ffecting the beauty of the page. Not too many words may be divided
between lines; otherwise the line endings will bristle with hyphens. A
paragraph should not end at the bottom of a page nor begin too near it,
neither should a final page contain too little nor be completely full.
Minor parts of the book, the half-title, the dedication page, the table
of contents, the preface, the index, present so many opportunities to
make or mar the whole. Especially is this true of the title-page. This
the earliest books did not have, and many a modern printer, confronted
with a piece of refractory title copy, must have sighed for the good old
days of the colophon. Whole books have been written on the title-page;
it must suffice here to say that each represents a new problem, a
triumphant solution of which gives the booklover as much pleasure to
contemplate as any other single triumph of the volume.

But what of color--splendid initials in red, blue, or green, rubricated
headings, lines, or paragraphs? It is all a question of propriety,
literary and artistic. The same principle holds as in decoration of
binding. A beautiful black and white page is so beautiful that he who
would improve it by color must be sure of his touch. The beauty of the
result and never the beauty of the means by itself must be the test.

But books are not always composed of text alone. We need not consider
diagrams, which hardly concern the book beautiful, except to say that,
being composed of lines, they are often really more decorative than
illustrations fondly supposed to be artistic. The fact that an engraving
is beautiful is no proof that it will contribute beauty to a book; it
may only make an esthetic mess of the text and itself. As types are
composed of firm black lines, only fairly strong black-line engravings
have any artistic right in the book. This dictum, however, would rule
out so many pictures enjoyed by the reader that he may well plead for a
less sweeping ban; so, as a concession to weakness, we may allow
white-line engravings and half-tones if they are printed apart from the
text and separated from it, either by being placed at the end of the
book or by having a sheet of opaque paper dividing each from the text.
In this case the legend of the picture should face it so that the reader
will have no occasion to look beyond the two pages when he has them
before him. The printers of the sixteenth century, especially the Dutch,
did not hesitate to s