The large-type collection is used, not only by elderly persons, but also in greater number by young persons whose oculists forbid them to read fine print, or who do not desire to wear glasses.  The absence of a wide range in the collection drives others away to books that are, doubtless, in many cases bad for their eyes.  Some books that have not been popular in the general collection have done well here, while old favorites have not been taken out.  Such facts as these mean little with so limited a collection.  Until readers awake to the dangers of small print and the comfort of large type there will not be sufficient pressure on our publishers to induce them to put forth more books suitable for tired eyes.  It is probably too much to expect that the trade itself will try to push literature whose printed form obeys the rules of ocular hygiene.  All that we can reasonably ask is that type-size shall be reported on in catalogues, so that those who want books in large type may know what is obtainable and where to go for it.

It has often been noted that physicians are the only class of professional men whose activities, if properly carried on, tend directly to make the profession unnecessary.  Medicine tends more and more to be preventive rather than curative.  We must therefore look to the oculists to take the first steps towards lessening the number of their prospective patients by inculcating rational notions about the effects of the printed page on the eye.  Teachers, librarians, parents, the press—­all can do their part.  And when a demand for larger print has thus been created the trade will respond.  Meanwhile, libraries should be unremitting in their efforts to ascertain what material in large type already exists, to collect it, and to call attention to it in every legitimate way.

THE MAGIC CASEMENT[16]

    [16] Read before the Town and Gown Club, St. Louis.

Anyone who talks or writes about the “movies” is likely to be misunderstood.  There is little to be said now about the moving picture as a moving picture, unless one wants to discuss its optics or mechanics.  The time is past when anyone went to see a moving picture as a curiosity.  It was once the eighth wonder of the world; it long ago abdicated that position to join its dispossessed brothers the telephone, the X-ray, the wireless telegraph and the phonograph.  What we now go to see is not the moving picture, but what the moving picture shows us; it is no more than a window through which we gaze—­the poet’s “magic casement” opening (sometimes) “on the foam of perilous seas.”  We may no more praise or condemn the moving picture for what it shows us than we may praise or condemn a proscenium arch or the glass in a show window.

The critic who thinks that the movies are lowering our tastes, or doing anything else objectionable, as well as he who thinks they are educating the masses, is not of the opinion that the moving pictures are doing these things because they show moving objects on a screen, but because of the character of what is photographed for such exhibition.