The perfect politician, the ideal political ally to a library, is often but not always an elected official. He or she is always an effective champion of "reasonable financial support," i.e., "the amount...which a thoroughly competent librarian can spend wisely." That is what J.T. Wyer, director of the New York State Library, said in his "What the…

Since the organization of the United States Bureau of Education in 1867 statistics of public libraries have appeared periodically in the annual reports. It has been the purpose to gather such statistics every five years, but it has not been possible to carry out the plan with perfect regularity. For forty years every annual report of the bureau…