Library Work with Children

by Alice Isabel Hazeltine

It has been the inevitable accompaniment of such rapid growth that the work should suffer growing pains in the form of criticism and even caricature at the hands of casual observers and clever writers. Those of us who have been identified with the movement since its inception have somehow managed to preserve our faith in a survival of the fittest by remembering that there was a time when everything was new, and have felt that if we could keep a firm grip on the active principles which inspire all successful work with children, whether it is the work of a small independent library or that of a large system of libraries, our labor was not likely to be lost. The children, the books and ourselves are the three elements to be combined and the success of the combination does not depend upon time, nor place, nor circumstance. It depends upon whether we have a clear vision of our surroundings and are able to adapt ourselves to them, a growing appreciation of the value of books to the persons who read them, and the power of holding the interest and inspiring the respect and confidence of children.

If we can do all these things for a period of years we have little need to worry about the future success of the work. The boys and girls will look after that. In many instances they have already begun to look after it and the best assurance for the future maintenance of free libraries in America rests with those who, having tried them and liked them during the most impressionable years of their lives, believe in the value of them for others as well as for themselves to the extent of being ready and willing to support them.

In passing from a long and intimate experience in the active work of a children's room in an independent library to the guidance of work in the children's rooms of a system of branch libraries, a great deal of thought has been given to deepening the sense of responsibility for library membership by regarding every form of daily work as a contributory means to this end.

The term "library membership" is a survival of the old subscription library but it defines a much closer relationship than the terms "borrower" or "user" and broadens rather than restricts the activities of a free library by making it seem more desirable to "belong to the library" than to "take out books."

It is the purpose of this paper to present in outline for discussion such aspects of the work as may help to substantiate the claim of its ambitious and perhaps ambigious title: Library Membership as a Civic Force.

1. Our first and chief concern is with the selection of books and right here we are confronted by so many problems that we might profitably spend the entire week discussing them.

In general, the selection of books for a children's room which is seeking to make and to sustain a place in the life of a community should offer sufficient variety to meet the needs and desires of boys and girls from the picture book age to that experience of life which is not always measured by years nor by school grade but is tipified by a Jewish girl under 14 years old, who, on being asked how she liked the book she had just read, "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm," said to the librarian, "It's not the kind of book you would enjoy yourself, is it?", and on being answered in the affirmative, tactfully stated her own point of view: "Well, you see it is just this way, children have their little troubles and grown people have their great troubles. I guess it's the great troubles that interest me." We have been quick to recognize the claim of the foreign boy or girl who is learning our language and studying our history but we are only just beginning to recognize the claims of those, who, having acquired the language, are seeking in books that which they are experiencing in their own natures. Human nature may be the same the world over, but there is a vast difference in its manifestations between the ages of ten and sixteen in a New England village or town and in a foreign neighborhood of one of our large cities.

The selection of adult books in all classes, especially in biography, travel, history and literature is too limited in the children's rooms of many libraries and should be enlarged to the point of making the shelves of classed books look more like those of a library and less like those of a school room. Titles in adult fiction should include as much of Jane Austen as girls will read and an introduction to Barrie in "Peter Pan" and the "Little Minister." "Jane Eyre" will supply the demand for melodrama in its best form, while "Villette," and possibly "Shirley," may carry some girls far enough with Charlotte Bronte to incline them to read her life by Mrs. Gaskell. William Black's "Princess of Thule" and "Judith Shakespeare" will find occasional readers. "Lorna Doone" will be more popular, although there are girls who find it very tedious. There should be a full set of Dickens in an edition attractive to boys and girls. A complete set of the Waverly novels in a new large print edition, well paragraphed and well illustrated, with the introductions left out and with sufficient variation in the bindings to present an inviting appearance on the shelves would lead, I believe, to a very much more general reading of Scott.

Conan Doyle's "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," "The Refugees," "The White company," "Micah Clarke" and "At the Sign of the four" will need no urging, nor will Dumas' "Count of Monte Cristo," "The Three guardsmen" and "The Black tulip." "Les Miserables" and "The Mill on the Floss" will fully satisfy the demand for "great troubles," treated in a masterly fashion. We should include Thackeray's "Henry Esmond," "The Newcomes" and "The Virginians"; Bulwer's "Last Days of Pompeii," "Harold," "Rienzi" and "The Last of the barons"; Charles Kingsley's "Westward Ho," "Hereward the Wake" and "Hypatia"; Charles Reade's "Cloister and the hearth," "Peg Woffington," "Foul play" and "Put yourself in his place"; Besant's "All sorts and conditions of men" and "The Children of Gibeon"; Wilkie Collins' "The Moonstone" and "The Woman in white" as many of Robert Louis Stevenson's stories as will be read "Cranford" and "The Vicar of Wakefield" with the Hugh Thomson illustrations; Miss Mulock's "John Halifax," "A Noble life," "A Brave lady" and "A Life for a life"; Lever's "Charles O'Malley" and "Harry Lorrequer", Lew Wallace's "Ben Hur" and "The Fair god"; Stockton's "Rudder Grange," "The Casting away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine" and "The Adventures of Captain Horn"; Mrs. Stowe's "Uncle Tom's cabin" and "Oldtown folks"; Howells' "Lady of the Aroostook," "A Chance acquaintance," "The Quality of mercy" and "The Rise of Silas Lapham"; Gilbert Parker's "Seats of the mighty" and "When Valmond came to Pontiac"; Paul Leicester Ford's "The Honorable Peter Stirling"; Richard Harding Davis' "Van gibber," "Gallagher," "Soldiers of fortune" and "The Bar sinister"; Rider Haggard's "King Solomon's mines" and "Allen Quartermain"; Weir Mitchell's "Hugh Wynne", Marion Crawford's "Marietta", "Marzio's crucifix", and "Arethusa"; Kipling's "The Day's work", "Kim" and "Many inventions" and, if they have been removed as juvenile titles, I think we should restore "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" under the head of adult fiction.

Other titles will be freely and frequently used in a children's room, which is taking into active account the interests of its users and is seeking to establish a genuine taste for good reading which will not be abandoned later on as artificial or forced. In general, the principle of selection should be to provide the best standard novels in order that the boys and girls who go out from the children's room may know what good novels are and so much of modern fiction as shall serve to give the collection the appearance of being interesting and up to date without lowering the standard of that taste for good reading which is the chief purpose in shelving such a collection in a children's room. The presence of the books is good for the children's librarian as well as for the children and it goes without saying that she must be familiar with them if she is to use them intelligently.