NUMBER OF MISSING BOOKS NEARS RECORD

With more than 80 books already missing from the reserved shelves in the Library, this year bids fair to equal last year's record of 350 stolen books. In the courses in Economics, Social Ethics, and Philosophy alone, 25 books have been missing since October 1. "But the worst part of it all", complained Librarian C. A. Mahady, when interviewed across the desk of the main reading room, yesterday "is that often a single volume of a series is stolen, and then the library usually has to buy an entire new set in order to replace just one volume. Recently, several volumes of Emerson's journals and one of the International Encyclopedia have been pilfered, and it will probably cost the library close to a hundred dollars to replace them."

Not only have books been pilfered from the main reading room, but there have been many cases of mutilation which have reduced materially the value of the books. One thoughtless student, evidently to make his labors in the stacks more comfortable, propped himself up with a big volume, with the result that the back of the book, a valuable reprint of an old Spanish edition, was complete crushed. There have also been several cases of cutting out pictures from books or magazines, some of which will be hard to replace. In fact the situation towards the end of last year had grown so bad that this year the library authorities decided to transfer some magazines such as the "Graphic" and "L' Illustration", from the periodical room to the regular stacks.

"Last year" said Mr. Mahady there was a regular epidemic of cases in which a man signed a false name in borrowing a book, with the expectation of being relieved altogether from the necessity of returning it. This year there have been no such cases."

"It is surprising," concluded Mr. Mahady "how men will try the same trick over and over again and hope to get away with it. Why, we had one fellow who tried to slip in two applications for the same book. He was caught and reprimanded by my assistant, but, nothing daunted he tried the same trick again four hours afterwards with me.

"There is another thing, that students don't seem to understand, and that is the returning of books by 9 o'clock in the morning. Students don't realize that often there is only one copy of the book they have taken out, and that it is very much in need in the Library. Therefore they feel offended when a notice, asking them to return the book, is sent to them. We had a man last year, who kept a book so long that we had to send a messenger to get the book in his room. Later, when fined 50 cents for the service, he replied with a very sarcastic letter, in which he enclosed a dollar, which was "to be given to any student too poor to pay such an unjust fine"