It is on this basis that the printers of today are returning to
"old-style," and other more or less obsolete styles of type which
are less legible and give a cruder appearance to the page than
the "modern." Even a scientific periodical, with ostensibly no
purpose but the most effective presentation of matter with which
its science is concerned, will concede so much to the demands of
this pecuniary beauty as to publish its scientific discussions in
oldstyle type, on laid paper, and with uncut edges. But books
which are not ostensibly concerned with the effective
presentation of their contents alone, of course go farther in
this direction. Here we have a somewhat cruder type, printed on
hand-laid, deckel-edged paper, with excessive margins and uncut
leaves, with bindings of a painstaking crudeness and elaborate
ineptitude. The Kelmscott Press reduced the matter to an
absurdity -- as seen from the point of view of brute
serviceability alone -- by issuing books for modern use, edited
with the obsolete spelling, printed in black-letter, and bound in
limp vellum fitted with thongs. As a further characteristic
feature which fixes the economic place of artistic book-making,
there is the fact that these more elegant books are, at their
best, printed in limited editions.
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