Bordering on the Sublime:
Ornamental Typography at the Curwen Press

by David Jury & Crispin Elsted

ESTIMATED PUBLICation date:
late 2025

An Explanatory Note For Those Whose Faith May Have Begine To Flag:

For the sake of clarity, we think it only fair to point out that since 2013, when we began to plan this book in detail and since which time work on it has been ongoing, we have published eleven further titles. Some of them have been of considerable length [Sudden Immobility (2021) and Endgrain Editions 5: Richard Wagener – a Dialogue with Wood Engraving (2019)], of some complexity [The Splendour of a Morning: Early Poems of C P Cavafy (2016)], or have required time-consuming editorial work [The Ingoldsby Legends: a Gallimaufry (2015)]. Apart from our
pleasure in publishing these books and the warm receptions they have received, their publication has been necessary because the books we produce are our only means of support. We simply cannot work on a single project of the size and complexity of Bordering on the Sublime and produce nothing else until it is completed (however ideal such a process would seem) as we would have no income during the time – other than the generous advances toward the book our subscribers have sent. It follows that work on this book has necessarily been pursued at the same time that other titles have been published.

This has certainly meant that the duration of work on the project has been protracted, but it is our conviction that Bordering on the Sublime will be much the better for the extra time, as it has allowed more careful consideration in the research, provided the possibility of revision in the writing, and has provided a degree of experiment in some elements of the production. Moreover, during the time spent on the project, our daughter Apollonia Felicity has joined the press as a partner, which has added greatly to our capabilities. We especially want to take this opportunity to express our deep gratitude to all those who have subscribed to this edition, and whose patience has been an overwhelming example of kindness, faith, and friendship.

A Status Report, February 2025

Bordering on the Sublime continues to progress steadily. David Jury’s opening section of text has long been completely printed, folded, collated, and packed. We have now (January 2025) completed over 150 pages of Crispin’s section of the book’s text, which comprises a Preamble and four substantial sections: I. Historical Notes on Printers’ Ornaments; II. ‘The Visual World at Play’: Stanley Morison and the Type Revivals; III. Apropos the Unicorn: Curwen in the Twenties and Later; and IV. Bert E Smith, Compositor, and the Curwen Borders. In addition, Apollonia (with occasional help from Jan) has printed a 60-page Gallery of Borders, principally consisting of standing borders from the Curwen Press, with a few facsimiles, modelled on working proofs from the Curwen Press in our possession, newly set by Crispin from the original cases of Curwen ornaments. Most of the borders contain texts copied from our large collection of Curwen’s working proofs, which provide not only various examples of how the ornamented borders were used at the Curwen Press, but an intriguing insight into the social structures and concerns of the day.

Both Sections III, on the work of the Curwen Press, and Section IV, on Bert Smith, have grown to be considerably longer than we first imagined. In Section III, the opportunity of referring to the large collection of Curwen ephemera at the Bruce Peel Library of the University of Alberta in Edmonton offered much more information that we would otherwise have had. In addition, the staff there have generously agreed to provide fine digital images of a number of rare items, and this has allowed Crispin to deal in more detail with the importance of ‘jobbing’ work at the press.

For Section IV, Bob Richardson, a volunteer at St. Bride Printing Museum in London, found himself with unexpected free time during the pandemic and most generously offered to help us. His research on the subject has largely made this chapter possible. Bert Smith was the compositor at Curwen who created most of the ornamental borders, and initially we knew practically nothing about him. Bob was able to discover some solid information, and even at this late date more details are emerging. We now know his full name, his date & place of birth, the year he began his apprenticeship, and the names of his wife, daughter, and grandchildren, along with some anecdotal facts about his life and interests, such as his love of gardening and his purchase of an Adana press for hobby printing upon his retirement. Given the bare facts we first knew (his name and the fact that he worked with ornaments at Curwen) it is wonderful to see how Bert E Smith has begun to take form beyond his reputation as a designer and compositor of brilliant and distinctive decorative borders. Bob was able to contact one of Bert’s grandchildren in the Autumn of 2021 and has met her and several of her relatives since to talk about Bert and glean some further facts.

