I have prescribed simple remedies—­too simple, I am convinced, to be readily adopted.  What could be simpler than to advise the extermination of all germ diseases by killing off the germs?  Any physician will tell you that this method is the very acme of efficiency; yet, the germs are still with us, and bid fair to spread suffering and death over our planet for many a long year to come.  So I am not sanguine that we shall be able all at once to kill off the programmes.  All that may be expected is that at some distant day the simplicity and effectiveness of some plan of the sort will begin to commend itself to clubwomen.  If, then, some lover of the older literature will point out the fact that, back in 1915, the gloomy era when fighting hordes were spreading blood and carnage over the fair face of Europe, an obscure and humble librarian, in the pages of THE BOOKMAN, pointed out the way to sanity, I shall be well content.

BOOKS FOR TIRED EYES

The most distinctive thing about a book is the possibility that someone may read it.  Is this a truism?  Evidently not; for the publishers, who print books, and the libraries, which store and distribute them, have never thought it worth their while to collect and record information bearing on this possibility.  In the publisher’s or the bookseller’s advertising announcements, as well as on the catalogue cards stored in the library’s trays, the reader may ascertain when and where the book was published, the number of pages, and whether it contains plates or maps; but not a word of the size or style of type in which it is printed.  Yet on this depends the ability of the reader to use the book for the purpose for which it was intended.  The old-fashioned reader was a mild-mannered gentleman.  If he could not read his book because it was printed in outrageously small type, he laid it aside with a sigh, or used a magnifying lens, or persisted in his attempts with the naked eye until eyestrain, with its attendant maladies, was the result.  Lately however, the libraries have been waking up, and their readers with them.  The utilitarian side of the work is pushed to the front; and the reader is by no means disposed to accept what may be offered him, either in the content of the book or its physical make-up.  The modern library must adapt itself to its users, and among other improvements must come an attempt to go as far as possible in making books physiologically readable.

Unfortunately the library cannot control the output of books, and must limit itself to selection.  An experiment in such selection is now in progress in the St. Louis Public Library.  The visitor to that library will find in its Open Shelf Room a section of shelving marked with the words “Books in large type.”  To this section are directed all readers who have found it difficult or painful to read the ordinary printed page but who do not desire to wear magnifying lenses.  It has not been easy