The Booklover and His Books | Page 7

and his public, and this he has been able to
do by mere indention and leading, without resorting to distinction of
type. The reader of a sonnet or ballad printed without these two aids to
the eye is robbed of his rightful clues to the construction of the verse. It
seems hardly possible that a poem could have been read aloud from an
ancient manuscript, at sight, with proper inflection; yet this is just what
printing can make possible for the modern reader. It has not usually
done so, for the printer has been very conservative; he has taken his
conception of a page from prose, and, not being compelled to, has not
placed all the resources of his art at the service of the poet. Accents,
pauses, and certain arbitrary signs might well be employed to indicate
to the reader the way the poet meant his line to be read. Milton
curiously gave us some metric hints by means of changes in spelling,
but we have to read all our other poets in the light of our own
discernment, and it is not to be wondered at if doctors disagree. Even
the caesura, or pause in the course of a long line, is not always easy to
place. Francis Thompson, in his poem "A Judgement in Heaven," has
indicated this by an asterisk, giving an example that might well be
followed by other poets and their printers. The regularity of

eighteenth-century verse made little call for guide-posts, but modern
free meter, in proportion to its greater flexibility and richness, demands
more assistance to the reader's eye, or even to his understanding. For
instance, to read aloud hexameters or other long lines, some of which
have the initial accent on the first syllable and some later, is quite
impossible without previous study supplemented by a marking of the
page. Yet a few printed accents would make a false start impossible.
Poetry will never require the elaborate aid from the printer which he
gives to music; but it seems clear that he has not yet done for it all that
he might or should.
It is surely not an extreme assumption that the first duty of the printer is
to the meaning of his author, and his second to esthetics; but shall we
not rather say that his duty is to meet both demands, not by a
compromise, but by a complete satisfaction of each? A difficult
requirement, surely, but one that we are confident the twentieth-century
printer will not permit his critics to pronounce impossible.

FAVORITE BOOK SIZES
In the following paper some account will be given of five book sizes
that have taken rank as favorites. It should excite no surprise that all are
small sizes. Nature's favorites are always small; her insect jewels
outnumber her vertebrates a millionfold; and book-loving human nature
takes the same delight in daintiness.
There is, to be sure, a general impression that the first centuries of
printing were given up to folios, the eighteenth century to quartos and
octavos, and that only the present period has been characterized by
twelvemos and sixteenmos. We think of the Gutenberg Bible, the
Nuremberg Chronicle, the mighty editions of the Fathers, the polyglot
Bibles of Paris, London, and Antwerp,--fairly to be called limp
teachers' Bibles,--the 1611 Bible, the Shakespeare folios; then of the
quarto editions of Addison, Pope, Walpole, and their contemporaries,
and the stately octavo editions of the same writers; and finally of the
myriad infra that have swarmed from the press during the last century.

But, when we walk through a library that offers a representative
collection of books from the invention of printing to the present, we
realize that the bigness of the folios and quartos has deceived us as to
their relative number, all forms of literature being considered.
The parent of our present book form, the Roman codex, split from an
actual block of wood, had a surface hardly as large as the cover of a
Little Classic. The vellum Books of Hours were dainty volumes. Even
in the period between Gutenberg and Aldus, books of moderate size
were not uncommon, and continuously, from the days of the great
Venetian popularizer of literature to the present, the small books have
far outnumbered their heavy-armed allies. Common sense, indeed,
would tell us that this must be so, even if it had not inspired Dr.
Johnson, its eighteenth century exponent, to declare: "Books that you
may carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are the most useful
after all."
Our account properly begins with Aldus. From 1494, the date of his
first productions, until 1501 he printed his books in folio and quarto.
But in the first year of the new century he began to use his famous
cursive type, now called