.. most of the illumination
of the books was done by girls, even by children after school hours. The
outlines of the letters and objects to be hand-illumined were printed in
with the text, the girls and children merely coloured them between the
lines.
In each department, hidden behind gorgeous, flowing curtains, were
time-clocks, on which employees rang up when they came to work, and when
they left. Also, each worker was supposed to receive dividends--which
dividends consisted in pairs of mittens and thick woolen socks
distributed by the foremen at Christmas time ... or maybe an extra
dollar in pay, that week.
"Two dollars a week less than a fellow would draw at any other place
that ran the same sort of business," grumbled a young bookbinder who was
by way of being a poet, "and a pair of woolen mittens or socks, or an
extra dollar, once a year, as dividends!"
However, I think that the artworkers had finer lodgings and board than
most workers could have supplied for themselves ... and the married
couples lived in nicer houses ... and they heard the best music, had the
best books to read, lived truly in the presence of the greatest art and
thought of the world ... and heard speak in the chapel, from time to
time, all the distinguished men of the country ... who came, sooner or
later, to visit Spalton and am? community....
What though the wages were not so big, what though you rang up the time
of arrival at work and the time of departure from it, on hidden
time-clocks, what though every piece of statuary, every picture, every
stick of furniture, had, on the bottom of it, its price label, or,
depending from it, its tag that told the price at which it might be
bought!.
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