In this way; records stand, but the things that they record progress. We must go to the library to find out where humanity stands on the road and what lies before us. If our public comes to us naturally to read these records and if our writers know this and write for a public interested in reality, the library has done its part. Before this linkage can function truly, we must have authors who realize that there is a special library public and who write for it. We are told that the English publishers, before they accept a manuscript ask, “How many will the circulating libraries take?” They mean the great commercial subscription libraries like Mudie’s and Smith’s. The patronage of these libraries is more important to them than that of the public at large, or at any rate, they feel that they can rely upon it as an indication of what that of the public at large will be. There is a library public that they recognize and respect. We have nothing in the United States to correspond to Mudie’s and Smith’s. Our great circulating libraries are our free public libraries. Do authors or publishers or booksellers recognize the public library as a force to be reckoned with, either apart from other readers or as indicative of what other readers will think or do? I once made an investigation of this question and I was compelled to acknowledge, as I am still forced to admit, that there is no such recognition. Neither author nor publisher consciously does anything different, because there are public library readers, from what he would do, if all our public libraries were wiped off the face of the earth. My hope for the future lies in a justified suspicion that though neither is consciously affected, both do recognize the library public unconsciously and indirectly. Both would admit that their output has been affected by the great extension of the reading public and its consequent alteration in quality. A discussion of the exact effect would lead us too far afield. The point is that the literary product has been changed by a change in the numbers and quality of the reading public, and that this change has been brought about in no small degree by the establishment and popularity of public libraries. Possibly it is not too much to expect that this unconscious recognition will give place to a conscious one, and that the producers’ mutual influence bring each other into more frequent contact with reality.