THE MOST COSTLY BOOKS DERIVE THEIR VALUE FROM THE CRAFT OF THE PRINTER AND NOT FROM THE AUTHOR'S GENIUS

A few months ago I came across a new bibliographical reference - almost by chance - of which I knew very little at first: only that its title was "Well Printed Books." Upon further investigation I found out that the item in question was not a book or an article, but rather a piece of art. More specifically, one by Tara McLeod (http://peartreepress.co.nz/), a "hand-print book-maker" based in New Zealand. Among his works, there is a beautiful broadsheet of a Shaw quotation that reads: 

"Well printed books are just as scarce as well written ones, and every author should remember that the most costly books derive their value from the craft of the printer and not from the author's genius."

I must admit I fell in love with the quotation, as well as with the quality of the printing and typesetting - to the extent that I went to great lengths to get one of the few copies available at the National Library of New Zealand (thanks are due to their staff, who went beyond their duty to make this possible). Here is what the framed piece looks like on my office wall. 

Initially, this piece was commissioned by the National Library Of New Zealand in 2015 for their exhibition “The Book Beautiful,” which seems to have been worth a visit. 

However, as you probably have guessed by now, this post is actually meant to find out more about the source and context of the quotation. Well, wait no more. These words belong to Shaw's essay "On Modern Typography," which opens with a note of gratitude "to the printer, and the printer's reader" and ends on "the moral of what I have been saying," summed up in the above quotation. 

Of course, by the reverse token, printers who do not do their job professionally - as it apparently happened with some page proofs of The Devil's Disciple (Collected Letters, 1898-1910, p. 226), "should be boiled down into tallow forthwith & sold for what he will fetch." This passage can also be read in the more recent Bernard Shaw and His Publishers, edited by Michel W. Pharand. 

Although most Shavians know of Shaw's interest in printing and typesetting - and practically every other process involved in publishing a book - is won't hurt anybody to remind readers of how this interest was spurred by his friendship with William Morris. 

And one gets a pretty accurate idea of how serious Shaw was about the whole printing business when one reads his letter to Grant Richards (9th September 1898) with the detailed specifications for the forthcoming edition of The Perfect Wagnerite: 

"If you choose the big type (as I anticipate from your letter you are likely to) then you must impress upon Clark that every defect in the printing will be ten times more glaring with the larger than with the smaller. There must be no holes and rivers of white patching the page. As a first step to attain this, the huge gaps left at the beginnings of each sentence on the sample page must be vehemently forbidden. The spaces between the words must be kept as narrow and even as possible: it is better to divide words at the end of the line with hyphens than to spoil the line by excessive spacing merely to “justify” without dividing, as some printers make a point of doing. There should be no greater space between the point at the end of a sentence and the capital, than between the last letter of one word and the first of the next within the sentence. In short, the color of the block of printing should be as even as possible. The printing of the sample couldn’t possibly be worse in this respect."

I guess I could quote a hundred other examples, but readers can delve into any of the sources cited here and find many more for themselves; although you may choose to start with Joseph R. Dunlap's interesting survey of these matters published in The Shavian 2.3 (1961, pp. 4-15), fittingly entitled "The Typographical Shaw: GBS and the Revival of Printing." The full text of the article was also published in The Bulletin of the New York Public Library (Oct. 1960), which you can also read below.