Page:Essays in librarianship and bibliography.djvu/106

all, the scattered portions of the nearest approach the world will have made to a Universal Catalogue may be brought together, digested into alphabetical order, and, reproduced in facsimile by this beautiful art–fit mate of Printing in that she too preserves what would else perish, and brings light into many a dark place—be given to the world.^[1]

1. This forecast of the service which photography might render to library catalogues would seem to have been inspired by the very spirit of prophecy. See, in the American Library Journal for March 1899, an account by A. J. Rudolph of the success of the Newberry Library, Chicago, "in printing a catalogue of the accessions accumulated in the British Museum since 1880 to date, in one general alphabet by the so-called blue-print process, a method of photo-printing." If the Newberry Library can do this, the British Museum ought to be able to incorporate its accession-titles with the general catalogue, and reissue the latter from time to time, as frequently recommended in this volume, and in a remarkable article in the Quarterly Review for October 1898.