Will Bradley's Graphic Art by Will Bradley

Author:Will Bradley [Bradley, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications

“When the tide is at the lowest, ‘tis but nearest to the turn.”

That quotation certainly applies to the year 1895 that had started with so little to its credit in the annals of commercial printing and in which we were now witnessing an encouraging aesthetic awakening in the kindred field of publishing. Choice little volumes printed on deckle-edge papers were coming from those young book-making enthusiasts—Stone and Kimball in Chicago and Copeland and Day in Boston—and were attracting wide attention and winning well-earned acclaim. Also there were the Kelmscott Press hand-printed books of William Morris, especially his Chaucer, set in type of his own design and gorgeously illustrated by Burne-Jones; the Vale Press books, designed by Charles Ricketts and for which he also designed the type; the exotic illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley in John Lane’s Yellow Book, all coming to us from London. Then there was the excitement occasioned by our own “poster craze,” with its accompanying exhibitions giving advertisers and the general public an opportunity to see the gay designs of Chéret and the astounding creations of Lautrec. All these were indicative of a thought-quickening trend due to have a stimulative influence in the then fallow field of commercial printing.

The Wayside Press which I opened in this year of transition was so named for a very real reason. I had worked in Ishpeming and Chicago so as to earn money to take me back to Boston where I hoped to study and become an artist, the profession of my father. I had always thought of printing as being along the wayside to the achieving of my ambition. And I chose a dandelion leaf as my device because the dandelion is a wayside growth.

On the main business street in Springfield there was a new office building called the Phoenix. In two offices on the top floor of the Phoenix Building I had my studio. Back of the office building there was a new loft building on the top floor of which I was establishing my Wayside Press, a corridor connecting it with the top floor of the Phoenix Building and thus making it easily accessible from my studio. It was an ideal location, and with windows on two sides and at the south end insuring an abundance of sunshine, fresh air and light, the workshop was a cheerful spot and one destined to woo me (probably far too often) from my studio and my only definitely established source of income, my designing.

My first Wayside Press printing, before the publication of my magazine, was a Strathmore deckle-edge sample book. Heretofore all Connecticut Valley paper-mill samples, regardless of color, texture or quality of paper, had carried in black ink, usually in the upper corner of each sheet, information as to size and weight. No attempt had been made to stimulate sales by showing the printer how different papers might be used. But one day, just after the Press opened, I had a visitor who changed all that.

I had a bed-ticking apron that

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