Author: John William Wallace

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2018-01-09

Total Pages: 20

ISBN-13: 9780428151805

Excerpt from An Address of Welcome, From the Librarians of Philadelphia, to the Congress of Librarians of the United States: Assembled October 4, 1876, in the Hall of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania But I regard this great anniversary of the nation less as the cause of this new sort of congress than as the occa sion of which it avails itself to assemble. It has been some what Obvious, I think, for several years past and is now entirely plain that with the much-increased and still much increasing issue of books from the printing press - several matters up to' this time little thought of by librarians - Tu deed not requiring to be much thought of by them - now demand consideration and, so far as practicable, a provision for the time not far distant when they are likely to come upon us. The increase of books to which I refer, is to be attributed in some part, I suppose, to the facility with which of late times, in consequence of the application of chemical agencies instead as formerly of mechanical ones alone, to the paper makers' art, paper itself is made; in greater part still, to the power which steam has given to the printing press, and in greatest part of all to the establishment of common schools and colleges everywhere throughout this country, by which both the capacity to write and the disposition and the ability to read are vastly increased. And as _i see nothing which islikely to arrest this progress of things, alike scientific and social, I see nothing which in coming years is to stand be tween the librarian and an issue upon him of books upon books, so vast and so uninterrupted that unless he brings the benefit of something like science to his aid he will be overwhelmed and buried in their very mass. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.