that the committee in charge of a club's activities, instead of marking
out a definite programme for the season, should simply announce that
communications on subjects of personal interest to the members, embodying
some new and original thought, method, idea, device, or mode of treatment,
would be received, and that the best of these would be read and discussed
before the club, after which some would appear in print. No conditions
would be stated, but it would be understood that such features as length
and style, as well as subject matter, would be considered in selecting the
papers to be read. Above all, it would be insisted that no paper should be
considered that was merely copied from anything, either in substance or
idea. It is, of course, possible to constitute a paper almost entirely of
quotations and yet so to group and discuss these that the paper becomes an
original contribution to thought; but mere parrot-like repetition of
ascertained facts, or of other people's thoughts, should not be tolerated.
Right here the first obstacle would be encountered. Club members,
accustomed to be assigned for study subjects like "The Metope of the
Parthenon" or "The True Significance of Hyperspace," will not easily
comprehend that they are really desired to put briefly on paper original
ideas about something that they know at first hand. Mrs. Jones makes
better sponge cake than any one in town; the fact is known to all her
friends. If sponge cake is a desirable product, why should not the woman
who has discovered the little knack that turns failure into success, and
who is proud of her ability and special knowledge, tell her club of it,
instead of laboriously copying from a book--or, let us say, from two or
three books--some one else's compilation of the facts ascertained at
second or third hand by various other writers on "The Character of the
Cid"? Why should not Mrs. Smith, who was out over night in the blizzard of
1888, recount her experiences, mental as well as physical? Why should not
Miss Robinson, who collects coins and differs from the accepted
authorities regarding the authenticity of certain of her specimens, tell
why and how and all about it? Why should not the member who is crazy about
begonias and the one who thinks she saw Uncle Hiram's ghost, and she who
has read and re-read George Meredith, seeing beauties in him that no one
else ever detected--why should not one and all give their fellows the
benefit of the really valuable special knowledge that they have acquired
through years of interested thinking and talking and doing?
But there will be trouble, as I have said. The thing, simple as it is,
would be too unaccustomed to comprehend. And then a real article in a real
cyclopædia by a real writer is Information with a big "I." My little
knowledge about making quince jelly, or darning stockings, or driving an
auto, or my thoughts about the intellectual differences between Dickens
and Thackeray, or my personal theories of conduct, or my reasons for
preferring hot-water heat to steam--these are all too trivial to mention;
is it possible that you want me to write them down on paper?
It may thus happen that when the committee opens its mail it may
find--nothing. What, then? Logically, I should be forced to say: Well, if
none of your members is interested enough in anything to have some
original information to tell about it, disband your club. What is the use
of it? Even three newsboys, when they meet on the street corner, begin at
once to interchange ideas. Where are yours?
Possibly this would be too drastic. It might be better to hold a meeting,
state the failure, and adjourn for another trial. It might be well to
repeat this several times, in the hope that the fact that absence of
original ideas means no proceedings might soak in and germinate. If this
does not work, it might be possible to fight the devil with fire, by going
back to the programme method so far as to assign definitely to members
subjects in which they are known to be deeply interested. This, in fact,
is the second method of treatment mentioned at the outset, namely, the
endeavour to secure immunity where the germ cannot be exterminated. We
shall probably never be able to rid the world of the _bacillus
tuberculosis_; the best we can do is to keep as clear of it as we can and
to strengthen our powers of resistance to it. So, if we cannot kill the
programme all at once, let us strive to make it innocuous and to minimise
its evil effects on its victims.
Let us suppose, now, that in one way or another, it is brought about that
every club member who reads a paper is reporting the result of some
personal experience in which her interest is vivid--some discovery,
acquisition, method, idea, criticism or appreciation that is the product
of her own life and of the particular, personal way in which she has lived
it.
What a result this will have on that woman's reading--on what she does
before she writes her paper and on what she goes through after it! If her
interest is as vivid as we assume it to be, she will not be content to
recount her own experiences without comparing them with those of others.
