- About Bookbinding -

Most inquiring readers are very patient, and being fully sensible how much they owe to the free enjoyment of the library treasures, and to the aid of the superintendent of them, they are willing to wait for information. However busy you may be at the moment, the reader can be asked to wait, or to call at a less busy time, when you will be prepared with a more satisfactory answer than can be given on the spur of the moment. What cannot be done today, may often be done tomorrow. Remember always, that readers are entitled to the best and most careful service, for a librarian is not only the keeper, but the interpreter of the intellectual stores of the library. It is a good and a safe rule to let no opportunity of aiding a reader escape. One should be particularly careful to volunteer help to those who are too new or too timid to ask: and it is they who will be most grateful for any assistance. The librarian has only to put himself in their place-(the golden rule for a librarian, as for all the world besides), and to consider how often, in his own searches in libraries, in the continual, never-ending quest of knowledge, he would have been thankful for a hint from some one who knew, or had been over the ground of his search before; and then he will feel the full value to the novice, of such knowledge as he can impart. He is not to forget that his superior opportunities for learning all about things, with a whole library at command, and within elbow-reach every hour of the day, should impose upon him a higher standard of attainment than most readers are supposed to have reached. In the intervals of library work, I am accustomed to consider the looking up of subjects or authorities as one of my very best recreations. It is as interesting as a game of whist, and much more profitable. It is more welcome than routine labor, for it rests or diverts the mind, by its very variety, while, to note the different views or expressions of writers on the same subject, affords almost endless entertainment. In tracing down a quotation also, or the half remembered line of some verse in poetry, you encounter a host of parallel poetic images or expressions, which contribute to aid the memory, or to feed the imagination. Or, in pursuing a sought-for fact in history, through many volumes, you learn collaterally much that may never have met your eye before. Full, as all libraries are, of what we call trash, there is almost no book which will not give us something,-even though it be only the negative virtue of a model to be avoided. One may not, indeed, always find what he seeks, because it may not exist at all, or it may not be found in the limited range of his small library, but he is almost sure to find something which gives food for thought, or for memory to note. And this is one of the foremost attractions, let me add, of the librarian's calling; it is more full of intellectual variety, of wide-open avenues to knowledge, than any other vocation whatever. His daily quests in pursuit of information to lay before others, bring him acquainted with passages that are full of endless suggestion for himself. He may not be able to pursue any of these avenues at the moment; but he should make a mental or a written note of them, for future benefit. His daily business being learning, why should he not in time, become learned? There are, of course, among the infinitude of, questions that come before the librarian, some that are really insoluble problems. One of these is to be found among the topics of inquiry I just now suggested; namely: what is the aggregate wealth of Great Britain, or that of other nations? This is a question frequently asked by inquiring Congressmen, who imagine that an answer may readily be had from one of those gifted librarians who is invested with that apocryphal attribute, commonly called omniscience. But the inquirer is suddenly confronted by the fact (and a very stubborn fact it is) that not a single foreign nation has ever taken any census of wealth whatever. In Great Britain (about which country inquiry as to the national resources more largely centers) the government wisely lets alone the attempt to tabulate the value of private wealth, knowing that such an object is utterly impracticable.

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