One almost wishes that all the members of the library association of America would write to Andrew Carnegie, snow him under with letters from the nation, asking him to try the experiment of having at least one of his libraries in the United States fitted up as elaborately and as elegantly with librarians as it is with dumb waiters, marble pillars, book racks and umbrella stands.
When we go into a library—some of us—we want to feel our minds being gently exposed to cross-fertilization. We may not want librarians to throw themselves at us—come down plump into our minds the minute we enter whether or no, but we do want when we come into a library to be able to find (if we steal around a little), eager, contagious, alluring librarians who can make people read books and from whom people cannot get away without reading books. Every library ought to be supplied with at least one librarian in each department, stuck all over with books, like burrs, so that nobody can touch him or be near him without carrying away a book on him that he's got to read and that he will long to read and will read until somebody drives him to bed!
Faithfully yours,
GERALD STANLEY LEE.
Northampton, Mass.
Greetings and good wishes to the men and women who hold the keys:
I saw in England, last year, a very old library where the books are chained to the shelves. They have always been chained there; at first because they were valuable and human nature was weak, and now to preserve the tradition. But in general, either because the value of books is less or because human nature is less weak, we trust our public with its books unchained. The shelves of most libraries, I understand, are open freely and the loss of books is small—small enough to be disregarded, you tell me, in relation to the general good.
And not only is the public freely admitted. In Northampton I have seen, many times, the books put on wheels and traveling out to the public; they are in a kind of clothes-basket set on a truck with tiny wheels; and the janitor trundles the truck to the trolley, and the trolley carries the books to Leeds or Florence or Williamsburg, it may be—I do not know their destination. I only see them traveling away on wheels. This is only A-B-C to all of you. Most of you could tell me much more interesting things that libraries are doing. Some of you have already seen that it is not enough to put the books on wheels and trundle them out to the public, but that the public itself must be followed and captured. You tell me that in the future the library that would be really up-to-date must catch its readers where it can and chain books to them.
Presently we shall need wings to follow life and bring it back to its books. For life moves swiftly; and you who hold the keys and who are putting books on wheels and sending them out will not stop till the life in books and the life of the world are come together again. Presently we shall all work for this. You have freed the books, you have sent them out, you have reached out to give them to us freely. Presently you will unlock the books themselves and open the pages; and the time when a child studied only a few books will belong to the past; the living use of books will be a part of the life of every child that is born into the world. Presently we shall all work together for this—with you who hold the keys.