Studio: international art (2.1894)

The Printed Book and its Decoration

tions has evidently been deliberately set aside, and
the record of the two hundred years made as full
and complete as possible with unimpassioned
summing up of the various points that distinguish
each particular style. The harmonious whole
resulting from the paper, type, illustrations, initial
letters and borders, which he claims for many of
the volumes of the old printers may be readily
granted, without the least readiness to accept such
harmony as the final word in book-planning. It
may be that no one has yet produced a result equally
perfect with polished paper, delicate process-blocks,
and the more academic drawing which modern
taste requires; but even to infer that with the new
materials no equally satisfactory book can ever be
made, is not a position which The Studio is willing
to take. In every past age of art we find a gradual
improvement up to a certain point, and then a more
or less rapid decline. It is only yesterday—so to
speak—that these hundred and one innovations
came upon us ; but if when the new materials are
understood, all the care and thought that is now
being so freely bestowed upon efforts to make a
modern book harmonious, with type, decoration,
and paper in perfect relation have not then suc-
ceeded, a careful study of this entirely delightful
volume may help on the end, because many of
the fundamental principles of fitness and beauty
hold good whatever be the style chosen to express
them. Mr. Pollard has done well in recording the
triumphs of the older printers, and if modern pub-
lishers will only work as carefully, and employ
artists not merely to draw pictures but to super-
intend the whole matter, material will accumulate
for a future editor in, say, the twenty-third cen-
tury, to issue such a volume relating to our own
time, in which Mr. Pollard's book itself should find
place as an instance of a very harmonious volume.

The next volume* touches a subject that has
only very recently occupied a place within the
limited group which attracts the sympathy of collec-
tors. It is curious to see that coloured illustrations
to books, drawings by a large number of artists, first
editions of certain popular authors, and a dozen
more characteristic features of the book which out-
siders would deem as important as those which are
recognised " subjects " to collect, fail to tempt the
cognoscenti. At present even Aldines and Elzevirs
are not greatly prized except in very perfect states,
emblem books are hardly sought after, and yet the
book-plate—a mere label of ownership—has a
society and a literature of its own.

It seems hardly a year since Mr. Egerton Castle's
book came as the forerunner, so far as the general
public were concerned, of the cult of " the ex
libris." Now the hobby it treated is almost
elevated to a recognised position among collectors,
and (so we are told) the market value of specimens
is rapidly rising. This volume, re-cast and with a
hundred new engravings, is likely to become the
standard book for popular reference, since, so far,
it is the only one that treats to any great extent

* English Book-Plates. By Egerton Castle. Second
Edition. (London : George Bell & Sons.) ios. 6d. net.

of modern plates. Here we are permitted to re-
produce five of the most interesting of the newly
included examples—the plates of Messrs. Alma
Tadema, R.A., W. Rae Macdonald, E. H. New,
George Kitchin, and that of the Rev. R. S. Phil-
pott. Of new artists introduced here, Mr. G. W.
Eve, with two really fine armorial compositions, is
perhaps the most important, since he preserves the
best traditions of the heraldic book-plate, and sets
them forth in a masterly fashion. The work of the
young Birmingham artists, Messrs. C. M. Gere,
E. H. New, Sidney Heath, and Oliver Brackett, is
not unfamiliar to readers of The Studio. Mr. F.
C. Tilney has two excellent examples of quite
another school, the one we reproduce here, and
another for Mr. F. H. Evans, a bibliophile who is
the adviser and friend of most city book-lovers.
Among the new full-page plates are a fine colour
facsimile, by Mr. W. Griggs, of the Nicholas-Bacon
ex libris, the smaller Pepys portrait plate, a very
graceful composition that Mr. Carlton Stitt uses ;
and four fresh examples of the reigning king of
engravers, Mr. C. W. Sherborn. The graceful
fancy of Mrs. Castle is displayed in the photo-
gravure of Mr. Walter Herries Pollock ex libris, and
in several others reproduced by process. Mr.
Castle's crisp and eminently readable text needs no
praise; it is not often one gets so much solid fact
presented so easily and lightly.

That a subject so interesting as Printers' Marks,*'
interesting alike to artists and bookmen, should have
hitherto lacked an English monograph is curious,
when one recalls the number of volumes upon every
detail of the printed book. Possibly the modern
craze for book-plates has turned many students of
the cult to study the devices of the old printers,
which undoubtedly supplied several very prominent
and insistent types for the " ex libris." As Mr.
Roberts observes, shorn of all the romance and
glamour that surround the works of the early
printers, these devices are but trade-marks. True,
but even trade-marks on other goods in those days
had much artistic beauty. Then, when the de-
signers aimed at prettiness, or at least at decora-
tion, they produced art; now, when our efforts are
for art, we produce prettiness, and not always deco-
ration in its rightful sense. The first known
mark is that of Fust and Schoeffer in a colophon
of the Mainz Psalter, 1457, a volume so rare that
Mr. Quaritch values it at five thousand guineas; it
is only the third book printed, and the first dated;
and the first edition was only a dozen copies.

The printer's mark offers, as it were, a popular
commentary on the prevailing fashion, reflecting
more or less clearly the decorative spirit of its period.
From the early English of Caxton and the primi-
tives, through the cumbrous Renaissance, as Ger-
many and Holland debased the purity of the Italian
type, to the tame devices of the early nineteenth
century, examples of all styles are well reproduced
(some barely squeezed on a page of this volume),
down to the smaller but not less attractive devices

* Printers' Marks. By William Roberts. (London :
George Bell & Sons.) 7s. 6d. net.

141