Of The Decorative Illustration Of Books Old And New Part 1

Of the Decorative Ill.u.s.tration of Books Old and New.

by Walter Crane.

PREFACE.

This book had its origin in the course of three (Cantor) Lectures given before the Society of Arts in 1889; they have been amplified and added to, and further chapters have been written, treating of the very active period in printing and decorative book-ill.u.s.tration we have seen since that time, as well as some remarks and suggestions touching the general principles and conditions governing the design of book pages and ornaments.

It is not nearly so complete or comprehensive as I could have wished, but there are natural limits to the bulk of a volume in the "Ex-Libris"

series, and it has been only possible to carry on such a work in the intervals s.n.a.t.c.hed from the absorbing work of designing. Within its own lines, however, I hope that if not exhaustive, the book may be found fairly representative of the chief historical and contemporary types of decorative book-ill.u.s.tration.

In the selection of the ill.u.s.trations, I have endeavoured to draw the line between the purely graphic aim, on the one hand, and the ornamental aim on the other--between what I should term the art of _pictorial statement_ and the art of _decorative treatment_; though there are many cases in which they are combined, as, indeed, in all the most complete book-pictures, they should be. My purpose has been to treat of ill.u.s.trations which are also book-ornaments, so that purely graphic design, as such, unrelated to the type, and the conditions of the page, does not come within my scope.

As book-ill.u.s.tration pure and simple, however, has been treated of in this series by Mr. Joseph Pennell, whose selection is more from the graphic than the decorative point of view, the balance may be said to be adjusted as regards contemporary art.

I must offer my best thanks to Mr. Gleeson White, without whose most valuable help the book might never have been finished. He has allowed me to draw upon his remarkable collection of modern ill.u.s.trated books for examples, and I am indebted to many artists for permission to use their ill.u.s.trations, as well as to Messrs. George Allen, Bradbury, Agnew and Co., J. M. Dent and Co., Edmund Evans, Geddes and Co., Hacon and Ricketts (the Vale Press), John Lane, Lawrence and Bullen, Sampson Low and Co., Macmillan and Co., Elkin Mathews, Kegan Paul and Co., Walter Scott, Charles Scribner's Sons, and Virtue and Co., for their courtesy in giving me, in many cases, the use of the actual blocks.

To Mr. William Morris, who placed his beautiful collection of early printed books at my disposal, from which to choose ill.u.s.trations; to Mr.

Emery Walker for help in many ways; to Mr. John Calvert for permission to use some of his father's ill.u.s.trations; and to Mr. A. W. Pollard who has lent me some of his early Italian examples, and has also supervised my bibliographical particulars, I desire to make my cordial acknowledgments.

WALTER CRANE.

KENSINGTON: _July 18th, 1896_.

NOTE TO THIRD EDITION.

A reprint of this book being called for, I take the opportunity of adding a few notes, chiefly to Chapter IV., which will be found further on with the numbers of the pages to which they refer.

As touching the general subject of the book one may, perhaps, be allowed to record with some satisfaction that the study of lettering, text-writing, and illumination is now seriously taken up in our craft-schools. The admirable teaching of Mr. Johnston of the Central School of Arts and Crafts and the Royal College of Art in this connection cannot be too highly spoken of. We have had, too, admirable work, in each kind, from Mr. Reuter, Mr. Mortimer, Mr. Treglown, Mr. Alan Vigers, Mr.

Graily Hewitt, and Mr. A. E. R. Gill; and Mrs. Traguair and Miss Kingsford are remarkable for the beauty, delicacy, and invention of their work as illuminators among the artists who are now pursuing this beautiful branch of art.

So that the ancient crafts of the scribe and illuminator may be said to have again come to life, and this, taken in connection with the revival of printing as an art, is an interesting and significant fact.

As recent contributions to the study of lettering we have Mr. Lewis F.

Day's recent book of Alphabets, and Mr. G. Woolliscroft Rhead's sheets for school use.

