine

Three Colour Process

Tub-sizing

Turtle

Type-case

Typograph

Typography

Vale Press

Water mark

Wharfedale Presses

Wicks, Frederick

Wiring

Woodbury Process

Wood Engraving

Wood’s Autoplate

Writing Ink

Yaryan Evaporator

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