The idea of “Fine Printing,” as Morris defines it, is to use books as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. Surrounding Morris were mass-produced books made with little care, leading to poor quality books with yellowing pages, type with no visual impact, and lack of proper proportioning, which he believes ultimately leads to a hideous, overly utilitarianist style of printing that undermines creators. Thus, the core principles of the aesthetics in Morris’s ideal book include page margins determined by the golden mean, high-quality and handmade paper, strong black Gothic type, with decorative elements that synthesize with the text. One important tenet that Morris defines is to avoid “beauty for beauty’s sake.”

The best way to demonstrate Morris’s ideals is with the Kelmscott Canterbury Tales, published by Morris himself. From the opening page, with the stark white Gothic letters standing against a dark, richly decorated background and border, it is apparent that the book is exceedingly well made. The ink is rich and the paper fine and handmade, and is still legible and pure to this day, and the binding remains strong. The page margins fit Morris’s ideals, and are filled with decorative engravings. Some of the passages begin with a detailed leading letter, and Morris has a liberal (but probably consistent) use of rubricated initials that stand out on the black-and-white pages. It seems like the only spaces left blank are the spaces between the letters, which allow the text to be distinctive from the illustrations even from far away.

I think it could be argued that the book is pursuing “beauty for the sake of beauty,” but I think Morris would argue that the illustrations and engravings are simply a factor in his aim for a book deserving of glory, triumph, and exaltation. To me, the illustrations, while somewhat excessive, are gorgeous and mind-numbingly well-crafted, with their design blending around the text instead of dominating it. It reminds me of the ornamentation on a cathedral, which, again, some people in some cathedrals would say they are ugly and unnecessary, and others would say they’re gorgeous.

For Book Set 3, the Pennyroyal Press’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn provides an interesting comparison to the Canterbury Tales. They’re both pretty hefty books, and the texts are dark and legible. Huckleberry’s letterpress origins are apparent in the indented text, and it is beautifully bound. However, while Huckleberry’s paper itself is archival, it is also commercial. Its woodcut illustrations are gorgeous, but separate from the text. It’s not the pure example of Fine Press that Morris would have wanted, but it’s still a high quality piece of work.

I guess the biggest folly of the Fine Press movement is that it looped around from Morris’s socialist ideals and became an embodiment of capitalism. My views on this are pretty complicated, probably contradictory, and I’m still figuring them out. First, while Morris’s Canterbury Tales isn’t the small and accessible book that Russem likes, it falls in with Morris’s socialism – it’s beautiful, but it’s also long-lasting and legible; it’s not a book that people will be forced to throw out several years later because of crumbling pages. And every part of its production supported individual workers, not the factory presses, just as Morris wants. It’s certainly a work from the Arts and Crafts movement.

But I think an important thing to note is that the Arts and Crafts/Handicraft movement was pretty quickly co-opted by the upper class – the ones who got rich through factories – especially in the United States. Man, there are more than a few texts where the rich guys talk about how handmade work is objectively better than those that are factory-produced, and proceed to jack up the prices of the handmade works to the point where they’re inaccessible for a lot of people. To varying extents, this attitude bleeds over to some fine printers – they say, “This book will give you a much stronger connection with the author’s work, so we’ll blast the prices up and print a limited number of copies.” (I can’t really blame them, though!) It’s just funny that a book style that has its roots in socialism ends up being ridiculously expensive. On one hand, the books can be seen as artistic; on the other hand, buying them can come across as “Hey, look at how much money I have!”

Like Russem says, if someone buys the Pennyroyal Huckleberry Finn (which goes for a whopping $12,000), it’s not going to be because they want to read it and understand or spread its ideas around. If they wanted that, they could just buy a regular copy for five bucks and enjoy that. Instead, a humongous, rich book like the Pennyroyal edition isn’t going on the coffee table or on the bedside; it’s going on a special place on the shelf.

And that’s perfectly fine, to be honest – it’s nice to have pretty things. Plus, I think I’ve gone on long enough…!

So, considering my associations with the Fine Press movement, Russem’s ideas appeal more to me. He doesn’t condemn paperbacks, and, honestly, I enjoy reading books more than just looking at them, so I like his model of accessibility above all. We definitely don’t have to strip away all beautiful things and decorative elements from books, though. Sometimes, like with French Fries, I think the added aesthetic helps the reader to interpret the books in a new way.

For now, I’m happy with the simple solution to have multiple editions of a book, like a regular DVD versus a Criterion Collection DVD (for example, running onto Amazon and randomly picking The Devil’s Backbone gets us a regular copy for $9.99 and a stylized Criterion copy for $29.95). This way, you satisfy different tastes – there is a visually simple copy that focuses on the text, and if you want to pay more money, you can an ornamental edition that you can show off on your bookshelf.