Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/248

 New Ways of Keeping Down the Issues of Fiction. 1 T BELIEVE that the briefly expressed opinions of twenty practical librarians, evoked during a discussion, are worth exactly twenty times as much as the opinion of one librarian expressed at length in a paper. For this reason, I have for some time urged that at our annual meetings, more valuable results would be obtained, if members would present to the meeting brief notes on any practical question that has come under their consideration, not so much to press upon the meeting the importance of their own notions, as to serve for a text for the notions of others. With this view, and as a mere outsider, I venture to place before the meeting a thought on the subject of the issues of fiction. Pray understand at the outset, that here and now I am neither an advocate for, nor against, the reading of fiction. I have my own strong views on the subject, but they do not concern the question now before you. The preponderance of fiction issues, whether in itself, a good thing or a bad thing, is undoubtedly used, oftentimes with sad effect, as a strong argument against the adoption of the Acts, and while I should repudiate any suggestion to deprive the ratepayers of the right of choosing freely their own reading, I would urge that any reasonable means likely to result in the diminution of the excessive percentages, so freely quoted against us, by the newspapers, is worthy of our attention. As an out- sider, the first thing that strikes me is that, all Public Libraries do their best to encourage and promote the excessive issues of fiction, while at the same time they profess to deplore the excess. That is to say, while they are perfectly content with one copy of Macaulay's History of England, when it comes to a sensational novel, they order copies by the dozen. When one lucky reader 1 Communicated to the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Library Associa- tion, Aberdeen, September, 1893.