The Private Library What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know About Our Books

_WITH all the literature published on behalf of Free Libraries--institutions which, after all, are of doubtful good--no one so far has written a book to assist in making THE PRI...

_Feb. 8, 1667-68._--'Thence away to the Strand, to my bookseller's, and there staid an hour, and bought the idle, rogueish book, _L'escholle des filles_, which I have bought in...

'Our books are taken down once a year, in the month of August, to be dusted, and, for the last four or five years, I have adopted a simple plan. When the books are well dusted I...

'In order to attain these advantages, two conditions are fundamental. First, the shelves must, as a rule, be fixed; secondly, the cases, or a large part of them, should have the...

A third instance shall be an old book which requires repairing or restoring. We will suppose that it is an old copy of _Clarissa Harlowe_, which you have picked up on a country...

[23] 'Periodically I am addressed by two constant and somewhat exigeant classes of correspondents: the young gentlemen who wish me to give them a list of the works requisite to...

The architect is very frequently a great enemy to the library. Underestimating the amount of wall space likely to be required for the housing of the books, or placing shelves an...

'Among the friends of Cosimo, to whose personal influences at Florence the Revival of Learning owed a vigorous impulse, Niccolo de' Niccoli claims our attention. . . . . His jud...