PREFACE
This volume is the third annual cumulation of the Book Review Digest. It includes principally the books of 1907 that have been reviewed by the best book critics in England and America. It aims first to record with unprejudiced exactness the scope, character and subject content of books as they appear, and further, to supplement this descriptive information from month to month with excerpts culled from the best current reviews appearing in forty-seven English and American magazines which give prominence to book criticism, thus furnishing to the librarian a basis for the valuation of books. Frequently the best reviews of a book appear during the year following its publication, so in this volume will be found supplementary excerpts relating to books which were entered in the 1906 annual. It will be observed that a number of entries include only the descriptive note. Reviews for these books have not yet appeared; 1908 will furnish the material for appraisal, and excerpts will be included in current numbers of the digest as fast as reviews are published.
In sending out this annual the publishers wish to emphasize the coöperative phase of the undertaking. From three to six people have been engaged during 1907 in the work of preparing descriptive notes to approximately 2,800 books, and clipping from 1,000 copies of magazines sentences most helpful for book selection. This card-index information furnished to libraries for five dollars per year would cost them many hundred times this sum should they do it themselves. For the time thus given to a valuable and indispensable part of library work the publishers look for an equivalent in the support of libraries all over the country. The justice of the statement “Time is Money” is commensurate with its economic terseness.