On entering Mudie’s Select Library, from New Oxford Street, we pass through the show-rooms devoted to the sale of bound books; for though the directors do not enter into the usual speculations of the bookselling trade, the clean copies of popular works are put into ornamental bindings, and in this manner a very extensive business is done in works adapted for presents and prizes. Behind these show-rooms stands the Great Hall, a large room, on the wall of which 16,000 of the current works most in vogue are shelved. What most strikes us here is the great order and method that everywhere obtains. The volumes are arranged in alphabetical order, and every attendant goes straight to the required book, without hesitation or delay. For each London customer a card is reserved bearing his name, and these cards are kept, like the books, in an alphabetical system. The books taken out are entered on the card, the books brought back ticked off, and the method is found to be as successful as it certainly is simple. The longer lists of large and country subscribers are still, however, entered in the ledgers. Proceeding upstairs to the first floor, we find books, still current, but not quite so incessantly called for. On the first floor, too, we have the private offices for clerks, and the foreign department. Mudie’s collection of German works is the best of any of the London circulating libraries, and the German books are said to be much more earnestly read than the French, occasional and popular novels, of course, excepted. On the higher floors the standard catalogued works are stowed, their popularity diminishing as the altitude of their resting place increases. As soon as a book is published in a shilling or other cheap edition, it ceases to be much demanded here. For instance, Lord Lytton’s novels are in very little request. On the contrary, we were told that no sets of books are so rapidly “worn out” as the works of Charles Dickens. The stock of books is so incessantly varying through the sale of old and the purchase of new volumes, that we were told that it was impossible to give anything like an estimate of the numbers. Some idea of the magnitude of the library may, however, be gathered from the following:--