The initial research and writing of all Crispin’s sections of the text took nearly two years – all of 2022 and about ten months of 2023 – and further revisions and additions continue to be made as the work is being set. Crispin’s typescript setting copy is covered with revisions, scratchings out, and addenda in the margins. (Woe to any future student or type historian who has to plough through those pages!) Three appendices will follow, and we have concluded that a further necessity will be a complete General Index. A book as complex and full of detail as Bordering on the Sublime must have one; its omission would be unforgivably impractical.

Conrad Gessner, the 16th century philologist and naturalist (the first to describe the tulip in Europe), had this to say about the index:

It is now generally accepted that copious and strictly alphabetically arranged indexes must be compiled, especially for large, complex volumes, and that they are the greatest convenience to scholars, second only to the true divine invention of printing books by movable type . . .

We estimate now that Bordering on the Sublime will probably not be completed until the late summer of 2025 – and by ‘completed’ we mean the completion of the presswork; after that must come the folding and collating of the printed sheets, the hand-tipping of a great many inserts into them, and finally the binding, which is certain to take many months. This means that, if we are to survive financially, we must as usual continue to produce some smaller books while the Curwen project is ongoing.

While working on two projects simultaneously might be seen as distracting attention from both, in practice this is not the case. Our culture’s insistence on speed and instant gratification has meant that ‘multi-tasking’ is too often touted as a desirable and admired skill, when it is frequently only a feeble excuse for not having paid sufficient attention to anything one is doing. However, we find that a balance between a large and complex book and a smaller, more homogeneous one can be mutually illuminating, one acting as a counterpoint or descant to the other, each allowing a chance to stand back and view the other objectively. We enjoy working on every book we produce. And it would be disingenuous not to point out that with Apollonia and Lea also working in the pressroom, we will now have two presses and three printers working nearly all the time.

A Re-cap of the History of this Book

A re-cap of the history of this book after all this time in production may begin to resemble a re-reading of Hakluyt’s Voyages. But there are those who will not know of it, so we hope this recap will be excused.

This book has been in successive stages of planning, designing, researching, writing, editing, hand-setting, and printing – sometimes simultaneously – since 2013, when we completed work on our monograph on Simon Brett, Endgrain Editions 4. Through great good fortune and the generosity of many of our subscribers, four years earlier, in the spring of 2009, we had been enabled to acquire the Curwen Press archives of Monotype ornaments & borders, comprising hundreds of pounds of new flowers in case and in packets from the foundry, with scores of composed borders which, once printed, had been tied up, wrapped, & stored for future use.

The Curwen Press, under the direction of Harold Curwen, and later Oliver Simon, was generally recognized as the best trade letterpress printing office in Great Britain for the better part of the 20th century. Their book design and presswork were unexcelled. The press employed some of the finest British artists & illustrators of the time – John Piper, Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Enid Marx, Barnett Freedman, and Claud Lovat Fraser, to name a few – and their jobbing work set standards which still hold today. Their clients included, among many others, the Arts Council of Great Britain, the British Transport Commission, and the Double Crown Club.

A significant element in their work, of course, was the use of ornaments & borders, often printed in two or three colours. These are major exemplars of ornamental typography, and they were nearly all created by one man, Bert E Smith, who worked at Curwen from 1924 until his retirement in 1964. Mr Smith showed endless facility and astonishing invention in creating these borders, setting them in a stick and composing them across their width, as one might weave a tapestry.

Until recently little of substance was know about Bert Smith beyond the evidence of his work at the Curwen Press and, as might be imagined, trying to trace someone with such a common name as his proved daunting. However, with the generous help of Bob Richardson of the St Bride Library in London we have gradually assembled a portrait of Bert E Smith, to which the Curwen Collection at Cambridge University Library has added some photographs. The full story will form a chapter in Bordering on the Sublime, but those interested can also read an article by Crispin discussing the preliminary findings (as we had learned them then) published in Parenthesis 42 (Spring 2022), and available online here: In Search of Bert Smith - Fine Press Book Association (fpba.com). Note that more recent discoveries have contradicted some points made in the article, thus reminding us of the occasional perils of ongoing research, despite every precaution.

