The opening of Preface
This volume is the third annual cumulation of the Book Review Digest. It includes principally the books of 1907 that have been reviewed by the best book critics in England and America. It aims first to record with unprejudiced exactness the scope, character and subject content of books as they appear, and further, to supplement this descriptive information from month to month with excerpts culled from the best current reviews appearing in forty-seven English and American magazines which give prominence to book criticism, thus furnishing to the librarian a basis for the valuation of books. Frequently the best reviews of a book appear during the year following its publication, so in this volume will be found supplementary excerpts relating to books which were entered in the 1906 annual. It will be observed that a number of entries include only the descriptive note. Reviews for these books have not yet appeared; 1908 will furnish the material for appraisal, and excerpts will be included in current numbers of the digest as fast as reviews are published.