The strongest new influences on the design of books in the early part of the twentieth century were the English private presses and the painter-illustrators. The revolution in painting which began in the late nineteenth century changed the illustration and layout of books. At the same time, the revival of fifteenth-century styles and standards begun by Morris animated the English private presses and, through them, fine printing in Germany and America.
The work of the English private presses was slow to have an effect on commercial printing in England. In Germany, on the other hand, it evoked a response in both commercial and private presses. Morris's heavy ornament and the sinuous line of Art Nouveau appeared in German books through the early years of the century. The pure typography of the Doves and Ashendene books was also taken up, and the Englishmen who had designed them were brought over to design German books. The Insel-Verlag began to print a series of German classics in 1905 designed by Emery Walker of the Doves Press. Their tide pages were by England's leading calligrapher, Edward Johnston, and the English designer Eric Gill.
The Bremer Press, a private press founded at Munich in 1911, produced books in a strong, simple typography. Like its British counterparts, the press had special types cut and relied on calligraphic details for decoration.
The Cranach Press founded at Weimar in 191 3 by the Graf von Kessler, printed fine books which drew on the talents of both England and France. Kessler commissioned the French sculptor Maillol to illustrate Virgil's Eclogues with woodcuts which Maillol began in 1912. The war delayed production of the book, but it was brought out in 1925-26. The types in which the book was set were designed by Johnston and Edward Prince, the initials by Eric Gill. Maillol, in the true Morris spirit, made the paper on which the book was printed.
In 1929 the press printed a handsome edition of Shakespeare's Hamlet in types designed by Johnston after those of Fust and Schoeffer, set in a block and bordered by commentary in the way common in the fifteenth century. Edward Gordon Craig, the English illustrator, made the woodcut illustrations.
The German type foundries participated strongly in the revival of interest in fine book production. They cut new types and set up their own small presses to produce exemplary books.

Ecclesiasticus, FIG 1

In America the English revival was the central influence for the first quarter century and more. The men who designed books were for the most part also typographers. Frederick Goudy, who, inspired by Morris, founded the Village Press in Chicago in 1903, designed over a hundred typefaces, often producing a new one especially for a book he was designing. Bruce Rogers, in charge of limited editions and general typography at the Riverside Press in Boston in the early part of his career, and later advisor to the presses of Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard, designed the Montaigne and Centaur types, based on Jensen's roman. Both Rogers and Daniel Updike at his Merrymount Press worked in an allusive style, using types and ornaments to suggest the era or content of the books they designed. Updike, at first under the spell of Morris's heavy books, gradually turned to the restrained taste of the English eighteenth century. Rogers ranged freely and tastefully among all periods, choosing and adapting what he liked for a given work. He was able to produce first-rate fifteenth-century Italian pages, complete with woodcuts; frivolous eighteenth-century French ones with feminine borders; or dignified British pages reminiscent of Bulmer and Bensley. When the Oxford Press undertook to print a splendid Bible in 1935, Rogers was chosen to design it in his Centaur type. Calm, dignified, monumental, the Oxford Lectern Bible is considered Rogers' greatest work.

While the best designers and publishers in England, America, and Germany were preoccupied with typography and the overall quality of the book, France concentrated on illustration. The illustrated book had a particularly high status in France; it was considered a worthy vehicle

In Germany, both the fifteenth-centUry influence and the new typography flourish side by
side. The designer and typographer Hermann Zapf, who has worked for the leading type- 2 founders and publishers, is fundamentally oriented in the early style. Besides calligraphic types J like Palatino, he has designed the sans-serif Optima with something of calligraphic sensitivity.
In his books Zapf shows an extraordinary sense for the balancing of type and space. He often uses a calligraphic letter, a handwritten word, or a chaste ornament (perhaps blind-embossed) to set off his otherwise perfectly simple, harmonious title pages.

