“Some are born great; some achieve greatness; some have greatness thrust upon them.” It is in this last way that the librarian has become a censor of literature. Originally the custodian of volumes placed in his care by others, he has ended by becoming in these latter days much else, including a selector and a distributor, his duties in the former capacity being greatly influenced and modified by the expansion of his field in the latter. As the library’s audience becomes larger, as its educational functions spread and are brought to bear on more of the young and immature, the duty of sifting its material becomes more imperative. I am not referring now to the necessity of selection imposed upon us by lack of funds. A man with five dollars to spend can buy only five dollars’ worth from a stock worth a hundred, and it is unfair to say that he has “rejected” the unbought ninety-five dollars’ worth. Such a selection scarcely involves censorship, and we may cheerfully agree with those who say that from this point of view the librarian is not called upon to be a censor at all. But there is another point of view. A man, we will say, is black-balled at a club because of some unsavory incident in his life. Is it fair to class him simply with the fifty million people who still remain outside of the club? He would, we will say, have been elected but for the incident that was the definite cause of his rejection. So there are books that would have been welcome on our library shelves but for some one objectionable feature, whose appearance on examination ensures their exclusion—some glaring misstatement, some immoral tendency, some offensive matter or manner. These are distinctly rejected candidates. And when the library authority, whether librarian, book committee, or paid expert, points out the objectionable feature that bars out an otherwise acceptable book the function exercised is surely censorship.
May any general laws be laid down on this subject?
Let us admit at the outset that there is absolutely no book that may not find its place on the shelves of some library and perform there its appointed function. From this point of view every printed page is a document, a record of something, material, as the French say, pour servir; from a mass of such material neither falsity, immorality nor indecency can exclude it. I do not speak at this time, therefore, of the library as a storehouse of data for the scholar and the investigator, but rather of the collection for the free use of the general public and especially of collections intended for circulation. It is to these that the censorship to which I have alluded may properly apply and upon these it is generally exercised. I know of no more desirable classification of books for our present purpose than the old three categories—the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Those books that we desire, we want because they fall under one or more of these three heads—they must be morally beneficial, contain accurate information or satisfy the esthetic sense in its broadest meaning. Conversely we may exclude a book because it lacks goodness, truth or beauty. We may thus reject it on one or more of the three following grounds; badness—that is undesirable moral teaching or effect; falsity—that is, mistakes, errors or misstatements of fact; and ugliness—matter or manner offensive to our sense of beauty, fitness or decency. The first and third qualities, badness and ugliness, are often wrongly confounded, and as I desire therefore to speak of them together, we will now take up the second, namely, falsity or lack of truth. Strangely enough, among all reasons for excluding books this is perhaps least often heard. Possibly this is because it applies only to non-fiction, and apparently in the minds of many non-fiction is desirable simply because it is what it is. Again, the application of this test to any particular book can generally be made only by an expert. The librarian needs no adviser to tell him whether or not a book is immoral or indecent, but he cannot so easily ascertain whether the statements in a work on history, science or travel are accurate. This lack of expert knowledge is bad enough when inaccuracy or falsity of statement is involuntary on the author’s part. But of late we have in increasing numbers a class of books whose authors desire to deceive the public—to make the reader take for authentic history, biography or description what is at best historical fiction. Again, the increasing desire to provide information for children and to interest the large class of adults who are intellectually young but who still prefer truth to fictitious narrative, has produced countless books in which the writer has attempted to state facts, historical, scientific or otherwise, in as simple, and at the same time as striking, language as possible. Unfortunately, with some noteworthy exceptions, persons with comprehensive knowledge of a subject are generally not able to present it in the desired way. Co-operation is therefore necessary, and it is not always properly or thoroughly carried out, even where the necessity for it is realized. Proper co-operation between the expert and the popularizer involves (1) the selection and statement of the facts by the former; (2) their restatement and arrangement of the latter; and (3) the revision of this arrangement by the former. It is this third process that is often omitted even in serious cyclopedic work, and the result is inaccuracy. Often, however, there is no cooperation at all; the writer picks up his facts from what he considers reliable sources, puts them into eminently readable shape, dwelling on what seem to him striking features, heightening contrasts here and slurring over distinctions or transitions there. This process produces what scientific men call contemptuously “newspaper science,” and we have as well newspaper history, newspaper sociology and so on. They fill the pages not only of our daily press, but of our monthly magazines and of too many of the books that stand on our library shelves. It is unfair to blame the newspapers alone for their existence; in fact, some of the best simple presentations of valuable information that we have appear in the daily press. Then there are the text books. Any librarian who has ever tried to select a few of the best of one kind—say elementary arithmetics—to place on his shelves, knows that their name is legion and that differences between them are largely confined to compilers’ names and publishers’ imprints. In part they are subject to the same sources of error as the popularized works and in addition to the temptation to hasty, scamped or stolen work due to some publisher’s or teacher’s cupidity. This catalog might be extended indefinitely, but even now we begin to see the possibilities of rejection on the ground of falsity and inaccuracy. I believe that the chief menace to the usefulness of the public libraries lies, not as some believe in the reading of frankly fictitious narrative, but in the use of false or misleading history, biography, science and art. Not the crude or inartistic printing of toy money, but the counterfeiting of real money, is a menace to the circulating medium.
Against such debasement of the sterling coin of literature it is the duty of the librarian to fight; and he cannot do it single-handed. Some things he should and does know; he is able to tell whether the subject matter is presented in such a way as to be of value to his readers; he can tell whether the simple and better known facts of history and science are correctly stated; he is often an authority in one or more subjects in which he is competent to advise as an expert; but only the ideal paragon, sometimes described but never yet incarnated, can qualify simultaneously as an expert in all branches of science, philosophy, art and literature. The librarian must have expert advisers.
Nor are these so difficult to obtain. The men who know are the very ones that are interested in the library’s welfare and are likely to help it without compensation. And in the smaller places where the variety and extent of special knowledge is less comprehensive the ground covered by the library’s collection is also less, and the advice that it needs is simpler. The advice should if possible be personal and definite. No amount of lists, I care not who prepares or annotates them, can take the place of the friend at one’s elbow who is able and willing to give aid just when and exactly where it is needed. As well might the world’s rulers dismiss all their cabinet ministers and govern from textbooks on law and ethics. The formula, the treatise, the bibliography—we must still have all these, but they must be supplemented by personal advice. And competent advisers exist, as I have said, in almost every place. The local clergy on questions of religion, and often on others, too; the school principal on history and economics, the organist on music, the village doctor on science—some such men will always be found able and glad to give advice on these subjects or some others; and the place is small indeed that does not include one or two enthusiasts, collectors of insects or minerals or antiquities, who have made themselves little authorities on their pet hobbies and may possibly be the greatest or the only living authorities on those local phases that particularly interest the local librarian. It will do the librarian no harm to hunt these men out and ask their aid; possibly his own horizon will broaden a little with the task and his respect for the community in which he works will grow as he performs it.
