One of the great offices of a Reference Library is to keep at the
service of everybody what everybody cannot keep at home for his own
service. It is not convenient to every man to have a very large
telescope; I may wish to study the skeleton of a whale but my house is
not large enough to hold one; I may be curious in microscopes but I may
have no money to buy one of my own. But provide an institution like this
and here is the telescope, here is the microscope, and here the skeleton
of the whale. Here are the great picture, the mighty book, the ponderous
atlas, the great histories of the world. They are here always ready for
the use of every man without his being put to the cost of purchase or
the discomfort of giving them house-room. Here are books that we only
want to consult occasionally and which are very costly. These are the
books proper for a Library like this--mighty cyclopaedias, prodigious
charts, books that only Governments can publish. It is almost the only
place where I would avoid cheapness as a plague and run away from mean
printing and petty pages with disgust.--GEORGE DAWSON. _Address at the
opening of the Birmingham Free Reference Library_, 1866.