Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/370

 358 The Library. requirements." However, several friends of the movement, unwilling that it should be allowed to drop, offered to meet the difficulty so far as funds were concerned if the committee would again undertake the work ; so the lectures were recommenced, and have been continued year by year. But, as the meetings have only been held once a month, and then not on one fixed day, the free lecture movement has never been a hardy plant at Handsworth, although large audiences have gathered whenever a popular subject, or an attractive lecturer, has been announced. In the same year as the Handsworth Library took up the movement, a very successful beginning was made at Oldham. There the free lecture movement was taken up with spirit, and with popular lectures and a varied range of subjects, they proved a great success. The crowds attending them have exceeded the accommodation provided, and the committee have received the sanction of the Town Council to extend the present building, in order to provide a special lecture hall. In 1887 the Bootle Free Library Committee arranged their first course of free lectures. Here, as at Aston, they felt the inconvenience of having to hire a lantern whenever the lectures had to be illustrated, and in 1888 they purchased a lantern and accessories at a cost of about 20. The popularity of the lectures increased, and the committee in 1891 found it desirable to follow the example of Liverpool and to pay a fee of two guineas for each lecture, inclusive of travelling expenses, and thus, as they hoped, to be able to obtain the services of lecturers not otherwise accessible, so that, as the librarian remarks, they now get up a better programme, and much more easily. A spirit of liberality was also manifested by the committee throughout the general arrangements for this branch of their work. They advertised largely, both by posters and in the columns of the newspapers, and free distributed a thousand programmes of the course of lectures, the total amount expended on the last year's course of eighteen lectures being about ^"50. In the autumn of 1888 the seed which had been sown at Manchester in the tentative attempts to arrange a course of lectures on the books in the library in 1852, sent forth new shoots, and once more a proposal was made to popularize the library by this method. Unlike the Birmingham experiment, where a whole class of literature was dealt with in a single lecture, the Manchester lecturers did not aim to be chiefly biblio- graphical, but were rather chatty popular talks about books, the