Book Arts in the Victorian Era

Victorian developments in the book arts—commonly understood as the specialized arts of printing, typography, bookbinding, illustration, illumination, papermaking, and so forth that go toward the material creation of a book—owe a great deal to the period’s evolving consciousness that a book no less than a painting or sculpture could be a work of art. They owe much also to the rapid proliferation of books and other print media, to improvements in literacy, technology, communications, and lighting, to ever faster and cheaper modes of production, and to the demands of a growing, more diverse, and more literate population. (See the separate Oxford Bibliographies article “Publishing”). These changes sparked invention and innovation, and while the demands of the mass market meant that the vast majority of Victorian books were produced cheaply with little concern for the quality and artistry of their manufacture, there was a growing understanding, at least among a small minority, that the book arts could strengthen and enhance a book’s verbal text. Bookbinding, illustration, and illumination all flourished, while the arts of letterpress printing, typography, and paper manufacture generally lagged behind until the century’s final decade, when a so-called revival of printing was discernible among a small cadre of new publishing firms. This revival is witnessed too in books privately printed from the late-1870s onward at the Daniel Press, in Oxford, after its founder Henry Daniel rediscovered the ancient Fell types once used by Oxford University Press. Still more can it be perceived in the work of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press (1891–1898) and the private presses that came in Morris’s wake. These presses rejected the industrial and commercial premises of trade publication entirely in favor of a thoroughgoing commitment to the printed book as a work of art and craft. They embraced the Albion handpress, printed on only the finest unbleached linen-based papers, created original typefaces, illuminated capitals and decorative page borders, and generally emphasized the artisanal crafts of bookmaking. Now regarded as constituting a veritable private press “movement,” these presses fostered a massive reinvigoration of just about all the book arts in the closing decade of the Victorian period. And while they had a limited effect on the worlds of commercial publishing and mass-printing in the Victorian period itself, the Victorian private presses marked the dawn of an ever-widening appreciation for what has been called “slow print.” Their effects were felt long into the twentieth century.