Updike of Merrymount: The Scholar-Printer

I

THE names of the Merrymount Press and of Daniel Berkeley Updike, who died in Boston near the end of 1941, almost eighty-two years of age, are inseparably connected. They suggest first of all to many who know them the production of beautiful books, both ecclesiastical and secular, often sumptuous and costly. It is nevertheless a fact that one of the last undertakings of the Merrymount Press in Updike’s lifetime was the printing of a general timetable for the Boston and Maine Railroad. In a time of curtailment of many plans this was not carried beyond the making of an ‘Index to Tables,’ a list of all the stations on all the branches of the road. It takes no expert knowledge of typography to see at a glance that this Index, in the current B. & M. folders, is an object of real beauty attained through clarity. At the very beginning of Updike’s career as a printer he declared his aim ‘ to make work better for its purpose than was commonly thought worth while.’ There spoke an intensely practical realist who felt that print was intended first and foremost to be read, and was glad to undertake any and every form of printing, from folios of learning to advertising cards, so long as he could do it in his own way. Because he was also an artist and a scholar, deeply imbued with a sense of the fitness of things, he brought to his work a capacity for which ‘unique’ does not seem too strong a term.

Now it is the achievement of Updike in his chosen field of printing, whether of stately tomes or of timetables, that makes him a figure of public interest and justifies such a paper as this. Let it be said at once that he could never have achieved what he did had he not been essentially a perfectionist — a devotee to what seemed the very best in his eyes, an embodiment of a pet word of my own, ‘aristophile.’ A family motto, ‘Optimum vix satis,’ used for his own bookplate spoke for his feeling that the best was hardly enough, in whatever field. He used it also for a colophon in the first substantial book of his own making, an exceedingly churchly volume, and soon afterwards, by way of contrast almost comic, as the legend of the Merrymount Press in a sketch of the Maypole round which Thomas Morton’s godless crew was supposed to have danced. The Optimum was Updike’s constant goal. His road to it was hard. The wayfarer was shy, under a cloak of aloofness, fastidious, sharp of tongue, exacting, but in all respects as critical of himself as of others — hardly an equipment that made for an easy march through life.

He was born in Providence in February 1860, of sound Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and, more remotely, Dutch stock. An eighteenth-century Daniel Updike was on such terms with Dean Berkeley in his Rhode Island days that the future Bishop, on quitting America, gave him a silver flagon as a token of friendship. The flagon and the name of Berkeley were transmitted in due time to the Updike with whom we are now concerned. His father, by the way, was named Cæsar Augustus — and who am I, a Mark Antony by descent, to think it strange? Our Rhode Island forbears must have had classical leanings.

Updike’s backgrounds and beginnings would commonly be called ‘advantages.’ But as an only child, with delicate health and a sensitive nature, he passed an unhappy boyhood, and when he was nearly eighteen years old experienced in the sudden death of his father a shock of more than passing effect. His mother, a woman of strong character and intelligence, was left to him, and until her death nearly twenty years later, they were inseparable and devoted companions. Yet he was conscious through life that a boy had better not be brought up by women only. In a recent summer, I am told, he looked with envy one day upon a number of young people at a seashore place disporting themselves in breakneck amusements, and contrasted their childhood with his own. Fears of everything, he said, were instilled into him. ‘Water,’ he went on, ‘was something that would drown you; fire would burn you, and dogs would bite you.’ My own remembrance of him in boyhood summers is that he took no part whatever in the tennis, sailing, and swimming in which his young contemporaries were finding pleasure. Nor did he ever present, except for a certain ‘filling out’ in his latest years, the figure of one to whom such exercises were natural. His physique and bearing, even the precision of his speech, were those of a man to whom the mind seemed more important than the body.

One may not, and would not, peep and botanize on the grave of a friend. When anybody makes so much of his life, however, as Updike did, the achievement shows only the more clearly if the handicaps and obstacles that precede it are frankly acknowledged. Besides those that have been mentioned, there was the plight of slender means, following his father’s death. At a Providence private school, where the weekly ‘ declamations ‘ filled him with dread, he made his beginnings with books, and turned his taste for them to good account by serving for a time as an assistant in the Providence Athenæum. This was another beginning — of a lifelong intimacy with libraries. If he had gone, as he hoped, to college — Brown or Harvard — there is no reason to believe that he would have become ultimately more a scholar and civilized thinker than he was, for the college graduates who achieve precisely that are few. So are they who start, like Updike, at the bottom of a particular ladder and proceed to the top. The rung on which Updike first put his foot was that of an errand boy in the Boston publishing house of Houghton, Mifflin & Company. At twenty, as he was in 1880, when this work began, he was beyond the normal age for this rudimentary but trying post. Sticking to it through fatigues and discouragements, he was transferred from the business office of the firm in Boston to the Riverside Press in Cambridge, where his aptitude in matters of print began to count — also his taste, which was by no means confined to type.

