The note-taker, the annotator, the commentator, the critic are of course inevitable everywhere, and are well enough in their place. " A chiel's amang ye takin' notes, And, faith, he'll prent it ; " but that will be in his own book; he will not pencil it in ours. It is THE LIBRARY IN THE HOME. 1 23 not fair to lay all the blame upon school-girls and maidens, how- ever, in this matter. The youth whose imagination is " sicklied o'er ", with his own conceit does it as often as the skin-deep female annotator. He obtrudes his cant, his bigotry, his feeble unreason and even his bad spelling and vile grammar upon all who have the misfortune to become his victims by reading hereafter the page upon which he has left his impress. To deface a man's book in this way should be a felony by law ; it is like the trick of some dishonest jewellers who extract the genuine and insert a bogus stone into the ring they profess to repair. Save us from this literary repairing of our books, say we. Not only does it destroy the value of the work as private property, but when perpetrated as it constantly is upon the volumes of a public or circulating library, it diffuses an intellectual small-pox and marks with varioloid all the reading of a neighborhood. Un- happily, these self-inflated scribblers conceal their names, or the public intelligence which they have outraged might deface and make mar- ginal notes upon the fleshly tablets of their own " calf" These strictures, of course, do not apply to those real note-takers who study what they read, and make references in books that belong to themselves. The interleaved plan is an excellent one, when some ancient or modern standard author whom one has often to refer to is being studied, especially when comparison with other authorities upon the same subject is necessary. This, of course, involves the unbinding and rebinding of the book, with alternate blank pages for annotation, but where that is too expensive a process, the separate note-book may be made as useful, if intelligently indexed and ar- ranged. Having decided that our home is incomplete and imperfect without a library, the next step is to set about providing one. And here the principle of a little, thoroughly, rather than a great deal superficially, should guide us. Wealthy people who give a wholesale order for a library all at once, never read, and often do not know the names of the books they buy. Hence it is, that famous and costly libraries pass by public auction from one wealthy owner to another, each new 124 THE hearthstone; or, life at home.

AI-modernized reading of the original text

The note-taker, the annotator, the commentator, the critic are of course inevitable everywhere, and are well enough in their place. " A chiel's amang ye takin' notes, And, faith, he'll prent it ; " but that will be in his own book; he will not pencil it in ours. It is not fair to lay all the blame upon school-girls and maidens, however, in this matter. The youth whose imagination is " sicklied o'er ", with his own conceit does it as often as the skin-deep female annotator. He obtrudes his cant, his bigotry, his feeble unreason and even his bad spelling and vile grammar upon all who have the misfortune to become his victims by reading hereafter the page upon which he has left his impress. To deface a man's book in this way should be a felony by law ; it is like the trick of some dishonest jewellers who extract the genuine and insert a bogus stone into the ring they profess to repair. Save us from this literary repairing of our books, say we. Not only does it destroy the value of the work as private property, but when perpetrated as it constantly is upon the volumes of a public or circulating library, it diffuses an intellectual small-pox and marks with varioloid all the reading of a neighborhood. Unhappily, these self-inflated scribblers conceal their names, or the public intelligence which they have outraged might deface and make marginal notes upon the fleshly tablets of their own " calf" These strictures, of course, do not apply to those real note-takers who study what they read, and make references in books that belong to themselves. The interleaved plan is an excellent one, when some ancient or modern standard author whom one has often to refer to is being studied, especially when comparison with other authorities upon the same subject is necessary. This, of course, involves the unbinding and rebinding of the book, with alternate blank pages for annotation, but where that is too expensive a process, the separate note-book may be made as useful, if intelligently indexed and arranged. Having decided that our home is incomplete and imperfect without a library, the next step is to set about providing one. And here the principle of a little, thoroughly, rather than a great deal superficially, should guide us. Wealthy people who give a wholesale order for a library all at once, never read, and often do not know the names of the books they buy. Hence it is, that famous and costly libraries pass by public auction from one wealthy owner to another, each new 124 THE hearthstone; or, life at home.

The hearthstone; or, Life at home