ect a guarantee--somewhat
crude, it is true--that this book is scarce and that it therefore is
costly and lends pecuniary distinction to its consumer.

The special attractiveness of these book-products to the book-buyer of
cultivated taste lies, of course, not in a conscious, naive recognition
of their costliness and superior clumsiness. Here, as in the parallel
case of the superiority of hand-wrought articles over machine products,
the conscious ground of preference is an intrinsic excellence imputed to
the costlier and more awkward article. The superior excellence imputed
to the book which imitates the products of antique and obsolete
processes is conceived to be chiefly a superior utility in the aesthetic
respect; but it is not unusual to find a well-bred book-lover insisting
that the clumsier product is also more serviceable as a vehicle of
printed speech. So far as regards the superior aesthetic value of the
decadent book, the chances are that the book-lover's contention has some
ground. The book is designed with an eye single to its beauty, and the
result is commonly some measure of success on the part of the designer.
What is insisted on here, however, is that the canon of taste under
which the designer works is a canon formed under the surveillance of
the law of conspicuous waste, and that this law acts selectively to
eliminate any canon of taste that does not conform to its demands. That
is to say, while the decadent book may be beautiful, the limits within
which the designer may work are fixed by requirements of a non-aesthetic
kind. The product, if it is beautiful, must also at the same time be
costly and ill adapted to its ostensible use. This mandatory canon of
taste in the case of the book-designer, however, is not shaped entirely
by the law of waste in its first form; the canon is to some extent
shaped in conformity to that secondary expression of the predatory
temperament, veneration for the archaic or obsolete, which in one of its
special developments is called classicism. In aesthetic theory it might
be extremely difficult, if not quite impracticable, to draw a line
between the canon of classicism, or regard for the archaic, and the
canon of beauty. For the aesthetic purpose such a distinction need
scarcely be drawn, and indeed it need not exist. For a theory of taste
the expression of an accepted ideal of archaism, on whatever basis it
may have been accepted, is perhaps best rated as an element of beau