The Pleasures of A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick [Laurence Sterne], Houghton Mifflin and Company, Boston and New York, 1905.

I have chosen one book from my collection of the works of Bruce Rogers to write about it: Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey. This is one of the Riverside Press limited editions, produced by Rogers, and published by Houghton Mifflin in 1905. In my retirement, I recently went through the shelves where I keep copies of Rogers’ books and took down A Sentimental Journey to read it, because I had published Tristram Shandy at Arion Press in 1988, with art by John Baldessari, and yet had never gotten round to reading his fantastic travel book. The experience was sheer pleasure: a masterpiece of literature set by a master bookmaker. It is as nearly perfect as a book can be. 

Holding pages up to the light I could see the perfect backup of the lines of type, with the exception of lines of capitals for the chapter headings and sub-headings. I am an avid incrementalist. That is, I establish the increment of type size and leading between lines and obey that arrangement throughout. But Rogers, ever the exacting and flexible designer, decided that the chapter names should float within the space between the page number at the top and the first line of the chapter, graced with the two-line indented initial letter. He left approximately two-line spaces above and below the title (and subtitle, if so), but did so to make the arrangement pleasant if not rigorous and keeping the totality of the page depth the same so that the lines of text would back up those on the other side of the page. The weave of the words on the page, the more than adequate margins, exaggerated white space surrounding the text, uplifting, inspiring, creates the ultimate reading experience. Fingers, hands holding the book never block out the words. The eyes dwell on the beautiful shapes of the letters, the perfect arrangement of all elements of the book. The mind wanders with the traveler who is not a diarist but a memorialist.

Bruce Rogers, the titan of typographers, had a marvelous opportunity as a young man. At the age of 26, Rogers was hired by George H. Mifflin, senior partner of Riverside Press, as a designer of catalogues and then of trade books. The company was one of the largest and best book production facilities in the United States, established in 1852 and lasting until 1971. In 1905 it had sixty steam presses and employed 700 workers. Four years after joining Riverside Press, Rogers induced Mifflin to establish a special department for the production of limited editions. He had his own studio and a highly skilled team of compositors, printers, and bookbinders who were assigned to the department. Rogers designed sixty editions between 1900 and 1912, each book different in the choice and arrangement of type, some inventive and experimental, most derived from and alluding to historical models.

Unlike the more ornate treatments Rogers lavished on other editions, with drawn ornamental title pages resembling engravings, this is simple by comparison. A typographic title page, initial letters that are larger capitals taking up two lines at the beginnings of chapters, and a colophon stating that the edition of 335 copies was printed at Riverside Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, this being copy number 14, hand-lettered, and beneath the attribution to Bruce Rogers, small capital B and R on either side of a pressmark of his own devising: a thistle atop a leafy branch resembling a dolphin fouling an anchor, a visual pun on the mark of Aldus Manutius centuries before. Oh, and I should mention a little drawing by Rogers on the title page, with a sun shining on a traveler in a horse-drawn carriage for two at most, supported by a floral device.

But more about the physical book later. For now, I must praise the text. The Sentimental Journey is ostensibly written by a Mr. Yorick, but that is a ruse. It is not Shakespeare’s Yorick, alas, but the author, unstated, is actually Laurence Sterne, who wrote the novel and published it in 1768, the year he died, based on his own journey through France and south in Italy to Naples three years earlier. He, the author of Tristram Shandy, slyly alludes to the skull in Hamlet and to two Shandys as well. The title page claims this account to be for a journey through France and Italy, but leaves off before the traveler reaches Turin, thus remaining for the reader always in France once he, an Englishman, has left from Dover. The many short chapters, seldom more than three pages in length are reflections on what happens in various towns and cities along the way and the thoughts and mental excursions of the diarist. His observations are subtle, perspicacious, amusing, often hilarious. Recall that Thomas Jefferson and his wife would read Laurence Sterne aloud to one another as evening entertainments.

Despite the misleading title, the book ends while still in France with Yorick bedding down in an inn that is overbooked and sharing a bedroom with a lady and her maid, attempting to maintain respectability in their arrangements. There is much about the chaise that transports him, along with his portmanteau containing a half-dozen shirts and a pair of silk breeches, his man La Fleur who looks after him and the horses. But most notable is the fact that he uses the carriage as his study and does much of his writing while it is sitting still. He has classified travelers into categories: those who go over land or water, those who go forth with benefit of clergy or guardians, and finally those who travel to save money, a small subset. They would be called Simple Travelers; others are Idle Travelers, Inquisitive, Lying, Proud, Vain, and Splenetic Travelers, and those of Necessity, Delinquency, Unfortunate, and Innocent. Finally, there is the Sentimental Traveler such as the author himself. It verges on a scientific treatise.

