A thing of beauty stands alone, and I know of no fixed law by which we can judge beauty except through the emotions; and emotions are rather difficult to tabulate. I, myself, can only contemplate the childhood of printing with amazement and admiration. In its youth it exhausted every possibility of type arrangement.
An estimate of the activity of those first wooden frames can only be guessed at. In Venice alone, as early as 1472, over two million separate volumes were printed. By the opening of the sixteenth century the art of printing had spread to every civilized country and the supply of its raw materials became so great that the process of cheapening set in.
The first printers had selected as models for their types the beautiful hand-written books of their day. The second generation of printers modelled their types from those of the first printers. The illuminator gave way to the wood-cutter and the fine art of printing became a science, then a craft, and when William Morris tried to stop its downward slide, in 1891, it was a trade.
During this downward trip through four centuries, weak attempts to restore the art of printing to its first high place in the life of man were made. Benjamin Franklin wrote on the "Improvement of Printing Backwards," protesting the discontinuance of the tall "f." But man was not interested in the intangible influence of art as much as he was in the perfection of the machine.
The ink was hardly dry on the effusions of our modern printing critics, when the collapse of over-production set in and silenced them, I hope, permanently.
Writing about modern books in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Francis Meynell of the Nonesuch Press says: "The type-setting machines used with as much skill as hand-set type will give a better result, and in alliance with fast but very perfect cylinder printing presses, will give this result not to a few, but to a multitude. It has taken us from the day of 'the book beautiful,' and given us the day of the beautiful book."
The fast moving cylinder presses of the Nonesuch Press have slowed up since this was written. And we can thank God that we have some opportunity for reflection.
One of the modern criticisms of William Morris and the private presses that he inspired is that too much stress was placed on method. Method means how a thing is done and how a thing is done is of very vital importance if we want to give our work durability.