we have occasion to lament often that the cost of circulating a single volume is so great. It is a fair question whether the cost of shelving, preparing for the public, and in many cases, of circulating a volume, is not greater than the fee which the bookseller asks as his profit, his wage in transferring that volume from the publisher to the reader. Therefore it seems to me that the suggestion of which Mr. Dewey is the apostle, that the public library should take the place of the book store, that it should exhibit recent books to the public and take the public's orders for those books, rests both on an economic and on a social fallacy. In a word, work cannot be done for nothing, and whether that work is paid for by the public in the shape of salaries or by the private buyer in the shape of profits is a matter of comparison. About the time at which the A. L. A. was organized, in 1876, there was an attempt on the part of the book trade to deal with this question, and at Philadelphia, in 1876, a meeting was held at which a reform plan was initiated. That plan, it seemed to me then as it seems to me now, involved a fundamental mistake, in that it did not deal with the question of published prices. It is evident that books cannot be increased in price, unless there is a specific reason in the price of paper or some such reason, without interference with their sale and wide distribution. It is poor policy for the publisher to limit the sale of his ware by putting a higher price on it than the traffic will bear. At that meeting it was proposed not to alter the published prices of books, but to recognize formally the custom of giving twenty per cent. discount to the retail buyer. The reform proceeded upon that basis, and the system presently broke down. Within a year past there have been shaped two organizations, the American Publishers' Association and the American Booksellers' Association, which are working in harmony on another plan. That plan is that new books, new copyright books (fiction and some special classes excepted for the time), should be published at a price which recognizes the fact that the published price hitherto has not been the real or standard price. In other words, a book which was priced at $1.50 it is expected to publish at twenty per cent., more or less, below that price, and to make a $1.50 book, say, $1.25 or $1.20; a $2 book $1.60 or $1.50, and a $1 book 75 or 80 cents. This plan recognizes the existing situation, and the proposal is that the plan shall be enforced by the publishers declining to supply books to booksellers who fail to maintain those standard prices. The plan has worked out with other classes of specially owned articles, in that respect similar to books, and it has worked with fair success.