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The John M. Wing foundation on the history of printing
by Dr Konrad F. Bauer
(Chicago)
The John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing is one of the few special collections devoted to the study of typographic arts. It is a separate department within the Newberry Library of Chicago, supplementing in a happy way the collections of this library which, for reference and research in the world-wide field of the humanities, is gaining a steadily increasing importance as a center of learned studies in the American Midwest. The names of Walter Loomis Newberry and John Mansir Wing, linked in the foundations maintained by their bequests, represent, at the same time, two successive generations of Chicagoans who, each in a distinct way, made history in their home town during the nineteenth century. Their personalities are, in more than one respect, typical of the origin of American institutions and public collections, and for this reason some words may be said concerning their lives and adventures.
Walter Loomis Newberry was a Connecticut Yankee. His family, settled in New England as early as 1634, produced in the nineteenth century, besides a continuous line of prosperous and progressive farmers, one famous geologist and explorer, some enterprising railroad car and steamship builders, and a Civil War general. Walter L. Newberry, born in 1803, was one of the first to realize the vast possibilities of the Midwestern regions and to
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notice the ideal location of the village of Chicago, when it began to grow around an isolated army post on the Southwest shore of Lake Michigan. He bought large tracts of land in this area, and, closing a prosperous drygoods business which he had established at Detroit, Michigan, moved to Chicago in 1833. The settlement, housing some 4000 inhabitants, had just been incorporated as a town. Walter Newberry's bold enterprise paid well. We are told that he sold by the front foot what he had bought by the acre, and his fortune increased at the same impetuous rate at which the city was expanding. Simultaneously he carried on a merchandising business, then turned to banking, railroad finance and management, being extraordinarily successful in these fields too. He was one of the most fortunate pioneers of his time, highly esteemed by his fellow citizens who bestowed upon him many positions of trust and honor. His gift of realistic vision was exceptional indeed - that it was matched by an equally strong feeling of responsibility could best be shown by the sincere concern he took in the intellectual life of young Chicago. In 1841 he founded an institution known as the Young Men's Library Association, a forerunner of the present Chicago Public Library. He was its first president and presented it with its first supply of books. For several terms he was president of the Board of Education. He became a member of the newly organized Chicago Historical Society, which, housed for a time in rooms furnished by him, owed much of its development to his contributions. A detailed account of such activities would probably add some rather unexpected features to the popular notion of an American frontier town in the eighteen forties and fifties. His will provided that, if his daughters died without issue, half of his fortune should be used to establish and endow a ‘free public library in that part of Chicago known as the North Division’. He died at sea when on a
voyage to Europe in 1868, and seventeen years later, with the death of his widow, his provisions establishing the Newberry Library became effective.
John Mansir Wing, born in 1845 at Ferndale, New York, came from the East coast too. Like Walter L. Newberry he was descended from an old New England family. His first American ancestor, the Reverend John Wing, who landed at Boston in 1632,
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was the author of several books. One of them, published in 1622, bears the remarkable title: The best merchandise, or a cleare discovery of the evident difference, and admirable advantage, betweene our traffike with God for the true treasure and with men for temporall commodity.
John M. Wing had scant schooling, a few terms only at Pulaski Academy, New York. The story is handed down in the Wing family that while hoeing corn one day in his father's fields, he heard the distant music of a circus Calliope in a nearby town, dropped his hoe, followed the music to town, and never returned home again. He found work as a printer's devil, later became a compositor in newspaper shops in Rome and in Utica, New York, and finally rose to be a proofreader and an editorial writer. Some of his early diaries are preserved. They show him wandering from East to West, an intelligent young man, well aware of his life's and his country's great adventure, full of hope and not without ambition. He attempted to run a newspaper of his own at Waukegan, Illinois, and tried to start an advertising agency as far East as St. Louis. Finding his path by trial and error he came to Chicago in 1865, where he worked as a newspaper reporter for the Chicago Daily Times and the Chicago Republican, till in 1868 he took the opportunity of travelling to Europe as a correspondent of the Boston Herald, accompanying the editor's son on this trip. Returning to Chicago he chose to be his own boss again, and this time was decidedly successful. He started a trade magazine which, as its title suggests, conformed exactly to the demands of time and place. It was called The Land Owner and it provided its founder with a handsome share in the earnings of the flourishing real estate business. The paper was prospering when the great fire of 1871 laid in ashes nearly all the big and bustling city of Chicago. Wing left at once for New York, to return with several trunks packed with materials to keep his paper running. Some books which he published at that time have gained considerable interest as sources of local history. Wing's Illustrated Travellers' and Visitors' Hand-book to the City of Chicago, printed
in 1874, depicts the town in the midst of its quick recovery and reconstruction. In 1876 he started a second big trade magazine, The Western Brewer and Journal of the Barley Malt
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and Hop Trades - the line of business once more being cleverly chosen.
