Fine Press: the amateur, the artist, and the printer

Another attempt to establish what fine press is, what it means, and how (or how little) it has changed. This essay, as with most of my writing, is an attempt to better understand something. In a way, it is an admission of ignorance and the fact that I have written about this topic on several occasions does not bode well! 

The concept of fine press printing has its roots in the print trade. John Bell in 1787 used the term ‘fine print’ in an advertisement for his newly installed printing establishment and wanted to make a clear distinction between his standards and those of the average trade printer. Fine print became a standard that printers might try to attain, although no one could say, with any precision, what, exactly fine print was, except that it was superior to the rather poor standards of the time.

 However, something significant happened when Charles Whittington II at the Chiswick Press in London revived the original Caslon type in 1843–4 and then went on to print some markedly superior books for the bookshop owner, publisher and, in everything but name, book designer, William Pickering. This work was described as a ‘print revival’ and became synonymous with ‘fine print’. 

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For those working in the print trade at the turn of the twentieth century, the fourth largest employer in London at that time, the establishment of a small number of privately owned printing presses was hardly alarming, although the inordinate amount of attention they garnered might have been irksome. Perhaps more troubling to the printer was the loss of exclusive access to type and presses. However, commercial printing was on a different trajectory: many printer’s had taken to wearing white lab coats, and preferred to describe their occupation as being more ‘science’ than craft, so what did it matter if a few iron hand-presses – inefficient relics – had found their way into the spare room of a few amateur print enthusiasts? The printing industry was modernising, and the commercial printer considered himself on a par with the engineer and the scientist. Reliance on human guile was fast becoming a thing of the past. 

Modernity brought important benefits. Books, magazines, and newspapers became more affordable as printing presses became faster and more efficient. But without the time, or perhaps even willingness, to consider alternative materials and processes, efficiency meant compromise in order to provide a guaranteed outcome. Nevertheless, lower costs and increased diversity resulted in an irresistible appetite for reading. Reading was no longer a sign of wealth or status. By the 1890s the literacy rate was 97% making reading the universal form of recreation; an increase of almost 40% from just fifty years earlier. An interest in print and printing itself was inevitable and, for some, the impetus to exploit its cultural and aesthetic potential was irresistible.

 If the initial appearance of amateur printers had been merely irksome the suggestion that they were now forging a ‘print revival’ had more serious implications and the response could be blunt. When William Morris showed the head of a large commercial printing company ‘with pretensions to artistic leanings’ around his Kelmscott press, ‘The visitor watched the careful setting and justifying of the compositors, watched the pressmen examining each sheet as it was pulled and commented “That’s all very well for Mr Morris, but there isn’t a man here that would be worth a penny an hour to me after he’d been here a week”’.1 

It would be misleading to suggest that this comment, reported by Morris’ son-in-law, Henry H. Sparling2 was the prevailing response of the trade to Morris (my own description of ‘modernisers’ wearing white lab coats, is, doubtless, equally prejudiced). There were certainly trade printers who had earned a reputation for exceptional craftsmanship – Theodore Low De Vinne in New York, and Charles Jacobi at the Chiswick Press in London, for example – achievements all the more significant for having been accomplished within the commercial maelstrom whilst admiring the work of the Kelmscott Press. De Vinne wrote, ‘No one can examine a book made by Morris without the conviction that it shows the hand of a master’. But influential printers and typographers who came after Morris were forthright in their criticism of those they called ‘traditionalists’. Stanley Morison, in a letter to D B Updike, 1923,3 described Jacobi as ‘the greatest bore in Christendom and very ignorant’, whilst Carl P Rollins said of De Vinne, ‘Conventional types, conventionally arranged, and printed with precision: this is the worst and the best that may be said of De Vinne’s printing’.3 A Technical mastery was no longer sufficient: a book had to show the hand of its maker. 

When Charles Whittingham II persuaded the Caslon foundry to recast the original ‘old style’ Caslon in great primer (18 point) it was because he was dissatisfied with the popular ‘modern’ types based on Didot and Bodoni and used it with great aplomb and to critical success for The Diary of Lady Willoughby for Longman Publishers. Not surprising then, that it was to Whittingham that the young William Morris turned – Didot and Bodoni being his bête noire – when he was considering the publication of his first book in 1858. 

