as friendship, loyalty, love of kin, affection for home. The links that
bind us to the past and the threads that stretch out into the future are
more satisfactory to us here in the United States, with the complexity of
its interests for us, than they would be in Nicaragua, or Guam, or
Iceland.

Then of what country in the realm of literature do you desire to be a
citizen? Of the one where Shakespeare is king and where your familiar and
daily speech is with the great ones of this earth--those whose wise,
witty, good, or inspiring words, spoken for centuries past, have been
recorded in books? Or would you prefer to dwell with triviality and
banality--perhaps with Laura Jean Libbey or even with Mary J. Holmes, and
those a little better than these--or a little worse.

I am one of those who believe in the best associations, literary as well
as social. And associations may have their effect even if they are
apparently trivial or superficial.

When the open-shelf library was first introduced we were told that one of
its chief advantages was that it encouraged "browsing"--the somewhat
aimless rambling about and dipping here and there into a book. Obviously
this can not be done in a closed-shelf library. But of late it has been
suggested, in one quarter or another, that although this may be a pleasant
occupation to some, or even to most, it is not a profitable one. Opponents
of the open shelf of whom there are still one or two, here and there, find
in this conclusion a reason for negativing the argument in its favor,
while those of its advocates who accept this view see in it only a reason
for basing that argument wholly on other grounds.

Now those of us who like a thing do not relish being told that it is not