“G. W. S.,” of the New York “Tribune,” speaks of the achievement of the Illustrators as “colossal vulgarities.” Mr. Percy Fitzgerald observes: “The pitiless Grangerite slaughters a book for a few pictures, just as an epicure has had a sheep killed for the sweetbread”
hese are very choice hard words. There is much extravagance, but some justice in all this criticism. As a question of economics I do not find any great difference between a Book-worm who spends thousands of dollars in constructing one attractive book from several not attractive, and one who spends a thousand dollars in binding a book, or for an example of a famous old binder. If there is any difference it is in favor of the Grangerite, who improves the volume for the intelligent purposes of the reader, as against the other who merely caters to “the lust of the eye”
I am willing to concede that the Grangerite is sometimes guilty of some gross offenses against good taste and good sense. The worst of these is when he extends the text of the volume itself to a larger page in order to embrace large prints. This is grotesque, for it spoils the very book. He is also blamable when he squanders valuable prints and time and patience on mere book lumber, such as long rows of histories; and when he stuffs and crams his book; and when his pictures are not of the era of the events or of the time of life of the persons described; and when they are too large or too small to be in just proportion to the printed page; and when the book is so heavy and cumbersome that no one can handle it with comfort or convenience. Above all he is blamable, in my estimation, when he entrusts the selection of prints to an agent. Such agency is frequently very unsatisfactory, and at all events the Illustrator misses the sport of the hunt. Few men would entrust the furnishing or decorating of a house, the purchase of a horse, or the selection of a wife to a third person, and the delicate matter of choosing prints for a book is essentially one to be transacted in person. The danger of any other procedure in the case of a wife was illustrated by Cromwell’s agency for Henry Eighth in the affair of Anne of Cleves, the “Flanders mare.”
ut when it is properly done, it seems to me that the very best thing the Book-Worm ever does is to illustrate his books, because this insures his reading them, at least with his fingers. Not always, for a certain chronicler of collections of privately illustrated books in this country narrates, how “relying upon the index” of a book, which he illustrated, he inserted a portrait of Sam Johnson, the famous, whereas “the text called for Sam Johnson, an eccentric dramatic writer,” etc. His binder, he says, laughed at him for being ignorant that there “two Sam Johnsons” (there are four in the biographical dictionaries, one of whom was an early president of King’s College in New York). But if done personally and conscientiously it is a means of valuable culture. As one of the oldest survivors of the genus Illustrator in this country, I have thus assumed to offer an apology and defense for my much berated kind. And now let me make a few suggestions as to what seems to me the most suitable mode of the pursuit.
