LIBRARIES. 



i from (mention to generation, from century to 

 > books may be ordered from the publisher in sheets 

 l tod fifty yean after their fint appearance. 



Th frmt majority of book* an of ooum thoM nut procurable at 

 Ant hand. Uince hirh an only accessible through the medium of 

 the second-hand bookseller in Germany be bean the more respectful 

 of "antiquarian' bookseller or the aale by auction. It is a 

 of aoOM importanoe whether the best method of acquiring 

 it through the boolueUer or the auctioneer. The fint method in 

 obviously the most simple, and to the purchaaer by far the most con- 

 venient. The price of the book a moat necessary element in the 

 ileiisiim on iu purchase U known beforehand ; the book U also gene- 

 rally sold with a guarantee of its completeness. On the other hand, at 

 a *aU it w aitimmrr for the intending purchaser to decide what price 

 be will go to, a decision which cannot in many cam be arrived at with- 

 out oonatderahle trouble, and which is after all almost certain to 

 be repeated if the book happen to be sold a little over. It is not 

 , aba, to nil boolu at auction* with all fault* or errors of 

 i ; and, in any case, to return a book purchased at an auction 

 U a more circuitous and troublesome proems than to return one pur- 

 chased of a bookseller. It is also exceedingly inconvenient to attend or 

 procure attendance at the time and place of sale. Under all these draw- 

 backs, it is somewhat surprising that purchasing books at sales should 

 be so popular, that it is becoming a common remark among booksellers 

 that books which they have long offered in vain in their published 

 catalogues go off at once at higher prices when a copy occurs at on 

 action. It might have been accounted for more easily during the 

 period of bibliomania at the beginning of the present century, when it 

 was customary for amateurs and collectors to attend in person at 

 sales, and the Valdarfer Boccaccio, for int*twv. wa s contended for by 

 the Marquis of Blandford, Earl Spencer, and others, in the auction-room. 

 The scene was so dramatic, and the excitement so contagious, that the 

 contest for an old folio might arouse the passions as weU as the chase 

 after a fox. The case is altered at present, when the biddings are 

 by booksellen or their commissioners, and the prices which pur- 

 n are to give are finally decided upon beforehand, in the cool of 

 the study instead of the heat of the auction-room. Still the highest 

 prices which are now obtained for books are generally given at auctions, 

 and the lowest prices at which books are sold are also taken at auctions. 

 But for this latter circumstance as the innovation has now been 

 attempted of publishing a book by auction there would be some 

 danger that the trade of a bookseller behind the counter would cease. 

 Both bookseller and auctioneer still continue, and if either is destined 

 to become extinct, it is to be hoped, for the sake of purchasers, it may 

 be the auctioneer. 



A proposal has recently found favour in the eyes of some for 

 acquiring books for public libraries by means of exchange. To sub- 

 stitute exchange for purchase is simply a return to barter, which is 

 not considered advisable by political economists in other cases, and of 

 which no peculiar benefits have been pointed out in connection with 

 the trade in books. The advocates of the measure appear, in fact, to 

 forget the advantages of a circulating medium. If, as they allege, some 

 libraries are encumbered with duplicates, and at the same time labour 

 under a deficiency of funds for purchases, it would seem obvious.that 

 a simple method of escaping from the double difficulty would be to sell 

 the duplicates, and with the proceeds purchase what was wanted to as 

 great an extent as the funds allowed. If instead of selling and buying, 

 librarians put themselves into the hands of an agent to exchange their 

 books for other books in the possession of some other library, they 

 depend in a great measure on the agent's sagacity and honesty, and 

 ""'" the books in the possession of both the contracting parties 

 happen to be exactly equal in value, there must after all be some money 

 exchanged ; as, indeed, in all cases, some money must pass in recom- 

 pense of the services of the agent The plan has been tried, at the 

 suggestion of the agent, M. Vattemare, between France and some of 

 the States of America, and some of the American states have expressed 

 themselves satisfied : but this measure of success in the experiment 

 does not seem likely to lead to its wider adoption. 



Public libraries of great importance have been endowed in almost 

 *y country with the legal right of demanding gratuitous copies of 

 every book published in the state to which they belong. The history 

 of the right and its limitations in various countries is treated of at some 

 length in KdwaruYs Memoirs on Libraries.' From the earlier part of 

 this century up to 18JHJ, eleven copies of every book published in 

 Kotbad, .Scotland, or Ireland, had to be delivered to different public 

 libraries in the three countries ; but by an act of parliament of that 

 year the number was reduced to five, of which that to the British 

 Museum was to be delivered at that institution without being demanded, 

 under penalty in case of neglect of a fine of five pounds. The com- 

 pUinU ^nt the " oopyUx," as it has been called, have often been 

 very loud, though the imposition U extremely moderate when compared 

 i th. Ui on patents, to which it bean a close analogy. It may be 

 I ny miperior method could be pointed out, to form a com- 

 plete collection of the products of the press. It has been said that 

 acquirement by purchase would be an much more effectual as it would 



50? **?"? *.* U I"*****- 1Jut >* this well established I The 



tuber of a local halfpenny newspaper is seldom found to keep a 



complete Mt of hie own journal, the trouble of doing so is not com- 



LIBRARIEa 



pensatod to him by the price. There is much more chance of his 

 attention being aroused by the danger of being fined five pounds than 

 that of losing a halfpenny. The' Bibliographic de la France. 1 j.iii.lisl,. ,1 

 weekly at Paris, is a record of the copies of books sent in obedience to 

 the law, to the office for receiving the legal deposits. It is extremely 

 common when orders are given to booksellen in Paris for some of 

 the smaller and cheaper works recorded in it, to receive for an answer 

 that it is impossible to procure them, that publishers in the pro- 

 vinces will not take the trouble to send them, or that printers ! 

