OLD PROBABILITIES IN THE LIBRARY—HIS MODEST VATICINATIONS[6]

“Don’t never prophsey onles ye know,” says Hosea Bigelow. I beg to call attention to the fact that this means “Don’t prophesy at all”—perhaps it was so meant by the shrewd Hosea. We never can know—and yet we continue to prophesy. The best we can do, of course, is to estimate probabilities. Probabilities! That is a good word. They have dropped it from the weather reports and call their estimate a “forecast.” I like the old word better. Let us see, then, what some of the probabilities are in library work.

“Everything flows,” said the Greek philosopher. Nothing in the world is stable; change is the order of the day. But note the word he uses. That which flows is in a state of orderly change in a definite direction. Everything progresses; and the library and its work are being borne along in the general current. Now the writers on hydro-dynamics, who are experts on blow, tell us that there are two ways of studying a current, which they name the “historical” and the “statistical”: In the former the attention is fixed on a definite particle of the moving fluid whose change of velocity and direction is noted as it passes along; in the latter a definite locality of the stream is selected and the fluid’s changes of form and density at that particular place are observed. In like manner we may study the library movement historically or we can select a definite point in its course—the present time—and note the conditions and their alteration. The latter plan, I venture to think, is the more favorable one for the would-be prophet.

Let us, then, take a few of the salient features of library work as they exist to-day and inquire: (1) What is the present situation with regard to each; (2) Is that situation changing; and whither and how fast; (3) Is its rate of change altering, and (4) are the conditions that affect it and its alteration, likely to remain as they are. If we can answer all these questions we can at least make an attempt at estimating the probable situation at a given future time. We must bear in mind, however, that in the library world, as elsewhere, there are sudden or abrupt changes, or catastrophes, and that these generally defy prediction. And this is equally true of unexpected aids or beneficient influences. The library benefactions of Mr. Carnegie would have upset the most careful and logical estimate of library progress made twenty years ago.

First let us take up the status of our stock in trade—our supply of books. President Eliot warned us two years ago that our books are piling up too fast. His warning has met with scant heed because experience has not brought it home to most of us. Malthus warned us long ago that the progress of population was toward overcrowding the world. We laugh at him because there is still plenty of room and means of utilizing it unknown in his time. Yet population increases, and it will overcrowd the world some day unless something occurs to prevent. In like manner our stock of books increases faster and faster. The ordinary American public library is a thing of yesterday; small wonder that it does not yet begin to feel plethoric. Our oldest large libraries are those of our universities, and Harvard’s president has told us that to them the evil day is within sight. Librarians have not received with favor President Eliot’s plea for getting us out of our future difficulty but this is neither here nor there. To judge by our present attitude either our library buildings must increase indefinitely in size or our stock must be weeded out. It must be remembered, however, that our books are perishable, and are growing more so. I do not regard this as an unmixed evil. Rather than to make our books unwieldy for the purpose of preserving them we prefer to make them usable and to rely on reprinting for their perpetuation. Thus what is not wanted will pass away. Perhaps this will solve our problem for us. But in any case it looks as if the future library building and its contents were to be greatly larger than those of to-day.

What are to be the style and arrangement of the future library building? The present situation can hardly be described in general terms. As in all building operations, there is a strife between the architect, representing aesthetics, and the administrator, representing utility. At present the architect seems to be having his way outside and the librarian his way inside. But why this contest? Is it not the architect’s business to make utility more beautiful but not less useful? And should not the administrator wish his surroundings to please the eye? Apparently the two are drawing a little closer together of late. We are having fewer temples of art that have to be made over to fit them for use as libraries and fewer buildings that are workable but offensive to the eye. The tendency seems to be toward simple dignity, although we certainly have some surprising departures from it. Probably the library of the future will be a simple and massive structure of much greater size than at present, with its decorations largely structural, and combining ample open-shelf and reading facilities with greatly increased capacity for book-storage.

There is one particular in which the architect has been specially out of touch with the administrator. The open-shelf is now all but universal, but many architects seem not to have heard of it. Many buildings, actually intended for administration on the free access system, seem yet to have been planned as closed-shelf libraries and opened to the public as an afterthought. A library without a special stack-room for book-storage is an unthinkable thing to most architects. And yet in many small libraries book-storage is not necessary, and in most branch libraries, where only books in general use are to be placed, it will never be necessary. To get the maximum advantage from open shelves, with a minimum of risk, the books should be placed on the walls as far as possible and such book-cases as stand on the floor should be as low as an ordinary table, so as to be easily overseen. A stack-room, it seems to me, is distinctly a closed-shelf arrangement. I believe this is coming to be recognized and that in the future library the books will be on or near the walls.

But how about the open-shelf system itself? At present there are few libraries that do not have it in some form, and some of these are libraries that continued strongly to disapprove of it even after it had become well and widely established. The indications are nearly all that it has come to stay. I say nearly all; for there is still a feeling among many people that it is not good administration to abandon so large a percentage of our books to thieves. In libraries in small communities where the loss is small, this question does not arise; but in New York, for instance, where we lost 5000 books last year, it is serious. We librarians may say and believe that the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages, but trustees and municipal authorities are hard to convince. In New York we have taken what many will consider a backward step, by partially closing, as an experiment, the shelves of two of our branches. So that although we may safely say that free access has come to stay, I do not look to see it applied very generally to large collections. One thing seems to me clear. Library administration is becoming increasingly business-like, and it is not business-like to accept a large annual loss without an attempt to minimize it. We must at least investigate regularly and rigidly the sources and character of this loss.

As for the other features that we have become accustomed to regard as distinguishing the new library era from the old—special work with children, co-operation with schools, travelling libraries, etc.—it is evident that these, too, have come to stay. Their spheres are widening and their aims are diversifying, however, so that he who should venture to predict their precise status in the future would be rash.

