DECORATION AND ITS USES: 
By EDWARD JOHNSTON 
HESE papers will deal chiefly with the decoration that is 
appropriate to books and letters, and, in particular, will con- 
sider what the modern craftsman may expect to get out of 
the study or practice of penmanship. But as the principles 
of decoration, which I hope to discover here, are in all crafts 
fundamentally alike, the larger title may be justified. 
As the word decoration has become somewhat artificialised, not to say 
degraded, it is Worth recalling its more primitive and exact meaning. I take 
the following definition of the verb from an ordinary standard dictionary 
(Annandalt-:'s Concise D. 1899) : 
Decorate, (L. decoro, decaralum, from decus, decor, comeliness, grace; 
akin decent.) To deck with something becoming or ornamental ; to adorn ; 
to beautify; to embellish.   
I should like to lay particular stress on the Latin derivation-comeliness 
andigrace-and the kinship with the word decent. 
Again, as the word Use is one for which we all have a private interpreta- 
tion and is therefore apt to be narrowed and ab-used, it is worth refreshing 
our memories with the wider sense of a dictionary definition. From the 
same dictionary I take the following : 
Use, n. [O. Fr. us, use, from L. usus, use, a using, service, need, from 
utor, usus, to use (whence also uliliéy, ulensil,   abuse,  The act 
of employing anything, or the state of being employed;   the quality 
that makes a thing proper for a purpose;   continued or repeated 
practice; wont; usage;   
In this reconsideration of my title I find that there are four meanings 
that I wish to make clear : 
(1) The Value of Decoration (Anglice, " What's the use of it P  
(2) The Appropriateness of it (Anglice, " Does it lit P  
(3) and (4) Its Practice and Usage (Anglice, " How it's done " and 
" How it works'_"). 
Later in these papers I hope to develop and meet the first two questions, 
here I shall deal specially with practice and usage, and, in the discussion of 
the craft with which I am most familiar-namely, pemnanship-try to show 
" how it is done." No man, however well he knows his craft, can tell another 
" how it is done " ; he can show to another, by example of his craft, only 
what that other is able to see-in most cases, a series of unrelated details. 
No man can know " how it is clone " until he himself has done the thing- 
and even to that achievement, in its ultimate sense, we can only approach 
I16a1'61'- Let me, therefore, ask the reader who would approach this subject 
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