Library Essays; Papers Related to the Work of Public Libraries

by Arthur E. Bostwick

Of course all such torn up or detached material is very convenient also for reference use—easily filed and quickly consulted. It may be kept in vertical file cases, in loose-leaf binders or in ordinary portfolios. One of the interesting things about it is the facility of assembling it in different ways. In our own library we sometimes tear apart the leaves of an art book simply to group the plates in an order that will make them more valuable for reference purposes. This leads us to another nearly related, though I should call it a still further, step toward the museum region, which is taken when we deliberately create specimens by clipping and mounting. Most libraries are now doing this freely, both for reference work and for circulation. In many cases there are no separate labels here except a brief descriptive title, the material being classified according to its subject or its intended use. The similarity to the school museum or circulating museum—a very recent development of museum work—is striking. In this field the library has been ahead of the regular museums. The material clipped and mounted is usually book material—largely plates from books, magazines or papers. There is much other material that can be so mounted and used—the kind of thing that is familiar in memorabilia scrapbooks—theatre and concert programs, announcements, invitations, tickets of admission, badges, menus, photographs, advertising material, etc. It is usually a mistake to make permanent scrap-books of such material. When they need to be assembled in book form the separate mounts can be brought together in a loose-leaf binder. A permanent scrap-book ties the material together in a way that may prove embarassing. Suppose, for instance, that you are keeping printed material from three clubs in your town, as you ought. Clubs seldom do this for themselves. Several St. Louis women’s clubs have told us that they visit the library when they want to indulge in research into their own past doings. It might be natural to keep a scrap-book for each club and insert the material as it comes. But suppose you desire to display all your material on war activities and that some of the material in these scrap-books falls under this head. You will have to leave it out or tear out your scrap-book leaves.

Mounting takes time, and it is not necessary to mount everything. Material used only occasionally may be left unmounted. For instance, much newspaper-clipped material may be kept loosely in heavy manila envelopes. Again, some material may be made more accessible if not mounted, especially if in card form and in standard sizes. Such is the postal card. The amount of valuable material obtainable in postal-card form will astonish those who have not looked into the matter. Besides the usual views of localities, embracing buildings, monuments and scenery, good collections of sculpture, architecture, portraits and many other things may be made in postal-card form. Postal cards are all of the same size and very compact, so that they may be filed in trays and treated very much like catalogue cards, guides being used with them as in an ordinary catalogue. The amount of usable material that can be stored to the square foot in this form is probably greater than any other.

In all material of this sort, the similarity of collection, treatment and use may be so close that the passage from the picture to the object seems almost negligible; yet many persons apparently consider that here we must draw the definite boundary line between the collections of the library and those of the museum. They would say for instance that it is perfectly legitimate for a library to acquire, preserve and use a plate bearing a printed fac-simile in natural colors, of a piece of textile goods, but not a card mount bearing an actual piece of the same goods, although the two were so similar in appearance that at a little distance it would be impossible to tell the colored print from the actual piece of textile. Librarians will not be apt to attach much importance to this distinction, and those whose collections include treatises on textiles with colored plates will not hesitate to supplement them with mounted specimens of the actual textile with typewritten descriptions.

Generally manufacturers are only too happy to furnish samples of their current output, and older specimens, sometimes of historical interest, can be bought from dealers.

There are precedents for the treatment of this sort of thing as library material. Probably Hough’s well-known work on American Woods will occur to everyone. No library, so far as I know, has ever thought of barring this from its shelves because it contains actual thin sections of the various woods instead of pictures thereof.

The peculiar adaptability of this kind of material to library use is a physical one, and is shared by every flat specimen that may be mounted on sheets. Instances will occur to every one. An actual flower or leaf, for example, is generally cheaper than a color reproduction of it, and takes up little more room when mounted. A good descriptive botany with inadequate pictures may well be supplemented by a herbarium of this kind. Historical material is quite generally flat—often written or printed on card or paper—old programs, menus, railroad tickets, dancecards, timetables, cards of admission, souvenirs of all kinds. One of the most interesting exhibitions I ever saw was of foreign railway material—timetables, tickets, dining-car menus, etc. Many Chinese and Japanese specimens were included. A treatise on forms of railway tickets, with fac-simile illustrations, would be eagerly sought by libraries; why should not the objects themselves be equally valuable? Librarians were glad to have Miss Kate Sanborn’s book on old wall papers, with its realistic reproductions, but how many of them thought of the possibility of making their own books of specimens, using the papers themselves, instead of photographic facsimiles thereof?

This point of view may be commended to the makers of decorated bulletins in libraries. Much laborious hand-work is often done in the preparation of these, and the results are seldom worth the trouble. Even when a work of art has been produced it may be questioned whether the time withdrawn from other library work has been employed to the best purpose. By the use of what has been called above “museum material” time may be saved and better results reached. For instance, I once saw, in an exhibition of picture bulletins one bearing a list of books and articles on lace. It was made in white ink on black cardboard, and bore a most realistic representation of lace, done with the pen, probably at a vast expenditure of time. The most that could be said for this really clever bit of work was that it looked enough like a real piece of lace, mounted on the cardboard, to deceive the elect at a short distance. Why then did not the maker mount a real bit of inexpensive lace on the board, at an expenditure of a few minutes’ time? It should not require much thought to see that bulletins prepared in this way are usually better and more effective than elaborate decoration with pencil and brush.

Another point of resemblance between this kind of library material and that utilized by museums is the fact that its value is so often a group-value—possessed by the combination of objects of a certain kind, rather than by any one in itself. For instance, a common earthenware jar designed by John Jones in the Trenton potteries may have little value, but if you add to it a thousand other earthenware jars, or a thousand pieces of any kind designed by John Jones, or a thousand other specimens made in Trenton, the collection acquires a value which far exceeds the average value of its elements multiplied by thousands. The former may be five cents—the latter five thousand dollars. In the same way an illustration by Mary Smith, clipped from a trashy story in a ten-cent magazine, has little value—zero value, perhaps. But a thousand such illustrations showing the published work of Mary Smith from the time she began until she acquired standing as an illustrator, is worth while.

It should not be necessary to tell librarians that the best way to make such a collection as this is not to search for each element by itself but to gather miscellaneous related material in quantity and then sort it. If you have a pile of slips to alphabetize, you do not go through the whole mass to pick out the A’s, and then again for the B’s and so on. You sort the whole mass at once, so that while you are segregating the A’s you are at the same time collecting the B’s and all the rest of the alphabet. Likewise, if you want the illustration work of Jessie Wilcox Smith, for instance, you need not hunt separately for bits from her pen; you need only clip all the illustrations from magazines and papers that would be otherwise discarded. Then you sort these by the names of the illustrators, and you have at once collections not only of Miss Smith’s current work but of that of dozens of other illustrators. This is applicable in a hundred other fields.

It should be noted that this group value is potentially present in many large collections of material, whether classified or not into the particular groups in question. For instance, we have a large collection of locality post-cards, filed by cities and towns. Here are groups ready for use. If anyone wants views of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, or Stockton, Cal., to show to a class, or for use with a reflectograph, or to copy for newspaper work, they are already assembled. But also if someone is going to lecture on court houses, it is the work of only a few moments to assemble from the file a temporary collection of fifty or sixty examples. The same is true of buildings of any other type, say college dormitories, railway stations, libraries or warehouses, of parks, mountain scenery and industrial processes and of a hundred other things. The value here is a true group value; it is created by assemblage and becomes dormant again when the items are distributed to their proper places in the file.