The individual user is quite wrong, of course, in condemning a regulation that annoys him personally, for this reason alone; but if we should find that it annoyed all other users as well without other advantage than the saving of some trouble to the library assistant, he would, I conceive, be quite right in calling it “red tape.” This term is applied primarily to annoying official restrictions that have no use whatever, but we may well extend it to restrictions that benefit the administrator without improving the administration. Rules, customs and manners of procedure in a library, whether they say “thou shalt” or “thou shalt not” are of two kinds--those addressed to the library staff and those addressed to the public. Both, however, are intended to enable the public to get more good out of the library. The members of the staff are told to do certain things and not to do others, because this will make it easier for the users of the library to get what they want. The latter in turn are bidden to do this and forbidden to do that--not, as some of them seem to think, to make the librarian’s work easier or to save him trouble--but to throw the library open wider to their fellows. System of this kind may bear very hard on the individual user; he may chafe, for instance, at any restriction in the number of books that he is allowed to borrow--but if no such restriction existed, the privileges of his fellow borrowers would be curtailed thereby. He may grumble because the time limit on his book has expired before he has finished reading it, unmindful of the fact that some of his fellow readers are anxiously waiting for it. But if the book in his possession is not wanted by anybody; if there are other such unused books in the library that he wants, should he not have and keep them? Assuredly. Every library should make arrangements whereby none of its books should be kept from use to stand idly on the shelves. Our test of public usefulness declares as decisively for this as it does for the partition of privilege in the case of more than one anxious borrower.