- About Bookbinding -

In many searches for names of persons, it becomes highly important to know before-hand where to look, and equally important where not to look, for certain biographies. Thus, if you seek for the name of any living character, it is necessary to know that it would be useless to look in the Encyclopedia Britannica, because the rule of compilation of that work purposely confined its sketches of notable persons to those who were already deceased when its volumes appeared. So you save the time of hunting in at least one conspicuous work of reference, before you begin, by simply knowing its plan. In like manner, you should know that it is useless to search for two classes of names in the Dictionary of National Biography, the most copious biographical dictionary of British personages ever published, begun in 1885, under Leslie Stephen, and reaching its sixty-first volume, and letter W in 1899, under the editorship of Sidney Lee. These two classes of names are first, all persons not British, that is, not either English, Scottish or Irish; and secondly, names of British persons now living. This is because this great work, like the Britannica, purposely confines itself to the names of notables deceased; and, unlike the Britannica, it further limits its biographies to persons connected by birth or long residence with the British kingdom. Knowing this fact before-hand will save any time wasted in searching the Dictionary of National Biography for any persons now living, or for any American or European names. Another caveat may properly be interposed as regards searches for information in that most widely advertised and circulated of all works of reference,-the Encyclopedia Britannica. The plan of that work was to furnish the reading public with the very best treatises upon leading topics in science, history, and literature, by eminent scholars and specialists in various fields. Pursuant to this general scheme, each great subject has a most elaborate, and sometimes almost exhaustive article-as, for example, chemistry, geology, etc., while the minor divisions of each topic do not appear in the alphabet at all, or appear only by cross-reference to the generic name under which they are treated. It results, that while you find, for example, a most extensive article upon Anatomy, filling a large part of a volume of the Britannica, you look in vain in the alphabet for such subjects as ''blood; brain, cartilage, sinew, tissue, etc., which are described only in the article Anatomy. This method has to be well comprehended in order for any reader to make use of this great Cyclopedia understandingly. Even by the aid of the English index to the work, issued by its foreign publishers, the reader who is fu hasty quest of information in the Britannica, will most frequently be baffled by not finding any minor subject in the index. The English-nation, judged by most of the productions of its literary and scientific men in that field, has small genius for indexing. It was reserved ~o an American to prepare and print a thorough index, at once alphabetical and analytical, to this great English thesaurus of information-an index ten times more copious, and therefore more useful to the student, than the meagre one issued in England. This index fills 3,900 closely printed columns, forming the whole of volume 25 of the Philadelphia edition of the work. By its aid, every name and every topic, treated anywhere in this vast repository of human knowledge can be traced out and appropriated; while without it, the Encyclopedia Britannica, with all its great merits, must remain very much in the nature of a sealed book to the reader who stands in need of immediate use and reference. We have to take it for what it is-a collection of masterly treatises, rather than a handy dictionary of knowledge. The usefulness and success of any library will depend very largely upon the sympathy, so to speak, between the readers and the librarian. When this is well established, the rest is very easy. The librarian should not seclude himself so as to be practically inaccessible to readers, nor trust wholly to assistants to answer their inquiries. This may be necessary in some large libraries, where great and diversified interests connected with the building up of the collection, the catalogue system, and the library management and administration are all concerned. In the British Museum Library, no one ever sees the Principal Librarian; even the next officer, who is called the keeper of the printed books, is not usually visible in the reading-room at all.

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