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w~ETHER ?R NOT micro-cards ever .come mto use m the form proposed, Fremont Rider's The Scholar and the Future of the Research Lib.rary may well prove to be one of the most important books dealing with libraries in this generation. This volume should be made required reading for library school students, and librarians of all ranks who do not read it carefully and try to think through the problems it discusses will deprive themselves of stimulation that they can ill afford to be without. It is probably the most dramatic boolt in library professional literature and is so full of meat that a review article the length of this one could profitably be written on any one of its s.eventeen provocative chapters. This statement cannot attempt to cover more than a small percentage of the points that are worthy of comment, arid those chosen are the ones where criticism rather than praise seems justified. It would have been easier and pleasanter for the reviewer to use all his space for a discussion of subjects where he had nothing but commendation to offer. He feels, howev.er, that the points which he \las selected are vital and should be aired. Mention should be made at this, point of Mr. Rider's earlier articles, which are listed in a note in the preface of his bonk and which deal with library costs, cataloging, cooperation, and growth. They also should become required library school reading. No other writings in this field are more thought p~o­ voking or deal with more basic library questions. The first chapter, that on the "Growth of American Research Libraries," is of special interest to this reviewer. Here is a problem that affects, and in many ways forms the basis for, other serious library problems, and yet it is one that has never, up to this time, been p~esented more than· superficially except in Mr. Rider's papers. Librarians have refused to face the facts of growth. They have optimistically believed that the geometric progres,sion of the past would not continue. Mr. Rider, through the articles just mentioned and now in the first chapter of this book, has converted many librarians to the thesis that since libraries have been doubling every sixteen years for the past three centuries, there is reason to believe they will continue to do so. The reviewer takes the stand, however, that the turn of the road was reached even before the great depression of the 1930's; that the second World War has made the turn an abnormally sharp one; and that the future growth of our larger libraries, taken as a group, will be more by arithmetical progression than by geometrical. If Mr. Rider had checked the reports of the New York Public Library and of the Harvard and Yale college libraries, the only large libraries in the United States that could be considered to have reached even adolescence, to say nothing of maturity, thirty-two years ago (the Library of Congress, while over a hundred years old, was then still in its infancy as a great national library), he would have found that they have failed to quadruple since that time and that their rate of growth on the percentage basis has been steadily decreasing. If he had checked the "Gerould statistics" for the libraries that had passed the five hundred thousand-volume mark sixteen years ago, he might have modified his figures, because he would have seen that, as libraries of any type grow larger, they tend to grow less rapidly. If he had considered the great libraries of England and France, which are old enough to form a ·sound basis for study, as American libraries are not, or if he had studied the United States Census

The Promise of Microprint: A Symposium Based on 'The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library