AN ACCOUNT OF CALLIGRAPHY PRINTING IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

From Dialogues Attributedto Christopher Plantin. French andFlemish text in facsimile, English translation and, notes by Ray Nash. Department of Printing and Graphic Arts,Harvard College Library, pp. viii,;70. Limited edition of 250 copies. $3.50.

"The printing craft has always had its historians: men who listed books, dates, places and people. But it was not until two centuries after Gutenberg that any of them attempted to describe technique. Thus Moxon was the first of a succession of practical printers or typefounders who had the inclination to write manuals or histories of printing."

This statement, made comparatively recently in a typographical journal by one of the more competent authorities on printing (Typography 1, November, 1936, p. 10), merely continues an error which has persisted quite generally up to this 500 th year of the history of printing. Moxon's Mechanick Exercises were published in 1683. The Dialogue here reproduced, translated and annotated by Mr. Nash is found in a volume published in 1567 by Christopher Plantin, one of the great French printers and publishers of the century after Gutenberg's, under the title of Dialogues Francois pour les JeunesEnfans. Although not unknown, this Dialogue has remained apparently unnoticed, perhaps because so inaccessible, the volume containing it being exceedingly rare.

The first part of the Dialogue, devoted to the art of writing, although its descriptions of technique are undetailed and elementary, is interesting to calligraphers because of observations therein on certain of Hamon's scripts, and to the general reader as a quaint description of penmanship when writing was an esoteric skill.

"The most important portion of the whole," Mr. Stanley Morison writes in his foreword to the present volume, "is doubtless the section which describes the press. It is a careful description which, while not comparable with Moxon from the point of view of detail, is very precious as giving us a clear picture of the press nearly one hundred and twenty years earlier than that of the Mechanick Exercises."

The Jeunes Enfans to whom the Dialogues were ostensibly presented, would seem to have been precocious, as Mr. Morison points out in his foreword, to which we are indebted for the authoritative estimate of the considerable significance of this publication to the annals of printing. For the adult layman of the 20th century, Mr. Nash's luminous notes are the heart of the volume, to say which is not to reflect on the lucidity of the translation. They demonstrate a wide and profound knowl- edge of the earliest phases of printing and much painstaking research, particularly in identification and translation of technical terminology.

The parallel facsimiles of the French and Flemish texts, never previously reproduced, again have a special interest to typographers as examples of Plantin's printing and the less important interest of quaintness to the general reader.

Laymen, of whom this reviewer is obviously one, will be inclined comfortably to forget the developments of printing in the intervening four centuries and agree with G. who, terminating this 16th century Dialogue, says, "I should never have thought there was so much to it!"

And, in this 500 th anniversary year in the history of printing, we will also agree with Mr. Morison that this first account of the working of the printing press is a highly appropriate first publication by the Harvard Library's new Department of Printing and Graphic Arts.

Were it not so interesting in content, the importance of this little volume would be in danger of being overshadowed by the charm and distinction of its presentation. This edition, limited to 250 copies, was printed by D. B. Updike at the Merrymount Press and is all that might consequently be expected of it.

Changes in Nomenclature in the Fernsand Fern Allies in Gray's Manual, a mimeographed pamphlet of six pages, has been prepared by Professor James P. Poole.

The October issue of the ShakespeareAssociation Bulletin contains an article Montaigne's Apologie of Raymond Sebond, and King Lear, by the late Professor W. B. Drayton Henderson. This article will be concluded in a latter number of the Bulletin.

Extracurricular Natural History Program at Dartmouth College Begins SecondSeason, by Dr. Richard Weaver, has been reprinted from the January issue of the Bulletin of the Massachusetts AudubonSociety.

Professor W. W. Longley is the author of an advance report on the western section of the Mattagami Lake Map Area, which is published by the Department of Mines and Fisheries, of the Province of Quebec, Canada.

Induced Size Effect 111. A Study of thePhenomenon as Influenced by Horizontal Disparity of the Fusion Contours, by Professor Kenneth N. Ogle has been reprinted from the October number of the Archives of Ophthalmology. Professor Ogle is also the author of an article entitled Relative Sizes of the Ocular Imagesof the Two Eyes in Asymmetric Convergence, which appears in the December number of Archives of Ophthalmology.

Professor Harold Bannerman is the author of Mines and Minerals of NewHampshire, which appears in the current Report of the New England, Associationof Chemistry Teachers.

Two stories by Professor Eric P. Kelly '06 appeared in Christmas publications —Don Pedro's Christmas, in Child Life and So Far Away in the Church School Publications, including the various Highroads, Pilgrim, Epworth, etc.