Some thirty-three years later, and inspired by what he had seen and the people he met at Chiswick, Morris set up the Kelmscott Press. ‘Fine printing’ was the generic term Morris used to describe the work of lauded printers of the 15th century and was determined to revive those ‘fine’ standards. However, not being restricted by ‘commercial exigencies’, Morris could also put his substantial craft skills at the service of his personal predilections and do whatever might be necessary ‘...according to what its nature, as a book, demands of Art’. The results astonished: certainly his technical standards were admired, but more significant was the fact that Morris’ books vehemently contradicted the long-held belief (and solemnly argued by John Smith in The Printer’s Grammar of 1755) that the typographer’s role in the design of printed matter should not only be unheralded but must also remain effectively invisible. Instead, Morris gave full rein to his personal and distinctive preoccupations, the result being that Kelmscott Press books are arguably the most recognisable of any book before or since.

 In so doing, Morris changed the definition of fine printing. In 1924, Stanley Morison in his Four Centuries of Fine Printing defined the term thus: ‘The fine printer begins where the careful printer has left off. For “fine” printing adds something to what the careful printer has accomplished. When those perceptions are added to a knowledge of the technical processes there will result a work expressing logic, consistency and perhaps, though not necessarily, personality. Fine printing may be described as the product of a lively and seasoned intelligence working with carefully chosen type, ink and paper.’ The typographer was now allowed a presence – a ‘personality’ no less – and, by the use of ‘mind and understanding’, become a collaborator in the construction and transmission of the meaning of a given text. Morison, however, stopped well short of sanctioning the idea that the typographer might be an artist. He disliked the self-aggrandising nature of the art world and was too close to the pressures of commercial imperatives, despite his political beliefs, to ignore the necessity of profit: ‘Typography is the efficient means to an essentially utilitarian and only accidentally aesthetic end.’4 Nevertheless, there is a sense that for Morison ‘fine’ print did not merely describe a standard but rather a vision, a resolve, and a method of practice. 

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In 1924, Morison was sharing an office with Oliver Simon in central London from where they worked as typographic designers; Simon for the Curwen Press and Morison, previously with the Pelican and the Cloister Presses and now a consultant for the Monotype Corporation, and typographic advisor for Cambridge University Press. Neither had received what could be called a formal print training but both took their lead from the achievements of the American typographer Bruce Rogers who, from 1900 until 1912, had been solely responsibly for the design and production of ‘fine editions’ at the Riverside Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Animosity from a workforce angry at amateurs not only being allowed on the premises but taking ownership of the printer’s work was hardly surprising. This was surely exacerbated by the fact that Rogers, like Morison and Simon, had also received no formal print training. Nevertheless, Rogers’ critical and commercial success was important in helping Morison and Simon to establish the symbiotic relationship of typographic designer with the attainment of fine print in Britain. 

Simon was twenty-four years old, recently demobilised and, with nothing more than a passion for books and the temerity of youth when he arrived at the Curwen Press in 1919. Harold Curwen, its Director, offered him an introductory (one-year) training (not an apprenticeship) for which Simon paid a £100 premium. This was augmented by printing classes at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. Initially a bank clerk, Morison worked for a brief but informative period as an assistant on the journal Imprint, bringing him into contact with Edward Johnston, Eric Gill and the Monotype Corporation and then alongside Francis Meynell at the Pelican Press, before being promoted to ‘Designer of Printed Matter’ on Meynell’s departure in 1919. 

