Page:The Story of the House of Cassell (book).djvu/267



few people is there fascination in machinery. Cogs and wheels, and whirling cylinders, are so much confusion and nerve-racking noise. The poetry of motion with its pulsating rhythm does not call to the heart of the majority. But it is the experience of the kindly chaperons who "show the works" to the visitors that the printing machines enchain the interest of all alike. There is a magnetism of attraction as one stands on the flying balcony overlooking the main machine-room. One inky leviathan in the well below is turning blank sheets into neatly printed pages, another is converting a mass of white into a bright-red section of what will be a sheet of coloured illustrations for Little Folks. In another part of this orderly medley of waving racks, revolving cylinders, and mysteriously disappearing rolls of paper, magazine sheets and other periodicals are tumbling out of the forest of rollers which represent the "rotary" that produces them from the blank paper, printed, stitched and counted, ready for the hungry trolley that whisks the piles away at top speed to the lift.

Yes! a marvellous advance from the early days of the Yard, when the coaching inn was first converted into a "Working Men's University." In the 'sixties Cassell's were proud of their machinery. Just on the left, where to-day the publishing department dispenses literature to the trade, and in the basement, where now is the paper store, the first lot of printing machinery was located—twenty-three machines, which were then considered to be the very acme of progress, the high-water mark of perfection. Dear old things, rumbling away at a most sedate speed—it was marvellous then; it is almost