But as I pointed out above, books are no longer the only kind of printing.
More and ever more important matter appears today in the form of maga
zines, newspapers, advertising, and so on. Here the above-mentioned
artist-designers, because of their one-sided outlook, could not perform. A
few of them did, indeed, try to introduce "reforms" in this field without suc
cess; and there are still a few artists of that generation who are seriously
talking about the reintroduction of the woodblock into newspapers! (That
this is a positively atavistic fallacy I need hardly say here. The book-artists
of th� pre-war period used to proclaim. and still do, that the halftone block
[from photographs] does not harmonize with the clear black-and-white of
type. Woodcuts, or at least line blocks, must take the place of halftones. In
practice this is impossible, because neither woodcuts nor line blocks offer
Title-page of an 18th-century
type specimen.
Brown type on printed tint.