[These posts are lightly edited versions of the 2023-4 student projects from our undergraduate unit, Studying and Making Early Printed Books, in which students adopt a book from Bristol University’s Special Collections, and work in groups to produce a creative response to it using our historic letterpress equipment. The group blog post is one of the two assessments for the unit]
De Architectura Paginae
By Liv Lockowandt, Serina Pandhare and Tass Pett.
Which book did you choose?
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, De Architectura (Books I-V), translated by Giovan Batista Caporali (1476-1560), (Perugia: Giano Bigazzini, 1536), Special Collections, Restricted Oversize NA2515 VIT. This a folio format book with the text in Latin and translation and commentary in Italian, containing 80 woodcut illustrations. Roman architect Vitruvius wrote this work for Emperor Caesar Augustus. It contains a guide to Greek and Roman buildings, plans and designs for military camps, structures including aqueducts, baths, harbours, and small machines and measuring devices.
Title-page [photograph by Jamie Carstairs]
What interested you about this book?
The most interesting aspect was its variability and contradiction, and its individualistic approach to printing. As none of us read Latin or Italian we were primarily drawn to the aesthetic quality of the book. Some pages follow a standard dual-text layout: a page filled with text, either in parallel columns or with commentary around a section of original Latin. Other pages seem to deny order and convention, with formations so complicated they resemble the architectural designs in their diagrams. We loved this idea of page structure as a form of architecture in itself, especially when played off the topic of the book. The irony of this publication excited us: Vitruvius’ work was the first to set out the significance of balance and symmetry in architecture, a contrast to the relationship between text and image in this book. On reflection, these page layouts almost become an anti-demonstration of what Vitruvius says in the text itself.
Changing layouts make the book visually unpredictable. The woodcut diagrams are spatially privileged, often to the detriment of the text’s readability, which is sometimes squashed to the side in a column only two words wide.
The text is arranged differently depending on language and font size: Vitruvious’s text is a larger Latin font, and the Italian translation and commentary is in a smaller size. Additional comments in the margins complicate the layout. With so many distinct aspects brought together rather chaotically, it is not easy to find a linear path to follow across each page. This is a second contradiction that we enjoyed: the tension between a book’s purpose of being read, and how this one seems to playfully border illegibility. This all-round air of confusion, intrigue and contradiction was the effect we wanted to create in our own book, inspired by the illogicality of this volume.
What did the early modern book inspire you to design and make?
We had two main points of inspiration. Firstly, we extrapolated the idea of page layout as a form of architecture. This is where the play on words in our title comes from: our adopted book is De Architectura: ‘On Architecture’, and so our project is De Architectura Paginae: ‘On the Architecture of the Page’. We really enjoyed this parallel and drew on the prominence of the many intricate diagrams in the original to play with the idea of the supporting structures of typesetting and printing. We hoped to draw attention to these processes and make them visible in subtle ways, such as having our diagrams run off the edge of the page. We specifically chose existing woodblocks that gesture directly at this architectural link, including an aerial map and church tower. Our initial design was far too ambitious, as we set the map diagram at a 45° angle to create a triangular shape stabbing into the page. We thus created a second design where this diagram runs off the page but remains parallel with the margins, and ultimately, this is what we created. This was also a nod to the printed comments in the margins of the original book, which created the impression of a text breaking free from the borders imposed upon it.
Our third page mirrors the Vitruvius’ title page, using an image of a church tower and a column of text as a frame. We wanted to convey the idea of the printed word as an architectural medium, thus the word ‘ARCHITECTURA’ arranged vertically becomes a second tower.
Our second main point of inspiration is the idea of in/accessibility and contradiction. This is reflected in the text we wrote for our inner pages. The printing press revolutionised the written word, enabling access to and mass-production of texts to an extent never imagined before. We therefore found it very ironic that the illogical layout of this book makes it almost impossible to follow the text across the page. This was, for us, compounded by the language barrier, which prevented us from accessing the text at all. Everything we know about Vitruvius and his work comes from other sources, so while we spent significant amounts of time studying and contemplating this book, it remains entirely unsuccessful in its primary objective: to impart upon readers the information it contains. We wondered then what it may look like for a book to refuse this objective, and become actively hostile against attempts to read it, as well as the reading of other books. This is the visual and thematic core of our printed text: ‘we haven’t read it either’.
