The public library

There is an enormous difference between the library service enjoyed in the more progressive municipalities, where public opinion has been properly educated and the authorities mean to do their best, whatever the financial impediments, and have a clear conception of what is the best, and the perfunctory service in places where the library is an unwelcome addition to the municipal family, which cannot be got rid of but must be prevented from becoming a burden on the rates. The most progressive of librarians and library committee-men would freely admit that no public library in this country is doing all that it might for the community, or anything like what it will do when the library habit has been instilled into the average citizen. The most progressive are but leading the way; the goal is still in the future. Accordingly, an account of the best work now being done by the best libraries will serve two purposes: it will show the possibilities that are actually being attained; it will help the reader to build up mentally a complete type of what a library service might be.

Lending Libraries.

“The jug and bottle department,” as it has been cynically called by illiberal critics, is the oldest and, in a sense, the fundamental part of a public library service. There were lending libraries before 1850, but none that could be regarded as its prototype. It was a consequence of the new democratic idea. In earlier times a library simply provided books to be read on the spot. Circulating libraries, such as began to be common in the eighteenth century, were shops that lent out books, chiefly light literature, to subscribers of the leisured classes. The literary and scientific institutions allowed their books to be borrowed, without troubling to divide their stock into distinct collections, or worrying themselves with the standing puzzle of the modern librarian, should this book, which is neither a novel nor an encyclopædia, go on the lending or the reference shelves?

The strongest argument for rate-supported libraries was that the studious person who could not afford to buy books, or the no less meritorious person who wished to enjoy good literature in an armchair but could not pay a subscription, should be enabled to read at home. Access to libraries was an excellent thing, and every seeker after knowledge was entitled thereto, but a supply of books in the home was a greater boon, and one that would have a far deeper effect on the mental life of the nation. Even a Freeman could not work in a reference library, but had to borrow—or buy. Circumstances of a different kind make the library of the British Museum, and even the local reading room inaccessible, or at any rate insufficient, to most busy people. The existence of the London Library—the finest lending library in the world—is proof enough of the most serious kind of reader’s need for a home supply of books.

Catering for all classes, for all ages, and for users having all sorts of motives for reading, the municipal lending library will not admit any petty or restricted purpose to limit the scope of its contents. Costly books, if it acquires such by purchase or gift, and works of the atlas or dictionary type, will for different but equally obvious reasons go into the reference department, however small that may happen to be. Very cheap books, with certain exceptions, it will not supply. College text-books may be refused, on the score that students should have them for their own, unless there are circumstances that justify a different course. Some books may be rejected for reasons of public morality, though a narrow-minded puritanism must not be tolerated. Otherwise, the lending library should develop on the most catholic lines.

The light literature that was the staple of the old-fashioned circulating library will, with the rubbish sternly and drastically sifted out, form a considerable proportion of the stock-in-trade. In the minds of some short-sighted people, indeed, the public library is identified with over-thumbed and dog-eared novels, and supposed to be a purveyor chiefly of books for private amusement at the public expense. The statistics that seem to authorize such a view are misunderstood. Half-a-dozen novels usually take less time to read than does a single substantial work of science, history, or even the other kinds of belles-lettres; and make six times as much show in the record of issues. If allowance be made for this obvious fact, study of the figures will usually reveal that a greater amount of reading having a serious value is going on than of reading for mere pastime. One ought to apply a different kind of calculus; but till a sort of mental foot-pound, a unit of energy expended effectively in self-development, has been fixed, we can merely ask that statistics should be interpreted with a due consciousness of what humane literature is, and with common sense. Over-thumbed novels are no argument against public libraries, but a very strong argument for making sure that the supply of fiction is of the best, and for doubling, quadrupling, and multiplying further the supply of first-rate novels. If there are always enough of these to go round, critics on the one hand and grumblers on the other may be disregarded.

The workshop theory, which is on the face of it a sound guide for the development of the reference library, though by no means a complete statement of its functions, applies also to the lending department. On the one hand, this should minister to our recreations and our æsthetic and spiritual needs; it will be well-stocked with excellent novels, the best poetry, drama, essays, and humane literature in general. On the other hand, it will cater for the student and serious reader in all branches of knowledge, and will provide all the books it can of general use for industrial and amateur craftsmen, shopkeepers and other business people, and the professional classes. The librarian and the book-selecting committee will have a keen eye for the needs of teachers, journalists, ministers of religion, and all who are in any way intellectual leaders. One healthy consequence of the workshop theory is the rule that a library must never be cumbered with dead stock. Books that have been superseded or have outlived their interest must be ruthlessly discarded. The workshop library has no room for any but live books. Such from the first have been the aims of the great bulk of our public libraries, with, naturally, some laxity here and there, and in rarer instances too much strictness in regard to education and mental improvement or the cult of mere utilitarian efficiency.

