The Sin of Small Type

Every few years there goes through China the ophthalmy, a disease of the eye which leaves thousands of people in partial or total blindness. Small print is doing the same work in this country. There are type-founders blasting the eyesight of the people. There are publishers who pride themselves on the number of words they can get within a square inch, and under the process we are suffering a great national ophthalmy. Better not read at all than kill your eyes with small print. God gives us only two organs of sight, and the penalty of trifling with them is lifelong twilight or midnight of vision. There is consequently a great rush upon opticians for spectacles. Girls and boys of fifteen at school must have their eye-glass astride the nose.

There is a fearful sarcasm in the action of the man who comes on the railway-train at Albany with spectacles for sale, as much as to say,” With those fine-print books and newspapers you have been slaying your eyes all the way from Buffalo;

I come in as an optical undertaker, just to try on you this coffin of spectacles.” Young men and maidens, nothing you can hang on the bridge of your nose in the way of eye-glasses can give you such dignity or grace as a clear eye, blue or black or hazel, unharmed by dissipation, or unextinguished by the type-setters.

Authors and publishers are often chagrined at the blunders of the printing-press. A Frenchman, having counted three hundred typographical errors in his favorite book, gave up the ghost, and got out of the world as soon as he could. We wonder that a similar departure was not witnessed when one of our popular magazines was, by mistake of the printer-boy, called “The Epileptic Review.” But the worst of all typographical errors is that of small type.

Let publishers not forget the failing sight of the old. As age comes on, father and mother cannot go out as much as they used to, and are more dependent upon reading for entertainment. Put not before their diminished sight typography that blurs and confounds them. In plain print tell them the news of the world out of which they go, and the news of the world which they are about to enter. Let the hymn-book, and the Bible, and the religious newspaper be in distinct letter-press.

The poorest compliment ever paid to the Lord’s

THE SIN OF SMALL TYPE. 2J

prayer was the cutting it in small letters on a fivecent piece. It is a hard thing for an octogenarian to “read his title clear” in type smaller than nonpareil or agate. It is a grand thing to have a page so plain that old age can read it either with or without spectacles. Mother had two pairs — her “near-sighted” spectacles and her “far-sighted” ones. She wore them both at once — one upon the forehead, the other on the nose, the distance of the object deciding which pair she would use. But one day she took off the “far-sighted” spectacles with which she had often looked toward heaven, and put on the “near-sighted” ones: it was just as she went into the Gate.

e.