e that in
Quincy or that have become useless. It having become evident that an
addition would presently have to be made to the building if the recent
rate of increase should continue, it seemed best to the trustees to
begin at once to reduce the size of the library. They proceeded, under
the able leadership of Mr. Charles Francis Adams, to remove from the
library large numbers of Government documents, unnecessary duplicates,
books of an outgrown ephemeral interest, and those unsuited to the
locality. Twenty-one hundred and forty-five volumes were removed
immediately. The Quincy library, by adopting this course, relieves
itself from very considerable prospective expenses and secures money to
use in increasing its usefulness.

Part of the plan is to keep the printed catalogs of the small library up
to date and to scatter copies of them widely throughout the city by
selling them at a nominal price. It is always expensive to prepare and
print a good catalog; it is very expensive to issue new editions
frequently. Still, if a popular library is to do its work well it must
introduce its constituents to its books by means of frequent revised
editions of a good, printed catalog.

The Thomas Crane Library has been famous for the excellence of its
annotated catalog and for lists of books on special subjects for the use
of school children. It proposes in future to use more money than in the
past in making, printing, and keeping up to date good catalogs, and, in
order to make it practicable to do so, to keep down the number of
volumes in the library, thus reducing the expenses of cataloging, and
also to save money in housing its books. That is to say, it is acting on
the well-established principle that a small library well cataloged, if
at all adapted in the number of its volumes to the size of a town, is of
incalculably greater advantage to its constituency than one many times
larger but poorly equipped with catalogs.

It is a distinctive feature of the Quincy plan not to make the library a
special reference library. That city is very near Boston and Cambridge,
which it is well known are richly supplied with large general and
numerous special libraries.

When a man appears in Quincy who wishes to make a minute inquiry on some
special subject, it is proposed to refer him to the great libraries in
the neighboring cities, and to confine the efforts of the trustees of
the Quincy library to supplying the general wants of its constit