Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/19

 Rh building in one of the principal streets of the city, provided with rooms large and small for all its purposes. With its occupation of these the institution started afresh on its career of usefulness, but unfortunately cumbered with a load of debt which continued to the end to embarrass its plans and depress its energies. It was seldom that the annual income from the library reached the sum of £250, and of course but little of that was available for the purchase of books. The directors gradually became wearied of their Sisyphean task, and began to look about for some means of escape from their trouble. Fortunately, a double way was open to them. On the one hand, there was the hope that by their assistance the citizens might be induced to adopt the Public Libraries Act; on the other, there was the reorganization under the Endowed Institution Act of the noble foundation in the city known as Gordon's Hospital. After prolonged negotiations both these ideas were realised, with the result that certain funds and properties were handed over to the governors of Robert Gordon's College for behoof of the science and art schools under their control, and the citizens adopted the Public Libraries Act and became the possessors of the library and the building of the Mechanics' Institution, subject to certain debts and liabilities. Of the stock of books thus presented as a nucleus for the Public Library, some 8,000 were found to be suitable for the lending department, and some 5,000 for the reference. By gift and purchase these have since been raised to over 20,000 and 19,000 respectively, a very creditable increase during the nine years that have elapsed since the institution of the Public Library.

It is hardly necessary that I should trace even in a cursory fashion the various stages in the development of the Public Library from the first days of its opening—when, to the surprise and no small consternation of the authorities, the citizens rose in their thousands and almost swept the shelves of their contents—down to its settlement in a building specially reared for it. Suffice it to say that, as an institution for the intellectual recreation and instruction of the community, it seems at least to have justified the expectations of all who were concerned in its establishment. Quite recently an interesting and instructive avowal was publicly made that so far "the money spent on the library was the best pennyworth of ratepayers' assessment spent in the city," as to which the only comment I would venture to make is that should the citizens see fit to entrust the Library