But what if two of our doctors disagree? Then follow the advice of both. It might be disastrous for a patient to take two kinds of medicine, but it can never hurt a library to contain books on both sides of a question, whether it be one of historical fact, of religious dogma, or of scientific theory. This may not be pressed too far; the following of one side may be beneath our notice. It is not absolutely necessary, for instance, for a small popular circulating library to contain works in advocacy of the flatness of the earth or of the tenets of the angel dancers of Hackensack; but it is essential that such a library should make accessible to its readers the facts of the Reformation as stated by both Catholic and Protestant writers, histories of the American Civil War written from both the southern and northern standpoints, geological works both asserting and denying the existence of a molten core in the earth’s interior. An impartial book is hard to find; it is a thing of value, but I am not sure that two partisan books, one on each side, with the reader as judge, do not constitute a winning combination. Against violent and personal polemics, of course, the librarian must set his face. All such are candidates for rejection. It is fortunate for us in this regard that we are supplying the needs of all creeds, all classes and all schools. Each must and should have its own literature while each protests against violent attacks on its own tenets. Such protests, while often unjustified, are helping us to weed out our collections.
So much for deficiency in truth as a cause for rejection. Now let us consider deficiency in goodness and deficiency in beauty; or stated positively, badness and ugliness. These two things are confounded by many of us. Is this because the great majority of librarians to-day are of the sex that judges largely by intuition and often by instinctive notions of beauty and fitness? To most women, I believe all ugliness is sinful, and all sin is ugly. Now sin is morally ugly, without doubt, but it may not be esthetically so. And goodness may be esthetically repulsive. Badness and ugliness in books are both adequate grounds for rejection, but they need not coexist. Some of the worst books are artistically praiseworthy and would be well worth a place of honor on our shelves if their beauty alone were to move us. On the other hand, some books that are full of impropriety or even of indecency are absolutely unimpeachable from a moral standpoint.
Shakespeare and the Bible are often indecent without being in the least immoral. “Raffles” is in no wise indecent, but is dangerously immoral. Bernard Shaw is often both indecent and immoral while at the same time so astoundingly clever that we stand gaping at him with our mouths wide open while he tosses down our throats the most unsavory things.
What, then, is the distinction between badness and ugliness? For our present purpose I believe it to be this: badness depends on immutable laws, while ugliness, at any rate that of the kind which concerns us here, is a matter of convention. Virtue, with all due apologies to Mr. Lecky and to many other eminent scholars, has certain standards that do not vary with place or time. Let us grant that a given act may be good to-day and bad to-morrow, good in Tasmania and bad in Pennsylvania; this is beside the question. We have here to do with the classification of this particular act in certain fixed categories that of themselves remain bad or good. The act of cutting off a man’s head may be good if the cutter is the public executioner, and bad if he be a private citizen; one may shoot an attacking highwayman but not an innocent friend. The reason for these differences, however, is that in one case the killing is murder while in the other it is not; murder itself always was and always will be bad.
Impropriety or indecency, on the other hand, is purely arbitrary. Personally I am inclined to think this true of all beauty, but it is unnecessary to obtrude this view here. Impropriety is a violation of certain social customs, and although I should be the last to question the observance of those customs, we must grant, I think, that they rest on foundations quite other than those of right and wrong. In fact decency, instead of being on the same plane with morality, comes nearer to being properly ranked with those fixed categories mentioned above, which are themselves always good or bad, but which may or may not include a given act, according to circumstances. Murder is always bad, but whether the taking of life is or is not murder depends on the circumstances; it may depend entirely on motive. So indecency is always bad, but whether a given act or object is or is not indecent depends on circumstances; it may depend not only on motive but on locality or environment. Objects and acts of the highest sanctity in one country may be regarded as low and vulgar in another—the standard varies from class to class, from one occupation to another; almost from family to family. One may mention, in all innocence, that which may bring a blush to the cheek of some listener, simply because of this instability of standard in the matter of impropriety. To this class of things particularly refers the celebrated dictum: “There is no thing in heaven or earth, Horatio, but thinking makes it so.” This is unexceptionable Christian Science, but it is not quite true. A higher authority than Shakespeare has asserted that by thinking one cannot make a single hair white or black; and this surely accords with the results of experience. Likewise no one by thinking can make badness goodness or the reverse. But whether a thing be improper or not depends entirely on thinking. Thinking makes it so. It is improper for a Mohammedan woman to expose her face in public because she thinks it is, and because that thought is an ingrained part of her existence. But although the Persian sect of Assassins thought with all their hearts that murder was good, it was still very evil. Are we getting too far away from the censorship of books? I think not. See the bearing of all this.
If a book is really bad—if it teaches that evil is good or that it makes no difference—it ought to be rejected uncompromisingly, despite the fact that it is void of impropriety or even artistically admirable. But if it is morally unobjectionable and yet contains that which is improper or indecent, it is then proper to inquire whether the degree and kind of this indecency is such as to condemn it, particularly taking into account the condition, the intelligence and the age of those who would be likely to read it, and also the time and the readers for whom, if it is an old book, its author originally wrote it. With increasing civilization there are certain things that become more and more indecent, and others that become less and less so, owing to the shifting of points of view.
