some
job office, in either city or country.

* * * * *

Certain parts of the work of bookbinding are monopolized by young
girls and young women. They are employed in folding, collating,
sewing, pasting, binding, and gold-laying. There is probably no large
establishment in the country where men are employed to do this kind of
work. The industry seems to be peculiarly adapted to young women who
are quick with their hands.

Employes in this trade are paid by the piece, with the exception of
the collaters, who receive a stated salary of $8 a week. "Collating,"
it may be mentioned for the benefit of those who are not familiar with
the term, means the gathering together of the various folded sheets or
sections of the book, and seeing that the pages run right, preparatory
to their being handed over to the sewers, who stitch them together.
The pay of folders, binders, pasters, and sewers will average, during
the year, from $6 to $7 a week. Gold-layers are paid by the hour and
make a dollar or two more a week. This average, it must be understood,
is for the whole fifty-two weeks. Some weeks the girls make $12 and
$15, other weeks not one third as much. Girls as young as fourteen
years are employed, and women forty and fifty years of age may be
found working beside them. Nine hours and a half constitute a day's
work. Some girls will make more than the average named. Those are the
steady workers who, to use the expression of one employer, "work just
like a man and don't care to hurry home and crimp up to see company in
the evening." Such employes will, the year round, average each week
two or three dollars more than the ordinary run of help.

It is said that there is always work in this trade for competent
women. But it is a trade that no woman of ambition would want to
enter, unless she was unable to find any thing better to do.
There is no chance to rise in the business and get a better paying
position, for the rule is to employ male foremen. In only one large
establishment in New York is there a woman occupying such a position.
It is proper to state, however, that she gives perfect satisfaction,
that her employer would not replace her for a man, and that he
believes other bookbinders will eventually see the advisability of
having a female instead of a male overseer. A man, it is said, is apt,
in giving out work, to favor the pretty girls at the expense of the
plain-looking damsels, thus creat