The Printed Book

Pasquier, 18.

Patas, 65.

Pauquet, 23.

Petit, 23.

Picart, 62.

Ponce, 65.

Prévost, 40.

Prud'hon, 14.

Queverdo, 54.

Rigaud, 18.

Roger, 17.

Romanet, 26.

Rousseau, 24.

St. Aubin, 70.

Scotin, 27.

Sève, 29.

Simonet, 83.

Tardieu, 64.

Tilliard, 15.

Trière, 39.

Doubtless some of these ascriptions are for frontispieces only, but as a list of the principal book illustrators of the time, and as showing the measure of their popularity, this table is of much interest.

With the Revolution the decline of the Book arrives, as that of all the arts. Moreau, friend of David, had become affected by the new ideas and the burlesque renaissance of Greek and Roman art. He made his apology on the altar of the gods, and engraved portraits on wood to punish himself for having painted the elegancies of fallen tyrants. At this game, nerve, as well as suppleness, was lost; and if he had had only the artistic knack of the Revolution, his daughter, married to Charles Vernet, could not have written of him, "That which can be most admired is, at the same time, the fecundity and flexibility of Moreau's talent, that marvellous facility of conceiving a picturesque scene and disposing it in an interesting and truthful manner in the least extended space." This was true before, but after?

In spite of his passion for the ideas and men of the Revolution, Moreau found himself at the end of his resources. Renouard, the publisher, received him as he had received St. Aubin, to whom he advanced sum after sum to prevent him dying of hunger. Like most of his contemporaries, Moreau, pressed by want, "took, quitted, and retook the cuirass and the hair-shirt." He had drawn for everybody: for Louis XVI., for the Republic, for Napoleon I.

The worst of it is that after his designs for Ovid, Molière, and Rousseau, dating from the reign of Louis XVI., he should have done them again in 1804, 1806, and 1808. The difference was great, even probably for his publishers, Renouard and Dupréel. It does not appear that the pontiff of the new school, David, knew of his distress; and Moreau succumbed in 1814 to a cancerous scirrhus of the right arm, forgotten and in the greatest misery.

We have passed a little quickly to the end of the century because it is of no importance to name each of the publishers and artists, but only to sketch briefly their tastes or their manner. We have not dwelt long on the engravers so called, because of their number; but their dexterity remains proverbial; they handled etching with extreme suppleness, and often interpreted the drawings of illustrators in remitting them to the needle. Many of these, not to say all, made use themselves of the etching needle, St. Aubin for example, who knew how to give to the work of others his personal mark and distinction.

The Revolution passed over some among those that it ruined, and, as stated above, they followed the movement, and lost themselves in the school of David. It was Duplessis-Bertaux who, after having furnished to Cazin, the publisher, vignettes for his Recueil des Meilleurs Contes en Vers, 1778, and many other books, after having worked for Didot, devoted himself to patriotic engraving and to the reproduction of scenes of the Revolution. When he published his Tableaux Historiques, in three volumes folio, adorned with nearly two hundred large plates, it was under the Consulate, that is to say far from the time when the work was begun. Renouvier assures us, with his exclusive disdain for the eighteenth century, that Duplessis-Bertaux was a mystifier, and that his scenes of the Revolution were a hoax, "in the kind of spirit in vogue under the Directory." The truth is that the artist, in place of being a cheerful Callot, as might be thought from his manner of engraving, so like that of the Lorraine artist, was imbued with the emphatic and exaggerated impressions of the first Republic, its sans-culottes in the poses of the Sabines and its tricoteuses apeing Penelope.

The immense artistic advance made in France in the eighteenth century in the manufacture and illustration of the Book made itself felt throughout Europe. In Germany, Chodowiecki, born at Dantzic of a family of apothecaries, developed his talent from ornamenting the boxes of his father, and from 1758 to 1794 he designed numerous plates for books and almanacs, a little heavy in engraving, but singularly clever in composition. There were a few others also designing, and Kilian, Folkema, and Ridinger produced some fine engravings, but the Book did not make so much progress in Germany as in France and England.

In England a vast improvement was manifested. Fine types were cast by Baskerville and Caslon; printing machines were perfected. The illustration of books by engraved plates was in the first half of the century almost entirely done by foreigners, but an English school was arising, which attained perfection in the latter half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. Wood engraving also, which, with the exception of blocks for head and tailpieces, had become almost a lost art, was revived by Bewick, to become later one of the chief adornments of the Book.

