handsome ten thousand per cent. profits we are speaking of will escape you. For a painter who is popular now will be out of date in twenty-five years—unless he happens to be one of those excessively rare creatures who know how to bait more than one hook. It is the unpopular man who is your best gamble by all odds—besides, his pictures are so much cheaper. Indeed you can persuade any number of young artists to part with their work for nothing. Then after twenty-five years you sell ten of the lot at ten thousand apiece and buy something you really want.
There is a publishing house in the East which, in addition to its good name as one of those whose imprint never lay upon an immoral book, has the reputation of allowing more errors to slip into the printed page than any other firm. The two things, we presume, do not necessarily go together, and we are not at all inclined to believe that a high moral purpose is sufficient excuse for bad paper, slipshod binding, careless type arrangements and typographical errors. Pianists in their recitals often play what they call "false notes" and audiences forgive them on the ground that excessive emotion condones the lack of technique. But book-making is a more leisurely and, perhaps, a more dignified profession; there are no false words, only wrong ones, and a good printer would know of nothing more immoral than a Prayer Book with ill-assorted type faces. All of which makes it the more alarming to find that the great majority of books printed in America have nothing to commend them as books and that the printer's art has developed into something of a cult, worshipped in secret and by a few, never brought into the bright light of day. If it is true that the invention of printing—it was fairly good printing then—put an end to the Dark Ages, what are we in for now, when printing has virtually ceased to exist and mere publication has taken its place?
If our commercial publishers fancy that their bad printing is a necessary evil, it may be well to remind them that the magazine with the largest circulation in America, The Saturday Evening Post, uses an ordinary type, has excellently drawn capitals for its titles, and is almost impeccable in its proof-reading. New type faces are still being made in America, and it costs no more to print from them than from bad ones. And finally, we have noticed that the better a