In fact, the library idea itself is beginning to suffer a sort of restless change that is quite distinct from its orderly progress. The activities of the library are at present a good deal like those of the amoeba—stretching out a tentacle here, withdrawing one there; improvising a mouth and then turning it into a stomach; shifting and stretching about; somewhat vague and formless, yet instinct with life, appetite and caution, and vitalized with at least the germ and promise of intelligence. Such a state is an unpromising one for prophecy. Is this or that new development of activity the beginning of an orderly march in a straight line, or is it to be withdrawn or reversed to-morrow? Is our work with children to include much that now seems to belong to the kindergarten, the museum, and the art gallery? Are our travelling library departments to sell books in the future as well as lend them? Are we to deliver books free at our user’s homes? Are our Boards of Education to turn over to us the superintendence of all such work as deals with books and their use? Many questions like these would have been answered in the affirmative yesterday but in the negative to-day. I might be inclined to say “yes” to some of them now, when to-morrow would prove them out of the question. But there is one assertion that we can make boldly. Whatever the library has tried to do or to be, whether success or failure has attended it, it has never ceased to be a library—a keeper and purveyor of books. Whatever else it may undertake, we may be sure that this will continue to be its chief reason for existence, and that its other activities, if such there be, will grow out of this and group themselves around it. Is the library to grow into a bookstore? I do not know, but if so its commercial functions are likely to be subsidiary. Certain libraries have already added to their duties as free institutions the functions of pay-libraries, and the commercial feature has thus been introduced. It seems to be spreading, and it may prove an entering wedge for a system of actual sales to supplement that of paid loans. A powerful deterrent, however, will be the influence of the book-trade. Following the line of least resistance, the activity of the library as an aid to the ownership as well as the reading of books is perhaps more likely to manifest itself in advice than in actual trade. Some libraries are now making special effort to give their readers information about book-prices, and about places and methods of purchase; and it seems likely that this kind of aid, since it can arouse no opposition, will increase.

The position in which we find ourselves, of opposition to those who make and sell books, is unfortunate. The situation has been growing more and more tense and it may continue so to grow, perhaps up to the point where all discount will be withheld from libraries and where new legislation may discourage importation, but I do not believe that it will keep on indefinitely. No one who looks into the matter closely can help believing that in the long run libraries advertise the book-trade and help it by promoting general interest in literature. This view of the matter was taken by a majority of the New York Booksellers’ League at a recent dinner at which the question was discussed. Even purely as a matter of business, the library deserves special privileges and it will doubtless continue in some measure to receive them.

It does not, however, seem probable that the average cost of books to a public library will ever be as low again as it was, say, ten years ago. In fact this may be said of all library expenses. Salaries are rising and ought to rise higher; our buildings are larger and finer and demand more expensive care. We are heating them with more costly apparatus and lighting them with electricity. The library of the future will doubtless cost more to maintain in every item than the library of the past—but the public will receive more than the difference.

As regards children’s work there seem to be at present two tendencies—one toward complete isolation and one in the opposite direction. Will our grandchildren, when they go to the public library, be segregated in a separate room, perhaps in a separate building; or will they be treated as a distinct class only so far as may be absolutely necessary for good administration? Probably complete separation is best for the library and best for the adults; I hesitate to say that it is best for the children. After all, childhood is but a stage and not a resting state at that—rather restless and progressive. Any special conditions that we provide for it must themselves be subject to constant change. In our schools the child passes from grade to grade. In our libraries the grades are only two; let us not make the leap from one to the other too great. I look to see special library work for children increase in importance, but with due recognition of the fact that some of the needs and aspirations of a “grown-up” are present in many a twelve-year-old and that it is better that the clothes of a growing child should be a size too large than an exact fit.

The travelling library deserves a special word, because its success is indicative of the tendency to bring the book and its user into closer contact. In New York we began, only seven years ago, to circulate a few hundred books monthly in this way among half a dozen schools. Now we give out nearly half a million a year from nearly 500 different points. We hear the same tale from all sides. And the cost of circulation per book is surprisingly small. In New York the circulation through travelling libraries is equal to that of three branches of the first class, while the number of assistants employed is about half the number required in one of those branches. The cost of operating three large branches in Carnegie buildings is about $40,000 yearly, whereas our travelling libraries for the last fiscal year cost us but $6400. Of course it must be remembered that a very large amount of the work of circulation in this case is done by volunteer assistants and that the users of the books have not the facilities and resources of a branch library—the number and variety of books, the pleasant surroundings, the trained aid. Of course the travelling library can never take the place of the fully equipped branch, but in supplementing branch work and in reaching those who live in sparsely settled communities its capabilities are great and it may be expected that its use will increase.

The broadening of library work illustrated by the successive appearance of the reference library, the circulating library, the delivery station, the branch and the travelling library suggests the thought that this series may be carried further in the future by the addition of some working plan that will bring the book still closer to its user. Such a plan would be the system in which books are delivered free of charge at the houses of those who use them, or the provision of a real library on wheels—a van supplied with shelving for a thousand books or more from which selection can be made as it moves about from house to house. It does not seem probable that any such device as this will be generally adopted for districts adequately provided with regular libraries, but for thinly settled regions they may supplement or take the place of our present travelling or home libraries. I believe for instance, that a moving library of 1000 books, calling once a week at each house in a farming district would be preferable to four travelling libraries of 250 books each, stationed at points in the same district, although, of course, the cost would be correspondingly greater.

The library’s status as an educational institution seems now to be well established. No one disputes it, and as this appears to be the chief ground on which its support by public funds is justified we may regard it as settled that the library is to continue to play its part in public instruction. This part, though not so definite and positive as that of the school, extends over a far longer period. While the library’s work is parallel and supplementary to that of the school in the case of those of school age, it must continue its work alone after its users have left school. Here it may settle its methods for itself, but in its earlier work when it deals with pupils, it has the teacher to reckon with. The necessity for constant consultation and co-operation between the authorities of two public institutions, whose work is so similar and can so easily result in wasteful duplication or still more wasteful conflict, is obvious. We need not be surprised that librarians and teachers are getting nearer together and we may confidently predict that the rapprochement will be closer in the future. But although the school is ceasing to look upon its younger sister as an interloper in the pedagogical family, there is still plenty of room for the definition of their respective spheres. And we have no right to complain that the school is still doing much library work, when we have ourselves sometimes tried to do school work. I look in the future for the definition of two clearly separated spheres of activity, one filled by the library and the other by the school, and for the closest co-operation between the two that is consistent with confining each to its own work. It is probably too much to expect that the school will give up the custodianship of books. It must at least control its own text books, and its collection of reference works should be complete enough to constitute a thorough guide and aid to proper study. But the distribution of supplementary reading should be the part of the public library. This and other related points are to be settled, if at all, in the future by two kinds of mutual understandings; namely, between the governing boards of library and school and between librarian and teacher. The due definition of spheres of work can come only from an official agreement between library board and school board; helpful aid on both sides can come only from an official agreement between library board and school board; helpful aid on both sides can come only from personal contact and acquaintance between teachers and library assistants—such a degree of acquaintance between teachers and library assistants—such a degree of acquaintance that each comes to have a practical knowledge of the other’s problems, trials and limitations. Most librarians have made more or less effort in this direction; some have met with distinguished success. We may safely predict further progress along this line.

