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Plantin and our time
by J. van Krimpen
of the Enschedé Foundry (Haarlem)
It may seem rather strange that a citizen of the Northern Low Countries called to lecture in their Southern counterpart, and of all towns in that of Antwerp, should begin by talking of Rotterdam. I simply have to do it because of a parallel I want to draw between the two towns and in particular between two - of either of the towns one - of their important citizens of bygone days. I can promise my Belgian friends that my story will not, and cannot, give rise to economic or political controversies, in which the relations between Antwerp and Rotterdam are rich enough, and that I will gladly leave those to the people whose almost daily concern they are; I can promise it even although the subject of the Rotterdam part of my parallel is closely connected with its economie life and prosperity which, as we all know, is one of the sources of the controversies I have mentioned.
Rotterdam, as we too all know, has been connected with the North Sea, by an under all circumstances reliable canal: the New Waterway, roughly speaking during the third quarter of the nineteenth century; it is thanks to the New Waterway that Rotterdam has become one of the three most important ports of the Western European Continent. How important it was, and fortunately has become anew, and how important it was thought by the owners of one of the two other ports - I am not now speaking of Antwerp! - was shown by what happened during the last war, in May 1940, when those owners tried to wipe out Rotterdam definitely.
Now this New Waterway was devised in 1857 and constructed from 1863 to 1878 by a Dutch engineer, no son of Rotterdam itself, called Pieter Caland. Caland, herewith, has created his own monu- | |
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ment, outside his elected town, in the green land west of Rotterdam. After his death in 1902, however, the town of Rotterdam has wanted to honour him and his memory by erecting a monument - ugly as people in those days knew how to create an ugly monument - in the living centre of the town itself. - I think that in the meantime - and if I am right it happened since the war - it has been either done away with entirely or moved to a less central and, as a consequence, less conspicuous spot somewhere in the town. I have learned since that it has indeed been moved to an other and quieter spot. The consequence is that now hardly anybody in Rotterdam knows of it at all.
But now listen how this monument was, shortly after its inauguration, spoken of in a folksong written and composed by the popular poet Speenhoff who was another citizen, but not a son either, of Rotterdam.
There used to be on guard near the monument a police constable; and Speenhoff has chosen this man as the typical representative of the population of the town and called his song ‘The Constable of the Caland monument’. In his first stanza he gives an ironical description of the monument which he repeats in the for my purpose most important one which I will now quote in my own clumsy and unmetrical translation. The poet says, then, ‘If one asks who was Caland the good fellow says: Caland does not regard me; he is no concern of mine. Caland is a monument in Caland Square: in a stone water basin there is running a fountain; there are, further, twins, plump as mud, who don't wear breeches and an angel in her shirt who is unable to fly. And I am only the constable of the Caland monument.’ Now you know how the people of Rotterdam, the life of which is so to say the New Waterway, are acquainted with the performance, and honour the memory of, one of their great fellow citizens who, by the time that the quoted song was written, was dead only for a few years!
I might as well have chosen Plantin's senior by not so many years: Erasmus; Erasmus of Rotterdam. He too has a monument, a statue, in Rotterdam. He is standing and holding a book. When I was a boy one could almost always see fathers or mothers or nurses and little children intently looking at the statue and after the clock of
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the main church had struck see some conversation, in a slightly disappointed way from the side of the children, going on. The joke was that the children were told that as often as Erasmus should hear the clock strike he would turn over a leaf of his book. The children complained that the clock had struck and that Erasmus had not turned a leaf. And the answer would be that he was likely not to have heard the clock strike. - And this was about what, on the average, the Rotterdammer knew of Erasmus.
I come to Antwerp and Plantin who maybe was a greater citizen of his town than Caland was of Rotterdam but, on the other hand, greater in a more special field; and dead, at that, for over three and a half centuries. He has, however, built his own monument - the patrician dwelling, printing house, typefoundry, and what not, in which we are now foregathering - in the living heart itself of a town that seems to have changed less than Rotterdam which, having developed later and quicker than Antwerp, is something entirely different from its own self of as little as a century ago.
