d attention be paid to its general arrangement. All here present,
I should suppose, will agree in thinking an opening of Schoeffer's
1462 Bible beautiful, even when it has neither been illuminated nor
rubricated; the same may be said of Schussler, or Jenson, or, in short,
of any of the good old printers; their books, without any further
ornament than they derived from the design and arrangement of the
letters, were definite works of art. In fact a book, printed or written,
has a tendency to be a beautiful object, and that we of this age should
generally produce ugly books, shows, I fear, something like malice
prepense--a determination to put our eyes in our pockets wherever we
can.

Well, I lay it down, first, that a book quite unornamented can look
actually and positively beautiful, and not merely un-ugly, if it be, so
to say, architecturally good, which, by the by, need not add much to its
price, since it costs no more to pick up pretty stamps than ugly ones,
and the taste and forethought that goes to the proper setting, position,
and so on, will soon grow into a habit, if cultivated, and will not
take up much of the master printer's time when taken with his other
necessary business.

Now, then, let us see what this architectural arrangement claims of us.
First, the pages must be clear and easy to read; which they can hardly
be unless, Secondly, the type is well designed; and Thirdly, whether the
margins be small or big, they must be in due proportion to the page of
the letter.

For clearness of reading the things necessary to be heeded are, first,
that the letters should be properly put on their bodies, and, I think,
especially that there should be small whites between them; it is
curious, but to me certain, that the irregularity of some early type,
notably the roman letter of the early printers of Rome, which is, of all
roman type, the rudest, does not tend toward illegibility: what does so
is the lateral compression of the letter, which necessarily involves the
over thinning out of its shape. Of course I do not mean to say that the
above-mentioned irregularity is other than a fault to be corrected. One
thing should never be done in ideal printing, the spacing out of
letters--that is, putting an extra white between them; except in such
hurried and unimportant work as newspaper printing, it is inexcusable.

This leads to the second matter on this head, the lateral spacing of
words (the whites between them); to ma