al importance to us. A book with small print, or letters illegibly
grouped, or of unrecognizable shapes, becomes as impossible to us as if it
were printed in the Chinese character.

It is an unfortunate law of nature that injurious acts appear to us in
their true light only after the harm is done. The burnt child dreads the
fire after he has been burned--not before. So the fact that the
middle-aged man cannot read small, or crooked, or badly grouped type means
simply that the harmfulness of these things, which always existed for him,
has cumulated throughout a long tale of years until it has obtruded itself
upon him in the form of an inhibition. The books that are imperative for
the tired eyes of middle age, are equally necessary for those of
youth--did youth but know it. Curiously enough, we are accustomed to
begin, in teaching the young to read, with very legible type. When the
eyes grow stronger, we begin to maltreat them. So it is, also, with the
digestive organs, which we first coddle with pap, then treat awhile with
pork and cocktails, and then, perforce, entertain with pap of the second
and final period. What correspond, in the field of vision, to pork and
cocktails, are the vicious specimens of typography offered on all sides to
readers--in books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers--typography that
is slowly but surely ruining the eyesight of those that need it most.

Hitherto, the public librarian has been more concerned with the minds and
the morals of his clientele than with that physical organism without which
neither mind nor morals would be of much use. It would be easy to pick out
on the shelves of almost any public library books that are a physiological
scandal, printed in type that it is an outrage to place before any
self-respecting reader. I have seen copies of "Tom Jones" that I should be
willing to burn, as did a puritanical British library-board of newspaper
notoriety. My reasons, however, would be typographic, not moral, and I
might want to add a few copies of "The Pilgrim's Progress" and "The
Saint's Everlasting Rest," without prejudice to the authors' share in
those works, which I admire and respect. Perhaps it is too much to ask for
complete typographical expurgation of our libraries. But, at least,
readers with tired eyes who do not yet wear, or care to wear, corrective
lenses, should be able to find, somewhere on the shelves, a collection of
works in relatively harmless print--large and blac