You recall the fact that the Adams or flat press was largely used until 1875; that the first flat-bed cylinder press used in America was a Napier brought from England in 1825; that in 1860 William Bullock began to experiment on a rotary self-feeding or web printing press, and finally achieved success in 1865. The web rotary press, as we know, can turn out about ten times as much work in a given time as the flat-bed cylinder press. Considering the fact that many millions of textbooks are now printed annually, requiring the service of high power rotary presses to print their sheets in season for use, is it not indeed fortunate for the educational world that human skill has perfected such a really wonderful instrument as this great machine, so splendidly equipped for the accomplishment of this gigantic task? The binding of books until a comparatively recent date was entirely done by hand. The process was so slow that only a few books could be bound in a day, even by the largest establishment. Folding machines were not used by binders until 1875, rounding and backing machines until about 1888, sewing machines and case-making machines until about 1890, gathering machines until about 1895, casing-in machines until about 1900. It is well known to you that a modern bindery in which up-to-date machinery is installed is able to produce per day from 20,000 to 60,000 three-hundred-page sewed books of octavo size. It is therefore evident that there has been as wonderful an improvement in the method of binding books in the last century as in the method of printing them, and that the output of a modern bindery is now so enormous that it would have made the heads of the early hand binders dizzy just to think of it. _The New England Primer_ was, of course, bound by hand. Its covers were of thin oak that cracked and splintered badly with use, in spite of the coarse blue paper that was pasted over the wood. The back was of leather. Neither back nor sides had any printing on them. Yet, despite its ugly appearance, this book has had a sale of at least two million copies since Harris first printed it in or before 1691. The binding of the old Blue Back Speller until 1829 consisted of back of leather and sides of thin oaken boards pasted over with a dull blue paper. “Blue paper of a somewhat brighter tint,” says Johnson, “was used on the later editions, which gave rise to the name _Blue Back_.” This book, as you know, has enjoyed a sale larger than that of any other schoolbook ever made in this or any other country--a sale which Mr. Appleton has recently told me has reached the stupendous figure of sixty-four millions of copies.