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Updated: July 10, 2025
What is so captivating and popular as a book of essays which gathers together and arranges a lot of facts out of histories and cyclopaedias, set forth in the form of conversations that any one could have taken part in? Is not this book pleasing because it is commonplace?
Don't you see I have given you a key to the way my library is made up, so that you can apriorize the plan according to which I have filled my bookcases? I will tell you how it is carried out. In the first place, you see, I have four extensive cyclopaedias. Out of these I can get information enough to serve my immediate purpose on almost any subject.
They possess several valuable works on Chinese jurisprudence, on agriculture, economy, mechanics, trades, many cyclopaedias and compendia, and several dictionaries, composed with extraordinary skill and patience. To this department may be referred all educational books, the most of them written in rhyme, and according to a system of intellectual gradation.
So, if the reader wants to know about the religious tenets of the Presbyterians, or the Mormons, or the Buddhists, or the doctrines of the Catholic Church, and asks the librarian's opinion about any controverted question of belief, he is to be answered only by the statement that the library is there to supply information, not opinions, and then pointed to the religious cyclopaedias, which give full summaries of all the sects.
He has not the faintest idea where to look for the information, except that it may be in the census, but the census is nine years old, and he wants recent facts. It is vain to turn him over to the cyclopaedias, for there is not one whose information upon such statistics comes anywhere near up to date.
It was as much as she could do, she said, to keep him from shaving one side of his head, so that he couldn't go out, the way he used to do in Athens when he was afraid he would be invited out and couldn't scare up a decent excuse for refusing." "Did he do that?" cried Elizabeth, with a roar of laughter. "So the cyclopaedias say. It's a good plan, too," said Xanthippe.
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