As has been already noted, in a moment of enthusiasm Mr. Proctor once said to the present writer that it was impossible to find a fifteenth century book that was really ugly. This was certainly putting the case for his beloved incunables a peg too high, for there were plenty of bad printers before 1500, and even such a master as Jenson was by no means uniformly careful as to the quality of his presswork. But one of the legacies which the early printers received from the scribes was the art of putting their text handsomely on the page, and the difference which this makes in the appearance of a book is very marked, little as many modern printers and publishers attend to it. But in the books of the best printers of our own day, as well as in those of the best of the fifteenth century, from 65 per cent to 72 per cent of the height of the page is devoted to the text, from 28 per cent to 35 per cent being reserved for the upper and lower margins, of which at least two-thirds is for the lower and not more than one-third for the upper. As compared with the height of a page of type the breadth is usually in the proportion of about 45 to 70 (a trifle more in a quarto), and here again the outer margin is at least twice as great as the inner. Thus in a book with a page measuring 10 by 7(1/4) inches, the type-page should measure about 7 by 4(3/4) inches, with a lower margin of about 2 inches, an upper of 1 inch, an outer of 1(3/4) inches, and an inner of (3/4) inch. It will be greatly to the advantage of book-buyers to bear these proportions in mind, in order to measure how much a book offered to them has been cut down, and also to be able to instruct their binders as to how to reduce the absurd margins of some modern "Large Paper" copies to more artistic dimensions. Whether it is legitimate further to reduce the margins of an old book which has already been mangled by a binder in order to get the proportions better balanced is a nice question of taste. If a two-inch lower margin has been halved and a one-inch upper margin left intact, if the upper margin is reduced, the book will become a pleasant "working copy" instead of an obviously mangled large one, and the collector must settle in his own conscience whether this be a sufficient justification for snipping off a centimetre of old paper.