Let us now take up more specifically moral badness as a cause for rejection. We occasionally meet people who hold that the mention of anything morally bad in a book condemns it; while, on the other hand, some would admit books whose atmosphere reeks with evil; whose bad characters live bad lives and speak bad thoughts, so long as the writer in his own person does not commend evil or teach that it is good. Both these extremes are to be avoided. Surely we have outlived the idea that innocence and ignorance are the same thing. “You can’t touch pitch,” says the proverb, “and not be defiled.” Granted; yet we may look at pitch, or any other dirt, and locate it, without harm; nay, we must do so if we want to keep out of it. This is not saying that it is well to seek out descriptions of evil, or to dwell on them, in a work of fiction. Things necessary in the study of medicine, folk-lore or law may be abhorrent in a narrative intended for amusement, although the advent of the “problem” novel—the type of fiction in which the narrative form is often merely the sugar coating for the pill—introduces confusion here into any rule that we may lay down. But however foolish it is to insist that the very existence of evil be concealed from readers of fiction, since evil is a normal constituent of the world as we find it, it is certainly fair to object to a dwelling upon evil phases of life to such an extent that the resulting impression is a distortion of the truth. This distortion may be so great as to make it proper to reject the book wholly on the ground of falsity. A filling of the canvas with lurid tints is apt to convey—or at any rate is often so done as to convey—the idea that the existence of the evil that the writer depicts is a matter of indifference. A man need not stop to assert his belief that theft is wrong whenever he tells the story of a robbery, but it is quite possible to tell a tale of theft in such a way as to leave an impression that it is a venial offense and to weaken in the reader the moral inhibition that must be his chief reliance in time of temptation. And for “theft” here we may substitute any form of moral dereliction that you may desire. One of the most potent vehicles of moral downfall of any kind is the impression that “everybody does it”—that some particular form of wrongdoing is well-nigh universal and is looked upon with leniency by society in general. The man who steals from his employer or who elopes with his neighbor’s wife is nine times out of ten a willing convert to this view. A book that conveys such an idea is really more dangerous than one which openly advocates wrong doing. There can be little difference of opinion here. There may be more in regard to the policy of telling the whole truth regarding a state of things that is morally very bad. It may be fatal to a patient to let him know how ill he is. And may it not also be injurious to a young man or a young woman to expose the amount of evil that really lies before them in this world? There is plausibility in this argument, but it is out of date. There is much philosophy in the modern paradoxical slang phrase: “Cheer up! the worst is yet to come!” And indeed if there is any superlative badness ahead of us, it is better that we should know it, rather than cultivate a false cheerfulness, based on misinformation, with the certainty of disillusionment. The Egyptians were right when they set a skeleton at their feasts. It was not to make the feasts gloomy, but to make the skeleton a familiar object by association; to accustom the feasters to think about death, how to avoid it as long as possible and how to meet it when inevitable. We should therefore welcome the truth in any book, unless it is that “half truth,” which the poet tells us is “ever the blackest of lies,” or unless it is so stated as to violate the canons of decency, in which case, as we have already seen, its rejection must be based on different considerations entirely.
It is these canons of decency, after all, that give the librarian his sleepless nights, not only because they are so frequently confounded with canons of morality, but because, as we have already seen, they are arbitrary and variable. Consider the one case of French fiction. Mr. Wister has told librarians that all subjects are “fit for fiction.” This is interesting as an academic thesis, but when the French proceed to act upon it, the Anglo-Saxon catches his breath. Books, like men, when they are in Rome must do as the Romans do, and whatever may be proper in Paris, an American public library is justified in requiring its books to respect American prejudices. This is true, at any rate, of books in the English language, even if they are translations from a tongue whose users have other customs and other prejudices. But how about these books in the original? Can we assume that books in the French language are for Frenchmen and that our censorship of them is to be from the French and not the American point of view? Or shall we hold that they are to be read wholly or in part by persons whose mother-tongue is English and whose ideas of the proprieties are Anglo-Saxon? And shall we bear in mind also that the reading public of a work of French fiction excludes in France the “young person” of whom the American library public is largely made up? This is only one of the perplexing questions that confront the American librarian in this field. Every one must struggle with it for himself, having in mind the force and direction of his own local sentiment; but few public libraries are treating it consistently and systematically. Probably, however, many librarians are placing on open shelves books in foreign languages, whose translations into English they would be inclined to restrict. In some cases, of course, appeal to a wholly foreign group of readers, with their foreign point of view, may be assumed, as in the case of a Russian collection on the East Side of New York; though even here it is a question of whether this is not a good place to prepare these readers for a change in library “folkways”—to use Professor Sumner’s expressive word.
Nor must we forget that our own ideas of propriety are constantly changing. Take the single instance of the use, in literature, of words regarded as profane or vulgar. Most of us can recollect a time when our acquaintances were likely to be shocked by the occurrence in a book of the expletive “damn”—that is, if it were spelled out. It was generally held to be unobjectionable, or at least less objectionable, if the second and third letters were replaced by a dash. Evidently this is the purest convention. This and worse words appear now, not without shocking some persons, to be sure, but certainly without shocking many of those who formerly would not have tolerated them. On the other hand, it would not be difficult to instance words formerly common in good literature whose use would now cause something of a sensation. There are also good people who will read unmoved surprising words and expressions when put into the mouth of a cowboy or a Klondike miner, but whose gorge would rise if the same words were employed by a writer in propria persona.
What is true of words is true also of subjects. That which could not be touched upon yesterday is discussed freely to-day, and vice-versa. No way of dealing with the situation will fail to offend some one, and the only approximation to satisfaction will be gained by the use of common sense applied to each case as it comes up.
Indecency, of course, is not the only offense against beauty that a book may commit. It may be trashy, that is, its subject matter or the manner in which it is treated may be trivial and worthless. The dust of the street is neither beautiful nor valuable, although it may contain nothing injurious to health or repulsive to the senses. The diction of the book may offend against beauty and order by its incorrectness; its paper, its typography, its binding, its illustrations may all be offensive to the eye. These last are mere matters of outward show, to be sure; it may be necessary to disregard them. They are usually reasons for excluding an edition rather than a book, though sometimes the only obtainable edition offends in so many of these ways as to make it unpurchasable, even if otherwise desirable. So far as they militate against the usefulness of the book rather than its beauty, as in the case of the badly sewed binding or paper that is comely but flimsy, they fall under the head of badness rather than that of ugliness—they are offenses against the Good and not against the Beautiful. Such material grounds for rejection, however, are not peculiar to books, and I do not dwell on them here. Ugliness that consists in mere triviality or in incorrectness of diction has this in common with impropriety—it is arbitrary and conventional. With regard to language, this is obvious. The fact that a certain combination of sounds means one thing in France and another in England and is quite unintelligible perhaps in Spain, is a matter of pure convention, though the convention is sanctioned by long usage. The fact that the double negative is very good Greek and very vulgar English is equally arbitrary. These conventions have become serious things with us; they are of prime importance in the consideration of books, but it is desirable that we should classify them correctly.
