their growing circulation figures as evidence that their effort to educate the public away from fiction is a success. But a rummy suspicion goes the rounds that the figures are cooked. A favorite device for increasing circulation painlessly is to require every reader who uses a reference-book to fill out a slip for it. These are then reckoned as circulation, and thus a man who drops in to look up the capital of North Carolina or the address of his aunt contributes to the circulation of the library he uses. Another potent scheme is to take books into the schools; a third is to offer vacation libraries of twenty-five or fifty books for the Summer. Are they read? Who cares? They make circulation, and circulation, in the librarian's mind, is the summum bonum. Yet even with these aids circulation growth falls below the ratio of population growth in most cities.
II
The librarians themselves grant that they are not keeping up with the output of the publishers. For this they assign one all-sufficient reason, to wit, that they do not receive the appropriations they got fifteen or twenty years ago.
Not that appropriations have failed to go upward. In most of the large cities, in fact, they have doubled since 1914. Reports from 248 cities show that they were twenty-two cents per capita in 1913, twenty-four cents in 1915, and forty-six cents in 1926. But appropriations for schools have quadrupled in the same period. In 1903, the libraries, then much fewer and smaller, got 1.5% of the cities' budgets, while today they get only 1.2%. Meanwhile, expenditures have so far out-distanced appropriations that they are left behind.
Books, for instance. One can arrive at a rough estimate of the increase in their cost by comparing two sets of figures. The publishers annually report the number of new titles they issue, and the Department of Commerce gives out an annual report on the retail value of books printed in the country. The value figures include items not in the publishers' list, such as pamphlets and continued printings of old books for which the demand is not dead. But as the elements other than new books are fairly constant and the comparison is one between years, it is not invalidated.
In 1914, then, the publishers announced about 9800 new titles and new editions. These had an aggregate retail value (including the other items mentioned) of $87,000,000, or something less than $8,926 a publication. In 1927, there were only 8900 new books and new editions, but they had an aggregate retail value in the neighborhood of $280,000,000, giving an average value of nearly $31,500 a publication. Some of this increase can be explained away, no doubt, by the increased sales of reprints and paper-backs. But there remains an imposing rise in prices. The one-dollar novel has become the two-dollar novel, and the seventy-five-cent book of verse a two-dollar book of verse. In other words, the libraries are getting almost twice as much money, but they are paying more than twice as much for their stock in trade.
But that isn't all. A certain portion of these increased appropriations has gone into heavier salary lists, and a still larger bit has gone into pork. Aldermen have found that a branch library in the home ward is a good fence-builder. Thus the money goes, leaving little for books. The Brooklyn Public Library spent $126,560 for them in 1914 and only $174,080 in 1927, with prices more than doubled, and the Akron Public Library (an extreme case) bought $8,137 worth in the former year and only $4,134 worth in the latter. Small wonder, then, that the libraries try to shunt their patrons from the new fiction to the antique history, travel and biography. They can't afford the new books, and their failure to provide them works into a vicious circle of declining public interest, declining pressure on city councils, and declining appropriations.
Meanwhile, ambitious libraries con-
