The Birth of Hart's Rules

The birth of Hart’s Rules* R. M. Ritter Introduction Across the distance of more than a century, the creation of Hart’s Rules for compositors and readers at the University Press, Oxford seems almost inevitable. Oxford’s fortuitous combination of a great academic press and an eminent printer, assisted by an array of distinguished scholars, seems to point inexorably to the birth of this extraordinarily influential little book. Yet when Hart took up his position in 1883, and even when the first edition of his Rules was produced a decade later, it would have been impossible to predict most of the factors that conspired to make the Rules what it was to become. Before Horace Hart’s arrival in 1883, Oxford University Press seemed almost hopeless as a business, still clinging to practices of the eighteenth century — if not the seventeenth. It was one of the last publishers in the country to persist in selling its books in sheets1 and was known never to put a book out of print: Wilkins’s 1716 Coptic New Testament was continuously on sale at the original price of 12s. 6d. until the last copy was finally sold in 1907.2 Although the Oxford Press’s output was both worthy and steady, it was ‘conservative in matters of style and not apparently ambitious of rising above the average commercial standard of book-production’.3 It was conservative as well in subject-matter, and there was a growing sense among those in the University that the Press ‘for too long had published too many books on religious polemics bound in chocolate brown’.4 Mark Pattison, Fellow (later Rector) of Lincoln College, complained in 1868, ‘The fact that so few books of profound research emanate from the University of Oxford materially impairs its character as a seat of learning, and consequently its hold on the respect of the nation.’5 During this same period, the New English Dictionary had found in Oxford a new home and name – the Oxford English Dictionary – but only after Cambridge University Press turned it down in 1876. Owing in large part to the meddling of the Delegates (the governing body of the Press), editor James Murray’s relationship with OUP was uneasy from the start, and by 1883 he was being hounded to cut corners and improve on the lagging publication timetable. His editorship was by no means secure, and that year Murray confided to jphs new series · 7 · summer 2004 * I am grateful to Richard Lawrence, Nigel Roche, Sue Walker, and Martin Maw for suggestions and encouragement in preparing this article. I am also grateful to Mick Belson for his delightful On the press: through the eyes of the craftsmen of Oxford University Press (Witney, Oxon: Robert Boyd Publications, 2003). Text and images of the Press, and of previous editions of Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford are reproduced by kind permission of the Secretary to the Delegates of Oxford University Press. 1. This continued even after the purchase of a London bindery in 1869. 2. ‘Die Oxforder Universitäts-Druckerei ist die einzige Druckerei in der Welt, die eine vollständige Liste ihrer Drucke während eines Zeitraumes von 329 Jahren besitzt’ (Anon., Die Oxforder UniversitätsDruckerei „1468–1914”, nach Falconer Madan, A brief account of the University Press (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), p. 1); R. W. Chapman, The Oxford University Press, 1468–1921 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), p. 61. 3. Harry Carter, introd. to the reprint of Horace Hart’s Notes on a century of typography at the University Press, Oxford, 1693–1794 (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1970), p. 3* See also Stanley Morrison with Harry Carter, John Fell: The University Press and the ‘Fell’ Types (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 205. 4. May Wedderburn Cannan, Grey Ghosts and Voices (Kineton, Warks.: Roundwood Press, 1976), p. 2. 5. Quoted in Peter Sutcliffe, The Oxford University Press: An Informal History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978; reprinted with corrections, 2002), p. 30. 37 journal of the printing historical society 6. Letter to Henry Hucks Gibbs (Lord Aldenham), 8 Nov. 1883. Quoted in K. M. Elisabeth Murray, Caught in the web of words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977; reprinted Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 228. 7. Philological Society Secretary’s Papers vol. ii, Dictionary accounts, 1 July 1885–30 June 1886. This was the year that the first complete volume (A–B) was published. 8. Murray, Caught in the web of words, p. 216. 9. A. E. Musson, The Typographical Association: origins and history up to 1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 1, 22. Social historians may argue that the exclusivity of this ‘aristocracy’ had greatly diminished by the close of the Victorian period, but printers successfully perpetuated their reputation and status, among themselves at the very least. Throughout I have used the term ‘men’ to describe both compositors and readers: though the 19th and 20th centuries saw women employed in both capacities elsewhere (especially Edinburgh and the USA), this was not the case at Oxford. 10. Little advantage was attached to familiarity with Latin or the usual European languages, with the exception of German, which was set in a different alphabet — Fraktur — till the Second World War. However, Greek with accents, Russian, ‘Saxon’, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Persian, Sanskrit, etc. could be charged up to double the standard rate. See Ellic Howe (ed.), The London compositor: documents relating to wages, working conditions and customs of the London printing trade, 1785–1900 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1947), pp. 316, 331– 2. See also generally Charles Manby Smith, The working man’s way in the world: being the autobiography of a journeyman printer (published serially in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1857; reprinted London: Printing Historical Society, 1967), and J. W. Rounsfell, On the road: journeys of a tramping printer (published serially in the Typographical Circular, 1899–1904; reprinted Horsham: Caliban Books, 1982). 38 a friend that he was attracted to overtures he had received concerning a possible professorship in a US college: ‘The future of English Scholarship lies in the United States, where the language is studied with an enthusiasm unknown here, and which will soon leave us far behind. I think I could help on that future.’6 Things seemed bleak: according to figures prepared by the Press two years later, the project began the fiscal year some £7,000 in debt, and with a yearly expense of £3,500.7 It would take another decade before the dictionary’s future, and with it much of OUP’s reputation, was assured. Benjamin Jowett, forthright Master of Balliol College and ex officio chairman of the Delegates, had grown convinced that something must be done about the Press, and determined to set its affairs on a more commercial footing. The Press was losing authors (who could get better terms elsewhere), and internally its structure was a muddle: facing each other across the Press’s quadrangle, the Learned Side and Bible Side each had different accounts, working hours, and even type heights. In principle the Bible Side’s profits from its bibles and prayer-books were ploughed into the Learned Side to subsidize publishing those worthy academic books that would not make a profit, but no one knew for sure which books those might be, and how much subsidy they would require to shore them up.8 And so it was that Jowett — himself the son of a printer — formed the committee that was eventually to choose Horace Hart for the task of modernizing the Press. Batey’s article on Hart, reprinted in this issue, provides an excellent overview of Hart’s swift and lasting improvements to Oxford University Press. My purpose here is not to elaborate on them; I hope instead to focus on the state of the Press before and during the creation of Hart’s Rules, and examine