Last word
Black'n'white
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Do things get better or worse? You will remember the conversation on the subject between Mr Foster the optimist and Mr Escot the pessimist. (I say 'you will' remember — a tiresome expression. You won't remember unless you have read Headlong Hall.) Perhaps they both missed the point. The question should perhaps be about the nature of progress. It is 'advance, advancement; growth, development; usu. in good sense, continuous improvement', according to the dictionary, but then language surely begs the question if improvement is taken as something chronological or linear.
If that sounds obscure, return to the original question and apply it to two arts, a language and a craft. Are better novels being written today than a hundred years ago. the age of Tolstoy, George Eliot and Flaubert? Better string quarters than two hundred years ago. the age of Haydn and Mozart? These are what's know as questions which answer themselves. It might not be a cause for surprise if the English language were not actually getting better; in fact (as far as 'fact' is the apt word) it is getting worse. T. S. Eliot (no relation) pointed out that English 'peaked' in the 16th century. when it had a richness and expressive power which it has been losing every since and which cannot be recovered. something that does not seem to have occurred to those who try to rewrite the liturgy of the Church of England.
Printing ought to have got better: industries do. judged in their own terms: So it has to the extent that hot-metal machine setting is quicker than hand-setting, rotary presses more efficient than flat-beds; and again as lithography and photocomposition succeed letterpress. But printing is a craft as well as an industry. Indeed it is a craft which can aspire to the status of an art. As such it has by no means enjoyed a history of Fosterian progress. It is arguable that in its early years printing achieved an eminence from which it has been declining ever since: there is scarcely a more beautiful book than Gutenberg's 42-line Bible.
In the 16th century the descent began with the chaste simplicity of early typography — some of it — replaced by confused ornamental styles. At least twice subsequently there have been reactionary movements (in the best sense ). in the 18th century when Bodoni and Baskerville separately returned to simplicity, and again in the first part of our century when Stanley Morison and his associates did the same. Morison's battle is by no means won, as John Ryder reminds us in a new book The Case for Legibility (Bodley Head £3.50).
Perhaps booklet, or bookette; anyway 78 pages most handsomely produced, as one would expect from the author, the outtanding publishing production manager of the age. Mr Ryder accepts Morison's basic premiss that typography should help and not hinder the reader, which may sound obvious but has not been a universally followed precept.
But he does not deal with the great puzzle about contemporary British printing. The contrast between American and British books — and I see many of both — is striking. The British easily excel from the point of view of design. Even when they don't have the limpid elegance of books designed by Mr Ryder, the products of London houses almost never descend to the depths of chichi. affectation affectation and clumsiness that is often found in New York books. But our printers — rather than designers — seem quite unable to match the standards of American presswork. One cannot expect commercial printers to master the extreme blackand-white contrast of a small press such as Madersteig's, but there is no excuse for the greyness of so many British books.
Nor does this seem to be a question of economics. One of the handsomest editions to be published in recent years is the Collected Works of Bagehot edited by Norman St John-Stevas. The publishers, the Economist, have not spared any expense and the volumes are finely designed and produced — it even has footnotes on the pages and a real cloth binding, both almost unheard of nowadays. But the machining is just, perceptibly, below the highest American standards.
Still, this edition compares very favourably with some recent products of our university presses. I notice with dismay that a good number of Clarendon Press books are now printed by commercial printers rather than in Walton Street. One might have thought that the whole point of the Oxford Press was to be able to print its most important titles at home. When they don't it shows. No reviewer that I read pointed out that Professor Gordon Craig's Germany 18664945, published last year in the Oxford History of Modern Europe series, was not printed in Oxford but was liberally salted with misprints, a poor reflection on the Press in its quincentennial year.
Maybe there are grounds for optimism. Though the printing industry is in a bad way, undercapitalized and overmanned. held back by union obscurantism, the latest developments in printing technology will have to be applied practically one day. One day British paper mills, which for no obvious reason are unable to now, will turn out paper of the same superb whiteness and opacity that Americans print their colourplate books on. As one printer, BAS, has shown, English companies can achieve the highest standard of excellence in photocomposition and litho presswork. Let it spread out from Hampshire. Who knows — one day it might even filter down to newspapers and magazines.
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