A large library, however liberally administered, does not often offer opportunities for a man’s larger initiative unless he occupies one of the chief positions; and the exercise of his gifts did not come fully until his appointment in 1888 to the newly-established Clerkenwell Public Library in London. The building is a comparatively small edifice occupying a triangular site, and hardly one in which experiments little short of epoch-making might be expected; but Brown was a man of ideas and courage who could make the most of such a building. Moreover, London offered him openings which he did not hesitate to take. Retiring in person as a rule, nervous in speech, and in appearance of no special significance, he yet threw himself with quiet energy into the work of the Library Association. It must be remembered that from about 1888 to 1898 the public library movement in England received its greatest impetus, probably because in those years the full effects of the Education Act of 1870 came into play. Few of the libraries founded in that period are entirely without marks of his influence. In 1891 he conceived the idea--very old in itself, but quite new in its application to municipal libraries in this country--of throwing open the shelves to the choice of readers; and he formulated a scheme, which he called by the somewhat tautological name of “safe-guarded open access,” and published it anonymously in _The Library_ in a paper entitled “A Plea for Liberty to Readers to Help Themselves.” A visit to America in 1893, where he attended the Chicago Conference of the American Library Association as a delegate of the Library Association, confirmed him in his opinion of the practical desirability of the system, although he says, “There was no such thing as proper safe-guarded open access as now understood anywhere in America when I was there”; but free access there was, without the locking wickets and other safeguards which he introduced at Clerkenwell. In brief, his method was to admit readers to the shelves, but by way of a wicket at which their credentials were checked unobtrusively, and to allow them to pass out at another wicket at which the books chosen were charged. Thus the reader was locked in the library while making his choice. The results of his experiment were presented to the Belfast Conference in a paper he wrote in collaboration with one of his Committee, Mr Henry W. Fincham, entitled “The Clerkenwell Open Lending Library,” which was modest and restrained in tone; but although the discussion that ensued was generous and appreciative to an extent, it was the fiercest yet known amongst librarians, and the question became the most contested one in our work. So sharp were the divisions the simple suggestion created that the municipal library profession went into two armed camps, and friendships and good-feeling were frequently destroyed by it. It is difficult for younger librarians to realize the courage and confidence that were