Such gorgeous title-pages! I gloated over dozens of them, making pencil memoranda of type arrangements and pencil sketches of wood-cut head and tail pieces and initials. Using Caslon roman with italic in a merry intermingling of caps and lower case, occasionally enlivened with a word or a line in Caslon Black, and sometimes embellished with a crude wood-cut decoration depicting a bunch or basket of flowers, and never afraid to use types of large size, the compositors of these masterly title-pages have given us refreshing examples of a typography that literally sparkles with spontaneity and joyousness. Apparently created stick-in-hand at the case, and unbiased by hampering trends and rules, here are honest, direct, attention-compelling examples of type arrangements reflecting the care-free approach of compositors merrily expressing personalities void of the self-consciousness and inhibitions that always tighten up and mar any mere striving for effect.
This Colonial typography, void of beauty-destroying mechanical precision, is the most direct, honest, vigorous and imaginative America has ever known--a sane and inspiring model that was to me a liberal education and undoubtedly the finest influence that could come to me at this time--1895.
I now become a member of the newly formed Arts and Crafts Society of Boston, possibly a charter member, and contribute two or three cases and a few frames of Wayside Press printing to the society’s first exhibition in Copley Hall. This showing wins flattering approval from reviewers--laughter from printers who comment: “Bradley must be crazy if he thinks buyers of printing are going to fall for that old-fashioned Caslon type.”
At this time the Caslon mats, imported from England, are in possession of one or two branches of the American Type Founders, probably those in New York and Boston, possibly the Dickenson Foundry in Boston. Less than a year after my original receipt of body sizes of Caslon in shelf-faded and fly-specked packages, these foundries cannot keep pace with orders and it is found necessary to take the casting off the slow “steamers” and transfer mats to the main plant in Communipaw, New Jersey, where they can be adapted to fast automatic type-casters. Here additional sizes are cut and a new series, Lining Caslon, is in the works--and, with novelty faces no longer in demand, foundries outside the combine, not possessing mats, are hurrying cutting.