And on the tessellated floor
The purple nectar madly pour,
Nectar more worthy of the halls
Where Pontiffs hold their festivals.
S. E. de V.
NEW PUBLICATIONS.
Public Libraries in the United States of America; their History, Condition, and Management. Special Report. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education. 1876.
In 1874 the Commissioner of the Bureau of Education in the Department of the Interior at Washington began the preparation of a complete Report on the Public Libraries in the United States; on the 31st of August, 1876, the report was submitted; it was printed, and it makes a volume of 1,187 pages. A careful study of the contents of this unique work compels us to express, in the first place, our most cordial appreciation of the great labor which has been expended upon it, and of the value of the information which it contains. The size of the volume, we fear, has deterred many into whose hands it has fallen from more than glancing over its pages; we confess for ourselves that we shrank, for a while, from the task of reading it. But we have been amply repaid for our toil, which soon became a pleasure; and we may say here that we have seen in foreign periodicals and journals a number of highly eulogistic and discriminating reviews of the report. We propose to make our readers share in the satisfaction we have derived from our study of this work; but our space will permit us only to give a condensed summary of a portion of its contents.
No less than 132 pages of the report are taken up with a table giving the statistics of all the “public libraries” in the United States and Territories numbering 300 volumes or more, excepting common or district school libraries. The table is as complete as it could be made from the returns received in 1875-76; but it is incomplete, because many of the libraries named in it do not report the date of their foundation, their average annual increase in books, their financial condition, or their yearly expenditures. But with all these defects the table is extremely valuable. It shows, to begin with, that the total number of these libraries is 3,647, having as their total number of volumes 12,276,964. We pause here for a moment to say that the report also shows that in the district-school libraries, not included in the table, there are 1,365,407 volumes, and that in all the libraries there are about 1,500,000 pamphlets not classed as “volumes.” The census of 1870 showed that there were 107,673 private libraries, containing 25,571,503 volumes, exclusive of those which may be in the State of Connecticut, from which State no returns on this subject were received. Here, then, we have a total of 39,213,874 volumes of books in the public, private, and school libraries of the country—a mass of printed matter large enough, estimating each volume to weigh a pound, to fill nine merchant vessels of 2,000 tons burden each. Let us also in this place give the following list of the number of volumes in several noted libraries in other countries, with the remark that, as the statistics of these libraries differ widely according to different authorities, we have in each case taken the highest number given, and that this number relates only to books, and not to manuscripts or pamphlets, fugitive publications, etc.:
| Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris | 2,000,000 |
| Mazarin Library, Paris | 160,000 |
| Royal Library, Madrid | 200,000 |
| Convent Library of the Escorial, Madrid | 130,000 |
| Vatican Library, Rome | 1,000,000 |
| Magliabecchíana Library, Florence | 200,000 |
| Laurentian Library, Florence | 120,000 |
| Museo Borbonico, Naples | 200,000 |
| University Library, Bologna | 200,000 |
| Brera Library, Milan | 200,000 |
| Ambrosian Library, Milan | 140,000 |
| University Library, Turin | 150,000 |
| Royal Library, Berlin | 700,000 |
| Royal Library, Dresden | 500,000 |
| University Library, Breslau | 350,000 |
| University Library, Göttingen | 400,000 |
| Ducal Library, Wolfenbüttel | 300,000 |
| University Library, Freiburg | 250,000 |
| Royal Library, Stuttgart | 450,000 |
| Royal Library, Munich | 900,000 |
| Royal Library, Copenhagen | 550,000 |
| Bodleian Library, Oxford | 700,000 |
| Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh | 300,000 |
| University Library, Edinburgh | 130,000 |
| Imperial Library, St. Petersburg | 1,100,000 |
| City Library, Augsburg | 150,000 |
| University Library, Cambridge | 400,000 |
| City Library, Frankfort | 150,000 |
| Ducal Library, Gotha | 240,000 |
| City Library, Hamburg | 300,000 |
| City Library, Leipsic | 170,000 |
| University Library, Leipsic | 350,000 |
| British Museum, London | 1,020,000 |