--I mean dull optically, visually.... Like--to put it into terms of sound--like a long, droning recital of a tedious story--no inflection--no climax--no motion. ... I like Mr. McG.'s figure of a "good, interesting talker."
--You'd spice it up with "modernist" feeling?
--No. He's right, there. No fireworks. Keep the explosions _outside_ the book.
--Yes, but you'll notice, not in places where _reading_ is going on.... Another point: letting the market set the _tone_ is not good merchandising. The market needs to be led, by a tone a little higher than its average taste.... And Mr. McG.'s good tool isn't made by majority vote in Congressional committee--it's made by somebody who knows, expertly and practically, just what the tool is intended to do and how it works.
--I am for books as tools--and that means cheaper books.... I think, too, that a lot of the things that make books expensive are false value--brummagem.... But the trade is so firmly established in the tradition of false-front and bustle-rear that I'm afraid it's going to take an awful tussle to get it back to real values again--to the tool basis--to the simplicity and directness and general fitness-for-its-job, for example, that makes a carpenter's plane a masterpiece of appropriate design.
[Illustration]DESMOND FLOWER[Illustration]
From _The Penrose Annual_, Vol. 44. Copyright 1950 by Lund Humphries Ltd., London, and Pitman Publishing Corp., New York. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.
We live in an unhappy age. I suppose that it must be the most wretched known in history since the hordes of Genghis Khan swept across the face of the eastern world. Yet it is not the physical losses--though these are bad enough--which are responsible for the malaise, but a spiritual shortcoming: a lack of direction and a lack of faith. Ours is an age in which there is no single thing, not great or small, which can escape our petty probing, our questioning and our doubts. Nothing is because it is: a shadowy reason must be sought behind.
In the course of man's desire to examine and explain away everything, one of the multitudinous minutiæ which have come in for worried attention is the position of printers, particularly in relation to the publishers they serve. The first four centuries of printing produced ninety-nine per cent of all the books which are worth looking at: yet, at what time during that period did anyone worry about the division of responsibility in a book's production? Then, it was a matter which somehow got done; now, unfortunately, it is a subject for discussion.