I have to deplore the loss of my former helper in this book, Mr. Gleeson White, since the work first appeared. His extensive knowledge of, and sympathy with the modern book ill.u.s.trators of the younger generation was remarkable, and as a designer himself he showed considerable skill and taste in book-decoration, chiefly in the way of covers. As a most estimable and amiable character he will always be remembered by his friends.

WALTER CRANE.

KENSINGTON: _June, 1904_.

CHAPTER I.

OF THE EVOLUTION OF THE ILl.u.s.tRATIVE AND DECORATIVE IMPULSE FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES; AND OF THE FIRST PERIOD OF DECORATIVELY ILl.u.s.tRATED BOOKS IN THE ILLUMINATED MSS. OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

My subject is a large one, and touches more intimately, perhaps, than other forms of art, both human thought and history, so that it would be extremely difficult to treat it exhaustively upon all its sides. I shall not attempt to deal with it from the historical or antiquarian points of view more than may be necessary to elucidate the artistic side, on which I propose chiefly to approach the question of design as applied to books--or, more strictly, the book page--which I shall hope to ill.u.s.trate by reproductions of characteristic examples from different ages and countries.

I may, at least, claim to have been occupied, in a practical sense, with the subject more or less, as part of my work, both as a decorator and ill.u.s.trator of books, for the greater part of my life, and such conclusions as I have arrived at are based upon the results of personal thought and experience, if they are also naturally coloured and influenced from the same sources.

All forms of art are so closely connected with life and thought, so bound up with human conditions, habits, and customs; so intimately and vividly do they reflect every phase and change of that unceasing movement--the ebb and flow of human progress amid the forces of nature we call history--that it is hardly possible even for the most careless stroller, taking any of the by-paths, not to be led insensibly to speculate on their hidden sources, and an origin perhaps common to them all.

The story of man is fossilized for us, as it were, or rather preserved, with all its semblance of life and colour, in art and books. The procession of history reaching far back into the obscurity of the forgotten or inarticulate past, is reflected, with all its movement, gold and colour, in the limpid stream of design, that mirror-like, paints each pa.s.sing phase for us, and ill.u.s.trates each act in the drama. In the language of line and of letters, of symbol and picture, each age writes its own story and character, as page after page is turned in the book of time. Here and there the continuity of the chapters is broken, a page is missing, a pa.s.sage is obscure; there are breaks and fragments--heroic torsos and limbs instead of whole figures. But more and more, by patient research, labour, and comparison, the voids are being filled up, until some day perhaps there will be no chasm of conjecture in which to plunge, but the volume of art and human history will be as clear as pen and pencil can make it, and only left for a present to continue, and a future to carry to a completion which is yet never complete.

[Sidenote: ILLUMINATED MSS.]

If painting is the looking-gla.s.s of nations and periods, pictured-books may be called the hand-gla.s.s which still more intimately reflects the life of different centuries and peoples, in all their minute and homely detail and quaint domesticity, as well as their playful fancies, their dreams, and aspirations. While the temples and the tombs of ancient times tell us of the pomp and splendour and ambition of kings, and the stories of their conquests and tyrannies, the illuminated MSS. of the Middle Ages show us, as well as these, the more intimate life of the people, their sports and their jests, their whim and fancy, their work and their play, no less than the mystic and religious and ceremonial side of that life, which was, indeed, an inseparable part of it; the whole worked in as with a kind of embroidery of the pen and brush, with the most exquisite sense of decorative beauty.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GERMAN SCHOOL. XVTH CENTURY.

LEIDEN CHRISTI. (BAMBERG, ALBRECHT PFISTER, 1470.)]

Mr. Herbert Spencer, in the course of his enunciation of the philosophy of evolution, speaks of the book and the newspaper lying on the table of the modern citizen as connected through a long descent with the hieroglyphic inscriptions of the ancient Egyptians, and the picture-writing of still earlier times. We might go (who knows how much further?) back into prehistoric obscurity to find the first ill.u.s.trator, pure and simple, in the hunter of the cave, who recorded the incidents of his sporting life on the bones of his victims.

