in pencil. If you decide later, to bind any
of them, this pencil-mark should be erased from the cards, on the return
of the pamphlets from the bindery.

CHAPTER 8.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE.

The librarian who desires to make the management of his library in the
highest degree successful, must give special attention to the important
field of periodical literature. More and more, as the years roll on, the
periodical becomes the successful rival of the book in the claim for
public attention. Indeed, we hear now and then, denunciations of the
ever-swelling flood of magazines and newspapers, as tending to drive out
the book. Readers, we are told, are seduced from solid and improving
reading, by the mass of daily, weekly, and monthly periodicals which lie
in wait for them on every hand. But no indiscriminate censure of
periodicals or of their reading, can blind us to the fact of their great
value. Because some persons devote an inordinate amount of time to them,
is no reason why we should fail to use them judiciously ourselves, or to
aid others in doing so. And because many periodicals (and even the vast
majority) are of little importance, and are filled with trifling and
ephemeral matter, that fact does not discredit the meritorious ones.
Counterfeit currency does not diminish the value of the true coin; it is
very sure to find its own just level at last; and so the wretched or the
sensational periodical, however pretentious, will fall into inevitable
neglect and failure in the long run.

It is true that the figures as to the relative issues of books and
periodicals in the publishing world are startling enough to give us
pause. It has been computed that of the annual product of the American
press, eighty-two per cent. consists of newspapers, ten per cent. of
magazines and reviews, and only eight per cent. of books. Yet this vast
redundancy of periodical literature is by no means such a menace to our
permanent literature as it appears at first sight;--and that for three
reasons: (1) a large share of the books actually published, appear in the
first instance in the periodicals in serial or casual form; (2) the
periodicals contain very much matter of permanent value; (3) the steady
increase of carefully prepared books in the publishing world, while it
may not keep pace with the rapid increase of periodicals, evinces a
growth in the right direction. It is no longer so easy to get a crude or
a poor book published, as i