Various, The Best Hundred Books — What Books are most Read (1886)
“ Our statistics in the case of Birmingham refer not to books issued at the free libraries themselves, but to books lent out for home reading from the central lending library. This is clearly the better test of the two as to a town's choice of books; readers at the library itself sip and skim, they take home what they really enjoy. We give the first six favourites in each of the divisions of the library, although, in view of the greater run on fiction, we enlarge the number under that head to twenty:— Fiction. ”
