The Poole Plan
This seems to be the best place to allude to the scheme which Dr. Poole proposed as an alternative of the stack. As Fletcher says, the principal objection to the stack plan was as to opportunities for readers to get at the books on the shelves. To place readers and books in close contact, Dr. Poole proposed dividing a building mainly into large rooms, in each of which readers should have tables near the windows, while opposite the windows the inner portion of the room should have floor-cases filled with some special class of books. He got the chance to embody this idea in the building of the Newberry Library of Chicago. As far as I know this plan has not been adopted elsewhere as a whole, but every large library since built has included rooms arranged more or less on this plan, which is indeed the idea of the department library in a college; or special rooms, such as Art and Patents, in a public library. So far as Dr. Poole advocated his plan he furthered library efficiency and should deserve credit and remembrance.
“In the Providence Public Library, for instance, two-fifths of the books are shelved outside of the stack.”—Foster.[280]
But the stack plan has “won out” as a system, and has established itself as a factor in modern American library building. Further changes, developments and improvements are doubtless coming, but so far as administration and architecture are concerned, the stack must be reckoned as the distinctive difference between libraries and other buildings.
See description and criticism of the Poole plan, with vindication of the stack system, in B. R. Green’s article in the Library Journal.[281]
Dr. Poole was a sturdy fighter in his day, but he was an excellent, practical librarian. If he had lived to see the stack as now improved, and had also seen its combination with the department library or special library in large buildings, I think he would have conceded the merits of the new system.
Stacks
Generally. These have been adopted in this country, in nearly all libraries which have got beyond the size where floor cases will serve. They come into use with us much earlier in the growth of a library than in England, where they seem not so much in favor.
The notion of the stack was first suggested by the modern revival in America, about 1850, of the floor-case system, exemplified two hundred years before in the Leyden University Library. The first modern mention of this system I can find is Winsor’s description (1876)[282] of the arrangement of his new Roxbury branch of the Boston Public Library. In his description of the floor-cases, then only floor-cases, he suggested the idea of providing for growth another story of superincumbent cases, apparently of wood, with “dumb-waiters,” and “spiral stairs.” In 1877, Winsor outlined plans for a similar shelving of several stories with iron framework and iron floors.[283] About this time (Winsor left the Boston Public Library and went to Harvard as librarian in 1877), the first metallic stack (with wooden shelves) was developed and installed in the addition to the Harvard library building. The idea seems due to Winsor, the practical embodiment of it in full stack form to the architects Ware and Van Brunt. The latter described it soon after in the Library Journal,[284] saying, “I am in part responsible for it.”