The Eighteen Nineties by Holbrook Jackson — Read

The revival of the art of printing began when Messrs Charles Whittingham revived Caslon's famous founts at the Chiswick Press in 1844. The first volume of the revival was the _Diary of Lady Willoughby_, printed for Messrs Longmans. Before that date, and for a period covering something like a century and a half, a process of degeneration had been at work in the craft of bookmaking, which, towards the close of the eighteenth century, had reached a degree of positive ugliness as supreme in its own way as the positive beauty of the books by the great presses of the past. This is all the more remarkable when it is remembered that the materials with which the revival was begun existed so far back as the year 1720, when Caslon set up his type foundry in London and commenced casting those "old-faced" alphabets which had been drawn from the seventeenth-century Elzevirs and Plantins.

But although the revival of printing began so far back as 1844 with the work of the Chiswick Press, the revival of the personal note in printing did not come about until a half-century later, when, during the Eighteen Nineties, suddenly, with few obvious preliminaries, we found ourselves in the midst of the Golden Age of what may be termed subjective printing. The revival appeared to be extemporaneous, but, like all such occurrences, it was founded on a succession of real if imperceptible circumstances, not least of which were the existence of ugliness and lack of individuality which sooner or later will, in any age in which it occurs, provoke the finer and more impressionable minds to protest. The protest in this instance took, in the productions of the Vale, Kelmscott, Eragny, Essex House, and Doves presses, a creative and positive form, as natural as the foliation and fruition of plants. The tastes of such men as William Morris, Emery Walker and Charles Ricketts were revolted at the vulgar, tawdry and expressionless books of the time and, being masters of practical imagination, their protest was creative. They wanted beautiful books, and instead of grumbling with what existed, they set to work and made what they could not buy. They were moved again by that vital form of atavism which, by throwing back to an earlier period, picks up the dropped thread of tradition, and so continues the process of evolution; their protest therefore became, in the best sense of the word, a revolution: a turning round to the period when craftsmanship, imagination and life were one and indivisible.