Inasmuch as if any book is going to exemplify the ideal that “printing should be invisible”, it would be a printing of “Printing should be invisible” by Beatrice L. Warde, so I found a copy of the 1937 printing by the Marchbanks Press just to see how invisible it really was. And, yes, also to have something close to an original of a well-known speech and article about typography, though possibly the 1955 version, produced by Warde herself, counts as more of an original even though it came out 25 years after the speech.
Since I was looking hard to find ways in which the printing wasn’t invisible, I first thought that the indenting of the page number wasn’t sufficiently ‘invisible’ enough to reach the ideal, but I now figure it was necessary if the page number was to be just underneath the body text so there’d be wide margins on the small page. As Warde said, “Are not the margins on book pages similarly meant to obviate the necessity of fingering the type-page?”
The cover is bound to the printed pamphlet using some binder’s thread, as you can see in the top image and which is a nice touch, but the pamphlet itself is kept together with a rather more prosaic staple, as you can see in the second image.
Its colophon: This essay, set in Monotype Fournier, designed by Edward Alonzo Miller and printed at The Marchbanks Press, New York