Together Simon and Morison produced The Fleuron: A Journal of Typography, initially edited and designed (and financed) by Simon, to demonstrate what they considered to be the essential role and purpose of the independent typographer in the revival of fine print. Substantial in form, restrained in design, The Fleuron was the first typography journal aimed at an audience other than the print trade. Morison put it more bluntly, it was for ‘that far more important man, the printer’s customer’, the suggestion being that the trade lacked the will-power to revive fine printing of its own accord. Indeed, Morison’s more guarded opinion of the trade printer was derisory ‘...the professionals are not worth a mention’.4a Although critically acclaimed by the printing trade press, the significance of The Fleuron was its establishment of ‘fine press’ as the raison d’être of the typographic designer – ‘amateurs’ as many in the trade preferred to describe to the likes of Morison and Simon.5 Articles critically analysing the work of fellow designers such as Bruce Rogers, W. A. Dwiggins, D. B. Updike, Frederic Warde, Rudolf Koch, and Eric Gill were featured. Later periodic publications such as Print-User’s Year Book and Graphic Arts Production Yearbook were more candid in declaring the typographic and/or graphic designer as their intended audience. 

In order to sustain such activities many designers chose a different strategy to Simon, preferring to remain independent of the printer by establishing their own roster of clients and initiating arrangements with printers on a project-by-project basis. The influence of The Fleuron played its part in this transition but other factors, such as increasingly more sophisticated technology, were already causing the print industry to diversify into various increasingly specialised activities. With the design process taken out of their hands the idea of fine print being the pinnacle ambition for the printer evaporated. It had become a service industry for the designer. 

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The fragmentation and resulting diminishment of the commercial printer (and, paradoxically, the increasing power and significance of print media) provided additional impetus to those amateur enthusiasts who had bought their own hand presses. First and foremost, privately owned presses were set up to enable someone not only to print ‘for the pleasure he gets from the experience but also [because] he is free to choose his own text which he can design, edit, set, illustrate and produce according to his own taste for himself or his friends without catering to the profit-minded publisher’.6 Or as Beatrice Warde later said it, the ‘man who is still able to utter those almost obsolete but strangely thrilling words, “All my Own Work”.’7 

There is a faintly actious tone in Warde’s words. As Publicity Manager at Monotype, she was a close colleague of Morison who did not disguise his distaste for private presses, ‘The amateurs [...] are too arts & crafty for my taste, they feel it almost lése majesté to admit that Morris was an anachronism.’8 Nevertheless, it was Morris’s ‘typographic adventure’ that had caused Morison – and every other significant typographic designer of his generation – to aspire to be creators of fine print, but importantly, unlike Morris, from within the turmoil of commercial enterprise. This was no easy task, requiring decisions to be constantly justified on financial grounds, inevitable arguments and sometimes having to make bitter compromises when alternate priorities intervene. To those embroiled in the intricate and banal complexities that plague every commercial enterprise, the private press, especially if financially supported by other means (meaning there need be little regard for time or effort) ‘fine print’ seemed an easy goal.

 Fine print certainly became synonymous with private presses, ‘brimful of enthusiasm for Morris’, that blossomed and became a movement of cultural value through the 1890s to the Ashendene, Gregynog, and Golden Cockerel Presses in the 1920s and much of the 30s. Private presses (or perhaps it was their collectors) cultivated a moral superiority (much despised by Morison): not only were they unsullied by the strictures of profit, they were, in short, the summation of the chaste judgment of hand and eye. Despite this high regard, only one commercial enterprise, the Arden Press, launched by Bernard Newdigate in 1904, attempted to work in a similar manner. 8A 

The intrinsic individuality of a hand-made book became (and remains) a crucial part of the private press allure because it represented resistance, a stand against the standardisation of mass-manufactured merchandise. Paradoxically, the perception of these presses existing in quiet, self-imposed rural isolation gave them a radical as well as a romantic aspect that put them at odds with societal ideas of ‘progress’. Indeed, location was often implicit in criticism from the commerical printing fraternity which described such presses as ‘out of touch and irrelevant’.9 Looking at the best private press work some hundred years later, their socio-political stance fades into insignificance in comparison to the startling originality achieved in some of the work: Gregynog’s The Revelation of Saint John the Divine (1932) for example, or the Golden Cockerel’s Canterbury Tales (1929) and The Four Gospels (1931) entitles these books to be recognised as masterpieces of fine press printing.10 

