THE LIBRARY PAST AND FUTURE 221 



otherwise printed matter will soon leave no place for the goods, 

 for the food, of the inhabitants of our towns.' ' 



This anticipation, which dates from 1758, still seems an exaggera- 

 tion, but I know not whether, a century and a half hence, posterity 

 will think it so, so great is the development of the industries, the 

 succession of ever new inventions for preserving any graphic repre- 

 sentation of human thought. Not even the life of Methuselah 

 would be long enough to read as much as the tenth part of all that 

 a modern library contains; and I know not whether we could invent 

 a more terrible punishment than to insist upon this for our criminals. 

 How many repetitions of the same ideas, how much superfluity, how 

 many scientific works canceled and rendered useless and condemned 

 to perpetual oblivion by those which succeed them! By welcoming 

 everything, without discrimination, the modern library has lost its 

 ancient and true character. No longer can we inscribe over its en- 

 trance the ancient motto, ''Medicine for souls; " few, indeed, of the 

 books would have any salutary influence on body or on mind. Now 

 that the conception of book and of library has been so enormously 

 expanded, now that the library has become the city of paper, how- 

 ever printed, and of any other material fitted to receive the graphic 

 representation of human thought, it will become more and more 

 necessary to classify the enormous amount of material, to separate 

 it into various categories. The laws of demography, whatever 

 they may be, must be extended also to books; the dead must be 

 divided from the living, the sick from the sound, the bad from the 

 good, the rich from the poor; and cemeteries must be prepared for 

 all those stereotyped editions of school-books, of catechisms, or rail- 

 way time-tables, for all that endless luggage of stamped paper that 

 has only the form of a book and has nothing to do with thought. 

 Sanatoria must be provided for books condemned to uselessness 

 because already infected with error or already eaten aw r ay with old 

 age, and the most conspicuous places must be set apart for books 

 worthy to be preserved from oblivion and from the ravages of time, 

 either on account of the importance of their contents or of the 

 beauty of their appearance. In this great republic of books the 

 princes principes will stand high above the countless mass, and an 

 aristocracy of the best will be formed which will be the true library 

 within the library. 



But even this will not have the exclusive character of the ancient 

 library. It will receive divers and strange forms of books; next to 

 a papyrus of Oxyrinchos, with an unknown fragment of Sappho, 

 may be placed a parchment' illuminated by Nestore Leoni or by 

 Attilio Formilli, a graphophone disk containing Theodore Roose- 

 velt's latest speech, or a scene from Othdlo given by Tommaso 

 Salvini, the heliotype reproduction of the Medicean Virgil or some 



