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the want of taste in suitable pictorial decoration, said such 
misapplied designs in the arts of carpet-weaving, metal working, 
and pottery were paralleled with printing type which copied the 
peculiarities and excellencies of copper-plate writing, and with 
press work which endeavoured to imitate lithographic printing. 
The question was what were the limitations beyond which one 
must not stray, and how were they to be discovered? The 
lecturer thought it would be admitted that in making the most 
beautiful book possible (without any regard to the cost of 
production) they would have to use a hand-made paper. Again, 
small types, although very useful for books of reference and 
for economising space in cheap books, were not so readable 
as large ones, besides being wanting in true dignity and 
grace of the bigger letters; therefore the largest type must 
be used, always considering it in reference to the size of 
the page. Having seen that the type and paper were as good 
and as suitable as could be found, care must next be taken if 
illustrations were to be introduced that they really ornamented 
the book by harmonising with the type, for it was shown by the 
works of the early printers that a book may be really beautiful 
without a single illustration. It was thought by many that an 
illustration was always ap improvement to a book. The lecturer 
said it may be in one sense, if it assisted in elucidating the text, 
but unless the designer and engraver thought also of its artistic 
relation to the type, it would not add toits beauty. The dominat- 
ing factor ina beautiful book must be the type. The lecturer said 
as there was an underlying assumption that ‘‘ a book is intended 
to be read,” the best type was that which was most readable. 
Letters were purely arbitrary forms, and they could not go to 
nature for inspiration for their shapes. There was not, what 
may be called a living standard of beautiful letters in our current 
handwriting, but they could see in the types of the early printers 
and in the handwriting of their contemporaries, the caligraphers, 
the utmost beauty of form which the present alphabet was 
perhaps capable of receiving. It was impossible to suddenly 
change the faces of our types. The law of evolution applied 
here as in the natural world, and our letters were the lineal 
descendants of those of the fifteenth century printers. The 
lecturer announced his intention of showing upon a screen 
some enlarged photographs of printed books and MSS., pro- 
duced at the end of the fifteenth and during the early part of 
the sixteenth centuries, in order to illustrate the intimate 
relationship subsisting at that time between the forms of written 
and printed letters. | Before doing so, he explained in what way 
modern type printing differs from the method used in the block 
books which has been practised in China for centuries, and a 
Japanese wood block was shown. ‘The inventor, speaking of him 
