When asked to provide a new lay-out for _McClure’s_ magazine, then a recent purchase by Mr. Hearst, I reveled in an opportunity to apply the suggestions presented in the report. Making photographic enlargements of available illustrations and eliminating all non-essentials I used full pages and spreads and prepared the dummy with a new note in typographic headings. Ray Long looked at it and gasped. “Will,” he said, “a magazine like that would outshine and humble _Cosmo_.” Mr. Hearst was still in California. Too bad! I had made suggestions of worth and Mr. Hearst, running true to form, would have weighed their values--not for a revived _McClure’s_, perhaps, but for his other magazines. * * * * * And now there is little more to tell, unless you want to listen to the way I enthuse about our present-day illustrators, their delightfully imaginative composition and masterly use of color. They are grand campaigners! God love them and the editorial lads who give them opportunity and encouragement. They are making an old man mighty happy--yes, making him envy their fun while he is relegated to sheer laziness in the siesta sun of California. Before final retirement I managed to lay out a new _Delineator_, a new Sunday magazine for the _Herald Tribune_ (about 1925), and a lay-out suggested by early New England news-sheets for the _Yale Daily_, and ... well, I guess that’s about all. No! Listen. In these last three lay-outs I continued to use my beloved Caslon! [Illustration] TODAY IN 1954 Do conditions today give the ambitious young designer and printer the same opportunities I enjoyed back in the late Victorian period? Not the same, of course, but even greater. While it is true that the Nineties were literally made to order for a boy who had acquired only such training as was to be had in the sparsely equipped print-ship of a weekly newspaper in a pioneer iron-mining town, today is made to order for the ambitious young designer and printer who is availing himself of the training to be had by even the small-town beginner. Back in my boyhood days a study of such examples of design and printing as now reach even the most remote out-posts of the printing industry, would have taught me more than I learned during a year in the art department, so-called, of the publishing house of Rand McNally in Chicago. The inspiration to be derived from the text and advertising pages of our standard magazines, together with the creative art of school children and the art magazines, quite unknown at the turn of the century, supplies a liberal education teaching the beginner how to appreciate and use the printing and designing advantages of today.