Reforming the "Art Preservative": Nineteenth-Century British Printing Manuals and the Discourse of Design

Abstract:Discussions of nineteenth-century letterpress design typically follow a narrative of loss and restoration: the explosion of typographic materials and machines made possible by industrialization led to a decline in the visual quality of letterpress production, which was reversed only at the end of the century by William Morris and the advent of modern graphic design. Many specimens of Victorian letterpress printing—especially job printing, which was constrained by fewer conventions than book or newspaper printing—seem to confirm this narrative. Nineteenth-century British printing manuals, however, often depicted the practice of display composition not as declining or fallen, but as entering an exhilarating moment of reformation. In the printing manuals I examine here, authors attempted to guide this reformation by offering printers a rudimentary theory of letterpress page design, one based largely on the tenets of Victorian design reform. Design reform, begun in the 1830s in response to fears that British industrial commodities were being outsold by better-designed foreign products, established graphic principles for designers and created a body of theoretical literature that was remediated by printers looking for a fixed definition of visual excellence upon which letterpress design could be premised. While modern viewers might question the design principles underlying much "artistic" job printing of the late-Victorian era, the aesthetic rules explained in printing manuals of the time do much to turn what can sometimes appear to be a bewildering profusion of archaic visual elements back into a legible architecture of the page.