Exactly why the proportions here laid down, with their limits of variation, are right for books cannot easily be set forth. It is easiest to see in the case of the relation between the inner and outer margins. As William Morris was never tired of insisting, the unit in a book is, not a single page, but the two pages which can be seen at the same time. The two inner margins separate the two type-pages by a single band of white, which, if each inner margin were as large as the outer, would become insufferably conspicuous. As for the proportions between the lower and upper margins, the explanation may lie in the angle at which we habitually read books, or by the need for leaving room for the reader to hold the book in his hands. But whether it be a matter of inherent rightness or merely of long-established convention, the pleasure of handling a book with correct margins is very great, and a collector who secures an uncut copy of even a poorly printed book of the period when margins were understood, will find that it presents quite a pleasing and dignified appearance. And so in regard to other points, any book which illustrates the relations of the early printers to the scribes, the difficulties which they experienced in their work and the expedients by which they were surmounted deserves, whatever its date or present price, to be reckoned as a real incunable, and the collector who gets together a few dozen books of this kind will have far better sport for his outlay than he who is tied down too rigorously by chronology. FOOTNOTES: [27] It will be so much the better if the collector can add to them a copy of one of the early books printed at Rome (the German ones are too rare) in which there still survives the text of the rubrics, printed not in their appropriate places, but on a separate leaf or quire for the guidance of the rubricator. [28] By Jenson and many early printers in Italy, and by Husner and a few others in Germany, the majuscules of the founts used in the text were massed together in headings with admirable effect. But for a time the heavy heading types carried all before them. CHAPTER VII EARLY GERMAN AND DUTCH ILLUSTRATED BOOKS [Illustration: VIII. AUGSBURG, G. ZAINER, C. 1475 TUBERINUS. GESCHICHT VON DEM SELIGEN KIND SYMON]