eriodicals and for accessions, which are,
as it were, _sub judice_. Often, too, a separate case is necessary for
rare and handsome books, and a locked case for _facetiae_. It is worth
while to observe that Pepys found that the best way to find his
numerous books was to number them consecutively throughout the
library.[40]
Numerous elaborate plans of book classification have been put forward,
principally by Americans, but in no way are they adaptable to the
requirements of private libraries, and I doubt very much the possibility
of comprehending them in such a way as to apply them in an intelligible
manner even to public libraries.
Mr. B. R. Wheatley, in an admirable paper upon Library arrangement,[41]
gives the following excellent practical advice:--
'If I had the planning of rooms for a private library, I should select
as the best possible arrangement a suite of three rooms, or one long
room or gallery divided by columns into three compartments, of which the
centre should be the largest, with several small contiguous ante-rooms,
the entrances to which, if so desired, might be concealed, for
uniformity or completeness of appearance, by filling them with sham or
dummy book-backs, the titles of which may be made an occasion for
witticism or joking allusion to local and family history.
'A good library arrangement is not achieved at once, but is a slow
growth through difficulties met and conquered. Some of the best portions
of it will be those which have flashed across your mind when there
seemed no pathway out of the thicket of difficulty in which you were
struggling. The arrangement of books, where the shelves are not made to
order to suit your plans, must naturally be of a progressive character
in its development in your mind.
'In some old libraries, collected mostly in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, there is such a preponderance of those portly
tomes in folio in which our sturdy ancestors delighted, that they
materially affect and disconcert our ordinary plans. I have known an
instance in which the library shelves projected slightly in their upper
part, and, there thus being an appropriate depth, I arranged on these
shelves two long parallel rows, completely round the room, of these
noble volumes of our old divines, State papers, Statutes, Treaties,
Trials, and our County histories; and the effect in strength and power
(as Ruskin might have said) of these long lines of large stout books of
nearly e
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