In response to your kind invitation to send a brief message on the subject—"Can public libraries legitimately attempt amusement as well as instruction of the people?" I would reply to the affirmative. If literature is an art, and if libraries are to be as they should be—reservoirs of literature—they surely cannot be complete without giving an important place to arts' most human appeal, amusement. The novel, invented to amuse, stands today as the vital force in literature. Of course, by "amusement" I do not mean a vaudeville. Shakespeare wrote to amuse; and if he does not offer a popular line today it is because modern writers are better chosen to amuse our century. Indeed, if you remove the fiction department—the amusement section—from your library you reduce it to the plans of a machine—an admirable machine, perhaps—but without a human soul to drive it.
Sincerely yours,
WALLACE IRWIN.
Carnegie Institution of Washington,
Washington, D. C.,
June 5, 1913.
The specific question which you propound, "What can the library do to encourage the study of American history?" is one which I suppose must have very different answers for different sorts of libraries. In the case of libraries of moderate size in small cities, it has sometimes appeared to me that the money used in the purchase of books on American history was too exclusively used in buying the less expensive sort of books, those in one or two or three volumes, of which it is perfectly easy to get a considerable number out of each year's appropriations; while on the other hand, the purchase of certain books of value in expensive sets was never made, because it could not easily be made in any one given year. If the purchasing policy were given a somewhat longer range, extending over several years, one might plan to redress this inequality. To avoid speaking as if I were recommending any one long set of Americana for purchase, let me adduce as an instance a library of forty or fifty thousand volumes with which I am familiar which has in the past twenty years bought a great many books of English history, without ever yet having afforded the purchase of the Dictionary of National Biography, obviously because it was too large a morsel for any one year's budget.
If I were to proceed to make any suggestion for the larger libraries, I might select for comment the relative lack of co-operation among such libraries in respect to the pursuit of the more expensive specialties. It is plain that the interest of students are, in respect to restricted specialties of this class better served on the whole by their being able to find relatively complete collections in one place, rather than scattered fragments of such collections in various places. The ambition of libraries for possession might well be tempered by some closer approach to systematic organization of these things, whereby certain ones should be recognized as belonging plainly in the field of a certain library without competition on the part of the others. I am speaking, of course, of things which only a few students are seeking, and which they must expect to seek by travel, and not of those things for which there is a separate effective demand in every large city.
May I also suggest the question whether it is not a legitimate use of the funds of a public library to pay recognized experts, resident in its city or summoned from elsewhere, to go over the shelves relating to a particular subject and carefully signalize those gaps which are almost certain to occur; to name, in other words, any important books which have been omitted but which are necessary to make the collection a well-rounded one for the needs of the particular locality as the librarian sees them. I think also that university and college libraries are particularly in need of such periodical redress, because professors are so prone to request books needed for the immediate purposes of their classes, and to exhaust their appropriations by such requests, forgetting the need of building up rounded collections for general purposes; and the librarian, on his part, feels a certain delicacy about suggesting books for which the professor has evinced no desire, though often he will agree they were desirable, if their absence were called to his attention. Believe me
Very truly yours,