ke a beautiful page great
attention should be paid to this, which, I fear, is not often done. No
more white should be used between the words than just clearly cuts them
off from one another; if the whites are bigger than this it both tends
to illegibility and makes the page ugly. I remember once buying a
handsome fifteenth-century Venetian book, and I could not tell at first
why some of its pages were so worrying to read, and so commonplace and
vulgar to look at, for there was no fault to find with the type. But
presently it was accounted for by the spacing: for the said pages were
spaced like a modern book, i. e., the black and white nearly equal.
Next, if you want a legible book, the white should be clear and the
black black. When that excellent journal, the Westminster Gazette,
first came out, there was a discussion on the advantages of its green
paper, in which a good deal of nonsense was talked. My friend, Mr.
Jacobi, being a practical printer, set these wise men right, if they
noticed his letter, as I fear they did not, by pointing out that what
they had done was to lower the tone (not the moral tone) of the paper,
and that, therefore, in order to make it as legible as ordinary black
and white, they should make their black blacker--which of course they do
not do. You may depend upon it that a gray page is very trying to the
eyes.

As above said, legibility depends also much on the design of the letter:
and again I take up the cudgels against compressed type, and that
especially in roman letter: the full-sized lower-case letters "a," "b,"
"d," and "c," should be designed on something like a square to get good
results: otherwise one may fairly say that there is no room for the
design; furthermore, each letter should have its due characteristic
drawing, the thickening out for a "b," "e," "g," should not be of the
same kind as that for a "d"; a "u" should not merely be an "n" turned
upside down; the dot of the "i" should not be a circle drawn with
compasses; but a delicately drawn diamond, and so on. To be short, the
letters should be designed by an artist, and not an engineer. As to the
forms of letters in England (I mean Great Britain), there has been much
progress within the last forty years. The sweltering hideousness of the
Bodoni letter, the most illegible type that was ever cut, with its
preposterous thicks and thins, has been mostly relegated to works that
do not profess anything but the baldest utilitarianism