MATERIAL REVIEWS.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,-11 have spent a good part of my life trying to bring about improvement in industrial design, and I do feel, so far as Leicester is concerned, that we have made some progress. Anybody who comes to the town at once notices what a large number of well-lettered signs, name-plates, window tickets, &e., there are—more than in any other town in the kingdom.
In the same way I should think the level of our factory and domestic architecture here is higher than in any other town. None of it is what you call thrilling, but, as Professor Lethaby has been preaching for many years, " it is the common things that matter most. Our lives are mainly concerned with the common things, and the world is really carried on by them." What we are doing is putting right the details and trying to get some fitness and balance into things—really at bottom what the old Greeks did, and what our universities have talked about for years, but never applied. You can even get a plain, honest head-stone for your grave at Leicester. Good lettering is the basis and best method of teaching this fitness ; that is why some of us in the Design and Industries Association have preached printing almost ad nauseam.
In our own Dryad Cane Furniture it is very hard work fighting to keep up a standard or pioneering a new design. Fifteen years ago, when our first catalogue came out, we were copied within a month of its appearance, and it is mainly thanks to the excellent support we have had from our workers that we have been able to keep up a standard which has not
• yet been equalled in any range of cane furniture, though -naturally here and there individual chairs-have been• quite well made. My own feeling about the whole question 'of art and industry is that until we can teach more appreciation of good work and _straightforward principles of. design in our-
ur- secondary
secondary schools and universities we arc not likely to get very forward, and modern conditions are all the while sovar- sting the man who makes from the man who buys.—I am,
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