"My Confidences." If ever there was a winsome
bit of writing it is this, and it should have made a book to take to
one's heart, something not larger than a "Golden Treasury" volume, but
of individual design. My comfort is that this will yet be done, and my
belief is that art will justify itself better in the market than
commercialism did. A more modern instance of expansion for commercial
reasons defeating fitness in design is furnished by Waters' translation
of "The Journal of Montaigne's Travels." Here we have three small
volumes outwardly attractive, but printed on paper thick enough for
catalogue cards, and therefore too stiff for the binding, also in type
too large to be pleasant. The whole should have been issued in one
volume of the same size in smaller type, and would then have been as
delightful in form as it is in substance.

It is not enough that all the elements of a book be honest, sincere,
enduring; otherwise the clumsy royal octavos of Leslie Stephen's edition
of Fielding would be as attractive as "the dear and dumpy twelves" of
the original editions. Royal octavo, indeed, seems to be the pitfall of
the book designer, though there is no inherent objection to it. Where in
the whole range of reference books will be found a more attractive set
of volumes than Moulton's "Library of Literary Criticism," with their
realization in this format of the Horatian _simplex munditiis_? For
extremely different treatments of this book size it is instructive to
compare the slender volumes of the original editions of Ruskin with the
slightly shorter but very much thicker volumes of the scholarly
definitive edition, which is a monument of excellence in every element
of book design except the crowning one of fitness. Our libraries must
have this edition for its completeness and its editorship; its material
excellence will insure the transmission of Ruskin's message to future
centuries; but no one will ever fall in love with these volumes or think
of likening them to the marriage of "perfect music unto noble words."

Granted that the designer knows the tools of his trade,--grasps the
expressional value of every element with which he has to deal, from the
cut of a type to the surface of a binder's cloth,--his task, as we said,
is first to know the soul of the book intrusted to him for embodiment;
it is next to decide upon its most characteristic quality, or the sum of
its qualities; and, lastly, it is so to use his physical el