Library Essays; Papers Related to the Work of Public Libraries

by Arthur E. Bostwick

In this way; records stand, but the things that they record progress. We must go to the library to find out where humanity stands on the road and what lies before us. If our public comes to us naturally to read these records and if our writers know this and write for a public interested in reality, the library has done its part. Before this linkage can function truly, we must have authors who realize that there is a special library public and who write for it. We are told that the English publishers, before they accept a manuscript ask, “How many will the circulating libraries take?” They mean the great commercial subscription libraries like Mudie’s and Smith’s. The patronage of these libraries is more important to them than that of the public at large, or at any rate, they feel that they can rely upon it as an indication of what that of the public at large will be. There is a library public that they recognize and respect. We have nothing in the United States to correspond to Mudie’s and Smith’s. Our great circulating libraries are our free public libraries. Do authors or publishers or booksellers recognize the public library as a force to be reckoned with, either apart from other readers or as indicative of what other readers will think or do? I once made an investigation of this question and I was compelled to acknowledge, as I am still forced to admit, that there is no such recognition. Neither author nor publisher consciously does anything different, because there are public library readers, from what he would do, if all our public libraries were wiped off the face of the earth. My hope for the future lies in a justified suspicion that though neither is consciously affected, both do recognize the library public unconsciously and indirectly. Both would admit that their output has been affected by the great extension of the reading public and its consequent alteration in quality. A discussion of the exact effect would lead us too far afield. The point is that the literary product has been changed by a change in the numbers and quality of the reading public, and that this change has been brought about in no small degree by the establishment and popularity of public libraries. Possibly it is not too much to expect that this unconscious recognition will give place to a conscious one, and that the producers’ mutual influence bring each other into more frequent contact with reality.

Now, there may be some here who, wondering at my classification of the Hoosier poet, are saying to themselves, “Was Riley also among the Realists?” And I ask in turn, why has Realism come to connote a proportion of things that do not enter at all into the lives of most of us? We have all known and loved the old swimmin’ hole; how many of us are familiar with the man who commits suicide, not to end an intolerable situation, not in a frenzy of grief or remorse, but just to see what will happen? Yet when a Russian writes about such anomalies as this our critics say, “What wonderful realism!” If realism is anything, it must surely be real. There is morbidity in life; we cannot avoid it or overlook it. But is there anything in life that corresponds to ninety-nine per cent of morbidity? Not in my life, nor in yours. For you and for me, Riley is a realist. God forbid that he may ever be anything else.

There is something in the situation of this city in which we are assembled, that encourages men to look life straight in the face. Those who dwell amid rocky heights and caverns may be excused for looking behind them when they walk and for trembling at shadows. The sailor between whom and eternity there stands only a two-inch plank may live largely among unrealities. But the man of the open prairie, with God’s solid earth stretching away north, south, east and west, and God’s free air above and about him, stands firmly and sees clearly. What interests him is the present and its necessary relationships with the future, with only so much of the past as is able to consolidate these relationships and illumine them. Here, as one would expect, is growing up a school of representative artists, working some with the pen and others with the brush, whose aim and whose high privilege it is to record those relationships on canvas and on the printed page, each in his own fashion, of course, for a love for the outer realities can never do away with that supreme inner reality, a man’s own self that which looks out upon the world and sees that world through its own spectacles. It is the triumph of all art that faithfully as it may represent what it sees, its representations will still be, in large part, functions of the artist’s own mood, so that the same scene, the same event, portrayed by different writers or different painters, may arouse in us emotions as varied as joy, grief or mere restfulness. And of course, although we may praise James Whitcomb Riley portraying what he saw about him there would be little to praise if he were not at the same time portraying James Whitcomb Riley and if that portrayal were not worth while.

I like to think that what we librarians are doing is in some measure akin to the work of the artists of pen or brush, though perhaps in a secondary way. The writer interprets reality; we interpret the writers themselves. Here is a case where we cannot have too many middlemen, for each, instead of piling up cost to the consumer, piles up the value of the product. How many men could sit in a country churchyard at evening and see unaided what Gray saw? Gray in his Elegy records that churchyard and himself as well. But how many men does Gray fail to reach? How many, whom he would rejoice or comfort, never heard him? And to Gray, in this query, let us add the names of all the good and great in literature. Here is where the librarian steps in. He presents Gray and Gray’s fellow artists in words, to his public.

Years ago the library was merely a storehouse and the librarian the custodian thereof. Today the library is a magazine of dynamic force and the librarian is the man who exerts and directs it—who persuades the community that it needs books and then satisfies that need, instead of waiting for the self-realization which too often will never come. Does not the librarian in some fashion interpret life and nature to his public, through books in general, even as the writer interprets them through one particular book?

This may seem fantastic, but I like to think that it is true. The October air in these autumn days is full of megaphonic voices, each insisting on its right to be heard above all the others. We are urged to enlist in the British army, to buy Liberty bonds, to build huts for the Y.M.C.A. and the Knights of Columbus, to work for the Red Cross, to buy tobacco for the soldiers, and at the same time to support all our local charities and pay our club dues as usual, not neglecting to respond to the calls of the tax collector. We librarians have ourselves used the megaphone to some purpose, having as you know, raised a million dollars to establish and maintain camp libraries, giving our soldiers the same public library facilities that they enjoy at home.

But in the midst of all this distracting chorus let us not forget that our normal lives must function as usual, despite the abnormalities that surround and interpenetrate them. The opening of this noble library building and the character of this assembly are proofs that we intend to live as usual, even amid so much that is unusual.

I see no limit to the usefulness of this building and of the institution whose home it is to be. The house is new but its occupant has been long and favorably known to your citizens. Indianapolis has library traditions, and is what we librarians call a “good library town.” Your library has had good leadership and it is to continue, adding the force and freshness of the new to the strength and experience of the old. The memory of your dearly loved poet will be brought to the mind of each library user—by the children’s room that bears his name, by the land that he gave to enlarge its site, by this enduring portraiture—by a thousand and one things, none the less cogent for being intangible. I look to see this library, in the home city of James Whitcomb Riley, grow into a place in the public heart comparable with that which was attained by Riley himself. It should be loved for its broad minded humanity, for its sympathy with mankind, especially with little children, for its readiness to “rejoice with those that do rejoice and weep with those that weep,” for its quick response to the personal and spiritual needs of every reader, and above all for its firm hold on the realities of life and its appreciation of life as something that is lived on the farm, in the city street, in the office, the school and the club, not in the clouds, not in fog and mist, not with the improbable or the impossible. That it will do and be all these things we may be confident. Riley the well beloved is gone. His memory lives on; let it live with peculiar force and vividness in this library, in its attitude toward those whom it serves—in the affection which they in turn feel toward an institution that has long been, and will long continue to be a center of literary, civic and intellectual force in the city where Riley lived and wrote.

THE CHURCH AND THE PUBLIC LIBRARY

The years immediately succeeding the great war are to witness great progress in team-work. The war is teaching us to get together, and it is impossible to believe that the lessons we are now learning will be suddenly and totally forgotten with the advent of peace. The world is full of institutions, associations, corporate bodies of all kinds, founded on a knowledge of what may be accomplished by the cooperation of individuals; but the cooperation of these bodies themselves, one with another, has been faulty until recently.