A proposal has recently found favour in the eyes of some for acquiring books for public) libraries by means of exchange. To sub stitute exchange for purchase is simply a return to barter, which is not considered advisable by political economists in other cases, and of which no peculiar benefits have been pointed out in connection with the trade in books. The advocates of the measure appear, in fact, to forget the advantages of a circulating medium. If, as they ;liege, some libraries are encumbered with duplicates, and at the same time labour under a deficiency of funds for purchases, it would seem obvious„that a simple method of escaping from the double difficulty would be to sell the duplicates, and with the proceeds purchase what was wanted to as great an extent as the funds allowed. If instead of selling and buying, librarians put themselves into the hands of an agent to exchange their books for other books in the possession of some other library, they depend in a great measure on the agent's sagacity and honesty, and gutless the books in the possession of both the contracting parties happen to be exactly equal in value, there must after all be some money exchanged; as, indeed, in all cases, some money must pass in recom pense of the services of the agent. The plan has been tried, at the suggestion of the agent, M. Vsttemare, between France and some of the States of America, and some of the American states have expressed themselves satisfied : but this measure of success in the experiment does not seem likely to lead to its wider adoption.
Public libraries of great importance have been endowed in almost every country with the legal right of demanding gratuitous copies of every book published in the state to which they belong. The history of the right and it. limitations in various countries is treated of at some length 111 Edwards's ' Memoirs on Libraries.' From the earlier part of this century up to 1836, eleven copies of every book published in England, Scotland, or Ireland, had to be delivered to different public lila-arias in the three countries ; but by an act of parliament of that par the number was reduced to five, of which that to the British )11issenn was to be delivered at that institution without being deinaodod, under penalty in ease of neglect of a fine of five pounds. The com plelute against the " copy-tax," as it hissbeen called, have often been very loud, though the imposition is extremely moderate when compared with the tax on patents, to which it bears a close analogy. It may be doubted if any superior method could be pointed out, to form a cone pieta collection of the products of the prem. It has been said that acquirement by purchase would be as much more effectual as It would be more agreeable to all parties. But is this well established I The publisher of a local halfpenny newspaper is seldom found to keep a ouinplote set of his own journal, the trouble of doing so is not corn penaated to him by the price. There is much more chance of his attention being aroused by the danger of being fined five pounds than that of losing a halfpenny. The' Bibliographies dole France,' published weekly at Paris, is a record of tile copies of books sent in obedience to the law, to the office fur receiving the legal deposits. It is extremely common when orders are given to booksellers in Paris for some of the smaller and cheaper works recorded in it, to receive for an answer that it is impossible to procure them, that publishers in the pro vinces will not take the trouble to send them, or that printers will not take the trouble of looking them up. Those, therefore, who
are anxious to see preserved one copy at least of the " fugitive literature" of our times, will not regret that the legislature has sup plied a powerful motive for publishers to attend to the supply of the national library.
A somewhat new light has been thrown upon the matter by recent transactions in America. The copy-tax was partly abolished last year in the United States, on the petition, not of the publishers, who aro usually spoken of in England as the aggrieved parties, but of the librarians, on whom devolved the trouble of collecting it. In February, I859, by an Act of Congress, it was determined that for the future one copy only instead of three of each book published in the United States should be required of the publishers, to be deposited in the "department of the interior," and that the Smithsonian Institution should be exonerated from the duty of receiving and preserving copies, which was considered a burthen rather than a benefit. The conduct of Sir Thomas Bodley has thus been selected for imitation by American librarians in the very point in which it was a warning instead of an example.
When books have entered a public library, one of the first operations usually performed on them is to mark them as the property of the institution by a stamp. The stamp in many cases boars the name of the institution only ; it is now, by a simple but ingenious contrivance, made at the British Museum to bear also the date on which the stamp is affixed. The uses of this are manifold. It is sometimes of conse quence, even in a legal point of view, to ascertain the exact date on which a book entered the Museum—it is a proof that on that day, if not before, the book was published. In the old Thomason collection of tracts, the collector noted on the title-page of each pamphlet the day on which he obtained it ; and Mr. Masson, the biographer of Milton, will thus have it in his power to ascertain the exact date of issue of several of Milton's publications, some of which were given by the poet himself to the collector. A similar end is contributed to by a regulation now adopted with regard to the Museum bindings. The cover of every pamphlet, and of every number of a magazine, is bound along with it. The English Cycloptedia,' which the reader now has before him, is issued in monthly numbers with covers when the volume is bound the covers are generally removed by the binder and destroyed. There are at the British Museum more copies than one of this Cycloptedia, and in that which is obtained by the copyright law, the covers are bound up with the text, and not at the end of each volume, but at the end of each number, so that in the bound volume the light-brown covers meet the eye at certain intervals in the midst of the white pages. An eminent Spanish bibliographer, who was visiting the Museum a few years ago, complained of the unsightliness of this practice in regard to some modern Spanish books he was examining, and it was pointed out to him that the covers in that case contained a portion of information which occurred nowhere else, and was thus preserved for perpetual use. Struck with the circum stance which he had overlooked before, he was silent for a minute, and then declared that on his return home lie would take care to adopt the plan in his own books, and mention it elsewhere, for that otherwise it was likely that the British Museum would in a few years contain unique copies of most of the books which it imported from Spain.