The lessons of the past and of the present all point to the increasing use of the library as a great engine of popular education, using the noun in its broadest sense and emphasizing the adjective. The library is more and more a great humanizing influence; if this is so, nothing human must be alien to it. And much that is human and humanizing is nevertheless ephemeral. With some the implications of this word are wholly contemptuous. Of a day! Does nothing valuable pass quickly away, having done its little work? The day itself is a day only and vanishes with the evening and the morning; yet it has its part in the record of the years. So with “ephemeral” literature. As we have seen, a great deal of what we are wont to consider as standard and permanent will ultimately perish. Yet be its life that of a year or a century, a book may play its little part in the mental development of those who read it. Just at present the favorite vehicle of literary expression is fiction. People put into stories what they have to say of history, sociology and ethics; they embody in romance their theories of aesthetics, economics and politics. There is good doctrine with a poor literary setting and there are paste jewels in pure gold. But taking it by and large the much decried deluge of modern fiction has undoubtedly been educative in its tendency. This is why I cannot yield to logic and predict the gradual disappearance of all but a small residuum of fiction from the public library. There is a tendency in that direction but there are some signs of a reaction. The seer may hope, even if he dare not predict, that the great public library that can afford to do so will continue to purchase such fiction as will interest or entertain the average person of education, even if it is to stay on the shelves but a few months.

What will be the future distribution of libraries in this country? At present their numbers are large in the northern states and comparatively small in the southern. Growth has been unexampled in its rapidity and has been stimulated by large benefactions. So far as this growth may be looked upon as the direct result of Mr. Carnegie’s gifts it may doubtless be regarded as abnormal, although it should be noted that every Carnegie building means a present and future outlay on the part of the community in which it stands, of many times the amount given by the donor. Primarily, library expansion is the result of a popular conviction that the public library is a public necessity. Expansion has proceeded in proportion to the spread of that conviction and along the lines of its progress. If there are fewer public libraries in the South than in the North it is because the need for them is not felt there, even if it exists. Doubtless the race problem is a powerful inhibitory influence. Two things are certain; that library expansion is to go on for some time, and that a time will come when it must stop. When that time arrives, the library will have attained its majority and we shall have an opportunity to address ourselves to problems that can not be attended to during our period of growth.

Who will use our great library of the future? Who uses the library of to-day? I have been asked that question by reporters and have been puzzled to answer it. For whose use is the public library intended? It will be logical to answer “the Public, of course,” but there are a great many people who will give this answer with mental reservations. With them “the Public” means some particular part of the public. Some think that the libraries are for the poor, or at any rate for those who cannot afford to buy books for themselves. This is a survival of the origin of some of our circulating libraries, which were originally charities. But a public foundation and a charitable foundation are two different things. Our parks are free, yet we do not object to their free use by the wealthy, nor do the wealthy classes themselves seem to shrink from it. Some again would limit the use of a library to students, or at all events to those who do not care to withdraw books for home use. These are people who do not believe in the circulating library—and there are still such. Others again would have the public library cater only to those of educated literary taste. For these reasons and for others it is a fact that our public libraries, even those with the largest circulations, are not used by the entire public. Probably, however, they are being used more and more freely. In a library that uses the two-book system it is impossible to tell exactly from statistics, how many persons are drawing from the library at one time. Assuming, however, that the number is proportional to the number of books outstanding, we find in the New York Public Library that it has been increasing a little faster of late years than the circulation. In other words, individual reading has not increased, and the great recent increase of circulation in our library and presumably in others also, is due to an increase of readers. The size of the library’s public is therefore increasing and there is no reason to suppose that it will not continue to do so. Of course there must be a limit. For instance, certain sections of the public will not use a library—as they will not use a school—in conjunction with other sections. This may be because of social or racial feeling, or personal uncleanliness or offensiveness, even when the latter is not carried to the point where the librarian can properly object to it. In such cases the lower element will drive out the higher. The remedy seems to be sought in segregation. This may be either open and acknowledged as in those southern cities where the library has a separate department for colored people, or it may be virtual, as where a convenient lounging room with newspapers is provided for the tramp element, sometimes with the privilege of smoking. In large cities the branch library system acts in the same way. The character of the card-holders is determined by that of the surrounding district and we thus get practically separate libraries for separate sections of the community. I look to see this separation proceed to a somewhat greater degree, not perhaps systematically but automatically and almost involuntarily. In spite of the apparent concession to class feeling, it will certainly increase the aggregate use of the library and thus make it more truly a public institution. So far as the branch system is concerned, of course, this is only one of the ways in which it increases the size of the library’s public. Even in a section where the population is perfectly homogeneous, more people will always be served by two libraries than by one. The number of branch library systems is rapidly increasing and the prospects are that the greatest possible use is to be made of them in the future. And they will be made up of true branches. Delivery stations have their uses, but they can never take the place of buildings with permanent stocks of books and all the conveniences of a separate library. Where a branch building is also a delivery station, as it always should be, that is, where the users of a branch are allowed to draw on the stock of the Central Library or of the other branches, it is found that the branch use vastly exceeds the station use. In our own library a branch that circulates 500 to 1000 of its own books daily will give out only two or three from other branches. This is sufficiently indicative of the preferences of the public, and in a matter of this kind public preference will ultimately govern. These branch libraries will have limited stocks of books, mostly, though not entirely, on open shelves, and will include small reference collections which will be more important as the branch is farther removed from the central library. These predictions, it seems to me, are all warranted by present tendencies.