There are between five and six hundred library buildings under the Public Library Acts in this country, and with few exceptions each contains a lending library, and some hardly anything else. A corollary of this distributing service is the branch library. Liverpool had two branches by 1853, and other towns quickly followed suit. A very large proportion of these buildings are branch libraries, established so as to bring a stock of books for lending as near as may be to your door. To-day, the biggest provincial cities have each from a dozen to a score such district libraries; the average town or metropolitan borough has two or three. Some places are content with delivery stations; some have these and branches as well. The delivery station is a device for bringing books that have been asked for from the central reservoir to the nearest point, and is a convenience to readers who have not the time, or do not think it worth while, to visit the library in person. Given a first-class catalogue and intelligent readers, the delivery station is a useful makeshift. But there are weighty reasons why it is much better to invite Mahomet to the mountain—why a service through district libraries will have more valuable results than one through delivery stations. The best systems combine the advantages of both methods, making the reader free of all the branch libraries in a town, with the right of direct access to the book-shelves, and at the same time bringing books from other branches to the one nearest the reader who is unable or finds it inconvenient to visit the library in person. Manchester and Glasgow, for example, have a motor-service whereby all the books in a score of district libraries are pooled as one vast stock, accessible, with a minimum of expense, difficulty, or delay, to the borrowers situated at any point in the civic area. Make your library area big enough, and you can provide the maximum of opportunities at the minimum cost.

During the last two decades, public libraries have been reverting to that old and sensible mode of working which, on its reintroduction, was styled “Open Access.” Practice varied in former times between letting the reader loose among the books and shutting these behind doors or shutters. When the new era began in 1850, the new race of librarians beheld themselves confronted with an unprecedented and hazardous problem. Here was the multitude of famished readers, who had never experienced the civilizing influence of libraries, who might be dishonest, and who certainly had to be served expeditiously and in large numbers; and there was the stock of books, which must be kept in working order and unpilfered. Hence the closed library—the books on one side of a counter and the reading proletariat on the other. Then, in an ill-omened moment, indicators were invented, and the proletariat could not even see the books at a distance, but must try to find out, first, what it wanted from a catalogue, perhaps an abbreviated form of hand-list conveying little meaning to the unbookish and then, through a numerical system compared to which Bradshaw or a census competition is an intellectual delight, whether there was a chance of getting what it wanted. The library movement would have spread with far greater rapidity, and its results on the national mentality would have been far deeper and more extended, but for the long reign of the closed system.

Very large libraries must keep the main bulk of their accumulations in a place apart; otherwise they could not contain them at all. When the stock begins to approach six figures, a librarian begins to think of having a stack, or some analogous form of magazine, accessible to none but officials and attendants. But in libraries of moderate dimensions there is no reason why the public should be locked out, and the most convincing reason why it should be invited and persuaded to come in. One must be something of a book-expert to know always precisely what book one wants; and then one may fail to obtain it through the mechanism of a catalogue and an indicator. The ordinary person will assimilate more mental food from browsing among the shelves than he would in thrice the time from reading what the chance of the indicator brought him under this discredited system. It may be that more books will disappear; but a certain percentage of losses may be faced with equanimity; it is one of the running expenses of true efficiency, and the results are well worth the cost.

In all the most recent public libraries, and in a very large number of the older, reorganized in the light of this reform, the public have the inestimable advantage of handling the books, and seeing, as it were in a bird’s-eye view, their relations to the other books in the sphere of knowledge or of art, before deciding what they want now and will want later on. This has had an immeasurable effect on the quality of the reading—on the education of the public taste. Only librarians know how difficult it used to be to lift a certain class of reader out of an old rut, to persuade him, or more often her, to try an unfamiliar author. Once get over the difficulties of an introduction to George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, or Tolstoy, and the devotee of Guy Boothby and Charles Garvice, who was stone-blind to the blandishments of the printed catalogue, will march on steadily in the new world that has been opened. It is the first step that counts in his literary salvation, and in an open access library the first step is pretty sure to be taken, if the contents have been well and tactfully selected.

An inducement to read other things than fiction is offered in many progressive libraries. This is a general permission to borrow two books at a time, provided only one is a novel. Teachers and other privileged persons are often allowed as many as half-a-dozen at once. There is indeed no reason except insufficiency of stock why any intelligent reader should not be able to have three or four books together, and a great many arguments for liberality. Three are regularly allowed at Coventry, and in American libraries, generous concessions are made on any reasonable grounds; in some the daring principle of “Take as many as you like” is in vogue, and many libraries lend freely to all comers without the irritating insistence on local residence or local guarantee which rules over here. To a man pursuing a serious course of study it is a manifest advantage to have several works in hand; the habit should be encouraged. The cost will be considerable; but it will be a cost in books not buildings, since the extra books will usually be in the hands of readers and not in need of house-room and larger premises. The cost can and ought to be borne now that library incomes are more elastic, if authorities take a serious view of their responsibilities and the part they should play in the business of education. Look at the empty shelves in almost any popular library, and the nature of the problem will be apparent.

The actual situation is significant. The need is for more books, and better books, rather than more buildings. The one essential to a successful library service exists, a great public demand—wanting more guidance, perhaps, and susceptible of education in the wiser use of books, but still vigorous, spontaneous, and unsatisfied. There is an unprecedented demand for books, fully commensurate with the demand, all over the country, for educational facilities. And there is an unprecedented shortage of books on the lending library shelves. During the war, expenses were kept down, and the gaps due to wear and tear were not filled up. Binding was allowed to fall into woeful arrears. Now, the cost of bookbinding has gone up threefold, the price of books has doubled. Yet under these disabling conditions, many a provincial town and a number of London boroughs have an annual issue of a million or thereabouts. Manifestly, the municipal lending library is a mighty power in the land. One librarian, in a borough where, it has recently been affirmed, the average intelligence is eighty under proof, tells me that out of 690 volumes of Rider Haggard’s various novels, which have to be duplicated over and over again, he would not expect to find more than sixteen on the shelf at a given moment. Sir Henry Rider Haggard is not a classic; he lies on the border between the kind of fiction to be tolerated and the kind to be encouraged. Nevertheless, empty shelves are a powerful argument.

