the book as it ought to be, will be both better
and cheaper than the book of to-day. It can afford to be cheaper, for it
will have a large and appreciative public, and for the same reason it
will have to be better. The question of supreme importance now, if this
public is ever to exist, is: How to educate our book buyers. The answer
is not easy, for our book buyers do not realize that they are untrained,
and, even if they realized it, the task of training them in the
knowledge and love of the well-made book would be difficult. But we can
do at least three things: agitate--proclaim the existence of a lore to
be acquired, an ignorance and its practices to be eschewed;
illustrate--show the good book and the bad together, and set forth,
point by point, why the good is superior; last and most important, we
must vindicate--back up our words by our deeds, support the publisher
who gives the world good books, and leave to starvation or reform the
publisher who clings to the old unworthy methods of incapacity or fraud.
Even now, if every enlightened booklover in America would carry out this
plan as a matter of duty merely where he could do so without
inconvenience, nothing less than a revolution would be upon us, and we
should have the Book of To-morrow while it is still To-day.

A CONSTRUCTIVE CRITIC OF THE BOOK

At the meeting of the British librarians at Cambridge in 1882 a bomb was
thrown into the camp of the book producers in the form of the question:
Who spoils our new English books? In the explosion which followed,
everybody within range was hit, from "the uncritical consumer" to "the
untrained manufacturer." This dangerous question was asked and answered
by Henry Stevens of Vermont, who, as a London bookseller, had for nearly
forty years handled the products of the press new and old, had numbered
among his patrons such critical booklovers as John Carter Brown and
James Lenox, and had been honored with the personal friendship of
William Pickering the publisher and Charles Whittingham the printer. He
had therefore enjoyed abundant opportunity for qualifying himself to
know whereof he spoke. If his words were severe, he stood ready to
justify them with an exhibit of sixty contemporary books which he set
before his hearers.[2]

The truth is, however unwilling his victims may have been to admit it,
that his attack was only too well timed. The men of creative power, who
had ennobled English book production during the