Bordering on the Sublime will examine this part of The Curwen Press legacy, reprinting most of the many original borders which remain standing, recomposing from proofs (when possible) some of those which were distributed, and showing examples of other decorative elements such as composed spots and swelled rules which were intended to accompany the borders. To provide a broad context for the Curwen borders and the use of Monotype ornaments at The Curwen Press, the texts by David Jury and Crispin Elsted will explore the story of The Curwen Press itself and something of the little-explored history of typographic ornament.
In the preliminary chapters, British typographer and printing historian David Jury – author of Letterpress: The Allure of the Handmade and Graphic Design before Graphic Designers, among other books, and proprietor of the celebrated Fox Ash Press – discusses the state of graphic design and printing in England and on the continent between the wars, reviews the history of The Curwen Press, its place in British design, its influence, and its importance, and makes special reference to its use of ornament, providing an illuminating introduction both for the chapters on the history of typographical ornament which follow and the ornamental work of Bert Smith which is at the heart of the book.

Crispin Elsted then provides a discussion of the origins and early development of printers’ flowers (as they are often called) in light of the manuscript books which preceded them, and the uses these historical ornaments were put to, before tracing the survival of some of the most popular and representative designs through distinct periods of European printing history. He also reviews the Monotype Corporation’s revival of ornaments in tandem with its program of reviving and re- cutting classic typefaces, beginning after Stanley Morison’s appointment as typographical advisor to the Corporation in 1922. He displays and discusses new ornaments from such designers as David Bethel, Elizabeth Friedlander, and John Peters, commissioned by Monotype and used at Curwen. There will also be some consideration of the use of ornaments by various other presses and designers, and reflections on the techniques & typographical decisions required to use them. Inter alia he will offer observations on developments and experiments in ornament within the contexts of changing interests and fashions in the fine arts and cultural history.

The book will include three appendices. First will be an annotated bibliography of books which discuss and display printers’ flowers. Second will be a facsimile of Sarah Clutton’s invaluable article, ‘A Grammar of Type Ornament’, published in The Monotype Recorder in 1960. And third, we will provide an index of the make-up of every border and ‘floating fleuron’ in the book – printing a single example of each of the ornaments used in each fleuron with its Monotype number, keyed to the page on which that border appears. This will allow those unused to looking at typographical ornament to see more clearly how these small decorative elements combine to create their effects.

The book will of course be lavishly illustrated with multi-colour borders, as well as photographs, facsimiles of early printed work, and other work from The Curwen Press. There will also be a full index.

We anticipate being able to complete the presswork by mid-2025, but please note that the binding will certainly take many months. Therefore, the first bound copies are unlikely to be shipped before the late autumn of 2025 at the very earliest.

Bordering on the Sublime: Ornamental Typography at the Curwen Press will be issued in three states. Our present estimations of them, subject to change, are as follows:

A. About 60 copies. Full leather, stamped or with an inserted panel. Many borders accompanying the text, with a photographic essay showing marked-up proofs, some of the formes made up for printing, details of the printing process, historical photographs, and other Curwen work. Accompanied by a portfolio containing several oversized borders, possibly recreations of some Curwen borders not present in type, some new borders created for this book, plus one original Curwen proof. Approximately 250 pages. Boxed.
PRICE: Approximately C$5,000.00 SUBJECT TO CHANGE.

B. About 40 copies. As above, but quarter leather with decorated paper, with a portfolio containing a selection of the oversized proofs, but without the original borders & Curwen proof. Slipcased.
PRICE: Approximately C$3,600.00. SUBJECT TO CHANGE.

C. Up to 50 copies. Book as in B, but quarter cloth binding and without portfolio. Slipcased.
PRICE: Approximately C$2,600, SUBJECT TO CHANGE.

PLEASE NOTE that the prices given here are only estimates, and may very well rise: costs of type, paper, binding materials and labour (the bindings are not yet designed, and will be elaborate) continue to rise, and the pricing of books this far in advance, especially books of this complexity (for example, with considerable photographic work having to be sent out of house) is problematic. We have modified the number of copies of the A and B states, because of very heavy demand for the A copies, of which nearly all are subscribed. However, if increasing demand for them is made apparent during the first few months of production we may be able to raise the number slightly, perhaps lowering the number of B state copies in turn.

RESERVATIONS are RECOMMENDED. Please contact the press.