us pay for themselves.

The statistics do not seem to show that the initial expenditure for
current fiction is very alarming. But the purchase price of these books
is but a fraction of the expense of handling them. They cannot be
supplied in adequate quantities; for while the frenzy of curiosity
persists, an adequate supply is beyond the resources of any library. But
since the attempt to supply is futile the pretense is injurious. The
presence of the titles in the catalogues misleads the reader into a
multitude of applications which are a heavy expense to the library
without benefit to him. And the acquisition of the single book means to
the library the expense of handling a hundred applications for it which
are futile to one that can be honored. In this sense a current novel
involves perhaps a hundred times the expense of any other book in being
supplied to but the same number of readers.

The British museum acquires the new novels as published; but it
withholds them from the readers until five years after their date of
publication. It is my personal belief that a one year limitation of this
sort adopted by our free libraries generally would relieve them of
anxiety and expense and their readers of inconvenience and delusion.

But as regards current light literature in general it is worth while to
consider whether the responsibility of public libraries has not been
modified by the growth and diffusion of the newspaper and periodical
press. In 1850, when the free public library was started, the number of
newspapers and periodicals published in the United States was about
2,500; now it is nearly 20,000. The total annual issues have increased
from 400 million to over 4-1/2 billion copies.

The ordinary daily of 1850 contained perhaps a single column of literary
matter. To-day it contains, for the same price, seven columns. In 1850
it gave no space to fiction; now it offers Kipling, Howells, Stockton,
Bret Harte, Anthony Hope, Crockett, Bourget and many others of the best
of the contemporary writers of fiction.

Then there are the cheap magazines, which tender a half dozen stories
for the price of a cigar or a bodkin. There are, also, the cheap
"libraries," which have flooded the United States with engaging
literature available to almost any purse.

In short, conditions have altered. A vast mass of light literature is
now cheaply accessible to the individual which formerly could be
acquired only painfully or at great