Library Work with Children

by Alice Isabel Hazeltine

The years went on, with once in a while an encouraging report about a boy who had made experiments from works on chemistry or beguiled a fortnight's illness with Wordsworth's "Greece," or Guhl and Koner's "Life of the Greeks and Romans," or had gone on from Alger and Optic to Cooper, Lossing, Help's "Life of Columbus" and Barber's "History of New England." Both boys and girls were beginning to apologize for taking poor stories.

In one of our bulletins, January, 1881, is an acknowledgment of Christmas material received from the advance sheets of Poole's Index, then in preparation in the Watkinson Library, on the other side of the building. Imagine life in a library without it, you who have the Readers' Guide and all the debates and Granger's Index to Poetry and the Portrait Index! Nevertheless, we were not entirely without printed aids, for we had the Brooklyn catalog, the Providence bulletins, and the lists of children's books prepared by the Buffalo and Quincy libraries.

In 1882, at the request of Frederick Leypoldt, editor of the Publishers' Weekly, I compiled a list of "Books for the young," some of which are of permanent value. In a second edition, in 1884, I reprinted from our bulletin a list of English and American history for children, between twelve and fifteen, based on my own experience with boys and girls. I can laugh at it now, after years of meeting child-readers, seventy-five per cent of whom have no books at home, and can also find food for mirth in my belief that a list of books recommended for vacation reading in another bulletin would attract most boys and girls under sixteen.

One school, under a wise and far-seeing principal, who is now an authority on United States history and the author of several school books on the subject, had in 1884 an arrangement with us for a supply of historical stories for reading, and we printed a list of these and of other books on American history which would be interesting if read by or to the older pupils in the grammar grades.

Sets of fifty copies each of books for supplementary reading in school were bought by the library in 1894, and apportioned by the school principals at their monthly meetings. Several new sets were bought every year till 1905, when the collection numbered about three thousand, and was outgrowing the space that we could spare for it. The schools then provided a place for the school duplicates, and relieved the library of the care of them. Since 1899 the graded schools have received on request libraries of fifty books to a room, from the third grade to the ninth, to be kept until the summer vacation, when they are returned for repairs and renewal. The number circulated during the school year has grown from 6,384 in 1899-1900 to 17,270 in 1912-13. The children's applications are sent to the main library, and no child may have a card there and in a school branch at the same time.

There were rumors for several years that the library would be made free, and when it was at last announced in 1888 that $250,000 had been given by the late J. Pierpont Morgan, his father and two families related to them, on condition that $150,000 more should be raised by private subscription to remodel the Wadsworth Athenaeum, which then housed three libraries and a picture- gallery, and to provide for its maintenance, the rumor bade fair to come true. That the money came in, is largely due to the personal efforts of Charles Hopkins Clark, editor-in-chief of the Hartford Courant, for many years treasurer of the Athenaeum, the Watkinson Library and the Hartford Public Library, and the sum required was promised in 1890. Later the library offered the free use of its books, and also the income of about $50,000 to the city, on condition of keeping its form of government by a self-perpetuating corporation.

The first step towards the enlarged use of the library was to separate the children's books and classify them. We had had a fixed location up to that time, and I had not yet broken loose from it, but I numbered them according to the best light I had, though in a very short time I saw that with the increased number of duplicates we had to buy, only a movable location was of the least practical use. It was several years before the Dewey classification was finally adopted for the children, although we classified our grown-up books by it before we opened to the public.

When the library became free, in 1892, the annual circulation of children's books rose at once to 50,000, 25 per cent of the whole, and as large as the largest total in the subscription days. We immediately had to buy a large supply of new books, carefully chosen, and printed a too fully annotated list, which we found useful for some years and discarded when we were able to open the shelves. We had only a corner for children's books, almost none for children under ten, and no admission to the shelves. We struggled on as well as we could for the next few years.

A dialogue between a reader and the librarian in 1897 shows what we were trying to do at this time. It is really true, and illustrates the lack of knowledge in one of the most intelligent women in the city of the many points of contact between the library and the boys and girls of the city.

Reader: "There ought to be somebody in the library to tell people, especially children, what to read."