- About Bookbinding -

The librarian, who desires to make the management of his library in the highest degree successful, must give special attention to the important field of periodical literature. More and more, as the years roll on, the periodical becomes the successful rival of the book in the claim for public attention. Indeed, we hear now and then, denunciations of the ever-swelling flood of magazines and newspapers, as tending to drive out the book. Readers, we are told, are seduced from solid and improving reading, by the mass of daily, weekly, and monthly periodicals which lie in wait for them on every hand. But no indiscriminate censure of periodicals or of their reading, can blind us to the fact of their great value. Because some persons devote an inordinate amount of time to them, is no reason why we should fail to use them judiciously ourselves, or to aid others in doing so. And because many periodicals (and even the vast majority) are of little importance, and are filled with trifling and ephemeral matter, that fact does not discredit the meritorious ones. Counterfeit currency does not diminish the value of the true coin; it is very sure to find its own just level at last; and so the wretched or the sensational periodical, however pretentious, will fall into inevitable neglect and failure in the long run. It is true that the figures as to the relative issues of books and periodicals in the publishing world are startling enough to give us pause. It has been computed that of the annual product of the American press, eighty-two per cent consists of newspapers, ten per cent of magazines and reviews, and only eight per cent of books. Yet this vast redundancy of periodical literature is by no means such 8. menace to our permanent literature as it appears at first sight;-and that for three reasons: (1) a large share of the books actually published, appear in the first instance in the periodicals in serial or casual form; (2) the periodicals contain very much matter of permanent value; (3) the steady increase of carefully prepared books in the publishing world, while it may not keep pace with the rapid increase of periodicals, evinces a growth in the right direction. It is no longer so easy to get a crude or a poor book published, as it 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.

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