THE TRAVELLING SALESMAN 303 By HARRY A. THOMPSON, formerly representing John Lane, and Small, Maynard & Company, Publishers. Now one of the Associate Editors of the _Saturday Evening Post_, Philadelphia.
SELLING AT WHOLESALE 320 By JOSEPH E. BRAY, formerly with A. C. McClurg & Company, Wholesalers, Chicago. Now with the Outing Publishing Company, New York.
SELLING AT RETAIL 328 By WARREN SNYDER, Manager of the Book Stores of John Wanamaker, Philadelphia and New York.
SELLING BY SUBSCRIPTION 339 By CHARLES S. OLCOTT, Manager of the Subscription Department of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Company, New York.
SELLING AT AUCTION 350 By JOHN ANDERSON, Jr., President of the Anderson Auction Company, New York.
SELECTING FOR A PUBLIC LIBRARY 362 By ARTHUR E. BOSTWICK, Chief of the Circulation Department of the New York Public Library.
RARE AND SECOND-HAND BOOKS 370 By CHARLES E. GOODSPEED, Dealer in Rare and Second-hand Books, Boston.
To the hasty observer printing seems the simplest of arts or crafts. The small boy who has been taught to spell can readily arrange lettered blocks of wood in readable words, and that arrangement is rated by many as the great feature of printing. With his toy printing-press he can stamp paper upon inked type in so deft a manner that admiring friends may say the print is good enough for anybody. The elementary processes of printing are indeed so simple that they might have justified Dogberry in adding typography to the accomplishments of the "reading and writing that come by nature." With this delusion comes the desire for amateur performance. Men who would not undertake to make a coat or a pair of shoes are confident of their ability to make or to direct the making of a book.
In real practice this apparent simplicity disappears. Commercial printing is never done quickly or cheaply by amateur methods. The printing-house that undertakes to print miscellaneous books for publishers must be provided with tons of type of different faces and sizes. It needs type-making and type-setting machines of great complexity, printing-presses of great size and cost, and much curious machinery in the departments of electrotyping and bookbinding; but these machines, intended to relieve the drudgery of monotonous manual labor, do not supplant the necessity for a higher skill in craftsmanship. They really make that craftsmanship more difficult.