250 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ical contrivances may easily put into the hands of the public 

 several thousand books in a day. It may serve a good purpose iu 

 so doing. It may find its proper field in performing part of the 

 book-lending work in any large library. But it certainly can not 

 compete, from an educational point of view, with a service in 

 which the attendant puts himself for the moment in the inquirer's 

 place, and himself goes to the shelves with an intelligent interest 

 in the inquirer's wants. 



Near the counter should be the catalogue room ; and the pri- 

 vate official catalogue of the library should be open to the public, 

 if possible. Such an arrangement saves much costly duplication. 

 It is also desirable to have the information about the library's 

 books which is stored up in the catalogue room made available 

 for the public at short notice. 



Near the delivery room and not far from the main book room 

 should be a special room for children, in which may be kept all 

 juvenile literature, so arranged that the children may make their 

 own choice from the shelves. This will prove a strong attraction 

 to the young people, will increase their use of books of the better 

 class, will free other parts of the library from the disturbance 

 children necessarily entail, and will save time and labor at the 

 delivery counter. 



The room for reference work, if the whole library is not 

 thrown open for this purpose, must be not far from the main 

 book room, must be near the catalogue, and should be near the 

 delivery counter. It should be so planned that those who come 

 to the library simply for a book, or to ask a question, or on sight- 

 seeing, will not be compelled to pass through it. 



The retiring rooms and lunch rooms for assistants, the conver- 

 sation or class rooms for special work, the rooms for rough work 

 as mending or binding and the manual part of the preparation 

 of books for the shelf the periodical room, and the newspaper 

 room can all be placed at a distance from the library's real cen- 

 ter, the delivery counter ; though the last two must be near enough 

 to the reference room to make it easy for readers in the latter to 

 consult the current numbers of magazines and journals. 



The office of the librarian in charge should be near to the 

 delivery room, and preferably not far from either catalogue or 

 reference room. 



The books in the public library should be selected with refer- 

 ence to the people who will use them. The people who make use 

 of the free public library are, sixty per cent or more of them, 

 readers of little but the newspapers, the popular magazine, and 

 novels. The reading room should supply, and generously, the 

 newspaper and the periodical. The circulating department should 

 put much thought and much energy into fiction. The fiction 