The following paragraph surely speaks with a most convincing eloquence of the work public libraries are performing; it is from the prospectus of the latest London borough to set up a library system, the borough that has the largest population of the lower middle class and the poor. This system is still in its infancy, yet it has achieved an annual issue of nearly a million volumes, and the separate uses of its libraries and reading rooms are estimated, on a count, to number 3,496,000 during the year.

“The cost of the Public Libraries to each inhabitant of Islington is one-fifth of a penny per week. For this outlay each person has at his or her disposal: Lending libraries containing 75,000 volumes; Reference Libraries containing 10,000 volumes; Children’s libraries containing 10,000 volumes; Reading rooms containing all the best current newspapers, magazines and periodicals of importance; and all these resources are constantly increasing.

“A penny newspaper daily costs 35 times as much as this extensive service.”

Books are not the only wares in which the lending library deals. Most of them circulate music in bound volumes, in sheets, in portfolios; some lend pianola records. Ordnance Survey maps are issued to ramblers and tourists, geological maps to students; prints and technical diagrams and other articles of use to the scientist, craftsman, or student are sometimes among the circulating stock.

Reference Libraries.

The lending library is for study and recreation, the reference library for study and information, the latter term covering the sources to be explored by the research student. A reference library is a much more expensive thing than a lending collection of the same numerical extent. Dictionaries, miscellaneous modern encyclopædias, atlases, many-volumed treatises, books having costly illustrations, and the numerous and rapidly multiplying books of inquiry, directories, year-books, and other compendiums of information, bibliographies and other registers—all these find their appropriate home in this department, where also are stored calendars of state papers, Annual Registers, Hansard, bound periodicals, transactions of learned societies, and other long sets, the risk of mutilating which renders them unsuitable for lending out. Such works as the Cambridge History of English Literature and the Mediæval and Modern Histories are usually duplicated, one set at least being available for lending; a host of smaller works, even the expensive ones, are likewise duplicated when it can be afforded.

In the large centres of population, reference libraries were opened soon after the passing of the Ewart Act, and they have grown apace, to no small extent as the result of windfalls in the shape of gifts or legacies of private collections amassed by amateurs and other experts. In the lesser towns, the lending department bulks large in comparison with the reference department, which too often has had perforce to be neglected. The one has been regarded as a necessity, the other as a luxury that must wait for better times. The places in the kingdom where a scholar could live and pursue his tasks with most of his material within easy reach, in public or semi-public libraries, can still be counted on the fingers of one hand: London and Edinburgh, the two ancient university cities, perhaps Manchester, and possibly Dublin. These towns have been favoured by other dispensations than the Public Library Acts. Yet Liverpool, Birmingham, and Glasgow each command at least a quarter of a million books in their reference libraries; and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Leeds, Bristol, Cardiff, Nottingham, and indeed most towns with over 100,000 inhabitants, possess reference collections respectable in the size and quality of their contents.

To regard this department as merely a luxury is a bad mistake. True, it is not a daily necessity of life to the average man; but there was a time—there still is a time in many parts of the country—when even a lending library is not supposed to be that. Yet the more lending libraries are used to good purpose, the greater will be the average man’s need for a place where he can seek or verify information of every sort; where the student may consult the larger works of which his text-books are but elementary abstracts or expositions, and find encyclopædias, lexicons, atlases, and commentaries to aid and elucidate his reading; where the busy worker, whatever his occupation, may see the expensive technical treatises and illustrated monographs that are indispensable to an intelligent pursuit of his calling. The political and social worker will find here the statistical returns, the inventor the Patent Office specifications, the researcher, if he cannot get all he wants, will discover where it is to be found from a liberal supply of catalogues and bibliographies.

Reference libraries are the obvious complement to a service of books for home consumption. The boundary between their domains is not easy to mark out, nor will any attempt be made here to answer the favourite question of the gravelled examiner in library routine: What distinguishes a reference book from one for the lending library? In most cases the distinction is obvious; in the more difficult, local circumstances may settle the point. Librarians in charge of comparatively small libraries may well shirk a final verdict, and allow much latitude in the use of reference books for lending, and the converse when the lending library book is in. Thus the whole stock of books on the premises is at the reader’s disposal without any pedantic restrictions. As an American authority sensibly puts it, “Obviously there is no book that may not be used for ‘reference.’ A reader who consults one of Anthony Hope’s stories to ascertain the name of a character or to refresh his memory in regard to some incident, without reading it consecutively, is using it as a reference book.”[4] Even a magazine or review may be a work of reference. Back numbers of all that are worth taking in are worth preserving for reference purposes; and these, with the bound sets of past years, should be always available for use. Energetic librarians index all the important articles as they come out; the published indexes to periodicals forming a key to the older numbers. Lastly, the very newsroom has its place in the reference scheme, its contents being a daily appendix to the stores of information in the library. No department of the library economy should work in isolation.

