The monthly bulletins of our public libraries, with a few shining exceptions, are bare and bald author and title lists employing that deadliest of all monotonous forms, the catalog entry. Now, I have been too long apprenticed to the trade of the cataloger to find it in my heart to cavil at his art and the carefully evolved, scientifically derived principles upon which it rests. But when the cataloger is "a-cataloging" he is not writing advertising copy. He is making a permanent record, and he is following certain rules which long experience has established and vindicated as good and necessary for that purpose. He finds it necessary to establish, beyond the possibility of confusion, the absolute identity of an author, and he does this by giving that author his full and correct name, stripping him of all disguises and never heeding the fact that the author himself may have been trying through all his years of discretion to live down the indiscretions of his baptismal record. This practice of employing full names in a card catalog can still be defended, though with much labor. But when an author is made to appear thus full-panoplied in a monthly bulletin, which should have the freshness and attractiveness of a news-sheet--which is all it is--he is more often disguised and concealed from, than revealed to, the view of him who is expected to read as he runs. Again, the cataloger rightly confines himself to rendering an accurate transcript of the title page, neither adding thereto, nor, if he be wise, subtracting one jot or tittle therefrom. But title pages, like human faces, are often but a poor index to character, and many a book which might upon closer acquaintance prove a very good friend indeed, if only some one had been near to speak the few formal words of introduction required in good society, is passed by because of a forbidding and austere, or otherwise misleading, countenance. And so the monthly record becomes a stern and monotonous affair, requiring to be furbished up and trimmed with all sorts of side issues by way of supplying what the city editor calls human interest, all of them well contrived to advertise the library, but using up the space which should be given over to advertising the books--of which, first of all, and after all the library is composed.