the
design--the outward appearance--is in great measure counted on to sell
the book; and printers and publishers will not consent to send the
paupers of literature forth upon the world in their native rags, for so
they would find no one to welcome them. It will be useless to quarrel
with the fact that the design of many books is meant as a bait and not
as a simple interpretation of their meaning and worth. Design of this
character, however, is relatively easy; it is really not design at all,
but millinery. It is when his work becomes genuinely interpretative that
the designer's difficulties begin.

The first business of the designer, therefore, is to understand the book
he is treating. Here, of course, his judgment, however sincere, may be
mistaken or misled. A classical instance of this is found in connection
with one of the most famous books in the history of modern
printing,--Barlow's "Columbiad." This work, which first appeared in 1787
under a different title, was enlarged to epic proportions during the
next twenty years, and was finally given to the world in 1807 in the
belief on the part of its author and in the hope at least on the part of
its publisher that it would take rank and be honored for all time as the
great American epic. Under this misconception the book was clothed in a
form that might worthily have enshrined "Paradise Lost." Its stately
quarto pages were set in a type specially designed for the work and
taking from it the name of Columbian. The volume was embellished with
full-page engravings after paintings in the heroic manner by Smirke; in
short, it was the most pretentious book issued in America up to that
time, and it still ranks, in the words of Professor Barrett Wendell,
"among the most impressive books to look at in the world." But alas for
the vanity of human aspirations! "The Columbiad" is now remembered as a
contribution to typography rather than literature. The designer overshot
his author.

We have tacitly assumed that a book has but one interpretation and
therefore but one most appropriate design. This, however, is far from
the truth. When, after various more or less successful editions of
Irving's "Knickerbocker" had appeared, Mr. Updike brought out some
twenty years ago his comic edition, with the whole make-up of the book
expressive of the clumsy and stupid Dutchmen depicted in Irving's
mock-heroic, we felt at the moment that here was the one ideal
"Knickerbocker." Yet, much as we