The librarian is in a position more than any one else to know the
disabilities of books. The author is interested in his fame and his
emoluments, the publisher in his reputation and his profits. To each of
these parties the sales are the chief test. But the librarian's interest
in the book begins after the sale, and it continues through the entire
course of the book's natural life. His interest, moreover, is all-round;
he is concerned with the book's excellence in all respects,
intellectual, esthetic, and physical. He is the one who has to live with
it, literally to keep house with it; and his reputation is in a way
involved with its character. He may, therefore, be allowed for once to
have his say as to how he would like to have books made.
If a book is worth writing at all, it is worth writing three times:
first to put down the author's ideas, secondly to condense their
expression into the smallest possible compass, and thirdly so to arrange
them that they shall be most easily taken into the mind, putting them
not necessarily into logical order, but into psychological order. If the
author will do this and can add the touch of genius, or--shall we
say?--can suffuse his work with the quality of genius, then he has made
an addition to literature. That, among all the books which the librarian
has to care for, he finds so few that he can call additions to
literature is one of his grievances. The three processes may, indeed,
by a practiced hand be performed as one. The librarian is only anxious
that they be performed and that he have the benefit.
With the publisher the librarian feels that he can speak still more
bluntly than with the author, for it is against the publisher that the
librarian cherishes one of his greatest grievances, the necessity of
supplying four times the amount of storage room that ought to be
required. I have before me two books, one larger than the other in every
way and four times as thick. Yet the smaller book is printed in larger
type, has twice as many words on a page, and has twice as many pages.
This is, of course, an exceptional contrast, but a difference of four
times between the actual and the possible is by no means unusual. When
one considers that in most of our libraries it costs, all told, a dollar
to shelve a volume, one realizes that the librarian has against the
publisher a grievance that can be put into the language of commerce. If
every book is occupying a dollar's worth of space, which ought to
accommodate three others, then, gentlemen publishers, in swelling your
books to catch the public eye, you have taken from us far more than you
put into your own pockets from your sales to us. You have made our book
storage four times as costly and unwieldy as it ought to be; but you
have done worse than this, you have sold us perishable instead of
durable goods. You have cheapened every element of the book--paper, ink,
and binding--so that, while we begin the twentieth century with some
books on our shelves that are over four hundred years old and some that
are less than one, the only books among them that have any chance of
seeing the twenty-first century are those that will then be five hundred
years old; the books that might have been a century old will then, like
their makers, be dust. It seems to the librarian that you, who have
taken it upon yourselves to direct the service to be rendered to men by
the "art preservative of all arts," have assumed very lightly your
responsibility for the future's knowledge of our time. You may and do
answer that, as the records begin to perish, the most important of them
will be reprinted, and the world will be the better off for the loss of
the rest. To this it may be rejoined that you give the distant future no
chance to revise the judgments of a rather near future, and that vast
quantities of material which would be read with eagerness by future
generations and which would be carefully preserved if it were durable,
will not be reprinted, whatever its value. We may be sure that the daily
papers of the present year will never be reprinted; the world of the
future will be too busy, not to speak of the cost; yet what a series of
human documents will disappear in their destruction! If a part of the
professional obligation which you assumed in making yourselves
responsible for the issues of the press is to transmit the record of
this generation to later time, then it seems to me that you have in
great measure betrayed your trust and have so far brought to naught the
labors of your comrade, the librarian, in the conservation of
literature. Also you compel him to pay for unnecessary rebindings which
can hardly be made, so poor is the stock you furnish the binder; yet on
this point you have shown some indications of a change of heart, and I
will pass it over. Perhaps you have finally come to realize that every
cent paid for rebinding is taken out of your gross receipts. I will not
speak of the books that you ought never to have published, the books
that are not books; most of these the librarian can avoid buying, but
sometimes a book is just "ower gude for banning," and he has to take it
and catalogue it and store it, and take account of it and rearrange it,
and, after all, get scolded by his authorities or ridiculed by the
public for housing so much rubbish. The author is responsible with you
here, but your own individual responsibility is enough for any shoulders
to bear.
To the printer the librarian would say: since wishing is easy, let us
imagine that what ought always to happen is happening regularly instead
of rarely, namely, that the author produces a book worth printing and
that the publisher leaves you free to put it into a worthy form. This is
the opportunity that you have always been looking for. How are you going
to meet it? Do you know all the elements that you deal with and can you
handle them with a sure touch practically and esthetically? If so, you
will not need any hints from the librarian, and he will order your book
"sight unseen." But still, among the good and right ways of making
books, there may be some that he prefers, and he will ask you, when you
are making books for him and not for private buyers, at least to give
his preferences a hearing. He wants his books no bigger physically than
they need be, and yet he would like to have them of a convenient height,
from seven to nine inches. He would rather have their expansion in
height and width and not in thickness, for the former dimensions up to
ten and a half inches by eight mean no increased demand upon shelf room,
while the thickness of every leaf is taken out of his library's
capacity. He would like to have no wasteful margins and no extreme in
the size of type. If it is too large, the book takes up too much room;
if it is too small, his readers will ruin their eyes over it or, what is
more likely, refuse to read it and so make its possession a useless
expense. For the sake of rapid reading he would like to have every wide
page printed in columns. For the same reason he would like to have every
possible help given to the eye in the way of paragraphs, headlines, and
variation of type, so far as it can be given in consonance with the
esthetic rights of the book. With these points observed, and the book
printed on paper as thin and as light in weight as can be conveniently
used and is consistent with opacity and strength, with clear type, clear
and durable ink, and good presswork, the printer will have done his
part, and a book will go to the binder that is worthy of his best
treatment.
What that treatment is the binder knows better than I can tell him. When
he has applied it, the book will come out of his hands at once solid and
flexible; unmutilated, either on the outer edges where mutilation can be
seen, or at the back where it cannot be seen, but where it nevertheless
hurts the integrity of the book; covered with honest boards that will
stand use, and clad with a material, cloth or leather, that is both
strong to resist wear and also contains within itself no seeds of
deterioration. Besides this let it have a character, however
unobtrusive, befitting the contents of the book, and the binder will
have paid his full debt to the present and the future.
While the librarian's ideals of bookmaking are not the only ones, they
are in harmony with the best, and there cannot be progress in bookmaking
without approaching his ideals. He is, therefore, by his very office
committed to every undertaking for the improvement of the book, and
because of the efforts of librarians and other booklovers there is
ground for belief that the books of the present decade will be better
than those of the last.