This is special publicity too, not general. There are some other cases where something about a piece of special publicity makes it so valuable to us that we display it, letting the advertiser get his advantage as a side issue. Within the last few years we have put up boldly in our art room, big glaring poster ads of beer, cigars and breakfast foods. How much could one of you have extorted from an advertiser if you had made him believe that you had some kind of a pull that would enable you to placard his wares not on Smith’s fence or Jones’s barn, but actually on the inside of the St. Louis Public Library? Now these posters were displayed, of course, not as inducements to smoke Fatimas or to drink Satanet, but because they were good and interesting commercial art. We believe that more people see the art on the fences than that in the Art Museum, and we want to do our part toward making it good. It has made great strides of late, as I think you will acknowledge. But answer me this: was not that valuable publicity for these products? Will not the knowledge that similar publicity may await the manufacturer who gets out a good poster, work out to the advantage of all concerned? You know those articles in _System_, of course, telling what the writer would do if he were an undertaker, or a druggist, or a farmer. Well, if I were an ad-man I would get up an exhibition of St. Louis-made commercial art, advertising St. Louis products, and offer it to the Public Library. We will display it, our only condition in each case being that it is artistically worth display. Your clients will have their products advertised gratis, in a place where space could not be bought for a million dollars a square foot. You will gain in reputation as a man who puts over big things: we shall get an interesting display of commercial art, and better than all else, an impulse will have been given toward improved quality in the poster art of St. Louis. This is only one instance of the fact, which I believe to be a fact, that there is almost no kind of advertising that cannot be done in a live, modern public library, if one only goes the right way about it. Many go about it quite the wrong way, and do not succeed. We do not assist Mrs. Smith to get piano pupils by placing on our bulletin boards a scrawled announcement. We are not willing to distribute by the million, small dodgers announcing that Jones’s clothes-wringers are the best. We do not allow Robinson to lecture in one of our assembly rooms in order to form a class in divine healing from which he, and he alone, will profit.