two hundred thousand volumes--to seek the little brochure on Karl
Marx written by his old friend and genial comrade Wilhelm
Liebknecht. It was in the card catalogue. As I made a note of its
number, my friend the librarian came up to me, and I asked him
whether it was not strange that a man like Marx should have so
many books devoted to him, for I had roughly reckoned the number
at several hundred.

"Not at all," said he; "and we have here only a feeble nucleus of
the Marx literature--just enough, in fact, to give you a glimpse
of what that literature really is. These are merely the books
written by Marx himself, and the translations of them, with a few
expository monographs. Anything like a real Marx collection would
take up a special room in this library, and would have to have its
own separate catalogue. You see that even these two or three
hundred books contain large volumes of small pamphlets in many
languages--German, English, French, Italian, Russian, Polish,
Yiddish, Swedish, Hungarian, Spanish; and here," he concluded,
pointing to a recently numbered card, "is one in Japanese."

My curiosity was sufficiently excited to look into the matter
somewhat further. I visited another library, which was appreciably
larger, and whose managers were evidently less guided by their
prejudices. Here were several thousand books on Marx, and I spent
the best part of the day in looking them over.

What struck me as most singular was the fact that there was
scarcely a volume about Marx himself. Practically all the books
dealt with his theory of capital and his other socialistic views.
The man himself, his personality, and the facts of his life were