CHAIRMAN’S PREFACE. 
The appended Reports of the Chief Librarian and the Curators 
of the Museums and Art Galleries, will be found full of interest, as 
illustrating the important part taken by those Institutions in the 
daily life of a great City. The fact that the use made of the 
Lending Libraries alone is, in its proportion to the total population, 
three times what it was thirty years ago, will have its significance 
for the future historian of social progress. And he will assuredly 
not ignore the statistics which show that, although the number of 
Borrowers from those Libraries increased, in the year now under 
review, by 4,000, the issue of works of Fiction for Home Reading 
dropped by 30,000, while the issues in such departments as History, 
Biography, Antiquities, and Foreign Literature, were largely 
increased. The returns from the Reading Rooms show the same 
feature, the Prose Fiction asked for being only 37 per cent. of the 
whole issues, as against 63 per cent. in other classes. Without 
any wish to question the value of sound Fiction as one of the great 
branches of Literature, we must gratefully welcome the growing 
popularity of other and even more important branches. It is 
pleasing to know that this result may be largely traced to the 
increasing interest taken by School Teachers in advising their 
pupils as to the books they should read. 
Last year the Committee completed and equipped the new 
Reading Room in Stanley Road, and two new Libraries for the 
districts of Sefton Park, and Walton and Fazakerley. The signal 
success of all these, especially the Sefton Park Library, has been 
most gratifying to the Committee, and although, for the first time 
in Liverpool, readers have been allowed free access to the shelves 
the immunity from loss proves once more that if you trust the 
public and let them know that you trust them, you will not be 
disapointed. 
