'If I had the planning of rooms for a private library, I should select as the best possible arrangement a suite of three rooms, or one long room or gallery divided by columns into three compartments, of which the centre should be the largest, with several small contiguous ante-rooms, the entrances to which, if so desired, might be concealed, for uniformity or completeness of appearance, by filling them with sham or dummy book-backs, the titles of which may be made an occasion for witticism or joking allusion to local and family history.
'A good library arrangement is not achieved at once, but is a slow growth through difficulties met and conquered. Some of the best portions of it will be those which have flashed across your mind when there seemed no pathway out of the thicket of difficulty in which you were struggling. The arrangement of books, where the shelves are not made to order to suit your plans, must naturally be of a progressive character in its development in your mind.
'In some old libraries, collected mostly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there is such a preponderance of those portly tomes in folio in which our sturdy ancestors delighted, that they materially affect and disconcert our ordinary plans. I have known an instance in which the library shelves projected slightly in their upper part, and, there thus being an appropriate depth, I arranged on these shelves two long parallel rows, completely round the room, of these noble volumes of our old divines, State papers, Statutes, Treaties, Trials, and our County histories; and the effect in strength and power (as Ruskin might have said) of these long lines of large stout books of nearly equal height and size was really magnificent. Sometimes you meet with such a valuable and massive body of topography as will not allow of its cavalierly being made a subsidiary section of the class of history, and the form and weighty character of the folios suggest that some deep and separate bookcases should be chosen in which it may assume the important individuality that it deserves.
'Folios of a modern date, being of very unequal sizes, would have a raggedness of outline which would be less observed nearer to the ground than in the elevated position just referred to. As a general rule, a row of folios on the lowest shelf will be succeeded by one of quartos, and then above the ledge the octavos and duodecimos will be placed, but they should not ascend in too rigid a law of gradual decrease. Rows of small books at the top of a bookcase look as petty to the mind as to the eyes, and, indeed, are in general more appropriately placed in dwarf bookcases specially fitted for their reception.
'For small libraries, not exceeding 3000 to 4000 volumes, the letters of the alphabet may be used for the cases, and small figures for the shelves, on the principle of the greater including the less, the letters having a more important appearance. But in larger libraries, where there is a chance of the alphabet being doubled or trebled, one regular series of large numbers for the cases, with small letters for the shelves, is to be preferred.'
Books should be marked in pencil, with a shelf letter and a case number.
Long sets of books need be numbered in the first volume only.
In the case of collections of pamphlets each item ought to be separately catalogued.
The catalogue should complement the arrangement on the shelves, and not be tautological.
Tables of contents of collected editions given in catalogue.