How will the future library be governed and administered? The governing body at present is almost universally a board of trustees who are men of standing and responsibility but usually without expert knowledge. These are sometimes semi-independent and sometimes under the direct control of their municipal government. The present tendency seems to be to minimize municipal control but to increase the number of governing bodies subject to it. In other words private libraries are doing more public work than formerly under contract with municipalities, becoming thereby subject to the control of the city or town but not so closely as to bring politics into the management. This state of things is so desirable that we may expect it to be multiplied in the future. As regards the lay or inexpert character of the governing board, though it is looked upon by some as objectionable, it is shared by the library with great numbers of other public and semi-public institutions. Such a board may be regarded as representative of the great lay public, on whose behalf the institution must be operated, and whose members are interested in results rather than in the special methods by which these results may be obtained. That the members of such a board should be mere figure-heads is certainly not to be desired; that they should, either as individuals or collectively, take part in the details of administration is equally undesirable. There are boards that are doing the one or the other of these things, but the tendency is to lean neither in the direction of laxity nor of undue interference—to require definite results and to hold the librarian strictly responsible for the attainment of those results, leaving him to employ his own methods.

And the librarian of the future; who and what will he be? The difference between the modern librarian and him of the old school has often been the subject of comment. The librarian nowadays is less the scholar and more the man of affairs. Is change to go on in this direction? There are rather, it seems to me, signs of a reaction. Perhaps reaction is hardly the word. The librarian, while keeping in touch with the times, is reaching back for a little of the spirit of the old-time custodian and incorporating it with his own. Is it too much to hope that the heads of our future libraries, will keep in the forefront of library progress, alert to appreciate the popular need and to respond to it, may yet have something of the sweet and gentle spirit of the old scholars who used to preside over our storehouses of books?

Who are to be the assistants in our library of the future? At present our staffs are recruited from the following sources:

(1) The library schools. The best of these have supplied chiefly the heads of the smaller libraries, and heads of departments or assistants of the higher grades in the larger libraries. Few heads of the large libraries are school-graduates and few lower-grade assistants. There are, however, schools of the second class whose graduates have gone into the lower grades both in small and large institutions.

(2) Apprentice classes, generally formed to instruct untrained persons in the work of a particular library, so that those who enter its lower grades may be at least partially fitted for their work. The best of these rise by promotion to the upper grades.

(3) Appointment of totally untrained persons. If such persons are thoroughly well educated they may enter the work in the higher grades or even as the heads of libraries. B If not they generally enter at the bottom, although of course some obtain higher positions through political or local influence.

This, I believe, states the situation fairly. What are the tendencies? There can be no doubt that the library school is growing in favor. The increasing numbers of those who apply for school courses, the raising of requirements, both for entrance and for graduation, the second class schools that have sprung up in limitation of those of higher grade, making necessary the appointment of committees by various library bodies to examine and report on them—all point in this direction. At the same time we have had numerous instances, of late, of the selection of non-graduates to fill high library positions and at least one instance of frank statement on the part of a librarian of acknowledged eminence, in favor of taking college men of ability into the library immediately on graduation, instead of putting them through a library school. The library schools aim, and very properly so, at occupying the same position toward the library profession that the medical and law schools do toward the medical and legal professions. Statistics show that they have not yet reached that position. Still, it is probable that they will continue to approximate to it as a limit. In the future, more and more of the higher library positions will doubtless be filled by library-school graduates—and so also will more of the lower positions. When the demand for assistants in the higher grades begins to slacken, proportionately to the supply, as it is sure to do some day, the library school graduates will be willing to enter the library force in the lower grade, and will thus crowd out the untrained or partially trained applicants to some extent. They may even make the apprentice class a superfluity, in which case I am sure librarians will abandon it without a sigh.

In these somewhat desultory forecasts the object of the prophet has been not so much to impress upon others his own beliefs as to stimulate a taste for prophecy—a desire to glance over the rail and see which way the current is setting. Without being fatalists, we may hold that there are certain great tendencies in human affairs, vast social currents, against which it is well-nigh hopeless to struggle. Those who desire to accomplish results must work with these currents, not against them. Success has almost always been won in this way. Even when a few bold spirits have seemed to stem and turn back the whole tide, it will generally be found that an unseen undercurrent was in their favor. Learn therefore to judge of the currents; so shall we avoid the rocks and shoals and bring our craft safely to port.

THE LOVE OF BOOKS AS A BASIS FOR LIBRARIANSHIP[7]

Is the love of books a proper or necessary qualification for one who is to care for books and to see that they do the work for which they were made? First, let us ask a question or two. What is the love of books; and what is there in books that one may love? The same question might be asked and answered of the love of human beings; for between it and the love of books there are curious analogies. Of what, then, do man and book severally consist as objects of interest and affection?

First of all there is the man himself, the ego, the soul—which cannot indeed exist on this earth without its material embodiment, but which most of us realize is in some way distinct from that embodiment. So the book has its soul. The ideas or facts that it sets forth, though dependent for their influence on the printed page, exist independently of that page and make the book what it is. Next we have the material embodiment; that without which the man or the book could not exist for us; which is a necessary part of him or it, but necessary only because it is the vehicle through which man or book may be known by the senses. The body of the book is thus so much, and only so much, of its material part, its paper and its ink, as is necessary to present the contents properly to the eye. Lastly, we have the clothing of man and of book, having the function of protection or of decoration, or both; in the case of the book the protective cover, often highly decorated, and so much of interior elaboration as cannot be said to be strictly necessary to the presentation of the idea. The “body” and the clothing of the book, let it be noted, are not strictly separable as are those of the man. The line between them may be drawn in different places by different people. The same illustration, we will say, may be considered by one reader an absolutely necessary part of the book—an organ of its body—while to another it is but an ornamental embellishment—a decorative gewgaw. In spite of this vagueness, however, there is here an undeniable distinction between those material parts of the book that are necessary to its existence and those that merely embellish it or protect it.

