SUMMARY
In 1888, Ainsworth Rand Spofford, the Librarian of Congress, appeared before a Senate Committee on behalf of the American Library Association to support pending legislation that would exclude libraries-works published in numbered paper-covered publications or series so publishers could claim they were “periodicals”-from low second-class postal rates and place the paper-covered publications, instead, in the third-class with books-at quadruple the price. Spofford excoriated the government's practice of subsidizing