and tendency are in this safe direction.

However, quality assumed, the general question as to the reading of
recreative literature remains. What shall we say of the fact that sixty
per cent. of the circulation of the free public libraries still consists
of fiction?

In the first place, that this percentage takes no account of reference
use, which is almost wholly of serious literature; second, that as to
home use the ratio in circulation of fiction to serious literature does
not represent a similar ratio of trivial to serious service. Fiction is
the small coin of literature. It must circulate more rapidly to
represent the same volume of real business done. A volume of fiction may
be issued, returned and reissued three times while a biography or
history or work of science is issued once. It will then count
seventy-five per cent. in the circulation. But the serious book has
during the entire period been out in the hands of the reader; and the
service which it has performed--the period of attention which it has
occupied--equals that of the novel in its three issues. And, finally,
there is to be considered the influence of the best fiction toward
general culture (if the library is not merely to inform but also to
cultivate)--in broadening the sympathies, giving a larger tolerance, a
kindlier humanity, a more intelligent helpfulness; in affording the rest
that is in itself an equipment for work, and the distraction that may
save from impulse to evil.

However, the amount of fiction circulated in proportion to the total
work of the library is on the average steadily decreasing. At the same
time the quality is improving; in part through critical selection, in
part as a happy result of the fact that the inferior novels are also, as
a rule, inferior books, so poorly manufactured that libraries cannot
afford to buy them.

But there is standard fiction and current fiction; and it is the current
fiction that constitutes by itself a special problem still perplexing.
It is a problem that concerns not the uneducated child, nor the
illiterate adult; it is caused by the people of intelligent education
who are avid to read the latest novel by Mr. X. or Mrs. Y. while it is
still the latest novel by Mr. X. or Mrs. Y. It is being talked about at
dinner or afternoon tea. Well-informed people are reading it; to read it
is a social necessity.

The reason that presses the public library to supply promptly every
most recent book in the d