Handmade Books and the Wider World of Design
First: what this is NOT about. Private presses, fine presses, and artists all make handmade books, and they call them with various names, including press books, livres d'artiste, and artists' books. Making sense of the categories would be a book-length topic, and my analysis of the distinctions would provoke howls from partisans. So for purposes of this web page, we're going to ignore the categories and just call them all handmade books.
It's also NOT about the fun you can have making your own handmade books: take a course at Columbia College if you want to find out about that. And finally, it's NOT about how handmade books have shaped the business of design. They haven't.
Instead, I'm going to explore, a bit, the question of whether the world of handmade books has any effect on the wider world of design, by which I mean the part of design which I've heard described as "styling." My thesis is that it does: not a huge one, but one nonetheless. I'll argue that handmade books provide a separate "gene pool" which designers can tap into when the current vocabulary of design expression has become stale. The people who make handmade books are suiting themselves (mostly), so they tend not to produce books which look like the current fashion in commercial books, advertising, or web sites.
The point in history when this was clear was the first heyday of private presses. The figure we've all heard of from that period was William Morris (1834-1896, though his book work was toward the end of his life), whose Kelmscott Press made many beautiful books based upon the design ideas of the earliest Venetian printers. [Kelmscott Chaucer illustration] He was only one of a group of such publishers whose books were doubly interesting to the designers of the time: first, they didn't look anything like other books; and second, they were made much more carefully, with handwork. The movement went by the name Arts and Crafts and touched on furniture and architecture as well as graphic design.
You can see their visual influence in everything from book printing to advertising of the period. The craft influence produced commercial limited-edition publishing (think Limited Editions Club at the high end, Franklin Mint at the low), where somewhat more effort went into the fit and finish of the product. A quick look at books from the turn of the century turns up some whose design was obviously influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, and others which were not. Chicago's own R.R. Donnelley even had a hand bindery where they made fancy leather covers for a few of their books.
The other important influence of the Arts and Crafts movement on graphic design was through typefaces. Morris and his friends each felt that they should have a unique type for their press. As a source for their designs, they started research into type history, in the process starting a sort of gold rush to mine the best type designs of the past. The American Type Founders catalog of 1895 contains only two typefaces I would consider to be based upon classical designs: Caslon, which had descended throughout the English-speaking world with the designer's name because he was an Englishman; and Jenson, which had been rushed out by the Dickinson Type Foundry (shortly to be subsumed into ATF) in 1893 to capitalize on the fame of William Morris' Golden Type, based on the 1470-76 types of Nicolas Jenson. But by the 1923 ATF catalog, they were also showing Baskerville, Bodoni, and Garamond–not to mention current designs by named then–living designers including De Vinne and Goudy.
A more recent occasion when I think it is possible that handmade books had an effect on (somewhat more) mainstream design came with the era of "postmodern" design. Unfortunately I do not possess enough examples of work from the period to demonstrate it conclusively. But the samples shown seem to me to have a distinct resemblance.
Back in 1981, the Society of Typographic Arts, the Caxton Club, and Northwestern University Library co-sponsored a series of programs and an exhibit on the topic of "Typography and the Private Press." I had the luck to be able to work on the exhibit. The exposure to handmade books I got while poring over candidates to be shown was one of the most formative experiences in my life as a designer. The Arion Press Moby Dick and the Golden Cockerell Four Gospels live with me still as the pinnacle of the designer's art.
Bob McCamant, Art Director of the Chicago Reader for 23 years and one of its founders in 1971, is proprietor of the Sherwin Beach Press and editor of the "Caxtonian".