“THE gulf which exists now between modern ‘fine’ printing and run-of-the-mill book production is not simply one of quality, but of completely different methods,” writes Sebastian Carter in Type & Typography, an anthology of essays from the journal Matrix.

Most book production now is by digital typesetting and lithographic printing, whereas private presses like to set text either by hand or using hot-metal typesetting, so that the paper is physically impressed by actual metal type.

Unfortunately, good printing has almost entirely disappeared down the gulf that Carter identifies. Most of today’s private presses are so preoccupied with their method that they neglect the content. Many of the books they print are absurdly whimsical and self-regarding. However good the engravings, I do not wish to spend £300 to read the emails exchanged by an artist and a printer. Such books are no more than showpieces for the craft.

Even when the text is worthwhile, the pleasure to be had from beautiful books is often annulled by woeful editorial standards. The transcendent complacency of John Randle of the Whittington Press, for instance, would be a little more sufferable if in the four pages of his piece about himself in Type & Typography he did not misspell “hieroglyphics”, use “may” for “might”, and write of a “death knoll” (for whom the bell knolls?)

On the other side of the gulf, automation and automatism have caused a sad decline in the look of printed pages. The grossest absurdities of computer hyphenation have often been remarked — “anal-ysis”, for instance — but more insidious and more common is the two-letter turn (“punch-es”, Type & Typography, p.78), which could so easily be prevented by writing a few lines of code. On the other hand, in order to prevent groups of initials breaking across lines (“S. C. Roberts”, Type & Typography, p.122), a new protocol has been imposed. Editors are now told that initials should be separated by a fixed thin space, ignoring the spacing of the line. S. C. Roberts. Wrong. Ugly. The three initials, ignoring the stops, ought to spaced equally, so that the eye immediately apprehends A. E. H. or W. H. A., and the spacing should be the same as that of the line.

Ellipses also should be spaced as the line . . . and not bunched tight... as so frequently today. But with computer setting there is the danger that one of the stops will be left stranded on one line while the others turn to the next (Type & Typography, p.150), so in many offices the style is now to hold them together with thin spaces. Wrong again.

Unfortunately, editors are no longer trusted to exercise judgment and resolve problems as they arise. Instead they are bidden to follow rules. In one Times column, for instance, each new item is to begin with three capitalised words. So a recent paragraph absurdly began “STEVE THE CHIMNEY sweep . . .” — as though the man were brick-built. This is almost as daft as the sub-editor who was so determined to follow the house rule that we don’t refer to “ the Old Bailey” that he had Dick Turpin appearing at the Central Criminal Court.

Another manifestation of automatic text spacing puzzles me. Until the 1950s or 60s many printers allowed a slight extra space at the end of a sentence — a guide to the eye and a pause for breath. Then the space after a full-stop was reduced to simple word-spacing. And now in some books it has been compressed to less than ordinary word-spacing.It looks like a run-together. Why?

Trivial though these things seem, they matter because they make reading harder. When the eye is distracted because the design is fighting the sense, concentration suffers.

My friend Rowley Atterbury, who used to run the Westerham Press, points out that most of the really good printing of the 20th century was done not by “fine” presses, but by good ones, ordinary commercial printers with high standards. Look, for instance, at H. E. Bates’s Through the Woods (1936) and you will see not only delicate impressions of Agnes Miller Parker’s exquisite engravings, but a rich, velvety black text superbly set around them, with sensitive word-breaks and elegant spacing that gives the pages an even “colour” and makes them a joy to read. The printers at Camelot Press were evidently real craftsmen.

Of course, printing is just one instance of this degradation. Unfortunately, people become accustomed to every kind of substitution, falsity and ugliness. They soon think plastic forks and knives are normal. With our pseudo-information, our boil-in-the-bags and our Musak, we live in a virtual, silicone-enhanced, pre-fab, ersatz world. Every kind of professionalism has been sacrificed to shortcuts and fakery. We have lost the satisfaction of the job done right.

The British Library is giving a new meaning to the expression “private view” by inviting book-lovers to a singles evening in its John Ritblat gallery on Thursday. The 14th-century Luttrell Psalter, the Beowulf manuscript and one of Leonardo’s notebooks are among the treasures on display, for anyone who has time to glance at the glass cases. Free tickets for the event, which starts at 6.30, are available by calling 020-7412 7110 or by emailing mingle@bl.uk

There are 65 pages of notes, by both the poet and the editor, in the handsome new edition of The Poems of Marianne Moore edited by Grace Schulman (Faber, £30). But how are they to be used without a single page reference to the poems?