Before 1716 English printers obtained their best founts of type from Holland, but the establishment of the Caslon foundry rendered them independent. William Caslon, the first great English type-founder, was born 1692, and died 1766. The foundry still exists, pre-eminent in the beauty of its characters. Baskerville established a foundry about 1750, and printed at Birmingham with his own types a number of extremely beautiful books. The impetus given to fine printing by these two men rapidly spread itself, and laid the foundation of the perfection which English book-making reached.

As mentioned above, Gravelot illustrated many English books in the early part of the century. He designed a set of plates to Shakespeare in 12mo, 1740, and another in quarto, 1744, besides numerous frontispieces and other plates in all kinds of books. Among other foreigners who engraved for English publishers were Grignion, Kip, Van der Gucht, Houbraken, and Bartolozzi. Bartolozzi, who was very prolific in the production of engraved plates, may perhaps be called the founder of that great English school of engraving which arose with the establishment of the Royal Academy in 1769 and the encouragement given by Alderman Boydell. Houbraken and Vertue engraved a set of fine portraits in folio for Rapin's "History of England," 1736; William Hogarth designed plates for Butler's "Hudibras," 1744; and among other curiosities of English engraving before 1750 were Sturt's edition of the Common Prayer, entirely engraved on copper plates, 1717, and an edition of Horace entirely engraved by Pine, 1733. That the taste for illustrated books soon grew to be great is evidenced by the publication of such expensive works as Boydell's edition of Shakespeare, in nine volumes folio, commenced in 1791, and adorned with a hundred plates from pictures specially commissioned by the spirited publisher; Claude's Liber Veritatis, with three hundred engravings by Richard Earlom 1777, Sir Robert Strange's engravings of fifty historical prints about 1750, collections of views in Great Britain by Kip, Buck, and Boydell; Holbein's "Collection of Portraits" 1792, a hundred and fifty plates to Shakespeare engraved by S. and E. Harding 1793, all of which cost great sums to produce, and greatly contributed to the elevation of public taste. Among the artists of the latter half of the century who contributed to the decoration of the Book are Thomas Stothard, whose very beautiful designs, extending into the next century, excelled those of all his contemporaries in their grace and spirit; Robert Smirke, best known by his plates for Shakespeare, "Don Quixote," and "Gil Blas;" Burney; and Richard Westall. It may be said generally that the English books of the eighteenth century were of a more solid character than the French, although English art, especially in the decoration of the Book, owes much to French initiation. It is curious to read now the opinion of a contemporary French engraver on English art. Choffard, in the preface to Basan's Dictionnaire 1767, wrote, "They" (the English), "having been supported by some foreign talent, are trying to create talent among themselves; but they have not seized the flame of genius that vivifies all art in France."

However, what had become of engraving by cutting in reverse, the figure in relief, from which printing could be done? It had, we may think, nearly disappeared in the midst of the continued invasion of the burin and etching. It only appeared from time to time in head and tailpieces, remaining purely typographical and lost in other decorations. There were always wood engravers, not very clever, capable only of working simple lines without charm. One of them resolved to resuscitate the art, and made various attempts about the end of the reign of Louis XIV. and beginning of that of Louis XV. He was named John Papillon, and was born at St. Quentin in 1661. His experiments did not go beyond a book of prayers, with thirty-six figures in relief after Sébastien Leclerc. His son, John Baptist, succeeded him, and continued to engrave without ceasing subjects of ornament, letters, often tailpieces, of a good style upon the whole, and taking an excellent place in an elaborate book. Unfortunately, grace had fled; the processes that the practitioners exhibited one after the other were lost; and the Papillons reconstituted, we may say, a vanished art. John Baptist also published in 1766 a theoretical treatise on wood engraving, abounding in historical errors, but in which something to learn may be found if taken with discernment. He says in his preface, "Now that excellent work is done on copper, wood engraving is neglected, and the use lost of designing and cutting the shadows of the pencil on the wood block; most of those who work in it have neither design nor taste, and only follow their own ideas; it is not astonishing that only very mediocre pieces come from their hands, to say nothing stronger; the profound ignorance of nearly all who meddle with it contrives more and more to destroy the beauties of this art in which many people find neither pleasure nor grace. To obviate all this, if it be possible to me, I have undertaken to give my precepts and observations to those who wish to apply themselves to my engraving."