In London, principally through the circumstance that the twenty-eight boroughs now existing were preceded by eighty-two parishes, two-thirds of which had set up libraries for themselves before the present library districts and borough authorities came into being in 1902, there are far too many reference libraries in proportion to lending libraries. Most of these are of indifferent or inferior quality, and, if they were suppressed and their collections centralized in a series of large district reference libraries, few would miss them, and the general gain would be enormous. All the same, more numerous ready-reference libraries are wanted. Every branch library should have a collection of dictionaries, atlases, and general encyclopædias, in short all the books that a business firm, a school, or the like usually provides for daily use. But, since reference libraries are so expensive, it is a vain and wasteful policy to duplicate them at random; and the result is merely a scattered series of middling libraries, far inferior to those open to all the world in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester, with a crippling of resources in other directions. This is not said to belittle local effort. The point is that, though Islington, Westminster, or Chelsea may each build up a reference library not inferior to that found in the average provincial town of like population, Islington, Westminster, and Chelsea are, after all, parts of London, and the Londoner ought to be vastly better off than the average provincial—else why should he stay there?

Though to one acquainted with the exacting needs of all grades and varieties of readers the deficiencies of our reference libraries are evident enough, it is none the less true that the richness of their contents and the value they yield to judicious users are realized by only a fraction of the public. Librarians have never been allowed to advertize their wares; a notice in the press such as a university or a State department would not consider beneath its dignity would have called down a reprimand and probably a surcharge from the Government auditor. In a strange town, the visitor may have some trouble to find out, first whether a public library exists, and then where. Advertisements in tramcars and finger-posts in the street are usually looked for in vain. Things being so, it is better to lay stress on what the reference library can and does do than on any delinquencies, since public opinion is sure to learn in time from the books that are there to be read, the immensity of the desiderata. In the cities previously mentioned as possible abodes for a worker among books, one may acquire a competent idea of this immensity. In other large towns and in several London boroughs, one may find reference libraries sufficing for the ordinary demands of all but the specialist and the researcher, and, in addition, one commonly finds special collections that attract readers from far away.

Thus Manchester, besides the ample provision of general works that everybody would expect to find on its reference shelves, and a large mass of works on textiles which would also be anticipated in the metropolis of Lancashire, has a fine collection of English dialect literature, others on music, the gipsies, and shorthand, and in the Greenwood collection the largest library of works for librarians in this country. The magnificent Hornby Library of engravings at Liverpool is as great a pride to the city as its Walker Art Gallery. Birmingham is famous for its Shakespeare Library, and possesses smaller collections relating to Milton, Byron, and Cervantes. The Boulton and Watt collection is also there. Stratford-on-Avon, again, is a depot for Shakespeare literature, having the memorial building and the valuable collection housed at the birth-place as well as the town library. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, owns the Bewick collection, Northampton the library of the poet Clare, Nottingham another accumulation of Byron literature and association books, Kilmarnock a Burns library, Glasgow among its many special sections a vast collection including not only Burns material but Scottish literature in general; Bristol is rich in works concerned with Chatterton, Cardiff specializes in Welsh books, though the National Library of Wales, at Aberystwyth, designed to be a British Museum for the principality, is fast outstripping this as a storehouse of Celtic literature in the wider sense. A library is fulfilling only its obvious duty by specializing in the staple industry. At Stoke-on-Trent, however, the valuable library of ceramics collected by Louis Solon, and acquired after his death by the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, has been placed, not in the public library, but in the National Pottery School, where the library of the Ceramic Society is also housed.

Many London libraries specialize in the same useful way, sometimes in response to local needs, sometimes as the accidental result of local associations. At Guildhall is the national Dickens library, at Hampstead the Keats collection, at Chelsea one devoted to Carlyle. The Bishopsgate Institute vies with Guildhall and St. Paul’s Cathedral Library in a huge collection of London books, prints, maps, and other miscellanea. The typographical library at the St. Bride Foundation contains the notable collection of William Blades, biographer of Caxton. But to consider London without taking into account the public and semi-public libraries that are not under the Acts, many of them highly individualized in the nature of their resources, and fitted to fulfil definite functions in the national library machine, would be absurd; and to treat them properly would require a volume. In fact, the volume exists, though it makes only modest and tentative suggestions for the wider application of all this intellectual wealth, much of which is lying dormant or only half-used.[5]

It goes without saying that every provincial reference library worthy of the name has a local collection of some importance. Most county towns collect county literature, and other large places have their regional collections. Regional surveys are largely carried on now by schools and local organizations, often with the library and its local collections as their central depository, and at all events helping and helped by the library. Some public libraries have been made depositories for the local records, and there is a strong case for conferring or imposing this duty upon them by law. A librarian, properly trained in palæography and the treatment of archives, is the right sort of custodian; a well-appointed library is the right place for the safe preservation, calendaring, and public use of documents. The historian, social student, biographer, and genealogist would always know then where to go for local information not to be found in London.

There are many other abiblia which Charles Lamb himself would approve that are rightly supplied in generous measure by a good reference library: modern maps, both of our own country and of the world, those of the neighbourhood within a wide radius, including large-scale Ordnance maps, accompanied by older maps of historical importance; prints and drawings in well-organized series, and lantern-slides for illustrating library lectures, or even to be issued on loan. The systematic collections of lantern-slides at the Croydon Public Library will be mentioned again later on. In this enterprising library numerous other things are collected and made accessible for general use; for example, illustrations, cut out and preserved, not because of their individual merit as prints, but because of the value they acquire in organized sets illustrating definite subjects. They are mounted in uniform style and classified in vertical files; thus they are available for reference purposes, and may be borrowed by teachers to illustrate lessons in class. Croydon has about 12,000 such illustrations, and the stock is constantly growing. Photographs of lace, woodwork, astronomical phenomena, and other subjects are collected on similar lines, and lent in sets to artists, craftsmen, and students. The vertical file in which the Manchester commercial library stores its press clippings and other items of information will be mentioned later; it is an object-lesson in the preservation, classification, and indexing of material which was erstwhile discarded as soon as it had served the moment’s use, a lesson in the value created out of the well-nigh valueless by mere organization; and teachers and business organizers have not failed to bring their pupils and their staffs to study what sheer method can accomplish.

