Or pale Urania’s deep and starry eyes.
Bryan Waller Procter.
LIBRARY is the scholar’s workshop. To the teacher or professional man, a collection of good books is as necessary as a kit of tools to a carpenter. And yet I am aware that many persons are engaged in teaching, who have neither a library of their own, nor access to any other collection of books suitable to their use. There are others who, having every opportunity to secure the best of books,—with a public library near at hand offering them the free use of works most valuable to them,—yet make no effort to profit by these advantages. They care nothing for any books save the text-books indispensable to their profession, and for these only so far as necessity obliges them to do so. The libraries of many persons calling themselves teachers consist solely of school-books, many of which have been presented them by accommodating book-agents, “for examination with a view to introduction.” And yet we hear such teachers talk learnedly about the introduction of English literature into the common schools of the country, and the necessity of cultivating among the children a wholesome love and taste for reading. If inquiry were made, we might discover that by a study of English literature these teachers understand some memoriter exercises in Shaw’s “Manual” or Brooke’s “Primer,” and that, as to good reading, some there are who are entertained more deeply by Peck’s “Bad Boy” than by Shakspeare’s “Merchant of Venice.” Talk not about directing and cultivating the reading-tastes of your pupils until you have successfully directed and cultivated your own! And the first step towards doing this is the selection and purchase of a library for yourself, which shall be all your own. A very few books will do, if they are of the right kind; and they must be yours. A borrowed book is but a cheap pleasure, an unappreciated and unsatisfactory tool. To know the true value of books, and to derive any satisfactory benefit from them, you must first feel the sweet delight of buying them,—you must know the preciousness of possession.
You plead poverty,—the insufficiency of your salary? But do you not spend for other things, entirely unnecessary, much more every year than the cost of a few books? The immediate outlay need not be large, the returns which you will realize will be great in proportion to your good judgment and earnestness. Not only will the possession of a good library add to your means of enjoyment and increase your capacity for doing good, it may, if you are worldly-minded,—and we all are,—put you in the way of occupying a more desirable position and earning a more satisfactory reward for your labors.
There are two kinds of books that you will need in your library: first, those which are purely professional, and are in the strictest sense the tools of your craft; second, those which belong to your chosen department of literature, and are to be regarded as your friends, companions, and counsellors. I cannot, of course, dictate to you what these books shall be. The lists given in the chapters which follow this are designed simply as suggestive aids. But in a library of fifty or even thirty well-chosen volumes you may possess infinite riches, and means for a lifetime of enjoyment; while, on the other hand, if your selection is injudicious, you may expend thousands of dollars for a collection of the odds and ends of literature, which will be only an incumbrance and a hindrance to you.
“I would urge upon every young man, as the beginning of his due and wise provision for his household,” says John Ruskin, “to obtain as soon as he can, by the severest economy, a restricted, serviceable, and steadily—however slowly—increasing series of books for use through life; making his little library, of all the furniture in his room, the most studied and decorative piece; every volume having its assigned place, like a little statue in its niche, and one of the earliest and strictest lessons to the children of the house being how to turn the pages of their own literary possessions lightly and deliberately, with no chance of tearing or dog’s-ears.”[17]
And Henry Ward Beecher emphasizes the same thing, remarking that, among the early ambitions to be excited in clerks, workmen, journeymen, and indeed among all that are struggling up in life from nothing to something, the most important is that of forming and continually adding to a library of good books. “A little library, growing larger every year, is an honorable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessaries of life.”
“How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?” asks another enthusiastic lover of books, already quoted. “If a man spends lavishly on his library, you call him mad,—a bibliomaniac. But you never call any one a horse-maniac, though men ruin themselves every day by their horses, and you do not hear of people ruining themselves by their books.... We talk of food for the mind, as of food for the body: now, a good book contains such food inexhaustibly; it is a provision for life, and for the best of us; yet how long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it! Though there have been men who have pinched their stomachs and bared their backs to buy a book, whose libraries were cheaper to them, I think, in the end than most men’s dinners are. We are few of us put to such trial, and more the pity: for, indeed, a precious thing is all the more precious to us if it has been won by work or economy; and if public libraries were half as costly as public dinners, or books cost the tenth part of what bracelets do, even foolish men and women might sometimes suspect there was good in reading, as well as in munching and sparkling; whereas the very cheapness of literature is making even wise people forget that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.”