It was probably the essays of Papillon that provoked curious experiments on the part of other wood engravers. Duplat, at the beginning of this century, proposed to prepare a relief on stone, and as this would be broken under pressure, he invented a mould; that is to say, he took a leaden matrix from the stone cutting, and ran a resistant metal into this mould, thus obtaining a relief similar to the stone. Renouard, the publisher, made the trials; and the younger Moreau made the designs. Moreau become an essayer of processes in 1811! One of the plates of La Fontaine's Fables, published by Renouard in 1812, in two volumes, 12mo, is here reproduced.

It appears, however, that the publisher was thwarted by bad printing. The printers of Didot or Mame, much as they consecrated all their care to it, did not yet know perfect workmanship; they put the most intense blacks into fine sheets. The great publishers trusted that better days would leave to more clever men the task of perfecting the invention.

Wood engraving owes its revival and almost perfection in England to Thomas Bewick, who published his first work in 1770, his "General History of Quadrupeds" 1790, and his "Birds" 1797. In these works he not only depicted his subjects with the most scrupulous fidelity, but in the tailpieces of the several chapters he drew the most quaint, humorous, and faithful representations of country life. He, with his brother, John Bewick, and their pupils, among whom was Luke Clennell, had an influence upon English art and the decoration of the Book in England which exists to our day. Not alone with us, for he may be said to have repaid the debt which we owed to France for her illustrated books of the eighteenth century by stimulating the art of wood engraving, which was practised by Tony Johannot and the other illustrators of the nineteenth century.

To return to the eighteenth century, with which this chapter is specially occupied, we have said that the Royal Printing House, after various fortunes, still existed; and in 1788 it worked, for better or for worse, at the Louvre. According to the budget of that year, it cost the King 90,000 livres, of which the director had 1,400.

There were, on the other hand, a certain number of official printing offices, that of war, for example, which was devoted entirely to the work of the Ministry. It was situated at Versailles, and was created in 1768. It is told of Louis XV. that, being one day in this workshop, he found a pair of spectacles, left as if in inadvertence on a printed sheet. As his sight was weakening, he took the spectacles and looked through them. The sheet was a hyperbolical eulogium composed, as if at random, by the director Bertier, in honour of the King. Louis XV., having read the dithyramb, replaced the spectacles, and quietly said, "They are too strong; they make objects too large."

Who would believe that at the end of the century of Voltaire and Rousseau a craftsman would be found desirous of leading back the typographical art to its cradle, and of making xylographs again, under the name of polytypes? A German was the original who conceived the plan. He obtained an order of council for the establishment of his presses in 1785, but the same council suppressed them 1st November, 1787. His process was to substitute for movable characters a plate of fixed letters, and probably engraved.

Another eccentricity of typography at the end of the century was the introduction of "logography" by John Walter, the proprietor and printer of the Times newspaper, which consisted in casting whole the words in most common use, in place of separate letters. The system had soon to be abandoned, but the early numbers of the Times, which was started January 1st, 1785, were printed on it.

In the eighteenth century there was a printing establishment for each of the constituted bodies; the King, the Queen, the princes, each had their own. The royal lottery occupied a special printing house.

The young inmates of the blind asylum worked under the direction of M. Clousier, royal printer. Louis XVI. authorised the celebrated Haüy, their master, to allow them to print; and in 1786 they composed an essay on the education of the blind. Pierre François Didot was in 1785 printer to the Prince, afterwards Louis XVIII.; and he published the Aventures de Télémaque, in two quarto volumes, from this special printing office.

The English colonies in North America early established printing there, their first book, the "Book of Psalms," known as the Bay Psalm Book, being dated 1640. By the middle of the eighteenth century literature held a strong position in the colonies, the greater part of it being, as might be expected, English; but the revolution and subsequent establishment of the United States created a national American literature, which has flourished to this day. Among the printers of North America in the eighteenth century, the most famous was the celebrated philosopher Dr. Benjamin Franklin, who served his apprenticeship to the printing press in London. He returned to America in 1726, and worked as a printer with his brother at Philadelphia.

