With this Handbook in their possession, a new committee, the members of which may never have seen the inside of a public library, may furnish and equip the institution under their charge as effectively as if an experienced library manager had lent his aid.
The second issue of the series will be on “Staff,” by Mr. Peter Cowell, Chief Librarian of the Liverpool Free Public Libraries.
The Editors.
London, August, 1892.
LIBRARY APPLIANCES.
THE TECHNICAL EQUIPMENT OF LIBRARIES, INCLUDING FITTINGS AND FURNITURE, RECORDS, FORMS, RECIPES, &c.
By James D. Brown, Librarian, Clerkenwell Public Library, London.
This Handbook bears some analogy to the division “miscellaneous” usually found in most library classifications. It is in some respects, perhaps, more exposed to the action of heterogeneity than even that refuge of doubt “polygraphy,” as “miscellaneous” is sometimes seen disguised; but the fact of its limits being so ill-defined gives ample scope for comprehensiveness, while affording not a little security to the compiler, should it be necessary to deprecate blame on the score of omissions or other faults. There is, unfortunately, no single comprehensive word or phrase which can be used to distinguish the special sort of library apparatus here described—“appliances” being at once too restricted or too wide, according to the standpoint adopted. Indeed there are certain bibliothecal sophists who maintain that anything is a library appliance, especially the librarian himself; while others will have it that, when the paste-pot and scissors are included, the appliances of a library have been named. To neither extreme will this tend, but attention will be strictly confined to the machinery and implements wherewith libraries, public and other, are successfully conducted. It would be utterly impossible, were it desirable, to describe, or even mention, every variety of fitting or appliance which ingenuity and the craving for change have introduced, and the endeavour shall be accordingly to notice the more generally established apparatus, and their more important modifications. It is almost needless to point out that very many of the different methods of accomplishing the same thing, hereinafter described, result from similar causes to those which led in former times to such serious political complications in the kingdom of Liliput. There are several ways of getting into an egg, and many ways of achieving one end in library affairs, and the very diversity of these methods shows that thought is active and improvement possible. As Butler has it—
“Opiniators naturally differ