Stories of Invention, Told by Inventors and their Friends

BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1889.

Copyright, 1885 , By Roberts Brothers.
University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.

This little book closes a series of five volumes which I undertook some years since, in the wish to teach boys and girls how to use for themselves the treasures which they have close at hand in the Public Libraries now so generally opened in the Northern States of America. The librarians of these institutions are, without an exception, so far as I know, eager to introduce to the young the books at their command. From these gentlemen and ladies I have received many suggestions as the series went forward, and I could name many of them who could have edited or prepared such a series far more completely than I have done. But it is not fair to expect them, in the rush of daily duty, to stop and tell boys or girls what will be nice books for them to read. If they issue frequent bulletins of information in this direction, as is done so admirably by the librarians at Providence and at Hartford, they do more than any one has a right to ask them for. Such bulletins must be confined principally to helping young people read about the current events of the day. In that case it will only be indirectly that they send the young readers back into older literature, and make them acquainted with the best work of earlier times.
I remember well a legend of the old Public Library at Dorchester, which describes the messages sent to the hard-pressed librarian from the outlying parts of the town on the afternoon of Saturday, which was the only time when the Library was open.
Mother wants a sermon book and another book. This was the call almost regularly made by the messengers.
I think that many of the most accomplished librarians of to-day have demands not very dissimilar, and that they will be glad of any assistance that will give to either mother or messenger any hint as to what this other book shall be.
It is indeed, of course, almost the first thing to be asked that boys and girls shall learn to find out for themselves what they want, and to rummage in catalogues, indexes, and encyclopædias for the books which will best answer their necessities. Mr. Emerson's rule is, Read in the line of your genius. And the young man or maiden who can find out, in early life, what the line of his or her genius is, has every reason to be grateful to the teacher, or the event, or the book that has discovered it. I have certainly hoped, in reading and writing for this series, that there might be others of my young friends as sensible and as bright as Fergus and Fanchon, who will be found to work out their own salvation in these matters, and order their own books without troubling too much that nice Miss Panizzi or that omniscient Mrs. Bodley who manages the Library so well, and knows so well what every one in the town has read, and what he has not read.