It is all of this, plus the unequivocal presence of the maker (intentionally displayed or not) that encouraged others to describe private press books as ‘art’. Morris, of course, stated this to be his prime aim, ‘By the ideal book, I suppose we are to understand a book not limited by commercial exigencies of price: we can do what we like with it, according to what its nature, as a book, demands of Art.’11 Those that followed were generally more circumspect. The press owner’s satisfaction, pleasure and learning came first. Financial expectations reflect this, the aim generally being that the private press, once established, simply paid for itself whilst in the commercial sector even the most generous proprietor must ensure that the press ‘succeeds as a business affair in order not to fail as an Art’.12 The possibility of making a profit, something private presses rarely achieved, may be part of the vision but is not the main consideration. Pleasure and self-improvement came first and were predominant in the creative endeavour. Private press books are not always items of technical perfection – despite monumental effort – but such flaws take on a value, as much for what they reveal about the personality and intent of their creator as any incidental or accidental aesthetic attributes. Fine printing can be flawed and yet remain ‘fine printing’, in the same way that there exists both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ art. 

Gibbings was an artist and bought the press because it offered the opportunity for him to publish books with engravings. He achieved far more. Gibbings had made books as he saw fit, as works of art whose edition size was limited to what could be made without loss of fervour. Only when finished could a sale price be calculated. This credo was compromised when, in August 1927, Bennett Cerf of the American publishers Random House, made Gibbings an offer too tempting to refuse. 

That fine printing might also be art had been integral to the hugely successful marketing of limited edition books in an America experiencing unprecedented prosperity during the 1920s. Roughly half of all Golden Cockerel Books were already sold in America through several of the leading bookshops. However, Cerf offered to buy 250 copies of all Golden Cockerel books for distribution in the United States and Canada.13 With these guaranteed sales, Gibbings substantially increased the size of Cockerel editions, generally to the 500 limit stated in the commercial agreement with Cerf (edition sizes had previously been around 250 to 350). This deal did not affect the ‘private press’ status of the press but it certainly meant that edition sizes were now printed to order; ‘fervour’ no longer being the deciding factor. The Golden Cockerel Press ceased to be a private press when Robert Gibbings sold it in 1933 and it became a publishing house of fine press books with typography and printing transferred to the Chiswick Press.14 

Random House issued fine press books exclusively, commissioning the most highly regarded and influential of American fine press printers, including Updike’s Merrymount Press in Boston; Elmer Adler’s Pynson Printers in New York; the Grabhorn Press in San Francisco; and the companies of William Edwin Rudge Mount Vernon, New York, and and John Henry Nash in San Francisco. Other publishers, such as Alfred Knopf, Harper Brothers, and Scribner’s, issued fine press editions in addition to their standard list. Commissions from the numerous fine press book clubs, notably the Book Club of California and the Grolier Club in New York, provided opportunities for ambitious printers to demonstrate their finer skills. Never more so than in the years following the financial crash of 1929. 

The crash ruthlessly exposed the fickle nature of market-driven ambitions which not only damaged the economic standing of publishers trading in ‘the book beautiful’ but also the cultural prestige of fine press printing in general. Suddenly, as sales collapsed, the claim of ‘beauty’ seemed conceited and the enthusiastic dismissal of everything contemporary patronising. For the fine press publisher, the crash proved that the ‘timeless’ values they had attributed to fine press books were anything but permanent. A high proportion of this work was designed for a market presupposed to conservatism and had become entirely predictable. Joseph Blumenthal, not a writer shy of distributing compliments, could not find any distinguishing features in a typical example from this period, ‘The typography is of a classical and felicitous clarity that is difficult to describe’ although he could absolve himself by adding that the ‘presswork is luminous – sharp and deep.’15 But technical excellence was not sufficient in itself. Impeccable print poorly designed or lacking anything remotely challenging, practically or culturally,  could not, after Morris, result in a fine press book. 

For the devoted fine press printer nothing really changed, except that survival, let alone standards, were increasingly difficult to uphold. Some were forced to close, others took the opportunity to retire. The brothers Edwin and Robert’s Grabhorn Press was one of those able to navigate a path through the tumult of the 1930s and, in fact, continued until 1965.16 This, together with the Book Club of California, since 1912, established an important sanctuary for American fine print that would blossom again after the Second World War, this time with artists and writers to the fore. 

