Special The judicious use of colour, especially of red
Subjects (see pp. 93, no), is very effective. The extra
printings required for additional colours may make
it worth while (in the case of limited editions) to
put in simple initials, paragraph marks, notes, &c.,
by hand (see pp. 160, 79). The earliest printed
books, being modelled on the MS. books, employed
such rubrication freely, in spaces specially left in the
text or in the margins. There are still great possi¬
bilities in the hand decoration of printed books.

The following note on printing, reproduced here
by the permission of Mr. Emery Walker, appeared
in the Introductory Notes of the Catalogue of the
first exhibition of The Arts and Crafts Exhibition
Society, in 1888.

“PRINTING

“Printing, in the only sense with which we are at
present concerned, differs from most if not from all the
arts and crafts represented in the Exhibition in being
comparatively modern. For although the Chinese took
impressions from wood blocks engraved in relief for cen¬
turies before the wood-cutters of the Netherlands, by a
similar process, produced the block books, which were
the immediate predecessors of the true printed book, the
invention of movable metal letters in the middle of the
fifteenth century may justly be considered as the inven¬
tion of the art of printing. And it is worth mention in
passing that, as an example of fine typography, the earliest
dated [1] book, the Gutenberg Bible of 1455, ^as never

1 [It was dated.1456 by a rubricator, not by the printer.—E.W.]

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been surpassed. Printing, then, for our purpose, may be
considered as the art of making books by means of movable
types. Now, as all books not primarily intended as
picture-books consist principally of types composed to
form letterpress, it is of the first importance that the letter
used should be fine in form; especially, as no more time
is occupied, or cost incurred, in casting, setting, or print¬
ing beautiful letters, than in the same operations with ugly
ones. So we find the fifteenth and early sixteenth century
printers, who were generally their own typefounders,
gave great attention to the forms of their types. The
designers of the letters used in the earliest books were
probably the scribes whose manuscripts the fifteenth-
century printed books so much resemble. Aldus of Venice
employed Francisco Francia of Bologna, goldsmith and
painter, to cut the punches for his celebrated italic letter.
Froben, the great Basle printer, got Holbein to design
ornaments for his press, and it is not unreasonable to
suppose that the painter may have drawn the models for
the noble Roman types we find in Froben’s books. With
the decadence in handwriting which became marked in
the sixteenth century, a corresponding change took place
in the types; the designers, no longer having beautiful
writing as a model and reference, introduced variations
arbitrarily. The types of the Elzevirs are regular and
neat, and in this respect modern, but they altogether lack
the spirit and originality that distinguish the early Roman
founts of Italy and Germany; Gothic characteristics
inherited from their mediæval predecessors. In the
seventeenth century type-founding began to be carried
on as a craft apart from that of the printer, and although
in this and the succeeding century many attempts were
made to improve the “face” (as the printing surface of
type is called), such examples as a rule reflect only too
clearly the growing debasement of the crafts of design.
Notable among these attempts were the founts cut by
William Caslon, who started in business in London as a
letter-founder in 1720, taking for his models the Elzevir

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