FORTUNES IN WAITING.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume III, Issue 119, 5 March 1901, Page 4

FORTUNES IN WAITING.

Despite latter-day exploitation of all sorts and conditions of fields of enterprise, for the brains of the mighty there still remain fortunes in waiting. There is yet undiscovered Tom Tidiers’s grounds of vast extent, where the picking up of gold and silver is dependent only upon the forging of a key with which to win admission. In the book-trade alone, there are fortunes beyond the dream of avarice awaiting the man who can do only one of several things. “ Why do publishers make some books so heavy ? ’ asks Ihe Publisher's Circular, referring to their literal avoirdupois, uot their literary merits. Like the solution of the historic enquiry, ns to why a miller wears a white hat, the answer is primitive, “ lleeauso they can’t help it.’’ They are at their wits’ end to properly print photo-zinc blocks on paper of sufficient lightness, combined with a polished surface, and tho man who in/ents a “feather-weight” paper with a proper surface for process pictures can claim No. 1 fortune without further hesitation. There is another fortune waiting for the binder who can find some modem material which wiil take the place of the strawboard, or millboard, at present used in the manufacture of covers for books, something very much lighter, and yet sufficiently strong for the purpose. At present, binders continually make the mistake of putting just as heavy a cover on a thick light book as one just as thick, but twice as heavy. The post office authorities are the only gainers from a policy of this character. Bo much for two hinls to fortune-hunters; but there is still a third waiting to be appropriated by the man who invents a cheap and rapid metholof fastening together the sheets of tho popular sixpenny and other periodicals, in such a way that tho pages will open out fiat. The present plan of sewing with wire makes it impossible to read these magazines with comfort. Indeed, there is one subscriber to a well-known magazine who goes to the trouble of extracting the wire stitches with a champagne opener. The book-trade, indeed, seems to lag far behind others in rho matter of improvement, for the binding of to-day, if efi’ecied by speedier and more summary methods, is no more effective, and certainly not as permanent, as that of fifty years ago.