how this environment, and its legacy, came to create the work we have today. Printers’ guides Printers have long memories, and perhaps the memories of those at the Oxford Press lasted longer than most. Customarily printers, steeped in medieval guild traditions, and part of a profession not yet reduced to mere ‘trade’, had been men with ‘superior education and almost aristocratic exclusiveness’, who in the past felt able to call themselves gentlemen, and wear a sword and cocked hat.9 From the earliest times, an impressive knowledge of foreign languages —at least sufficient to set text in them quickly and accurately — was a prerequisite for a good deal of bookwork, with setting in non-roman alphabets and writing systems attracting higher fees.10 Readers charged with correcting scholars’ work traditionally held a position new series · 7 ritter · the birth of hart’s ‘rules’ of great esteem in academic and editorial circles: the elder D’Israeli described such men by saying, ‘it became the glory of the learned to be correctors of the press to eminent printers’.11 Among such printers, those in Oxford appear to have enjoyed a particularly good reputation: certainly they always seem to have been men of substance and property, whose authors would treat them as equals.12 As great as Oxford’s reputation in academic publishing was to become in time, the ancient privileges of its press rested solely on printing. The earliest printer’s manual, Moxon’s Mechanick exercises, was dedicated to the press at Oxford, which at that date (1683) was the best-equipped in England, and ‘the only one that could rival the best printers of the Low Countries and France for the number and diversity of its types’.13 In it, Moxon states his belief that The quadrangle at OUP about 1900. the carelessness of some good Authors, and the ignorance of other Authors, has forc’d Printers to introduce a Custom, which among them is look’d upon as a task and duty incumbent on the Compositor, viz. to discern and amend the bad Spelling and Pointing of his Copy, if it be English; . . . Therefore upon consideration of these accidental circumstances that attend Copy, it is necessary that a Compositor be a good English Schollar at least; and that he know the present traditional Spelling of all English words, and that he have so much Sence and Reason, as to Point his Sentences properly: when to begin a Word with a Capital Letter, when (to render the Sence of the Author more intelligent to the Reader) to Set some Words or Sentences in Italick or English Letters, &c.14 All subsequent printers’ manuals likewise noted the burden borne by compositors and readers, and exhorted their audience to standardize spelling and punctuation when setting; all despaired of authors doing the job beforehand.15 As was common for guidelines governing any trade, most of the manuals’ rules for setting were purely pragmatic, and compositors followed them simply ‘as a matter of practical convenience because it enabled them to set up quicker’.16 Consistent setting-up reflected well on the compositor as well as his master, and eased the reader’s task as well as the author’s. As John Johnson states in his Typographia: Nothing can be more vexatious to an author, than to see the words honour, favour, &c. spelt with, and without the u. This is a discrepance which correctors ought studiously to avoid. The above observations equally applies [sic] to the capitaling of noun-substantives, &c. in one place, and the omission of them in another. However the opinions of authors may differ in these respects, still the system of spelling, &c. must not be varied in the same work: but whatever authority is selected should be strictly adhered to, whether it be [Samuel] Johnson, or any of his contemporaries.17 summer 2004 11. Quoted in Encyclopaedia Britannica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), vol. xxii, p. 438, s.v. ‘proofreading’; also available online: http: //86.1911encyclopedia.org/P/PR/PROOF_ READING.htm 12. Percy Simpson, Proof-reading in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 171. 13. Joseph Moxon, Mechanick exercises on the whole art of printing, ed. Herbert Davies and Harry Carter (London: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn. 1962), p. 2. 14. Ibid., pp. 192–3. 15. Authors were in their turn equally antagonistic towards printers who did violence to their copy: see e.g. Simpson, Proof-reading, pp. 4–45. 16. Ibid. p. 176. 17. Typographia, or, the printer’s instructor (London: Longman et al., 1824), vol. ii, p. 231. 39 journal of the printing historical society James Gilbert, compositor 1880–1928 18. It also contains ‘a Collection of English Words which agree in sound, yet differ in sense’, e.g. ‘Accidence, for scholars | Accidents, chances . . . Hoop, for a vessel | Whoop, to halloo . . . Kill, to slay | Kiln, for bricks’. 19. I am delighted to have been able to make use of Hart’s own volumes, now owned by Richard Lawrence. Johnson’s example of ‘Typographical marks exemplified’ (vol. ii, pp. 216–17) was reprinted (with credit) in every edition of Hart’s Rules, and has been retained with modifications for the Oxford guide to style and Oxford style manual. Predictably, it appeared in other works as well, e.g. Thomas F. Adams, Typographia, or, the printer’s instructor (Philadelphia, 1844; reprinted New York: Garland, 1981); and Neill & Co., Memoranda regarding style, punctuation, spelling, word-division, etc. (Edinburgh: Neill & Co., 1895). 20. Simon Eliot, ‘Some patterns and trends in British publishing, 1800–1919’, Occasional Papers of the Bibliographical Society no. 8 (London: London Bibliographical Society, 1994), p. 25. Production declined during the First World War, as one might expect, but quickly rallied thereafter. 40 For the benefit of those starting out in printing, or in starting up a printing house, early printers’ manuals supplemented (or repeated) information typically passed on during apprenticeship. As an embodiment of an ancient guild, manuals not only made frequent reference to the ‘art and mistery’ of printing, but also included much that was of only infrequent or tangential interest. Over the centuries these dense tomes became notorious for reproducing without credit matter from earlier guides, as well as for larding otherwise useful information with impressive but arcane trivia: for example, P. Luckombe’s 506-page History and art of printing in two parts (London, 1771) has musical and zodiacal signs;18 John Smith’s Printer’s grammar (London, 1755) has an eclectic assortment of Chinese characters; Caleb Stower’s 497-page Printer’s grammar (London, 1808) has three types of Etruscan script; and Johnson’s 1,324-page Typographia has nine pages of scribal abbreviations found in the Domesday Book. Each printers’ manual was inclined to emphasize different topics; where they did overlap, there was no broad consistency in treatment beyond what might have been lifted whole from elsewhere. Apart from comparatively minor improvements in technology, the printers’ métier and preoccupations remained remarkably consistent over time: it is a truism that a printer in 1850 worked in largely the same way as his predecessor in 1750, and he could, with little adjustment, draw on the same manuals. When apprenticed, Horace Hart used a first edition of John Johnson’s two-volume Typographia, despite the fact that it had been published over thirty years before, and throughout draws freely on J. Smith’s influential Printer’s grammar, printed half a century earlier still.19 The growth in publishing and printing rapidly accelerated in the second half of the nineteenth century. This was fuelled by the combination of new technology (especially rotary printing, hot-metal typesetting, and new lithographic and photographic techniques), new formats (case bindings, railway and 6d. paperbound editions), new regulations (rationalization of copyright, abolition of customs and excise duty on paper, evolution of the royalty system), increased transport and communications (railways, penny