original ideas. This, of course, is
inevitable in an institution presided over by a committee which has
infinitely less personal interest in books than in politics or the price
of coal. No Municipal Library can hope to be nearer than twenty-five years
to date. Go into the average good home of the crust, in the quietude of
"after-tea," and you will see a youthful miss sitting over something by
Charlotte M. Yonge or Charles Kingsley. And that something is repulsively
foul, greasy, sticky, black. Remember that it reaches from thirty to a
hundred such good homes every year. Can you wonder that it should carry
deposits of jam, egg, butter, coffee, and personal dirt? You cannot. But
you are entitled to wonder why the Municipal Sanitary Inspector does not
inspect it and order it to be destroyed.... That youthful miss in
torpidity over that palimpsest of filth is what the Free Library has to
show as the justification of its existence. I know what I am talking
about.

* * * * *

A third agency is the book-pedlar. There are firms of publishers who never
advertise in any literary weekly or any daily, who never publish anything
new, and who may possibly be unknown to Simpkins themselves. They issue
badly printed, badly bound, showy editions of the eternal Scott and the
eternal Dickens, in many glittering volumes with scores of bleared
illustrations, and they will sell them up and down the provinces by means
of respectably dressed "commission agents," at prices much in excess of
their value, to an ingenuous, ignorant public that has never heard of
Dent and Routledge. The books are found in houses where the sole function
of literature is to flatter the eye. The ability of these subterranean
firms to dispose of deplorable editions to persons who do not want them is
in itself a sharp criticism of the commercial organization of the more
respectable trade.

* * * * *

Let it not be supposed that my group is utterly cut off from the newest
developments in imaginative prose literature. No! What the bookseller, the
book-pedlar, and the Free Library have failed to do, has been accomplished
by Mr. Jesse Boot, incidentally benefactor of the British provinces and
the brain of a large firm of chemists and druggists with branches in
scores, hundreds, of towns. He has several branches in my group. Each
branch has a circulating library, patronized by the class which has only
heard