Among the old-established departments the reading rooms where newspapers and other periodical literature are displayed must, to judge by statistics of use, take a foremost place. Hundreds of thousands enter these newsrooms daily, twice as many as come into the lending libraries. Until the question was raised ten years ago by the late J. D. Brown, a librarian who attempted reconstruction in library administration long before the word began to be written with a big R, it seemed the most natural and unchallengeable thing in the world to put a newsroom in every library building and furnish it with a motley array of dailies and weeklies of all denominations. Brown induced the committee of the Islington Public Libraries to reform the reading room in a drastic way. No newspaper except the “Times” was provided for public consumption, though the advertisement columns were cut out from others and posted for the benefit of the unemployed. This violent departure from routine did bring out the fact that newsrooms, at any rate as they were and as they are at present, occupy a somewhat illogical position. At first sight, there hardly seems any better justification for their inclusion in a library than that they also provide reading matter. But it is reading matter, too often, of a very different and doubtful kind; and the awkward fact that it is not the same people who use the newsroom that use the library, in short that the library proper and the newsroom, but for an inconsiderable overlap, cater for two different publics, gives occasion for thought. To put it roundly, the proper place in the library scheme for the newspaper and its like has never been thought out. Brown went too far, and the library which was the scene of this experiment is now furnished with a careful selection of newspapers as well as with magazines and reviews of good standing. But he gave the problem serious thought. In the various public reading rooms which were under his care, he saw to it that the right kind of periodicals were provided, and the best of each kind. Among his many publications on library practice was a classified and annotated list of English and foreign periodicals, which ought to have done even more than it has to help provide something far better and more scientific than the mere hotchpotch of journalism with which too many tables are littered. Here again, economy of the baser sort has been the offender; for the poorest journalism is, of course, the cheapest, and a steady provision of the high-class periodicals recommended by Brown is an expensive drain on slender funds. [Illustration: READING ROOM, STEPNEY PUBLIC LIBRARY.]