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Show 1h c·t And the agent said, "Buy it for your children." o.f Taeg astrtye And the man replied, " I. ha~e no c h"ld !'' I ren " Then buy it for your wife. . . . " I have no wife-and look here," said the man, "tf I bought your book, do you know what I would do with it? " "No-w hat would you do with it ? " asked the agent. "I 'd throw it at the cat! " "Put your name right here!" gleefully cried the book agent. And so books became so cheap that men utilized them to throw at the cat. Instead of spelling it missal- they spelled it missile. In Tagaste they used to cut down a tree, saw it into blocks, feed them into a machine, make the sawdust into a dried paste, and print a newspaper on it, all in forty-six minutes by the watch. The rage for invention increased-typesetting machines came in, and typesetters by the thousand, too old to learn a new trade, were taken from their cases, and walked the streets looking for work, and not finding it, prayed for death. · By the use of photography, the engraver was abolished in many instances, & the illuminator had long turned to dust. Even the bookbinder got up one morning, and like 2 Othello, found his occupation gone-paper made to The City look like leather was pasted by machinery over o.f 1"'agaste boards made from wood pulp. Other covers were fed into a machine by a girl, who was paid two boboli a day, and were stamped in gaudy red or blue. The books were stitched on specially-made sewing machines, and no sheets of paper were folded by hand-all were fed in to a machine. And so in a factory where ten thousand books a day were made, there was neither a printer, an illustrator, an illuminator nor a binder. There were sad-eyed girls and yellow, haggard boys who stood all day & fed sheets into a machine, week after week, month after month, twelve hours a day, and they were paid just enough money to keep them from starvation. And so to us who view the condition through the dim lapse of time, it seems curious that there should have existed such a mad rage to make books cheap. Was the country so poor that buyers could not afford to pay more than the price of a ham sandwich for a volume ? Not at all-this happened in the richest country in the world, and in cities where there were hundreds of homes that cost upwards of a hundred thousand dinars each. But the rage for cheapness was in the air-not how good can this be made, but how cheap, was the motto. .3 |