ts as volumes. Thus, the Royal Library at Munich, in
Bavaria, has been ranked fourth among the libraries of the world,
claiming over a million volumes, but as it reckons every university
thesis, or discussion of some special topic by candidates for degrees, as
a volume, and has perhaps 400,000 of this prolific class of publications,
it is actually not so large as some American libraries, which count their
pamphlets as distinct from books in their returns.

The pamphlet, or thin book, or tract (as some prefer to call it) is
reckoned by some librarians as a nuisance, and by others as a treasure.
That it forms rather a troublesome asset in the wealth of a library
cannot be doubted. Pamphlets taken singly, will not stand upon the
shelves; they will curl up, become dogs-eared, accumulate dust, and get
in the way of the books. If kept in piles, as is most frequent, it is
very hard to get at any one that is wanted in the mass. Then it is
objected to them, that the majority of them are worthless, that they cost
altogether too much money, and time, and pains, to catalogue them, and
that they are useless if not catalogued; that if kept bound, they cost
the library a sum out of all proportion to their value; that they
accumulate so rapidly (much faster, in fact, than books) as to outrun the
means at the disposal of any library to deal with them; in short, that
they cost more than they come to, if bound, and if unbound, they vex the
soul of the librarian day by day.

This is one side of the pamphlet question; and it may be candidly
admitted, that in most libraries, the accumulation of uncatalogued and
unbound pamphlets is one of the chief among those arrears which form the
skeleton in the closet of the librarian. But there is another side to the
matter. It is always possible to divide your pamphlets into two
classes--the important, and the insignificant. Some of them have great
historical, or economic, or intellectual value; others are as nearly
worthless as it is possible for any printed matter to be. Why should you
treat a pamphlet upon Pears's soap, or a quack medicine, or advertising
the Columbia bicycle, with the same attention which you would naturally
give to an essay on international politics by Gladstone, or a review of
the Cuban question by a prominent Spaniard, or a tract on Chinese
immigration by Minister Seward, or the pamphlet genealogy of an American
family? Take out of the mass of pamphlets, as they come in, what ap