EASTERN AND WESTERN ASIA

much for the perfectly expressive and perfectly graceful form of every ideograph, that it is not

FIG. 180.

Poem, Mount Nakusa and the sea beach. Japanese writing dating from the early years of the Tokugawa dynasty of Shoguns (1603-1868). Such writing may be taken as personal, of the nature of the handwriting of the poet rather than of a professional caligrapher

possible that this should be modified by decorative considerations. Fig. 180 is a page of poetical

allusion mounted in face of a delicate landscape in water-color. The two form The two form a tenth part of a Japanese album whose binding and mounting are not very old; but the water-color drawings are assumed to be of the seventeenth century A. D., and the script given in our figure is nearly contemporaneous. The light buff paper is decorated by clouds of dull gold which hardly show in the photograph, and across these, disregarding them, go the vertical columns of written matter. It was not necessary to go so far into the past for beautiful Japanese writing. The supply of art treasures from the ancestral collections of Japan are not yet exhausted, and Western shops are still full of manuscripts and reproduction of manuscripts, of exceeding beauty; nor is the art lost; a Japanese gentleman will still write a congratulatory or grateful message in characters as carefully considered, and, in a traditional way "designed" for the purpose, as words are picked and chosen for the sake of rhetoric, or for poetical expression.

It would be quite easy to continue this examination by comparison of the engraved titlepages of the sixteenth-century books. Some of the larger Elzevir titlepages are adorned with beautiful lettering, evidently engraved carefully on copper, and printed carefully on tough old paper. The extension of caligraphy to the invention of beautiful letters, produced by no matter what medium, would

LETTERING USED IN ENGRAVING

lead us into consideration of the noble lapidary inscriptions of ancient Greeks and Romans (see Chapter XIX) and the bronze tablets with letters in relief forming part of this and that Renaissance wall-tomb.

F

Chapter Twenty-Three

PRINTING

OR the purpose of this inquiry the term printing" must include the immediate preparation for the actual making of the impression. Thus in the matter of making paper prints from etchings or other engravings, and in the matter of making ornamental paperhangings or printed calico, while the cutting of the block, the engraving of the plates, the making of the type for book-work, and the like, are all separate arts, and are considered elsewhere in this treatise so far as space allows, there is still a certain preliminary to the actual printing off of the desired impression, which is equivalent to the preparation of his palette by a painter, and which demands the utilization of a great deal of the printer's skill. In the case of a book let this preparation be taken as including the " composition," that is to say, the setting of the type. There is then room for the working of the artistic intelligence in the choice of the size of letter, the choice even of the form of letter, and the consequent careful selection of the particular design of

THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE PAGE

type to be used.

Then there is much room for going astray, and therefore for careful treatment, in the matter of width of margin as compared with the size of the printed surface; and this becomes peculiarly important when the two adjacent pages are looked at together, the book being opened wide. How wide the inside margins, those

nearest the back, are to be as compared with the outer edge and top and bottom margins, and how wide the top as compared with the bottom blank surface, are really delicate questions. So are the use of letters of different sizes, and the use of italics, of capitals, of "small caps.," of very large initial letters where a new chapter or section begins.

Fig. 181 gives a 'page of a curious old Horace, and it will be seen in this piece of printing how strongly the printer was interested in its comeliness. The type itself has been beautifully designed—it is a most intelligent modification of the "Gothic" letters dealt with in Chapter XXII. As no very large initials had been cast, as yet, the printer left space for the I of Integer, which space the caligrapher was to fill up with a painted letter and perhaps further decoration. Then the ode was beautifully set out with its longer and shorter lines; and margins and all other blank spaces were carefully considered.

If we should consider two open pages, taken together, of any fine book accepted as a model