Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/88

76 In the Lending Library. cessful and run out of print, a new edition is produced with the slightest possible alteration, and then they are to buy them all over again. This amounts to a compulsory taking of the author's physic, and when you are ready to thank goodness that it is all gone, a variation of one ingredient in the prescription is made, and you are expected to take it all over again. The reader's ideal is that the libraries shall provide happy hunting grounds of three volume novels, ever new, ever good, always amusing, always exciting, with a spice of impropriety, but not too outrageous. The realisation of this ideal is the gathering of a crop of dead- sea apples, and all the librarian may expect as reward for help- ing towards it, is a tacit implication of responsibility for their unsatisfactoriness. But the librarian has his ideal also, and that which he is ever striving to realise is that all readers should want good books, good for them and good for the library, and that all should know what they want, though this last is sometimes pleasantly substituted by the reader saying, " You know so much better than I do what will suit me help me to a book." The librarian's ideal is that every one who goes out of the doors should go out helped. This means a great deal more than that he should go out with a book in his hand, and indeed it means more than that he should go out with the book asked for, and this is a thing that takes our test and our measure. The young assistant, newly entered to his or her duties, bristling with zeal but lean of knowledge, dis- tributes according to that overflowing zeal and lack of know- ledge. The mechanical indicator has no zeal, and only as much knowledge as Mr. Robertson or Mr. Cotgreave put into it. One human habit I have noticed on the face of Mr. Cotgreave's invention, of blushing when questions are put to it revealing deficiencies. I think it is rather tantalising and aggravating that that indicator should look so cheerful and bright when it tells you the book you want is out, and that cold slaty blue stare of the numbers of the books that are in is rather suggestive of their dryness and unattractiveness. Our free public librarians are oftimes troubled with heavy statistics of fiction issues. Not only do the thoughts of them sit heavily on their chests, but sometimes cause commissioners to sit heavily on the (money) chest when fresh outlay for books is desired. We really want some system of counting, like that of the marks at a rifle range, when Whymper's Andes counts for so many marks as a bull's-eye, and a volume of the Pseudonym Series counts for so few as an outer.