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COLORED-PLATE BOOKS

THIS essay and the one immediately following grew out of a paper on English Colored Plate Books, read before the Print Club of Philadelphia.

The event came about in this way: two ladies, light-blue-stockinged women, in a manner of speaking, asked me to prepare and deliver this paper. They were charming women, or I would none of them: moreover, one was the wife of the Chief Justice of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the other, the wife of a Superior Court Judge. Now, in these days when traffic rules and regulations change every hour, one spends a good deal of his time before a Chief Justice, and, as it is a well-known legal axiom that the fines imposed by a Chief Justice are subject to review by a Judge of the Superior Court, I thought it well to accede to their request. Everyone is aware that there are not enough lawyers to go round, and that it is almost an impossibility to get a lawyer to go square: hence it is my invariable custom to throw myself on the mercy of the judge. At such times it is always well to have a friend at court - preferably two friends.

By nature a sedentary man, color-plate books changed the whole course of my life. I have become a sportsman, an authority on horseflesh; I breed

dogs and ride to hounds. I have learned to swear, roundly, with Jack Mytton, - not difficult, and to drink, deeply, with Jack Jorrocks, who claims, with some reason, that drinking will soon become a lost art. My friend Mr. Frank Raby was by my side when we stood with bowed heads at the grave of Mr. Mytton. "Take him for all in all, we shall not look his like again."

upon

In all the realm of English bibliography there is nothing, I think, more interesting and more perplexing than the subject which we usually refer to as colored-plate books. First, we must begin with defining what a book is. Obviously, letterpress bound, with or without illustrations, is a book. If it is a few leaves unbound, with or without illustrations, it is a pamphlet; but a certain number of plates or illustrations unbound is not a book. Does the binding of them make it a book? I should say, strictly speaking, that it does not. Where are we then? Frankly, I do not know. If I labor the point, it is because there are certain items -I do not know what we collectors would do without that handy word "items" very important and costly in themselves, which when bound together look like books, but which, having no letterpress, are not books; or, if we must call them books, we add some qualifying words, as when we say, "a book of drawings by Cruikshank," or "A book of plates by Alken."

I am going to eliminate from present consideration

anything which cannot fairly and squarely be called a book, for the reason that to do otherwise would extend this paper unduly. I shall have little or nothing to say upon that fascinating subject of sportingprints, but there are certain works of art which are usually bound and look like books, which on account of their beauty and importance I must briefly refer to; Wheatley's Cries of London, for example, thirteen plates engraved in untouched mezzotint by Schiavonetti and others, is a superb example of one kind of colored-plate book; and Orme's British Field Sports, the plates of which, drawn by Howitt and engraved by Clark, Merke, and others and subsequently colored by hand, so exquisitely as to look like water-color drawings, is another. The arts to which we owe these items, that is to say, mezzotinting and aquatinting, I shall refer to in more detail later.

But when we have decided what is and what is not, properly speaking, a book, when we have decided to eliminate certain important works of art as not within our range, we meet with other difficulties. There are no bibliographies of colored-plate books. Perhaps no one with a reputation would care to jeopardize it by attempting to make one: the subject is intensely difficult. Colored-plate books were frequently first published in monthly parts, and when it is remembered that it is the plates and not the text that are of chief importance, it will be seen there is a fine chance for a difference of opinion. Plates were printed separately, not in sheets, and inserted in the

text in a more or less haphazard manner. Sometimes there are "instructions to binder," more frequently there are not; and what is to prevent an artist or a publisher from changing his mind after he has made his announcement? For example, this very day, as I write, there drifts to my desk a catalogue from Harry Stone, a New York dealer. Glancing at it, under the head "Colored Plates," I read this:

Rowlandson (Thomas). Journal of Sentimental Travels in the Southern Provinces of France. Illustrated with 18 fullpage beautifully aquatint-colored plates. First edition in book form; the title calls for 17 plates, but the list calls for 18, all of which this copy contains. In pristine condition. London, Ackermann, 1821, price $50.00.

And we have further to remember that the artists who have done most to make colored plates famous have also done most to make them perplexing. Perhaps the greatest name in English book-illustration is Cruikshank. It is important to remember there were three Cruikshanks, a father and two sons. Of Rowlandson there was, thank Heaven, but one. Of Alken there were four: two Henrys, a father and a son, to say nothing of Samuel and George, and they all made sporting-prints. "With plates by Alken," then, does not necessarily mean much. There was, of course, one great Alken, the father, as there was one great Cruikshank, the son.

And now that I have suggested some of the difficulties that confront me in speaking of English colored-plate books, let me begin.

A good place to begin is with William Blake. His Songs of Innocence (1789) was the first of a number of books published by him, "created" would be a better word, - which have become famous alike for their literary and their artistic merit. The story is well known of how Blake, his first volume of verse having proved a failure, decided to become his own publisher and, being by trade an engraver, elected to try a new method of production and reproduction. Taking small pieces of copper, he wrote upon them the text and drew the designs and embellishments in an impervious varnish, and after he had by this means covered that portion of the plate which was to appear in relief, he ate away the rest of the surface with acid such as etchers use, and by this means secured a result that somewhat resembled a stereotype, from which he could print a reasonable number of impressions in any color he desired. This method, original with Blake, served him admirably until the end of his life. Pulling prints from his plates in dull browns or greens or grays, he colored and elaborated them by hand, the outlines serving him somewhat in the manner of a stencil. Almost never were two plates colored in the same manner, with the result that all of them are, practically, original paintings. In this manner Blake produced his America, Europe, Milton, Urizen, and other works. As we shall not return to this particular method of publication and illustration, we may say here that fine examples of Blake's work are now excessively rare: probably not more than two hundred