As evidenced in the back-and-forth cleaning I’ve been doing with this
interview ;) Apologies again.
Do you feel enough is being done to preserve design history? Where does responsibility fall?
The only kind of design about which I claim any expertise is typographical design, so I will limit my comments to that.
Large collections of finely printed books — and sometimes the archives of private presses that created them —
tend to gravitate toward research libraries. They are comparatively easy to find. The real problem is the material artifacts
of the last great letterpress printing establishments and the (non-digital) type foundries. Some of them are rescued at the
last minute (much of the Chiswick Press material went to the St. Bride Printing Library, for example, and the new Type Museum
in London has acquired huge quantities of Monotype and Stephenson Blake stuff), but there are great losses, too, as when the
ATF collection was hurriedly (and irresponsibly) dispersed a decade ago. Sometimes an imaginative and resourceful individual
does the rescue work: John Randle, of the Whittington Press, salvaged the Monotype casters and many of the types of Oxford
University Press when it abruptly went out of the printing business — after five hundred years, no less.
I would guess that archiving and cataloguing could become very expensive and time-consuming, especially as collections
grow. I was surprised to read not too long ago, that a large institution like the Smithsonian was having difficultly in finding
space for certain collections.
As far as preserving design history, I was referring more to finding publishers and authors, such as you, that are
willing to actually commit themselves to create a volume like The Well-Made Book.
Yes, books occupy a certain amount of shelf space, but consider the problems of housing old printing presses,
Monotype machines, and vast quantities of types, punches, and matrices!
I think there’s a surprising amount of interest in the history of typographical design. Organizations
like the Grolier Club, the American Printing History Association, and the Printing Historical Society (in Britain),
for instance, have active publishing programs, and a handful of commercial publishers show a strong interest in the
subject. However, there is a persistent feeling in some quarters that design is only a minor branch of the arts,
and typography is an even smaller and more technical part of the design scene. When I showed The Well-Made Book to a
friend recently, he shook his head sadly and said, “Ah, a niche book, I see.” I certainly hope it’s
more than that, and I know Mark Batty (who is a new publisher enthusiastically committed to publishing books about
forms of graphic communication) feels that there is potentially a large market. I, myself, find the history of
letterforms and book-design endlessly fascinating, so I’m always a bit puzzled when I encounter a dismissive
attitude like my friend’s. We need more publishers like Batty who care passionately about typographical design
and are willing to produce books that proclaim its importance.
We definitely do. What would you hope readers take away from The Well-Made Book?
Updike’s roots were in the private-press world, but most of his career was devoted to producing fine books under
ordinary commercial conditions. He was interested in new technologies, yet he also believed that the challenges facing
printers were essentially the same from one century to another. He liked to point out that even Gutenberg was just a
fellow-craftsman wrestling with a series of typographical problems. I like the down-to-earth, practical view of
printing that Updike offers, and I hope that readers of The Well-Made Book will recognize and respond to
it as well.
Can you tell us what you have planned for your next project?
At the moment I’m writing an article for Matrix about C. T. Jacobi, for many years the manager of the
Chiswick Press. Poor old Jacobi was so overshadowed by Morris that his name is almost unknown nowadays, but he’s
a central figure in the late-nineteenth-century revival of printing in England, and I’d like to bring him out
into the sunshine again. My article is built around a wonderful scrapbook that Jacobi put together — apparently
for the Art-Workers’ Guild — of samples of his best work. I bought the scrapbook some years ago: it’s
an amazing collection of the very best Victorian typography.
I’m also struggling with my Great Unfinished Book — a descriptive bibliography of Sir John Betjeman.
Bibliographies of modern writers are almost impossible to complete because they leave such a large paper trail after
them. When I’m not worrying about Betjeman, I devote some of my free time to preparing electronic texts for my
Web site “English Literature and
Religion”. Some of my first texts were coded in HTML, but that seemed to me like typesetting a book
on a manual typewriter; now I create the texts in InDesign and convert them to Acrobat files. Designing texts
for the computer screen is a very stimulating exercise.
Definitely looking forward to what’s next.
Thanks again for the interview William+
Mark Batty Publisher
English Literature and Religion
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