 will not take the trouble of looking them up. Those, thrr. i'..i.-. who 

 are anxious to see preserved one copy at least of the " fugitive 

 literature " of our times, will not regret th it the legislature has sup- 

 plied a powerful motive for publishers to attend to the supply of the 

 national library. 



A somewhat new light has been thrown upon the matter by recent 

 transactions in America, The copy-tax was partly abolished last year 

 in the United States, on the petition, not of the publishen, who are 

 usually spoken of in England as the aggrieved parties, but of the 

 librarians, on whom devolved the trouble of collecting it. In February, 

 1859, by an Act of Congress, it was determined t! future 



one copy only instead of three of each book published iu the United 

 States should be required of the publishen, to be deposited in tho 

 " department of the interior," and that the Smithsonian Institution 

 should be exonerated from the duty of receiving and preserving copies, 

 which was considered a burthen rather than a benefit. The con. ! 

 Sir Thomas Bodley has thus been selected for imitation by American 

 librarians in the very poiut in which it was a warning instead of an 

 example. 



When books have entered a public library, one of the first operations 

 usually performed on them U to mark them as the property of tho 

 institution by a stamp. The stamp in many coses bears the name of 

 the institution only ; it is now, by a pimple but ingenious contrivance, 

 made at the British Museum to bear also the date on which the stomp 

 is affixed. The uses of this are manifold. It is sometimes of conse- 

 quence, even in a legal point of view, to ascertain the exact date on 

 which a book entered the Museum it is a proof that on that il.iy. if 

 not before, the book was published. In the old Thomason collection 

 of tracts, the collector noted on the title-page of each pamphlet the 

 day on which he obtained it; and Mr. Masson, the biographer of 

 Milton, will thus have it in his power to ascertain the exact date of 

 issue of several of Milton's publications, some of which were given by 

 the poet himself to the collector. A similar end is contributed to 

 by a regulation now adopted with regard to the Museum bindings. 

 The cover of every pamphlet, and of every number of a magazine, 

 is bound along with it. The ' English Cyclopaedia,' which the reader 

 now has before him, is issued in monthly numbers with coven : 

 when the volume is bound the coven are generally removed by the 

 binder and destroyed. There ore at the British Museum more copies 

 than one of this Cyclopx-dia, and in that which is obtained by the 

 copyright law, the covers are bound up with the text, and not at the 

 end of each volume, but at the end of each number, so that in the 

 bound volume the light-brown coven meet the eye at certain intervals 

 in the midst of the white pages. An eminent Spanish bibliographer, 

 who was visiting the Museum a few yean ago, complained of the 

 unsightlineas of this practice in regard to some modern Spanish books 

 he was examining, and it was pointed out to him that the coven in that 

 case contained a portion of information which occurred nowhere else, 

 and was thus preserved for perpetual use. Struck with tho circum- 

 stance which he had overlooked before, he was silent for a minute, and 

 then declared that on his return home he would take care to adopt the 

 plan in his own books, and mention it elsewhere, for that oth< 

 it was likely that the British Museum would in a few years contain 

 unique copies of most of the books which it imported from Spain. 



The question of the catalogues of public libraries is one that has 

 been much debated of late yean both in England and Fran 

 portion was issued in 1841, of an alphabetical catalogue of the library 

 of the British Museum, in a folio volume, comprising the letter A ; ami 

 a portion of a classed catalogue of the Imperial Library of I'm 

 been published since 1855, in six quarto volumes, comprising the 

 history of France, and a part of the division of Medicine. These are 

 the two largest libraries of which it has been attempted to publish a 

 catalogue, and that of the Museum has not been carried further in 

 print, though it is now advancing rapidly in manuscript, and will pro- 

 bably, in the course of 1862, be brought to a conclusion, that is, it 

 will then be completed, iu manuscript, on a level with the time. The 

 immense acquisitions of the library throughout the period during 

 which it bos been carried on, have rendered it necessary to catalogue 

 almost 400,000 volumes which were not in the Museum at the time 

 that a commencement was mode of printing. \\ !. n tin catalogue of 

 more than 600,000 volumes is completed in manuscript, the question 

 will again present itself whether it is to remain in manuscript or to 

 t.-d; and if printed, whether in a classed or alphabetical 

 arrangement. 



It seems to be generally assumed that the title-slip, or title-card, for a 

 book, when once written, is only available for some particular form of 

 catalogue that it must necessarily be arranged in the order indicated 

 by tho heading, and no other. A moment's examination of the 

 question will show that this opinion is by no means well founded. 



