Reservocation, Issue: 015 Interview William S. Peterson Interviewed by: Jarrett Kertesz WILLIAM S. PETERSON DISCUSSES HIS NEW COLLECTION OF DANIEL BERKELEY UPDIKE ESSAYS ENTITLED, THE WELL-MADE BOOK" 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. Heh. That’s a very good idea. What were, in your opinion, some of the important typefaces of the last century? I can only talk confidently about the kinds of fonts that I myself like and use — classic typefaces for bookwork. In the first half of the twentieth century, the best faces were almost always produced by Monotype, but that firm unfortunately fumbled the ball when the era of hot metal came to an end. Monotype’s digital versions (and, slightly earlier, the versions for phototypesetting) of its own library of typefaces were often embarrassingly bad: Perpetua, Bembo, Bell, and Centaur, for example — all great Monotype triumphs in the days of letterpress printing — seem to me, now essentially unusable in their present forms. The Monotype faces that still look good in the twenty-first century are mainly ones that were a bit heavy to begin with, such as Poliphilus, Bulmer and Erhardt. I think even Times Roman — that poor, tired, overworked old warhorse — could be made into a decent typeface if it were supplied with long descenders (Monotype had such a variant in pre-digital days) and were used with f-ligatures, true small caps, old-style figures, and of course sensitive leading and word-spacing. Of the faces designed since the digital revolution, my favorites for bookwork are Adobe Caslon, Founder’s Caslon, Minion, Galliard, and Miller. Miller in particular fascinates me, because my own historical and cultural interests lie mostly in the nineteenth century, and Matthew Carter’s model for Miller — Scotch Roman — is one of the few enduring types of that Century. Miller isn’t glamorous (though it has a lot of period charm), but I find it terribly useful for bread-and-butter books like reference works. Obviously there are other wonderful book faces floating around (Sabon, Dante, and Hoefler Text are examples that come immediately to mind), but I feel I don’t have an intelligent opinion of any type until I actually use it or at least play around with it. At the moment, I’m looking forward to trying out Monticello, Matthew Carter’s new revival of one of the earliest American typefaces. Getting back to D.B Updike, what effect did World Wars I and II have on him as far as shaping the work he did towards the end of his career? I don’t know whether the First World War had much effect on Updike’s printing (though it certainly cut him off from friends and collaborators like T. M. Cleland when they enlisted), and the beginning of the Second — the beginning for Americans, at least — coincided very closely with Updike’s death. He was terribly preoccupied, in his final days, with the military struggle in Europe, and it confirmed his darkest fears of an impending collapse of civilization. In the final essay that I included in The Well-Made Book, entitled “A Last Word” (1941), he argued that although the future looks uncertain, we must remind ourselves that the great craftsmen (including printers) and artists of the past also lived in troubled times: “For life, in nature and in human nature, after each cosmic disaster or phase of man’s folly, is renewed again and again.” Those seem like timely words right now, don’t they? They definitely do. He had an amazing dedication to his craft. Every nuance of a job was thoughtfully considered by how it would be used or displayed. Do you think it’s fair to say that he was one of the first “usability experts?” I’m not sure exactly what label is appropriate for Updike. I’d be more inclined to say he was one of the first real book-designers. When I first started thinking about writing a book on the Kelmscott Press, I spent a full summer at the Library of Congress reading nineteenth-century printer’s manuals and professional journals, trying to understand how Victorian printers and publishers understood the designing of books before Morris came along. My research was a great exercise in futility, because it became clear that there was then very little "designing" in the modern sense. Morris changed that — he demonstrated that creating a beautiful book required artistic skills of the highest order — and Updike was one of the very earliest young commercial printers at the time to understand the implications of that discovery. And of course he was a brilliant designer, though much more self-effacing than, say, Bruce Rogers, his great contemporary (and rival). The intense preoccupation with detail that you mention, incidentally, seems to be characteristic of all successful book-designers. If you asked my old friend John Dreyfus (who, sadly, died just recently) for directions to a bus stop near his flat in London, he would explain it to you in excruciating detail for twenty minutes and then would walk with you to it so that you could not get lost. That’s a designer’s instinct: spell everything out so that nothing is left to chance, because the basic rule of a designer’s professional life is that if anything can go wrong in production, it will. 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 ©2000-2004 Reservocation Media/Design magazine. All rights reserved.