30                   The Editor Visits Burgess Library

viously-offered course, who would like Burgess to purchase an
excessive number of expensive books? The Librarian has to deal
efficiently and diplomatically with these problems. He showed us,
in passing, a copy of an obscure book, of which five copies had
been requested by a professor.This copy (the only one purchased)
had never been taken out, although it had been there some time,
and it had hardly been looked into, judging by the protesting
crackle it emitted when opened. "I have to try to estimate what is
a reasonable number of copies to order," he explained. Outside on
a bulletin board he showed us the dust cover of this particular
volume, along with half a dozen others. "Some of these are new
acquisitions which are not being read," he said, sounding a little
like an anxious father with a backward child. "We try in this way
to bring them to the students' attention."

Your editor kept prowling around the rooms, fascinated by
this microcosm of the world. On one shelf we found James Jones's
From Here to Eternity and Mailer's The Naked and the Dead.
"They're used for the history of World War II," said the Li¬
brarian, and we rendered a mental salute to the instructor who
had so imaginatively perceived the teaching value of "popular"
literature. There were many books on Russia, running the gamut
from Lenin to Masaryk. "Russia shares the honors with that
perennial favorite, Lincoln and the Civil War, as one of the two
most studied subjects in the history field," Mr. Palmer told us.

". . . Our most popular book? Well, the first one I think of is
Mills's White Collar. Probably the students are doing some extra¬
curricular reading with that one—sort of finding out about them¬
selves. The same thing goes for Riesman's The Lonely Crowd."

We were curious about the Library as a barometer of student
interests. The Librarian hazarded a guess that early in the century
ancient history and the French Revolution would have been
among the favorite subjects. Now these are crowded out by in¬
terest in contemporary revolutions, or nationalist movements, such
as those of Eastern Europe, the Far East, and Africa, and by new
sciences like anthropology and sociology. As soon as they become