Updike’s earliest printed writings consisted of five unsigned articles in the ‘Contributors’ Club’ of the Atlantic Monthly in the years 1889 and 1890. They were little essays, with one exception relating entirely to observations in Europe. Many eminent writers have done worse in their twenties. One of these ‘Clubs’ was devoted to a rendering into meritorious English verse, under the title ‘A French Folly,’ of a long poem of François Coppée’s on the Eiffel Tower. This was not only a token of Updike’s self-cultivation, already well under way. Beyond that, and without reference to him, but of peculiar interest at this much later moment for its revelation of the seer in Coppée, are these stanzas written about the Tower in 1888: —

The exceedingly churchly volume of which I have spoken was made under Updike’s direction at the Riverside Press before he became a printer on his own account. It was a work of collaboration with his friend Harold Brown of Providence, who, besides sharing in Updike’s ecclesiastical sympathies, could finance both this book, On the Dedication of American Churches, and the superb Altar Book which Updike published under the imprint of the Merrymount Press five years later, in 1896. The authors of the first appeared on its title-page merely as ‘Two Laymen of the Diocese of Rhode Island.’ Its dedication: ‘To the Right Reverend Father in God, Thomas, By Divine Permission Bishop of Rhode Island ‘ was perhaps more strictly in the tradition of Anglican propriety than was the witty old Bishop Clark himself.

Like a number of young Bostonians of his earlier years Updike, according to his own statement, had little in common with American Protestantism. If the term ‘ Anglo-Catholicism’ had not yet come into common use, it was that to which he was devoted — and so sincerely that any sincerity less than his own annoyed or amused him. I remember the relish with which he related one experience of the time — at an early Easter service at the Cowley Fathers’ Church of St. John the Evangelist. Passing through a vestibule door he found himself face to face with another young layman, who greeted him eagerly with ‘ Christ is risen — give the proper answer!’ Updike could give all the proper answers, but that was not the way to get them out of him. Equally foreign to him were the rather selfconscious activities of the young Jacobites, members of the ‘ Order of the White Rose’ who celebrated the Feast of Charles the Martyr with ceremonies of mourning and expiation and, for another outlet, tossed their ‘Pewter Mugs’ and published their Knight-Errant. There are natural Bohemians, and there are those who outlive their Bohemianism. From this, in any of its forms, Updike was perpetually immune. Whatever partook of sham, in whatever degree, was anathema to him, and he was at no pains to conceal his scorn of it. A case in point was his allusion, in his Notes on the Merrymount Press and Its Work, to the books produced by the short-lived firm of Copeland & Day — books thought by many of us to be attractive in form. He admitted that these were the best of the period when his own press was in its infancy, but they could not help reminding him of a saying of Lord Minto’s at a soulful house party: ‘I hate clever people — they’re so damned silly.’

II

All this may seem a long preliminary to the story of the Merrymount Press. Perhaps it is justified by taking thought that Updike’s work was so much an expression of his personality that the one can hardly be understood without some knowledge of the other. Pretense and compromise were equally foreign to his nature. This was as true of his printing as of everything else about him.

When he made up his mind, still at Riverside, with no sufficient prospect of advancement, to become a better all-round printer than was commonly thought worth while, he knew that this end could be attained only in an establishment of his own. As he looked back after forty years on the beginnings of his business in two rooms on an upper story of an old house at the corner of Beacon Street and Tremont Place in Boston, he could not wonder that the valor he displayed was regarded as ignorance. ‘ I required capital,’ he wrote, ‘and had little; comprehension of my own trade, of which I had less; and business experience, of which I had none at all.’ He did not permit himself any illusions about his work, either when he undertook it or afterwards. Thus he referred to it all in a bit of autobiography which he contributed in 1930 to a Boy Scouts’ pamphlet on Printing: ‘There is one encouraging thing to be learned from what I have done — that starting with no education, not much health, little money, and a generally poor and unpractical training for life, and being pushed by necessity into printing, a work that I hated, by studying that work and persistently keeping at it, I have succeeded in it better than some men, and, in spite of many handicaps, made myself over, through it.’ To these words he added others, of which the following set forth a philosophy of life and work, not for printers only: ‘What we specially need in these United States is an intensive cultivation of the field that is given a man to till — not talking about it, or writing about it, but working at it. If you do this, by and by, after years of effort, success and failure, you will become so good at your work, that you will be (just as I am) asked to tell how you did it! — which appears to be the lowest rung on the ladder of Fame!’

