to the reader the
way the poet meant his line to be read. Milton curiously gave us some
metric hints by means of changes in spelling, but we have to read all
our other poets in the light of our own discernment, and it is not to be
wondered at if doctors disagree. Even the caesura, or pause in the
course of a long line, is not always easy to place. Francis Thompson, in
his poem "A Judgement in Heaven," has indicated this by an asterisk,
giving an example that might well be followed by other poets and their
printers. The regularity of eighteenth-century verse made little call
for guide-posts, but modern free meter, in proportion to its greater
flexibility and richness, demands more assistance to the reader's eye,
or even to his understanding. For instance, to read aloud hexameters or
other long lines, some of which have the initial accent on the first
syllable and some later, is quite impossible without previous study
supplemented by a marking of the page. Yet a few printed accents would
make a false start impossible. Poetry will never require the elaborate
aid from the printer which he gives to music; but it seems clear that he
has not yet done for it all that he might or should.

It is surely not an extreme assumption that the first duty of the
printer is to the meaning of his author, and his second to esthetics;
but shall we not rather say that his duty is to meet both demands, not
by a compromise, but by a complete satisfaction of each? A difficult
requirement, surely, but one that we are confident the twentieth-century
printer will not permit his critics to pronounce impossible.

FAVORITE BOOK SIZES

In the following paper some account will be given of five book sizes
that have taken rank as favorites. It should excite no surprise that all
are small sizes. Nature's favorites are always small; her insect jewels
outnumber her vertebrates a millionfold; and book-loving human nature
takes the same delight in daintiness.

There is, to be sure, a general impression that the first centuries of
printing were given up to folios, the eighteenth century to quartos and
octavos, and that only the present period has been characterized by
twelvemos and sixteenmos. We think of the Gutenberg Bible, the Nuremberg
Chronicle, the mighty editions of the Fathers, the polyglot Bibles of
Paris, London, and Antwerp,--fairly to be called limp teachers'
Bibles,--the 1611 Bible, the Shakespeare folios; then of the quarto
editions o