Page:Library Administration, 1898.djvu/180

 interest in having books on kept together, but how much more in seeing, for example, the literature of chess and cricket kept in distinct places? Similar subdivision would be convenient in other branches. Again, the historical literature of a country might with advantage be divided into numerous periods. Herein appears the essential weakness of the fixed-location system. The space available has to be mapped out many years beforehand on the lines of the classification proposed, as shifting is not allowed. If the divisions be few, a modicum of the prophetic instinct will enable the librarian to make provision for the increase of each; but the more minute the divisions, the more arduous becomes his task. We hear that an attempt to classify the books of the Bodleian too ambitiously has in a few years brought that library to a serious pass for want of space. The Museum classification, as experience shows, errs in the other direction. The books on the literature of all countries are indiscriminately placed together, but if the remarkable growth of this subject could have been foreseen, a different course would have been adopted. The same may be said of some other classes that have increased far more in proportion than any one would have foreseen even forty years ago, when the space enclosing the new Reading-room was covered in and fitted up on the stack system. Among these may be mentioned theology, fiction, economics (more especially questions of capital and labour), and memoirs and biographies. In all these cases a palliative has been