With regard to triviality the case is not so clear, yet I feel strongly that it is a relative, not an absolute, quality. The term should be classed with that other misused word—superficiality. No book, of course, and no mind is absolutely thorough, and the lesser grades of knowledge are as important in their place as the higher. What we should condemn is not that a man, or a book, possesses a certain slight degree of knowledge or of ability, but the fact that, possessing it, he believes or represents it to be a higher degree. A man desires, we will say, to memorize the Russian alphabet, so that he may read the proper names on book titles. Is he to be condemned because he knows no more of Russian? Another wishes to wield a hammer dextrously enough to drive a nail without smashing his fingers. Is he “superficial” because he is not an expert cabinet-maker? Still another has learned to play the piano well enough to amuse himself in his idle hours. Does his lack of skill lay him open to the charge of “superficiality?” These people may, it is true, think that they are respectively a Russian scholar, a skilled carpenter, and a good pianist; then and then only are they culpable. The “superficiality,” in other words, consists in mistaking a lesser degree of knowledge for a higher or in thinking that the lesser degree suffices for something that requires the higher—not in the mere limitation of the possessor. A superficial book is that which, skimming the surface of the subject, persuades the reader that he has gone into its depths; as for the skimming itself, that might be quite adequate and sufficient for some purposes. So with “triviality.” Nothing is trivial that has an aim and accomplishes it; as for the gradation of aims from unimportant up to important, I leave that to others. Who shall say whether the passing of an idle hour or the addition of a few facts to one’s store of knowledge is the more important? The idle hour may be the recreation period of a hard-working mind, without which it might break down from over-pressure, leaving to less competent minds the completion of its useful labor. The few facts might be quite unfruitful. This is why we should hesitate to condemn a trivial book that has beauty of form or some other positive virtue to commend it. Triviality is objectionable only when it masquerades as importance. Perhaps it would be better to say: a book that pretends to excellence along any line where it is really valueless is a dangerous book. This brings us back to Truth as a criterion of excellence, for such a book is a hypocritical or false book, as much as if it definitely asserted as a fact that which is untrue.
When a book, therefore, comes up as a candidate for omission from the purchasing list, or perhaps for exclusion after it has actually been placed on the shelves, the librarian’s first duty is to inquire whether it is objectionable because of falsity, of evil morality or of impropriety. The first question may be determinable only by reference to an expert. If the second is alleged, it is well to inquire whether the supposed immorality of the book be not in fact simply impropriety, and if impropriety is the only objection, whether it is of kind and amount likely to be properly offensive. If the charge of immorality is sustained I see no place for the book on the shelves of a public circulating library.
What has been said may seem to need rounding out with specific illustrations and instances, but it is particularly desirable to avoid here anything in the nature of purely personal opinion and prejudice. It might be possible of course to define the content of certain well-known works by their conformity or non-conformity with the canons above laid down, without attempting to settle the question, at the moment, whether the degree of non-conformity, if it exists, is high enough to make exclusion from a public library desirable or necessary. From this point of view Othello, we will say, is a play teaching a moral lesson, in doing which it discusses sin, but never with approval, expressed or implied. The author uses words and expressions not in accordance with modern standards of propriety, although not contrary to those of his own time. In like manner Boccacio’s “Decameron” may be characterized as a collection of short stories connected by thin narrative, often telling of wrongdoing in a manner clearly implying that it is usual and unobjectionable, with use of words and incidents frequently contrary not only to modern ideas of propriety, but also to those of the author’s time, except in the dissolute circles for which the tales were originally written. Some of the stories, however, teach morality, and the literary style and method are beautiful and commendable, while the pictures of society are truthful. The implications of customary vice are simply reflections of life as the author knew it. “Gil Blas,” by Le Sage, continuing in this vein, we may call a tale of adventure in which everything is set down as it happens, good, bad and indifferent; important and trivial, with a hero who is somewhat of a rogue, although the wickedness is incidental and is described in such a way that the reader never mistakes it for virtue even when the writer tells it with a relish. The implication that wrongdoing is common, though undoubtedly conveyed, leaves the impression only that it is common among the people and under the circumstances of the tale, which is undoubtedly correct.
It would greatly aid the library censor if he could have annotations of this sort on all books intended for promiscuous public circulation. For this purpose, in fact, all literature should be evaluated by the light of this one color of the critical spectrum. The two or three books just noted possess at least some of the elements of greatness; yet good people differ regarding the extent to which they should be made freely accessible to the general public. I have tried to set down regarding them data on which all may agree, for the purpose of impressing upon you the fact that disagreement is not so much regarding the data as regarding the application to them of principles which, if they have been stated correctly, are few, simple and readily accepted.
We have been lightly skimming the surface of a subject vital to all who have to do with the production and distribution of books—to authors, editors, publishers, booksellers, and above all to us librarians. The ranks of readers are swelling to-day; it is our boast that we are doing our best to swell them. They are recruited from classes whose literature—if we may so extend the term—has been oral rather than written, whose standards of propriety are sometimes those of an earlier and grosser age, whose ideas of right and wrong are beclouded by ignorance and distorted by prejudice. And at the same time hosts of our people, with little background of hereditary refinement to steady them, have become suddenly rich, “beyond the dreams of avarice.” The shock has upset their ideas and their standards. Riches have come so suddenly and so vastly even to the educated, to those whose culture dates back for generations, that it has overturned their ideals also. Our literature is menaced both from below and from above. Books that distinctly commend what is wrong, that teach how to sin and tell how pleasant sin is, sometimes with and sometimes without the added sauce of impropriety, are increasingly popular, tempting the author to imitate them, the publishers to produce, the booksellers to exploit. Thank heaven they do not tempt the librarian. Here at last is a purveyor of books who has no interest in distributing what is not clean, honest, and true. The librarian may, if he will—and he does—say to this menacing tide, “Thus far shalt thou go and no farther.”
If a man is to improve himself, he must first realize his own deficiencies; in other words, he must know what he ought to be, and how and in what degree he falls short of it.
First, then, what are the best books; and do we get them?
“Best” here as always is a relative term; what is best for one may not be best for another, or for all. We hear “good books” gravely recommended to people who will not read them, and who could not extract the good from them if they did read them. When the book fits the man, provided he is a good man, it is a good book, ipso facto.
You remember the tale of the rural parish priest at dinner with his bishop. The host, desiring to poke a little quiet fun, asked him whether it were lawful to baptize a man in soup. “I should make a distinction,” calmly answered the priest; “if it were good thick soup, I should say not; if it were wishy-washy stuff like this we are eating, it would be quite proper.”
So long as we do not realize that the same literary consistency is not adapted both to nutrition and to immersion we shall not be able to decide on what are the best books.
But is there no general line of division between bad and good books?
I can give but a few, but I venture to lay down one or two simple rules for testing. My tests would be—
(1) The test of language. No book can be good that is not written in correct English. By this I mean, of course, that the author himself must speak correctly; his characters may be ignorant persons and he will naturally make them talk accordingly.
(2) The test of simplicity and clearness. No book can be good whose author expresses himself in words that are too large for his subject or in sentences that are so involved that they cannot be easily understood.
(3) The best of good taste. No book can be good whose author uses words or expressions that would not be used by cultivated people.
(4) The test of truth. No book can be good whose subject matter is false; or, in case of fiction, whose manner of telling is such as to make it seem absurdly improbable. The plot of the book may, it is true, lack probability. It may be frankly improbable like a fairy tale, but the author must not seem to lose faith in it himself, and no matter how impossible his foundation the structure that he builds on it must hold together.
