uperiority for
ready reference.

The departure from legibility that we have thus far considered has
related to the size of the letters. Another equally marked departure is
possible in respect to their shape. In business printing, especially in
newspaper advertisements, men are sometimes tempted to gain amount at
the risk of undue fineness of type. But no advertiser who counts the
cost will take the chance of rendering his announcement unreadable by
the use of ornamental or otherwise imperfectly legible letters. He sets
no value upon the form save as a carrier of substance. In works of
literature, on the contrary, form may take on an importance of its own;
it may even be made tributary to the substance at some cost to
legibility.

In this field there is room for type the chief merit of which is apart
from its legibility. In other words, there is and always will be a place
for beauty in typography, even though it involve a certain loss of
clearness. As related to the total bulk of printing, works of this class
never can amount to more than a fraction of one per cent. But their
proportion in the library of a cultivated man would be vastly greater,
possibly as high as fifty per cent. In such works the esthetic sense
demands not merely that the type be a carrier of the alphabet, but also
that it interpret or at least harmonize with the subject-matter. Who
ever saw Mr. Updike's specimen pages for an edition of the "Imitatio
Christi," in old English type, without a desire to possess the completed
work? Yet we have editions of the "Imitatio" that are far more legible
and convenient. The "Prayers" of Dr. Samuel Johnson have several times
been published in what we may call tribute typography; but no edition
has yet attained to a degree of homage that satisfies the lovers of
those unaffected devotional exercises.

What, therefore, shall be the typography of books that we love, that we
know by heart? In them, surely, beauty and fitness may precede
legibility unchallenged. These are the books that we most desire and
cherish; this is the richest field for the typographic artist, and one
that we venture to pronounce, in spite of all that has yet been done,
still almost untilled. Such books need not be expensive; we can imagine
a popular series that should deserve the name of tribute typography.
Certain recent editions of the German classics, perhaps, come nearer to
justifying such a claim than any contemporary British or American w