CHAPTER I. RUDIMENTS OF BOOK-COLLECTING; WITH IT may fairly be exacted of those who undertake the formation of a Library for the Public, that they should form clear ideas of the aims with which it is established; of the studies which it is more especially intended to facilitate; and of the probable requirements of those who may be expected to form the majority of its fre BOOK I. Chapter I. Rudiments. BOOK 1. Chapter I. Book-Collecting. being Encyclo pædical' in their contents. quenters. To a great National Library, indeed, all kinds Rudiments of and varieties of books are welcome, and may wisely be sought for. But a Library of this class is rather a Necessity of Na- growth than a formation. Almost every such Library tional Libraries that is now extant has been begun by the acquisition of some considerable collection already formed, and, in most cases, has absorbed many private Libraries before any very definite plans have been laid down for its developement. When the period shall have come for preparing plans of future and systematic increase, such plans must shape themselves with a view to filling up by degrees all the classes of literature which are weakly provided in the existing collection, rather than to the impressing upon it any one leading characteristic. National Libraries should be the store-houses whence educators of every kind may derive their materials, rather than direct educational agents themselves. If we must designate them by any descriptive epithet at all, we can but call them 'encyclopædical.' They must contain alike the most costly and enduring monuments of literature, and its slightest and most trivial "ephemera." The "trash" of one generation becomes the highly prized treasure of another. What a Bodley at the end of the sixteenth century calls "riff-raff... which a Librarykeeper should disdain to seek out, to deliver to any man," a Bodley's Librarian has to buy, amidst keen competition, and almost for its weight in gold, at the beginning of the nineteenth; since, by that time, it has come to be apparent that the obscurest pamphlet, or the flimsiest ballad, may throw a ray of light upon some pregnant fact of history, or may serve as the key to an enigma in some grand life-career which gave to an age its form and pressure. It may, doubtless, be somewhat startling to contemplate the kind of receptacles which will by and bye be required for this comprehensive storing up of both the literature, and the historic raw-material, as well of the present as of past ages. Such is the activity of the press in these days, that we may estimate the number of volumes annually produced in three only of the countries of Europe-Britain, France and Germany-as considerably exceeding 20,000. So alarming indeed, did this rapid production--even when it was much less rapid -long ago appear to some minds, that, as I remember, a trenchant critic lamented (half sportively, but half in earnest,) that there is no epidemic among books to thin their ranks, and that the fire-proof inventions of the present day extinguish all future hope of the deliverances which were occasionally realized, by the timber boards of our books, and the wooden carpentry of our Libraries. 2 To critics of quite another calibre it will probably seem a very absurd thing to contemplate "encyclopædical" book-collecting, in any case. When persons unaccustomed to the sight of a great Library visit one for the first time, they often put the question:-"Are all these books ever read?" Nor is it easy to convince them that the books which no man,— In the year 1854, the number of volumes of English production, actually delivered at the British Museum, under the Copyright-Act, was 5787. I have not present access to the latest issues of the French Journal de la librairie, or of the Leipsic Catalogues, but I may state that in 1847 the number of separate works published in Germany was 11,400, and that of those published in France, 5530. 2 Quarterly Review, 1xx, 71. BOOK I. Chapter I. Rudiments of Book-Collecting. BOOK I. Chapter I. Book-Collecting. of this century at all events,-would ever think of Rudiments of "reading," are precisely those which it is most important that a national collection should possess. However excellent the old advice that the student should aim to master thoroughly a few books, rather than to dip into a great many, it would fare ill with the man who has to use books as his daily tools, were that principle to govern the formation of Libraries. For the useful and honourable craft of "book-makers," we must continue to have vast miscellaneous store-houses, and the more extensive these are, the larger will be the proportion borne by the mere books of reference to the aggregate numbers, and the larger also will be the proportion of the "trash," or as Mr. Carlyle is fond of calling them (although few men are more skilled than he is, in their transmutation into gold), of the "rubbish-heaps" of days departed. But besides those great repositories, for whose enrichment nets of all sorts must be continually cast into the rivulets as well as the deep seas of learning, we need Libraries of narrower aims and more specific character. Of these some will be professional-as Law Libraries, Divinity Libraries, Medical Libraries, and the like, and their formation cannot be better provided for than by entrusting it to some one professional man of known and eminent skill in his department. Many, too, and of easy access are the appliances which lie ready to his hand for facilitating the task. Far more difficult will be the labour of planning, advisedly and with forecast, those Provincial and Town Libraries. Town Libraries, having a distinctly popular and edu TOWN AND COUNTY LIBRARIES. 573 cational character, yet aiming to meet the requirements BOOK 1. Chapter I. Book-Collecting. as storehouses of local topo graphy. and to subserve the uses of all classes of the population, Rudiments of in which hitherto the United Kingdom has been so confessedly deficient. Here the combined forethought and the joint labour of many minds will be requisite. Elsewhere I have cited, at length, the words in which County Libraries Bishop Bale expressed his earnest desire that in every shire of England there were at least one Library, "for the preservation of noble works, and the preferment of good learning." Had effect been given to that desire in his own day, not only would many of the choicest treasures of the old monastic Libraries have been saved from destruction, but an excellent foundation would, in all probability, have been laid for special collections on the local topography of each county, and much valuable material of that kind would have been preserved which is now irrecoverably lost. This, I think, should be one of the first departments to receive attention, in the formation of new Libraries for the Public. Every thing that is procurable, whether printed or MS., that bears on the history and antiquities, the fauna and flora, the trade and politics, the worthies and notabilities, and, generally, on the local affairs of whatever kind, of the parish, town and county in which the Library may be placed, and of the adjacent district, should be carefully collected. Wherever unprinted materials of this sort are known to exist in other Libraries, whether public or private, transcripts should be obtained. If the town or district have any great staple trade, every book and pamphlet relating to that trade-generally as well as locally-should be procured, as opportunity |