West of the Blue Ridge, or the front line of the Alleghany, so called
in most of its length, there was not a newspaper published in
1776. Ten years later, scarcely more than one--the _Pittsburg
Gazette_--existed west of the mountains. The few in the seaboard
towns kept alive the name, and little more. In 1850, '60 and '70 the
periodicals of the Union numbered, respectively, 2526, 4051 and 5871,
with an average circulation, at the three periods, of twenty-one
hundred, thirty-four hundred and thirty-six hundred copies each. The
circulation thus outgrew the numbers in the proportion of nearly
two to one. And both are largely in excess of the increase of the
population, that being in the twenty years but 65 percent. The number
of daily papers (254 in 1850 and 574 in 1870) must now be equal to the
entire number of periodicals in France outside of Paris (796 in 1875),
with an average issue less than half that of ours. The proportion of
readers to the population, certainly in this class of literature, thus
appears to be rapidly growing: and the change is most striking if we
take, for example, that group of periodicals which are most purely
literary and most remote from the mere chronicle. The returns for
the three periods place the monthlies at, respectively, 100, 280 and
622--an advance of sixfold.

The magazine leads us to the door of the library; and here the exhibit
is still more marked, significant and gratifying. The census figures
are, for many reasons, extremely confused, but in the general result
they cannot be outrageously wrong, and they can mislead us only in
degree as to the immense multiplication of books in both public and
private libraries. The returns are manifestly far below the truth.
To give them here without the explanations accompanying them in
the census volumes would mislead; and those explanations, or a fair
synopsis of them, would occupy too much space, and would, after all,