May one expect that the great Plantin is better known by the people of Antwerp, taken on the whole, than Caland - who might be substituted by almost any great man of any other town - by that of Rotterdam? I am afraid that the answer will have to be in the negative.
Old Antwerp, the quarter in which the House of Plantin is to be found, is for the non native, the occasional visitor, of this town not too easy to find one's way in; it is, in fact, quite as mazy and difficult as, for instance, Covent Garden in London. The first several times I have been here I was in the company of one native of Antwerp or another. And so I have managed to lose my way, intending to go to this place, only once. That one and single time I had the good fortune to run into a kind and erudite lady from these parts whom I had met several times in this very house and who I knew to be one of its great friends. She of course directed me at once and thoroughly. As a consequence I cannot speak from my own experience. But several friends who, at some time, were unable to find their way to the Plantin Museum have assured me that unmistakable Antwerp citizens they had asked proved to be as wise as they were themselves: they seemed never to have heard of a
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similar institution. One could even not tell how to go to the Friday market. - You will agree with me that, if there should be any ground at all for controversies between Antwerp and Rotterdam, it can certainly not be found in the one having a right to think of the other that it insufficiently knows or honours its great men of the past.
I am supposed, because asked, to talk on Plantin and our time; on, I take it, Plantin's influence in our time. I think my story proves that Plantin is unknown to the people at large and that, in consequence, there can be hardly any question of his influence on them. The august international train of lecturers who have preceded me have each of them dealt with a particular side of the many-sided phenomenon that was Christopher Plantin. In looking over the programme of this celebration I find that most subjects treated by them are before anything else of a historical nature; and as far as they can be said to be factual they are historical still because they deal with historical facts and material.
It is most decidedly beyond my competence to make out in how far an influence of Plantin can be traced in his capacity as the centre of a humanist circle, as a religious man - as such, surprisingly enough for a printer and publishers of bibles and other liturgical and religious books, we have heard precious little - or as anything of this same class.
Plantin, whom I have just called a many-sided phenomenon, was in several respects a great man. Greatest, perhaps, as a man of business. And it has, more than once, been justly said that hardly anything can be thought of that speaks more to the imagination of the masses than longevity combined with spectacular success in business; longevity rather of a firm or a house than of a single person. - Houses like Medici, Fugger, Rothschild, belong to the best known examples; in the publishing and printing trade Elsevier is better known and remembered than, for instance, Blaeu: most decidedly not because of the quality of their work, for in this respect Blaeu must be admitted to be the winner, but because of the public success with which, and the long stretch of time during which, members of the Elsevier family have been working in the Trade. - Plantin, during his just over thirty years of activity, laid the found- | |
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ation for the astonishingly long life of the House of Plantin-Moretus. Might here an influence or possibility of an influence be found? My answer is no again. For success in business depends on the very personal qualities of single persons; personal qualities that, as a condition for success, have, moreover, to fit in the time in which those single persons live. - Has it not been said, over and over again, during the first years after the second world war, that the taxation systems of the countries that had been at war, and the unquenchable greed of the fisc in almost all of them, would prevent people from building up fortunes as we had seen in former times? And do we not all know instances of persons who have succeeded in collecting riches that are nearly unimaginable within ten years' time since the last war? Maybe they are speculators; but then, maybe Plantin, too, was a speculator: who knows? And I think speculating can neither be taught nor learned; if it does have a certain influence, this influence is of a thoroughly other nature than the
radiation we are thinking of here and now.
Plantin as a bookbinder then. When he first came to Antwerp bookbinding was the craft he practised. - Has, besides paper making, any part of the Trade changed so fundamentally as bookbinding? How many people will there be in the entire world who still have a more or less distinct idea what bookbinding and a bookbinding, or a bound book, really are? For the several kinds of cases and covers, ephemeral in themselves, with which we stick, and try to keep, together our so much more ephemeral books, than those of Plantin's days were, are not really bookbindings and they should rather not be called thus. Plantin was, to the best of my knowledge, neither an experimentalist nor an innovator in the part of his craft that is called forwarding; nor was he, I think, very original or outstanding in the finishing, which includes the ornamentation, of his bookbindings. - Wise men amongst the limited number of real bookbinders the world still knows - like equally wise architects, makers of furniture, typographers, and other craftsmen - are aware that, for the time being, ornament is dead in our Western civilization. Perhaps it will revive - which would mean that it should have to be re-born entirely anew - but what is left of old ornament, that has a symbolic value, has been killed by ill-treatment and misuse by generations
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before ours and by losing its symbolic meaning and value; and I for one can see nor believe that a more simple form of revival, than a laborious re-birth which might take centuries to be achieved, could be possible or would be able to have any genuine vitality. By having said this one has at the same time expressed the opinion that in the field of bookbinding, too, no influence of Plantin on our time can be traced.