And after her paper has been read and the comment and criticism of other
interested members have been brought out--of some, perhaps, whose interest
she had never before suspected, then she will feel a fresh impulse to
search for new accounts and to devour them. There is no longer anything
perfunctory about the matter. She can no longer even trust the labour of
looking up her references to others. She becomes an investigator; she
feels something of the joy of those who add to the sum of human knowledge.
And lo! the problem of clubwomen's reading is solved! The wandering mind
is captured; the inane residuum is abolished by union with the rest to
form a normal, intelligent whole. No more idiotic questions, no more
cyclopædia-copying, no more wool-gathering programmes. Is it too much to
expect? Alas, we are but mortal!
I trust it has been made sufficiently clear that I think meanly neither of
the intellectual ability of women nor of the services of women's clubs.
The object of these papers is to give the former an opportunity to assert
itself, and the latter a chance to profit by the assertion. The woman's
club of the future should be a place where original ideas, fed and
directed by interested reading, are exchanged and discussed. Were I
writing of men's clubs, I should point out to them the same goal. And
then, perhaps, we may look forward to a time when a selected group of men
and women may come together and talk of things in which they both, as men
and women, are interested.
When this happens, I trust that in the discussion we shall not heed the
advice of some modern feminists and forget that we are as God made us. Why
should each man talk to a woman "as if she were another man"? I never
heard it advised that each woman should talk to each man "as if he were
another woman"; but I should resent it if I did. Why shut our eyes to the
truth? I trust that I have not been talking to the club-women "as if they
were men"; I am sure I have not meant to do so. They are not men; they
have their own ways, and those ways should be developed and encouraged. We
have had the psychology of race, of the crowd and of the criminal; where
is the investigator who has studied the Psychology of Woman? When she
(note the pronoun) has arrived, let us make her president of a woman's
club.
It is with diffidence that I have outlined any definite procedure,
because, after all, the precise manner in which the treatment should be
applied will depend, of course, on the club concerned. To prescribe for
you most effectively, your physician should be an intimate friend. He
should have known you from birth--better still, he should have cared for
your father and your grandfather before you. Otherwise, he prescribes for
an average man; and you may be very far from the average. The drug that he
administers to quiet your nerves may act on your heart and give you the
smothers--it might conceivably quiet you permanently. Then the doctor
would send to his medical journal a note on "A Curious Case of Umptiol
Poisoning," but you would still be dead, even if all his readers should
agree with him.
I have no desire to bring about casualties of this kind. Let those who
know and love each particular club devote themselves to the task of
applying my treatment to it in a way that will involve a minimum shock to
its nerves and a minimum amount of interference with its metabolic
processes. It will take time. Rome was not built in a day, and a
revolution in clubdom is not going to be accomplished over night.
I have prescribed simple remedies--too simple, I am convinced, to be
readily adopted. What could be simpler than to advise the extermination of
all germ diseases by killing off the germs? Any physician will tell you
that this method is the very acme of efficiency; yet, the germs are still
with us, and bid fair to spread suffering and death over our planet for
many a long year to come. So I am not sanguine that we shall be able all
at once to kill off the programmes. All that may be expected is that at
some distant day the simplicity and effectiveness of some plan of the sort
will begin to commend itself to clubwomen. If, then, some lover of the
older literature will point out the fact that, back in 1915, the gloomy
era when fighting hordes were spreading blood and carnage over the fair
face of Europe, an obscure and humble librarian, in the pages of THE
BOOKMAN, pointed out the way to sanity, I shall be well content.
BOOKS FOR TIRED EYES
The most distinctive thing about a book is the possibility that someone
may read it. Is this a truism? Evidently not; for the publishers, who
print books, and the libraries, which store and distribute them, have
never thought it worth their while to collect and record information
bearing on this possibility. In the publisher's or the bookseller's
advertising announcements, as well as on the catalogue cards stored in the
library's trays, the reader may ascertain when and where the book was
published, the number of pages, and whether it contains plates or maps;
but not a word of the size or style of type in which it is printed. Yet on
this depends the ability of the reader to use the book for the purpose for
which it was intended. The old-fashioned reader was a mild-mannered
gentleman. If he could not read his book because it was printed in
outrageously small type, he laid it aside with a sigh, or used a
magnifying lens, or persisted in his attempts with the naked eye until
eyestrain, with its attendant maladies, was the result. Lately however,
the libraries have been waking up, and their readers with them. The
utilitarian side of the work is pushed to the front; and the reader is by
no means disposed to accept what may be offered him, either in the content
of the book or its physical make-up. The modern library must adapt itself
to its users, and among other improvements must come an attempt to go as
far as possible in making books physiologically readable.
