The United States are considered to be far behind foreign countries in their book collections. We have nothing to compare with Dresden, Berlin, and Paris, with their 500,000, 700,000, and 2,000,000 volumes. We do not reach the wealth of even such second-rate places as Wolfenbüttel, Breslau, and Göttingen, if their collections are correctly reported at 300,000, 340,000, and 400,000 volumes. And yet each year witnesses the purchase of more than 400,000 volumes for our public libraries, taken collectively, a number that is larger than any one collection in this country! The permanent fund of our libraries, so far as known, amounts to $6,105,581 and their annual income to $1,398,756. These figures do not, in fact, represent anything like the truth, for not half the libraries reported their permanent fund, or their yearly purchases, and only one-quarter reported their yearly income. About one-fifth of the whole number (769 exactly) report their expenditures for new books at $562,407, and in 742 libraries the use of books amounts to 8,879,869 volumes yearly. In these figures Sunday-school libraries, one of the most constantly used kinds, are not included. Looking at the magnitude of the numbers reported, and considering all that is omitted, we obtain an inkling of the immense exchange of books among the people from these public distribution points. The existing public libraries, excluding all under 300 volumes, and all in Sunday-schools of whatever size, may be considered as belonging to six principal divisions. These, with the number of libraries and the volumes in each, are as follows: _Class._ _No. libraries._ _No. Volumes._ Educational 1,577 3,442,799 Professional 360 1,406,759 Historical 51 421,794 Government 122 1,562,597 Proprietary Public 1,109 3,228,555 Free Public 342 1,909,444 Miscellaneous 121 305,016 ----- ---------- 3,682 12,276,964 The "miscellaneous" class contains the libraries of secret and benevolent societies, and some others difficult to arrange. On the whole it might be better to class them with the proprietary public libraries.