Now books, beside this modern form of distribution by loan, are widely distributed commercially both by loan and by sale, and especially in the latter form advertisement is now very extensively used in connection with the distribution.  In fact we have all the different types specified above—­economic, uneconomic and illegitimate, both through misrepresentation and the harmful character of the subject matter.  The reason for all illegitimate forms of advertising is of course not a desire to misrepresent or to do harm per se, but to make money, the profit to the distributor being proportioned to the amount of distribution done and not at all dependent on its economic value.  Distribution by public officers is of course not open to this objection, nor are the distributors subject to temptation, since their compensation does not depend on the amount of distribution.  If they are capable and interested, furthermore, they are particularly desirous to increase the economic value of the work that they are doing.  Since this is so and since the danger of uneconomic or harmful forms of advertising is thus reduced to a minimum, there would seem to be special reason why the economic forms should be employed very freely.  But the fact is that they have been used sparingly, and by some librarians shunned altogether.

Let us see what library advertising of the economic types may mean.  In the first place it means telling those who want books where they may get them.  This simple task is rarely performed completely or satisfactorily.  It is astonishing how many inhabitants of a large town do not even know where the public library is.  Everyone realizes this who has ever tried to find a public library in a strange place.  I once asked repeatedly of passers-by in a crowded city street a block distant from a library (in this case not architecturally conspicuous) before finding one who knew its whereabouts; in another city I inquired in vain of a conductor who passed the building every few hours in his car.  In the latter case the library was a beautiful structure calculated to move the curiosity of a less stolid citizen.  In New York inquiry would probably cause you to reach the nearest branch library, anything more remote than that being beyond the local intelligence.  Sometimes I think we had better drop all our far-reaching plans for civic betterment and devote our time for a few years to causing citizens, lettered and unlettered alike to memorize some such simple formula as this:  “There is a Public Library.  It is on Blank street.  We may borrow books there, free.”

You will notice that I have inserted in this formula one item of information that pertains to use, not location.  For of those who know of the existence and location of the Public Library there are many whose ideas of its contents and their uses, and of the conditions and value of such uses, are limited and crude.  The advertising that succeeds in bettering this state of things is surely doing an economic service.