CHAIRMAN’S PREFACE. 
The separate Reports of the Chief Officials of the Libraries, the 
Museums, and the Art Gallery, contained in this volume, form a 
collective record of another year’s active and useful work in all those 
Departments. 
Columns of statistics are usually looked upon as very dry and 
unattractive, but facts of great interest and import often lie hidden in 
them. Thus, pages 19 to 25 of this volume will in themselves demon- 
strate the value to the Citizens of the vast collections of books on our 
Library shelves. An analysis of the figures shows that there are, im 
all the Libraries under the management of the Committee, 350,000 
volumes, grouped among fifteen different Sections, a number which, if 
placed side by side on one continuous shelf, would extend from William 
Brown Street to Sefton Park. It will-be seen that the largest Section 
is that of Prose Fiction, which contains 65,000 volumes, but these only 
form 18°5 per cent. of the whole. The two next largest Sections, those 
of Fine and Industrial Arts, and History and Biography, contain 
respectively 42,000 volumes and 36,000 volumes, being 12 per cent. and 
10°3 per cent. of the whole. Thus, in view of the oft-repeated fallacy, 
that the shelves of Public Libraries are mostly given up to Fiction, it 
is interesting to note that these other two Sections together exceed in 
numbers the Section of Fiction by 13,000 volumes. I trust no imper- 
tinent critic will remark that the Section of History and Biography 
probably contains a good deal of Fiction in itself. 
The total issues during the year were, in round figures, 2,389,000, so 
‘that, on the average, every book in our thirteen Libraries was issued 
more than six times last year. It is indeed surprising how very 
few volumes of the 350,000 fail to be consulted at all in the course 
of a year. The gloomy picture which has sometimes been drawn of a 
Public Library as a ‘‘Cemetery of Dead Books” certainly cannot be 
realised in Liverpool. Every day we have cause to be grateful to those 
who built up the Libraries in the past, for the sound judgment and 
common sense they displayed in their selections. 