We decided to play on the different sizes of type in the Vitruvius and take this to the extreme as far as possible. This was a far simpler way of communicating our intent and playfulness than the triangular diagram we had hoped for. Similarly, we designed our title and back pages to be comparatively simple, to juxtapose the chaos we hoped would be inside and replicate the unpredictability of our inspiration.
What were some of the processes and challenges involved in making your book?
We realised very quickly that our ideas were ambitious and would be difficult to execute, so our process of creation needed to be as adaptable as possible. Since we were only able to learn these processes by doing them, we had to continually rethink to make our ideas more achievable. Historically, the printing process was a collaborative practice, and this is something our creative project made really clear. We were continually bouncing ideas off each other, making collaborative decisions, and this co-operation especially paid off during the actual printing step, which indisputably went the smoothest.
Our first step was to measure precisely all the components of our design once we had factored in available type and diagram sizes. Though we took great care in this, we had not yet realised how simultaneously exact and malleable these measurements needed to be, or how many obstacles we would encounter throughout this process.
We concentrated on the outer pages at first, as these seemed the simplest through which to learn the type-setting and locking up processes – though they were far from ‘simple’. As we had initially planned and measured our title page design to use different, larger decorative blocks, we faced issues with line length discrepancies when we then changed these, meaning the locking-up procedure was far more complicated than we had anticipated or planned for. This left us less time to work on our internal pages and is the primary reason our church tower page is so simple.
Once we had our text, we set the internal text blocks for the left hand page. It is difficult to spell-check when each letter is flipped, and this resulted in several misspellings we had to rectify after proofing – including letters of the wrong size or typeface, which had been replaced into the wrong typecases. Secondly, we quickly began to run out of the letter ‘t’ in our chosen type, 14 pt Perpetua Italic, and so had to rewrite our planned text to omit as many instances of this as possible. Thus we used the phrase ‘ye olde printing press’, as it seemed more important to use our final remaining ‘t’ in ‘printing’ than ‘the’! This was honestly a very amusing problem to have, and this is reflected in the playfulness of our solutions.
There were two further points of complication during the setting and locking up of our second page. To allow the diagram to run off the side of the page, we needed to include the rest of the over-running block in the chase, resulting in two separate chases for the two internal pages – one portrait and the other landscape. We had to be especially careful when lining these up exactly for printing.
How would you approach this project differently a second time?
We could have struck a better balance between planning in advance and thinking on our feet. Because we had new challenges to troubleshoot each week, our goals changed session to session, and as a result the timing plans we had initially made quickly had to be abandoned.
We were aware from the outset that there would be practical limitations to our theoretical designs, and we became much quicker at adapting to these throughout the project. However, this was an adjustment: we spent significant time at the start trying to make our diagonal illustration work, despite knowing it was ambitious.
We would take higher-quality proofs earlier in the process. Blurry and imprecise prints meant that we only noticed some mistakes after proofing the entire locked-up page. Correcting these required a second, time-consuming locking-up procedure. Underestimating the meticulous and frustrating work that goes into locking-up a chase was a fatal error!
Something else we failed to consider was the difference between the metal and wooden printing presses. The variation between impressions on the wooden press was immense, depending on pressure, packing and whether we took one pull with the platen positioned in the centre of the forme, or two pulls. This was an added element we hadn’t anticipated, with some impressions looking rather faded, and others indented heavily into the page.
Despite the various issues we faced, we whole-heartedly believe our project to have been a success. Our final product conveys exactly what we wanted it to, though not in the ways we had initially planned, and the process of adapting to obstacles enhanced the playfulness and irregularity of our work. The unfinished or altered aspects of our work could be argued to in fact bring it closer to our inspiration source: the Vitruvius was sold and bound despite being far from complete, and our project was also not entirely what we had originally set out to create, yet both are incredibly valuable and worthwhile in spite of this.