post, telegraph, telephone), and increased demand (widespread literacy, daily rather than weekly newspapers, public libraries). Growth gathered speed in the 1890s and 1900s, to peak in the pre-War years at around 284 points of its 1855–9 baseline value.20 This era also saw a fundamental shift from publishing religious material towards more secular subjects, especially prose literature. According to the Publishers’ Circular, by the 1870s ‘Literature’ was for the first time being produced in larger quantities than ‘Religion’. The 1880–1919 period new series · 7 ritter · the birth of hart’s ‘rules’ continued this trend, with a progressive diminution of the percentage share of ‘Religion’ and a rapid increase in the total market share for ‘Literature’.21 Though in 1881 the Printer’s Register could exclaim, ‘What wondrous strides have been made in almost every department of the Art! Hand-presses have become almost exterminated, pushed out by power-driven machines’,22 in fact book-printing and jobbing printers embraced printing machines more slowly than did their newspaper brethren. Later, the same was true of composing machines — and UK printers were slower than their counterparts in the USA, home of Linotype and Monotype. In Britain, hand-composition remained the norm until the 1890s, at least, and by 1914 ‘most jobbing work and perhaps also most books and better weekly periodicals and magazines were still set by hand’.23 The changes in working practice necessitated by new methods and machinery must have been unsettling for compositors and, to a lesser extent, readers. By and large, however, the transformation was effected over time, through a steady stream of innovations that were not in the main detrimental.24 Not surprisingly, it was the manufacturers of printing and composing machines who were quickest to predict the demise of traditional methods: an early cover of the Monotype Recorder showed a Monotype machine rising triumphantly over an old-style comp, with the maxim ‘The old order changeth, yielding place to the new.’25 On the whole, practical-minded printers simply adapted to the new order, where possible turning it to their advantage. Whatever Luddite suspicions those in printing may have harboured, they tended not to manifest themselves in the strikes and rebellions seen in other industrializing trades. The expansion of the late-Victorian printing offices (or ‘works’, as they were coming to be called) mirrors the general expansion of the labour force in industry during this time: in the seventy years between 1841 and 1911 it increased nearly eight-fold.26 Yet progress was not without its evils: the last three decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a dazzling array of quite hideous typography, ‘for these were the years in which the flood-gates were down, and in which the whole nation was getting its first taste of leisure and the joys of literacy. In no age has printing increased at the pace of those years, and the demand for cheapness and quantity often overstepped every consideration of quality.’27 Creation of new printers’ manuals, after a small but significant output over the preceding two centuries, seems to fall off in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is hard to explain why this should be so, at a time when printing production and staff were summer 2004 21. Ibid. p. 58. 22. 6 Jul. 1881, p. 1. But e.g. Albion handpresses continued to be used for pulling proofs until the 1920s. 23. Musson, The Typographical Association, pp. 85, 87, 88–9. 24. Printers seem to have been remarkably flexible. Just as mechanical printing created the trade of ‘pressmen’ and a greater demand for hand-composition, so too mechanical setting’s leap in productivity eventually absorbed rather than replaced most hand-setters. 25. This quotation, lifted from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1869), continues ‘And God fulfils himself in many ways lest one good custom should corrupt the world.’ 26. Eliot, ‘Some patterns and trends’, p. 94; Musson, The Typographical Association, p. 80. 27. John Johnson, The printer: his customers and his men (London: Dent & Sons, 1933), p. 40. Tawdry workmanship might exemplify not just social but moral failure, as Ruskin sought to do in singling out the cheap modern binding of a book depicted in Holman-Hunt’s The awakening conscience (exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1854). Ruskin was sufficiently interested in book production to try his hand at designing bindings, and to demand a specially-cast font for the 1889 edition of his Modern painters. His own attempts at ‘artistic’ printing were, however, derided on both sides of the Atlantic (William S. Peterson, The Kelmscott Press: a history of William Morris’s typographical adventure (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 32, 34. 41 journal of the printing historical society 28. Sue Walker has shown that e.g. typewriting guides were quick to follow the development of typewriters; see her Typography and language in everyday life: prescriptions and practices (Harlow: Longman, 2001), pp. 113–25. 29. Though Beadnell’s Guide to typography described itself as being a ‘real Vade-medum for the author, the Editor, the Corrector, and the Compositor’, at 269 pages it was simply too bulky and ‘too detailed to be of much help to compositors and readers’ (Sue Walker, ‘Happy birthday Hart’s Rules’, Information Design Journal 7/2 (1993), p. 177 n. 2). 30. Despite the scholarship of Gaskell and others, concrete evidence of specific working practices remains scarce for this period. See e.g. Peter L. Shillingsburg, Pegasus in harness: Victorian publishing and W. M. Thackeray (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1992), pp. 146–7. 42 expanding, and with it presumably a demand for new guides.28 Perhaps the existing books’ reassuring endurance — which for good or ill had been a constant feature of printers’ manuals — suddenly appeared to be outdated in this new context. Certainly the earlier manuals’ leisurely, discursive tone fits more comfortably with a small old-time printing house than with a large modern works. In an environment where increasingly time was money, it is more likely that traditional printers’ guides were simply too cumbersome to be handy:29 as helpful as they might have been to those learning the craft or starting up in business, they would have been maddening to use for the man standing at the case or bent over proofs, who needed a quick answer for recurring conundrums. One can only marvel at the fortitude of anyone reading by candle- or gaslight John Johnson’s dense pages of pearl and diamond type. The need for a sort of ready-reference becomes especially plain when set against two features common to printing of this period: tramp-relief and the companionship system. Tramping, a scheme through which union members could circulate among different towns with a guaranteed minimum of employment and benefits from union printers, furnished peripatetic journeymen compositors with a broad range of experience, yet little opportunity to familiarize themselves completely with a given printer’s rules. The ’ship system involved a ‘clicker’ dividing a single job — typically large or urgent or both — on a piecework basis among fellow compositors, who shared the profits with him. In order to work efficiently both systems (which continued well into the twentieth century) required compositors to be brought swiftly up to speed with the prevailing rules of the house. This maintained continuity and minimized correction time, in turn benefitting proofreaders. (Unlike piecework hands, establishment workers — ’stab hands — were paid a salary rather than by quantity of work; but as every comp had to make good his own mistakes, it was a point of pride as well as a practical necessity to limit errors by balancing speed against accuracy: while ‘whip-hands’ were respected for their fast pace, comps who rarely made a mistake were held in equal esteem.) Little evidence remains of how individual printers enforced, or even