But the whole library should be an object-lesson of high educational value. A large, well-organized collection of books, especially if the public be admitted to the interior, is a graphic example of method and order, not to mention the enormous increment of value given to any stock of material by systematic indexing. The art of classification is not only an excellent mental discipline, but may be applied with advantage in every province of business and life. Though a classification of books is not the same thing as a classification of things, and may depart widely from the exactness of logical theory, there is no better way of inculcating the benefits of system than by allowing the reader to find his way from shelf to shelf, and follow the tracks pointed out for him to other book-cases the contents of which are more distantly connected with his subject. It is superfluous to point out the assistance the library gives in the choice of books, not only to the reader who relies on it for his whole supply, but on the book-lover and the purchaser of books. Of the aid offered to the student and the potential student, over and above the library organism itself as an efficient reading machine, more will be said under the heading of library extension. In American libraries certain members of the staff are told off for “floor duty,” that is, to keep a sympathetic eye on persons looking out books and to offer guidance. It is a duty calling for high attainments and insight into the particular requirements and idiosyncrasies of readers. It would be unfair to say it is a duty unfulfilled in libraries over here, since the more active public libraries are beginning to organize themselves as real bureaux of information; but in the precise form just described it is practically unknown. Our method is to be ready with advice when it is asked for; and in big libraries, such as the British Museum, it is the most useful kind of advice, that of the specialist, which is our particular forte. Yet we still repeat, “The librarian who reads is lost!” More specialism, not less, is what we want.

Newsrooms and Magazine Rooms.

Among the old-established departments the reading rooms where newspapers and other periodical literature are displayed must, to judge by statistics of use, take a foremost place. Hundreds of thousands enter these newsrooms daily, twice as many as come into the lending libraries. Until the question was raised ten years ago by the late J. D. Brown, a librarian who attempted reconstruction in library administration long before the word began to be written with a big R, it seemed the most natural and unchallengeable thing in the world to put a newsroom in every library building and furnish it with a motley array of dailies and weeklies of all denominations. Brown induced the committee of the Islington Public Libraries to reform the reading room in a drastic way. No newspaper except the “Times” was provided for public consumption, though the advertisement columns were cut out from others and posted for the benefit of the unemployed.

This violent departure from routine did bring out the fact that newsrooms, at any rate as they were and as they are at present, occupy a somewhat illogical position. At first sight, there hardly seems any better justification for their inclusion in a library than that they also provide reading matter. But it is reading matter, too often, of a very different and doubtful kind; and the awkward fact that it is not the same people who use the newsroom that use the library, in short that the library proper and the newsroom, but for an inconsiderable overlap, cater for two different publics, gives occasion for thought.

To put it roundly, the proper place in the library scheme for the newspaper and its like has never been thought out. Brown went too far, and the library which was the scene of this experiment is now furnished with a careful selection of newspapers as well as with magazines and reviews of good standing. But he gave the problem serious thought. In the various public reading rooms which were under his care, he saw to it that the right kind of periodicals were provided, and the best of each kind. Among his many publications on library practice was a classified and annotated list of English and foreign periodicals, which ought to have done even more than it has to help provide something far better and more scientific than the mere hotchpotch of journalism with which too many tables are littered. Here again, economy of the baser sort has been the offender; for the poorest journalism is, of course, the cheapest, and a steady provision of the high-class periodicals recommended by Brown is an expensive drain on slender funds.

The library cannot do without the newspaper any more than it can do without the review, the technical periodical, and the learned society’s journal. All of these are necessary supplements to the books, since they are records of new knowledge; and they require the same care in selection, the guiding principle of which must be a clear idea of what they are there for. The much-debated dictum that history is past politics and politics current history needs no debate as a reason why the leading newspapers and the weekly reviews should be accessible in public libraries. Almost every one takes in a paper suited to his opinions: the public newsroom should give the opportunity of studying other opinions, and also of checking information by comparison of different sources and versions that conflict. The newsroom is to the library as the open-air excursion to the botany class, the laboratory to the lecture-room. Here theory and doctrine are seen in action; applied politics, applied sociology, all the different phases of the science of life set forth in books illustrated, tested, verified, or confuted. Which study is of more importance than the other? Fortunately, that is a futile question: the relevant one is, how incalculably each gains by conjunction with the other.

There is no need to provide the paper that every one buys. Nor are those that deal in police news, divorce cases, spice and sensation, the journals that a public institution is called upon to buy. The most authoritative journals, representing each of the recognized parties, weekly reviews of similar credentials, and the leading provincial organs, are all that need be supplied in this group. Even in a large and prosperous library, it is better to duplicate such than to make too wide a selection. Subsidized journals, sent gratis by political or social cliques or by advertising agents, might as well be rejected altogether; where they are accepted, the approved course is to pigeon-hole them until there is an applicant. The least approved is to employ this worthless stuff to cover serious gaps, and offer the public a stone when it asks for bread. A library committee should feel the same responsibility for a newspaper as for a book. By admitting either, they virtually give it a public guarantee.

