Library Essays; Papers Related to the Work of Public Libraries

by Arthur E. Bostwick

Lastly, the selector may rely on the name of the publisher. This may tell him much or little, but it may at any rate guarantee good paper and type, and it may also assure him that the book contains no improprieties. Unfortunately, it cannot insure against dullness—publisher’s readers are but mortal, and the best will occasionally reject a pearl and take in a pebble.

When all is said and done, of course the intelligent man who has read a book carefully knows more about it than he could have found out by reading all the annotations and reviews in the world. The librarian of a small library can read every book under consideration. The head of a large library cannot do this; the larger his daily or weekly order, the more he must rely on the recommendations and opinions of others, and even the books that he orders on approval he cannot read himself.

Here, perhaps, is the place to note that not every librarian is his own selector. The responsible decision in these matters rests, of course, in most libraries, with a committee of some sort; but if the librarian is one in whose judgment this committee has confidence (and no other should hold the position at all) he will have a practically free hand. For decision in regard to doubtful books, especially current fiction, some libraries have special reading committees, often composed of ladies, but it can hardly be said that the results arrived at in this way are satisfactory. It is vastly better for the librarian to select a few persons, either on his staff or outside of it, on whom he can rely to give him information, after reading a book, on specific points regarding which he may require it. Especially in considering current fiction should the reader be able to distinguish between mere outspokenness, such as we find in the Bible or Shakespeare, and immoral or degrading tendency. The ordinary woman reader, especially the young woman, will often condemn a book for frankness when its tendency is decidedly good, and pass a clever, pleasant tale whose influence on many persons is bad, though conveyed entirely by indirection. Of course the librarian or the committee may make a general rule to exclude frankness, which, personally, I think is a mistake, though I am free to acknowledge that there are boundaries beyond which even a well-meaning writer should not be allowed to go.

Of course, I can say but a word here on the trash question in fiction. But be not, I pray, too stern a censor. When selecting for a free public library judge books largely by their fruits. If a story sends a boy out with a pistol to play robber—somewhat too much in earnest—it is surely bad; if it makes him love justice and incline to pity, it cannot be altogether out of place in a library though it may be unreal and inane. Its characters may be wooden puppets to you, while to the young reader they are heroes, full of the divine qualities of courage, sympathy, and tenderness. As the reader thinketh so is the book—not as you, wise critic, in your plentitude of knowledge, would have it to be.

The third consideration that must govern us in our choice, though I have put it last, is really the controlling one. Unless there is something in the treasury we may choose books all day, and our selection is as unavailing as the street child’s choice of jewels in a shop window; and the more money one has at one’s disposal, the easier it is to spend it. I must speak of the library’s finances here, however, only as they affect the librarian’s choice of books. Given a specified book appropriation, the librarian must often have to decide upon the best way to spend it, and upon the proper distribution of expenditure over the year.

All these things influence his choice more or less. From one point of view it seems well to expend the greater part of the amount as soon as it becomes available, especially if a large number of pressing needs have been waiting for satisfaction. The trouble is that one cannot foresee what needs will also press for satisfaction during the coming year. Another plan is to distribute the expenditure pretty evenly without making any too strict rule in the matter.

With the first arrangement the librarian will be apt to buy a good many of the larger and more expensive works—and, perhaps, be sorry for it afterward. With the latter he will purchase more current literature and satisfy his readers better, though the general quality of his purchases may not be so high.

Perhaps a compromise may bring the best results. He who decides at the outset what reference works he can afford to buy during the year, and how much he must spend at once on replacements and duplicates, and after deducting these fixed charges from his appropriation divides the remainder into weekly or monthly portions for current purchases, will not go far wrong.

To the financial section of this discussion belongs also the question of editions. Shall the librarian choose the best or the cheapest? Which is the best and which is the cheapest for his purpose? In the first place, we may exclude the extremes. Editions de luxe have no place in the ordinary free library, and, on the other hand, we should not think of offering to a self-respecting reader books printed on bad paper with worse type, simply because they can be purchased at a phenomenally low figure. But between these two there are many grades of beauty and durability. Here, as elsewhere, there is safety in the golden mean. As far as bindings of exceptional durability go, the question of paying extra for them depends on the use that is to be made of the book. If it will circulate so little that the ordinary binding will last twenty years, why spend money for anything stronger? Again, if it get such hard treatment that it must be replaced in a year’s time, why put on it a binding that would outlive ten years of such vicissitudes? Still again, with current books of popular interest, the library cannot wait to have them put into special bindings, but for standard, popular works, which will have steady but not hard use, and which can be ordered three months before they are to be used, money spent on special bindings may be economy in the end. Here, however, we are drifting a little way from our subject.

The three points that we must take into consideration in selecting books, namely, the community’s need, the determination of what books will satisfy it, and the consideration of how far the library’s financial condition will allow it to go in that direction, have been treated separately, but it must be evident that they are in reality so closely connected that they act and react on each other. No one of them can in practice be considered apart from the others. Thus the first necessity of the library may be books on music, and a secondary need may be books on water supply. It may so happen, however, that a complete and up-to-date work on the latter subject, we will say, has just been issued at a moderate price, while the works on music most needed are expensive. The result would be quite different from that reached by a consideration of the first point alone. Again, we will take the case of a large library with a book appropriation large enough to buy practically all that it wants in current literature. This fact drops point third out of consideration entirely and modifies both the others considerably. If the library wants both music and hydraulics, and has money enough for only one, we must consider carefully which can best be spared; but if the funds are at hand for both, all this thought is not needed. In like manner, even if there are funds for both, but only for one or two books on each subject, we must select the books we need most, which we need to do if we have money to buy all we want on both subjects. In short, the work of selecting is more difficult, as has been said, with a few books than with many, but the consolation must be that the result is better. The temptation, when one has plenty of money, is to let selection go by the board altogether and to garner in wheat and tares alike, trusting to the public to do the sorting.