Beauty and the Book: Fine Editions and Cultural Distinction in America (review)

Beauty and the Book: Fine Editions and Cultural Distinction in America. By Megan L. Benton. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. xii, 323 pp. $30.00. ISBN 0-300-08213-4.

Fine printing does not exist in a commercial vacuum, but historians have sometimes been tempted to treat it as an isolated activity motivated primarily by aesthetic and idealistic impulses. It is worth recalling that even Gutenberg, who had extraordinarily high typographical standards, went bankrupt, and private printers since his day, no matter how apparently insulated from the pressures of the marketplace, have never been able altogether to ignore the preferences of their readers.

Megan L. Benton, in Beauty and the Book, offers a close examination of this tension—to put it simply, the choice between the pursuit of beauty and the pursuit of money—in the world of American fine printing during the 1920s and 1930s, and she demonstrates that private presses, designers, illustrators, and book collectors were much more strongly driven by financial motives than they were prepared to acknowledge openly. (Libraries, too, as important customers for the presses, played a role in the bibliophilic world of those decades, though Benton rarely mentions them.) The primary sources for Benton's study are three hundred representative books "analyzed for features and aspects of their content, design, production, financial arrangements, marketing, distribution, and sales" (243) and a number of major archives, including the Bennett Cerf papers at Columbia University, the Carl P. Rollins papers at Yale, and the Grabhorn Press records at the University of California at Berkeley.

Benton writes clearly and stylishly (despite her reliance upon depressingly fashionable terms liked elitism and commodification), and the book is usefully illustrated. She is immensely well informed about the world of fine printing that she describes. If her work has any obvious weakness, it is a tendency to see book production entirely in ideological terms and to ignore the practical realities of printing. She treats the common use of hand-made papers by the private presses, for example, as merely an exercise in conspicuous consumption, whereas one can make the case that such papers are more attractive and durable than machine-made papers. The deep impress of type and ink into the fabric of dampened paper is not a silly affectation, as she seems to believe; it is, in fact, a superior form of inking that produces much deeper blacks than lithographic inks, which lie only on the surface of the paper, can ever create. Benton's analyses of the intellectual and moral confusion of the private press movement are often extremely shrewd, but they do not always take into account the pragmatic necessities imposed on a printer by the equipment and materials he or she uses.

Another shortcoming of Benton's book is that her knowledge of the American scene is much more profound than her awareness of the English world of fine printing. Inevitably, there are frequent references to William Morris's Kelmscott Press, the chief source of inspiration for many modern private printers, yet Benton is hazy about the real commercial pressures that Morris actually experienced. She assumes that the Kelmscott Press represented an unsullied ideal of aesthetic purity that could never be attained by any other private press, whereas Morris, too, struggled with the classic problem of how to produce beautiful books that would actually sell. For that matter, Benton's references to other important English figures such as Stanley Morison and Emery Walker also betray shallow research.

It is not surprising that Benton is drawn to personalities like Porter Garnett (of Carnegie Tech) or the Grabhorn brothers, who illustrate her thesis about the hypocrisy and ethical bewilderment behind the self-confident facade of early-twentieth-century American fine printing. But if she had paid more attention to Daniel Berkeley Updike (or Francis Meynell, though he was on the wrong side of the Atlantic for Benton's purpose), she would...