What is taste? To me, taste is the ladder by which we mount toward greater perceptions of beauty, by exchanging, progressively, that thing which we recognize instinctively as not altogether good, for something we recognize as less gross, and, in turn, exchanging that thing for something more pleasing, until, finally, we become more and more capable of distinguishing between mere personal opinion and the opinions of those whose taste is accepted as fine; our taste has become now a discriminating faculty which we exercise almost intuitively.

Taste in printing determines the form the typography is to take; the selection of a congruous type; the quality and suitability for its purpose of the paper to be used; the care, and labor, and time, and cost of materials devoted to its production, and all in direct ratio to its ultimate destination and worth. Taste determines, too, whether the work shall bear decoration or not, how much, and where it is to be introduced; in short, what is admissible and what is becoming.

The quality of taste revealed in the great printing of the past is, usually, the outcome of simple thinking, simplicity in form and in execution. Quaintness in an old piece of printing may be admired because of its sincerity; to revive or imitate it in a piece of modern work is distasteful, hateful even, because of its affectation.