Having achieved what he does have achieved in the publishing trade Plantin must have been a clever business man. Not being a publisher myself - nor, at that, really a business man -, and having only the faintest of notions of what goes on in the publishing trade, I must abstain from giving an opinion on this side of Plantin's activity. I am pretty sure, however, that no modern publisher will think of devoting his spare time, unless as an investigator into the history of his trade, in studying Plantin's business methods. The modern publisher knows as well as, nay better than, I do that Plantin and his methods have nothing to teach him.
There have been lectures, during the present celebration which is now nearing its end, on the physical sides of Plantin's books; and I well understand, even though I have so far only delivered some small talk on other facets of the object of our celebration, that its organisers have expected and wanted me to say something on his influence during our time, if it can be detected, on the physical side of modern book production.
I have delayed so long coming to my proper subject in order to soften an inevitable feeling of disappointment. Here, too, I do not see much that could prove that Plantin, though gone from this world these three hundred and sixty-six years, should still be regarded as, in some ways, a living personality.
Plantin and his work are typically and undeniably of the sixteenth century. It is undeniable, too, - and besides that I think rather logical - that, in book production, after the era of William Morris and his direct influence had come to a close - that is, roughly speaking, since the first world war - the makers of books should no longer believe in the fifteenth century as having the monopoly of all means of grace.
Dr Stanley Morison has told us, many a time, that the type face
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which Aldus Manutius used for Pietro Bembo's De Aetna was the first roman that had shaken itself free from the direct calligraphic influences characteristic for the type faces used by Aldus's immediate predecessors. I should not like to gainsay this verdict. And, yet, to me this face, produced on the verge of the sixteenth century, is not, if free from all too direct calligraphic influence, really and purely typographic. It has been the sixteenth century French puchcutter, and typefounder and printer, Claude Garamont who created the first roman type face in which hardly a trace of evident or visible calligraphic influence can be found. (And, when I say Garamont, I of course mean the true vintage and not the seventeenth century Jean Jannon of Sedan on whose romans several, and too many, of the modern versions of so-called Garamont are based.) - Besides the undeniably typographical type face that, after developing in this way or other and through a number of mostly abortive tentative forms, has come back to as the prototype of sound type design the sixteenth century has also created the title page as, in principle, we still know and use it. - It has, too, seen the birth of the first monstrosity in mature typography; of the class of printing types commonly called Caractères de Civilité the first of which was, as far as we know, cut by Claude Garamont's younger contemporary Robert GranIon. (GranIon has, at the same time, cut a number of italics which certainly belong to the very best ever produced.)
In Plantin's workshop there have been used type faces by Garamont and several other great French punchcutters - some of the original punches, and quite a number of matrices and strikes, still remain in the archives of his House - and the average of his performances must be said to be of sound and good taste. There was in use, for certain liturgical books, a specifically Spanish blackletter of a particularly fine design which is still the delight of the great friend of this House Professor Ray Nash who has also lectured for us. - Numbers of title pages there have been made of which, if not for their logical structure then at least for their decorative value, a lot could be learned by many a typographer of our day. - The monstrosity I have mentioned, the Caractères de Civilité, Plantin has not resisted; or perhaps one should say not been able to resist or to reject; - on the contrary: Plantin has not only profusely used the
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firstlings by Robert Granion but also caused Flemish craftsmen, such as Ameet Tavernier and Henrik van der Keere - and possibly even GranIon himself -, to cut further versions and body sizes of this most unreadable, and (technically speaking) utterly clumsy and detestable though cleverly made, class of type faces. In this respect, therefore, he made no exception: a flaw - on taste, on reason, on whatever it may be - can be found almost everywhere and in any man alive.
