0.1 Afterword  (Page 18/25)

Perhaps most important, the title-page to The Sphinx is the first of many pages to be printed in three colors, and it must have been especially breathtaking to the poem’sfirst readers on this account. The Victorian period contains few precedents for the manner in which Ricketts has used color, both on the title page andthroughout The Sphinx , to integrate strictly visual material and letterpress text. For instance, the rust-coloredink utilized first for the title page “Melancholia” design is used again repeatedly, throughout the book, for the title words (“The Sphinx”) of thebook’s running header. Similarly, green ink is utilized throughout to achieve a series of visual “rhymes” between illuminated capital letters and catchwords, onthe one hand, and the bibliographic data listed on the title page. Though green ink has admittedly been confined to strictly “textual” materials in each case,the effect of Ricketts’s use of it is to highlight such materials as visual and material phenomena, thereby integrating them with other colored and visualelements of the book.

This integration of text and vision through color is all the more remarkable when we consider that fine color printing was still agreat luxury in the 1890s, especially where letterpress printing was involved. Chromolithography, a planographic technique for the printing of color perfectedin the early Victorian period, had been utilized previously with great success in such works as Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament (1856) or Henry Noel Humphreys’s The Art of Illumination (1849), but it required colors to be printed—at great expense of time and money—on a separate “plate”from the text, often on a different paper. Already on the wane by the 1870s, chromolithography was best suited to works of abstract and geometric design, butit was ill suited to letterpress printing and to book illustration (insofar as book illustration requires representational forms), where a more thoroughgoingintegration of text and design was required (see Frankel, “Ecstasy of Decoration” and “The Designer’s Eye”). Wood engraving held more promise so faras literary publishers and printers were concerned: a number of printers had perfected the art of printing from wood engravings in the 1860s, 1870s and1880s, producing color-illustrated books (McLean, 171-204) that are still notable both for the excellence of their printing and for the marriage ofletterpress text with wood-engraved illustration. But such successes were usually confined to the children’s and gift book markets or to specializedworks, such as works of ornithology and botany. Rarely had relief printing in color been applied to works of poetry and adult literature; and rarely had thetext itself been saturated with color. ^{There are two exceptions to this rule—firstly, the occasional printing of illuminatedcapitals and chapter headings in red ink, especially in religious and bibliophile productions. See also n. 25 below. The second exception is constituted by many of the books produced for children by Walter Crane, such as Baby’s Own Aesop (1886) and Flora’s Feast (1889), where the text itself is printed in color by the process of wood-engraving rather than letterpressprinting. Wilde wrote a review of Flora’s Feast upon its appearance in 1889, calling it “as lovely in colour as it is exquisite in design” (“Some Literary Notes I,” 390). As stated above,Crane provided an important model for Wilde’s own ideas about design.} Even in the hands of master printers such as George Leighton and Edmund Evans (the latter of whom printed books by Kate Greenaway and WalterCrane, as well as illustrations by Randolph Caldecott), color was almost always confined to “illustration” as an accompaniment to the monochrome letterpresstext. With the exception of Ricketts’s friend Lucien Pissarro (whose Eragny Press from 1895 onwards would earn a reputation for finely-printed color woodengravings as accompaniments to works of literature), no fine printers or private presses associated with the so-called revival of printing had hithertoexperimented with printing in multiple colors, let alone with using color to integrate text and vision. ^{The best surveys of the so-called revival of printing are Colin Franklin, The Private Presses (2 nd ed. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1991); Roderick Cave, The Private Press (2 nd ed. New York: Bowker, 1983) and Will Ransom, Private Presses and Their Books (1929; rpt. New York, AMS Press, 1976). See also Ricketts’s A Defence and Holbook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the NineteenthCentury (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914), 309-23. William Morris had been persuaded before 1894 to introduce color into Kelmscott Press books inthe form of chapter titles and catchwords printed in red (a practice later to be imitated by many other private printers, including Ricketts). But Morrisutilized red ink only sparingly and was averse to the introduction of any other colors.} As Ricketts rightly observed in 1899, The Sphinx “is the first book of the modern revival printed in three colours” ( A Defence , 25), and its printing must have been especially eye-opening to its earliest readerson this account.