But if the newspaper is to be treated as the organ of current history, then the newspaper room should be equipped with every facility for rendering current history real and intelligible. Maps of every part of the world should be hung over the reading stands. The room itself should be in the closest contiguity with the reference library, and should contain a ready-reference collection on open shelves, enabling readers to consult dictionaries, encyclopædias, statistical year-books, compendiums of geography, and other sources of general information as they read. That it should not be separated from the reading room where the periodical magazines and reviews are kept goes without saying. Files of such as are preserved should be close at hand. All this means that the reading room for newspapers will be another expensive department; yet the policy of making it a vital part of the whole library undertaking is in the long run economic. Here, surely, that training for citizenship which so many are preaching may be carried on without the features that make it objectionable to the old-fashioned party man. The existence of public newsrooms where the daily papers are read intelligently and their pronouncements checked and compared, might, in the course of time, react healthily on the daily press itself.

As to the lighter class of periodical, the same discretion has to be exercised in shunning the frivolous and worthless as an intelligent and responsible committee, not devoid of a sense of humour, would display in handling fiction. It is high time that the policy of treating this department as a kind of bait for the unregenerate, something to make the library popular, were abandoned. It is a delusive policy, grounded on two false assumptions—the first, that it is our duty to get people to read, no matter what they read; the second, that if you start them reading and bring them into the library they will eventually proceed to higher things. Every librarian knows that the habitual consumer of silly and pernicious reading-matter never can, without some almost miraculous change of mind, be taught to read and enjoy anything else. If you lure him with rubbish, you are encouraging tastes that are a greater obstacle to library progress than absolute illiteracy; you are putting obstacles in the road you propose to take him. The remark of an American librarian about certain popular novelists, that the people who like that sort of thing would be more sensible and better educated had they never learned to read, applies even more forcibly to the besotted victims of our periodicals of the baser sort. But the mere fact that the public who kill time with this sort of chewing-gum are not the public that borrow books or use the reference library, at once disposes of such a plea. By all means, let us have light literature, but let it be literature, and not an unrecognizable imitation.

Much, however, and far the largest amount of the material in a well-appointed reading room will not be literature at all, but simply information. In the chief London and many provincial libraries a large number of scientific and technical periodicals are taken, including publications of research societies and a good many foreign periodicals. More are required, and, as our public libraries are able to spend more money, one at least in each large area of population ought to be as well provided in this respect as are the science libraries at South Kensington, the university libraries, or, say, the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Institution, to take a good provincial example. These publications are as necessary as it is to keep editions of scientific and technical books thoroughly up to date. Their contents should be fully accessible, and to ensure this every library must subscribe to the Subject-Index to Periodicals. A practice increasing in frequency is that of indexing the current periodicals as they arrive, and mounting the entries in a mechanical guard-book or vertical file. Such libraries as possess a stock of long sets will naturally be provided with Poole’s and the other older indexes to periodicals; even libraries not possessing such long sets ought to have the indexes, for the same reason as they have other bibliographical guides, namely, to show inquirers in what books or periodicals information exists, an intelligent staff being relied upon to point out in what nearest libraries the books or periodicals are to be found.

Special Reading Rooms.

Not much is to be said nowadays in favour of separate reading rooms for ladies; the segregation of the sexes is going out of fashion, even in railway travelling. Yet they are still provided; for instance, the fine library building now all but completed at Dunfermline has a ladies’ room worthy of its scale and dignity. Far more urgent is the need for separate rooms where students can read and write in peace and quiet; children’s reading rooms will be discussed under another head. The Adult Education Committee wisely emphasized this desirability. “It is, in our view, essential that in all public libraries, in addition to the usual reading room where newspapers and magazines are consulted, there should be a room for the purposes of study. It is too often forgotten that many students have no place where they can study in comfort. It is also most desirable that all public libraries should possess a room large enough to be used for classes, lectures, and discussions.”[6] The latter requirement should have been framed differently. A lecture room is not a good class room. Every library should have its lecture room; it should also have one or more small rooms suitable for classes, tutorial or other, of the cosy size and character that help so much to bring out comradeship and intimacy. Whoever has tried to conduct a seminar numbering more than a dozen members will have experienced how difficult it is to break down shyness and evoke a frank and genuine exchange of thought. Rooms that are small and intimate are wanted for reading circles and discussions; at a pinch, the study room can be utilized; but both purposes must be served, and often at the same hour. The need for still other rooms dedicated to special uses will appear when we deal with the various forms of library extension.

The Children’s Department.

During the nineties of last century a good many libraries began to allot separate reading rooms to the children, at first, as a rule, to boys only, but later to boys and girls, sometimes in separation, sometimes together. At first experimental and subsidiary, this children’s reading room, usually combined with a children’s library, has come to be an essential part of the modern public library: those that are without it have no claim to be considered modern. Its relative importance varies according to the views of different committees and librarians, and also according to the local ability or willingness to meet the heavy cost of running such a department on proper lines. When we remember that the children are our future reading public, and when, taking a broader view, we imagine what it would have meant had every man and woman been trained from childhood in the intelligent use of books, we see how impossible it is to overrate this side of public library work. We must treat the child in the library in the most liberal, sympathetic, and respectful way. We must give the child in our libraries and reading rooms, from the outset, all the privileges and dignity of a citizen, and the future of our libraries and reading rooms will be ensured.

