An excellent form of wooden case is one seven feet high, with shelves three feet long and seven and a half inches wide, supported on iron pegs. The pegs fit into a series of holes bored one inch apart in the sides of the case, thus making the shelves adjustable. These pegs can be bought in the market in several shapes. The shelves have slots cut in the under side at the ends to hold the projecting ends of the pegs, thus giving no obstructions to the free movement of the books. With some forms of pegs the slots are not needed. The uprights are made of inch and a half stuff, or even inch and an eighth. The shelves are inch stuff, finished to seven-eighths of an inch. The backs are half inch stuff, tongued and grooved and put in horizontally. This case-unit (3' x 7' x 8") may be doubled or trebled, making cases six and nine feet long; or it may be made double-faced. If double-faced, and nine feet long, it will hold about a thousand books of ordinary size when full. It is often well to build several of your cases short and with a single front--wall cases--as they are when in this form more easily adjusted to the growing needs of the library. A library can never do its best work until its management recognizes the duty and true economy of providing skilled assistants, comfortable quarters, and the best library equipment of fittings and supplies. For cases, furniture, catalog cases, cards, trays, and labor-saving devices of all kinds, consult the catalog of the Library Bureau. Very many libraries, even the smallest, find it advantageous to use for book cases what are known as "steel stacks." The demand for these cases has been so great from libraries, large and small, that shelving made from a combination of wood and steel has been very successfully adapted to this use, and at a price within the reach of all libraries. One of the principal advantages in buying such "steel stack" shelving, with parts all interchangeable, is that in the rearrangement of a room, or in moving into a new room or a new building, it can be utilized to advantage, whereas the common wooden book cases very generally cannot. CHAPTER IX Things needed in beginning work--Books, periodicals, and tools The books and other things included in the following list--except those starred or excepted in a special note, the purchase of which can perhaps be deferred until the library contains a few thousand volumes--are essential to good work, and should be purchased, some of them as soon as a library is definitely decided upon, the others as soon as books are purchased and work is actually begun. I. BOOKS *American catalog of books in print from 1876-1896, 5v. with annual supplement. The Publishers' weekly, N.Y. Several of the volumes are out of print. All are expensive. They are not needed by the very small library. The recent years of the annual volumes are essential.