"Mental Efficiency And Other Hints to Men and Women"

I would regard it as only a cheap edition of a library. There would be something about it that would arouse in me a certain benevolent disdain, even though every volume was well printed on good paper and inoffensively bound. Why? Well, although it is my profession in life to say what I feel in plain words, I do not know that in this connection I can say what I feel in plain words. I have to rely on a sympathetic comprehension of my attitude in the bookish breasts of my readers.

In the first place, I have an instinctive antipathy to a " series." I do not want " The Golden Legend " and " The Essays of Elia " uniformed alike in a regiment of books.

It makes me think of conscription and barracks. Even the noblest series of reprints ever planned (not at all cheap, either, nor heterogeneous in matter), the Tudor Translations, faintly annoys me in the mass. Its appearances in a series seems to me to rob a book of something very delicate and subtle in the aroma of its individuality -- something which, it being inexplicable, I will not try to explain.

In the second place, most cheap and handy reprints are small in size. They may be typo- graphically excellent, with large type and opaque paper; they may be convenient to handle; they may be surpassingly suitable for the pocket and the very thing for travel; they may save precious space where shelf-room is limited; but they are small in size. And there is, as regards most literature, a distinct moral value in size.

Do I carry my audience with me? I hope so. Let Paradise Lost" be so produced that you can put it in your waistcoat pocket, and it is no more Paradise Lost." Milton needs a solid octavo form, with stoutish paper and long primer type. I have Walpoles Letters " in Newness " Thin Paper Classics," a marvelous volume of near nine hundred pages, with a portrait and a good index and a beautiful binding, for three and six, and I am exceedingly indebted to Messrs.

Newness for creating that volume. It was sheer genius on their part to do so. I get charming sensations from it, but sensations not so charming as I should get from Mrs. Paget Toynbee's many volumed and grandiose edition, even aside from Mrs.

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