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THE BOOK OF TO-DAY AND THE BOOK OF TO-MORROW

The book of to-day is not necessarily the parent of the book of to-morrow, just as it is itself not necessarily the child of the book of yesterday. The relation is apt to be one of succession and influence rather than anything suggesting biological evolution. Nature, according to Linnaeus's famous maxim, never goes by leaps, but the book is a human product, and human nature takes its chief pride in its leaps, calling them inventions and discoveries. Such a leap in book production was the substitution of parchment for papyrus, of paper for parchment, of mechanical for manual processes when writing was displaced by typography, of higher for lower mechanism in the creation of the power perfecting press. These inventions had behind them, to be sure, the impetus of economic demand, but no such partial explanation can be given for the advent of William Morris among the printers of the late nineteenth century, unless an unrecognized artistic need may be said to constitute an economic demand.

The book of to-day in its best examples resembles not so much the book of yesterday as that of some earlier days, and we may count this fact a fortunate one, since it relegates to oblivion the books made in certain inartistic periods, notably of the one preceding the present revival. It is rather the best of the whole past of the book, and not the book of to-day alone, that influences the character to be taken by the book of to-morrow. This element is a historical one and a knowledge of it may be acquired by study; it is the possible inventions that baffle our prophecies. We know that any time some new process may be discovered that will transform the book into something as unlike its present character as that is unlike the papyrus roll. But because the element of invention is so uncertain we can only recognize it, we cannot take it into account. Our advantage in considering the book of to-day in connection with the book of to-morrow will be chiefly a negative one, in making the book as it is, so far as we find it defective, our point of departure in seeking the book as it ought to be.

To-day, for our present purposes, may be taken as beginning with the great work of Morris. But its book includes the worst as well as the best. It is not only the book by which we in our jealousy for the reputation of our age should like to have our age remembered, but also the more frequent book that we have to see and handle, however much against our will, and sometimes even to buy. We may congratulate ourselves that this book will perish by its own defects, leaving after all only the best book to be associated with our age; but this does not alter the fact that in the present the undesirable book is too much with us, is vastly in the majority, is, in fact, the only book that the great mass of our contemporaries know. How bad it is most book buyers do not realize; if they did, a better book would speedily take its place. But, until they do, our only chance of relief is the doubtful one of an invention that shall make good books cheaper to make than poor ones, or the difficult one of educating the public in the knowledge of what a book should be. The latter is obviously our only rational hope; but before we turn to consider it, let us first look at the book of to-day to see exactly what it is.

The book of to-day is first of all a novel. It has other forms, to be sure,--poetry, essays, history, travels, works of science and art,--but these do not meet the eye of the multitude. We may disregard them for the moment, and, in reply to the question, What is the book of to-day? we may say: It is a one-volume novel, a rather clumsy duodecimo, with a showy cover adorned with a colored picture of the heroine. It is printed on thick paper of poor quality, with type too large for the page, and ugly margins equal all around. Its binding is weak, often good for only a dozen readings, though quite as lasting as the paper deserves. For merits it can usually offer clear type, black ink, and good presswork. But its great fault is that in addressing the buyer it appeals to the primitive instinct for bigness rather than to the higher sense that regards quality. Such is the book of to-day, emphatically what Franklin over a hundred years ago called a "blown" book.

But though the novel fills the multitude's field of vision, it is after all not the only contemporary book; there are others from which we may be able to choose one worthier to be the book of to-day than the self-elected novel. But we shall not find it where commercialism is rife. In the presence of that element we find still only an appeal to the many--which, if successful, means large profits--by an appearance of giving much while really giving little. In this game of illusion the sound principles of bookmaking are forsaken. Books are not designed on the basis of what they are, but on the basis of what they can be made to seem. The result is puffery, not merely in advertising, but still earlier in the dimensions of the book itself--the most modern and profitable instance of using the east wind for a filler.

But at this point a new element is introduced, the public library. The ordinary buyer carries home the distended book, and after he and his family have read it, he cares not if it falls to pieces after the next reading. Neither does he care if it takes up thrice the room that it should, for he no longer gives it room. But the public library, under the existing inflationism, must not only pay too much for its popular books; it must also house them at a needless outlay, and must very early duplicate a serious percentage of their first cost in rebinding them. So burdensome has this last item become that our libraries are consenting to pay a slightly larger first cost in order to avoid the necessity of rebinding; and enterprising publishers, following the lead of a more enterprising bookbinder, are beginning to cater to this library demand, which some day, let us hope, may dominate the entire publishing world for all books worth preserving, and may extend to all the elements of the book.

But fortunately there is here and there the uncommercial publisher and now and then an uncommercial mood in the ordinary publisher. To these we owe a small but important body of work of which no previous age need have been ashamed. Of these books we may almost say that they would be books if there were nothing in them. They have come into being by a happy conjunction of qualified publisher and appreciative buyers. They show what most books may be and what all books will strive to be if ever the majority of book buyers come to know what a good book is. This brings us finally to the book of to-morrow, what we hope it will be and how we can make it so.

The book of to-morrow, the book as it ought to be, will be both better and cheaper than the book of to-day. It can afford to be cheaper, for it will have a large and appreciative public, and for the same reason it will have to be better. The question of supreme importance now, if this public is ever to exist, is: How to educate our book buyers. The answer is not easy, for our book buyers do not realize that they are untrained, and, even if they realized it, the task of training them in the knowledge and love of the well-made book would be difficult. But we can do at least three things: agitate--proclaim the existence of a lore to be acquired, an ignorance and its practices to be eschewed; illustrate--show the good book and the bad together, and set forth, point by point, why the good is superior; last and most important, we must vindicate--back up our words by our deeds, support the publisher who gives the world good books, and leave to starvation or reform the publisher who clings to the old unworthy methods of incapacity or fraud. Even now, if every enlightened booklover in America would carry out this plan as a matter of duty merely where he could do so without inconvenience, nothing less than a revolution would be upon us, and we should have the Book of To-morrow while it is still To-day.

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