CHAPTER VI

THE BOOK IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The Didots and their improvements – The folio Racine – The school of Didot – Fine publications in England and Germany – Literature and art of the Restoration – Romanticism – Wood engraving – Bewick's pupils, Clennell, etc. – The illustrators of romances – The generation of 1840 – The Book in our days in Europe and America.

POLITICAL imitators had not been found for the French Revolution in all the neighbouring countries of Europe, but its Greco-Roman art established itself, and by degrees was introduced into the studios of painters and the printing offices. Prud'hon, Gerard, Girodet, and later Desenne, without counting the younger Moreau and his contemporaries of the older regime, rallied to the new study, forming a school of illustrators and vignettists with which the publishers could resolutely advance. England followed suit with Flaxman, West, Fuseli, Barry, and a crowd of others. Among the publishers the powerful family of the Didots took first rank, and its members, at once type-founders, printers, booksellers, and savants of the first order, were the best fitted to direct an artistic and literary movement. When Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French, the elders of the family had already brought about a number of perfections and discoveries in their profession by which their workshops had profited. François Ambroise, who died in the year of the Empire, had given an exact proportion to types, a free and elegant turn, but perhaps too regular and precise to be agreeable. He had also invented a press called the presse à un coup, in which the impression was taken by a single pull instead of being produced by a series of successive strikings. His brother, Pierre François, spoken of in the preceding chapter, was a type-founder and paper-maker at Essones, and counted among his official titles "printer to the Comte de Provence," as François Ambroise was to the Comte d'Artois.

Of these two branches equally faithful to typography, Pierre Didot, son of François Ambroise, became the head on the death of his father. Born in 1760, he had studied his art with passion, and had merited the installation of his workshops in the Louvre, where he published a celebrated collection known as the Louvre editions, the chef-d'œuvre of which was the works of Racine. The splendid execution of this book, in three large folio volumes, was a true typographical revolution. Never in any country had scrupulous perfection of detail been joined to so masterly a knowledge of disposition and form of characters. The great artists of the Davidian school had the honour of seeing their drawings reproduced as illustrations, and those named above designed the fifty-seven plates with which the edition was adorned. Pierre Didot displayed a great affectation in only printing two hundred and fifty copies of his irreproachable and marvellous work, of which a hundred had proofs of the plates before letters. Published by subscription, the ordinary edition was issued at 1,200 francs, and with proofs 1,800 francs.

To these superb works Firmin Didot, his brother, added ingenious discoveries. Struck with certain difficulties of printing as well as of correction, he imagined the welding together of the types of a forme, when once obtained without faults, so as to avoid the trouble of new composition. This process, useless for books of small number, had a capital importance in the case of reimpressions of popular and successful works. He named this method stereotype, and from 1799 he published a Racine in 18mo by this method; but the originality of the method, which he was the first to call stereotype, ended with its name, for the process had already been discovered by William Ged, a goldsmith of Edinburgh, in 1725, the first book produced in this manner being an edition of Sallust, printed in 1744, 8vo, "non typis mobilibus ut vulgo fieri solet, sed tabellis seu laminis fusis, excudebat."

This admirably directed house, we may indeed say this school of typography, formed with Renouard, Claye, Rignoux, and others, the greater number of the French publishers of the middle of the century. When the Czar Alexander went to Paris, he wished to do honour to the greatest French practitioners in the science of printing, in the persons of the brothers Pierre and Firmin Didot. But these were not the only ones. The sons of Pierre François, Henri and Pierre François II. – the latter specially applied himself to paper-making, under the name of Didot St. Leger – followed

in the footsteps of their father and uncle.

Pierre François made at Essones an excellent paper, which he brought to the perfection of making it in endless rolls, such as are made to-day for rotary machines. Bernardin de St. Pierre retired to Essones about the end of the last century, and there married the daughter of Pierre François II. It is a curious coincidence that the same village contained at once the man whose works at the beginning of the century had so extraordinary a success and the great family of printers who had given definitive impetus to typographical work. It was in this tranquil circle that the author of "Paul and Virginia," at the age of sixty, sought repose; that the publication of his book was resolved upon with all the luxury due to its success, with admirable type and with plates by Prud'hon and others. He added to it the Chaumière Indienne, written in 1790, on the eve of the Terror, which is one of the most delicate novels of the time.