—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.
COMPOSED IN ELECTRA TYPES
DESMOND FLOWER
The Publisher and the Typographer
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.