made
an addition to literature. That, among all the books which the librarian
has to care for, he finds so few that he can call additions to
literature is one of his grievances. The three processes may, indeed,
by a practiced hand be performed as one. The librarian is only anxious
that they be performed and that he have the benefit.

With the publisher the librarian feels that he can speak still more
bluntly than with the author, for it is against the publisher that the
librarian cherishes one of his greatest grievances, the necessity of
supplying four times the amount of storage room that ought to be
required. I have before me two books, one larger than the other in every
way and four times as thick. Yet the smaller book is printed in larger
type, has twice as many words on a page, and has twice as many pages.
This is, of course, an exceptional contrast, but a difference of four
times between the actual and the possible is by no means unusual. When
one considers that in most of our libraries it costs, all told, a dollar
to shelve a volume, one realizes that the librarian has against the
publisher a grievance that can be put into the language of commerce. If
every book is occupying a dollar's worth of space, which ought to
accommodate three others, then, gentlemen publishers, in swelling your
books to catch the public eye, you have taken from us far more than you
put into your own pockets from your sales to us. You have made our book
storage four times as costly and unwieldy as it ought to be; but you
have done worse than this, you have sold us perishable instead of
durable goods. You have cheapened every element of the book--paper, ink,
and binding--so that, while we begin the twentieth century with some
books on our shelves that are over four hundred years old and some that
are less than one, the only books among them that have any chance of
seeing the twenty-first century are those that will then be five hundred
years old; the books that might have been a century old will then, like
their makers, be dust. It seems to the librarian that you, who have
taken it upon yourselves to direct the service to be rendered to men by
the "art preservative of all arts," have assumed very lightly your
responsibility for the future's knowledge of our time. You may and do
answer that, as the records begin to perish, the most important of them
will be reprinted, and the world will be the better off for the loss of
the rest. To this it