Unfortunately the library cannot control the output of books, and must
limit itself to selection. An experiment in such selection is now in
progress in the St. Louis Public Library. The visitor to that library will
find in its Open Shelf Room a section of shelving marked with the words
"Books in large type." To this section are directed all readers who have
found it difficult or painful to read the ordinary printed page but who do
not desire to wear magnifying lenses. It has not been easy to fill these
shelves, for books in large type are few, and hard to secure, despite the
fact that artists, printers, and oculists have for years been discussing
the proper size, form, and grouping of printed letters from their various
standpoints. Perhaps it is time to urge a new view--that of the public
librarian, anxious to please his clients and to present literature to them
in that physical form which is most easily assimilable and least harmful.
Tired eyes belong, for the most part, to those who have worked them
hardest; that is, to readers who have entered upon middle age or have
already passed through it. At this age we become conscious that the eye is
a delicate instrument--a fact which, however familiar to us in theory, has
previously been regarded with aloofness. Now it comes home to us. The
length of a sitting, the quality, quantity, and incidence of the light,
and above all, the arrangement of the printed page, become matters of
vital 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 black, clear in outline,
simple and distinctive in form, properly grouped and spaced.
The various attempts to standardize type-sizes and to adopt a suitable
notation for them have been limited hitherto to the sizes of the type-body
and bear only indirectly on the size of the actual letter. More or less
arbitrary names--such as minion, bourgeois, brevier, and nonpareil,--were
formerly used; but what is called the point-system is now practically
universal, although its unit, the "point," is not everywhere the same.
Roughly speaking, a point is one-seventy-second of an inch, so that in
three-point type, for example, the thickness of the type-body, from the
top to the bottom of the letter on its face, is one-twenty-fourth of an
inch. But on this type-body the face may be large or small--although of
course, it cannot be larger than the body,--and the size of the letters
called by precisely the same name in the point notation may vary within
pretty wide limits. There is no accepted notation for the size of the
letters themselves, and this fact tells, more eloquently than words, that
the present sizes of type are standardized and defined for compositors
only, not for readers, and still less for scientific students of the
effect upon the readers' eyes of different arrangements of the printed
page.
What seems to have been the first attempt to define sizes of type suitable
for school grades was made fifteen years ago by Mr Edward R. Shaw in his
"School Hygiene"; he advocates sizes from eighteen-point in the first year
to twelve-point for the fourth. "Principals, teachers, and school
superintendents," he says, "should possess a millimetre measure and a
magnifying glass, and should subject every book presented for their
examination to a test to determine whether the size of the letters and the
width of the leading are of such dimensions as will not prove injurious to
the eyes of children." To this list, librarians might be well added--not
to speak of authors, editors, and publishers. In a subsequent part of his
chapter on "Eyesight and Hearing," from which the above sentence is
quoted, appears a test of illumination suggested by "The Medical Record"
of Strasburg, which may serve as a "horrid example" in some such way as
did the drunken brother who accompanied the temperance lecturer. According
to this authority, if a pupil is unable to read diamond
type--four-and-one-half-point--"at twelve-inch distance and without
strain," the illumination is dangerously low. The adult who tries the
experiment will be inclined to conclude that whatever the illumination,
the proper place for the man who uses diamond type for any purpose is the
penitentiary.
