s too often happens in the case of Bibles and
books of devotion, upon letter-press which is respectable journeyman's
work and nothing more. The men of the Renascence had a truer sense
of adaptation; the age of jewelled bindings was also the age of
illumination and of the beautiful miniatura, which at an earlier
stage meant side or margin art,[3] and then, on account of the small
portraitures included in it, gradually slid into the modern sense of
miniature. There is a caution which we ought to carry with us more and
more as we get in view of the coming period of open book trade, and of
demand practically boundless. Noble works ought not to be printed
in mean and worthless forms, and cheapness ought to be limited by an
instinctive sense and law of fitness. The binding of a book is the dress
with which it walks out into the world. The paper, type and ink are the
body, in which its soul is domiciled. And these three, soul, body, and
habilament, are a triad which ought to be adjusted to one another by the
laws of harmony and good sense.

Already the increase of books is passing into geometrical progression.
And this is not a little remarkable when we bear in mind that in Great
Britain, of which I speak, while there is a vast supply of cheap works,
what are termed "new publications" issue from the press, for the most
part, at prices fabulously high, so that the class of real purchasers
has been extirpated, leaving behind as buyers only a few individuals who
might almost be counted on the fingers, while the effective circulation
depends upon middle-men through the engine of circulating libraries.
These are not so much owners as distributers of books, and they mitigate
the difficulty of dearness by subdividing the cost, and then selling
such copies as are still in decent condition at a large reduction. It
is this state of things, due, in my opinion, principally to the present
form of the law of copyright, which perhaps may have helped to make
way for the satirical (and sometimes untrue) remark that in times of
distress or pressure men make their first economies on their charities,
and their second on their books.

The annual arrivals at the Bodleian Library are, I believe, some twenty
thousand; at the British Museum, forty thousand, sheets of all kinds
included. Supposing three-fourths of these to be volumes, of one size
or another, and to require on the average an inch of shelf space, the
result will be that in every two yea