st you come to
know something of the various elements of the book, their possibilities
of beauty or ugliness, and their relations one to another. No one should
feel ashamed if this process takes a long time--is indeed endless.
William Morris pleaded to having sinned in the days of ignorance, even
after he had begun to make books. So wide is the field and so many and
subtle are the possible combinations that all who set out to know books
must expect, like the late John Richard Green, to "die learning." But
the learning is so delightful and the company into which it brings us is
so agreeable that we have no cause to regret our lifelong
apprenticeship.

The first of all the qualities of the book beautiful is fitness. It must
be adapted to the literature which it contains, otherwise it will
present a contradiction. Imagine a "Little Classic" Josephus or a folio
Keats. The literature must also be worthy of a beautiful setting, else
the book will involve an absurdity. Have we not all seen presentation
copies of government documents which gave us a shock when we passed from
the elegant outside to the commonplace inside? But the ideal book will
go beyond mere fitness; it will be both an interpretation of its
contents and an offering of homage to its worth. The beauty of the whole
involves perfect balance as well as beauty of the parts. No one must
take precedence of the rest, but there must be such a perfect harmony
that we shall think first of the total effect and only afterwards of the
separate elements that combine to produce it. This greatly extends our
problem, but also our delight in its happy solutions.

The discerning reader has probably noticed that we have already smuggled
into our introduction the notion that the book beautiful is a printed
book; and, broadly speaking, so it must be at the present time. But we
should not forget that, while the printed book has charms and laws of
its own, the book was originally written by hand and in this form was
developed to a higher pitch of beauty than the printed book has ever
attained. As Ruskin says, "A well-written book is as much pleasanter and
more beautiful than a printed book as a picture is than an engraving."
Calligraphy and illumination are to-day, if not lost arts, at best but
faint echoes of their former greatness. They represent a field of
artistic effort in which many persons of real ability might attain far
greater distinction and emolument than in the overcrowde