Fine Books — A Closer Reading

The Scholar-Printer as a Recurring Figure

Pollard repeatedly returns to the figure of the scholar-printer, a type that combines intellectual ambition with commercial acumen. Henri Estienne, we learn, started his Paris business by marrying a printer's widow—an expedient Pollard notes appears often in English printing annals. Robert Estienne, his son, became royal printer for Latin and Hebrew, then for Greek, overseeing the creation of a special fount. Simon de Colines, another son-in-law, carried on the business before striking out on his own. These interlocking biographies form a dense network of collaboration and rivalry, with Pollard tracing how personal relationships—marriage, partnership, succession—directly influenced the production of fine books.

Greek Types and the Weight of Tradition

Pollard devotes careful attention to the design of Greek type, a marker of scholarly prestige. The royal Greek founts cut by Claude Garamond for Robert Estienne, based on drawings by the calligrapher Angelus Vergetius, are praised for their clarity and dignity. Yet Pollard notes a fatal defect: they were modelled on contemporary handwriting rather than on the book-hand of a nobler Greek period. This observation reveals his critical eye for typographic lineage. He compares them unfavourably to Aldus's Greek types, from which they inherited the same flaw. The passage exemplifies how Pollard balances technical description with aesthetic judgment, grounding his assessments in specific design choices.

The Small Book and Its Triumphant March

A recurring motif in Fine Books is the shrinking format. Pollard tracks how Aldus introduced octavos, then the Estiennes and de Colines pushed further to sextodecimo editions of Latin classics, some in italic, some in roman. He calls this 'the triumphant march of the small book,' a phrase that captures his sense of progress. These pocket volumes were not merely practical; they carried cultural weight, making classical texts portable and affordable. Pollard's attention to format as a driver of change—rather than just content or decoration—gives the book a distinctive structural argument, one that moves from the monumental to the intimate.

The Abandoned Chapter and the Shape of the Survey

Pollard's preface lays bare the book's incompleteness: the survey of illustration ends about 1780, and he admits defeat in covering the whole ground. The missing chapter would have included France, Germany, and the United States, and sections on colour illustration, wood-engraving, etching, steel-engraving, and lithograph. He offers a wry excuse—that later illustrated books are 'not really Fine Books, but only books with fine pictures in them'—before retracting it. This self-awareness about the book's boundaries becomes part of its structure. The reader is left to consider what is absent, and why, as much as what is present.

Pollard's Fine Books is best read as a series of linked case studies rather than a continuous narrative. The author's voice—candid about his limitations, precise in his observations—guides the reader through workshops and across decades. Pay attention to the recurring figures of scholar-printers and the shifting formats they championed; these are the threads that hold the survey together. The book rewards those who follow its digressions into type design and the movement of craftsmen between cities.

Reading Pollard’s admission that his fine-press survey leaves gaps, I felt a fondness for that incompleteness—the way a collector’s catalogue whispers of bustling workshops. It reminded me of the quiet heft of A Short List of Scientific Books Published by E. & F. N. Spon, Limited. June 1913 — Edition Insights, pages listing practical tools, each title a small, unadorned door into another mind’s concentration.