It was certainly a happy thought to name his enterprise the Merrymount Press. Established in 1893, it was not definitely so called until three years later, and while it still needed to be made known, he declared the Maypole of Merrymount ‘a symbol of happiness found in workaday things; of a high aim and pleasure in trying to attain it, an ideal to which the Merrymount Press has endeavoured to be true.’ Many details of its attainment are set forth in Updike’s own Notes already quoted. Here it would be superfluous to follow them at all minutely — the migrations from smaller to constantly larger quarters, always harmonized in taste, through old furniture and prints, with the work proceeding from the Press, the relations between management and ‘help,’ the fortunate association with Mr. John Bianchi, foreman until he became partner in 1915. Through the hands of Updike and Bianchi, under whom the business is now continued, it has been estimated that some twenty thousand pieces of printing have passed during the nearly forty years of the Press. The rule that nothing was too small or trivial for close personal supervision has accounted for much. Under the further principle of Merrymount that it should remain a small establishment, the number of employees has seldom exceeded thirty.

Updike’s equipment for the adventure of the Press has been excellently defined by Mr. W. A. Dwiggins as ‘an æsthetic predilection, a philosophy of life, and friends.’ These elements have already been suggested. The technical aspects of Updike’s work may be left to printers and designers, writing as specialists for special readers. The experts will assign him to his particular place, among the loftiest, in the hierarchy of printers, relating him duly to past and present masters of the craft. In more general terms it is to be said that friends at the start are a blessing in every endeavor, and also that they are of no avail unless the befriended proves worthy of their belief in him. This is precisely what Updike did with the Altar Book which he could not have undertaken but for his friend Harold Browm. His philosophy of life was a religious philosophy, taking its outward form in the Anglican Church, for he was a traditionalist as well as a perfectionist. Thus he brought to the making of a book designed for clerical use in the service of Holy Communion a complete understanding and sympathy. His æsthetic sense led him to choose, from his young contemporaries in Boston, the supremely gifted Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue as the designer of borders, initials, and special type. For a few full-page illustrations he turned to England and enlisted the services of Robert Anning Bell — as of Sir John Stainer for bits of musical notation. In the early nineties, when this book was in preparation, William Morris and his Kelmscott Press were having their effect upon what was called the Renaissance of American printing. The influence was noticeable in Updike’s Altar Book, but only to a limited extent, and it did not continue. The standards of a cool lucidity, closely related to the rules of common sense, fundamental in Updike and calling for legibility as the first requisite of anything meant to be read, were the standards most truly expressive of his own nature. On these he proceeded to build, freed, again by common sense quickened by imagination, from any fetish of the superiority of work by hand, and demonstrating beyond doubt that the most modern labor-saving mechanisms of the printer’s trade could be employed under intelligent direction, with the best of results.

Of these results in general Updike himself wrote: ‘I have been classed by my work as a conservative, but I am a liberal conservative or a conservative liberal — whichever you like or dislike. All I wish to conserve, either in traditionalism or modernism is common sense.’ In another place he suggested the relation of his whole life to his printing: ‘One is automatically either a critic or an enthusiast of modern trends in literature, music, art, and daily living, so we unconsciously govern our printing by the kind of life we approve.’ With him it was the life and the printing of a liberal conservative.

The mention of Goodhue and other helpers in the production of the Altar Book suggests what became a continuing alertness of Updike’s — to recognize ability even in beginners, and to employ it for the Merrymount Press. The names of W. A. Dwiggins and T. M. Cleland, now well known, were relatively unfamiliar when Updike first printed their designs; and of Rudolph Ruzicka — both designer and friend — it is enough to say that from 1912 till 1941, excepting only the year 1925, he was the producer of the cherished ‘Annual Keepsakes, Printed for the Friends of the Merrymount Press.’ These twenty-nine wood engravings in colors of views in and about Boston, the beauty of each enlivened by a Latin text of singular aptness, chosen by Updike himself, can hardly fail to become ‘collector’s items’ for the sheer pleasure of possessing them.

