ll for a school of
typography, which shall teach a recognized grammar of book manufacture,
especially printing, a grammar as standard as Lindley Murray's. He
believes that the art of bookmaking cannot be held to the practice of
the laws of proportion, taste, and workmanship, which were settled once
for all in the age of the scribes and the first printers, without the
existence and pressure of some recognized authority. Such an authority,
he holds, would be furnished by a school of typography. This, as we
interpret it, would be not necessarily a school for journeymen, but a
school for those who are to assume the responsibility too often thrown
upon the journeymen, the masters of book production. With a large annual
output of books taken up by a public none too deeply versed in the
constituents of a well-made book, there would seem to be much hope for
printing as an art from the existence of such an institution, which
would be critical in the interest of sound construction, and one might
well wish that the course in printing recently established at Harvard
might at some time be associated with the name of its prophet of a
generation ago, Henry Stevens of Vermont.

BOOKS AS A LIBRARIAN WOULD LIKE THEM

The librarian is in a position more than any one else to know the
disabilities of books. The author is interested in his fame and his
emoluments, the publisher in his reputation and his profits. To each of
these parties the sales are the chief test. But the librarian's interest
in the book begins after the sale, and it continues through the entire
course of the book's natural life. His interest, moreover, is all-round;
he is concerned with the book's excellence in all respects,
intellectual, esthetic, and physical. He is the one who has to live with
it, literally to keep house with it; and his reputation is in a way
involved with its character. He may, therefore, be allowed for once to
have his say as to how he would like to have books made.

If a book is worth writing at all, it is worth writing three times:
first to put down the author's ideas, secondly to condense their
expression into the smallest possible compass, and thirdly so to arrange
them that they shall be most easily taken into the mind, putting them
not necessarily into logical order, but into psychological order. If the
author will do this and can add the touch of genius, or--shall we
say?--can suffuse his work with the quality of genius, then he has