The Booklover and His Books | Page 2

has taken toll of
them, and in the hands of its worthiest makers these elements have
worked themselves out into its material body. Enshrining the artist's
thought, it has, therefore, the qualities of a true art product, and stands
second only to those which express it, such as painting and sculpture;
but no other art product of its own order, not the violin nor the
jewel-casket, can compare with the book in esthetic quality. It meets
one of the highest tests of art, for it can appeal to the senses of both
beauty and grandeur, either separately, as in the work of Aldus and of
Sweynheym and Pannartz, or together, as in that of Jenson.
Books have doubtless had their lovers in all ages, under all their forms.
Even the Assyrian clay tablet, if stamped with the words of poet or sage,
might have shared the affection which they inspired. So might the
papyrus roll of the Egyptian, and so does even to-day the parchment

book of the middle ages, whenever its fortunate owner has the soul of a
booklover. From this book our own was derived, yet not without a
break. For our book is not so much a copy of the Roman and medieval
book as a "substitute" for it, a machine product made originally to sell
at a large profit for the price of hand-work. It was fortunate for the
early printed book that it stood in this intimate if not honored relation
to the work of the scribes and illuminators, and fortunate for the book
of to-day, since, with all its lapses, it cannot escape its heritage of those
high standards.
Mr. John Cotton Dana has analyzed the book into forty elements; a
minuter analysis might increase the number to sixty; but of either
number the most are subsidiary, a few controlling. The latter are those
of which each, if decided upon first, determines the character of the rest;
they include size, paper, and type. The mention of any size, folio,
quarto, octavo, twelvemo, sixteenmo, calls up at once a distinct mental
picture of an ideal book for each dimension, and the series is marked by
a decreasing thickness of paper and size of type as it progresses
downward from the folio. The proportions of the page will also vary, as
well as the surface of the paper and the cut of the type, the other
elements conforming to that first chosen.
Next to size, paper determines the expression of a book. It is the
printing material par excellence; but for its production the art could
never have flourished. It is as much preferred by the printer as
parchment was by the scribe. Its three elements of body, surface, and
tint must all be considered, and either body or surface may determine
the size of the book or the character of the type. A smooth surface may
be an element of beauty, as with the paper employed by Baskerville,
but it must not be a shiny surface. The great desideratum in modern
paper from the point of view of the book-buyer is a paper that, while
opaque and tough, shall be thin enough to give us our books in small
compass, one more akin to the dainty and precious vellum than to the
heavier and coarser parchment. It should also be durable.
Type gives its name to the art and is the instrument by which the
spoken word is made visible to the eye. The aims in its design should

be legibility, beauty, and compactness, in this order; but these are more
or less conflicting qualities, and it is doubtful if any one design can
surpass in all. Modern type is cleaner-cut than the old, but it may be
questioned whether this is a real gain. William Morris held that all
types should avoid hair-lines, fussiness, and ugliness. Legibility should
have the right of way for most printed matter, especially children's
books and newspapers. If the latter desire compactness, they should
condense their style, not their types.
A further important element, which affects both the legibility and the
durability of the book, is the ink. For most purposes it should be a rich
black. Some of the print of the early masters is now brown, and there
have been fashions of gray printing, but the booklover demands black
ink, except in ornaments, and there color, if it is to win his favor, must
be used sparingly and with great skill. We are told that the best
combination for the eye is ink of a bluish tint on buff-tinted paper; but,
like much other good advice, this remains practically untried.
Illustrations have been a feature of the book for over four hundred
years, but they have hardly yet become naturalized within its pages. Or
shall we say that they