Among the friends who helped him both by counsel and by patronage in the earlier days of the Press was Charles Eliot Norton, about to quit the scene as a guide and arbiter of American taste. Another was Edith Wharton, who required of the Scribners, on publishing her first volume of short stories, that it should be printed at the Merrymount Press. This was not quite the first, or by any means the last, of the ‘trade books’ manufactured by Updike for publishers in New York and Boston. Privately printed books, — family chronicles and the like, — yearbooks for churches, annual reports, school and college catalogues, club publications, programmes, all the varieties of ‘job work’ which a printing house is glad to undertake, issued year after year in growing volume from the Merrymount Press. Happily there was no quarrel with Dr. Holmes’s principle of ‘small fevers thankfully received.’ If the work was regarded as expensive, it is only to be remembered that a large number of discriminating patrons found it worth while to meet the cost attaching to the productions of highly qualified specialists who spared no pains to give of their meticulous best. Not every printing house is thoughtful enough in making a programme for a musicale in a private house to use paper so soft that no rustling is audible; or to ‘check up’ a European journey of 1833 by means of road maps and guidebooks of the time; or in printing Benjamin Franklin on Balloons, with a Montgolfier balloon on the title-page, to secure from a French papermaking Montgolfier of the present, descended from the aeronaut, a specially made paper watermarked with a Montgolfier balloon.

The standard Book of Common Prayer of the Protestant. Episcopal Church is regarded as the acme of Updike’s work. All his liturgical learning and typographical skill were brought to bear upon the production of the folio volume, of the highest dignity and beauty, from which all the Prayer Books printed since its completion in 1930 are reproductions, with uniform pagination whatever their size. An important point in its design was the avoidance of ‘turnovers’ at moments when what he likened, in connection with an earlier book, to ‘the effect of the sudden flight of a flock of pigeons’ was particularly to be avoided. It is well for all users of the Prayer Book as it stands today to know what they owe to a Scholar-Printer.

III

There are fugitive writings and several small books on which Updike’s right to the title of scholar might well be based. There is, however, one work, his monumental Printing Types in two volumes, which gives him a place among the really learned. It had its origin in a course of lectures at the Harvard School of Business Administration, ending with the entrance of the United States into the World War. A searching study of types at home and in European travel, and first-hand intimacy with their use, qualified him to speak with a rare authority. The extensive rewriting, and the choice and explanation of numberless illustrations, before the book could be published in 1922, were labors of genuine erudition. Second and third printings wore called for in 1923 and 1927, and in 1937 a revised and enlarged edition met the continued demand for the book, which has come to be called — by others, be it noted, than Updike himself — ‘The Printers’ Bible.’

In evidence of the place this book immediately took, and has held, in circles best qualified to appreciate its value, I must give myself the pleasure of quoting some words about Updike received since his death from his friend, Mr. Stanley Morison, historian of the London Times and Typographical Adviser to the Cambridge University Press. This master of Updike’s own calling met him first on a visit to America in 1924.

‘I went as a pilgrim,’ writes Mr. Morison, ‘for the two volumes of Printing Types had been published in 1922. No more needs be said here than that this publication was the most exciting event of a decade. Its value to a country that had been starved of typographical literature since 1914 can hardly be imagined by Americans. To us at that time the book had a messianic quality. Despite the immense amount of research that has been done since, and which Updike’s work was designed to inspire, Printing Types remains absolutely essential to the understanding of the subject; and, as far as the intelligent appreciation of printing style is concerned, every bit as valuable to-day as it was twenty years ago. The book, like the man I met, was not made in a hurry. . . . The whole is a combination of charm, wit, and solidity.’

Printing Types won for its author the honorary degree of Master of Arts at Harvard in 1929, even as the reissue in 1907 of The History of the Narragansett Church by his grandfather Wilkins Updike gave to Brown University the occasion to honor him with the same degree, which the grandfather had received on the appearance of the same book in its original form in 1847. Updike was wont to deplore his lack of a formal education and the scholarship to which it might have led. In fact he was a shining illustration of the familiar truth that selfeducation often produces the best results of all. For him they were recognized through his election to learned societies and his part in the governance of libraries in Boston and Providence.

