The Art and Craft of Printing: Collected Essays
A 1902 American reprint, 210 copies printed by Clarke Conwell at the Elston Press, New Rochelle, collecting William Morris's writing on how books should look.
What it is
A 1902 American reprint, 210 copies printed by Clarke Conwell at the Elston Press, New Rochelle, collecting William Morris's writing on how books should look. It opens with Morris's 1895 note on his aims in founding the Kelmscott Press: hand-made linen paper modelled on a Bolognese sheet of about 1473, a roman type drawn from Jenson's Venetian letter of 1470 to 1476, a readable gothic, tight and even word spacing, little leading, and margins that widen from inner to top to outer to bottom. S. C. Cockerell's 1898 history follows, with the Golden, Troy and Chaucer types, 644 designs by Morris in seven years, and an annotated list of all 52 Kelmscott works with print runs and prices, the Chaucer among them at twenty pounds. Then come the 1893 address The Ideal Book and the essay Printing, written with Emery Walker.
Why read it now
Two things here still hold. His layout rules: tight, even word spacing, restrained leading, the spread as the unit of design, and ornament that belongs to the page instead of sitting on it. Web and slide designers still work from the same ideas under the names grid and spread. His business model holds too. Kelmscott sold small runs, mostly 200 to 500 paper copies priced from two guineas to twenty pounds, printed vellum copies at several times the price, and sent the wood blocks to the British Museum on condition they not be printed from for a hundred years, to keep the designs from going stale. That is scarcity built into the product, not claimed in an ad. What has dated: his verdict that Bodoni is the most illegible type ever cut; legibility studies since Tinker find small differences between common text faces, with familiarity doing much of the work. His medieval taste also made dense pages that tire readers over long texts. Use: write your house design rules as measurable choices, as he did for margins and spacing, and let limited editions carry the premium.
Passages worth keeping
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
هدف موريس الجمع بين الجمال وسهولة القراءة؛ فالكتاب الجميل الذي يُتعب العين فاشل في نظره.
the unit of a book is not one page, but a pair of pages.
الصفحتان المتقابلتان تُريان معًا، لذلك يجب تصميمهما معًا لا كل صفحة وحدها.
To be short, the letters should be designed by an artist, and not an engineer.
تصميم الحروف عمل فني يحتاج عينًا مدرّبة، لا حسابًا هندسيًا جامدًا.
The sweltering hideousness of the Bodoni letter, the most illegible type that was ever cut, with its preposterous thicks and thins
حكم قاسٍ على حرف بودوني بأنه أصعب الحروف قراءة بسبب التباين الحاد بين خطوطه، وهو ذوق شخصي لا تؤيده دراسات الوضوح الحديثة.
no more time is occupied, or cost incurred, in casting, setting, or printing beautiful letters than in the same operations with ugly ones.
الحرف الجميل لا يكلّف وقتًا ولا مالًا أكثر من القبيح، فلا عذر لاختيار القبيح بحجة التوفير.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
Read the original archive.org
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