agreed, points of consistency among themselves, though much would have been accomplished through word of mouth during apprenticeship.30 As the ratio of apprentices to qualified printers was fixed in union houses, there was always an ample supply of men familiar with a given press’s rules — increasingly these were ’stab hands, who tended to move about less than piecework hands. Writing at the turn of the century, T. L. De Vinne says that common rules new series · 7 ritter · the birth of hart’s ‘rules’ of the house were committed (in America, at least) to a ‘style-card’: ‘As there is no book of generally accepted authority that lays down a full code of explicit rules for orderly printing,’ he says, ‘every printing-house that strives for consistency as well as accuracy has found it necessary to make its own code for its own work. The code (or stylecard, as it is often called) is constantly needed in every house for the guidance of new compositors and the maintenance of uniformity.’31 It is unclear how a style-card would have been presented,32 how big or exhaustive it was, or how it was disseminated. There must have been a range of approaches, since each style-card seems to have been unique to a given printer, since ‘the works done in different printing houses are much unlike . . . What is correct in one house may be incorrect in another, and rules have to be more or less flexible on special occasions.’33 The state of the Press and the start of the Rules By the last decade of the nineteenth century the Press was averaging 272 books each year. Largely through Hart’s influence and technical advances, OUP printing did exceptionally well at the Paris Exhibition of 1900, receiving the Grand Prix in several key categories. Later, when the Paris exhibits were put on display in Oxford and London, The Times recorded, ‘In no department have the everincreasing activities of the University of Oxford been more vigorous and successful than in its printing press. Within the lifetime of men still in middle age the Clarendon Press, to use the alternative term, has developed from a comparatively small concern to one of the greatest in the world.’34 In 1908 Falconer Madan produced a short booklet describing OUP, which by then enjoyed a worldwide reputation.35 It provides an excellent, if breathless, account of the Press at that time, and highlights many of the changes Hart had brought about: The Learned Press employs 3000 persons, chiefly compositors and proof-readers . . . More than 150 languages, each with its appropriate type, can be offered to the prospective author or editor. . . . The average production of the Learned Press is now about one book for every working day, that is to say about 320 a year. On the opposite or South side is the Bible Press, where about 400 persons, with sixty modern printing machines, produce on average 3,000 copies of the Bible, not to mention Prayer Books, every day. Here, too, are the rooms for standing type, for folding and stitching the printed sheets and for . . . binding work, such as is not sent to London for wholesale production. Electrotyping and stereotyping machines and the greatly developed photographic department, with lithography and collotype appliances, occupy another part, summer 2004 31. Theodore Low De Vinne, The practice of typography: correct composition (New York: Century Co., 1901), p. viii. 32. A small-scale printer might conceivably make do with a handwritten style-card; a printing works with more than a handful of compositors and readers would probably typeset a style-card to make multiple copies. In any event printers, through habit or recourse to tools at hand, tended to set matter that in other trades would have been hand- or typewritten. 33. De Vinne, The practice of typography, p. viii. 34. Quoted in Sutcliffe, Informal history, p. 110. The distinction between the Oxford University Press and the Clarendon Press, its learned imprint, remains a stumbling block for many outside the Press, and a cherished shibboleth for some within it: ‘There was always a sort of mythology about the Press. No one, it was said . . . knew what the difference was between the Clarendon Press and the Oxford University Press, unless indeed it were my father [Charles Cannan, Secretary 1898–1919], and no one liked to ask him’ (Cannan, Grey ghosts and voices, p. 83). 35. According to an article in the British Printer, the Press compared favourably ‘with the Imprimerie Nationale in Paris, and with the Reichsdruckerei or Government Printing Office in Berlin, while it has not the Government support of either of these great institutions’ (reprinted in ‘The University Press at Oxford’, Bodl. GA Oxon 4° 175, fo. 14). 43 journal of the printing historical society and also the engines, boilers, and repairing works connected with the varied machinery used throughout the building . . .36 Madan goes on to say that: ‘No less than seventeen distinct branches of the printing and allied trades are carried on in the Press and adjacent buildings, including book binding, collotype printing, photography, copper-plate printing, electrotyping, engineers’ work, ink making, including varnish and lampblack making, lithography printing, letterpress printing, roller making, smelting (of lead), stereotyping, type foundry, Woodbury type printing, and zincography’ (p. 60). 36. Falconer Madan, The OUP: a brief account, with illustrations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), pp. 18–19. 37. E. L. Gass, quoted in Belson, On the press, p.x. Gass began work as a printer’s devil just before Hart’s arrival, retiring in 1935 as Head Reader. 38. Internal OUP email correspondence from Peter Foden (then Press archivist), 8 Aug. 1995. 39. This broadsheet was reproduced in facsimile as a supplement to the Printing Historical Society Bulletin 36 (Spring 1994). 40. Founded in 1698, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) was the third oldest publisher in Britain, after Oxford and Cambridge. The Religious Tract Society (RTS) was founded in 1799. Both were frequent customers of the Press. 44 When Hart took up his appointment, the weight of the Press’s activities was on the Bible Side: the Learned Side was then ‘still a thing apart and rather sparsely inhabited’.37 During his time at the Press the staff more than doubled: as part of a programme of expansion and reorganization, Hart recruited many new compositors, particularly on the Learned Side. When he joined the Press in 1883 there were 63 compositors; in 1887 there were 103; in 1892, 133; and in 1893 (the year of the first edition of the Rules), 154.38 This trend continued till the First World War, with a smaller but proportional number of readers taken on to handle the increased output. Records suggest this was a case of expansion rather than replacing departing Oxford comps (at least a rump of whom remained). Nevertheless, it seems plausible that the inundation of new workers, who would have trained at other presses with other modi operandi, meant the Press could no longer rely on it seven-year apprenticeship system to relate its own house rules. Part of Hart’s modernizing of the Press led him to compile and draw up guidelines for his compositors and readers. Hart had been greatly interested in the subject since his own days as an indentured proofreader; his list of Oxford conventions — begun a decade earlier, and even by 1893 still fitting onto one page — would form the basis for the first of his Rules for compositors and readers at the University Press, Oxford. The prototype, incubating for some thirty years, was a single broadsheet, produced in March 1893.39 Printed on one side in four columns, it measures 530 × 286 mm (21 × 11¼ inches), and is titled ‘Rules for Compositors and Readers, which are to be observed in all cases where no special instructions are given.’ Beneath this is the instruction ‘NB: — These rules having been compiled for the Compositors’ convenience, Readers are instructed to mark any departure from them in the first proof, and to see that the corrections are made before the first proof goes out. (In S.P.C.K., R.T.S., and a few other books, a special style is always observed.)’40 Since much of the Press’s work was for other publishers with house styles new series · 7 ritter · the birth of hart’s ‘rules’ of their own to be followed, from the very first these rules were used by default, in the absence of directions to the contrary, rather than imposed unilaterally. One can assume from the selection and arrangement of the matter included — a list distilled to only about 750 guidelines and examples — that Hart considered his staff to be so well trained as to need only minor nudging on recurring details. No information survives regarding the purpose this broadsheet served, but it is likely that copies were intended to be posted as an aide-memoire throughout the printing works.41 The broadsheet, once circulated, also would have been useful in generating comment: a handful of minor corrections and improvements to it found their way to the first edition of the Rules, which appeared in booklet form a month later. We do not know whether Hart planned the broadsheet as a precursor to the booklets, or whether the broadsheet was found to be unsuitable. Nevertheless it is safe to conclude that the readers, compositors, and compositor–apprentices for whom the rules were created preferred the booklets, which would have been more expensive than broadsheets to produce. In any case, there is no evidence of a subsequently corrected broadsheet, and by the turn of the century the text had grown too large to fit comfortably on a single sheet. What is certain, however, is that the broadsheet was intended solely for employees of the Clarendon Press, like the style-cards described by De Vinne. Nevertheless Hart took the trouble — crucially, in retrospect — to ensure that the rules he produced were scrutinized by James Murray and Henry Bradley, with whom he worked closely for years on setting text for the OED. Thus bearing ‘the stamp of their sanction,’ as Hart puts it, ‘the booklet has an authority which it could not otherwise have claimed’.42 The first edition of Hart’s Rules was a booklet made up of a single 24-page signature. Produced in April 1893, it measured 137 × 88 mm (5³⁄8 × 3³⁄8 inches), sewn, with a cover of thin vividblue card — dimensions and binding that were to remain largely unchanged for the next decade. After the first edition was reprinted in December 1894, corrected editions quickly followed, issued once and sometimes twice a year: January and February 1895, January 1896, July 1897, September 1898, April and August 1899, January and February 1901, and so on. (It would be more technically correct to call these ‘reprints with corrections’ rather than ‘editions’.) Replaced with such frequency, each edition might be considered as ephemera: surviving examples are rare, and typically have been used to death: well-thumbed, with tattered and loose pages, marked with printer’s ink and their owners’ marginalia. To understand why the summer 2004 41. Contemporary photographs of the Press show nothing stuck to the walls, but it is possible that any such clutter was removed before taking any photographs, which would have been a rarity. In the days of naked gasjets, it is also possible that they might have been prohibited as a fire-hazard. Yet many other Press notices from that era survive (albeit in smaller formats): in common with much Victorian bureaucracy, Hart was keen to post warnings and instructions — of a sort that today would seem officious — concerning even the smallest details of policy and procedure. 42. p. 3 of the preface to the 15th edn. (March 1904), the first for publication. 45 journal of the printing historical society 43. F. Howard Collins, Author and printer: a guide for authors, editors, printers, correctors of the press, compositors, and typists (London: Oxford University Press, 1st edn. 1905). After Collins’s death in 1910, Hart prepared the 4th edn. (1912). 44. Idem., ‘Desirability of standard rules for printing, and a method to obtain them’, The Author 12/6 (1901), pp. 97–9; reprinted in the Publishers’ Circular 15 Feb. 1902. 45. pp. xiv–xv. The printers listed are ‘Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.; Chiswick Press; Richard Clay & Sons; W. Clowes & Sons; Horace Hart (Oxford Press); C. F. Hodgson & Son; Lorimar & Chalmers; Morrison & Gibb; Neill & Co.; Nelson & Sons; Turnbull & Spears; Waterloo Bros. & Layton’. As these printers were all British, one might conclude that style-cards were more prevalent in the USA than the UK. 46 rules were considered so mutable, one must recognize that at this time both the Rules and the OED were plainly works in progress. For example, the broadsheet had a note (repeated in subsequent editions) attached to the spelling of gypsy: ‘ “I think we shall have to put this under ‘gypsy’ in the Dictionary, but have not yet decided.” — Dr. J. A. H. MURRAY.’ (Once Murray had decided, in time for the twelfth edition of the Rules (Jan. 1902), the note was removed — and the spelling altered to gipsy.) For efficient, streamlined setting, rules that changed periodically were still better than no rules at all, or rules found (eventually) in old-fashioned printers’ manuals. Over time, however, as the volume and influence of the Rules grew, and especially once they were published and disseminated widely, Hart’s original rules-by-default themselves became the standard, and far beyond the confines of OUP. F. Howard Collins furnishes us with an excellent snapshot of the existing state of publishers’ ‘house rules’. Collins created Author and printer (later the Authors’ and printers’ dictionary, still later the Oxford dictionary for writers and editors); following its publication in 1905, this book would become a companion volume for the Rules, despite the fact that advice given in each at first did not always agree.43 In 1902 Collins was still testing the waters to see if the ‘divergence of practice’ he noted among publishers ‘could not be done away with’. He wrote to ‘some dozen of the leading printers as to the “customs of the house” in their particular establishments, and the possibility of evolving a standard set of rules. With two or three exceptions they wrote that they had no printed rules, but worked in accordance with their own unwritten laws.’44 The first edition of Collins’s Author and printer, published three years later, contains a roster of ‘Authorities Consulted’, under which a section titled ‘Rules of the house’ lists the dozen printers whose advice had been sought.45 These printers — among them the most prominent in Britain — represent a fair cross-section of the state of turn-of-the-century printing, and help to describe the terrain in which Hart’s Rules gained purchase. Fine printing After Jowett prompted an investigation in 1886 into ‘the alleged deterioration in the quality of printing at the University Press’, Hart was able to equip the Press with new fonts and, eventually, raise the standard by which its books were printed. In addition to his abilities as a manager, years of practical experience had given him a complete command of the technique of printing: he was himself a skilled craftsman, able to turn his hand to every aspect of the art of book-making. In this he fits Oscar Wilde’s deadpan description of new series · 7 ritter · the birth of hart’s ‘rules’ the expert who has ‘the keen artistic instinct that comes out of actually working in the art of which he spoke’.46 Frederick York Powell, elected a Delegate in 1884 and Regius Professor of Modern History thereafter, famously said that a university consisted of a library and a press. (He shared Pattison’s suspicion that students were optional.) His stated aim was to make OUP ‘what it ought to be: the first Press in the world’,47 and Hart found in him an ally among the Delegates, and something of a kindred spirit. Hart’s portrayal of York Powell sheds light on his own sensibilities: ‘No point of detail was too small for his attention,’ he wrote: On all matters of printing or illustration, the