So much for the information to be obtained from the library by business men. You are advertising men. Your business is the dissemination of information. Your boast is that it is your business to tell the truth, and I believe it. How can the Library help you tell it? Well--I believe the Library to be the greatest publicity field in the world--largely a virgin field, for you men, like everybody else, have got the hysteresis--you are suffering from brain lag--not brain fag. You think the library is back where it was in 1850, when it was the last place in the world where any sane man would go for publicity. It was a good place to hide. They tell the story of a library in Philadelphia, a beautiful old mausoleum, where an escaped criminal once stayed in its public reading room for three days before the police found him. We don’t covet that reputation. The modern library, I repeat, is the very best publicity field in the world. First, as we have seen, it is absolutely non-partisan. If you get your publicity material into the library it is because the library thinks it is good for something, not because you have some kind of a pull. Next, the people who frequent the library are intelligent. Publicity there is like that obtained from a high-class periodical: it is gilt-edged. Last and not least, the publicity given by the library is incidental. It accepts your publicity material and makes it available, not because it wants to boom your product at the expense of some other, but because it thinks that your material contains something of value to the business man. In most cases its publicity is general, not specific. You know that splendid Eastman ad--“There’s a photographer in your town.” That makes a thrill run down my spine whenever I see it, just as Tschaikovsky’s Sixth symphony does or Homer’s description of Ulysses fighting the Cyclops; and for the same reason--it is a product of genius.