1875 there were only nine libraries containing
100,000 volumes or over. These were the Library of Congress, 300,000;
Boston Public Library, 300,000; New York Mercantile Library, 160,000;
Harvard College Library, 154,000; Astor Library, 152,000; Philadelphia
Mercantile Library, 126,000; House of Representatives Library, 125,000;
Boston Athenaeum, 105,000; Library Company of Philadelphia, 104,000. In
1913 there were in this class 82 libraries, or over nine times as many,
including 14 libraries of 300,000 to 2,000,000 volumes, a class which
did not exist in 1875.

Meanwhile the individual book remains just what it always was, the
utterance of one mind addressed to another mind, and the individual
reader has no more hours in the day nor days in his life; he has no more
eyes nor hands nor--we reluctantly confess--brains than he had in 1875.
But, fast as our libraries grow, not even their growth fully represents
the avalanche of books that is every year poured upon the reader's
devoted head by the presses of the world. To take only the four
countries in whose literature we are most interested we find their
annual book publication, for the latest normal year, 1913, to be as
follows: Germany, 35,078 volumes; France, 11,460; England, 12,379;
America, 12,230. But Japan, Russia, and Italy are each credited with
issuing more books annually than either England or the United States,
and the total annual book publication of the world is estimated to reach
the enormous figure of more than 130,000 volumes. In view of this
prodigious literary output, what progress can the reader hope to make in
"keeping up with the new books"? De Quincey figured that a man might
possibly, in a long lifetime devoted to nothing else, read 20,000
volumes. The estimate is easy. Suppose we start with one book a
day--surely a large supposition--and count a man's reading years from 20
to 80, 60 years in all; 60 times 365 is 21,900. This estimate makes no
allowance for Sundays, holidays, or sickness. Yet, small as it is--for
there are private libraries containing 20,000 volumes--it is manifestly
too large. But whatever the sum total may be, whether 20,000 or 2,000,
let us see, if I may use the expression, what a one must read before he
can allow himself to read what he really wants to.

First of all we must read the books that form the intellectual tools of
our trade, and there is no profession and hardly a handicraft that does
not possess its literature. For i