For this question there is never an absolute or ready answer, and there never can be. On some of the affairs to be reported all journalists would agree; but they would differ in their estimates of the relative worth of even these and the lengths at which they should be treated; about lesser occurrences there would be no fixed percentage of agreement. 12 Now the application of all this to the business of giving the news of books should be fairly clear. A new book is news--and so, sometimes, is an old one, rediscovered. Since a new book is news it should be dealt with by a news reporter. Not all that happens is news; not all the new books published are news; new books, like new events of all sorts, are news when they compete successfully with a majority of their kind. There is no more sense in _reporting_--that is, describing individually at greater or less length--all the new books than there would be in reporting every incident on the police blotters of a lively American city. _Recording_ new books is another matter; somewhere, somehow, most occurrences in this world get recorded in written words that reach nearly all who are interested in the happenings (as in letters) or are accessible to the interested few (as the police records). The difference between the reporter and the recorder is not entirely a difference of details given. The recorder usually follows a prescribed formula and makes his record conform thereto; the good reporter never has a formula and never can have one. Let us see how this works out with the news of books. 13 The recorder of new books generally compiles a list of _Books Received_ or _Books Just Published_ and he does it in this uninspired and conscientious manner: IN THE HEART OF A FOOL. By William Allen White. A story of Kansas in the last half-century, centered in a single town, showing its evolution from prairie to an industrial city with difficult economic and labor problems; the story told in the lives of a group of people, pioneers and the sons of pioneers--their work, ambitions, personal affairs, &c. New York: The Macmillan Company. $1.60. That would be under the heading _Fiction_. An entry under the heading _Literary Studies_ or _Essays_ might read: OUR POETS OF TO-DAY. By Howard Willard Cook. Volume II. in a series of books on modern American writers. Sketches of sixty-eight American poets, nearly all living, including Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell, Witter Bynner, Robert Service, Edgar Guest, Charles Divine, Carl Sandburg, Joyce Kilmer, Sara Teasdale, George Edward Woodberry, Percy Mackaye, Harriet W. Monroe, &c. New York: Moffat, Yard & Co. $1.60.