APPENDIX II
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
The great source for the study of the newspaper must be the newspaper itself. The bulk of long runs of the daily paper must, however, always prevent the usual public or college library from having on its shelves more than a very limited number of bound volumes of newspapers. But great collections extending over many years and covering every part of the world are found in the Library of Congress, in the library of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin[1] at Madison, in the library of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, Mass., in the Boston Public Library, and in the New York Public Library. For all ordinary purposes, however, the exchanges found in any newspaper office, even the smallest, will repay careful study.
Books written in regard to the press are surprisingly few and nearly all are of recent date.[2] They can, in general, be grouped into two classes,—the recollections of newspaper men, and the lives of eminent editors, correspondents, critics, cartoonists, and other persons connected with the press.
Personal memoirs are often random recollections, often garrulous, some times censorious,and, especially the earlier ones, usually written so carelessly and so lacking in a sense of order and system as to give rise to the constant query how such work could come from professional journalists. Possibly the explanation is unconsciously given by the author of one of these works when he says: "Although I had many other things to do, I knocked off the present volume within the space of little more than a fortnight." Their value per se is often the slightest and is found for the most part in the revelation they give of the financial "hard luck" that has often attended the founding of new papers and the consequent reaction of this on the private fortunes of those connected with them.
Lives of editors, correspondents and cartoonists as a rule suffer from the temptation of their authors to make excursions into contemporaneous politics and to explain the criticisms directed against the subjects of the biography. Very few biographers of journalists have been able to make the persons of whom they are writing take on flesh and blood and become living men. It must be said in extenuation of this defect that biography is the