The fact that John M. Wing could retire at the age of fortythree in 1888 may be indicative of Midwestern life at that time. For the last twenty-nine years of his life he was a traveller and a bibliophile. He collected books - but the way he did it seems to prove that he was too young and too active to enjoy the fruits of his fortune as a wealthy dilettante. He extra-illustrated his books, indulging in the hobby of grangerizing which had won some popularity among booklovers ever since, in 1769, James Granger encouraged the readers of his Biographical History of England to add engraved portraits and other illustrative matter to the original contents of the book. A paper read by Daniel M. Tredwell before the Rembrandt Club of Brooklyn, New York, on his experiences in ‘the seductive art of privately illustrating books’, printed in 1881, seems particularly to have inspired Mr Wing's imagination. He spent an incredible amount of work and patience on this hobby, doing everything, save the rebinding of the volumes, with his own hands, and he developed a remarkable skill in this rather wayward craft. The scope of his literary interests was fairly wide, ranging from Chaucer to Oscar Wilde. He delved into the field of general history as well as of biography, and the history of printing kept him intensively busy too. As a rule, octavo and quarto volumes had to be turned into folios in order to receive the heterogenous material assembled for their illustration, so that the original pages as well as the added prints had to be inlaid in leaves of the larger size. In this way, for instance, a rather homely octavo edition of Voltaire's Age of Louis XIV was blown up into a set of sixteen thick folio volumes. New title pages had to be inserted, and here Mr Wing liked to mention his share in the work done, usually adding to his name some whimsical and often enough bitter sounding remarks. Thus, on the title of a magnificent folio,
which he had built around a magazine article on Aldus Manutius, he calls himself: ‘Erstwhile Printer, Editor, Publisher, who, approaching the end of a life of turmoil, and not having found in all the world, after traversing many climes, anything worth the trouble, has become Philosopher, Paper-splitter and Paster of Literary Patchwork, to employ his
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leisure and ease his spleen withal, preferring this princely diversion to contact with fools and jackals’.
John Wing had become a lonely bachelor. He was growing old and seemed destined to end his days in sullenness. But fortunately one of his few friends, the learned lawyer and book collector, Horace Hawes Martin (1855-1925), succeeded in pointing out a human and beneficial object as a worthy end of this obviously still unsatisfied life. John Wing loved books and the printing trade, and Horace Martin persuaded him to enter into an arrangement with the Trustees of the Newberry Library, whereby he left his property to this institution for the establisment of a collection on the history of printing, with his own collection as a nucleus and as a memorial to the donor. The Trustees provided him with a private room in the library where he could keep and use the books he had collected. This he did until his death in 1917.
The provisions in Mr Wing's will relating to his foundation had been carefully considered, and were precise. But, fortunately, they have proved to be flexible enough. They leave ample scope for reasonable interpretation, neither barring future development nor excluding concentration on any special and restricted subject that might be temporarily desirable. Besides giving rules for the keeping of his own collection of books and prints, the maintenance of a Memorial Room and the Custodian's appointment, Mr Wing directed that the income from his bequest should be used for the purchase of books which ‘treat of, relate to, illustrate, exemplify, or depict, either wholly or in part, either directly or indirectly’, (1) the history and development of the arts of printing, engraving, and book illustration, and (2) bibliography, by which term he wished to be understood the ‘science, history, record and description of printed books’. He indicated that his foundation should ultimately include representative and typical specimens of the work of all the typographically or historically important printers and presses of Europe and North America. The typographer, the historian and the bibliographer should be enabled to trace here at first hand from original material every significant development of the arts of printing and book production, and Mr Wing wished that the contents of the books assembled should always, as far as possible,
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have a literary, biographical, historical or artistic importance as well as typographical. The last mentioned request has proved to be particularly farsighted and wise.
