Our Exchanges.

The Bookmart for June begins a new volume, and is much improved in appearance. It has abandoned the unpleasant small type of the earlier numbers, and comes out in a bold and clear small-pica.

The American Lithographer and Printer is always practical, and is always full of correspondence on matters affecting the interests of the trade. The subject of Freetrade v. Protection is argued out in its columns by some of the keenest wits in the country. Mr Louis Prang, the great lithographer, has a contribution on the subject filling five columns. « Protection, » he says, « is a policy of war and not of peace, such as befits a great and leading nation like our own; it is a policy of spoliation of the working man in the interests of a few manufacturers and monopolists; it is a policy that tends towards state socialism; it is a policy that begets wholesale demoralization of the nation. Carried to its logical end, it would hurl us back into barbarism where brute force of the individual reigns supreme."—Another correspondent hits a big blot in the practice of submitting designs free. « What fools these mortals be! » he exclaims. « Fancy twelve designs for a hanger, 14 x 29, in at least ten colors (no limit in fact), involving a portrait, submitted recently by as many (twelve) litho houses to one firm in St. Louis! Figure average cost $75 (low estimate), and you have $900 thrown away, for they were all rejected! » One of the twelve victims writes on the following week. For many years he refused to make sketches without remuneration; but was at length driven to it by competing houses. The outside profit that could have been made upon the job was $800, so that even if the work had been given out, the trade as a whole, having spent $900 in rejected designs, would have been $100 the poorer.— There is too much of this kind of suicidal competition in New Zealand.

The Typographic Advertiser is of opinion that fecundity in type designing has gone too far. The editor complains, and not without reason, of the many new designs which « seem to have been made with no aim whatever and with no purpose to fill. » This might almost have been a commentary on the specimens in the number before us. American founders would do well to take a lesson from the Germans, who, with a fertility of production that is simply marvellous, always have a well-defined and intelligent purpose, and whose ornamental designs are becoming the standard, and are fast pushing rival styles out of the field.

L'Intermediare (Lyons), contains a biography with portrait, of M. Hippolyte Marinoni, the celebrated inventor and manufacturer of printing machines.