within the reach of any student
who chose to study, meditate, and interpret them for himself. And to
Aldus belongs the credit of having, through his new type and size,
opened the way to the democratization of learning."

That the taste which Aldus so successfully hit was no merely temporary
one, any person will be convinced if he will stand before a shelf full
of these little Aldus classics, handle the light, well-proportioned
volumes, and take in the esthetic charm of their type and page and form,
which, in spite of their four hundred years, by no means savors of
antiquity. In these books Aldus achieved one of the greatest triumphs
possible in any art, a union of beauty and utility, each on so high a
plane that no one is able to decide which is pre-eminent. In a copy
which I have before me of his "Rhetoricorum ad C. Herennium Libri IIII,"
1546, the fine proportions of the page appear in spite of trimming. Very
noticeable are the undersized roman capitals; more curious is the letter
printed in the otherwise blank square to indicate what initial the
illuminator should insert in color, and the irregular use of capitals
and small letters after a period. The catchword appears only on the last
page of the signature, not on every page, as was the later practice.
Modern usage wisely consigns italic to a subordinate place, but in point
of beauty combined with convenience, it may well be questioned if four
centuries of printing have made any advance upon this page.

In nearly every library for scholars is to be found a row of plump
little books that never fail to catch the eye of the sightseer. If the
visitor does not know beforehand what they are, he is little enlightened
on being told that they are "Elzevirs," and the attendant must needs
supply the information that the Elzevirs were a family of Dutch printers
who flourished during the century that closed with the arrival of
William III in England, and that these tiny volumes represent their most
popular productions. Says George Haven Putnam in his "Books and their
Makers during the Middle Ages": "The Elzevirs, following the example set
a century and a half earlier by Aldus, but since that time very
generally lost sight of by the later publishers, initiated a number of
series of books in small and convenient forms, twelvemo and sixteenmo,
which were offered to book buyers at prices considerably lower than
those they had been in the habit of paying for similar material printed