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Interview by: Jarrett Kertesz
William S. Peterson, author of the recently released The Well-Made Book: Essays and Lectures by Daniel Berkeley
Updike agreed to do his first email-based interview for Reservocation. Mr. Peterson sheds some light on an important part
of the history of American fine-printing.
Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I’m a Professor of English at the University of Maryland. My earliest books would probably be classified as
literary history, but in the late 1970s, I became interested in typographical design, and most of what I’ve written
since then is connected with that subject. I’ve also done a certain amount of freelance book designing. My most
recent book is The Well-Made Book: Essays and Lectures by Daniel Berkeley Updike (Mark Batty, Publisher, 2002),
which I both edited and designed. Before that, I wrote several books about William Morris and the Kelmscott Press.
I really miss visiting Washington D.C. It’s one of my favorite places. I haven’t been there in years though
except for short meetings.
Was The Well-Made Book put together in an effort to explore one of Morris’ contemporaries or more out of
interest in someone that took a more pragmatic view of printing?
Well, it was the first book I’ve written or edited about an American subject (all the others have
been focused on Britain), and that was a pleasant change for me. However, I had admired Updike for many years:
in particular, I thought he was an excellent example of a printer who was strongly under Morris’s example
in the 1890s (as were many of the better American printers and designers of that time) but eventually found his
own style — his own voice, as we might say today.
There were two other aspects of the production of this book that interested me a great deal. One is that it
is the first book I’ve designed or typeset in InDesign. The other is that it gave me an excuse to use
Justin Howes’ brilliant replica of Caslon’s original types (because Caslon was Updike’s
favorite typeface). There are many varieties of Caslon on the market (including Adobe Caslon, which I’m
using in a book I’m setting right now), but Justin’s clever approach to the problem of reviving historic
types was to reproduce the letterforms exactly (even including imperfections caused by ink spread) without
modifying them at all. It’s a surprisingly radical technique (though Monotype’s Poliphilus was done in
this way during the 1920s, and more recently Jonathan Hoefler has produced a precise facsimile of one of the Fell
types), and Justin took it a step further by reproducing every size that Caslon designed. Hence, in my Updike book,
it was possible to use types of the right weight and fit for several sizes — even without Multiple Masters.
I can’t imagine why some other small, creative type foundries don’t try some experiments along
these lines.
I was very curious why you chose Justin’s version of Caslon. It’s a nice change from the
super-cleaned up reproductions that we are used to seeing in print. Did it take more time to set than Adobe’s
version of Caslon?
No, Justin’s Caslon — which he markets under the name of Founder’s Caslon — is
extremely easy to work with. On the other hand, it seems to function less well in FrameMaker than in InDesign,
which has some sort of anti-aliasing mechanism built into it and smoothes the edges of the letterforms. In
FrameMaker, Founder’s Caslon looks unpleasantly ragged on the screen (I think this problem would go
away if I were using Windows XP), and for the same reason I don’t find it suitable for use in PDF
files. However, on the printed page it’s a superb typeface.
Since basing the design and typographical decisions for The Well Made Book on what Updike
preferred in his own work, was this goal applied to printing and binding methods and if so, in
what ways?
Mark Batty and I agreed that we would not try to imitate Updike’s style obsessively in every
aspect of The Well-Made Book, though I certainly felt the ghost of Updike at my shoulder in
each stage of the production. He’s a hard act to follow. Several years ago I edited, designed,
and typeset a small book about Morris for the Grolier Club, and I realized then how dangerous it
is to follow slavishly the example of a great printer. Updike, in a way, offers a more reasonable
model (much as I admire Morris), because if you choose a good typeface, fuss a bit over leading
and word-spacing, and use margins of the right proportions, you can come very close to achieving
a page of which Updike would — to put it negatively — probably not have disapproved.
Morris, however, is a very tricky model. You’re tempted to use inappropriate typefaces and
grotesquely heavy ornaments; that’s why the influence of the Kelmscott Press on
late-nineteenth-century American printers and publishers was not always wholesome.”
The P22 Type Foundry, incidentally, has recently issued very plausible versions of Morris’s
types (employing the same technique of facsimile reproduction that Justin Howes adopted). However,
I worry about how they’ll be used. A few days ago, I saw an ad in a magazine in which the 10 pt
version of Founders’ Caslon had been blown up to a tremendous size in order to emphasize its
ragged, “Ye Olde Antique” quality. Designers who abuse good typefaces like that should
be sentenced to do community service.
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