Again, where the advertising takes the form of a benevolent sort of “log-rolling,” the thing advertised being educational and the _quid pro quo_ simply the impulse given to library use by anything of this nature, it is generally regarded as proper. Thus most libraries display without hesitation advertisements of free courses of lectures and the like. When the thing advertised is not free, this procedure is more open to doubt. Personally I should draw the line here, and should allow the library to advertise nothing that requires a fee or payment of any kind, no matter how trifling or nominal and no matter how good the cause. These things are mentioned only to exclude them from consideration here. The library is really exploited only where it is used to further someone’s personal or business ends without adequate return, generally with more or less concealment of purpose, so that the library is without due realization of what it is really doing. Attempts at such exploitation have by no means been lacking in the past. Take if you please this case, dating back about a dozen years: An enterprising firm, operating a department store, offered to give to a branch library a collection of several thousand historical works on condition that these should be kept in a separate alcove plainly labeled “The gift of Blank Brothers.” Nothing so unusual about this. Such gifts, though the objections to the conditions are familiar to you all, are frequently offered and accepted. In this instance, however the name of the branch happened to be also the name of the enterprising firm. The inference would have been overpowering that the branch had been named after the firm. The offer was accepted on condition that the books should be shelved each in its proper place with a gift label, to be of special form if desired, and that the donation should be acknowledged on the bulletin board. These conditions were not acceptable--a sufficient indication of the real object of the gift. Other cases might be cited, to say nothing of the usual efforts to induce the library to display commercial notices or to give official commendation to some book. Several cases of the more ingenious attempts at exploitation having come to my notice during the past few months I set myself to find out whether anything of the kind had also been noted by others. Letters to some of the principal libraries in the country elicited a variety of replies. Some librarians had noted nothing; others nothing more than usual. One said frankly that if the people had been “working” him he had been too stupid to know it. But others responded with interesting instances, and one or two, in whose judgment I have special confidence agreed with me in noticing an increase in the number of attempts at this kind of exploitation of late. I may make my meaning more clear, perhaps, by proceeding at once to cite specific instances which must be anonymous, of course, in accordance with a promise to my informants.