Printing ideals

Lawrence had long professed an interest in the art of printing. Nostalgia for the romance of the Middle Ages and the aesthetic ideals of William Morris had been an early and continuing influence on him, with Morris's Kelmscott Press having largely provided the inspiration for his ideas on typography and book production, [see Appendix - William Morris], as it had done for so many, including the printers of the Pilgrims Progress from which Lawrence chose his typeface. That book contained a note, following the text, that the Essex House Press had been founded 'in the hope to keep living the traditions of good printing that William Morris had revived.'

Together with Vyvyan Richards, Lawrence had for many years nurtured vague and fanciful plans to carry out hand-press printing 'in some remote and spacious medieval hall' (1) in the manner of a William Morris, creating beautiful and sumptuously ornamented books. His own collection of finely bound hand-press books, ranging from the Kelmscott Chaucer to work by the Ashendene Press, gave him great pleasure, and even towards the end of his life he contemplated building a hand-press, going so far as to gather together materials at Clouds Hill, with the help of neighbour Pat Knowles, to build a printing shed, where The Mint, his journal of RAF life, would perhaps be the first production.

Lawrence found himself bound to agree with Bernard Shaw 'that hand-setting is to-day no more than an affectation. You can do beautiful work by hand, every bit as good as mono, and nearly as good as lino: but the cost of it falls on flesh and blood. It ranks with boy chimney-sweeps.' (2) Vyvyan Richards records Lawrence's comment that 'A man never amounts to anything in this world unless he be an artist' (3), a goal he continually sought to achieve with his realisation of SP, both in its writing and production, but to Graves he wrote 'I can salve the regret of not being an artist by watching artists work, and providing them with a model.' (4)

And so it was against this background, and with his veneration of craftsmanship as exemplified by William Morris, that Lawrence had supervised every stage of production of his own book from the very beginning, everything from the choice of paper and typeface, to decorations, the width of margins and the number of lines on a page. As the final printing began, Lawrence made numerous motorbike trips from Cranwell to check on progress, sometimes staying in London overnight, when he would sleep on a make-shift bed on the hot water pipes in the basement of the print shop.

1	Friends, p 387
2	L 363, G B Shaw, 19.7.28
3	T E Lawrence, Vyvyan Richards, Duckworth, 1939, p 120
4	Biog G, p 76

Next section - Skill of printers

The writing of Seven Pillars of Wisdom - full listing