If a new library is to be formed, having no sets of periodicals on which to build, effort should be made to secure full sets from the beginning of as many of the prominent magazines and reviews, American and foreign, as the funds will permit. It is expedient to wait a little, rather than to take up with incomplete sets, as full ones are pretty sure to turn up, and competition between the many dealers should bring down prices to a fair medium. In fact, many old sets of magazines are offered surprisingly cheap, and usually well-bound. But vigilant care must be exercised to secure perfect sets, as numbers are often mutilated, or deficient in some pages or illustrations. This object can only be secured by collation of every volume, page by page, with due attention to the list of illustrations, if any are published. In the absence of British bibliographical enterprise (a want much to be deplored) it has fallen to the lot of American librarians to produce the only general index of subjects to English periodical literature which exists. Poole's Index to Periodical Literature is called by the name of its senior editor, the late Dr. Wm. F. Poole, and was contributed to by many librarians on a cooeperative division of labor, in indexing, under direction of Mr. Wm. I. Fletcher, librarian of Amherst College. This index to leading periodicals is literally invaluable, and indispensable as an aid to research. Its first volume indexes in one alphabet the periodicals embraced, from their first issues up to 1882. The second volume runs from 1882 to 1887, and the third covers the period from 1887 to 1891, while a fourth volume indexes the periodicals from 1892 to 1896, inclusive. For 1897, and each year after, an annual index to the publications of the year is issued. Besides this, the _Review of Reviews_ publishes monthly an index to one month's leading periodicals, and also an annual index, very full, in a single alphabet. And the "Cumulative Index," issued both monthly and quarterly, by W. H. Brett, the Cleveland, Ohio, librarian, is an admirably full means of keeping our keys to periodical literature up to date. There are other indexes to periodicals, published monthly or quarterly, too numerous to be noticed here. The annual _New York Tribune_ Index (the only daily journal, except the _London Times_, which prints an index) is highly useful, and may be used for other newspapers as well, for the most important events or discussions, enabling one to search the dailies for himself, the date once being fixed by aid of the index. Mention should also be made here of the admirably comprehensive annual "_Rowell's Newspaper Directory_," which should rather be called the "American Periodical Directory," since it has a classified catalogue of all periodicals published in the United States and Canada. CHAPTER 9. THE ART OF READING.