I venture to say that if a book survives these tests—if it is simply and clearly expressed in good English and in the best taste and is consistently put together—it cannot be a bad book so far as style goes.
So far as the subject matter of the book is concerned, my test would be simply that of its effect on the reader. If a book makes the reader want to be mischievous, foolish or criminal—to be a silly or bad man or woman, or if it tends to make him do his daily work badly, it is a bad book and all the worse in this case if it is interesting and fascinating in style. But even here the trouble is largely in the manner of treatment. A book may tell of crime and criminals in such a way as to make the reader detest both or feel an attraction toward both. In this case, as the scripture says, “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” If a book sends a boy out to be a burglar, it is bad; if it impels him to take a crying child by the hand and lead it home, it is good. And here let me say that this compelling power, this effective result of a book should speak in its favor though all other tests be against it. Musicians tell us that a great composer may write a work that breaks every rule of harmony and yet be a work of genius. Genius knows no rules.
So much for the general line of cleavage. But the special may for the moment exclude all the claims of the general. A community may be in crying need of books on a given subject—pottery or rowboats or hygiene. This need may or may not be realized by the community, but its existence makes a special class of books the best, for the moment, for that community. To buy a good collection of minor poets for a town that clamors, or ought to clamor, for books on the electric industries, is to get bad books.
Now do we, under our present system, or lack of system, in selection, get these best books—best both in the general and in the special sense?
What is the matter with the books in the average small library? The trouble is not generally that the books are bad, but that they might easily be better, and by “better” it must be borne in mind that I mean more closely adapted to the legitimate needs of the community. If we go over the shelves of the average small library we shall generally be able to note the following facts:
(1) A considerable portion of the books have not been taken out in long periods. This can easily be ascertained by examining the book-cards or dating-slips. Of course, the non-use of a book does not mean that it should not be in the library. The fault may be with the readers, not with the book. Non-use, however, does mean that something is the matter. Either the library public has had taste or is not properly guided, or else a mistake was made in providing it with this particular book.
(2) A considerable number of standard books whose reading should be encouraged will not be found on the shelves. These books are almost always part of the collection, but there are not enough duplicates to supply the demand. At the same time it will be found that the library is adding current books of doubtful value.
(3) Books on large local industries—shoemaking, pottery, agriculture—are often lacking. In such cases there is generally a lack of demand; but this is because the persons who would read such books have learned by experience not to look for them in a public library.
(4) Books in the languages spoken by industrial colonies of foreigners in the neighborhood are usually conspicuous by their absence.
(5) The collections in classes where some technical knowledge is necessary for selection, such, for instance, as the sciences, the arts, or history, often show a lack of intelligence, or, at any rate, a lack of system. There are badly written books and books full of errors; there is lack of uniformity in grade—an advanced mathematical work on electricity, for instance, and very elementary ones on light and sound.
(6) In particular, controverted subjects are represented in a one-sided way; there may be no way for a reader to get at the Catholic story of the Protestant reformation, or the southern view of the civil war, or both sides of the spelling reform or the woman-suffrage movements. Socialism, vivisection, anti-vaccination, the negro question, prohibition, the tariff—all these and a hundred others are represented only in a partisan sense.
(7) There is too much care about the outward garb of decency and too little about the pervading atmosphere of morality. Books that describe in decorous language ingenious methods of shop-lifting are given place, but you look in vain for works of lofty moral tone couched in diction that is occasionally coarse.
How far are these faults due to methods of book selection? One of the troubles seems to be that the book-selecting body does not avail itself of expert advice as much as it ought. The librarian is learning, to be sure, to use lists and printed aids more and more, though they are rarely used with discrimination; but supplementary to such lists as these, especially since they so largely lack the personal element, we need the personal advice of experts. If the lists and reviews will leave us in the dark about the man who advises us to buy books on engineering or art, we must go to someone who we know understands these subjects, at least knows a little more of them than we do ourselves. There are, in general, two grades of expert advice. The first is that received from the man who is personally familiar with the current literature of his specialty, who watches the books as they appear and who sends to the library the titles that he thinks it ought to have. This grade of expert service is very difficult to obtain. I have found few men in my experience who are able and willing to give it. Those who have the good-will and the time have usually not the knowledge; those who have the knowledge are busy men who cannot give the time.
The second grade of expert aid is that which pronounces on concrete cases, which decides whether a given book (either from inspection of the mere title or of the volume itself) is suitable for the library. This kind of aid is not difficult to obtain, and there are persons in almost every place qualified in some degree to give it. It requires, however, a preliminary selection and generally the obtaining of books on approval, which is easier in a large place than a small one.
The library is only one of various institutions that must use expert aid of this kind. The same limitations apply to all. Take, for instance, the work of reference, the cyclopedia, we will say. Its editor cannot write of his own knowledge the articles on Venezuela, and open-hearth steel, and Plato. He must rely on the information, direct or secondhand, of experts. But he cannot allow his experts to write his cyclopedia. Some cyclopedias are written very nearly in that way, and they are not the best. The expert must be coached before he does his work and the work must be edited when finished. It is on the proper combination of expert and editorial work that the value of the finished volumes will depend. So it is with library selection. The librarian is the editor of a big cyclopedia of thousands of volumes. He must have expert aid in selection, but he must not allow his experts to select the library uncontrolled. They must be instructed beforehand, and their advice must be carefully considered after it has been given. It must, in short, be edited. This brings us to the consideration that we have ultimately to face in discussing any phase of human activity—the question of personality. If the librarian and the book committee are incompetent and believe themselves to be competent—then the collection, in spite of all efforts, will reflect their faults—it will be intolerant, or trivial or ill-balanced.
Much, therefore, depends upon the actual book selector for the library. Should this be the librarian, or a committee of the trustees, or the board itself, or an advisory committee of outsiders? Probably the best results are obtained through a preliminary selection made by the librarian with the aid of lists and the advice of individual experts—not committees—as suggested above, and then submitted to some person or committee representing the Board of trustees. This places the final responsibility where it belongs—on the trustees; but with a satisfactory librarian, the duties of the reviewing committee would consist chiefly of deciding on matters of policy—rarely of considering individual titles. It would decide, for instance, on how closely fiction is to be censored, on how far the library is to go in the purchase of recent fiction, on the extent to which foreign languages are to be recognized, on the purchase and duplication of text-books, on the policy of the library with regard to denominational religious works or of controversial books generally—and so on.
