Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 207, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 September 1915 — BOOKS BY MILLION [ARTICLE]

BOOKS BY MILLION

Nation Has 18,000 Libraries With 75,000,000 Volumes. Bureau of Education of the Federal Government Compiles Some Interesting Statistics on the Subject —Distribution Uneven. Washington.—There are 18,000 regularly established libraries in the United States, containing more than 76,000,000 volumes, according to statistics Just compiled by the United States bureau of education. The number of volumes is an increase of 20,000,000 since 1908. Of the 2,849 libraries containing 6,000 volmes or over, 1,844 are classified as “public and society libraries” and 1,006 are school and college libraries. Public and society libraries have an aggregate of over 60,000,000 volumes, with 7,000,000 borrowers’ cards in force; 1,446 of these libraries were entirely free to the public. Libraries reporting from 1,000 to 6,000 volumes numbered 6,453, of which 2,188 were public and society libraries and 3,265 school libraries. These libraries contained 11,689,942 volumes. Another group of still smaller libraries, comprising those that reported from 300 to 1,000 volumes, increased the total by 2,961,007 volumes. The distribution of library facilities is still uneven. Of the 1,844 public and society libraries reported for the entire United States, more than half were in the North Atlantic states, and they contained 24,627,921 volumes out of the total of 60,000,000; and of the 3,000,000 volumes added to library collections for the year 1913 almost one-' half were for the same section. New York state had 7,842,621 volumes in her 214 libraries; Massachusetts, 7,380,024 in 288 libraries; Pennsylvania, 3,728,070, and Illinois 3,168,765 volumes. Four-fifths of the borrowers’ cards in use were in the North Atlantic and North Central states.