Birkenhead seems to have been the first town to become alive to the need of special provision for the youngest readers. Child readers enjoyed the advantage of a special section in the lending library there as long ago as 1865, and a few years later they were furnished with a separate catalogue of the children’s library. At Nottingham, a benevolent M.P., the late Samuel Morley, gave a sum in 1882 to found a separate building for children. These English libraries laid the first stone; but it was in American libraries that most of the building now took place. In the United States, the mere children’s corner rapidly developed into the separate library and reading room, and then gradually into a very peculiar and admirable thing, the children’s room—a distinct department, under the control of persons trained to work with children. It is a sort of autonomous children’s institute, combining something of the kindergarten with a well-planned school library ministering to both teaching and recreation. There are readable books to be read on the spot or taken home; works of reference to help in doing school work and make this more interesting; pictures, statuettes, and miscellaneous exhibits, which have more meaning given them by reading courses, talks, and illustrated lectures; and, finally, there is the story-telling—an art on which the American librarian pins much faith as a mode of awakening interest and evoking the right atmosphere before a child reads books on any given subject.

In this country, the Junior Library at Croydon is perhaps as near an approach as any we have made to the American idea. It occupies one of the largest rooms in the central building, and combines the functions of lending and reference library and magazine room. There is a platform and a lantern screen; ferns and other plants are dotted about. Any child of school age is admissible on the recommendation of a teacher. The librarian in charge and the one assistant do nothing but work for children; the children make it possible for them to carry out an extremely full and varied programme by acting as voluntary helpers, and are trained to serve at the counter, put books back in classified order on the shelves, and act as monitors. Others are drilled in groups for various duties, such as cutting out and mounting pictures for the great cyclopædia of illustrations, lettering posters, writing up bulletins of topical information for their fellow-readers. Lectures are delivered once a week at least, and story hours come much oftener. The children’s librarian takes classes brought from the schools, and explains the value of classification or the use and pleasures of books. Teachers, also, are allowed to use the children’s library at times as a class-room, illustrating lessons from the books and other exhibits there. Sometimes a class is brought and the children are simply allowed to browse at will. The collection of pictures is utilized in many ways. Sets of illustrations are hung on green baise screens to illustrate current events, the seasons of the year, the birthdays of notable men, and so on, with lists of the books in the library on the subjects to which the children have been introduced. A large part of the librarian’s time is taken up with showing the young readers how to find their way about among the reference books, and how to make the easiest and most remunerative use of these in their school lessons and their private hobbies. But the children are also gradually trained to help each other, and eventually to help the librarian in the daily routine of what they soon come to regard as their own library; they grow, in fact, into a sort of union society, running all sorts of affairs on their own account, with the official but not too officious eye directing and assisting rather than controlling their efforts. They might be compared to a group of patrols under a scoutmaster. The library in the children’s room contains about 4,000 volumes, and issues from 1,000 to 1,200 every week; in the period of five months from the report on which many of these details are taken, 1,200 new borrowers enrolled themselves.

Discipline, of course, must be maintained; this is essential to smooth working; but it must be evoked rather than imposed. Only the right sort of person, having had the right sort of training, even if born with the right disposition, is competent to evoke it and at the same time keep the children friendly, happy, and occupied with interesting things. Scores of children’s reading rooms have been a failure from the lack of this well-qualified superintendent. It is a waste of time to try running them as a minor department, to be committed to the hands of each junior assistant as his turn comes on the time-sheet. A mob of youngsters idling their time away and making the pleasant place a bear-garden would be the certain result. One common mistake that has a bad initial effect is to make the junior readers enter the library at a separate door, usually guarded by a special custodian who is a martinet. This preliminary insult to a child’s dignity is, perhaps unconsciously, resented; it strikes a wrong note. The idea that he or she must be segregated from grown-up readers subtly provokes a spirit precisely the opposite of that which needs to be cultivated. It is more fatal than the contrary mistake of pampering and idolizing children. Put him or her on nearly the same footing as their elders; mutual deference is infinitely better than the eighteenth century doctrine that every child is either a limb of Satan or a little imbecile.

To attain full success, librarian, teacher, and parents must learn to co-operate. Few parents take any interest in what their children read, and those few often take too much; they do not understand that coercion, or even a too didactic purpose, is fatal to the true object of an apprenticeship to reading, and will assuredly not lead children to love and enjoy reading, or to discover for themselves the values it can give to their own interests and pleasures. Until parents in general are capable of taking a wise interest, it is better perhaps that they should remain as indifferent as most parents are. In the fulness of time, when our children’s rooms are less markedly inferior to those across the Atlantic, when each has an adequate staff of persons trained for this highly specialized work, and teachers understand how much can be done by suggestion to direct the child’s reading and so lighten their own labours in teaching, by then the parent will doubtless have learned to take a proper share of interest and responsibility. All this cannot be achieved in one generation. We have now had public libraries for three-quarters of a century; but, for the arrears of intelligent use we have to make up, we might have only just begun experimenting with them.

The secret of success is to bring out the child’s own initiative. This, it may be taken for granted, is not a tendency to original sin. Good taste, like good art, is at bottom a natural thing: a misguided belief that it must be painfully instilled has done more than aught else to pervert it. Children perceive as much instinctively; hence their suspicion of well-meant efforts to put them on the right paths. A boy will hate even Robinson Crusoe if he is told he must read it; rather let him discover the realms of gold for himself. All which means that children want handling in matters of taste with a refined skill to which the mere common sense and tact required by the adult reader in a library is nothing. It means, again, that though the children’s librarian is sometimes born, when he, or rather she, has to be made, the making is an important and highly specialized process.

