Joyce Kilmer

There are young gentlemen whose delight it is to tell their married and established and venerable friends how to form libraries. Generally, these young gentlemen wear spectacles rimmed with tortoise shell, and the condensed milk of their alma mater is yet wet upon their lips. They peer at your laden shelves and say: “It is better to have one good book than a dozen bad ones. Of any standard work you should have the definitive edition—not necessarily a rare imprint or something in fine binding, but the most modern and comprehensive edition. It is better to have one good anthology than a shelfful of third-rate poets. Go through your shelves and throw away all the rubbish; buy sets of the classics, a volume at a time, and in this way you will gradually build up a useful and really representative library, something appropriate and coherent.”

When a young gentleman talks to you in this wise, the only thing to do is to lead him gently away from the bookshelves and make him sit in a comfortable corner and talk to you about hockey or socialism or some other of his boyish sports. He knows absolutely nothing about libraries. Probably he lives in the shadow of Washington Arch, and his own library—on the bureau—consists of the “Life of General Ulysses S. Grant,” inscribed “To dearest Teddy, from Aunt Mag., Xmas, 1916,” and a copy of the New Republic for last August, containing a letter in which he took exception to an editorial on the relation between pragmatism and Freud’s second theory of the semi-subconscious. To-morrow he will sell General Grant to a second-hand book dealer for fifteen cents, and thereby diminish his library by one half. What right has he to tell you what books you shall keep and what you shall destroy?

Now, it would not be so bad if this raving about a library was confined to young persons like him I have mentioned. But the trouble is, there are people of means and reputation for intelligence who are actually putting into practice the evil theories he advances, who are deliberately “building up libraries,” instead of surrounding themselves with books they like. Against this pernicious heresy it is the duty of every honest bibliophile to protest.

We need waste no words on the purchaser of “subscription sets” and many-volumed collections of “Kings and Queens of Neo-Cymric Realism and Romance,” and “The Universalest of All Libraries of Super-extraordinary Fiction,” in forty-eight volumes, fifteen dollars down and five dollars a month until the purchaser is summoned to a Better Land. Either these people want books for mere shelf-furniture, or else they are the victims of voracious book agents, and deserve a tear of sympathy rather than a rebuke. Our concern, the concern of those who have at heart the good name of printed literature and the liberty of the individual householder of literary tastes, is with the person who is highly literate and possessed of an account with a bookseller, and is abusing his talent and privilege by “efficiently” building up a library.

When efficiency confined itself to the office and the factory, it was bad enough. When it (loathsome animal that it is!) crawled up a leg of the table and began to preach to us about our food, babbling obscenely of proteids and carbohydrates, we felt that the limit of endurance had been reached. But no sooner do we cuff efficiency from the dining table than it pops up in the library. And this is not to be endured. Efficiency must be plucked down, kindly, of course, but resolutely, from the bookshelves, and put in a covered basket to await the coming of the wagon which shall convey it to the lethal of the S. P. C. A.

Except for an efficient family, what could be less interesting than an efficient library? Think of the sameness of it—every study in a block of houses containing the “Oxford Dictionary” and “Roget’s Thesaurus” and the “Collected Essays of Hamilton Wright Mabie” and similar works of reference, with a few standard fictions such as Arnold Bennett’s “Your United States,” and Owen Wister’s “The Pentecost of Calamity”! There would be no adventures among books possible in such libraries. Indeed, efficiency in the library would soon reduce it, if logically developed, to a collection of anthologies and reference books, and possibly some such practical jokes as ex-President Eliot’s “Five Foot Shelf.”

An advocate of the efficient library, a spectacled young gentleman of the type already described, once engaged in some ignoble literary task—book-reviewing I believe it was called—while a guest at my house. The volume of which he was writing a criticism had to do with a single-tax experiment in New Zealand, and therefore he wished to include in his review a quotation from the “Life of Benvenuto Cellini.” He did not find the “Life of Benvenuto Cellini” on my shelves, and therefore reproached me, and made my library the object of his callow disapproval.

