Application was made to a library for the use of an assembly-room for a free lecture on stenography. On cross-examination the lecturer admitted that he was a teacher of stenography who desired to form a class, and that at the close of his lecture he intended to make announcement of his courses, prices, etc. He was told that this must be done outside the library.
It is very common, where the exaction of an admission fee is forbidden, to take up a collection before or after the lecture. When told that this is inadmissible, the lecturer sometimes takes up his collection on the sidewalk outside. There have been cases where employees of a library have embraced this opportunity to gather contributions. A colored janitor of a branch library was recently admonished for standing outside his own assembly-room door and soliciting money for a pet charity. Another janitor made a pilgrimage to the central library to collect from the staff. A classic instance of this kind is that of the street gamin who for several hours stood at a branch library door and collected an admission fee of one cent from each user. The branch was newly opened and its neighbors were unused to the ways of free libraries.
An example of the difficulty of deciding, in matters of this kind, whether an undoubted advertising scheme may or may not legitimately be aided by the public library is found in the offer, with which all of you are familiar, of valuable money prizes for essays on economic subjects, by a firm of clothiers. The committee in charge of the awards is composed of eminent economists and publicists; the competitors are members of college faculties and advanced graduate students; the essays brought out are of permanent value and are generally published in book form. Under these circumstances many libraries have not hesitated to post the announcements of the committee on their bulletin boards. Others regard the whole thing as purely commercial advertisement and refuse to recognize it. One library at least posted the announcement of the competition for 1910, but refused to post the result. It would be hard to tell just how much altruism and how much selfishness we have here and the instance shows how subtle are the gradations from one motive to the other.
Advertising by securing condemnatory action of some sort, such as exclusion from the shelves, has also not been uncommon. This requires the aid of the press to condemn, abuse or ridicule the library for its action, and so exploit the book. The press, I grieve to say, has fallen a victim to this scheme more than once and has thereby given free use of advertising space ordinarily worth thousands of dollars. A flagrant instance of this kind occurred in one of our greatest cities about ten years ago. The work of a much-discussed playwright was about to be put upon the boards. A wily press agent, in conversation with an unsuspecting librarian, obtained an adverse opinion. The aiding and abetting newspaper, which was one of ostensible high character, proceeded at once to heap ridicule and contumely on the library and the librarian for their condemnation and exclusion of the play (which really wasn’t excluded at all). The matter, having reached the dignity of news, was taken up by other papers and for a week or more the metropolitan press resounded with accusation, explanation, recrimination and comment. The gleeful playwright cabled objurgations from London, and the press agent, retiring modestly into the background, saw advertising that would have cost him $100,000, at the lowest estimate, poured into his willing lap by the yellow, but easy, press of his native burg. It is possibly unfair to cite this as an attempt to “work” the library—it was the public press that was ingeniously and successfully exploited through the library.
The fact that the mere presence of a public library is an advantage to the neighborhood in which it stands has led to numerous attempts to locate library buildings, especially branches, in some particular place. These are often accompanied by offers of building-lots, which, it is sad to say, have occasionally appealed to trustees not fully informed of the situation. I recall several offers of lots in barren and unoccupied spots—one in an undeveloped region whose owner hoped to make it a residence park and another in the middle of a flourishing cornfield, whose owner considered it an ideal spot for a branch library—at least after he had sold off a sufficient number of building lots on the strength of his generous gift. These particular offers were declined with thanks, but in some instances members of boards of trustees themselves, being only human, have not been entirely free from suspicion of personal or business interest in sites. Here it is difficult to draw the line between the legitimate efforts of a particular locality to capture a branch site and those that have their origin in commercial cupidity. Both of course have nothing to do with the larger considerations that should govern in such location, but both are not exploitation as we are now using the word.
A curious instance of the advertising value of the mere presence of a public library and of business shrewdness in taking advantage of it, comes from a library that calls itself a “shining example of efforts to ‘work’ public libraries for commercial purposes.” This library rents rooms for various objects connected with its work, and finds that it is in great demand as a tenant. Great effort is made by property owners both to retain and to move quarters occupied for library purposes. The board has recently refused to make selection of localities on this basis.
There is another respect in which the public library offers an attractive field for exploitation. In its registration files it has a valuable selected list of names and addresses which may be of service in various ways either as a mailing-list or as a directory. Probably there are no two opinions regarding the impropriety of allowing the list to be used for commercial purposes along either line. The use as a directory may occasionally be legitimate and is allowable after investigation and report to some one in authority. I have known of recourse to library registration lists by the police, to find a fugitive from justice; by private detectives, ostensibly on the same errand; by a wife, looking for her runaway husband; by persons searching for lost relatives; and by creditors on the trail of debtors in hiding. Where there is any doubt, the matter can usually be adjusted by offering to forward a letter to the person sought, or to communicate to that person the seeker’s desire and let him respond if he wishes to do so. One thing is certain: except in obedience to an order of court, it is not only unjust, but entirely inexpedient from the library’s standpoint to betray to anyone a user’s whereabouts against that user’s wishes or even where there is a mere possibility of his objection. If it were clearly understood that such consequences might follow the holding of a library card, we should doubtless lose many readers that we especially desire to attract and hold.
Of course the public library is not the only institution whose reputation has exposed it to the assaults of advertisers. The Christian ministry has for years been exposed to this sort of thing, and it is the belief of Reverend William A. Lee, who writes on the subject in “The Standard,” a Baptist paper published in Chicago, that in this case also increased activity is to be noted of late. Persons desire to present the minister with a picture on condition that he mentions the artist to his friends; to give him a set of books or a building-lot that his name may be used to lure other purchasers; they even ask him for mailing-lists of his parishioners’ names. “I am constantly being besieged,” says Mr. Lee, “by agents of divers sorts, and of divers degrees of persistency, for indorsements of patent mops, of ‘wholesome plays,’ of current periodicals, of so-called religious books, of ‘helps’ almost innumerable for church-workers and of scores of other things which time has charitably carried out of memory.”
It is refreshing to find that the kind of library exploitation most to be feared seems not yet to have been attempted on any considerable scale or in any objectionable direction. I refer to interference with our stock and its distribution—an effort to divert either purchases or circulation into a particular channel. My attention has been called to the efforts of religious bodies to place their theological or controversial works on the shelves of public libraries. When the books are offered as donations, as is usually the case, this is hardly exploitation in the sense in which we are considering it, unless the library is so small that other more desirable books are excluded. A large library welcomes accessions of this kind, just as it does trade catalogs or railroad literature. Attempts to push circulation are occasionally made, but usually without success.
But up to the present time it is the glory of the public library that it knows neither North nor South, Catholic nor Protestant, Democrat, Republican nor Socialist. It shelves and circulates books on both sides of every possible scientific, economic, religious and sectional controversy, and no one has raised a hand to make it do otherwise. We should be proud of this and very jealous of it. As we have seen, there is some reason to think that newly awakened interest in the public library as a public utility has led to increased effort to gain its aid for purely personal and commercial ends. Naturally these interests have moved first. It is comparatively easy to steer clear of them and to defeat them. But attempts to interfere with the strict neutrality of the public library and to turn it into partisanship in any direction, if they ever come, should at the earliest betrayal of their purpose be sternly repressed and at the same time be given wide publicity, that we may all be on our guard. We may legitimately and properly adopt a once famous and much ridiculed slogan as our own, in this regard, and write over the doors of our public libraries “All that we ask is, let us alone!”