Book Description

Excerpt from Remarks on the Practice and Policy of Lending Bodleian Printed Books and Manuscripts If Convocation could only seize the full signifi cance and incalculable value to present and future generations of a library of reference, a library, that is, where, at all lawful times, every book deposited in it should always be forthcoming in a moment, it would at once see that from such a library no lending whatever ought to be permitted, simply because lending and deposit are practical contra dictories; and if Convocation could plainly see this, it would make very short work of any statute which legalized loans. There is no denying, how ever, that in the present day the public mind, as it is playfully called, and the University mind as well, is in a wonderfully flabby condition. Nobody seems to be thoroughly convinced of the nu' questionable truth, that every possible plan in this world is open to objections more or less serious, and so they go hunting about for a scheme that shall embrace all good and exclude all evil; such people are emphatically limp and unpractical. All that is offered to our choice here below is a lesser evil, and experience has proved over and over again, that it is a lesser evil never to lend a book out of such a library as the Bodleianhthan it is to lend one. But if the University in its inscrutable wisdom should choose to do the wrong thing, there are more ways than one of doing it. 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.