The first public libraries in Europe were not built for ordinary readers. Manus were s costly th many vol were cha to t desks, a access w limited t scholars w carried a letter of introduction. Printing changed the arithmetic. Once a single press could produce hundreds of identical copies in a week, the value of any one book fell sharply, and chaining it to a desk began to look absurd. By the seventeenth century the chains were coming off, and libraries were slowly turning into places where the public could simply walk in.

Type only the missing letters. Each box is one letter, and the number of boxes matches the letters that are missing.