he tendency of this teaching in its
effect on consumption and on the production of consumable goods.

The manner in which the bias of this growth of taste has worked itself
out in production is perhaps most cogently exemplified in the book
manufacture with which Morris busied himself during the later years of
his life; but what holds true of the work of the Kelmscott Press in an
eminent degree, holds true with but slightly abated force when applied
to latter-day artistic book-making generally--as to type, paper,
illustration, binding materials, and binder's work. The claims to
excellence put forward by the later products of the bookmaker's industry
rest in some measure on the degree of its approximation to the crudities
of the time when the work of book-making was a doubtful struggle with
refractory materials carried on by means of insufficient appliances.
These products, since they require hand labor, are more expensive; they
are also less convenient for use than the books turned out with a view
to serviceability alone; they therefore argue ability on the part of
the purchaser to consume freely, as well as ability to waste time and
effort. It is on this basis that the printers of today are returning to
"old-style," and other more or less obsolete styles of type which are
less legible and give a cruder appearance to the page than the "modern."
Even a scientific periodical, with ostensibly no purpose but the most
effective presentation of matter with which its science is concerned,
will concede so much to the demands of this pecuniary beauty as to
publish its scientific discussions in oldstyle type, on laid paper, and
with uncut edges. But books which are not ostensibly concerned with the
effective presentation of their contents alone, of course go farther
in this direction. Here we have a somewhat cruder type, printed on
hand-laid, deckel-edged paper, with excessive margins and uncut leaves,
with bindings of a painstaking crudeness and elaborate ineptitude. The
Kelmscott Press reduced the matter to an absurdity--as seen from the
point of view of brute serviceability alone--by issuing books for modern
use, edited with the obsolete spelling, printed in black-letter, and
bound in limp vellum fitted with thongs. As a further characteristic
feature which fixes the economic place of artistic book-making, there
is the fact that these more elegant books are, at their best, printed in
limited editions. A limited edition is in eff