Morris described the diverse range of activities necessary in the making of his books as the ‘minor arts’.17 At the end of the 19th century there remained an intractable distinction between the ‘fine’ arts and the ‘applied’ (or ‘minor’, ‘decorative’ or ‘lesser’) arts. Morris considered this a false distinction that diminished both the value and ambition of the craftsman, insisting instead that all aspects of the making process remain indivisible, even when resolved by different hands. With a single vision intact, Morris argued, the ‘minor arts’ could combine to create a book that transcends its elemental purpose.18 The final lines of ‘Printing’, an essay he co-authored with Emery Walker, states, ‘Therefore, granted well-designed type, due spacing of the lines and words, and proper position of the page on the paper, all books might be at least comely and well-looking: and if to these good qualities were added really beautiful ornament and pictures, printed books might once again illustrate to the full the position of our Society that a work of utility might be also a work of art, if we cared to make it so.’19 

Acquiescence to tradition is the last thing an artist generally sets out to achieve. Whilst fine press printing had undoubtedly achieved works that were also works of art, the form these books took remained very much a celebration of those characteristics that make a book a ‘book’, in other words, a work of utility. The process was one of enduring reference to previous values, and the revival of skills required and materials carefully sourced to give those values a new materiality. 

Post 1945, there were a number of artists who began to explore printing not so much for its intrinsic aesthetic potential but, instead, for its egalitarian character. Printing technology was changing and had never been cheaper, more plentiful or accessible. Letterpress, though technically superior, was no longer the standard commercial means of production, instead, lithography offered both flexibility and lower costs. In addition, duplicating machines, purchased by larger corporations for internal communications, was attracting the attention of young writers seeking to bypass imperious publishing houses. Print was offering new opportunities; the mantra was populist, spontaneous, and to hell with permanence. Professor Marshall McLuhan, author of the irreverent The Mechanical Bride (1951) and The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) declared ‘advertising [to be] the greatest art form of the 20th century’, perfectly interpreting the tone of the period: to be serious was to be seriously out of touch. 

For aspiring artists, the art gallery system seemed to be in a state of entrenchment, fixated on the past and disinterested in the present. Print and printing, potentially cheap and without pretension, offered artists an effective way of circumnavigating the art gallery. ‘Editions’ became ‘multiples’ and, conceivably sold for the price of a coffee. Meanwhile, young writers such as d. a. Levi and Ted Berrigan, frustrated by the indifference displayed by publishing houses, turned to duplicating machines, often used illicitly, to run off small editions of typewritten poetry to sell in the local independent bookstore. With stapler in hand the author, now effectively a typographer, printer and publisher, the opportunity to reinvent the book was impossible to resist. Rub-down sheets of Letraset, handwriting and drawings, coloured and patterned papers, sections of newspapers and tipped-in photographs were utilised and, sometimes, even letterpress. Disrespect and contempt for the establishment in all its forms was often as big an incentive as the freedom of expression, and the art gallery system and publishing houses were as ‘establishment’ as it was possible to be – apart, that is, from fine press print. From the point of view of the 1960s, fine press printing was distinctively historic. It was also too slow, too serious, and far too expensive. 

The last of the true private presses, the Ashendene and the Gregynog, had closed in 1935 and 1954.20 In America, the Grabhorn Press had produced what many consider to be its finest book, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1930, despite continuing until 1961, so the notion that fine press printing was ‘historic’ is understandable. But it was far from dead. Pockets of resistance lingered, often motivated as much by the sheer allure of the tools and equipment as by the possible results gained from their use; indeed a passion that demanded audacious acts of rescue be made to save rare and invaluable material from distruction21 – such as the sudden demise of the Curwen Press in 1984. 