In England, the private presses had begun to wane after about 1925. Only one, the Golden Cockerel Press, continued to produce fine books, many of which were the work of Eric Gill in his roles of typographer, designer, and illustrator. They owe much to their superb paper and presswork. Gill had a sleek and decorative medieval approach to design. His woodcuts are often contained in short side borders or worked into the beginnings of sections, as in The Canterbury Tales of 1931. In The Four Gospels, printed the same year, he made beginning words the decorative element, twining the woodcut letters with human forms in a way that was new but strongly reminiscent of manuscript illumination. There is a great unity to these pages, set in Gill's own Cockerel type.
The Nonesuch Press, founded in 1923 by Francis Meynell, has filled some of the functions of the private press under commercial auspices. Its aim has been to produce books with "significance of subject, beauty of format, and moderation of price." The typesetting, printing, and binding of these books was mostly done by machine, but they were produced with great care, and their design and illustration has been of high quality. A wide variety of media and styles have been used in their illustration, from Stephen Gooden's line engravings of seventeenthcentury inspiration to the stencil-colored illustrations of poster artist McKnight Kauffer. Nonesuch books did something the private presses had not done: they put fine books within the scope of the general public.
British illustration of this century is not in a class with the best French work, but some of it, such as the satirical drawings of Edward Bawden, is very much suited to books. British style is at its best in the work of Rex Whistler, who, before his death in World \Var II, worked in an imaginative revival of Baroque style, using many architectural details.
The so-called "paperback revolution" of our time originated in 1932 with Albatross Books, a series of contemporary English books printed in Hamburg, Paris, and Milan in inexpensive but pleasant format. The idea was not precisely new. Paper-covered sixpenny reprints were common in VictOrian England. The little booklets of sacred plays and romances sold in the streets of late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florence were in a real sense paperbacks, pictorial cover and all.

In America after World \Var I the general run of books began to improve. Certain of the large presses such as William E. Rudge of Mount Vernon, N. Y, and the Lakeside Press in Chicago became concerned with the design and production of good books. William E. Rudge employed designers of the caliber of Bruce Rogers and Frederic Warde; the Lakeside Press was guided by the sound standards of William Kittredge.
A number of smaller printers were from the start dedicated to fine book production. Among them were the Grabhorn brothers in San Francisco, and Elmer Adler's Pynson Printers and Joseph Blumenthal's Spiral Press in New York. The Spiral Press, which began work in 1926, continues to turn out both good, conservative commercial work and fine limited editions such as the Ecclesiastes published in 1965, with Ben Shahn's illustrations and letters, and Blumenthal's own Emerson type.
In 1929 the Limited Editions Club, founded by George Macy, began to publish books of more than ordinary interest for its fifteen hundred subscribers at the rate of one a month. They were designed by the leading typographers and artists of both continents and produced in a manner which if not de luxe was the next thing to it. A peculiarly democratic featUre was that the book titles were selected by the readers by ballot.
The Limited Editions Club acquainted Americans with the work of outstanding European designers and printers. Among them was Giovanni Mardersteig whose Officina Bodoni at Verona has the official right to use Bodoni's matrices; with the Bodoni types and others he prints fine editions in a pure and controlled typography. Jan van Krimpen of the long-established Enschedc Press in Haarlem designed one of the Limited Editions books in his handsome Romance type. French and Russian illustrators, Czech typographers, Swedish printers, all contributed to the series which ran for thirty years.
Other limited edition series and illustrated edition series turned out books which made a conscious effort to please. From soberer motives, more akin to those of the early scholar-printers, the university presses also became important contributors of well-designed books. The books of the Yale Press, in particular, continue to be remarkable, many of them in the clean, sensitive

The homogenizing forces of our time have broken many barriers of national style, and sometimes it is difficult to tell at a glance the origin of a book. But local differences in production or taste still exist, and where they are manifest they bring the pleasure of variety. Czechoslovak books, for example, often have a unique peasant quality in their decorations and a corresponding strength in their typography. British books, at their best, have a typically British sound and forthright quality, which may stem largely from their use of well-cut, snug