The book of to-day is not necessarily the parent of the book of
to-morrow, just as it is itself not necessarily the child of the book of
yesterday. The relation is apt to be one of succession and influence
rather than anything suggesting biological evolution. Nature, according
to Linnaeus's famous maxim, never goes by leaps, but the book is a human
product, and human nature takes its chief pride in its leaps, calling
them inventions and discoveries. Such a leap in book production was the
substitution of parchment for papyrus, of paper for parchment, of
mechanical for manual processes when writing was displaced by
typography, of higher for lower mechanism in the creation of the power
perfecting press. These inventions had behind them, to be sure, the
impetus of economic demand, but no such partial explanation can be given
for the advent of William Morris among the printers of the late
nineteenth century, unless an unrecognized artistic need may be said to
constitute an economic demand.
The book of to-day in its best examples resembles not so much the book
of yesterday as that of some earlier days, and we may count this fact a
fortunate one, since it relegates to oblivion the books made in certain
inartistic periods, notably of the one preceding the present revival. It
is rather the best of the whole past of the book, and not the book of
to-day alone, that influences the character to be taken by the book of
to-morrow. This element is a historical one and a knowledge of it may be
acquired by study; it is the possible inventions that baffle our
prophecies. We know that any time some new process may be discovered
that will transform the book into something as unlike its present
character as that is unlike the papyrus roll. But because the element of
invention is so uncertain we can only recognize it, we cannot take it
into account. Our advantage in considering the book of to-day in
connection with the book of to-morrow will be chiefly a negative one, in
making the book as it is, so far as we find it defective, our point of
departure in seeking the book as it ought to be.
To-day, for our present purposes, may be taken as beginning with the
great work of Morris. But its book includes the worst as well as the
best. It is not only the book by which we in our jealousy for the
reputation of our age should like to have our age remembered, but also
the more frequent book that we have to see and handle, however much
against our will, and sometimes even to buy. We may congratulate
ourselves that this book will perish by its own defects, leaving after
all only the best book to be associated with our age; but this does not
alter the fact that in the present the undesirable book is too much with
us, is vastly in the majority, is, in fact, the only book that the great
mass of our contemporaries know. How bad it is most book buyers do not
realize; if they did, a better book would speedily take its place. But,
until they do, our only chance of relief is the doubtful one of an
invention that shall make good books cheaper to make than poor ones, or
the difficult one of educating the public in the knowledge of what a
book should be. The latter is obviously our only rational hope; but
before we turn to consider it, let us first look at the book of to-day
to see exactly what it is.
The book of to-day is first of all a novel. It has other forms, to be
sure,--poetry, essays, history, travels, works of science and art,--but
these do not meet the eye of the multitude. We may disregard them for
the moment, and, in reply to the question, What is the book of to-day?
we may say: It is a one-volume novel, a rather clumsy duodecimo, with a
showy cover adorned with a colored picture of the heroine. It is printed
on thick paper of poor quality, with type too large for the page, and
ugly margins equal all around. Its binding is weak, often good for only
a dozen readings, though quite as lasting as the paper deserves. For
merits it can usually offer clear type, black ink, and good presswork.
But its great fault is that in addressing the buyer it appeals to the
primitive instinct for bigness rather than to the higher sense that
regards quality. Such is the book of to-day, emphatically what Franklin
over a hundred years ago called a "blown" book.
But though the novel fills the multitude's field of vision, it is after
all not the only contemporary book; there are others from which we may
be able to choose one worthier to be the book of to-day than the
self-elected novel. But we shall not find it where commercialism is
rife. In the presence of that element we find still only an appeal to
the many--which, if successful, means large profits--by an appearance of
giving much while really giving little. In this game of illusion the
sound principles of bookmaking are forsaken. Books are not designed on
the basis of what they are, but on the basis of what they can be made to
seem. The result is puffery, not merely in advertising, but still
earlier in the dimensions of the book itself--the most modern and
profitable instance of using the east wind for a filler.
But at this point a new element is introduced, the public library. The
ordinary buyer carries home the distended book, and after he and his
family have read it, he cares not if it falls to pieces after the next
reading. Neither does he care if it takes up thrice the room that it
should, for he no longer gives it room. But the public library, under
the existing inflationism, must not only pay too much for its popular
books; it must also house them at a needless outlay, and must very early
duplicate a serious percentage of their first cost in rebinding them. So
burdensome has this last item become that our libraries are consenting
to pay a slightly larger first cost in order to avoid the necessity of
rebinding; and enterprising publishers, following the lead of a more
enterprising bookbinder, are beginning to cater to this library demand,
which some day, let us hope, may dominate the entire publishing world
for all books worth preserving, and may extend to all the elements of
the book.
But fortunately there is here and there the uncommercial publisher and
now and then an uncommercial mood in the ordinary publisher. To these we
owe a small but important body of work of which no previous age need
have been ashamed. Of these books we may almost say that they would be
books if there were nothing in them. They have come into being by a
happy conjunction of qualified publisher and appreciative buyers. They
show what most books may be and what all books will strive to be if ever
the majority of book buyers come to know what a good book is. This
brings us finally to the book of to-morrow, what we hope it will be and
how we can make it so.
The book of to-morrow, the book as it ought to be, will be both better
and cheaper than the book of to-day. It can afford to be cheaper, for it
will have a large and appreciative public, and for the same reason it
will have to be better. The question of supreme importance now, if this
public is ever to exist, is: How to educate our book buyers. The answer
is not easy, for our book buyers do not realize that they are untrained,
and, even if they realized it, the task of training them in the
knowledge and love of the well-made book would be difficult. But we can
do at least three things: agitate--proclaim the existence of a lore to
be acquired, an ignorance and its practices to be eschewed;
illustrate--show the good book and the bad together, and set forth,
point by point, why the good is superior; last and most important, we
must vindicate--back up our words by our deeds, support the publisher
who gives the world good books, and leave to starvation or reform the
publisher who clings to the old unworthy methods of incapacity or fraud.
Even now, if every enlightened booklover in America would carry out this
plan as a matter of duty merely where he could do so without
inconvenience, nothing less than a revolution would be upon us, and we
should have the Book of To-morrow while it is still To-day.