Bruce Rogers was fortunate to have come of age in a time of printing achievement. Technologically letterpress printing was improving, with the refinement of cylinder presses, advances in the Monotype composition and casting system, with many new and revived faces available, inspired by the revival of fine printing in England. He had large printing plants at his disposal, and highly trained craftsmen were assigned to him by supportive employers who were themselves his patrons, as well as the publishers, organizations, and individuals who retained his services. Both Rogers and Daniel Berkeley Updike had close working relationships with compositors and pressmen.

Rogers may have gone to the case with composing stick in hand, but he left behind elaborate pencil layouts, drawn by hand, that served as instructions for compositors, and finished drawings for new types, ornaments, stamping dies for bindings and illustrations.

Rogers was inspired by Updike toward allusive printing, that is to emulate in the choice and arrangement of types and ornaments earlier models to reflect the period or culture of the literary work. This meant variety in the approach. That was quite different from the “Revival” presses, such as Kelmscott, Doves, Ashendene, Eragny, whose proprietors had private types cast and pursued an “ideal book” program that was applied to all publications. Rogers’ Riverside limited editions looked nothing like the English fine presses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and for that reason held appeal for collectors.

Here are the bibliographical specifications of Rogers’ Sentimental Journey.

Page format: 6 × 9-3/8 inches, tall octavo.

Paper: handmade, no watermarks.

Pages: 232, plus 4 unnumbered pages for pre-title and title page and two blank leaves front and back, with blank endpapers attached.

Type: Bell (Brimmer), handset, 12-point text, 10-point caps for subtitles, 8-point for footnotes, 36-point capitals (cut down) for initials. When Rogers discovered a type in the Riverside cases he assumed it was a private type of unknown origin and named it Brimmer. It was, in fact, Bell, an English type first cut in 1788 by Richard Austin for the British Letter Foundry, operated by John Bell, that had been purchased in England in 1864 by Henry Oscar Houghton, founder of the Riverside Press. It is a Transitional face, between Old Style (such as Caslon) and Modern (such as Bodoni). New mats for italic swash capitals were made and these may have been Rogers’ first type designs.

Measure: 20 picas. Depth: 27 lines, leading 2 points.

Margins: gutter, 5 picas, top 5 picas (to page number in splayed brackets), side 10.5 picas, bottom 13 picas.

Binding: hand sewn, square back, three-piece case, dark brown cloth spine with gold stamped leather label, mottled lighter brown paper over boards.

Bruce Rogers was not a businessman. Neither did he claim to be a printer. He said that he “disliked intensely the smell of printing ink” and that he “could never hear the music that some find in a running press”, and that a press drove him “nearly frantic with its incessant repetition of the refrain: ‘Double pneumonia, double pneumonia, double pneumonia.” He bore little or no responsibility for management in the printing firms where the work was carried out. While he did establish budgets for some commissions, he was generally shielded from economic concerns by others who ran the organizations he worked for. His career was relatively unaffected by world events and economic downturns. His greatest opportunity came with the Oxford Lectern Bible, a substantial commission that carried him through the years of the Depression. Most of the rest of his work was for limited circulation, its impact on culture was removed one step by the example he set, as an encouragement to others, as a beneficial influence on fine printing and mass production. Rogers was an inspired and inspiring designer. He paid close attention to every detail yet was not obsessive. He was a pleasant, urbane person, who made friendships with workers, clients, fellow members of the book community, and leading figures in the world at large. Rogers led a charmed life.

When I worked part-time at the Grabhorn Press in 1964 and during my partnership with Robert Grabhorn, 1966–73, we frequently talked about Bruce Rogers and the example he set. Robert had collected Rogers to learn from his examples. I did the same.

In the archives of Arion Press is a framed portrait of Bruce Rogers. It once belonged to Carroll T. Harris, president of Mackenzie & Harris, a company I acquired to provide foundry types and Monotype composition for Arion Press and other letterpress customers. The portrait is a reproduction of a painting by W.A. Conrow from 1933, that was used by the Eli Lilly Company as an advertisement in drugstores across the United States, supposedly depicting the trustworthy family physician writing out a prescription. In fact, it is the eminent book designer sketching a layout for a page, with a book at his elbow, looking benign.