If we could now examine the libraries as they existed at intervals of one hundred years, say one, two, three or four centuries back, what would we find? Probably very little factual

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The First Agricultural Report

GRAPHIC PRESENTATION

information. Even books in our grandfathers' attics, if classified, would be short on factual material and long on abstruse discussion of theories, most of which were of a religious nature or perhaps vaguely astronomic or otherwise theoretical considerations of the universe.

The development of printing and the gradual cheapening of paper resulted in people of Europe and this country being exposed not to pictures but to more and more words, words not only from the printed page but from ministers of the gospel who, being of the educated class and able to read, obtained their inspiration from the printed material which came to them.

Let us consider bookmaking in the early days from the standpoint of cost. There would seem to be little reason why illustrations should not be generally used. Books were made from wooden blocks even before the use of movable metal type. Illuminated manuscripts and early books of similar pattern used illustrative methods which today we would think prohibitive from the cost standpoint. Labor must have been relatively cheap, especially in monasteries or other religious institutions which in those days produced so much of the literary output. Probably there was nothing whatever to prevent the development of illuminated graph charts long before the days of William Playfair except lack of reliable factual data from which to make the charts. People of those days must have found out, just as we find out so often now, that if we start to chart our facts, we are frequently stopped by the startling insufficiency of the data, the annoyance that the data may have a single gap in its continuity, or that the data have not been kept on a uniform basis over the period of time under consideration.