The trouble with many scholars is that they lack precisely the cultivation, the sense of proportion between their own interests and those of the larger world of general urbanity, which Updike possessed, to the constant and increasing advantage of his writing. He could draw at will, for instance, upon an abundant store of apt quotation, for which he took no credit, saying that his mind was equipped with a number of little drawers, which would pop out with needed words at the call of a retentive memory. Both his talk and his writing were quickened by this gift, which indeed was only one of the elements that gave to the best of his writing a positive distinction and charm. Witness, besides the books already mentioned, the papers collected in the two small volumes, In the Day’s Work, and the last of his publications, Some Aspects of Printing Old and New. There is also his Richard Smith, First English Settler of the Narragansett Country, Rhode Island, dealing, after the best fashion of the pious antiquarian, with progenitors of his own.

As a man of the world he was not, to be sure, of the sort that suffers fools at all gladly, but he impaled them with his wit less frequently in his printed writings than in his talk and correspondence. In these he often seemed to echo the Silver Swan in the song of Orlando Gibbons — ‘More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.’ He chose his diversions and companions with much care, discarding readily those that were not for him. He used to tell a story of a child who was held up before a window to see a passing procession, and soon complained, ‘My buttons hurt more than I can see.’ In terms of adult choice, Updike was just as sure of his own preferences.

That sense of the fitness of things to which I have alluded developed early in him, together with a humorous recognition of its opposite. Late in his life he recalled the first Washington’s Birthday party he attended, with a special remembrance of a head of George Washington in vanilla ice-cream, mated, not with Martha, but with a strawberry icecream rabbit — ‘the last emblem applicable to a childless pair.’

To the loneliness of his later years it is hard to believe that he would not have preferred a family life of his own and the perpetuation of a name of which he was naturally proud. If he never married, it was not because he shared at all in the confirmed celibate’s scorn of matrimony. In its place he made the most of his friendships, whether, through these later years, in the house he occupied in Boston, or at his farm in Vermont, far from his associations with Lenox and Newport. In the beauty and peace of the countryside, in the simplicity of his surroundings, innocent of the cares of business, his sense of reality found a satisfaction of which both the visitors who came to share it and the devoted Italian couple who ministered to him for many years were keenly aware. Younger fellow-craftsmen were among the friends to whom he gave himself with least reserve; and so, early and late, were intelligent, witty, and sympathetic women, with whom a feminine quality of sensitiveness in his own perceptions gave him a special kinship of spirit. There was something of the older world about him and — Yankee as he was — something Gallic, something consequently in the essence of his mind and wit that made him turn, as cultivated French Abbés of the eighteenth century turned, to the society of congenial women. Of course there were Abbés and Abbés, but if one only knew the life and letters of preRevolutionary France as well as he did, it would be possible to name the very Abbé to whom he might be likened with some accuracy. With respect to less intimate human relations, it was like him to observe that a man who came to see him on a matter of business expected to encounter a mixture of King Solomon in wisdom and a wildcat in manners, and was surprised to find a normal human being. Such a creature as this visitor expected to meet would never have indulged himself in little plays of wit which Updike enjoyed — such, for example, as the Wordsworthian lines ‘On a Wash-Cloth Left on a Visit to the Lake Country by the Printer Rogers,’ received by Bruce Rogers after a country visit to Updike.

For further light on Updike’s distinctive qualities I am indebted yet again to Mr. Morison, who writes: ‘He was, I judged, immovably attached to the virtues of self-reliance, hard work, and thrift which were so intensively cultivated in old and new England when he was a boy, of which less and less has been heard both sides of the ocean during the past twenty-five years. I recognized at once, too, that Updike was very deeply rooted in the spiritual department of life, besides the social, professional, and commercial. Nothing he seemed to say or do was done rashly; nor was there any precipitancy in making what this generation calls “contacts.” Similiarly, Updike was too surely what spiritual writers describe as a “recollected” man, to allow conversation to degenerate into mere gossip. In his relish for talk about persons as well as things he was careful to refrain from harsh verdicts upon men as men. But he had too good an eye for genuine quality to be patient under any attempt to secure his approval of work that was pretentious, showy, or egoistic. His comments, then, however acid in form, were never spiteful in substance. He showed, in fact, an unexpected keenness of sight in searching for redeeming qualities and a tenderness towards those the Victorians called the “deserving” poor.’

