Library Essays; Papers Related to the Work of Public Libraries

by Arthur E. Bostwick

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

In using this expression it is not intended to imply that the library is, or should be, the only place in a town where educational processes are going on—perhaps not even the principal place. The center of a circle is not the whole circle; its area is zero, it is simply a point so related to other parts of the figure as to give it supreme importance. The center of a wheel, through which the axle passes, is not the whole wheel, but around it the whole wheel turns. So the educational functions of a town library, while they may not bulk large in a catalog, should be so related to those of other institutions in the community as to give it peculiar importance and authority.