The book therefore, like the man, is made up of soul, body and clothes. Which of these is the entity that may be loved? Now there are many kinds of lovers and many kinds of love. The belle of the ball may be surrounded with admirers, but if clad in rags and seated in a gutter she might excite no favorable notice. Still more may a pretty face be loved when it has no mental or spiritual qualities behind it. Yet these types of affection are inferior—no one would deny it. In like manner those who love the book merely for its fine clothes, who rejoice in luxurious binding and artistic illumination, and even those who dwell chiefly on its fine paper and careful typography, are but inferior lovers of books. The one loves his book for its clothes, and the other for its bodily perfection; neither cares primarily for its contents, its soul.

Now the true lover is he who loves the soul—who sees beyond clothes and bodily attributes, and cherishes nobility of character, strength of intellect, loftiness of purpose, sweetness of disposition, steadfastness of attachment—those thousand qualities that go to make up personality. All these the book has, like the man or the woman—for is it not the essence of its writer? Your true book-lover would rather have a little old dog’s-eared copy of his favorite author, soiled and torn by use, with binding gone, and printed on bad paper with poorer type and worse ink, than a mediocre production that is a typographic and artistic masterpiece.

And yet we call the collector of fine bindings and rare editions a “book-lover,” to the exclusion of the one who loves truly and devotedly. The true book-lover wants to get at the soul of his book; the false one may never see it. He may even refrain from cutting the leaves of the rare first edition that he has just bought, in doing which he is like the ignorant mother who sews her child up in his clothes for the winter—nay, worse; for you cannot sew up the child’s soul.

Now let there be no misunderstanding. As the true lover would have his mistress beautiful—nay, as she is beautiful to his eyes, whatever she may be to others, and as he would, if he could, clothe her in silks and adorn her with gems, so the true book-lover need not be and is not adverse to having his favorite author sumptuously set forth; he would rather than not see his books properly and strongly printed and bound; his love for the soul need not interfere with proper regard for the body and its raiment. And here is where the love of the book has an advantage over the affection whose object is a person. In spite of the advertisements of the beauty doctors, a homely face can rarely be made beautiful; but the book may be embodied and clothed as we will; it is the same, however printed and bound, to him who loves it for its contents.

Thus it will be seen that when I speak in general of “a love of books” I mean not a love of their typography, their illustration, or their bindings, but of their contents; a love of the universal mind of humanity as enshrined in print; a love of the method of recording ideas in written speech, as contrasted with their presentation in the spoken tongue—a love of ideas and ideals as so recorded. Such a love of books is pre-eminently a characteristic of civilized man. It is not synonymous with a love of knowledge—the savage who never saw a book may have that; it is not even the same as a love of recorded knowledge, for knowledge may be recorded in other ways—in the brain by oral repetition, in sculptured memorials, in mere piles of stone. It is a love of the ideas of men recorded in a particular way, in the particular way that has commended itself to civilized man as best.

The very existence of a library presupposes such a love of books. No one who had not an affection for the printed records of his race would care to possess them, much less to collect and preserve them. It would seem, then, that a love of books should be not only a qualification but an absolute prerequisite for entrance upon librarianship. By inquiring how and why it has come to be regarded as a non-essential or as of secondary importance, we may perhaps learn something.

A young woman comes to me to ask for library work; and when I demand sternly, “Have you training or experience?” she timidly answers, “No; but I’m very fond of books.” I smile; you all smile in like case. Why do we smile? What business have we to underrate such a fundamental qualification and exalt above it mere technicalities? The ability to acquire these technicalities exists in ten persons where the ability to love books as they should be loved is found in one. If the love so avowed is real, even if it is only potential, not actual, our feeling in its presence should be one of reverence, not amusement. It should prove the candidate fit, perhaps not for immediate appointment, but for preliminary training with a view to appointment in the future.

If it is real! Candor compels me to confess that, like some other avowals of love, that of a love for books does not always ring true. “What have you read?” I once asked one of these self-styled book-lovers. She fixed me with her eye and after a moment’s impressive pause she replied “Deep thought!” I mentally marked her as a false lover. Proud parents relate how their progeny in childhood would rather peruse E. S. Ellis than play and pore over Alger than eat—this as irrefragable proof of fitness for a library career. Consideration of cases like these makes us wonder whether the smile is so much out of the way after all. Does the true book-lover publicly announce her affection in the hope of gain? Does she not rather, like Shakespeare’s maid, “never tell her love?” It is to be feared that some of these people are confusing a love of books with a love of reading. They are not the same thing. Some persons enjoy the gentle mental exercise of letting a stream of more or less harmless ideas flow through their brains—continuously in and continuously out again—apprehending them one after another in lazy fashion, and then dismissing them. The result is a degree of mental friction, but no permanent intellectual acquisition. How much of our own reading is of this kind I shudder to contemplate. Far be it from me to condemn it; it has its uses; it is an excellent cure for wakefulness after a busy day; but it no more indicates or stimulates a love for books than shaking hands with a thousand callers makes it possible for the Governor or the President to claim them all as intimate friends.

A real love for books, after all, is betrayed rather than announced; it shows itself in the chance remark, the careless action, just as another kind of love may show itself in a glance or a word.

I believe this to be the reason why a love for books is so little considered among the modern qualifications of librarianship; it appears in acts, not in words; it cannot be ascertained by asking questions. He who protests that he has it must needs be an object of suspicion. And yet I venture to say that if any librarian has made a conspicuous success of his work, apart from the mere mechanics of it, he has achieved that success primarily and notably through love of books. This I assert to be the case down to the assistant of lowest grade.

To be good, work must be ungrudging. And though other things than love for one’s task may make one willing to do it and able to do it well, intelligent interest is always a prime factor in securing the best results.

