Catalogue of an Exhibition of the History of the Art of Printing, 1450-1920
The catalogue of a 1920 exhibition at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, collected by Elmer Adler, with notes by John Rothwell Slater, professor of English at the University of Rochester, and printed by the Typothetae of Rochester.
What it is
The catalogue of a 1920 exhibition at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, collected by Elmer Adler, with notes by John Rothwell Slater, professor of English at the University of Rochester, and printed by the Typothetae of Rochester. The preface calls printing both a useful art and a fine art, and sets out to trace the rise, decline and revival of good taste among master printers. Its 367 numbered items open with eight historical sections: manuscripts from Egyptian hieroglyphs to a French Book of Hours; 41 incunabula owned locally; the sixteenth-century golden age of Aldus, Froben, Estienne and Plantin; the decline of the next two centuries; early American printing; the age of machinery; the revival from William Morris to Updike and Goudy; and seventeen books designed by Bruce Rogers. Oddities, local imprints, title pages, portraits and a bibliography follow. Each note judges spacing, type, margins and presswork.
Why read it now
For a marketer the value is in the notes, which judge each page by a few repeated tests: clear type, white space, sound margins, one design idea. A 1593 title page is praised because its printer knew "that the whites are part of the picture"; a 1694 Cambridge title page is labelled "A typographical crime" for crowded lines and mixed types. Those tests hold, and usability research agrees that cluttered layouts slow reading and bury the main message. Two notes touch selling directly: Aldus's small octavos sold at popular prices, a format change that widened the market, and a 1569 law book whose publisher used pictures to lure buyers. What has dated: the taste is one-sided, dismissing most printing from 1600 to 1850 and treating the Morris-led revival as the peak, and commercial printing gets only a sneer at "printers of advertising booklets". Use: audit a brochure or landing page with Slater's questions. Is the type clear, is there air around the headline, does one design idea hold the page?
Passages worth keeping
A well printed page is a design in black and white.
الصفحة المطبوعة جيدًا عمل تصميمي قائم بذاته، يعتمد على توازن الحبر والبياض قبل أي زينة أو لون.
that the whites are part of the picture.
المساحة البيضاء ليست فراغًا ضائعًا، بل عنصر في التصميم يمنح النص وضوحه وهيبته.
The enterprising publisher has sought to help his sales by luring the unwary customer with pictures.
حتى في القرن السادس عشر استعمل الناشرون الصور لبيع كتب جافة الموضوع، فالصورة هنا أداة تسويق.
The crowded pages, mixture of incongruous types, indiscriminate use of italics, employment of large head-letters without sufficient white space to set them off, all mark the decadent taste of the period.
الازدحام وخلط الحروف والإفراط في المائل والعناوين الكبيرة بلا مساحة حولها علامات تصميم رديء في أي عصر.
These pocket editions of the classics and of current literature were sold at popular prices and were widely circulated.
تصغير حجم الكتاب وخفض سعره فتح سوقًا جديدة من القراء، وهو ابتكار في شكل المنتج قبل أن يكون ابتكارًا في الطباعة.
What it teaches best
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