Page:The small library. A guide to the collection and care of books (IA smalllibraryguid00browiala).pdf/90

80 that the sum of human knowledge in all its departments and ramifications can be arranged in a variety of ways, and that all kinds of methods of classification can be devised to suit the basis selected, be it supernatural, physical, ethnological, philosophical, historical or other. It will be sufficient for small libraries to start with a complete scheme, fully indexed, which can be applied in a short form, and afterwards expanded to infinity if necessary. Such a scheme exists ready to hand, in the Subject Classification, which was specially compiled for the use of English libraries, and from it is extracted the series of chief divisions, into which most ordinary subjects can be approximately placed. The full tables of this system provide numbered places in logical order for every subject of importance on which literature exists, but it may be thought simpler for small libraries to commence with the less-ambitious condensed table, which provides places for a majority of the subjects represented in books. By marking books with the easy symbols provided, it is possible to assemble in one place most of the books on any particular subject. Thus all cookery books would be marked I9, and al books on Egypt 04. Books on France would be numbered Ro, while everything relating to the Bible would go at. The effect of thus marking a small collection of books would be to assemble all relative main subjects together, and enable any one to find by a simple number where any special subject was kept, because