We need waste no words on the purchaser of “subscription sets” and many-volumed collections of “Kings and Queens of Neo-Cymric Realism and Romance,” and “The Universalest of All Libraries of Super-extraordinary Fiction,” in forty-eight volumes, fifteen dollars down and five dollars a month until the purchaser is summoned to a Better Land. Either these people want books for mere shelf-furniture, or else they are the victims of voracious book agents, and deserve a tear of sympathy rather than a rebuke. Our concern, the concern of those who have at heart the good name of printed literature and the liberty of the individual householder of literary tastes, is with the person who is highly literate and possessed of an account with a bookseller, and is abusing his talent and privilege by “efficiently” building up a library. When efficiency confined itself to the office and the factory, it was bad enough. When it (loathsome animal that it is!) crawled up a leg of the table and began to preach to us about our food, babbling obscenely of proteids and carbohydrates, we felt that the limit of endurance had been reached. But no sooner do we cuff efficiency from the dining table than it pops up in the library. And this is not to be endured. Efficiency must be plucked down, kindly, of course, but resolutely, from the bookshelves, and put in a covered basket to await the coming of the wagon which shall convey it to the lethal of the S. P. C. A. Except for an efficient family, what could be less interesting than an efficient library? Think of the sameness of it--every study in a block of houses containing the “Oxford Dictionary” and “Roget’s Thesaurus” and the “Collected Essays of Hamilton Wright Mabie” and similar works of reference, with a few standard fictions such as Arnold Bennett’s “Your United States,” and Owen Wister’s “The Pentecost of Calamity”! There would be no adventures among books possible in such libraries. Indeed, efficiency in the library would soon reduce it, if logically developed, to a collection of anthologies and reference books, and possibly some such practical jokes as ex-President Eliot’s “Five Foot Shelf.” An advocate of the efficient library, a spectacled young gentleman of the type already described, once engaged in some ignoble literary task--book-reviewing I believe it was called--while a guest at my house. The volume of which he was writing a criticism had to do with a single-tax experiment in New Zealand, and therefore he wished to include in his review a quotation from the “Life of Benvenuto Cellini.” He did not find the “Life of Benvenuto Cellini” on my shelves, and therefore reproached me, and made my library the object of his callow disapproval.