Guided by these provisions, the Wing Foundation was organized and developed within the Newberry Library. It has grown slowly but steadily in the course of a quarter century, and now its shelves house about 17.000 volumes. It was clear from the beginning that the program outlined in Mr Wing's will could not be realized in a short time or by adopting any simple schedule. Work had to be done one bit at a time, and it had to be done thoroughly. A committee appointed by the Trustees of the Newberry Library formulated some general directions, pointing out that it would be impracticable to attempt the simultaneous development on a large scale of two such vast subjects as Bibliography and the History of Printing. It seemed the wise course to develop only one for the present. Bibliography being well and strongly represented in the leading Chicago libraries, there was every reason for preferring the History of Printing as the main subject. Obviously, it appeared that in Chicago, one of the great printing centers of the world, a good and carefully chosen collection on the history of printing, and the arts connected with it, would render outstanding service directly and indirectly to the printing and publishing trades. There was need for such an institution in this city.
The income of Mr Wing's bequest became available in 1919, and in the following year, Dr Pierce Butler, until then in charge of the Book Selection Department at the Newberry Library, was appointed Curator of the Foundation. His was the task of laying out a working plan and starting its materialization. In a memorandum on the policy to be followed, he expressed the opinion that the John M. Wing Foundation should concern itself with the ‘humanities of typography,’ and that it should be, in its particular field of the printing arts, what the Newberry Library is in the broader realm of general culture. Stress should be laid rather on the artistic than on the mechanical aspects of the craft, thus leaving the mere technology of printing to The John Crerar Library of Chicago, which specializes in the natural and applied sciences. The Wing Foundation should devote itself ‘wholeheartedly to the accumul- | |
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ation of such things as will instruct, correct, and inspire the makers and users of books in the higher aspects of typographic art’.
On these principles and on the solid foundation of critical scholarship Pierce Butler began to build the collection. One of his main interests lay in the fifteenth century, and he began to hunt incunabula, with skill and success. He knew that any haphazard gathering of volumes out of the mass of available early printed books would have no great value. In accord with the purpose of the Wing Foundation he attempted to secure specimens of the work of each one of the fifteenth century presses, and, for the most part, this was done. Every important printer's name is represented in the Wing collection by at least one of his books. In Gutenberg's case one had to be content with some fragments while the mass of smaller presses is shown well enough in proportion to their actual significance. The books thus collected accomplish a manifold object. They provide the student with a comprehensive survey of type design and punch cutting during the first half-century of the printing art. They show the development and the variations of type composition, of page layout, illustration and ornament, and of all the accessories belonging to a book. They are something more. Pierce Butler succeeded in assembling a collection of early printed books, which actually has become what he, in a programmatic article published in 1921, described as an ‘approximate equivalent of what a good institutional library must have been in the early years of the sixteenth century’. Cleverly selected as they are, the 1800 volumes of incunabula in the Wing collection represent the main sources of intellectual life at the end of the Middle Ages, and the outline fairly well the social, economic and political background of that period. This subordination to a high point of view could be attained without neglecting the special and professional purposes of the collection, being in perfect accord with the provisions of Mr Wing's will. Once in a while a new acquisition is added to the Wing collection
of incunabula, but, generally, it is felt that this section is equal to its task and not particularly in need of further development.
While turning his chief attention to the heroic times of the printing art, Pierce Butler did not fail to build a stable framework
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covering the whole of the wide ground allotted to the Wing Foundation. He acquired books of many of the famous presses that have flourished since the sixteenth century, and he provided for a strong array of standard books dealing with printing and its related subjects, chiefly from the viewpoint of history and design. The first large purchase he ventured was a very fortunate one. When in 1920 the library of the well-known printer Theodore L. De Vinne was offered for sale, nearly all of the desirable books were secured for the Wing Foundation, among them many rare items of early professional printing trade literature. Apart from their value, the volumes bearing DeVinne's bookplate may be considered as a worthy memorial to the great, scholarly typographer, and probably could have found nowhere else a more appropriate place. About the same time a complete series of the books printed by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press was acquired.
