must be oftener performed.  Owing largely to his demonstration, “The Printing Art,” a trade magazine published in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has changed its make-up from a one-column to a two-column page.  It should be noted, however, that a uniform, standard length of line is even more to be desired than a short one.  When the eye has become accustomed to one length for its linear leaps, these leaps can be performed with relative ease and can be taken care of subconsciously.  When the lengths vary capriciously from one book, or magazine, to another, or even from one page to another, as they so often do, the effort to get accustomed to the new length is more tiring than we realize.  Probably this factor, next to the size of type, is most effective in tiring the middle-aged eye, and in keeping it tired.  The opinion may be ventured that the reason for our continued toleration of the small type used in the daily newspapers is that their columns are narrow, and still more, that these are everywhere of practically uniform width.

The indifference of publishers to the important feature of the physical make-up of books appears from the fact that in not a single case is it included among the descriptive items in their catalogue entries.  Libraries are in precisely the same class of offenders.  A reader or a possible purchaser of books is supposed to be interested in the fact that a book is published in Boston, has four hundred and thirty-two pages, and is illustrated, but not at all in its legibility.  Neither publishers nor libraries have any way of getting information on the subject, except by going to the books themselves.  Occasionally a remainder-catalogue, containing bargains whose charms it is desired to set forth with unusual detail, states that a certain book is in “large type,” or even in “fine, large type,” but these words are nowhere defined, and the purchaser cannot depend on their accuracy.  An edition of Scott, recently advertised extensively as in “large, clear type,” proved on examination to be printed in ten-point.

In gathering the large-type collection for the St. Louis Library fourteen-point was decided upon as the standard, which means, of course, types with a face somewhere between the smallest size that is usually found on a fourteen-point body, even if actually on a smaller body, and the largest that this can carry, even if on a larger body.  The latter is unusually large, but it would not do to place the standard below fourteen-point, because that would lower the minimum, which is none too large as it is.  The first effort was to collect such large-type books, already in the library, as would be likely to interest the general reader.  In the collection of nearly 400,000 volumes, it was found by diligent search that only 150 would answer this description.  Most octavo volumes of travel are in large type, but only a selected number of these was placed in the collection to avoid overloading it with this particular class.  This statement