THE WORLD is full of writings. In libraries, archives, offices, and attic trunks is an enormous and rapidly increasing mass¹ of written material of all sorts, the products of learning and imagination and speculation, of observation and painstaking record keeping, of public and private business. Some of the writings are of lasting interest, representing the cores of civilizations, bodies of literature and law, religion and philosophy, theories about the world, and recipes for successful action. Most are only of passing interest to anyone, despite their being records or traces of human activity; not all of our history is worth remembering. The endless folders of business correspondence may never again need to be referred to; the angry letters to editors may be forgotten. Yesterday's newspaper and last year's popular novel might not be much missed if they were never found again, and perhaps only half a dozen people will ever again care to look at the latest papers in entomology or Romance philology. But almost any piece of writing might be of at least temporary interest and value to someone. How can the valuable be kept from oblivion? How can a man be sure of finding, in the great mass of writings, good and bad, pedestrian and extraordinary, the writings that would be of value to him? In some remote Golden Age, a sufficiently intelligent, industrious, and wealthy man might have discovered, acquired, and mastered all of the writings, or at least all of the" public" writings, that his society had produced or acquired from other producers, and so have become acquainted with all those of even remote interest to him. Now there is too much for any one to master, so much that is it difficult to sort out that which one would like to master from that which one cannot be bothered to try to master. Discovery of the valuable in the mass of the mostly worthless or uninteresting is a major ingredient in the problem of bibliographical control. But there are other ingredients in that complex problem, and it is our job to attempt to understand them all, as best we can.

The attempt might be thought needless, for do we not already understand what bibliographical control is, how it is attained, and why it is desired? The words" bibliographical control" are used freely enough by people who must know what they are talking about. But understanding has many va-