The Printers’ Blues

 

What follows is a long-winded announcement for a new chapbook from HM, with some additional information on the topic it addresses appended... 

 

The first blue paper copy of a book I saw was not auspicious: it was Black Sparrow Press’ 1973 edition of D. H. Lawrence’s The Escaped Cock. The blue paper looked like cheap copy stock. But it started me wondering about blue paper copies. Why blue?

 

That was about 30 years ago. I didn’t spend all that time pondering blue copies, but the question did recur a few years ago while working on the Griffo project – Aldus was the first publisher to issue a few copies of a new book printed on blue paper – and I did some searching. I thought surely some academic or bibliophile would have researched the whys & hows of blue paper copies, but apparently not, or at least not the answer to my specific question of Why blue? I did find an essay in the 1959 edition of Gutenberg Jahrbuch by Wisso Weiss (a German paper historian & “watermarker” among other vocations), but it didn’t seem to ever have been translated from the original German. So I had our new AI overlords do a quick pass, just to get a sense of the article.

 

It is broader in scope than simply why blue, but a few sections speak to it directly. This month HM issues a chapbook printing English translations of these sections, along with a foreword and postscript that provide some historical context and additional details. 

 

The chapbook is similar in form and style to Francesco Griffo’s Foreword to Petrarch (2021), although sewn in a handmade paper wrap rather than cased in boards. Like that book, it is set in Pablo Impallari’s digital version of Cancelleresca Bastarda. It was printed on my small stash of blue-tinged J Whatman mouldmade paper. Not as blue as Aldus’ blue paper, but blue enough. Given my unreliable printing, I anticipated getting no more than 40 acceptable copies from the paper available, but I actually netted 42. Each copy is sewn in a wrap of Reg Lissel’s handmade rag paper that has been dyed blue. The cover and text pages have been enlivened with calligraphic flourishes taken from J.B. Preusse’s Vollständige Anleitung zum Schreiben für die Land-Schulen (1792) and G. Bickham’s The Universal Penman (1733).

 

The Whatman paper is very thin and therefore somewhat transparent, more than one might ideally want, but it prints beautifully. I’d been hording it for years, and there was just enough for this small project, so I just decided to live with the transparency.  

 

The HM email list was offered pre-publication purchase, with a discount, and those copies have all been shipped. The remaining copies are available priced at US$150 plus shipping. A page with some photos has been added to the HM site. 

 

A FEW INTERESTING BLUE PAPER COPIES

Blue is not the only color to be used for a few special copies: pink, yellow and red are also known, but blue has been the most common colored paper used. While the examples of blue paper copies I’ve seen do have an intriguing appearance, the blue doesn’t seem to make the printing more legible or beautiful in any way. Book collectors being what they are, that intriguing oddness probably is all it took to make the practise a satisfying addition for publishers. I’ve answered my own question.

 

The study of blue paper has become an active field of research over the past few decades, something Weiss anticipated in his article. In recent years there was a large symposium on the topic, coinciding with an exhibition at the Getty. But if the answer to my question lies in the sympoisum papers, I have not found it. One academic, Paolo Sachet, touches on the question in his paper ‘Exploiting Antiquarian Sale Catalogues: A Blueprint for the Study of Sixteenth-Century Books on Blue Paper,’ and provides what probably is the best answer we’ll have (which is included in the new chapbook), barring the discovery of some note from Aldus explaining why he decided to add a few blue sheets to the pile when he was printing Scriptores rei rusticae in 1514 (a plain, boring white paper copy shown below).

 

Printing a few ‘special’ copies on blue paper was clearly inspired by artists who had begun using it for drawings and prints, experimenting with the tonal effects that could be achieved. Using it for type quickly spread from Adlus to other printers in Venice, then across Italy & into France over the next century, and then to other European printing centers through the 19th century. But it seems to have largely died out during the 20th century; I’d have thought the fine press revival of the early 20th century would have been ripe for blue copies, but seems not. The use of special, or at least different, paper for a few copies persisted, but not blue so much. Corvinus Press issued a few copies of Lawrence of Arabia (1936) on blue paper, but also used three other papers for the edition, which makes the blue variant a little less notable.

 

Incline Press printed a small volume on blue paper in 2013, celebrating Boccaccio’s birth, but it seems the entire edition of 250 copies was printed on the same paper, so not just a few special ones.

Tragara Press printed a short essay (Autumn Thoughts) on blue paper in 1975, but again the entire edition of 90 copies, not just a few.  

 

Here are some links to a few interesting blue paper copies...

 

A forged blue copy Aldine! I’d have thought the easiest way to forge a blue copy would be to simply dye the sheets of a regular copy, but apparently this an actual printed forger. Seems a lot of effort. 

 

PrPh Books has issued one catalogue devoted to blue paper copies, and another catalogue with many examples included. Lots of great images. The book above is the first and only edition of the heroic poem that recounts the true events of a duke’s fall from his horse during a tournament, said duke being the author’s patron. Ripe for translation & reprinting. 

The first Italian edition of Euclid’s Elements, printed in Urbino, 1575. 

 

I found a reference stating the 1553 edition of Ludovico Dolce’s translation of Metapmorphosis is the earliest known fully illustrated book printed on blue paper, but I can’t find anything to back that claim up. Either way, lovely book. 

Two Essays on Slavery (Gehenna Press) includes an 8-page section at the end printed on blue paper. The text in this section is set in 8-pt type, which combined with the dark blue paper doesn’t make for easy reading. The book’s title page is dated 1970, but the blue section includes the colophon, which is dated 1975. 

 

Just to tie things off, I wasn’t the only person wondering about blue paper. Thea Burns has just published a much more thorough investigation, Blue Paper: The Overlooked History of a Drawing, Printing & writing Material 1400-1600. Probably a good thing I didn’t know about it until after printing my measly 12 pages. 

 

See you in September, by which time I should have news about another project moving through the press.