, the
world will come to you; which aphorism the old man backs up with another,
probably derived from experience, to the effect that a man is a fool to
chase after women, because, if he doesn't, the women will chase after
him.

The wisdom of this hard-headed old son of the soil--who abandoned
agriculture for art at seventy--is exemplified in the fact that during
the year just past, over twenty-eight thousand pilgrims have visited the
Roycroft Shop--representing every State and Territory of the Union and
every civilized country on the globe, even far-off Iceland, New Zealand
and the Isle of Guam.

Three hundred ten people are on the payroll at the present writing. The
principal work is printing, illuminating and binding books. We also have
a furniture shop, where Mission furniture of the highest grade is made; a
modeled-leather shop, where the most wonderful creations in calfskin are
to be seen; and a smithy, where copper utensils of great beauty are
hammered out by hand.

Quite as important as the printing and binding is the illuminating of
initials and title-pages. This is a revival of a lost art, gone with so
much of the artistic work done by the monks of the olden time. Yet there
is a demand for such work; and so far as I know, we are the first
concern in America to take up the hand-illumination of books as a
business. Of course we have had to train our helpers, and from very crude
attempts at decoration we have attained to a point where the British
Museum and the "Bibliotheke" at The Hague have deigned to order and pay
good golden guineas for specimens of our handicraft. Very naturally we
want to do the best work possible, and so self-interest prompts us to be
on the lookout for budding genius. The Roycroft is a quest for talent.

There is a market for the best, and the surest way, we think, to get away
from competition is to do your work a little better than the other
fellow. The old tendency to make things cheaper, instead of better, in
the book line is a fallacy, as shown in the fact that within ten years
there have been a dozen failures of big publishing-houses in the United
States. The liabilities of these bankrupt concerns footed the fine total
of fourteen million dollars. The man who made more books and cheaper
books than any one concern ever made, had the felicity to fail very
shortly, with liabilities of something over a million dollars. He overdid
the thing in matter of cheapness--mistook his market. O