Other obvious points must be borne in mind, by teachers, parents, and librarians. The mere posture in reading, and the need for a good light at the proper angle, are not minor points, for bad habits in this respect are ruinous and alarmingly common. Many children read far too much. They must not be allowed to become bookworms; the parent ought to see that they have a healthy outdoor life, and the teacher that the charms of the book-world do not lead to the neglect of tasks set at school. Steady co-operation with the teachers in leading children to find in books aids to the business and the pleasures of life, is characteristic of those library systems where the children’s department has been given its due place in the scheme, and is not a mere side-show, ignorantly mismanaged and not thought worth spending money on. It is characteristic, for instance, of the admirable group of children’s libraries and reading rooms in the Islington Public Libraries, with its stock of 10,000 volumes set aside for the junior clients. There are numerous others in London and the provinces where co-operation is carried on in some form or another; but differences of opinion on the comparative merits of school libraries and of the library in the children’s reading room make for differences of method. Yet access to a school library does not render the public library any the less valuable to an intelligent child; and there ought to be the fullest mutual understanding and the keenest desire to help each other between librarian and teacher.

The fare provided in the children’s department consists, not only of books, but also of the best juvenile magazines, together with a sprinkling of illustrated weeklies and monthlies intended by the producers for readers of any age. Easy French magazines are sometimes provided. On the reference shelves stand suitable encyclopædias, atlases and gazetteers, dictionaries of several languages, works on local history and topography, illustrated natural histories, the works of the poets, and many other books that are likely to prove useful to children in their home work. The choice of books for children is a different thing now from what it was before the advent of Kingsley, Kingston, and Kipling. With a few exceptions, the didactic trash that constituted the whole stock of children’s literature a century ago may now be jettisoned, along with a still greater volume of more recent lumber depressingly written down to the childish intellect. Any modern author, for children or any one else, knows, if he knows his business at all, that the first thing to avoid is the habit or affectation or process of writing down to an inferior mind. Lewis Carroll, Sir James Barrie, Walter de la Mare conquered the child by writing as children themselves, and writing their best, writing with all their genius and with all the gusto due to things that are high and serious. Didactic writing is always bad. It cannot help being bad. The moment a writer begins to think of his audience instead of his subject, he becomes self-conscious and artificial. Worst of all when he has the effrontery to think of that audience as inferior to himself, and tries to adapt his thoughts to feebler understandings. Children are not slower than those of riper age to detect the false note, and be insulted by the condescension. Thus it is far better to offer children books that have been written for their elders than such as have been manufactured on the plan of mild adulteration. In fact, a very large proportion of the best books in the junior library belong to this higher category. Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver are obvious examples; Uncle Tom’s Cabin is another; Kidnapped will be received as warmly as Treasure Island or The Black Arrow, and if Lavengro has not such a universal appeal there will be no hesitation about The Cloister and the Hearth. Many of the novels of Blackmore and Stanley Weyman, most of Dickens’s, some of Thackeray’s and all of Scott’s are on the shelves of every good children’s library; and Jane Austen, Mrs. Gaskell, and some at any rate of George Eliot’s novels will meet the taste of girls. Many works of travel, some histories, and biographies not a few, such as the delightful life of Frank Buckland, are as much in place here as in the senior library; and among the poets and essayists the same freedom of choice may safely be exercised. Both publishers and librarians are now at one in seeing that there is nothing shoddy in the format of the books provided for children any more than in their contents; good paper, readable print, and illustrations of artistic merit, are becoming the rule. In the last-named particular children’s books at the present day are immensely superior to the volumes of popular fiction that seem to be perfectly satisfactory to thousands who are obviously their elders, but hardly their betters.

The advantages of a closer relationship between education authorities and library authorities are manifest both in children’s rooms in libraries and children’s libraries in schools. The library is certainly part of the educational fabric. On the one hand, the teacher is aided enormously by the child’s work in the library, all the more if that work is spontaneous and enjoyable; on the other hand, the children who find out the vital part a library can play in their work and recreations, who have become familiar with books of reference and periodicals, with the uses of catalogues, the vistas opened by files, albums, and indexes, and the order and intelligibility brought about by a clear system of classification, will have acquired something of inestimable value in the process of self-development to be carried on long after school-days are over. The Adult Education Committee were of opinion that the intimate relationship required could not exist without a common administration; and they would accordingly have placed all our public libraries under the care of the education authorities. There is no need at this point to discuss their proposals, beyond assenting to the argument for the closest bond between school and library. Even if they continue to be managed by different authorities, all library activities in the schools should be worked from the library. Whether school libraries are stationary or circulating collections, they should be administered from the children’s library as the base, and their complementary relation thereto should be an important fact in the mind of every child reader.

In England it must not be hastily assumed that every town or even the majority are blessed with all the facilities described above for the benefit of children. Only a few have faced the problem seriously, and hardly any have faced the expense of a thorough service. A town like Toronto employs twenty-one assistant-librarians in the mere work of supervising the school libraries, and many American cities have much larger staffs engaged on this alone. It is obvious, at all events, that no library authority can be expected to carry on such an undertaking except at the cost of the sister authority, ready though it may be to furnish the knowledge and experience of a trained staff. Common administration, or at least harmonious administration under departments of the same supreme body, seems a logical consequence.