PRINTING AS AN ART.

By Ray Nash. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955- 141pp. $6.00.

What Professor Nash means in his title by "art" appears partly when he says, speaking of the early nineteenth century, "art being then sensibly defined as doing or making as distinguished from science or knowing." So far he leaves aside the difference between art and engineering, and the difference between arts and crafts.

But the printer's trade permits him, as engineers are seldom permitted, to stand "superior to the divisive tendencies of industrial departmentalization." For this reason, perhaps, the printer's is "a craft having more possibilities for the cause of spiritual regeneration than those buried deeper in industrialism." Perhaps the need for regeneration has something to do with "that 'softening' which is supposed to demoralize workmen whenever technological advances replace an awkward, laborious process with a simpler, better one."

Ray Nash is not one to provide pat answers for such questions as these. He is writing here a history of the Society of Printers and predecessor organizations in Boston among the practitioners of "the black art." This is a volume of historical scholarship showing how a society which has included in its membership America's most distinguished exponents of the graphic arts sprang from the period which had produced William Morris's Kelmscott Press and the arts and crafts movement in England.

The book does not overtly define the difference between art and craft, nor does it press openly the concealed polemic of the title: that printing is an art as well as an industry and a craft. But it appears that it is in the printer's "traditional status as a man of letters," in "the old-time printer's sense of literary vocation" that printing becomes an art. "The so-called Morris revival was at core the rediscovery by artists that printing offered a proper field for their endeavors." The knowing craftsman becomes "the artist specialist who can feel with an author and by typographic means extend his power of expression." "The printer must know in order that he may express feeling through his collaboration with authors." Art is making rather than knowing, but the artist, like the good engineer rather than the craftsman, must be knowledgeable. But with the craftsman the artist is an individual who can comprehend his job as a whole.

Bruce Rogers, responsible for the sumptuous design of this book, may well be illustrating the role Nash assigns him as, par excellence, the artist specialist mentioned above, by taking his cue from the author's remark, "they found Caslon's types very practical and, with an added dash of blackletter, quite gratifying." Printing as an Art is precisely responsive.