It is generally agreed that when an irresistible force meets an immovable body, the result is a stalemate; equally obviously, whichever power wanes first will suffer an immediate eclipse. From this we may proceed by a process of elimination. A publisher who knows what he wants employs a printer who is an artist, and the result should be a masterpiece of give and take. A publisher who does not know what he wants employs a printer who is an artist, and the result should be a piece of fine printing. A publisher who knows what he wants employs a printer who is not an artist, and the result will depend on the degree of taste of the publisher. A publisher who either does not know what he wants or does not care, and employs a printer who is not an artist, will both get and deserve a shambles. From these simple equations one constant factor emerges--the publisher; and this fact is not at all at variance with the traditional saw that he who pays the piper calls the tune.
There have been a number of eminent publisher-printer relationships in the past. I have mentioned the French of 1500-1550, where there seems already to be evidence of a publisher's taste exerting an influence. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries offer no examples which are worthy of study: the works undertaken by one printer on behalf of a syndicate of publishers produce no evidence of the book's appearance being dictated by any taste other than that of the printer himself.
The nineteenth century saw the publisher come into his own. One of the greatest publisher-printer partnerships in the history of British book-production is that of Pickering and Whittingham. It would be reasonable to suppose that Pickering was the moving force in this partnership, since the ideas are publishing ideas mainly exemplified by the Aldine poets and the Diamond classics, and their starting point is Pickering's choice of the anchor and dolphin with the motto grouped about it: _Aldi Discip. Anglus_. To the same taste of Pickering and his delight in the printing of Aldus and his contemporaries may be attributed the gracious and restrained use of sixteenth-century fleurons which in the eighteen-thirties are not readily to be found elsewhere, and the curiously appropriate renaissance borders occasionally introduced. Another partnership in which I suspect that the publisher had a considerable say was that of Edward Moxon and Bradbury & Evans. In 1850 Moxon issued the first edition of two most important works, Wordsworth's _Prelude_ and Tennyson's _In Memoriam_; both were printed by the same printer. But eight years later we may point to John Murray's edition of Coleridge's _Table Talk_; this, too, was printed by Bradbury & Evans with more than a glance over the shoulder at Pickering's publications, but without the guiding hand of Moxon. It is an interesting book, for it just fails before every problem which the text sets. Pickering would have set the solid prose at least a point smaller and increased the margins; in the same way he would have managed to get more space between each specimen of _Table Talk_. Instead of a page of grace and readability, there is in consequence a slightly crowded air and the eye skips disconcertingly from line to line.