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The subject of pamphlets used in the different courses, and especially of the expense necessarily incurred in obtaining them has recently been brought to our notice in a practical, and therefore very forcible way. The monopoly value that some of these pamphlets get in the hands of our very respectable, as well as very mercenary Cambridge stationers, is nothing short of being mirabile dictu. By magic, like the transformations in a fairy-tale, a few printed sheets, worth (with an allowance for a very respectable profit). about ten, fifteen, or even twenty-five cents, expand in value, or rather in price, to fifty cents, seventy-five cents, and upward. Of course the only cause of this expansion is a very natural one, namely, the heat of the seller's eagerness after the almighty dollar. Heat expands, and cold contracts; so we learned in freshman Physics. In what way are we to send a good cold draught across these now red hot prices? The question is a difficult one to answer. A few years ago the Co-operative Society reduced very materially the temperature of the prices of other things; but did not (probably because it could not) do anything regarding the prices of the pamphlets and syllabi used in such large numbers in college. These pamphlets are necessary in a college course, and it is indeed an evil that they should be sold at prices so far above their real value, nay, so far above their real value, with a good fat profit added. Is this evil incurable, and must we always be imposed on thus? Is it not somehow in the power of editors and compilers of the pamphlets to regulate the market prices, if in no other way, at least by giving the pamphlets for publication to those who will gladly undersell and outwit a Cambridge dealer whose great trouble is chronic high prices?

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