stantly bite off more than they can chew. Not content with "taking literature to the people," their elder and legitimate aim, they have of late tried to make their libraries the chief fountains of learning in their communities and the only book-distributing agencies. Newark conducts direct-mail advertising campaigns among engineers and business men with all the fervor of a company pushing a new safety razor; Los Angeles and San Francisco call upon college professors and students to use the local libraries for all purposes; grandiloquent posters in other American libraries advertise library work as "the profession upon which all others depend," and the librarians do their best to make this a fact by inviting specialists of all kinds to do their research work in public libraries.
This is an invasion of the field of the university and special libraries, and the process has been accelerated by the bequests of well-meaning collectors and the natural tendency of all librarians to specialize. The New York Public Library now has no less than eighty-three special collections, including groups on such topics as magic, penmanship and shooting. But a special collection makes a heavy drain on the resources of the library that maintains it, for it involves the purchase of numbers of rare and expensive books and the services of highly-trained assistants for the benefit of small groups of students. These students often come from considerable distances, and while the specialization is no doubt of benefit to them, it leaves the general reader with a feeling that he has been told to go hang.
The paradoxical cheapness of certain sorts of literature is one of the reasons why the general reader is quite willing to keep away. Public libraries have always received their warmest support from that comparatively well-educated section of the public which reads the classics and semi-classics by choice. Fifteen years ago most of these books could be had only in out-of-print editions at high prices. But then came the Everyman's Library and the Modern Library, and now nearly every publisher has something of the sort. The annual number of new editions of old books has gone up from 760 to 1,450 in fifteen years, while the number of new books has sunk from 10,135 to 7,450. Every purchaser of these reprints is a patron lost to a public library.
Parallel with this is the discovery by the publishers that the star system could be applied to literature. The increasing effort given to making the best-sellers even better sellers has thrown on the libraries the burden of providing an immense number of copies of the two or three books at the head of the current list, with the certainty that in a year or two they will cease circulating for good and all. Stacks of such successes as "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," "Red of Redfields," and "Michael O'Halloran" can be found gathering dust in every large public library in America.
Meanwhile, a new class of readers has risen to call for these best-sellers. These new readers are the stenographers and shop-girls, sheiks and shebas who want "good live fiction." A compilation by the Syracuse Public Library shows that 12,109 of its card-holders are school-boys and school-girls, that only 5,134 of them are business and professional men and women, and that the 12,000-odd remaining are largely stenographers and clerks who like books with a kick. Twenty years ago a similar compilation by the Albany Library showed about as large a proportion of students, but the proportions of the other readers were reversed.
These new readers represent the second and third generations of the wave of immigration that struck this country between 1890 and 1910. The old folks read the Staats-Zeitung and the Novy when they read anything; the youngsters are brought up on the tabloids and carry the literary tastes inculcated by these sheets into the libraries. "Fewer old people patronize the library now," said the librarian of a
