--No. It's got to be in boards--people want them that way--it's one of your "realistic" details.
--In your "new angle" volume would you have the insides as you do them now?
--No. There again I'd let the demand shape the product. Your market doesn't give a hang about the type and printing so long as they can read it.
--Not much. It's as true now as it was then.
--But all this talking and writing and lecturing....
--Two or three thousand persons, perhaps--two or three thousand have become "book conscious" as they say--the limited edition crowd. I'm dealing with the ten million.... There's a lot of whoosh in all that book beautiful stuff, you know.
--Mr. ---- thinks it helps to tell them about type and paper, etc.
--I know. It doesn't. They don't understand his little notices--it's all shop talk. He likes 'em. He thinks they give the books tone, I daresay. I think it doesn't matter a damn one way or the other. All that shop detail is zero. They don't care to know and they don't _need_ to know. Just make your book so it will read handily and let it go at that.
--Have you got this "new angle" idea to a point where you could describe a book made that way?
--Well. I might. Take the cover--I'd have board covers and cloth. But I wouldn't stamp them. Bright color. Gay. Patterned cloth sometimes. I'd have the simplest kind of paper label on the backbone. Printed from type--standard affair--library label that you could read. No embroidery, just plain function. On the least expensive terms possible. Make it a kind of house-trademark feature.... Inside I'd forget all I knew about fine printing--the art--it's a great art--forget all I knew--start fresh with the _use_.
--That's right. I do. In its place. The place isn't trade books. You can't have fine printing in trade books. All you can have along _that_ line is cheap imitation--celluloid collar and no shirt. If you go out with your imitation fine printing as a mark to shoot at you come back with what we turn out now, all of us--shabby genteel, to the limit. My book won't try to get by with a paper collar. My book won't have _any_ collar. It will get down to the basis of realism--a handy, efficient, _cheap_ tool for temporary use. Read it--throw it away. Who saves a book now? If you save it, where are you going to put it? In the car?