I used to spend occasional evenings at the Boston Public Library, reading, partly for the pleasure of the contents, patly for the exhilaration of the printing, the books which William Morris had printed at the Kelmscott Press. This was only five or six years after the close of that establishment, and those who have not the necessary years to their credit or discredit, cannot possibly realize the effect of that virile printing on the English-speaking world of that day. But its effect on Boston—and Cambridge—was peculiarly and particularly fortunate. It is true, and, looked at in perspective, a bit amusing, that the first repercussion was imitative. Mr. Rogers produced such books as the Song of Roland and Raleigh’s Last Fight of the Revenge at Sea, beautiful and magnificent books, both of them, yet showing very clear evidences of the Morris influence; while Mr. Updike succumbed to the spell of Kelmscott by printing the Altar Book; and Joe Bowles’s Modern Art, the University Press’s edition of Louise Guiney’s Nine Sonnets written at Oxford, the Masters in Art series, and other books, tried valiantly to catch the mood of Morris printing with that respectable but hardly distinguished Antique Old Style type. But Boston printing, which had such sound traditions as Henry O. Houghton had maintained at the Riverside Press, after bowing temporarily to the strong blast from Upper Mall, Hammersmith, righted itself, found its true course again, and proceeded to take the Kelmscott lesson to heart with an intelligent sanity.

The first fruits of the Morris influence were those beautiful little books of Stone & Kimballs’s, based rather more on the work of the Chiswick Press than on that of Kelmscott, but which nevertheless would hardly have been born but for the work of the latter. Stone & Kimball made use of Caslon type as well as the Modernized Old Syle; their influence on current typography was probably very great, as may be evidenced by the work of their contemporaries and successors. And when the typographers came on the scene, Mr. Rogers and Mr. Updike and Mr. Heintzemann and others, they had the good sense to use the best of the traditional types, but they used them with a freer hand than anyone had done in America for a hundred years. (I do not forget Mr. De Vinne, but while he did use the traditional types, he did not use them with a free hand, and he had no such aesthetic judgement as the Boston printers in the selection of the better of the existing types.)

Let me call attention for a moment to the type faces with which these Boston printers did their work—and established their reputations. The first entry in the list of Merrymount Press editions is dated 1893. From then until 1900, Mr. Updike had, according to the dates of his fonts as given in Mr. Julian P. Smith’s account of the Press, Caslon’s Black Letter, Caslon’s Roman (from the English foundry), the Miller & Richard Scotch Face, and Goodhue’s Merrymount—a total of four type faces. By using those faces with discrimination, he had produced by 1900 a most respectable corpus of book and miscellaneous printing, and had established the reputation of the Merrymount Press as one of the leading establishments of the country in the production of good work.

Mr. Rogers began work at Riverside in 1897. For years thereafter his books are composed in Caslon, Old Style, Brimmer, with almost monotonous regularity. True, he soon designed the Montaigne, and eventually expanded his typographic repertory, but it is quite safe to say that he built his reputation on a half-dozen traditional type faces.

The Heintzemann Press, less famous for its books, but more famous for its miscellaneous printing, got along very well in general with Caslon, Old Style, a rather indifferent modern, and a few job faces.

I do not mean to infer that these men were completely content with what the American Type Foundry on Congress Street could offer from its shelves; cautiously Mr. Updike and Mr. Rogers acquired a few other types—French Gothics, Brimmer, Oxford—learning at the same time how to use them effectively. There was a paucity of good type then, as compared with today, which was, I think, a stimulus rather than a handicap. True, the restless activity of the type foundries provided the annual deluge of ornamental and fancy types, some of which, like De Vinne and Cheltenham, had enormous vogue, but which were not at all adapted to book printing nor to good printing.

To the modern enthusiast for an “economy of plenty,” this typographic “economy of scarcity” may seem hampering and stultifying. With only four or five type faces in his cases, how is a printer to interpret properly the varying moods and wishes of his customers, the delicate nuances of his various problems? How, if he is, as most printers are, a sort of typographic prostitute, can he satisfy the promiscuous desires of the advertising agency? Or how can he adequately “express” his own random and wanton creative urge?

Well, Mr. Updike did at the Merrymount Press; Mr. Rogers did at Riverside; Ginn & Company made a reputation for orderly and attractive textbooks; Mr. Heintzemann wrought miracles of form and color in his “job” printing. It is a truism with me that no man knows how to spend a million dollars. And if you do not believe that an “economy of scarcity” has its merits and its opportunities, turn to that issue of the Printing Art where there are eight pages of all sorts of printed forms beautifully worked out in one size only of type—fourteen point Caslon, caps, small caps, lower case, and italic. That exhibition is one of the most valuable I know for any printer—a revelation to the tyro, a sobering corrective and stimulant to the master printer.

This “economy of scarcity” was a dominant factor in the printed product of what sometimes seems to me the finest era in our printing history—that is, the eighteenth century. The eighteenth-century printer had, frequently, only one or two faces of type to use; usually he had his text type, Caslon or Baskerville, and a few sizes of display letters, and a handful of ornaments. Of course the French printers, like Barbou, had a fine feeling, an aesthetic touch, which has perhaps never been equalled. The English printers, clumsier, less facile, did not produce such interesting work, but they did well with the type they had and the knowledge they possessed. Our American printers, more handicapped in both elements of equipment and artistic flair, did indifferently. Yet I knave been very much impressed of late in looking at the imprints of an obscure Vermont printer, Anthony Haswell, whose life and work have been well set forth by Mr. John Spargo, to see how much style and “feeling” Haswell got into his printing, despite his typographic, political, and personal difficulties in the first Bennington printing-office. And if we are to find the very best newspaper typography of all time, we shall have to find it in the better journals of the eighteenth century, such, for instance, the Pennsylvania Gazette, or, in especial, the New York Daily Advertiser.

I speak of the “economy of scarcity” as helping and not hindering the perfection of typographic style. The story of type designs illustrates this point. Up to the early nineteenth century there was, of course, but one style for printing, as for the other crafts—that is, the contemporary method of design, which all printers followed as a matter of course, varying their interpretation if it according to their individual capacities and preferences. But all printing of a given time was generically the same. Then came the break-up of the styles, and the loss of the continuous connection with the past. In type-founding we find in the specimen books of the early nineteenth century, and subsequently in the general printing of the time, a complete break with tradition which has long provoked the mirth and denunciation of students of printing. Fat-face types, back-slants, shaded type, febrile monolines, awkward and obese ornamentation, took the place of such well-designed types as Caslon, Baskerville, Bell. Until the introduction of the modernized old style in the early ‘fifties, these typographic monstrosities ran riot, and indeed until the last decade of the century, printing was, by aesthetic standards, in very low estate.

This extract is taken from “Whither now, Typographer?“‘ a talk given in 1936 by Carl Purington Rollins before the Society of Printers in Boston. It is to be found in its entirety in Off the Dead Bank: Addresses, Reviews and Verses, New York: The Typophiles, 1949.