I reasoned with him. He had read Benvenuto, I said, and Benvenuto was waiting for him in the public library if he desired to renew his acquaintance with him. Here, I said, are many volumes of biography and autobiography in place of the one for which you cry. Here is a book entitled “The Life and Labours of Henry W. Grady, his Speeches, Writings, etc., Being in Addition to a Graphic Sketch of His Life, a Collection of His Most Remarkable Speeches and Such of His Writings as Best Illustrate His Character and Show the Wonderful Brilliancy of His Intellect, also Such Letters, Speeches, and Newspaper Articles in connection with His Life and Death as Will Be of General Interest.” Here, I said, is “Colonel Thomas Blood, Crown Stealer,” by Wilbur Cortez Abbott, a highly entertaining book. Here, I continued, as a preface to this collection of the “Essays in Prose and Verse of J. Clarence Mangan,” is an illuminating biographical essay by Mr. C. P. Meehan, together with Mr. J. Wilson’s “Phrenological Description of Mangan’s Head,” and “The Poet’s Own Recipe to Make Tar Water.” Here is—

But my friend rudely interrupted my well-meant remarks, and went in quest of Cellini to the south-west corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, where he found a library more suited to his efficient tastes. In doing this he was perfectly justified. Public Libraries should be efficient. They are places to which you go to get useful but uninteresting information. But there is no more reason for your own library to resemble a public library than there is for your study to resemble your office, or for your dining-room to resemble the Automat, or for every bedroom in your house to bear on its door printed directions to ring twice for your wife to bring you hot water and three times for a clean collar.

The crowning virtue of the successful private library is inefficiency. As an example closely approaching the ideal, as a model to householders who have been allowed a closet or vault in which to keep books, I respectfully present my own library. And in order that the radiance of its inefficiency may be as penetrating as possible, I wish my library to be considered in comparison with its efficient rivals.

Let us therefore assume that the spectacled young gentleman already several times celebrated in this treatise has, without acquiring more sense, got married, and perhaps thereby acquired a sufficient competency to warrant his establishing a library. Let us begin our survey of his books with the shelves of poetry. Where is there a good basis for comparison? Ah, here we have it—here is Milton in the efficient library, and here the long-winded old gentleman is found again in my own! Is any comparison between these volumes possible? Would any real bibliophile hesitate a moment in making his choice between the two? The efficient Milton is a tall, sombre-looking volume with a long biographical preface by a man who used to be a poet before he became a college professor, a preface which proves that Milton never went blind, lived in Wales rather than in England, had only one daughter and knew no Latin. At the foot of every page there is a thick sprinkling of notes conveying unnecessary information. There is an appendix of variant readings and an exhaustive, monumental bibliography.

Could anything be more depressing? The only illustration in the book is John himself, in a black cloak, with what seems to be a baby’s bib under his chin, and this picture can scarcely be called a decoration. My “Milton’s Poetical Works,” which was published in New York in 1857 and purchased by me from a stall on Twenty-third Street for a quarter, is more entertaining in every respect. In the first place, it has no notes—which alone makes it worth the price of admission. In the second place, the only biographical introduction is “The Life of Milton, by His Nephew, Edward Philips,” a most estimable piece of writing, which begins, “Of all the several parts of history, that which sets forth the lives, and commemorates the most remarkable actions, sayings or writings of famous and illustrious persons, whether in war or peace—whether many together, or any one in particular—as it is not the least useful in itself, so it is in the highest vogue and esteem among the studious and reading part of mankind.” Doesn’t a biography of this sort promise more flavours and exciting things than one written by a college professor, and beginning, “John Milton was born in London, England, December 9th, 1608”?

Furthermore, my Milton is bound in black cloth, with stars and wreaths and baskets of flowers stamped in gold all over it. Furthermore, my Milton has all sorts of highly entertaining steel engravings, most delightfully 1857—Lycidas being shipwrecked on St. Michael’s Mount, and the Warring Angels mustering for battle, and skeletons and devils and angels and “wood nymphs, deck’d with daisies trim,” keeping “their merry wakes and pastimes,” and Melancholy, who looks like Queen Victoria in her old age, and the “Goddess fair and free, in heaven yclep’d Euphrosyne,” wearing a very becoming white frock. Furthermore, my Milton was “Presented to Mifs Ellen R. Baxter, by Her Resp’t’l friend, J. Stuart, Oswego, May 4, 1859”—so the violet ink inscription on the flyleaf tells me. And some one has drawn in pencil a very attractive cat on the blank page opposite the opening of “Samson Agonistes.” The efficient library’s copy of Milton lacks all these amiable associations.

