On Wednesday 20 June 1903 Charles Ricketts noted in his diary that 'old Maccoll', that is, Charles McCall, manager at the Ballantyne Press where the Vale Press books were printed, or D.S. Maccoll, the art critic, 'showed me an attack on me by the fool who wrote years ago in the Fortnightly [...]'.
The fool's name was Albert Louis Cotton (1874-1936). His earlier critical essay on modern printing was published in August 1898 in the Contemporary Review, not the Fortnightly Review - it was typical of Ricketts to err when he got angry.
The second article was published in The Monthly Review in May 1903. Ricketts wrote:
[...] he uses my definitions of book printing against me & Morris, and also the beastly work done in America, this made me realize that work suffers more from its imitation than by its own faults.
Cotton ridiculed the neo-Gothic decorations of an American Morris adept and fired arrows at Clarke Conwell's Elston Press editions, accusing William Morris and Charles Ricketts of aiming for ornamentation rather than readability for their books:
I suppose that Mr. Ricketts'[s] Vale Press may be considered the most important undertaking in "artistic" bookwork now among us. Like his fellows, Mr. Ricketts prefers to regard a printed book as a mere piece of decorative furniture.
He based his accusation on the sometimes peculiar alternation of capitals and lowercase letters on opening pages of the earlier Vale Press editions and praised the restraint in the decorations of the multi-volume Shakespeare edition.
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| Vale Press edition of The Rowley Poems of Thomas Chatterton, volume 2, page [5]: designed by Charles Ricketts (1898) |
Cotton quoted an example from the The Rowley Poems of Thomas Chatterton, but he erred in the rendering of the word 'SKyNS', as it read 'SKYns' - but his point, of course, remained.
It must have stung the artist that Cotton claimed Ricketts produced his books just to showcase his borders and initial letters and Cotton was repeating an old complaint from the printing world, when, in the early 1890s, it was confronted with artists who demanded something different from nineteenth-century printing - think Morris, but also Whistler and Ricketts. The bottom line was that artists should mind their own business:
A study of "artistic" presses, indeed, brings one to the conclusion that the professions of an artist and a printer are not compatible with one another.
As an artist, you only got in the way of - above all - the author; as the most important thing had to be the text itself.
Cotton then spends several more pages bashing the Essex House Press and sets the Doves Press as an example because of its lack of decorations. He ends with a dystopian vision of the future: a time when the artist can instruct the author to write something to match his decorations. What he failed to see was a growing need for a 'graphic designer', a concept that, after the turn of the century, was not completely unknown but still undefined.
Ricketts concluded his diary note with the observation:
I suppose I should not grumble since book making has meant a comfortable livelihood to me for 4 years.
But he could not stop grumbling:
Yet why should education lead in England to this university type that runns [runs] forward not to advocate the excellent but merely to find fault.
(Thanks are due to John Aplin for the transcription of the diary note.)