Going back for a moment to the question of experts, probably the most difficult advice to procure, with any degree of satisfaction, is regarding fiction, whether in English or in foreign languages. It has been said that one may approve a book simply on the author’s name, or even on that of the publisher, and this is still true in isolated cases, but in these days, when both author and publisher are continually trying experiments, continually varying standards and style, each book must be dealt with individually. I do not see how one can decide whether a given novel should or should not be bought for a library without reading it through from cover to cover or hearing a report from someone who has so read it and who understands the wants and limitations of the American public library. This is a line, it seems to me, along which great improvement in our selection is possible; but I confess I do not see my way to an immediate solution of the problem. Possibly this is a good opportunity to say a word for a method of testing the adequacy of one’s collection which has scarcely been used as it deserves. One of the most difficult things for a librarian to ascertain is whether his collection is properly distributed among the different classes, and by this I mean, as before, distributed in accordance with the legitimate requirements of the community. It is not possible to find by a statistical method exactly what people need, but it is possible to find out what they want, as indicated by the kind of books that they read. The statistical record of this will be found in the class percentages of circulation. Whether or not the library is equipped to supply this need is indicated by the class percentages of books on the shelves. A comparison of these two percentage tables is always most interesting to the book selector. It does not enable him automatically to select books, but it does indicate points for fruitful investigation. To take some actual cases, I find a library with four per cent of history and six per cent of literature on the shelves, whereas the corresponding circulation percentages are five and seven. This is prima facie evidence that the collections in those two subjects are used rather more than the others and could well be increased. In cases where it is not desirable to encourage circulation in a given class, such an indication should evidently meet with no response. The circulation of fiction always runs far beyond its proportion, and it is neither proper nor desirable for the library to try to keep up. Thus in three libraries where the percentage of adult fiction on the shelves is 20, 19 and 17, respectively, I find the corresponding circulation percentages to be 34, 35 and 27. What, let us ask ourselves, are library statistics for? Is all the labor concerned in their collection and assemblage to result simply in a table that is to be glanced at for a moment with more or less interested curiosity, or do we intend to do something with them? It sometimes seems that the foreign reproach that we Americans care only for money, which we are properly disposed to resent, is partly justified by the fact that the only statistics that appear to mean anything to us are financial. When a man learns that he is living beyond his income or that he is getting a smaller per cent for his investments than his neighbor, or that the man at the desk next to him is receiving a larger salary for doing the same work, he does not sit still and say, “Ah! how interesting!” He gets up and does something about it. But statistics that convict him of all sorts of incompetency and foolishness along lines other than monetary ones, he regards simply as objects for intellectual absorption.
These percentages, of course, are not the only indications by which a librarian may adjust the proportions of the classes in his collection. If his library has the reserve system, for instance, the call for books in circulation is an unfailing index of the popular demand. If that demand is one that should be heeded, the number of copies in the library may well be proportionate to the number of names on the reserve list.
But a librarian who keeps in continual touch with the public by contact with users at the desk needs none of these somewhat mechanical indications. It is the inestimable privilege of the librarian of a small library in a small community to know her public, its wants, its needs, its abilities and its limitations in a way that is denied to custodians of huge collections.
In closing, let me suggest the following “Don’ts” for selectors of library books:
(1) Don’t buy books that are intellectually far above your readers, in the hope of improving their minds; a man may walk up stairs, but he can’t jump from the sidewalk to the roof.
(2) Don’t buy fine editions of books that need rather to be extensively duplicated; better two good souls than one fine body.
(3) Don’t buy McGrath and McCutcheon when you have reserves on file for Dickens and George Eliot.
(4) Don’t buy biography in excess because you are fond of it yourself, when a comparison of percentages shows that your supply of travel or applied science is not up to the demand.
(5) Don’t buy books in flimsy bindings that will give out after the first issue; work should not be done in gauzy garments.
(6) Don’t buy books in very strong bindings when their use is to be light and small; overalls are not suitable for an afternoon tea.
(7) Don’t buy “sets” and “libraries;” they are adulterated literature, coffee mixed with chicory.
(8) Don’t buy subscription books of an agent at a personal interview; it is the agent’s game not to let you think; stand up for your rights and think it over.
(9) Don’t estimate public demand by its effect on your own patience; one persistent old gentleman often bulks larger than a crowd of quiet but deserving persons without either push or pull.
(10) Don’t buy books of which you are not in immediate need, when you are morally certain that copies in good condition will be thrown on the markets as remainders at one-quarter the original list price.
(11) Don’t buy costly “new editions” of reference books without assuring yourself that the newness is more than nominal.
(12) Don’t buy novels because you see them advertised in the trolley cars.
(13) Lastly—and this is the most important thing of all—don’t get discouraged. Our methods of selecting books, and their results, doubtless need improvement, but so do those of all the other libraries we know. Let us try to realize our deficiencies, and then try to make this year’s book list just a little better than the last. If we can succeed in this, the standard will take care of itself.
It has been said by Mr. W.H. Mallock that what we call labor-organizations are mis-named, because their object is, in most cases, the organization not of labor, but of idleness. This somewhat cryptic statement may be understood to mean that trade unions have endeavored usually not to improve the methods and results of labor, nor to make its output larger and more satisfactory, but rather to improve the condition of the laboring man; to make his life more comfortable and his task easier, to shorten hours and lessen output, and often, as a result, to make that output of lower grade.
This will be regarded as a base slander by many people, and it is doubtless exaggerated; yet there is an amount of truth in it that cannot be overlooked by any worker or any combinations of workers—which is the same as saying that it interests almost all of us in this country; for the only Americans able to work who do not work are tramps and a very few millionaires. We shall try to consider its bearing on library workers, but before doing so, it will be well to look at it a little longer in its more general aspect.
Those who desire to improve the worker’s condition will justify themselves very properly on economic grounds by saying that to do this is also to improve the methods of work and the quality of the product. No one can do good work who is ill-housed, underfed, improperly clothed or overworked. This is true; but it is not also true that if we make it our primary aim to see that the worker is as comfortable as possible, to lift from him all the difficulties and burdens of his task, we shall also improve his output proportionally. Rather should we do away with that output altogether. We should simply be “organizing idleness.” We may consider, as an analogy, the difference between a tariff for revenue and one for protection. The total abolition of import duties is impossible, we are told. They are necessary for revenue. Even England, the world’s greatest free-trade country, has import duties. Very true, but the amount of the duty and the objects on which it is laid will differ absolutely according to its purpose. Again, we will suppose that the same company owns an elevated railway and a surface trolley line. They will naturally, if left to themselves, adjust fares, speed and stops on the former so as to induce a larger proportion of people to travel by the slower surface line, which is less expensive to operate. If the surface line were owned by a rival company, there would be an entirely different schedule of fares, speed and stops on the elevated road, intended to crowd it with passengers and to derive the largest possible revenue from it alone.