My efficient friend possesses a Byron, it is true. But not to be mentioned in the same breath with the volume which stands in my study between Witter Bynner and Bliss Carman. My Byron contains eight contemporary memoirs of the poet, by distinguished fellow-craftsmen, and sixteen pictures—himself, his birthplace, his Newfoundland dog, his daughter, and a dozen landscapes which the publisher happened to have on hand. Also, in the preface of my Byron I find this sentence: “Thus died Lord Byron at the early age of thirty-seven, leaving behind him a name second only to that of the renowned Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, and a memory which the sublime effusions of his muse will endear to all posterity.” My friend’s Byron has nothing to compare with this.

The trouble with my friend’s library is that it has no surprises. Any one who has seen his waistcoat—the V of which is edged with heavy white cord—and his cuff links—which are oval and bear, engraven on their golden surfaces, his initials—could describe his library to a volume. It is obvious; its obviousness is a part of its efficiency.

I suppose Benvenuto Cellini is on a shelf of the efficient library. He must be, since he is in the public library. Probably my efficient friend has also Benjamin Franklin’s “Autobiography” and the “Complete Works of Mrs. Humphry Ward.” He has a limp-leather tissue-paper encyclopedia, and an obese dictionary, and a magnificent atlas. And in a corner of his study he has a map of the world in the form of a great globe on a pivot.

I envy him this last possession, for one may amuse himself by spinning a geographical globe, as one entertains himself by spinning a piano stool. But aside from this, there is nothing in my friend’s library that I desire. And my own triumphantly inefficient library—what treasures it contains!

You mention French literature. Do I overwhelm you with a sumptuous Voltaire, or sicken you with a sentimentally illustrated “Paul et Virginie”? I do not. I exhibit to you yellow-back volumes of the later verse of Francis Jammes—which are supposed to be going to be bound one of these days—or I show you a play or two of Rostand’s. If you desire to have further dealings with the literature of France, the French department of the university is, for a consideration, at your service. You mention Fraser’s “Golden Bough”? I show you something equally informing and more entertaining, comfortable volumes in which the mythology of Ireland is narrated to us by Jeremiah Curtin and by Seumas MacManus, and I show you a stray volume of Louis Ginzberg’s “The Legends of the Jews.”

I should not try to make the possessors of efficient libraries unhappy. But I do it for their own good, in the hope that I may eventually reform them. And when I look upon my two volumes of “The Evergreen,” a quarterly published in Edinburgh some twenty years ago, numbering among its contributors Fiona MacLeod, Nora Hopper, Douglas Hyde, Standish O’Grady and Rosa Mulholland, and “The Squire’s Recipes,” by Kendall Banning, and “Scottish Heraldry Made Easy,” and Shaemas O’Sheel’s “The Dear Old Lady of Eighty-sixth Street,” and a bound volume of The Gentleman’s Magazine for 1761 and “L. Annsei Senecae et Aliorum Tragoediae (Amsterodami, Apud Guiljel: Ians: Caesium)” and a battered edition of Scott’s “Marmion,” enriched by the comments of a Louise Cogswell who owned it in 1810 and wrote approvingly, “and very well told too” under the sub-title “A Tale of Flodden Field,” and Joseph Forster’s “Studies in Black and Red” (very ghastly), and both of Ernest Dowson’s novels and his translations from the French, as well as his poems, and “The American Annual of Photography” for 1916, and “Miss Thackeray’s Works,” complete in one volume, and Layton Crippen’s “Clay and Fire,” and Bithell’s “Contemporary Belgian Poetry,” and Sir Francis Burnand’s “More Happy Thoughts,” and a volume containing “The Poetical Works of Rogers, Campbell, J. Montgomery Lamb, and Kirke White,” and an inscribed copy of Palmer Cox’s “The Brownies, Their Book”—when I contemplate, among the more commonplace inhabitants of my shelves, these books, then I cannot keep from feeling a sense of superiority to all those who have laboriously “built up” their libraries in accordance with the mandates of strict utility.

My library is inefficient and impractical, entertaining and unexacting. Its members have come to me by chance and by momentary inclination. For if a man’s books are to be, as the old phrase has it, his friends, they must be allowed to him because of some fitness on his part subtly felt by them. A man does not deliberately select his friends; there must be a selection by them as well as by him. Unless he is applying the principles of efficiency to friendship. And in that case he has no friends at all.