Some Notes on Early Woodcut Books, with a Chapter on Illuminated Manuscripts by William Morris

Author:William Morris [Morris, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Nonfiction
ISBN: 4064066202880
Google: JR_EDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Good Press
Published: 2019-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

Now you have seen my examples, I want once more to impress upon you the fact that these designs, one and all, while they perform their especial function—the office of telling a tale—never forget their other function of decorating the book of which they form a part; this is the essential difference between them and modern book illustrations, which I suppose make no pretence at decorating the pages of the book, but must be looked upon as black and white pictures which it is convenient to print and bind up along with the printed matter. The question, in fact, which I want to put to you is this, Whether we are to have books which are beautiful as books; books in which type, paper, woodcuts, and the due arrangement of all these are to be considered, and which are so treated as to produce a harmonious whole, something which will give a person with a sense of beauty real pleasure whenever and wherever the book is opened, even before he begins to look closely into the illustrations; or whether the beautiful and inventive illustrations are to be looked on as separate pictures imbedded in a piece of utilitarianism, which they cannot decorate because it cannot help them to do so. Take, as an example of the latter, Mr. Fred. Walker's illustrations to "Philip" in the "Cornhill Magazine," of the days when some of us were young, since I am inclined to think that they are about the best of such illustrations. Now they are part of Thackeray's story, and I don't want them to be in any way less a part of it, but they are in no respect a part of the tangible printed book, and I do want them to be that. As it is, the mass of utilitarian matter in which they are imbedded is absolutely helpless and dead. Why it is not even ugly—at least not vitally ugly.

Now the reverse is the case with the books from which I have taken the examples which you have been seeing. As things to be looked at they are beautiful, taken as a whole; they are alive all over, and not merely in a corner here and there. The illustrator has to share the success and the failure, not only of the wood-cutter, who has translated his drawing, but also of the printer and the mere ornamentalist, and the result is that you have a book which is a visible work of art.

You may say that you don't care for this result, that you wish to read literature and to look at pictures; and that so long as the modern book gives you these pleasures you ask no more of it; well, I can understand that, but you must pardon me if I say that your interest in books in that case is literary only, and not artistic, and that implies, I think, a partial crippling of the faculties; a misfortune which no one should be proud of.

However, it

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