And love of one’s work becomes a very simple matter when there is love of the subject matter of that work. Those who lament that they are doomed to drudgery should remember that drudgery is subjective. All work consists of a series of acts which taken apart from their relationships are unimportant and uninteresting, but which acquire importance and interest from those relationships. It is so also with sports. Think how childish are the mere acts of striking a ball with a racket or of kicking an inflated leather sphere over a cross-bar! Yet in their proper sequence with other acts they may be the object of the breathless interest or enthusiasm of thousands of spectators. And if this may be the case with a mere game, how much more so with an occupation that is part of the world’s life! To dip a brush in color and draw it across a canvas is a simple act, yet such acts in their sequence may produce a work of art. Here the workman understands the position and value of each act in the sequence; hence he is not apt to feel it as drudgery. Drudgery is work in which the elementary acts are performed unintelligently, with little or no appreciation of their position in the scheme of things, as when a day laborer toils at digging a hole in the ground without the slightest knowledge of its purpose, not caring, indeed, whether it is to be a post-hole or a grave. But to the man who is searching for buried treasure the digging ceases to be drudgery; he knows what he is about, and every shovelful as it is lifted brings him nearer to possible gold and gems. To change drudgery into interested labor, therefore, realize what you are doing; know its relation to what has gone before and what is to come; understand what it is you are working on and what you are working for. Learn to love that something; and all that you can do to shape it, to increase its usefulness and to bring it into new relationships will have a vivid interest to you.

What could be duller than the act of writing in a book, hour after hour, certain particulars regarding other books, the author’s name, the title, the publisher, the size, the price? But if you love those volumes, individually or generically, and if you realize that what you are doing is a necessary step in the work of making their contents accessible and useful—of leading others to love them as you have learned to do—then and only then, it seems to me, does such a task as accessioning become full of interest. And so it is with every one of the thousand acts that make up the daily work of a library assistant. I am saying nothing new; you know and we all know that the laborer who does his work well is he who does it con amore. The wage-earner may labor primarily to support himself and his family, but he will never really earn his living unless his work is of a kind that can command his whole-hearted interest—unless he likes it and takes pride in doing it well. This is why the love of books—an intelligent interest in literature and in the world’s written records—is so fundamental a necessity for a librarian.

It should be emphasized that one may love books even if some of the great masterpieces leave him cold, just as one may love humanity though Alexander and Cæsar, we will say, do not happen to stir his enthusiasm. One may even, in a way, love books when that love is expended on what is by nature ephemeral, so long as it is lovable and excellent. Perishability and excellence are not contraries by any means. Indeed, I heard a painter once, indignant because his art had been characterized as less permanent than sculpture, with implied derogation, assert that all beauty is of its nature perishable. If this be so, a thing of beauty, instead of being a joy forever, is a passing pleasure and the more evanescent as it nears perfection. This thesis could hardly be successfully maintained, and yet I conceive that it has in it an element of truth. There are critics who refuse to admire anything in art that has not in it the elements of permanency. A sunset they will acknowledge to be beautiful, though fleeting, but its artistic portrayal, they say, must be lasting. An idea, a passion, may be fine, even when forgotten in a moment, but if enshrined in literary form it must be worth preserving forever or they regard it as without value. These people are confusing mere durability with beauty. “Is anything that doesn’t last three years a book?” asks Mr. Carnegie. We might as well refuse to admire a flower because it fades over night, or turn from our daily food because it is incapable of retaining indefinitely its savor and nutritious qualities. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that a thing may possess beauty and usefulness in a high degree to-day and lose them both to-morrow. That is an excellent reason for discarding it then, but not for spurning it now. What is cast into the oven of oblivion to-morrow may to-day be arrayed, beyond all the glories of Solomon, in aptness of allusion and in fitness of application.

Much of the best that appears in the daily press is of this kind. Along with a good deal that is worthy of long life, there is a host of admirable material in the ephemeral paragraphs that we are accustomed to despise. We may despise them, but still we read; and nothing that is read with interested attention by fifty millions of people is really despicable. The average newspaper writer may well be content to toss off paragraphs for us; he need not care who constructs our leading editorials. The influence of the paragraph is incomparably the greater; it has the raciness of the soil, shrewd wit driven home with our native exaggeration and the sting of the epigram. And much of that which is bound between covers has this peculiar aroma of journalism—its fitness to-day, its staleness to-morrow. This sort of thing may be badly done or it may be well done—inconceivably apt, dainty and well-flavored. If it is of the best, why may we not love it, though it be to-morrow as flat as the sparkling wine without its gaseous brilliancy?

To those who have been accustomed to books from childhood, who have lived with them and among them, who constantly read them and read about them, they seem to be a part of the natural order of things. It is something of a shock then when we awake, as we all must occasionally, to the realization that to a very large proportion of our population, supposedly educated, they are a thing apart—pedantic, useless, silly; to be borne with during a few years of schooling and then cast aside; to be studied perfunctorily but never to be read. When the statistics of reading are analyzed I believe we shall be startled, not by the great increase in it, notable and indubitable as this is, but at the enormous amount of progress that still remains to be made before the use of books by our people indicates any real general interest in them and appreciation of them. An attitude toward books that is very general is indicated by a series of cartoons which has now been running for several years in a New York evening paper—a proof that its subject must strike a responsive chord, for the execution of the pictures is beneath contempt. It is entitled “Book-Taught Bilkins,” and it sets forth how on one occasion after another Bilkins relies on the information that he finds in a book—and meets with a disaster. This is a trifle, but it is one of those straws that tell which way the wind blows. A presumably intelligent man, a graduate of the public schools, occupying a position under the city, recently remarked to one of our library people that he spent his holidays usually at one of the nearby recreation parks. “Why don’t you go sometimes to one of the branches of the public library?” he was asked. He laughed and said, “I’ve never read a book yet, and I don’t think I’ll start now.” How many are there like him? We are educating them by thousands. They leave school with no interest in books, without the slightest appreciation of what books mean—certainly with no love for them. To these people books are but the vehicles and symbols of a hateful servitude. Perhaps this is inevitable; if it is, all that we can say is that far from “continuing the work of the schools,” as we are often told is our function, we may often have to undo a part of it, which consists in creating an attitude of hostility toward books and reading. Can this be done by those who do not appreciate and care for literature?

I do not want to be considered pessimistic. This lack of interest in books I believe to be noticeable largely because we have changed our whole attitude toward the relationship of literature to the people. Love for books used to be regarded as properly confined to a class; that the bulk of people did not care for literature was no more significant than the fact that they had never tasted paté de foie gras. Now we consider that every one ought to love books—and the fact that vast numbers of people do not, no longer seems natural to us. That these people are beginning to show an interest, and that the ranks of the indifferent are growing slowly less, I firmly believe; and it is my opinion that the public library is no inconsiderable factor in the change. Some, it is true, are beginning to care for books by caring for poor and trashy books. These, however, are on the right road; they are on their way up; it is our business not to despise them, but to help them up further. Can we do it without having ourselves a proper appreciation of what is good in books?

