Library Essays; Papers Related to the Work of Public Libraries

by Arthur E. Bostwick

For years this small place supported these two clubs, each with its club-house, grounds, dues and assessments. Those who were not partisans had to belong to both, to keep the peace. Meanwhile, the town greatly needed a small social club where the retired city merchants, professional men and artists who largely made up its population could assemble occasionally, have a game of pool or bridge and drink a cup of tea. But their incomes were not large and they had to keep up those two golf clubs. The situation is so typical that I am enlarging on it a little. I wish that the outcome were typical too. That outcome was that after years of discussion the clubs were merged, one of the links was discontinued, and the village now enjoys the little social club that it needed. An omission has been filled by doing away with a duplication.

The church history of many a small place is very much to the point. We see three or four denominational bodies struggling with small congregations, inadequate buildings and general poverty when by uniting they might fill all these lacks simply by saving what they are now spending on duplication. Doctrinal differences are said to keep them apart; but to the non-theological mind these differences are not greater than these that must always exist between thoughtful men in the same religious body. It is pleasant to see an occasional lapse into sanity, shown by the union of such churches and the consequent strengthening and growth of a town’s religious life. Probably it is not too much to say that the whole problem of Christian Unity is but a phase of this general question of duplication and omission.

In the business world our two sins flourish like green bay trees. Small villages have two groceries and no hardware store; large cities may be overrun with one trade while there is lack of another. These things ought to adjust themselves, but they do not. One can pick out duplication and omission in the stock of a single institution. On asking for something at a department store recently I was met with the remark, “Isn’t that funny? You are the fifteenth person who has asked for that in the last three days!” The fact was noted as merely curious and interesting and there was apparently no intention of remedying the omission, even by cutting out some of the superfluous styles of neckties.

The most flagrant example I know of duplication in the business and industrial world is the duplicate telephone company. A telephone company is a good example of a mutual enterprise; its value to any subscriber depends on the existence of all the other subscribers. If a man could afford to buy up the company and discontinue all the telephones but his own, the value would disappear. Two companies are simply a nuisance, involving duplication of plant with no resulting convenience. The same is not true of gas or water companies, because here one user does not depend on the others. You would get just as good service if the electric company concluded to serve you, and you alone. There is, to be sure, wasteful duplication in these cases also, but in the instance of the telephone it is accompanied with necessary deterioration of service.

I suppose I need say little about the existence of our two sins in the household. We are honeycombed with them from the rural dinner table where there are no soup and three kinds of pie, to the housewife who yields to the temptation to buy another evening dress and “can not afford” an outing costume. What we need everywhere is some kind of a Board of Equalization, with autocratic powers, that will rigourously suppress all our duplication and with the money saved supply our omissions for us.

We may learn something from the efforts that have recently been made to minimize these two sins in charitable work and social service. Every city contains numerous charitable bodies, all trying to relieve want and alleviate suffering. They are frequently the prey of unscrupulous persons who manage to get their wants alleviated by three or four societies at once—by each, of course, without the knowledge of the others. The result is that there are no funds to relieve many worthy persons who accordingly suffer. The two sins in this case are being avoided by the simple establishment of a card-index at a central point. When an application is made for relief the index-office is informed by telephone, the index is consulted, and if it is found that the applicant is already receiving aid from some other source his request is politely but firmly refused.

The present production of books gives us an instructive example of the existence of duplications and omissions on a large scale; and the elucidation of these will bring us a little nearer to the application of our principles to the library, toward which we are tending. I know not which is the more striking fact in connection with the publishing business—the continual issue of useless books—fiction and non-fiction, or the non-existence of works on vital subjects regarding which we need information. Of course this is due partly to the fact that the men who know things are also the men who do things. They are too busy to write them down. It is also due to the abnormal appetites of the semi-educated, which create a demand for the trivial and fatuous. The semi-educated person is intellectually young; he has the peculiarities of the child. Foremost among these is the love of repetition. The little one would rather hear his favorite fairy tale for the hundredth time than risk an adventure into stranger fields of narrative. There is something admirable about this when it leads to the adult’s love of re-reading great literature. But in the semi-educated it appears as an unlimited capacity for assimilating unreal fiction with the same plots, the same characters, the same adventures and the same emotions, depicted time after time with slight changes in names and attendant circumstances.

An African explorer told me recently that the events attending the southward progress of the French through the Sahara and down into Central Africa were the most thrilling and the most important, from the standpoint of world history, among those of recent times. The story of them remains unwritten, except for a few episodes in French that have not been thought worthy of translation into other tongues. Yet in this period how much trivial incident, how much banal reminiscence, has been thought worthy of enshrinement in bulky octavos, selling at four dollars each! The money spent in putting forth the same idle stuff that has oppressed the world for centuries would have supplied great gaps in our catalogues of history, travel and science and have given us vital literature that we may now have lost forever.

In fiction, the sin of repetition is largely due to the substitution of imagination for observation. No two actual things are alike and no two events happen in the same way. Observation and accurate description will never result in duplication. But the semi-educated imagination sees always the same things and sees them in the same way; and its use in the writing of fiction results as we have seen.

Would that we had, to-day and here, realism like that of Turgenief in his “Memoirs of a Sportsman”—the detailed account of every-day happenings; the hardest thing in the world to write interestingly. When we try it, which we seldom do, we seem to revert at once to the dreary side of life, which doubtless exists but surely not to the exclusion of other things. Turgenief’s book helped toward the emancipation of the serfs. I will not dwell on that, for Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—a very different sort of book, performed a like office for us. I will rather insist that Turgenief wrote simple, vital descriptive literature; something that you will look far to find in our modern fiction.