The literature upon this general subject, such as it is, is concerned
largely with its relations with school hygiene. We are bound to give our
children a fair start in life, in conditions of vision as well as in other
respects, even if we are careless about ourselves. The topic of
"Conservation of Vision," in which, however, type-size played but a small
part, was given special attention at the Fourth International Congress of
School Hygiene, held in Buffalo in 1913. Investigations on the subject, so
far as they affect the child in school, are well summed up in the last
chapter of Huey's "Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading." In general, the
consensus of opinion of investigators seems to be that the most legible
type is that between eleven-point and fourteen-point. Opinion regarding
space between lines, due to "leading," is not quite so harmonious. Some
authorities think that it is better to increase the size of the letters;
and Huey asserts that an attempt to improve unduly small type by making
wide spaces between lines is a mistake.
As to the relative legibility of different type-faces, one of the most
exhaustive investigations was that made at Clark University by Miss
Barbara E. Roethlin, whose results were published in 1912. This study
considers questions of form, style, and grouping, independently of mere
size; and the conclusion is that legibility is a product of six factors,
of which size is one, the others being form, heaviness of face, width of
the margin around the letter, position in the letter-group, and shape and
size of adjoining letters. For "tired eyes" the size factor would appear
of overwhelming importance except where the other elements make the page
fantastically illegible. In Miss Roethlin's tables, based upon a
combination of the factors mentioned above, the maximum of legibility
almost always coincides with that of size. These experiments seem to have
influenced printers, whose organization in Boston has appointed a
committee to urge upon the Carnegie Institution the establishment of a
department of research to make scientific tests of printing-types in
regard to the comparative legibility and the possibility of improving some
of their forms. Their effort, so far, has met with no success; but the
funds at the disposal of this body could surely be put to no better use.
With regard to the improvement of legibility by alteration of form, it has
been recognized by experiments from the outset that the letters of our
alphabet, especially the small, or "lower-case" letters, are not equally
legible. Many proposals for modifying or changing them have been made,
some of them odd or repugnant. It has been suggested, for instance, that
the Greek lambda be substituted for our _l_, which in its present form is
easily confused with the dotted _i_. Other pairs of letters (_u_ and _n_,
_o_ and _e_, for example) are differentiated with difficulty. The
privilege of modifying alphabetic form is one that has been frequently
exercised. The origin of the German alphabet and our own, for instance, is
the same, and no lower-case letters in any form date further back than the
Middle Ages. There could be no well-founded objection to any change, in
the interests of legibility, that is not so far-reaching as to make the
whole alphabet look foreign and unfamiliar. It may be queried, however,
whether the lower-case alphabet had not better be reformed by abolishing
it altogether. There would appear to be no good reason for using two
alphabets, now one and now the other, according to arbitrary rules,
difficult to learn and hard to remember. That the general legibility of
books would benefit by doing away with this mediaeval excrescence appears
to admit of no doubt, although the proposal may seem somewhat startling to
the general reader.
In 1911, a committee was appointed by the British Association for the
Advancement of Science "to inquire into the influence of school-books upon
eyesight." This committee's report dwells on the fact that the child's eye
is still in process of development and needs larger type than the fully
developed eye of the adult. In making its recommendation for the
standardization of school-book type, which it considers the solution of
the difficulty, the committee emphasizes the fact that forms and sizes
most legible for isolated letters are not necessarily so for the groups
that need to be quickly recognized by the trained reader. It dwells upon
the importance of unglazed paper, flexible sewing, clear, bold
illustrations, black ink, and true alignment. Condensed or compressed
letters are condemned, as are long serifs and hair strokes. On the other
hand, very heavy-faced type is almost as objectionable as that with the
fine lines, the ideal being a proper balancing of whites and blacks in
each letter and group. The size of the type face, as we might expect, is
pronounced by the committee "the most important factor in the influence of
books upon vision"; it describes its recommended sizes in millimetres--a
refinement which, for the purposes of this article, need not be insisted
upon. Briefly, the sizes run from thirty-point, for seven-year-old
children, to ten-point or eleven-point, for persons more than twelve years
old. Except as an inference from this last recommendation, the committee,
of course, does not exceed its province by treating of type-sizes for
adults; yet it would seem that it considers ten-point as the smallest size
fit for anyone, however good his sight. This would bar much of our
existing reading matter.