Facsimile PDF - Online Library of Liberty

of utility which is thereby acquired for ths community at a
trifling cost. If a, beautiful picture be hung in the diningroom
of a private house, it may perhaps be gazed at by a few
guests a score or two of times iu the year. Its real utility is
too often that of ministering to the selfish pride of its owner.
If it be hung in the National Gallery, it will be enjoyed by
hundreds of thousands of persons, whose glances, it need
hardly be said, do not tend to wear out the canvas. The same
principle applies to books in common ownership. If a man
possesses a library of a few thousand volumes, by far tho
greater part of tbcm must lie for years untouched upon the
shelves; he cannot possibly use more tban a fraction of the
whole in any one year. But a library of five or ten thousand
volumes opened frco to the population of a town may be used
a thousand times as much. It is a striking case of what I
propose to call the primiple of the ~nultiplication of utility, a
principle which lies at the baso of some of tho most importaut
processes of political economy, including tho division of
labour.
Tho extent to which this multiplication of utility is carried
in the case of free lending libraries is quite remarkable.
During the first year that the Birmingham Free Library was
in operation every book in tho library wns issued on an average
seventeen times, and the periodical literature was actually
turned over about fifty times.* In the Transactions of the
First Annual Meeting of the Library Association” (p. 77),
Nr. Yates, of the Leeds Public Library, has given an account
of tho stock and issues of his libraries. In the Central Library
the average turn-over-that is to say, the average number of
times that ench book wae used-was about eighteen times in
1873, gradually falling to about twelve times. In tho branch
libraries it was eight in 1873, falling to four-and-a-half. This
fall in the turn-over is, however, entirely due to the increase
in the stock of books, the total number of issues having largely
increased. The general account of all the free libraries, as
The Free Library of Birmingham. By Edward 0. Osborne :
‘I hsactions of the Social Science Association. London Meeting,
lM2, p. 786.