But can a love for books be taught? To those who have the aptitude for it, it certainly can. In other cases it cannot. To those who have it in them, however, appreciation for the beautiful may certainly be awakened by precept and example. I have in mind a farmer in the Virginia mountains, dwelling in a lovely region, but among a rural population without the slightest appreciation of the beauties of nature. This particular man had worked for years in and about a summer camp and had thus associated with people from the city whose appreciation of the fine prospects from cliff and summit was unusually keen. In time he actually came to feel such appreciation himself, and he would spend the whole of his rare holidays on a rocky peak 4000 feet above the sea, drinking in the beauties of the scene and eagerly pointing them out to his tousle-headed children, all of whom he took with him. None of that brood will cease to love nature, I am sure, and their lives will be sweeter and better for it. In like fashion, association with people who appreciate good books will awaken a similar love in many an unpromising mind. Mere contact with the books themselves may do it, and so our open shelves have brought it to thousands, but the additional influence of a sympathetic human mind will hasten it wonderfully. The busy assistant at the desk may have a chance to say but a single word. Shall that word relate to the mechanics of librarianship—the charging system, the application form, the shelf-arrangement—or shall it convey in some indefinable way the fact that here is a body of workers, personally interested in books and eager to arouse or foster such an interest in others?

But how may one tell whether the true love of books is in him? To detect it in another, as already noted, requires more than a brief acquaintance. But to test oneself is easier. What would the world be to you without books? Could you go on living your life, physically and mentally, even as you do now, if the whole great series, from big to little, from old to new, from the Bible and Shakespeare down to the latest novel, were utterly wiped away? If you can truthfully say that such a cataclysm would make no difference to you, then you certainly do not love books. If the loss of them, or of some part of them—even the least—would leave a void in your life, then you have that love in greater or less degree, in finer or coarser quality. Let us pity those who have it not. And as for you who have it, you surely have not only a fundamental qualification for librarianship, but that which will make, and does make, of you better men and women. Let us perfect ourselves in all the minutiæ of our profession, let us study how to elevate it and make it more effective, but let us not forget the book, without which it would have no existence. Possibly the librarian who reads is lost, but the librarian who has never read, or who, having read, has imbibed from reading no feeling toward books but those of dislike or indifference, is surely worse than lost—he has, so far as true librarianship goes, never existed.

THE LIBRARY AS THE EDUCATIONAL CENTER OF A TOWN

From the moment when the new-born babe feels the contact of the outer world, through his organs of sense, that contact begins to develop his possibilities. Here education begins, and it ceases only with the stoppage of all functions at death. When it has gone on so far that a contact is established with other human minds, this development takes a special turn that differentiates it from any training that the lower animals receive—that makes it a link in the education of the race. Still further is this accentuated when the child begins to have access to the printed records of the race in the shape of books.

Books, or no books, his educational development goes on, at home, among his playmates, in his chosen work in shop, farm or office, but the use of books gives it a wider relationship—a broader outlook. This relation of our formal intellectual records to education which is emphasized especially during the period of attendance at school or college, makes a storehouse of books of peculiar value and importance to a community. Especially should the existence of such a collection direct the attention of every person in the community to the fact that the use of books to develop the mind and broaden the possibilities does not properly end with the close of the school life. It is the misfortune of the school, in too many instances, that its work engenders a hatred of books instead of a love for them. Play, we are told, is “work that you don’t have to do.” It is the merit of the library that there is no compulsion about its use. We dislike what is forced upon us, but the study which is the hardest of work in a school may become recreation when one is free to follow the line of inclination among the books of a well-made collection. In this way the post-scholastic education, if we may call it so, which lasts as long as the life, is kept in touch with the written records, instead of casting those records aside and proceeding haphazard wholly on so-called “practical” lines. The teachers express this, when they admit the public library at all into the educational pantheon, by saying that it may “continue the work of the school.” This is a one-sided way of looking at the matter—as one-sided as it would be to say that the function of the school is to prepare people for the use of the public library—a statement no less and no more true than the other. The proper way to put it is that the school and the library have closely related educational functions, both employing largely the written records of previous attainment, but the school concentrating its influence on a short period of peculiar susceptibility, with the aid of enforced personal discipline and exposition, while the library works without such opportunities, but also freed from these limitations. Thus the library uses books as a means of development, not with the aid of personal influence, but without taskmasters; not without discipline, but without compulsion. During the years of school attendance, it works with the school, and it recognizes the fact that its use is a habit best acquired early. This is the reason for our separate rooms for children, with their special collections and trained assistants, and also for our efforts to co-ordinate the child’s reading with his school work. We are not trying to set up a rival educational system, which by its superior attractiveness may divert the attention of the child from school; we are merely seeing that our young people may become accustomed to use books properly, to love them dearly and to look upon the place where they are housed as in some sense an intellectual refuge through life.

This closeness of contact with a public collection of books is largely a modern idea. In ancient times the safeguarding and preservation of the individual book was far more important than it is today. Greater public security, and especially the improvement in methods of duplication, have now made such care unnecessary, except in the case of volumes kept as curiosities, or for occasional use. The book that does the most for popular education is not kept behind bars, but sent out broadcast for free use, shortly perishing in the flesh to be reincarnated in fresh paper, type and binding. Sending out books for home use has added enormously to the educational value of the library and to the good done by books—to the number of points of contact of mind with mind. Along the same line has been the development of subsidiary centers of distribution—branch libraries, traveling libraries, delivery stations. All these have added to the tendency to look upon the public library as a center of municipal education. In many communities it is being looked to now as such a center in matters having no direct connection with books. It is a museum on a small scale; a lecture bureau; the maker, sometimes the publisher, of lists and bibliographies. In old times the local collector of minerals or of prints turned over his crystals or his pictures to the school; now, as likely as not, he gives them to the library. It is better that he should; for in the educational life of the individual, the school comes and goes, but the library goes on forever.

