BOOK REVIEWS AND THE LIBRARIAN Available to Purchase

Few readers have any inkling of the care with which a good librarian selects his bookstock. It is doubtful whether the average reader gives any thought to the way in which a library stock is built up, but if he does he probably imagines that it is merely an affair of going round the shelves of the nearest bookseller and selecting the books according to their appearance and titles. This, of course, is the last way in which a sound collection of books is developed, and no librarian has sufficiently large book funds to be able to ignore the accepted methods of book‐selection. These consist of a process of watching for advance notices of books which may come within the scope of his library, noting the publication date, reading and comparing reviews in reputable journals, examining the books themselves, and finally selecting those which: