bulletin appears with another long list? All these things conduce to high circulation statistics and are therefore grateful to our senses. But how many of them are calculated to impart the reading habit, are effective in instilling "much love and some knowledge of books" as a distinguished librarian has paraphrased it in a recent lecture? How far does any of this machinery go in advertising books as to their subject and scope, as the program has it? The science of advertising claims a psychological basis all its own. Perhaps it is no psychology at all but only a functioning of instinct that causes us to respond, and often capitulate in the end, to the ceaseless reiteration and ever-present insistence upon a given assertion. But whatever it is, it reacts upon the volition in so compelling a manner as to justify, even in the final acid test of the cash book, the enormous outlay of money poured forth in arousing it. And the keynote of it all is, not the fact of the reiteration, though that is important, but the overpowering irresistible confidence with which the assertion is put forth. The advertiser who would go before his public with the guarded statement that "our soap seems to be a very good soap and barring certain blemishes, a very desirable article," or would quote somebody else's testimonials (a practice now employed only by those Ishmaelites of commerce, the patent medicines) might spread his placards in a solid wall across the country, with no other result than that of obliterating the landscape which now he only makes hideous. Yet I ask whether the foregoing does not fairly represent the general style of book annotations in library publications, when we treat ourselves to the luxury of annotations at all?