is much more than
three-quarters of the height, the page offends by looking too square. In
the so-called "printer's oblong," formed by taking twice the width for
the diagonal, the width is just under fifty-eight per cent of the
height, and this is the limit of stately slenderness in a volume. As we
go much over sixty per cent, the book loses in grace until we approach
seventy-five per cent, when a new quality appears, which characterizes
the quarto, not so much beauty, perhaps, except in small sizes, as a
certain attractiveness, like that of a freight boat, which sets off the
finer lines of its more elegant associates. A really square book would
be a triumph of ugliness. Oblong books also rule themselves out of our
category. A book has still a third element in its proportions,
thickness. A very thin book may be beautiful, but a book so thick as to
be chunky or squat is as lacking in elegance as the words we apply to
it. To err on the side of thickness is easy; to err on the side of
thinness is hard, since even a broadside may be a thing of beauty.

We now come to the type-page, of which the paper is only the carrier and
framework. This should have, as nearly as possible, the proportion of
the paper--really it is the type that should control the paper--and the
two should obviously belong together. The margins need not be extremely
large for beauty; an amount of surface equal to that occupied by the
type is ample. There was once a craze for broad margins and even for
"large-paper" copies, in which the type was lost in an expanse of
margin; but book designers have come to realize that the proportion of
white to black on a page can as easily be too great as too small. Far
more important to the beauty of a page than the extent of the margin are
its proportions. The eye demands that the upper margin of a printed page
or a framed engraving shall be narrower than the lower, but here the
kinship of page to picture ceases. The picture is seen alone, but the
printed page is one of a pair and makes with its mate a double diagram.
This consists of two panels of black set between two outer columns of
white and separated by a column of white. Now if the outer and inner
margins of a page are equal, the inner column of the complete figure
will be twice as wide as the outer. The inner margin of the page should
therefore be half (or, to allow for the sewing and the curve of the
leaf, a little more than half) the width of the outer. Then, w