It is this capacity of the modern library to reach out beyond its own walls in many different directions that makes it proper for us to speak of it as a center. In a similar way the physicist speaks of centers of force. And as a body exerting attraction or repulsion—a magnetic pole, an electrified sphere, a gravitating particle—is surrounded by a field of force which is very real, though invisible, so there are invisible lines that connect such an intellectual center as the library with every interest in the community. We recognize this in our colloquial speech. Did you never hear of a network of branch libraries? Yet on a map they show merely a system of dots. The network is formed of the commingling fields of force, which together enmesh the community in a web of intellectual influences. And as an ordinary force has two aspects, so the influences radiating from our library centers are directed both from and toward them. The up-to-date library strikes out toward every member of the community and it strives to draw each one to itself. It sends its books into every home, its helpful aids to reading and to study, its library news and gossip in the local paper: but on the other hand, its cozy rooms, its well-stocked reference shelves, its willing and pleasant attendants exert on every man, woman and child in the community an intellectual attraction, and having let them taste of the delights it has to offer sends him out again as a willing missionary to lure in others. By such methods should the library strive to be a center of mental development in a community; by such methods is it succeeding, for no other center can vie with it in the universality of its appeal, whether we follow the individual from birth to death, or regard the various members of a community as they exist at one specified time.

But there is another sense in which the library should be and is able to serve as the intellectual center of a community. A community’s moral and intellectual status is not simply the sum of that of its component members. This is true of all aggregates where the components are interrelated in any way. In all such cases the properties of the whole depend, it is true, on the properties of the components, but not by simple addition. The taste of common salt is not the taste of sodium added to that of chlorine; the feelings, thoughts and acts of any aggregate of men may be quite different from those of the men taken individually. This is true whether the aggregate be simply a body of spectators in a theater, mutually related only by the fact of their common presence in the place, or an association, or the members of a municipal community. The human aggregate is in all cases less advanced than the individual; it is more primitive in its emotions, its morals, its acts. This might be expected, since the formal group, of whatever kind, began its evolution later than the individual. A community’s moral sense is thus less advanced than that of its members; it will lie, swindle and steal, when they would hesitate to do so; it will resort to violence sooner than they. Its intellectual ability is also less; its business transactions are looser; its appreciation of artistic values is inferior.

The education of a group of men, as a group, is thus something different from the education of its individual members. In the case of a loose group, such as an audience, it could not be attempted; with a group dwelling together and bound by ties of blood and common interest it is not only possible but quite worth while.

Of course it must be understood that whatever educates the individual also helps to educate the community; but when, as is almost always the case, the community lags behind, something may be done to bring its ideals, feelings and acts nearer to the individual standard, even without altering the latter.

Now we have already been reminded by Prof. Vincent of Chicago university that the library may act as the social memory; the town library should therefore be emphatically the municipal memory. And as memory is the basis of our intellectual life, so a communal memory of this kind will serve as the basis of the community’s intellectual life and as a means through which it may be fostered and advanced. As the individual looks back with interest on his own personal history and refreshes his recollection by means of family portraits, old letters, diaries, scrapbooks and material of all kinds, so the community should retain consciousness of the continuity of its own history by keeping in the public library full records of similar import—files of all local publications, printed memorabilia of all kinds, material for local history, even to the point of imagined triviality; even private letters, when these bear in any way on the community life. The legal and political history, or, at last, its dry bones, is locked up in the official archives or the town or city; we need, in addition, an intellectual and social hall of records out of which the delver in local history may clothe this skeleton with flesh and blood.

A man with a memory has the basis for a mind and a conscience; so a community with this kind of a collective memory is much more ’apt than another to develop collective intelligence and collective morality. It may be asserted, not as a figure of speech, but as a cold fact, that a community whose citizens look back upon an honorable history with records preserved in an accessible place, ought to be much less likely to sanction a trolley steal or to wink-at official graft.

In a recent striking address, Prof. William James has called attention to the importance of the things that may serve to unlock stores of reserve energy. When the runner’s fatigue has increased up to a certain point he all at once gets, as we say, his “second wind”—something to enable him to draw on a reserve energy. These reserves, Prof. James tells us, we all possess, especially in matters of the intellect and morals; they may be unlocked by ideas, sentiments or objects. The ideas represented by such phrases—catchwords, if you choose to call them so—as love, mother, home, liberty, church, the old flag; righteousness, civic duty—have had a power in setting energy free and accomplishing results, that is beyond estimation. In regarding the library as a center of municipal education we make it a storehouse of objects and records, with their associated ideas and sentiments, that are competent to act in just this way. A man who feels that he is a “citizen of no mean city,” who has been made to realize it from earliest childhood, whose mind turns habitually to the storehouse that has done most to make him realize it, is a nobler man, and the community of which he is a part is a nobler community, than if such a place were non-existent, or if its records and associations were scattered and unheeded. This is a most cogent reason for making the library the intellectual center of the town, as the town hall is the political and the church the religious center; for seeing in it not alone a collection of books, however good, that are given out to those who ask for them but a means for guiding and leading the town’s intellectual progress, for turning it from trivialities to what is worth while, caring for the children’s reading, stimulating public thought by lectures, endeavoring by every legitimate means to attract toward it the public eye in regard to all things that contribute to individual and civic development.

The most important part of our education, says Emil Reich, we gain after we are twenty-five years old. We cannot prevent the acquisition of such a post-graduate education by every young man and young woman in the town. The question is not: Shall the mind be trained? Shall character be developed? It is rather, How and by what means shall the development go on? Under what auspices shall it take place and toward what end shall it point? Shall it deal in trivialities and end in vacuity? Shall it impart insincerity, dishonesty, uncleanliness? Shall its product be a useless citizen, an indifferent one, a positively harmful one?

The answers to these questions depend on the home, the church, the school—a score, perhaps, of minor civic societies. Let us at the very center of the town’s mental and moral life erect an institution, which, having as its basal object the collection, preservation and popularization of the records of what has been worth while in the past, may serve also as a support to what is good in the present, and a ladder on which the community may mount to still better things in the future. Is this too large, too serious a view to take of the importance of the public library? That will depend on what we choose to make of it—a mere pile of books to be turned over by the passerby, or a true center of municipal education.