t was a generation ago. The standard of
critical taste has risen, and far more readers are judges of what
constitutes a really good book than ever before. While it is true that
our periodical product has so grown, that whereas there were twenty years
ago, in 1878, only 7,958 different newspapers and magazines published in
the United States, there are now, in 1899, over 20,500 issued, it can
also be stated that the annual product of books has increased in the same
twenty years from less than two thousand to more than five thousand
volumes of new issues in a year. Whatever may be the future of our
American literature, it can hardly be doubted that the tendency is
steadily toward the production of more books, and better ones.

Whether a public library be large or small, its value to students will
depend greatly upon the care and completeness with which its selection of
periodical works is made, and kept up from year to year. Nothing is more
common in all libraries, public and private, than imperfect and partially
bound sets of serials, whether newspapers, reviews, magazines or the
proceedings and reports of scientific and other societies. Nothing can be
more annoying than to find the sets of such publications broken at the
very point where the reference or the wants of those consulting them
require satisfaction. In these matters, perpetual vigilance is the price
of completeness; and the librarian who is not willing or able to devote
the time and means requisite to complete the files of periodical
publications under his charge is to be censured or commiserated,
according to the causes of the failure. The first essential in keeping up
the completeness of files of ephemeral publications, next to vigilance on
the part of their custodian, is room for the arrangement of the various
parts, and means for binding with promptitude. Some libraries, and among
them a few of the largest, are so hampered for want of room, that their
serials are piled in heaps without order or arrangement, and are thus
comparatively useless until bound. In the more fortunate institutions,
which possess adequate space for the orderly arrangement of all their
stores, there can be no excuse for failing to supply any periodical,
whether bound or unbound, at the moment it is called for. It is simply
necessary to devote sufficient time each day to the systematic
arrangement of all receipts: to keep each file together in chronological
order; to supply them for th