hen we
open the book, we shall see three columns of equal width. The type and
paper pages, being of the same shape, should as a rule be set on a
common diagonal from the inner upper corner to the outer lower corner.
This arrangement will give the same proportion between the top and
bottom margins as was assigned to the inner and outer. It is by
attention to this detail that one of the greatest charms in the design
of the book may be attained.

We saw that the shape of the book is a rectangle, and this would
naturally be so if there were no other reason for it than because the
smallest factor of the book, the type, is in the cross-section of its
body a rectangle. The printed page is really built up of tiny invisible
rectangles, which thus determine the shape of the paper page and of the
cover. A page may be beautiful from its paper, its proportions, its
color effects, even if it is not legible; but the book beautiful, really
to satisfy us, must neither strain the eye with too small type nor
offend it with fantastic departures from the normal. The size of the
type must not be out of proportion to that of the page or the column;
for two or more columns are not barred from the book beautiful. The
letters must be beautiful individually and beautiful in combination. It
has been remarked that while roman capitals are superb in combination,
black-letter capitals are incapable of team play, being, when grouped,
neither legible nor beautiful. There has been a recent movement in the
direction of legibility that has militated against beauty of type, and
that is the enlarging of the body of the ordinary lowercase letters at
the expense of its limbs, the ascenders and descenders, especially the
latter. The eye takes little account of descenders in reading, because
it runs along a line just below the tops of the ordinary letters, about
at the bar of the small e; nevertheless, to one who has learned to
appreciate beauty in type design there is something distressing in the
atrophied or distorted body of the g in so many modern types and the
stunted p's and q's--which the designer clearly did not mind! The
ascenders sometimes fare nearly as badly. Now types of this compressed
character really call for leading, or separation of the lines; and when
this has been done, the blank spaces thus created might better have been
occupied by the tops and bottoms of unleaded lines containing letters of
normal length and height. Too much leading, like