Distressed as he was by tendencies of the times quite out of keeping with standards he set for himself and by the signs of chaos in world affairs, he found a countervailing comfort in the recognition of his labors by those best qualified to pass upon them. Year after year since the American Institute of Graphic Arts began its annual exhibitions of ‘ Fifty Books of the Year’ in 1923 the productions of the Merrymount Press have received signal honors. In 1940 the Institute and the Grolier Club joined in arranging a display of the work of Updike and his Press in the exhibition room of the Club, and marked the occasion by publishing a pamphlet with the addresses made by Royal Cortissoz and others, with Updike’s response, and an admirable checklist of the books, pamphlets, and articles written and edited by Updike. Even since his death, the Institute of Graphic Arts has counted three of the latest Merrymount books among the fifty best of 1940, and the Huntington Library has prepared an exhibition commemorated in a pamphlet, The Work of the Merrymount Press and Its Founder, Daniel Berkeley Updike (1860-1941). Stretching thus across our continent, his fame has long been established also beyond these boundaries. His labors may truly be said to have had a world-wide reward.

IV

In the bit of autobiography which Updike wrote for the Boy Scouts’ manual he said: ‘I became a printer by accident. If I have become a good printer — not more — it is through intention and determination, and the intention has got hold of me to such an extent that printing has become to me — with one exception — the most interesting thing in the world.’ For those who knew him there can be little doubt that this one exception was the church, religion, God and the soul of man — however you may choose to define a sphere of life and thought which was paramount with him, as it was with the best of Abbés. May not the pursuing of a trade in the spirit of a profession be merely the regarding of one’s job as a vocation in the sense of a commission from higher powers?

Order is heaven’s first law — and it was Updike’s. I have already spoken of him as a traditionalist. In the church of his forefathers for several centuries, and of his own upbringing, he found an order, an authority, which met his own deep sense of tradition and of human need.

‘It seems,’ he once wrote a friend, ‘ as if religion and God as found in it, is the only thing in the world that understands because it knows the whole story. It is the great Friend, who knows our troubles and deficiencies without being told: and one sometimes meets something like that in people, though only rarely.’ For another friend he copied from a notebook of his own this fragment of Richard Bentley’s translation of Manilius:

‘Wherefore see we the stars arise in their season, and move as at a word spoken, on the paths appointed for them? Of whom there is none that hastens, neither is there any that tarries behind. Why are the summer nights beautiful with these that change not, and the nights of winter from of old? These things are not the work of chance, but the order of a God most high.’

With this sense of the nearness of God, it was natural for Updike, on successive Eves of All Saints’ Day, to light the candles on each side of a Madonna and Child on the pressroom side of a door to his office, and to observe the Day himself in worship and remembrance. To faith, however, he added works, and of a sort which could not have been easy for him. This, for a number of years, was the regular visiting of inmates of the State Prison at Charlestown, and befriending them on their release. There was an instance of taking one of these men into his own employ, after telling the man’s story to those who were to work beside him, and ensuring his welcome. The church, for Updike, was by no means all of Christianity. His outward devotion to it took many forms, including expressions of loyalty to his own past in the shape of memorials in the Rhode Island ‘South County’ churches with which his ancestors were associated. Here, too, there was a secular loyalty, prompting gifts to a local school, library, and hospital.

Have we strayed too far from the printer? I think not, and for a reason that will stand repeating — that the work and the personality of Updike were immitigably bound together. If the work is an object of interest outside his immediate circle, the personality, surrounded in that circle with personal reserves, must also be regarded. The two were very much of a piece. For his life and for his art — which he preferred to call his trade — there was a single standard. This can be shown forth hardly better than in a passage of his own carefully considered writing on the final pages of his Printing Types: —

For the printer there are two camps, and only two, to be in: one, the camp of things as they are; the other, that of things as they should be. The first camp is on a level and extensive plane, and many eminently respectable persons lead lives of comfort therein; the sport is, however, inferior! The other camp is more interesting. Though on an inconvenient hill, it commands a wide view of typography, and in it are the class that help on sound taste in printing, because they are willing to make sacrifices for it. This group is small, accomplishes little comparatively, but has the one saving grace of honest endeavour— it tries. Like Religion, ‘it will remain a voice crying in the wilderness; but it will believe what it cries, and there will be some to listen to it in the future, as there have been many in the past.’ Around this camp idealistic lunatics hover, but they are quite harmless, and were never known to hurt or print anything seriously. This camp I think the only one worth living in. You may not make all the money you want, but will have all you need, and you will have a tremendously good time, for as Stevenson said, ‘work that we really love is nothing more than serious play.’

With these words of his, rather than any of my own, Updike, the printer and the human being, may be left in the camp of things as they should be.