age is producing its quota of good books, and these the
booklover makes it his business to discover.

In order to appreciate, the booklover must first know. He must be a
book-kenner, a critic, but one who is looking for excellencies rather
than faults, and this knowledge there are many books to teach him. But
there is no guide that can impart the love of books; he must learn to
love them as one learns to love sunsets, mountains, and the ocean, by
seeing them. So let him who would know the joys and rewards of the
booklover associate with well-made books. Let him begin with the
ancients of printing, the great Germans, Italians, Dutchmen. He can
still buy their books if he is well-to-do, or see them in libraries and
museums if he belongs to the majority. Working down to the moderns, he
will find himself discriminating and rejecting, but he will be attracted
by certain printers and certain periods in the last four hundred years,
and he will be rejoiced to find that the last thirty years, though
following a decline, hold their own--not by their mean but by their
best--with any former period short of the great first half-century,
1450-1500.

Finally, if his book-love develops the missionary spirit in him, let him
lend his support to the printers and publishers of to-day who are
producing books worthy of the booklover's regard, for in no other way
can he so effectually speed the day when all books shall justify the
emotion which more than five hundred years ago Richard de Bury, Bishop
of Durham, expressed in the title of his famous and still cherished
work, the _Philobiblon_.

FITNESS IN BOOK DESIGN

"A woman's fitness comes by fits," said slanderous Cloten; but to say as
much of fitness in book design would be on the whole a compliment.
Fitness as applied to book design means, of course, that the material
form of the book shall correspond to its spiritual substance, shall be
no finer and no meaner, and shall produce a like, even if a slighter,
esthetic impression. At the outset we have to surrender to commercialism
more than half our territory. All agree that our kings should be clothed
in purple and our commoners in broadcloth; but how about the
intellectual riffraff that makes up the majority of our books? Are our
publishers willing that these should be clothed according to their
station? Hardly; for then would much of their own occupation be gone. It
is recognized that for a large proportion of our publications