justification of an initial letter, the disposition of print upon the page, the degree of success of a chromo-colotype, even the composition of different inks, he was able to give instantly, or after brief inquiry, advice that was useful in practice.48 At the time many quarters in printing experienced an aesthetic backlash against the generally poor quality of Victorian printing, the cure demanded of book-production what the Pre-Raphaelites had earlier demanded of art. The consequent embracing of an earlier sensibility soon meant that ‘Quaintness had become a typographical disease’;49 nevertheless, it fitted in with the Arts and Crafts nostalgia for a simpler and purer pre-industrial age, which the Kelmscott Press popularly — if inaccurately — exemplified.50 While beautiful things in themselves, the resulting books were less crystal goblet than Arthurian chalice, and could appear (as Holbrook Jackson put it) made to be looked at rather than read.51 However by 1900, says Stanley Morison, notwithstanding William Morris, ‘gothic was beyond revival’;52 and throughout this period, ‘A highly significant conversion, from the characteristic mid-nineteenth century industrial absence of style to a twentieth-century sense of design, occurred in Oxford during the years 1883–1920.’53 Hart accomplished this by deftly steering a course between aesthetic extremes. Morison describes the result thus: A magnificent use of the ‘Fell’ material is to be seen in the two largequarto editions of the Book of Common Prayer, the fruit of the joint labours of Charles Cannan and Horace Hart. The University Press deserves unstinting congratulations upon this uniquely impressive presentation of the Anglican rite. . . . The Yatterdon Hymnal and the Oxford Book of Common Prayer completed between 1899 and 1911 represent the highest point reached since the example [of Fell] which William Pickering set in his black-letter folio editions on handmade paper of the Book of Common Prayer. The materials were antiquarian, but their usage was individual. To that extent the style was ‘contemporary’ and its rationality, summer 2004 46. ‘Printing and printers’, Pall Mall Gazette, 16 Nov. 1888, p. 5: a review of Emery Walker’s seminal lecture on ‘Letterpress Printing and Illustration’, given the previous day at the Arts & Crafts Society. 47. Quoted in Sutcliffe, Informal history, p. 107. 48. Quoted in Olivier Elton, Frederick York Powell (Oxford, 1906), vol i, p. 217; and by Carter in Hart, Notes, p. 6*; and by Sutcliffe, Informal history, p. 82. 49. Peterson, The Kelmscott Press, p. 31 50. Following an 1896 visit to the Kelmscott Press, the US publisher W. Irving Way remarked with satisfaction that there was ‘nothing modern about it. No noise of machinery, escaping steam, or hum of electric motor, distracts me. No mahogany furniture, Axminster rugs, or click of the type-writer reminds one of nineteenth century progress’ (‘A visit to William Morris’, Modern Art, 4 (Summer 1896), p. 79). 51. From a 1938 address to the Double Crown Club (quoted in Roderick Cave, The private presses (New York: Bowker, 1983), p. 111). Harry Carter described the phenomenon as the ‘gulf between antiquarian interest in a typeface and willingness to read a book in it’ (Carter in Hart, Notes, p. 2*). 52. Stanley Morison and Kenneth Day, The typographical book, 1450–1935 (London: Ernest Benn, 1963), p. 51. 53. Ibid. Surely it is no coincidence that Morison dates the start of this conversion from the year Hart took up his position. Among the tributes paid to Hart at the time of his retirement, Sir Walter Greg, general editor of the Malone Society publications, wrote, ‘I should like to add before saying goodbye that I believe that under your guidance the Oxford Press has, in the combination of the technical and artistic sides, come as near perfection in its work as any press we are likely to see for a long time.’ From the British Museum Sir Frederick Kenyon wrote, ‘Under your Controllership the Press has become the head of the printing and publishing trade in the whole world’ (OUP Archives file box FS 2/9/1–2, ‘Recollections and Memoirs OUP’). 47 journal of the printing historical society combined with the technical excellence of the Oxford Press, conferred upon it a note of authority.54 In 1906 the Clarendon Press began issuing the handsome Oxford English Texts series, printed in Fell on pure linen rag paper, which served to extend further OUP’s reputation for fine printing beyond cognoscenti and typographical anoraks. After the First World War, the Syndics of Cambridge University Press (equivalent to OUPs’ Delegates) recognized that their own books suffered in comparison with those Hart had produced for Oxford. They invited Bruce Rogers to assess Cambridge’s practices and standards, and his resulting ‘detailed and highly critical report’ became ‘one of the defining documents of twentieth-century typography’.55 Before the War, in 1914, Rupert Brooke had reviewed Grierson’s 1912 edition of Donne, and was sufficiently moved by its superb quality to add it to his list—with tongue at least partly in cheek—of praiseworthy things: 54. Morison and Day, The typographical book, p. 52. 55. S. H. Steinberg, Five hundred years of printing, new edn. rev. by John Trevitt (London: British Library, and New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 1996), p. 189. 56. Quoted in Sutcliffe, Informal history, p. 170. 57. ‘Souvenir of the OUP: July 7, 1906’ (a booklet printed for the Associated Booksellers of Great Britain and Ireland meeting in Oxford, 6–8 July 1906), Bodl. GA Oxon 4˚ 247 fo. 57; Musson, The Typographical Association, p. 172. 58. Oxford Times, 14 Oct. 1916; Cannan, Grey ghosts and voices, p. 107. 59. When Charles Batey was collecting information on Hart for his Signature article, he received many reminiscences from those who had worked under ‘the great man’. Typical was a letter from Sidney Squires, who had worked in the Press’s Type Foundry, 1883–1944, and had helped Hart catalogue the type for his Notes. It said in part, ‘In spite of a stern, brusque manner I always found him to be kind, and singularly just and fair’ (OUP activities, 15 July 1953, file box FS 2/9/1–2, ‘Recollections and Memoirs OUP’). 60. Hart’s stated philosophy was ‘To stick to the old methods so long as they serve a good purpose, and to abandon them when the right time has arrived, while the American proverb — “There is always room at the top,” is never forgotten’ (‘The University Press at Oxford’ (booklet, reprinted from an article in the British Printer), Bodl. GA Oxon 40 175, fo. 14). Hart recognized that his own career demonstrated the benefits of a manager encouraging subordinates’ potential. 48 Charing Cross Bridge by night, the dancing of Miss Ethel Levey, the Lucretian hexameter, the beer at an inn in Royston . . . the sausages at another inn above Princes Risborough, and the Clarendon Press editions of the English poets. But the beer and the sausages will change, and Miss Levey one day will die, and Charing Cross Bridge will fall; so the Clarendon Press books will be the only thing our evil generation may show to the cursory eyes of posterity, to prove it was not wholly bad.56 Hart’s compositors and readers At the Oxford press compositors and readers were, as we have seen, renowned well before Hart’s arrival, and Hart was able to augment their number with men of great ability. During his time at the Press, the compositors’ scale at the Press was higher than any outside London: the minimum ’stab wage was 36s. a week for both compositors and machine-minders, and the piecework scale was based on London’s.57 Even though famously terse, and occasionally ferocious, Hart by all accounts showed marked capacity in managing trade difficulties (the house was a branch of the Typographical Association).58 He was revered by the men who worked under him, even at a time when he was responsible for enormous changes to every aspect of their working lives.59 Hart might have lacked the Oxbridge first in Greats that seemed among his peers at the Press to be a precondition for success, but he knew instinctively how to get the best out of those whom he managed. Hart also knew how to encourage those of ability and talent.60 By today’s standards his criteria for judging new staff might be considered woefully unscientific, but when combined with a shrewd judgenew series · 7 ritter · the birth of hart’s ‘rules’ Cyril ‘Dinky’ Piper, Reader 1908–1970. ment of character, they seemed unerring. Cyril Don ‘Dinky’ Piper recalled that as a lad just out of school, he was given an interview as a reading boy: ‘Unexpectedly I was ushered into the presence of the Controller, the famous and forthright Horace Hart. After looking me up and down he suddenly asked: “There is a man mentioned in the Bible called Pharaoh, isn’t there?” “Yes, sir, there is,” I replied. “All right, then” he said, “take this piece of paper and this pencil and write down his name.” And I did — correctly!’ When Reg ‘Midge’ Bellinger went to sign his indentures, his immediate boss remarked to Hart, ‘He’s a bit small I’m afraid.’ Hart (not himself large) replied, ‘That’s immaterial, most of England’s great men have been small!’61 Both Piper and Bellinger went on to have notable careers in the Press and beyond: during the First World War Piper was commissioned in the field, and Bellinger lost an arm in the Somme in 1916. Each returned to the Press, Piper as a reader, and Bellinger able to run two casters simultaneously with just one hand and a hook. The ability to find and cultivate expert personnel was essential to the sort of scholarly work for which OUP was increasing its reputation: the quintessential Clarendon Press book was ‘one so impenetrably erudite that it was impossible to extract from it any passage likely to entice the non-specialist reader’.62 Those who set and correct such texts need singular skills, and Oxford readers especially held a formidable reputation in the learned world. As R. W. Chapman (Secretary 1920–42) put it, ‘Long training in a severe school develops unusual powers; and authors are sometimes startled by instances of what seems beyond natural acumen.’63 Stories persist summer 2004 61. Quoted in Belson, On the press, pp. 59, 107–8. Seemingly whimsical interview techniques enjoyed success with subsequent Printers: in John Johnson’s day (1925–46), compositors applying for a job had to write an essay in the entry office, after which Johnson would scrutinize their spelling and punctuation. 62. Sutcliffe, Informal history, p. 98. This recalls F. M. Cornford’s observation that ‘University printing presses exist . . . for the purpose of producing books which no one can read; and they are true to their high calling’ (Microcosmographia academica (Cambridge: Metcalfe, 1908), p. 9). 63. Chapman, The Oxford University Press (London: Oxford University Press, 1922), p. 84. 49 journal of the printing historical society The top composing room, home of the Oriental Ship. of these redoubtable specialists, whose talents could equal, and on occasion outstrip, those of the scholars whose work they were called upon to treat. One such reader in Hart’s day was J. C. Pembery — a reader for 70 years, who corrected Max Müller’s Sanskrit even though he had no formal training in the language.64 OUP was able to set texts in every language from Aramaic to Zend, such as Lepsius hieroglyphics, Bengali, Burmese, Eteo-Cretan, Etruscan, Gothic, Himyaritic, Icelandic, Kanarese, Lombardic, Minoan, Phoenician, Runic, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Tegulu. The same compositors who dealt so ably with these languages had a cheerfully dismissive term for any matter not in English: ‘rubbish’.65 While the readers had a greater respect for and interest in such languages, few would have held formal qualifications in them: readers were, at Oxford and elsewhere, commonly chosen from among the ablest compositors. (Only later did one or more degrees become a requirement for a place in the Reading Department — and with it the distinction ‘graduate reader’.) Like their fictional contemporary, Hardy’s Jude, much of the readers’ knowledge would have been selftaught; unlike him, they found a niche in which their aptitude might happily flourish. Curious languages might have been the most obvious manifestation of the Press’s skill in scholarly works, but every branch of the arts and sciences seemed to meet with equal success on the printed page, sometimes to the disquiet of the scholars themselves. When G. S. Gordon succeeded Sir Walter Raleigh as Professor of English Literature, he stated in his inaugural lecture, ‘We cannot much longer expect the Clarendon Press to train, and to train on proofsheets, half the editors of England. It has been hitherto our only training school.’66 An article in the Monotype Recorder depicted the environment of the Press: The Readers of Oxford, of course, are the very aristocrats of their difficult profession . . . Learned men devote their time here to verifying the most obscure points in exotic or dead languages. . . . To one who lives in the world of printing and book production, there is something very gratifying in the intimate connexion between august scholarship and the printers’ craft that exists at the Clarendon Press. . . . Its private types, as we have seen, can still be cast and set by hand, in rooms which are a printer’s museum in themselves.67 64. The fiftieth and concluding volume in Max Müller’s Sacred books of the East was published (posthumously) in 1910. 65. Belson, On the press. 66. Sutcliffe, Informal history, p. 139; cf. Monotype Recorder 228 (Jan.–Feb. 1929), p. 15. 67. Ibid. 50 Charles Cannan’s daughter described the impression received by a visitor to the Press. He was rather overcome by the Quad which made the place look like a College, and the green grass and the Compositors bowed over ‘their’ type, and the Readers who were obviously a law unto themselves. Fiercely new series · 7 ritter · the birth of hart’s ‘rules’ committed to the production of ‘Oxford’ Books, scholars in their own right, they read strange tongues; Latin and Greek, Coptic and Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac and Sinhalese and Tibetan, and one at least had a long flowing beard and a light in his eye . . .68 A less romantic but equally evocative account was recorded by Philip Bennet, who entered the Press as an errand boy in 1892 and rose to be Hart’s assistant: In those days the hours of work were from 6.30 to 8.15, 9 to 1, 2 to 4.30, 6 to 7, and when work was in full swing it was a great sight to look down those rooms of restless activity and see the hundreds of gaslights over the compositors’ cases and stones. At the end of a dark winter’s day the atmosphere became, to say the least of it, somewhat ‘thick’, and the smell of ‘print’, made up as it was of gas, old boots, snuff, paper, and ink, was undeniably strong!69 House style Early printers’ guides traditionally drew their authority from the fame of the printers who wrote them, and enjoyed an audience among apprentices, printers, and (to a very limited extent) authors. Later, style-cards carried no authority beyond the walls of the printing works that created them, their audience being restricted to those already acquainted with the house rules the cards supplemented or clarified. Hart’s Rules, however — though created solely for Clarendon Press compositors and readers — was adopted by Press authors, then by publishers and authors having no association with either Oxford or academic publishing. In the first instance, one must assume that this was because the little booklet was helpful, and nothing like it existed. Secondly, the Press’s burgeoning fame had grown sufficient for its opinions to be considered authoritative in the wider world. This fame was directly related to the Press’s link with its university and especially the OED. Henceforth, association with a high-profile institution or project would be a prerequisite for a printer’s rules to be adopted in a larger context. Hart’s Rules was by no means the first attempt to apply principles