“I Seldom Read but as a Printer” – Samuel Richardson’s Manipulation of Paper and Ink and Type

Alicia Rasley
September 13, 2026

Intriguingly, the “Printer Richardson” exploited his tools of font, type, symbol, and punctuation to mimic the actual physical form of the letters, deepening the experience of the epistolary form. According to Ian Gadd of the Ambient Literature Project (which supplied these pictures of the text), Richardson claimed, “I seldom read but as a Printer.”

This is most impressive in the so-called “Mad Letters,” after Clarissa is raped by Lovelace and suffers a breakdown. Richardson used slanted and even upside-down text to replicate the madness she is experiencing, and italics, em-dashes, and run-on sentences to give a visual echo of her frenzied thoughts. He also played with physical representation of ripped, blotted, and deleted passages, using asterisks and blank brackets [ ] to signal that something is missing. The overall impression is that of a scrapbook or box of letters and notes rather than a neatly printed novel.

These still-innovative physical tactics increased the intensity of the reader experience of the epistolary form while emphasizing the intrinsic artificiality of the novel form—very pre-modern post-modern! With these experiments, readers didn’t just read the story, they experienced it in a visceral way, almost like “reading a performance.” Remember that Londoners would have had experience of performed drama — the actors, the music, the stage set– from Shakespeare up through Congreve and Garrick– and so could perhaps more fully “live in” the text with these textual cues such as the slanted text.

More Pre-modern Post-modern Printing

A decade after Clarissa, Laurence Sterne took typographical storytelling to new heights in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. In the book, a beloved character Parson Yorick dies (his last words are, predictably, “Alas, poor Yorick!” – this is, after all, a comedy).

When the readers turned the page, they were met with two completely black pages to signify the sorrowful event. With the printing methods of the time, this was quite difficult, and probably expensive, as the printers had to ink the entire type-blocks for those two pages. The pressure required to get a deep black impression left an indentation on the page, adding a tactile effect.

Sterne also experimented with marbled pages, blank chapters, and wavy narrative line graphs. He often posed these almost as critiques of the arbitrary nature of a book, divided into lines and pages and chapters. The marbled pages (originally hand dipped into ink by the printers) became a “motley emblem of my work.” The blank chapters (Chapters 18 and 19 of Volume III) signified an invitation for the reader to participate, mentally “filling in the empty spaces” with alternative scenes to the ones that take up in Chapter 20.

At one point, when “Tristam” is trying to describe a beautiful woman, he stops and leaves a blank space, suggesting that the reader sketch a portrait of her instead. “To suit your own fancy… write but one word of it upon the paper, and I’ll swear to the end of my life, there is not a man in world could have given such a description.”

These “pre-modern post-modern” techniques have been used in epistolary novels ever since, adding to both the seeming authenticity and also self-reference of the story, and above all, challenging the reader to join into the making of meaning.

These “pre-modern post-modern” techniques have been used in epistolary novels ever since, adding to both the seeming authenticity and also the self-reference of the story.

Shaping Poetry

Richardson wasn’t the first to make use of the “rectangles” of pages to frame unusual text forms. The poet George Herbert, a century earlier, had fashioned his poem “Easter Wings” in the shape of angel wings across two facing pages. He also used typography in another “shaped poetry” poem, “The Altar,” which used longer and shorter lines to represent an altar.

Much later, Lewis Carroll enlivened the already quite lively Alice in Wonderland with “The Mouse’s Tale,” shaped like—well, you guessed it.

In the mid-20^th-century, it seemed that no major poet cared about rhyme or meter or even line-endings (at least to me—thank God for Robert Frost, a master of them all). But some poets followed the examples of the pre-moderns to use the very existence of page and type to create more meaning.

I love ee cummings’s “A Leaf Falls on Loneliness,” which breaks up the words “leaf” and “loneliness” to indicate the sadness of the descent. Roger McGough’s “40-Love” uses the typographical representation of a tennis court to show the conflict between a middle-aged couple.