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THE SIZE OF BOOKS.

ere I a despotic ruler of the universe I would make it a serious offense to publish a book larger than royal octavo. Books should be made to read, or at all events to look at, and in this view comfort and ease should be consulted. Any one who has ever undertaken to read a huge quarto or folio will sympathize with this view. The older and lazier the Book-Worm grows the more he longs for little books, which he can hold in one hand without getting a cramp, or at least support with arms in an elbow chair without fatigue. Darwin remorselessly split big books in two. Mr. Slater says in “Book Collecting:” “When the library at Sion College took fire the attendants, at the risk of their lives, rescued a pile of books from the flames, and it is said that the librarian wept when he found that the porters had taken it for granted that the value of a book was in exact proportion to its size.” Few of us, I suspect, ever read our family Bible, and all of us probably groan when we lift out the unabridged dictionary. The “Century Dictionary” is a luxury because it is published in small and convenient parts. I cannot conceive any good in a big book except that the ladies may use it to press flowers or mosses in, or the nurses may put it in a chair to sit the baby on at table. I have heard of a gentleman who inherited a mass of folio volumes and arranged them as shelves for his smaller treasures, and of another who arranged his 12-mos on a stand made up of the seventeen volumes of Pinkerton’s “Voyages” and Denon’s “Egypt” for shelves. What reader would not prefer a dainty little Elzevir to the huge folio, Cæsar’s “Commentaries,” even with the big bull in it, and the wicker idol full of burning human victims? What can be more pleasing than the modern Quantin edition of the classics? Or, to speak of a popular book, take the “Pastels in Prose,” the most exquisite book for the price ever known in the history of printing The small book ought however to be easily legible. The health and comfort of the human eye should be consulted in the size of the type. Nothing can be worse in this regard than the Pickering diamond classics, if meant to be read; and it seems that there are too many of them to be intended as mere curiosities of printing. Let us approve the exit of the folio and the quarto, and applaud the modern tendency toward little and handy volumes. Large paper however is a worthy distinction when the subject is worth the distinction and the edition is not too large. Nothing raises the gorge of the true Book-Worm more than to see an issue on large paper of a row of histories, for example; and the very worst instance conceivable was a large paper Webster’s “Unabridged Dictionary” issued some years ago. The book thus distinguished ought to be a classic, or peculiar for elegance, never a series, or stereotyped, the first struck off, and the issue ought not to be more than from fifty to one hundred copies; any larger issue is not worth the extra margin bestowed, and no experienced buyer will tolerate it But if all these conditions are observed, the large paper copies bear the same relation to the small that a proof before letters of a print holds to the other impressions. Large margins are very pleasant in a library as well as in Wall Street, and much more apt to be permanent. There are some favorite books of which the possessor longs in vain for a large copy, as for instance, the Pickering “Walton and Cotton.”

great deal of fun is made of the Book-Worm because of his desire for large paper and of his insistence on uncut edges, but his reasons are sound and his taste is unimpeachable. The tricks of the book-trade to catch the inexperienced with the bait of large paper are very amusing. “Strictly limited” to so many copies for England and so many for America, say a thousand in all, or else the number is not stated, and always described as an edition de luxe, and its looks are always very repulsive. But the bait is eagerly bitten at by a shoal of beings anxious to get one of these rarities—a class to one of whom I once found it necessary to explain that “uncut edges” does not mean leaves not cut open, and that he would not injure the value of his book by being able to read it, and was not bound to peep in surreptitiously like a maid-servant at a door “on the jar.” I once knew a satirical Book-Worm who issued a pamphlet, “one hundred copies on large paper, none on small.” There is no just distinction in an ugly large-paper issue, and sometimes it is not nearly so beautiful as the small, especially when the latter has uncut edges. The independence of the collector who prefers the small in such circumstances is to be commended and imitated.

Too great inequality in uncut edges is also to be shunned as an ugliness. It seems that some French books are printed on paper of two different sizes, the effect of which is very grotesque, and the device is a catering to a very crude and extravagant taste.