In like manner, we must doubtless look out for the worker; and he must doubtless look out for himself. His conditions of life and work must be made such that he will perform his task as well as possible. But those conditions will be adjusted quite differently if we regard the comfort of the worker as the prime object from what they will be if we regard the excellence of the output as the prime object and the worker’s comfort as a means to that end.
This will bear statement in still another way. We are put into this world to do our appointed tasks, and it is our business to do them as well as we possibly can. This means that we must take the proper amount of rest, eat good food, keep happy and contented, and all the rest of it. But he who regards his work simply as a means of furnishing him the wherewithal to be happy, to take expensive vacations, live in a fine house, and so on, will neither do his best work, nor will he enjoy the good things of life as he ought.
Our friends, the Socialists, whose propaganda is receiving more attention from thoughtful men to-day than it did a few years ago, both because of the truths that it presents and the menace that it offers to our present civilization, are making the mistake of dwelling upon the importance of the worker’s comfort rather than that of the worker’s improvement. They promise us that we shall all be in comfortable circumstances and will have to work only three hours a day. Incidentally, the output is to be better. But by putting the matter thus, instead of the other way about, they have appealed to the element of laziness that exists in all men—they have held out the prospect of idleness instead of labor.
I have not lived west of the Mississippi long enough to know whether the same conditions obtain here as in the East; but there, comparing things to-day with what I remember of my boyhood, I seem to see an increasing tendency among all workers to put self first and work second. The policy of “ca’ canny,” as they call it in Scotland—of “go easy”—doing as little as one can and still keep his job—is creeping in and has secured a firm foothold. It is increasingly difficult to get any kind of work, manual or mental, done really well—so well that one feels like saying, “Well done, thou faithful servant.” And yet the shirkers are all anxious to get to the top; and they wonder why they do not. They comfort themselves by saying that success nowadays is solely a matter of pull. But it is not so. Look around you and you will see, for the most part, men in charge of large enterprises who are efficient, and who have put work before self—men who are engrossed in what they are doing, who love it and therefore do it effectively.
There never was a baser slander than the common assertion that we Americans love money. If we loved the dollar for itself alone, we should never sling it about as we do. We love the excitement and the fun of making money. Look at our working millionaires! They want no more money; they can not use what they have. They enjoy the task of owning and running a great railway system, of organizing and managing some great industrial combination. We may find it necessary to clip their wings a little, but we can not call them lazy and inefficient—they make the job too hard for us. There is no “go easy” policy here, and those who favor it will never get to the top.
Let us hope that this pernicious idea that self is worth more than work will never find a foothold in the library. We see it here and there, but I believe that, taken by and large, library workers love their tasks and that they are efficient in proportion to that love.
As our libraries are growing larger, our organizations more complex, it is, I know, growing harder to take a live personal interest in the work, so much of it is specialized routine; one feels like a mere cogwheel in a great machine. The assistant who pastes labels or addresses postal cards in a big library, finds it harder to realize that she is doing something interesting and useful than the librarian of a small library who not only performs these tasks but all the others—meets her public, selects and buys her books, plans in one way and another for the extension and betterment of her work. Yet the rapid, accurate and efficient performance of the lesser task is as important as that of the greater. A label pasted awry may ruin the library’s reputation in the eye of a casual user; a mis-sent card may cause trouble to dozens of one’s fellow assistants. Routine work is dull only when one does not understand its purport. Dullness is in the worker, not in the work.
Are libraries, indeed, introducing too much organization into the work—is it becoming too machine-like? Now, it should not be forgotten that there is in a machine something akin to personality—individuality, at any rate, is not too strong a word. Every locomotive has tricks and characteristics that its engineer knows and sometimes loves. He pats its back affectionately and speaks of it as “she.” The idea that to be part of a machine excludes personality and individual work is all wrong. One can not go careering about eccentrically and unsystematically; the very purpose of organization is to stop all that; but within the limits of motion and action assigned to a person as his part in the larger motion and action of the machine, there is still room for moving well or ill, for helping on the greater work or antagonizing it and throwing it out of order. If a cog-wheel thinks that it is manifesting its originality in some meritorious way by making the whole machine creak and wobble and turn out an inferior product, that cog-wheel has power to do just this; but it should not complain if the machinist throws it into the scrap heap.
Now, in the library, the parts of our machine are workers of all kinds; their connection and relationship are conditioned and limited by customs, rules and orders. To test the desirability of these or of any change in them there is just one question to be asked; first, last and all the time, namely—is this for ourselves or for our work? Is it merely to make things easier for the assistants or will it improve the work and benefit the public?
The asking of this question and its thoughtful consideration will puncture many a bubble. We will take, if you please, the question of vacations. Any one who has tried to make out a vacation schedule in a large library knows that, next to making out a recitation schedule in a large school or college, it is the most vexatious task of the kind that is given to man to do. Everyone must have a vacation, and everyone wants to have it at some time when the efficiency of the library will be impaired by it. Everyone wants to go away at once, and there are times when no one wants to be absent. Any possible arrangement means dissatisfaction, heartburnings, a feeling that favoritism or prejudice has been at work. Into the mind of most librarians has, I am sure, crept the suggestion: What is the use of all this? Why not close the library for a month? Is not that done by the schools: and are not we, too, an educational institution?
The fact that librarians do not yield, in this case, to the suggestion of a change that would benefit them and all their assistants, is, of course, due to the obviousness of the other fact that it would be bad for the public.
This test of the public advantage may be applied to the whole question of system in the library—of how much system is good, and what kind and how it shall be determined and applied. When a man comes in contact with a library rule that incommodes him personally, he is apt to deride it impatiently as “red tape.” When he finds absence of a rule where he would have benefited by it, he concludes that the library is in “chaos” or “confusion.” Now, there should evidently be neither one nor the other of these, although we cannot allow the personal convenience of a single user to be the test—our system should not exist for itself alone, nor should we try to get along without system altogether. There should be just so much and of just such a kind as will result in the maximum degree of service rendered to the public.
