11 - The morphology of the page

Summary

The shape of words on a page, like the shape of the letters of which they were composed, followed conventions adopted without alteration from those of manuscript books. These protocols, generally derived from earlier continental examples, had altered little in Britain throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Change in the sixteenth century was due not so much to insular taste as to the new French orthography, introduced by Huguenot émigrés. The seeds of another change in the layout and components of the printed page can be seen at the end of the seventeenth century, which may again be due to French influence and the release of more Huguenot printers. French taste was as fashionable in this as in other aspects of the decorative arts, in Holland as well as France. These phenomena may have provided the impulse that led others besides printers to re-examine accepted conventions for the printed page. Many factors contributed to this – social, political and economic – from the introduction of a tariff on imported paper to the improvement of communications, all of which led to a more conscious approach to the novel demands made for the layout of texts. The study of the changes thus induced constitutes the ‘morphology’ of the book, a phrase used by Henri-Jean Martin at a conference in 1977 to describe this process.