Pierce Butler left the Newberry Library in 1931, accepting an appointment as professor of library history at the University of Chicago where, in previous years, he had already given lectures on the history of printing and on bibliographical methods. His successor in the Custodian's office at the Wing Foundation was Ernst Frederick Detterer, until this time head of the department of printing in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Deeply interested in the history of books and book making, he knew the printing craft thoroughly from its practical side too, and he was a designer of high abilities. At an early time in his career the art of the calligrapher had begun to fascinate him in a particular way. He had taught writing and lettering at the Institute School, and he found a way of continuing this beautiful educational work while being associated with the Newberry Library. Friends of his and interested young people gathered around him in the Wing rooms in order to study under his direction the art of writing in its historical as well in its practical aspects. The Newberry Calligraphy Study Group which in this way came into existence actually developed into something like a school of writing, lettering and graphic design. Probably unique in its kind, it exercised a remarkable influence throughout the American Midwest. In the very heart of the Wing Foundation, in a small room adjacent to the Wing
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Memorial Room, Ernst Detterer set up a small printing shop, equipped with an iron hand press, a platenpress and some cases of type. Here, assisted by his pupils and some type-minded members of the Library staff, he did experimental work of various kinds, and occasionally some practical jobbing printing was done for the Newberry's own needs. For the library's bookbinding department Ernst Detterer designed a new type, roman capitals of bold and open shape. It is one of the finest type faces that have been cut for this purpose, and the Newberry is rightfully proud of it. Widely esteemed as an authority on graphic design, Ernst Detterer was appointed director on the National Board of Printing Type Faces, while to his profound knowledge of this special subject the Wing Foundation owes a well selected file of important type specimens, from the seventeenth century up to the present time.
Such happy mutual penetration of scholarship and craftmanship may be considered as a further approach to what the Wing Foundation should be: a place of exchange for all the experiences accumulated in the field of printing design, and a meeting place for people who love books and the book-creating crafts, no matter what avocation or predilection may lead them to that noble subject.
In June 1941 the calligraphic collection of the Chicago scribe and illuminator, C. Lindsay Ricketts, was acquired by the Newberry Library. The income of the Wing Foundation not being sufficient for this extraordinary purchase, recourse was had to a fund bequeathed in 1928 by Edward L. Ryerson for the acquisition of manuscripts and rare printed books. The purchase of the Ricketts Collection provided the library with a set of books on calligraphy and some closely related subjects that, as to value and extension, may safely be ranked among the foremost collections of its kind. It contains one of the oldest manuscripts treating with the proportions and the construction of the roman capital letters, a highly interesting and important book written in Italy about the end of the fifteenth century, and a similar tract teaching the geometrical construction of gothic letters. The collection includes a number of manuscripts that, irrespective of their contents, were acquired as specimens of fine scriptorial work, but the bulk consists of writing-masters' copybooks and treatises on the art of writing and lettering.
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Nearly all the famous books belonging to this class of literature may be found here, beginning with Pacioli's Divina Proportione (1509), Dürer's Underweysung (1525), Tory's Champ Fleury (1529), and Neudörffer's Ein gute Ordnung (1538). Several of the more important books may be seen in various editions, some of them in complete sets. With the purchase of the Ricketts Collection 53 manuscripts and 675 printed books were added to the Newberry Library, providing a broad and solid foundation for a department of calligraphy which is being continually enlarged and rounded off, encouraged and supported by the strong personal interest which the President of the Library, Mr Alfred E. Hamill, takes in the subject. Copybooks as well as various specimens of outstanding penmanship have been added during the last years. A book of statutes of the city of Venice, executed about 1565 in an immaculate cancelleresca Hand, and a magnificent baroque manuscript, written and profusely illuminated for the education of the Archduke Charles - later King Charles III of Spain and Emperor Charles VI - may be cited among recent acquisitions.
Ernst Detterer died suddenly in 1947, in the midst of intense and prolific work. His death left a gap, hard to fill, in the Newberry staff. The many people who are indebted to his knowledge, wisdom and friendliness, remember him with gratitude and affection, and the ties uniting the Newberry Calligraphy Study Group have proved strong enough to last. The group is now directed by two of his friends, James Hayes and Robert Middleton, both passionate penmen, and the latter, in addition, owner of a private press. As yet, Ernst Detterer's position as Custodian of the Wing Foundation is vacant, and the Newberry head librarian, Dr Stanley Pargellis, takes immediate care of this department. In the summer of 1948 Stanley Morison, invited as a Visiting Fellow, assisted him for about two months, and this year the present writer has had the pleasure of working in the John M. Wing Foundation, enjoying its treasures and trying to give some advice in return for the Newberry's hospitality.
