Library Essays; Papers Related to the Work of Public Libraries

by Arthur E. Bostwick

But it is true that in meeting the business man’s needs the library is assimilating itself more and more to a huge information bureau. This is the case especially at our Municipal Reference Branch in the City Hall, where we have few books, properly so called, many reports, pamphlets and clippings, properly indexed, and a great deal of manuscript material, gathered by correspondence in answer to queries and waiting for more queries on the same subject.

It matters little whether what you want is bound between covers, or slipped into a pamphlet case, or slipped into a manila envelope; it really matters little whether it is printed at all, so long as it is indexed so that it can be found quickly. We may perhaps look forward to the day when all the bound books in the library will be for home use, and will give information at second hand, too late for the business man to act promptly on it. The real sources of up to date knowledge will be, as they often are now, manuscript letters, circulars, newspaper clippings and trade catalogs. With their inevitable index they form a huge encyclopedia, absolutely up to date.

The printed cyclopedia in umpty-seven volumes is lucky if it catches up with year before last; it may do for your private library where the skilful agent has induced you to put it, but it is worthless in the Business Man’s collection, except on the rare occasions when he wants the life of Epictetus or the location of the Dobrudja. For the Business Man we want this morning’s material. Shall we deny it, collectively, the name of a library just because the book-binder has not been at work on it, and in many cases will never get the chance?

Not that the Business Man may not read books if he wants them—books on commerce, the industries, transportation, salesmanship, advertising, accounting. He may have them sent to his home if he likes, with no more trouble than sitting down again to his telephone. We use Uncle Sam’s messenger service—his parcel post. The only annoying thing about it is that he will not deliver C.O.D. and we are accordingly forced to ask for a postage deposit in advance—anything you choose, from the postage on one book one way to several dollars. We will notify you when the money is used up. This combination of telephone and parcel post seems to me the ideal of library service when you can name the book you want and don’t care to be merely browsing along the shelves. If the book is out, you will be put on the waiting list and will get it automatically when your turn comes. Why does not every citizen of St. Louis avail himself of this easy service? Hysteresis, I suppose; thinking of the old library of 1850 and neglecting that of 1917. Or perhaps it is that provoking little advance payment. Pay beforehand may be a poor paymaster, but those who work with Uncle Sam have to make his acquaintance.

So much for the information to be obtained from the library by business men. You are advertising men. Your business is the dissemination of information. Your boast is that it is your business to tell the truth, and I believe it. How can the Library help you tell it? Well—I believe the Library to be the greatest publicity field in the world—largely a virgin field, for you men, like everybody else, have got the hysteresis—you are suffering from brain lag—not brain fag. You think the library is back where it was in 1850, when it was the last place in the world where any sane man would go for publicity. It was a good place to hide. They tell the story of a library in Philadelphia, a beautiful old mausoleum, where an escaped criminal once stayed in its public reading room for three days before the police found him. We don’t covet that reputation. The modern library, I repeat, is the very best publicity field in the world. First, as we have seen, it is absolutely non-partisan. If you get your publicity material into the library it is because the library thinks it is good for something, not because you have some kind of a pull. Next, the people who frequent the library are intelligent. Publicity there is like that obtained from a high-class periodical: it is gilt-edged. Last and not least, the publicity given by the library is incidental. It accepts your publicity material and makes it available, not because it wants to boom your product at the expense of some other, but because it thinks that your material contains something of value to the business man. In most cases its publicity is general, not specific. You know that splendid Eastman ad—“There’s a photographer in your town.” That makes a thrill run down my spine whenever I see it, just as Tschaikovsky’s Sixth symphony does or Homer’s description of Ulysses fighting the Cyclops; and for the same reason—it is a product of genius.

Advertising is more and more bending this way. Why couldn’t we have seen it before? For the same reason that we can’t all write plays like Shakespeare’s or compose Wagner’s operas. When two shoemakers, Smith and Jones, had little shops opposite each other, Smith’s chief idea of advertising was to tell what trash Jones was making, and Jones’s to assure people that nothing good could come out of Smith’s store. What was the result? The same that induced the darky to say after he had heard the political orators: “If bofe dese fellers tells de trufe, what a pair of rascals they must be!” The net effect was to put people’s minds on the worthlessness of the product, instead of its excellence. Nowadays Smith and Jones are getting together, even if they haven’t been gobbled up by the Trust, and are assuring people that shoes are good things to have—that we ought to wear more of them; more kinds and better quality. The result is to fix the public mind on the excellence of shoes and both Smith and Jones sell more of them than under the old method. The library is willing to boom shoes for you, and labor-saving machinery, and food-products, and textiles and seeds, and lighting and heating devices. It does this to some extent without your co-operation, by the books that it places on the shelves; but no one who knows will go to a book for up-to-date information of this sort. If you want a description of the very latest device for any purpose, go to the publicity material of the concern that makes it.

We trust to you ad-men and your campaign for truth in advertising, that it is no fake. Here is where you can help us and help your clients by so doing. We stock every bit of good, informative publicity that we can find. We miss much of it. You can help us get it all. Your clients will get more publicity and better publicity for nothing than they have often bought for hundreds of dollars. Perhaps it is another effect of hysteresis that makes us afraid of anything that is offered free. You remember the story of the man who all day long, on a bet, offered sovereigns unsuccessfully in exchange for shillings on London Bridge.

If we were allowed to charge for our privileges I believe we could turn ourselves into a money-making institution on this count of publicity alone. I believe that it would be profitable for publishers to pay us for putting their books on our shelves. If we charged for the space we are giving to trade catalogs, circulars and other publicity material the issuers, I am sure, would not wait for us to ask for what they print. We have been trying for several years to get framed pictures of St. Louis industries to hang in our Business and Industrial Room. If we had asked $50 per, for the privilege of using space on the walls of a public institution I am sure we could have had it. But since we offer that space absolutely free of charge—a sovereign for a shilling—we can’t get what we want.

This is special publicity too, not general. There are some other cases where something about a piece of special publicity makes it so valuable to us that we display it, letting the advertiser get his advantage as a side issue. Within the last few years we have put up boldly in our art room, big glaring poster ads of beer, cigars and breakfast foods. How much could one of you have extorted from an advertiser if you had made him believe that you had some kind of a pull that would enable you to placard his wares not on Smith’s fence or Jones’s barn, but actually on the inside of the St. Louis Public Library? Now these posters were displayed, of course, not as inducements to smoke Fatimas or to drink Satanet, but because they were good and interesting commercial art. We believe that more people see the art on the fences than that in the Art Museum, and we want to do our part toward making it good. It has made great strides of late, as I think you will acknowledge. But answer me this: was not that valuable publicity for these products? Will not the knowledge that similar publicity may await the manufacturer who gets out a good poster, work out to the advantage of all concerned?

You know those articles in System, of course, telling what the writer would do if he were an undertaker, or a druggist, or a farmer. Well, if I were an ad-man I would get up an exhibition of St. Louis-made commercial art, advertising St. Louis products, and offer it to the Public Library. We will display it, our only condition in each case being that it is artistically worth display. Your clients will have their products advertised gratis, in a place where space could not be bought for a million dollars a square foot. You will gain in reputation as a man who puts over big things: we shall get an interesting display of commercial art, and better than all else, an impulse will have been given toward improved quality in the poster art of St. Louis. This is only one instance of the fact, which I believe to be a fact, that there is almost no kind of advertising that cannot be done in a live, modern public library, if one only goes the right way about it. Many go about it quite the wrong way, and do not succeed.