I began printing books with the hope of producing some which would
have a definite claim to beauty, while at the same time they should
be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye, or trouble the
intellect of the reader by eccentricity of form in the letters. I
have always been a great admirer of the calligraphy of the Middle
Ages, & of the earlier printing which took its place. As to the
fifteenth-century books, I had noticed that they were always
beautiful by force of the mere typography, even without the added
ornament, with which many of them are so lavishly supplied. And it
was the essence of my undertaking to produce books which it would
be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing and arrangement of
type. Looking at my adventure from this point of view then, I found
I had to consider chiefly the following things: the paper, the form
of the type, the relative spacing of the letters, the words, and
the lines; and lastly the position of the printed matter on the
page. It was a matter of course that I should consider it necessary
that the paper should be hand-made, both for the sake of durability
and appearance. It would be a very false economy to stint in the
quality of the paper as to price: so I had only to think about the
kind of hand-made paper. On this head I came to two conclusions:
1st, that the paper must be wholly of linen (most hand-made papers
are of cotton today), and must be quite 'hard, ' i. e., thoroughly
well sized; and 2nd, that, though it must be 'laid' and not 'wove'
(i. e., made on a mould made of obvious wires), the lines caused by
the wires of the mould must not be too strong, so as to give a
ribbed appearance. I found that on these points I was at one with
the practice of the paper-makers of the fifteenth century; so I
took as my model a Bolognese paper of about 1473. My friend Mr.
Batchelor, of Little Chart, Kent, carried out my views very
satisfactorily, and produced from the first the excellent paper,
which I still use
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