The individual user is quite wrong, of course, in condemning a regulation that annoys him personally, for this reason alone; but if we should find that it annoyed all other users as well without other advantage than the saving of some trouble to the library assistant, he would, I conceive, be quite right in calling it “red tape.” This term is applied primarily to annoying official restrictions that have no use whatever, but we may well extend it to restrictions that benefit the administrator without improving the administration. Rules, customs and manners of procedure in a library, whether they say “thou shalt” or “thou shalt not” are of two kinds—those addressed to the library staff and those addressed to the public. Both, however, are intended to enable the public to get more good out of the library. The members of the staff are told to do certain things and not to do others, because this will make it easier for the users of the library to get what they want. The latter in turn are bidden to do this and forbidden to do that—not, as some of them seem to think, to make the librarian’s work easier or to save him trouble—but to throw the library open wider to their fellows. System of this kind may bear very hard on the individual user; he may chafe, for instance, at any restriction in the number of books that he is allowed to borrow—but if no such restriction existed, the privileges of his fellow borrowers would be curtailed thereby. He may grumble because the time limit on his book has expired before he has finished reading it, unmindful of the fact that some of his fellow readers are anxiously waiting for it. But if the book in his possession is not wanted by anybody; if there are other such unused books in the library that he wants, should he not have and keep them? Assuredly. Every library should make arrangements whereby none of its books should be kept from use to stand idly on the shelves. Our test of public usefulness declares as decisively for this as it does for the partition of privilege in the case of more than one anxious borrower.
To return to that part of the library machine that affects the library staff, I have many times heard assistants complain of incidents of organization and systematization that seemed to them too much like those in vogue in commercial institutions. Now it may be freely admitted that there is a difference between the library and the store or the factory, or more generally between any institution for the public good and one for private gain. In the former the public advantage is the prime object, and to attain it we must often consult the comfort or convenience of the administrators. In the latter, the advantage of the administrators is the prime object, and to gain it they are generally forced to consult the comfort and convenience of the public. The primary and secondary elements are reversed, but they exist in each. Both the department store and the library must look out for the public. It is the library’s business to do so, and it is in the store’s business advantage to do the same.
It is hard to see, therefore, why any kind of system that will make a store work better is not worth looking into by a librarian. The systematization in the staff of an up-to-date, modern business organization, and in its work, is a continual surprise to him who has not looked into such things for a score of years. The stores and the factories are ahead of librarians in this respect, and we may as well admit it. After all, this is natural. What is to one’s business advantage is always done better than what is merely one’s business. But there is no reason why we should not study these better methods and imitate those that are worth copying.
Take one little example. In a factory the raw material is followed statistically from its purchase to its sale as a finished product; and even after its sale its performances are watched. The owner can find out, when he wants to do so, whether that particular article made or lost money for the firm, and how much, and why; whether it gave satisfaction to the purchaser, and if not, why not; to what its excellence or deficiencies were due, whether to the qualities of the raw material or the methods of manufacture. How many librarians can similarly ascertain whether the purchase of a given invoice of books was profitable to the library or not, taking into account the number and duration of their issues, the time lost and the money spent in mending and re-binding them, and so on? How many can tell you whether those books gave satisfaction to the users, in their bindery, typography, and paper; whether the reader found them hard on his eyes, easily soiled, difficult to hold open—and whose fault it was, the publisher’s, the binder’s or the mender’s? This, too, is merely the material and physical side of the question—all that the manufacturer or the merchant needs to consider. We librarians say we are on a loftier plane; we purvey ideas. So we do. How many of us then can say what was the mental and moral effect on our community of the books added last year, as compared with those added the year before? How many of us know even whether the readers liked the books of one year better than those of another? Again; the individual worker in a good factory, the travelling salesman in a good mercantile house, is watched statistically. His employers can tell just how profitable his work is to them. If the failure of an operation, or the loss of custom in a town, is due to him, they know it, and if his service continues unprofitable, he is replaced. How many librarians watch the work of individual members of the staff with such detail? Suppose at the end of six months’ service, an assistant were confronted with statistical evidence that she had mischarged ten books, made eight bad mistakes in accessioning, written twenty catalog cards that had to be replaced and caused four complaints by her bearing at the desk? Suppose she were thereupon given notice that she must do better or go; what would she say? I think I know. She would say that the library was run just like a department store. And she would be quite right; only, instead of being derogatory to the library as it would be intended, her remark would be a compliment. It is time that we should carefully discriminate between what is commercial, in commercial institutions, and what simply makes for orderliness and efficiency.
Now, we may consider three things, belonging to a given institution, that every employee of that institution has in his care. If they are properly conserved the institution will be efficiently administered, and the visible machinery for conserving them constitutes system. They are time, property and reputation. A large part of the system under which any institution is conducted has for its object the utilization of every bit of time. We Americans, with all our hustling are great wasters of time. Workers do nothing, not so much in periods of actually shirking or laziness as in getting started, in passing from one task to another, in fruitless pottering about, in endeavoring to decide some unimportant question of detail and in one or another of a thousand different ways when they seem to themselves to be at work, while they really are doing nothing useful. As for talking, it is the bane of many different kinds of work. I am inclined to think that all work should be done in silence. Possibly, however, this would be a mistake, for an occasional word keeps workers alive and in good humor where absolute silence is not necessary. It is, however, difficult to stop with a word. Words group themselves into phrases, phrases into sentences and sentences into conversation, and the workers who assert convincingly that they get on exactly as well while they are talking, succeed in cutting in half, not only their own sum total of useful achievement, but that of the annoyed toilers anywhere within earshot. System surely requires close conservation of valuable time; by promptness, by quickness, by keeping the cobwebs from one’s brain, and above all, by silence, relative if not absolute.
The property that the librarian is expected to conserve consists of books—the material in which he works and with which he is expected to produce his effects, and of money and objects—buildings, furniture and utensils—intended to aid him in handling the books properly and in getting them and the users together. The Philadelphia alderman who proposed to do away with the buildings, furniture and staff of the library altogether, spend the money for books, dump these on the city-hall floor, and let the public choose, may have been somewhat crude in his ideas; but he at least understood that books are the basis of a library and that librarians and buildings are but subsidiary. His attitude was vastly more intelligent than that of some persons who appear to think that a good librarian in a fine building ought to produce satisfactory results without any books at all. The librarian, then, must provide above all for the care and preservation of the books. If his library is on open shelves it must assure careful watch against thievery; it must insure, by an adequate charging system, the due return of borrowed volumes; it must see that the physical structure of the book is protected, and repaired when needful; it must watch and count the books at intervals to see that they are all on the shelves. This last means the taking of a regular and careful inventory—the bane of the average librarian. Yet how can he shirk it? Books are valuable property entrusted to his care. If he were custodian of money or funds he would not be let off year after year with the statement that the labor of ascertaining how much remained in his possession was greater than it was worth. One may omit to inventory his private collection, just as he may omit to count the money in his purse, if he chooses, not that of others. And if it is his duty to see that the quantity of his collection remains unimpaired, it is equally so to see to the quality. A library system that counts the books carefully, but esteems a torn and filthy volume as good a unit as one in proper condition, will no longer pass muster.