The machine method of binding books omits many processes of hand binding, and combines others into one simple operation. In hand binding, one book is the center of attention until it is finished, and each volume requires slightly different treatment. In machine binding, the method is to repeat one process thousands of times, adopting the factory system with its division of processes and its labor-saving machines. A pamphlet should be folded and its sections placed in proper order as accurately as a book bound in cloth or morocco, but as it is to be covered only with heavy paper, it requires no such careful pressing, trimming, and retrimming, rounding and backing, glueing, lining-up, drawing-in, and all the other diverse manipulations by which the artistic binder assures the preservation of the sheets in a solid and substantial cover made by hand. A periodical is a species of pamphlet, but it is distinguished by uniformity of size week after week or month after month. Thus it lends itself admirably to machine production. Women are standing on the threshold of the bindery trade. All the work of preparing the sheets is theirs, folding, placing them in sequence, and attaching them together with paste, thread or wire. In pamphlet binding they put on the covers, but in edition binderies, they have no share at all in the important work of the forwarding department, and they enter the finishing department only in order to lay the gold on the covers and to examine and wrap the completed volumes. Will the process of change give them greater or less opportunities? The machine is the great fact which looms large before the eyes of bindery women, when they describe changes in their trade. They accept it as they would accept a rainy day but it usually spells “out of work” for someone in the bindery, and the calamity of unemployment is more immediate and real to the workers than are the advantages of better methods of production.