Between 1960 and 1980 the closure of so many smaller jobbing printers and the availability of letterpress printing presses – often free – proved irresistible for those bibliophiles, print historians, lovers of literature and bookshop proprietors who had dreamt of publishing their own books. The intention for most of these new amateur press owners was modest: choose an author or poet – sometimes themselves, naturally – and then print and publish a book that befits the text. Similarities between this resurgence of small-scale, craft-orientated print activity and the origins of the private movement are tempting but erroneous. The aim was usually to do little more than reflect the appearance of past books of repute and apply those same characteristics to the task in hand. ‘Fine print’ might have been an ambition, but unlike the private presses, ‘art’ was not. For fine press printing to command the meaningful presence it had achieved at the height of the Private Press movement, it required a meaningful purpose, something more than mere technical perfection. 

The development of artists’ books22 had been quite separate from that of fine press books, but it was the adoption of books by artists that was the prime cause of a renewed revival of fine press during the 1970s. 

As with any mode of creative endeavour, there is little that is formulaic about the making of artists’ books. The use of materials, the organisation or arrangement of its parts, or physical make-up are all apt to challenge notions of ‘best practice’ – that is if such practice is known. For some, perhaps the majority, elemental printed media was appropriated because of its cheap, even transitory nature – characteristics defined as ‘democratic’ and exemplified by Ed Ruscha’s sardonic celebration of triviality, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963). For such aspirations, the concept of ‘fine press’ was not just irrelevant but counter-productive. This kind of independent publishing, mocking and deliberately subverting the blandest – almost invisible – kind of mass-market printing (Ruscha had previously worked as a graphic designer) became an end in itself, smart and cynical but ultimately an impasse. 

When the point is reached that materials need to be less customary, when a page needs to feel, sound, and move in a particular way when turned, artists find themselves seeking out a closer affinity with the raw materials at their disposal and doubtless begin to explore ways to make them work more exactingly. In other words, the artist will become acquainted with the notion of ‘fine print’. Of course, it is equally possible that a fine press practitioner, given the time to ponder, will discover the delight of molding familiar materials to suit new and specific expressive purposes. This kind of empowerment requires risk-taking – but then what is craft without risk? Once achieved the sense of elation is addictive and technical perfection will never suffice again. 

California’s reputation for fine printing was rejuvenated when a veritable ‘book arts revival’ took place with the establishment of new presses such as Harry Reese’s Turkey Press (1974) Felicia Rice’s Moving Parts Press (1977) Carolee Campbell’s Ninja Press (1984) Peter Koch’s Hormone Derange and Editions Koch (1988) and Lawrence G Van Velzer & Peggy Gotthold’s Foolscap Press (1990).23 Initially conceived in the ‘fine press’ mold, these presses were put to a purpose that was more courageous and less conventional in both form and content. ‘Fine press artists’ books’, although a convoluted phrase, accurately describes the high levels of exactitude sought by artists in pursuit of a creative accord. With exactitude comes, of necessity, materials of a proven standard and reliable character: requisites required of sound craftsmanship, whatever the occupation. 

The necessity of creative ambition in fine press printing, hinted at by the Chiswick Press, made explicit by Morris and Gibbings in the private presses; and by Rogers and Morison in the commercial sector, today occupies the unsettled and complex domain of artists’ books. Here, quietly embedded in a spirited adventure, the concept of fine press remains not only viable but thriving as new demands are asked of it. With this in mind, Koch, on establishing the Codex Foundation in 2006 declared his aim to be the encouragement of a ‘renegade temperament’ that is aligned rather than intimidated by the idea of fine press.24 The Codex ‘mission statement’ is a more expansive, ‘...bringing together the best of the best book artists and fine press printers from around the world to share their work, explore new and old concepts, and to start an on-going conversation about the fate and future of the book as an essential art form.’ 

The future of the book (no, not that plastic husk with its black, long-dead screen at the bottom of a drawer somewhere) has never been more vibrant than it is today. Some thirty years after the arrival of the desktop computer, the authority and allure of ink on paper has not only survived but rediscovered its raison d’etre. A book with pages that must be turned25 remains a prized object. National libraries around the world do not support conservation programmes merely to protect a book’s content – that will have already been recorded in a myriad of ways – but, instead, to maintain the integrity of the book as an object and, in so doing, preserve those inextricable links with the place, the people and the time of its making. From the most lavish to the humblest, print has and will continue to provide invaluable cultural landmarks.