for setting out matter in type: printers’ guides since Moxon were doing just that. Neither was it unique in attempting to describe its house rules in booklet form: the years following the first edition of the Rules saw the US Government Printing Office (1894), Neill and Company (1895), and the University of Chicago Press (1906) produce similar pamphlets addressing similar concerns. It is unlikely any was created in direct response to the Oxford rules; indeed, it is by no means certain the American presses even knew of its existence. Rather it is more likely they were prompted by the same summer 2004 68. Cannan, Grey ghosts and voices, p. 107 69. Quoted in Belson, On the press, p. 307. Bennet served under three Printers before retiring in 1946. For his reminiscences of Hart’s working day, see http://www.ritter.org.uk/ H&C/H_edns/Horace%20Hart’s% 20working%20day.html. 51 journal of the printing historical society circumstances and demands that Hart hoped to address, which they approached in similar, but distinct, ways.70 In his Modern printing, John Southwood cites the rules of Oxford and Neill & Company, meticulously comparing them in different contexts. He justifies his decision to draw on these two guides because each ‘old-established’ publisher produces famous titles (the OED and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, respectively), ‘and other words of great importance’, and their ‘rules, therefore, are invested with very considerable authority’.71 Yet it was the sheer weight of the Press’s reputation, manifested most visibly in the OED, that set Hart’s Rules apart: in 1896 W. E. Gladstone, editing the Clarendon Press Butler’s works, had the temerity to ask for the spelling forego rather than the forgo specified by the Rules. By way of reply Hart sent Gladstone a copy of W. W. Skeat’s Etymological dictionary of the English language (1879–82), but it was only once he wheeled out James Murray’s judgement that Gladstone relented: ‘Personally I am inclined to prefer forego, on its merits: but authority must carry the day. I give in.’72 Prefaces to later editions of guides from this period often express a combination of satisfaction and surprise that they have found favour in the wider world. In its second edition (1910), Chicago’s Manual of style states that its purpose ‘will have been abundantly realized’ if it has ‘incidentally prove helpful to other gropers in the labyrinths of typographical style’: 70. See Title 44 US Code, Public Printing and Documents §1105; Neill & Co., Guide to authors: with memoranda regarding style, punctuation, spelling, word-division, etc. (Edinburgh: Neill & Co., 1917), p. 1; and Catherine Seybold, ‘A brief history of the Chicago manual of style’, Scholarly Publishing 14/2 (Feb. 1983), p. 164. 71. Modern printing: a handbook of the principles and practice of typography and the auxiliary arts, 4 vols. (London: Raithby, Lawrence, 1898),vol. i, pp. 178–9, 181–9. Neill’s prominence and association with the Encyclopaedia Britannica failed to continue, however: it did not print Britannica’s celebrated 11th edn. (1911) and, like many Edinburgh printing firms, it never recovered from the First World War downturn. 72. Quoted in Rules, 19th edn. (Jan. 1905), p. 12 n. 73. Quoted in Seybold, ‘A brief history of the Chicago manual of style’, pp. 165–6. 74. Even so, an index was eventually necessary — though largely unsuccessful — and at least one Press reader thumb-indexed his own copy. 75. ‘The complete press reader’, Transactions of the Bibliographical Society ns 6/3 (Dec. 1925), p. 269. 52 The merit of the Manual is best evidenced by its very general adoption and use in editorial offices and proof-rooms throughout the United States and Canada, and the remodelled work is now again offered to a public which, at the time of the first edition, was not expected to make such general use of the book as later proved to be the case.73 This recognition of how such guides are viewed from outside signals a small but fundamental shift in how, in turn, the guides view themselves. To a greater or lesser extent, they would in future expand to accommodate demands from without as well as within. Since its inception as a broadsheet, Hart’s Rules has continued to grow in pagination and format. Over the years, as sections and examples were grafted on to the original stock, the Rules flourished in what might seem curious or uncontrolled ways: it comes as a surprise to most people that — barring appendices — all thirty-nine editions of Hart’s Rules were arranged alphabetically by subject.74 No guide — certainly none the size of Hart’s Rules — can legislate for every circumstance: as Sir Walter Greg dryly observed in his review of the twenty-seventh edition (1925) of Hart’s Rules, ‘I do not think even the Oxford Press rules provide for all eventualities.’75 new series · 7 ritter · the birth of hart’s ‘rules’ The need for more discursive explanations and a greater breadth of topics continued to spur on the growth of the Rules, which by its thirty-ninth edition reached nearly 200 pages. By the early 1990s it had begun a quantum-leap to its new incarnation as the Oxford guide to style. In looking back over the history of the Rules it is interesting — or perhaps unsettling — to consider that its dimensions have fattened into those of the early printers’ manuals it so efficiently unseated. Yet this expansion is a function of other guides with pedigrees very nearly as long (such as the usgpo manual and the Chicago manual of style), and is commonplace to new editions of all style guides. Without the sort of meticulous guidance inherent in the apprenticeship system, or in now-scarce in-house editing departments, there is a mounting reliance on reference books to explain what was left previously to collective expertise. Time and technology have changed forever how such books are used: gone are the days when the man at the case, stick in hand, thumbed through his booklet by gaslight. The success and longevity of Hart’s Rules may be ascribed to a number of happy coincidences, all of which conspired to create its unique place in the history of English usage. The first was Horace Hart himself, a talented and able manager, whose expertise in printing was coupled with a no-nonsense insight into what those under him needed to get on with their jobs. The second was James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary, without whose intellectual clout the Rules might well have remained a parochial in-house bulletin. The third was the staff of the Clarendon Press, who, alongside other experts, shaped and expanded the Rules for over a hundred years. The fourth was the Press’s reputation for fine printing, which raised its status beyond that of a stolid academic press. The fifth was the milieu in which the Rules were first formulated, at precisely the time when all preceding guides — together with nearly all preceding technologies — seemed obsolescent. In considering this final point it is tempting to see the single page of Hart’s 1893 broadsheet as the narrow link, like the throat of an hourglass, that connects printers’ guides since Moxon to the guides of today. summer 2004 53 journal of the printing historical society 7KH2OG6FKRRO3UHVV ZZZWKHROGVFKRROSUHVVFRP +DUU\&DUWHU7\SRJUDSKHU 6WDQOH\0RULVRQ ¶-RKQ)HOO· E\0DUW\Q7KRPDV-RKQ$/DQHDQG$QQH5RJHUV E\0DUW\Q2XOG $ WULEXWHWRRQHRIWKHIRUHPRVW(QJOLVKW\SRJUDSKHUVRI WKHWZHQWLHWKFHQWXU\WKHPDQZKRP)UDQFLV0H\QHOO GHVFULEHGDV¶RQHRIWKHOHDVWNQRZQEHVWNQRZQPHQLQ WKHZRUOGRIERRNV·7KLVQHZWLWOHZLOOFRQWDLQDVNHWFKRI KLVOLIHZLWKUHPLQLVFHQFHVIURPVRPHZKRNQHZKLPDQG D FRPSUHKHQVLYHELEOLRJUDSK\RIKLVSXEOLVKHGZRUN 5HDG\ODWH 7KHH[WUDRUGLQDU\VWRU\RIRQHRI0RULVRQ·VJUHDWHVW DFKLHYHPHQWV¶-RKQ)HOOWKH8QLYHUVLW\3UHVVDQGWKH¶)HOO· W\SHV·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ood condition Funditor 3-phase lead rule/ type cut-off power saw. Cast steel construction with reciprocating bed, adjustable height blade, incremental feed bar in ems. £100 o.n.o. Contact D. Shaw : Telephone 01733 574857 (Cambs) 54 new series · 7