But, again, Plantin's influence; and now in particular the influence of his typography in our time!
I can hardly call it influence when which has happened rather frequently, Plantin's name has been used for series of type faces which, as Mr Harry Carter might have said (as he once, many years ago, did when speaking of a type face that, too, was named after a distinguished typographer of the past, - which ‘useful though they may be have little or nothing to do with the original from which they derive their name’; or for printing offices when they just happen to be established in the city or the country, or not even that, where Plantin operated his; or for typefoundries. All this is done, like so many things, for publicity's sake; and nobody present here can more strougly dislike, than I do, the ways and means of modern publicity because of their immorality and their lack of taste.
One of the greatest living typographers - on whom, just before the last world war, Dr Morison has written a fine eulogy which I am afraid is little known but which should be read by everybody who has an interest in these matters -; one of the greatest living typographers who, being eighty-five, may well be the oldest practising one in the craft at the same time is, of all those I know or know of, the man who perhaps has undergone the strongest and most direct influence of sixteenth century typography.
He is a great master of so-called period typography - a way of working, of arranging texts, that aims at suggesting in the typography of a book the period in which the printed text was written: a principle of which I cannot call myself, for many reasons, either an admirer or even a friend - but, of whatever period he, the master I and now talking of, is thinking, it remains obvious in all his achievements that the sixteenth century in typography, and above
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all its airiness and delicacy, is the period of his predilection. - He has also worked as a designer of type. During his youth he has learned, from William Morris and his followers, that never a finer type face has been produced than that of the Frenchman from Tours, who about 1470 started printing in Venice, Nicolas Jenson. All his performances in the field of type design are closely based on Jenson's letters. And I think it a remarkable fact that he has managed to give the ultimate version of his roman, while he is rather scrupulously following his fifteenth century models, a distinct sixteenth century flavour.
I have named Bruce Rogers and his Centaur roman.
I cannot see, however, that Plantin and his work count for anything in the work of this great American master. Tours, said to be the cradle of Plantin, is there in Nicolas Jenson who had been a Master of the Royal Mint at Tours before becoming a printer; so Tours is there: but not the Master of the Golden Compasses. - For his typography, as far as it is influenced by or perhaps it is better to say as far as he has learned from the sixteenth century, he seems rather to have found his inspiration in the books of Plantin's older contemporaries such as Geoffroy Tory, Claude Garamont, the Estiennes,
Still there is one side of Christopher Plantin's activities - a side which I have not mentioned so far - part of which must be taken to have a very distinct influence, during our days, on a considerable number of people.
I think I have not been to any country without finding in one or more houses, framed or pinned to some wall or door, a print of his sonnet ‘Le Bonheur de ce Monde’ either bought in this house or printed, or maybe calligraphed, in some other place: quite a number of various settings there must exist.
A remarkable thing it is that in any company having this sonnet before their eyes there are always people who proclaim to detest this tame and lame philosophy of domestic bliss - as they call it - and others who think it one of its most sublime expressions. I certainly do not belong to those who absolutely detest the sonnet's contents. I only ask myself, sometimes, what its modern
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fervent admirers, living in their tiny little flats on fifth or sixth floors, think when they read about ‘un jardin tapissé d'espaliers odorans’; and then I still do not talk of ‘dire son chapelet en cultivant ses entes’! But, anyhow, the widespread worship of ‘Le Bonheur de ce Monde’ is there to prove that at least something of Christopher Plantin is still alive and has an undeniable influence in our time.
But if I could have my say in this matter I should by far prefer to be aware that his other verses, also sold in this house, - and written, as I like to think, with and out of the wisdom of a man who feels that he is going to die soon - I mean the distich
‘Un labeur courageux, muni d'humble constance,
Résiste à tous assauts par douce patience’
were the ones that are liked so much; for if there is anything our time can do with it is people who live up to this maxim that conveys the principle lying at the root of Plantin's greatness.
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