HUMAN RATS

On a Monday morning forty or more bags of mail will arrive at the National Lending Library; half of this mail will be returned loans and half new publications, mainly serials, from 109 countries. The fact that the volume of returned loans and the volume of new publications are about equal should be noted. It means that on average each piece of new literature we receive is used once in its lifetime. Some publications of course are used many times; so many are not used at all. The trouble is that we cannot tell the sheep from the goats.