In its present state the Wing collection certainly is one of the foremost libraries in its special field, as useful as it is beautiful and inspiring, and one could be contented with adding the new publish- | |
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ed books concerning the arts and trades of bookmaking, and occasionally acquiring an extraordinarily valuable volume that would fit nto the collections of fine printing. But there would always be a pressing ambition to do something more than library routine work and probably a collection like this one never could be successfully run in a more or less mechanical way. Its growth and development will always depend on the predilections as well as on the knowledge of the responsible persons, even their hobbies will have some bearing, and wholehearted devotion, ready to do a thing for its own sake, will always provide the most efficient motive power. The Wing Foundation can specialize in certain limited subjects without neglecting its duty of keeping the whole of the collection on a fairly high and even level. By such a concentration of means, financial as well as intellectual, the Wing collection of incunabula was developed, and now, as stated before, some of the foundation's surplus energies are being directed into the field of calligraphic arts. One day, when the possible and desirable level of completeness will be attained here too, the attention will be focussed on a new subject, on a topic that might be as large and abundant as the history of publishing, or as intricate and difficult to handle as the development of commercial printing. But perhaps, and this is the present writer's opinion, it would be a good course to develop one of the existing sections into a permanent center around which every item eligible could find its place by some kind of organic subordination.
Now the very basis of printing is obviously incorporated in the arts and crafts of type design and lettering. No matter what changes the technique of printing may undergo in the future, the beauty and the efficiency of the printed word will always depend on the qualities of letter design. Fortunately the Wing collection is already very strong in this central field of the printing arts. The collection of incunabula, backed by ample auxiliary literature, offers an exceptional opportunity for the study of fifteenth century types. The collection of fine printing, including books of nearly all important printers from the sixteenth century to our day, and the files of type specimens cover adequately the later centuries. The collection of writing-masters' copy-books, significant of course for their own sake, provides the very best means of tracing the inter- | |
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relations of handwriting and printing types, which always and everywhere exist. Since printing type design as well as the writing-master's art are derived from antique and medieval handwriting and lettering, the subjects neither of paleography nor epigraphy can be omitted in a collection devoted to serious study of letter-forms. It would be impracticable of course to accumulate medieval manuscripts in the Wing collection - though there are some - but a very instructive file of fragments and single leaves has been started, and the important manuscript collection of the Newberry Library is at the student's beck and call. A good selection of paleographic textbooks and facsimiles is present, and, since research on monumental lettering is still in its beginnings, the idea of collecting photographs and rubbings of remarkable inscriptions has been taken into consideration.
It would be a beautiful and great task to gather systematically and thoroughly everything pertaining to the art and history of letterforms. The craftsmen certainly would appreciate such an undertaking, which, by the way, would conform perfectly to the ideas that Stanley Morison displayed in his admirable lecture on ‘The Art of Printing’. The pure historian, too, would find here a storehouse of information, containing probably much more than he expects. For the history of letterforms reflects and records in a very distinct way every conceivable movement in the history of the human mind, providing graphic records that ought to be read like cardiographic curves. This kind of ‘reading’, it is true, must be learned, and methods have to be developed. But there is little doubt that it will be attempted, and there is every reason to predict success. As yet, the historical interpretation of letter-forms has scarcely ventured beyond the gathering of criteria for dating and locating documents, monuments and books, though obviously scriptorial style and rhythm at any time and in every country are closely related to the spirit of contemporary art. Moreover, there are some rather surprising facts, indicating that true ‘style’ can find in letter-forms its most distinct expression. At this point, aesthetic interpretation of writing passes into psychological analysis, and the Chinese - probably the most experienced people in this respect - seem to have felt ever since that this essentially is the
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same thing. In the Western world graphology is a rather young science, classified as a branch of psychological research and therefore, bibliographically as well as in general consent, located far apart from subjects like paleography, calligraphy, lettering, or type design. But historical graphology - if such label is necessary at all - should be considered at least as a possible approach to some crucial problems of style, attitude and behavior in history. It would take the combined efforts of several hitherto segregated branches of knowledge, but the venture would seem particularly enticing just for this reason. Most probably, the application of psychological methods to the problems of letter-forms would open considerable new insight into some fundamental facts of printing design. It would help to consolidate our judgment and provide understanding where we still have to guess. Work is left for the future, and an institution like the John M. Wing Foudation would certainly be able to instigate research in this direction, too.
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1. Geometrically constructed Gothic letter from an anonymous 15th century manuscript of the alphabet.
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2. Fine Italian chaucery hand in black and red with gold calligraphic initials.
First page of the laws and statutes of Venice, written at the order of Aloysius Mocenigo in about 1570.
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3. Leaf from manuscript writing book prepared for and presented to Princess Elisabeth, only daughter of James I, by the famous master Jehan de Beauchesne.
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4. Type specimen. Leipzig, 1646. Unidentified press.
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