Of the poet I have said that his ability to gain the public ear and to reach the public heart is closely bound up with the portrayal of realities. This is true also of the library. Every step of its progress from a merely scholarly institution to a widely popular one has been marked by the introduction of more red blood, more real life, into its organism. The frequenter of the older library went there to find books on the pure sciences, on philosophy, in the drama, in poetry. These we of today in no wise neglect, but we entertain also those who look for books on plumbing, on the manufacture of hats, shoes and clothing, on salesmanship and cost accounting, on camping and fishing, on first aid to the injured, on the products of Sonoma county, California. Our assistants take over the telephone requests to furnish the population of Bulgaria, the average temperature of Nebraska in the month of June, plans for bungalows not to cost more than $1750, pictures of the Winter Palace in Petrograd, sixty picture postals of Baltimore for a reflectoscope lecture, a copy of a poem beginning “O beauteous day!” the address of the speaker’s uncle who left Salem, Massachusetts, for the West twenty-six years ago. Everyone of these queries throbs with the red blood of reality. Few of them would have been considered within the library’s scope fifty years ago. Books are written nowadays about all such subjects, whereas in the earlier day the knowledge of these things and the ability to write of them did not reside in the same person. So the library’s progress toward the realities is but the expression of that same progress in literature, using the word in its widest sense to signify all that may lurk between the covers of a book. The contemptuous name of _biblia abiblia_--books that are no books--which the earlier writers bestowed upon dictionaries, directories, indexes, lists and the like, is disregarded by the modern librarian. He prizes a list of all the grocers in the United States; he points with pride to his collection of hundreds of telephone directories; he has names galore in alphabetical array--indexes to places, persons, pictures, events and books. All these things are as much a part of his library as the Iliad of Homer or the dramas of Calderon.