We know that the letters of our alphabet were once pictures, symbols, or abstract signs of ent.i.ties and actions, and grew more and more abstract until they became arbitrary marks--the familiar characters that we know.

Letters formed into words; words increased and multiplied with ideas and their interchange; ideas and words growing more and more abstract until the point is reached when the jaded intellect would fain return again to picture-writing, and welcomes the decorator and the ill.u.s.trator to relieve the desert wastes of words marshalled in interminable columns on the printed page.

In a journey through a book it is pleasant to reach the oasis of a picture or an ornament, to sit awhile under the palms, to let our thoughts unburdened stray, to drink of other intellectual waters, and to see the ideas we have been pursuing, perchance, reflected in them. Thus we end as we begin, with images.

Temples and tombs have been man's biggest books, but with the development of individual life (as well as religious ritual, and the necessity of records,) he felt the need of something more familiar, companionable, and portable, and having, in the course of time, invented the stylus, and the pen, and tried his hand upon papyrus, palm leaf, and parchment, he wrote his records or his thoughts, and pictured or symbolized them, at first upon scrolls and rolls and tablets, or, later, enshrined them in bound books, with all the beauty that the art of writing could command, enriched and emphasized with the pictorial and ornamental commentary in colours and gold.

As already indicated, it is my purpose to deal with the artistic aspects of the book page, and therefore we are not now concerned with the various forms of the book itself, as such, or with the treatment of its exterior case, cover, or binding. It is the open book I wish to dwell on--the page itself as a field for the designer and ill.u.s.trator--a s.p.a.ce to be made beautiful in design.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GERMAN SCHOOL. XVTH CENTURY.

FROM BOCCACCIO, DE CLARIS MULIERIBUS. (ULM, JOHANN ZAINER, 1473.)]

[Sidenote: THE TWO GREAT DIVISIONS.]

Both decorated and ill.u.s.trated books may be divided broadly into two great periods:

I. The MS., or period before printing.

II. The period of printed books.

Both ill.u.s.trate, however, a long course of evolution, and contain in themselves, it might be said, a compendium--or condensation--of the history of contemporary art in its various forms of development. The first impulse in art seems to answer to the primitive imitative impulse in children--the desire to embody the familiar forms about them--to characterize them in line and colour. The salient points of an animal, for instance, being first emphasized--as in the bone scratchings of the cave men--so that children's drawings and drawings of primitive peoples present a certain family likeness, allowing for difference of environment. They are abstract, and often almost symbolic in their characterization of form, and it is not difficult to imagine how letters and written language became naturally evolved through a system of hieroglyphics, starting from the unsystemized but irrepressible tendency of the human to record his linear ideas of rhythm on the one hand, or his impressions of nature on the other. It would seem that the ill.u.s.trator or picture writer came first in the order of things, and the book afterwards--like the system we have heard of under modern editors of magazines, of the picture being done first and then written up to, or down to, by the author.

Side by side with the evolution of letters and calligraphic art went on the evolution of the graphic power and the artistic sense, developing on the one hand towards close imitation of nature and dramatic incident, and on the other towards imaginative beauty, and systematic, organic ornament, more or less built upon a geometric basis, but ultimately bursting into a free foliation and flamboyant blossom, akin in inventive richness and variety to a growth of nature herself. The development of these two main directions of artistic energy may be followed throughout the whole world of art, constantly struggling, as it were, for the ascendancy, now one and now the other being paramount; but the history of their course, and the effect of their varying influences is particularly marked in the decoration and ill.u.s.tration of books.

Although as a rule the decorative sense was dominant throughout the illuminated books of the Middle Ages, the ill.u.s.trator, in the form of the miniaturist, is in evidence, and in some, especially in the later MSS., finally conquers, or rather absorbs, the decorator.