Paul and the Printing Press

have been wondering how the old printers got rid of the Latin text, letter

tering was a far cry from our uniform, clear, well-designed variety of print. In the first place, as I told you before, good ink and good paper were necessary to beautiful text, and these Gutenburg did not have. Gradually, however, as a result of repeated experiments, paper and i

ys seem to be doing t

n them was that while China locked all her discoveries up within her own walled cities,

re a great peopl

and poor. Nobles, artisans, barefooted friars worked together towards that common goal. It was an Italian prince, Nicholas V, a man who afterward became Pope, who founded the Vatican Library and collected five thousand books, at a time, you mu

es would not think

n reach that we scarcely appreciate them. We cert

read many," sa

"But most of us are intellectually lazy; even grown-up persons devote a g

Hare, for example," sug

Lorenzo de Medici dragged from the corners of Europe and Asia some two hundred Greek and Latin manuscripts. Other Florentines, Venetians, Romans collected private libraries. Princes of the land turned their wealth not to their own idle pleasure but to financing Gutenburg's invention and establishing printing presses which the culture and brain of the country controlled. There was a printing press at the Vatican itself, and scholars who were paid large salaries met in consultation concerning the literature printed. The best artists contributed their skill to the undertaking.

face clouded,

sive for universal use. For it is the subject matter inside the book which, when all is said and done, is the thing we are after, and which we are eager to spread abroad; and never in any age has every type of li

learning, the greater accumulation there is for us to master. Like a mammoth snowball, each century has rolled up its treasure until such a mass has

r," echoed Paul. "

ally significant movements of the world; we can follow the path of the sciences; study the progress of the drama from its infancy to the present moment; trace the growth of the novel; note the perfecting of the poetic form. History, philosophy, the thought of all the ages is ours. That is what I mean when I say there is no excuse for persons of ou

lly, "that those who come after u

y's harvest. We thank Gutenburg for our books. We thank such men as Nicholas V and many another of his ilk for the Vatican Library, the British Museum, the numberless foreign museums; we owe a debt to our nation for

a moment o

ions both in translation and in their mother tongue. Remember that after printing had got well under way, type in other l

ook that into acco

"not every person of the olden time was alert for l

re not skilful enough to do the illustrating demanded, and a guild of bookbinders sprang up. Into the hands of artists outside the cloister were put the more dainty and worldly pictures required by secular text. Then followed a period when scholars who owned books were no longer forced to loan them to students to copy for their own use, as had been the case in the past. Books became less expensive and were accessible to everybody. Slowly they were got into more practical form-were made smaller and less bulky; not only outs

was a

over the Italian novelle of Boccaccio, weaving them into his great English dramas, and nobody censured him. It was this craving for romance that overcame the delight in mere display and roused interest not alone in the binding of a book but in its co

t books became c

largely the size of the edition printed that reduces the expense of production. It is practically as much work to print fifty copies of a volume as several hundred. The labor of setting the type is the same.

ul, "I see. Of cou

s from the various selling houses of our large cities. It means spreading a book from coast to coast. While the publisher is getting the book through the press, correcting proof, having illustrations and the colored jacket designed and printed, perhaps having posters made for advertising, his salesmen are taking orders for it by means of a condensation of the story and a dummy cover similar to the one which later will be put on the volume. Then, when the books are ready, they are shipped east and west, north and south, but are not released for sale until a given date, when all the stores begin selling

ahead what people will

ller, but to the surprise of both publisher and author as well. One cannot always prophesy what readers will like, especially if a

ook ready for the market after he once gets

it is again corrected and is cut up into lengths suitable for a page. Following this the page proof is printed, care being taken that the last word at the bottom of one page joins on to the top word of the next. It is very easy to omit a word and thus mar the sense. It is also a rule of most publishing houses that the top line of each page shall be a full line, and in consequence it is often a Chinese puzzle to make the text conform to the rule. Readers often have to insert a line or take one out to meet this necessity, and sometimes an author's text is garbled as a resul

to heed this printer'

se. Books being no longer the property of the few, they must be within the reach of the many, and the book-manufacturer's business is to make them so. It is precisely because we have such a large reading public that America has attained her high intellectual average. Not that we are a cultured nation. By no means. What I mean is that our public school system offers education so freely, and even compels it so drastically, that there is a much smaller proportion of illiterate persons here than in most lands. Our illiterates are largely foreigners who have not been in our country long enough to become educated. Most of them have immigrated from places where they had no educational advantages, and some

ck to my job on the Mar

say, does not like his text tampered with. Firms differ greatly about this. Some publishers feel perfectly justified in going ahead and remodeling a writer's work to suit themselves; others regard an author's ma

n smoked r

beg the patronage of the rich in order to get their works printed; contracts were unfair and publishers unprincipled. The unfortunate author was the prey of vultures who cheated him at every turn. Many died in extreme poverty, only to become famous when it was too late. In our day the law has revolutionized most

policy for a publ

the writer the publisher could not exist, and no writer is going to put his work in the hands of