STUDIES ON MUSEUMS AND KINDRED INSTITUTIONS. 461 



15 feet. These heij^hts so greatly exceed the heights of the book 

 stacks, which are 7 feet 6 inches high, and which can be used without 

 ladders, that a large free space remains above them, and the books are 

 also lighted laterally from above. This has been done to give them 

 "light and breathing space," but I am not aware that books suffer 

 even in closed cases, and it contradicts the principles of modern library 

 arrangement, according to which the books should be compressed into 

 as narrow a space as possible, which, owing to the rapid increase of 

 books in our prolific times, is the only possible method of preventing 

 a too wide extension of the building. For this reason stacks are piled 

 directly on stacks with hardly any free space between. Sufficient air 



Fig. .17.— Newberry Library, Principal entrance. 



for " breathing" is afforded by good ventilation, and the electric light 

 to-day affords means of temporary illumination of the darkest corners, 

 while the daylight, bleaching everything that it falls upon, can not be 

 considered in any case as the most desirable. The book stacks are 10 

 inches deep. ^ 



In March, 1901, there were in the library 229,361 books, pamphlets 

 (71,859), maps, manuscripts, etchings, and autographs (of which 56 

 per cent were in languages other than English), an average for the 

 fourteen years of 16,000 numbers a year, so that at the end of 1901 

 there will be almost one-quarter of a million. The present building 

 has room for 900,000; with the prospective later building there would 



