How often have we, wearied and hurried, hastily taken a few herbs and apples, only to feel later the solemn scorn of a wasted opportunity.
There are probably few libraries today, outside the very small ones, that do not employ book lists, more or less elaborate in form, to call attention to their resources. These can be used to good advantage to recommend the purely literary attractions of the library's collection. But there are book lists and book lists. To some librarians a book list is a list of books, and nothing more. The newest member of the staff can take his subject, a pencil and a pad, and look in the card catalog under the proper heading, and lo! the list is made! And it is worth just about the amount of work put into it. A successful list requires far more than this. The books must be carefully selected by some one who knows them. If there are annotations, they must really annotate. If your brief note adds nothing that the public wishes to know, it is wasted. The number of entries, the title, the arrangement, the paper, and the print, all are important in deciding the popularity of a list. A distinction needs to be drawn between the list for students and the list for popular reading. The former may be very full, but experience tends to show that the latter should be brief—twenty-five entries at the longest; and many times, ten would be better. Ten great autobiographies, ten world-famous dramas, ten literary masterpieces—the very titles hint at that multum in parvo which gives popularity to collections like Dr. Eliot's five-foot library. To read five feet of books and find oneself simply but sufficiently armed and equipped to hold one's own with any university giant, how enticing it sounds! and how simple. The public dearly loves superlatives—"the best," "the most famous," "the greatest." If any librarian doubts the drawing power of these phrases, let him make a trial of them. A knowledge of psychology may be a great aid in library work.
To be successful, the compiler of a book list should thoughtfully consider whom he hopes to reach by it and then take measures to see that it reaches them. Advertise your list, and do not for a moment think that great literature, because it is great, needs no advertising. If your local paper will say that the library is distributing a fine list on the immortal Greek tragedies, far more people will be interested in that list than if you merely hand it out at your delivery desk.
The most encouraging thought in regard to the promoting of the reading of the best books by means of lists is the broad field from which the books can be selected. The true book-lover in library work often feels like Tantalus—seeing all the time so much he would like to read and cannot. And so he turns with avidity to preparing for more fortunate mortals lists, not only of the things he has read and loved, but of the things he would love to read. Poetry, drama, essays, biography, letters, travel—here is a world from which to choose.
Supplementing the lists and adding to their attractiveness are collections of the books themselves. In large libraries most people are more or less at sea. Who has not seen them wandering aimless and bewildered from shelf to shelf, and who has not noted the relief with which they turn to almost any small selection of books. Many libraries have kept statistics showing the circulation of books placed on special shelves, and it is invariably found that it is much higher than that of the books kept in their regular places. This has passed the experimental stage. Today we know that we can in this way increase the use of any books we select. There are just as good books in the stack, but they will not be read to anything like the same extent. A library has in its delivery room certain shelves on which appear all the new books that are bought, regardless of class. The circulation from these shelves is notably large. After a varying length of time these books are sent to the regular shelves. Immediately the use of them decreases. Books that were read almost continuously while they were on the special shelves only go out occasionally. But take them back to one of the small miscellaneous collections in the delivery room and they immediately begin to circulate again. The merchants learned long ago that people buy what they see, and so in all the stores a large amount of stock is on the counters for inspection. Librarians have learned that people also read what they see. In both cases, however, the methods adopted to secure patrons are influenced by the natural limitation as to the amount that can profitably be seen. The experienced clerk does not show the prospective buyer too many different kinds of cloth, lest he should become confused, be unable to decide, and refrain from buying. So with the reader. He can select something satisfactory from a single case of books, when row after row of them gives him mental vertigo. So do not say to him, "Here is all Greek literature—choose." But bring together on a table or a shelf a few books and say, "Here are a dozen of the greatest tragedies in the Greek language. All of them are worth reading. Take one."
But when you have brought together this little collection and called attention to it, never think your work is done. After a little while change it for something else. The wonted soon becomes out-worn. When the collection is new, it is regarded with interest. Leave it too long, and people cease to see it. They walk past the shelf with a subconscious feeling that they know what is there. The thing to cultivate in them is a delightful uncertainty as to what they will find, coupled with the expectation that it will be something different from what they saw last time. Change we must have. Here again we may take a lesson from the merchant. Time, thought, and money are spent on preparing a beautiful window display. Does the proprietor settle back and say, "This is the high-water mark. We cannot arrange a better window than this; therefore we will make it permanent." Not at all. He realizes that while at first it will draw crowds, after a bit it will become an old story. He must offer something fresh. So get together a collection of the best books; call attention to them; get your public in the habit of looking for them; but change them frequently. The infinite variety of literature is such that its presentation need never become stale.
One method of introducing people to the best literature seems comparatively little used in this country, though common in England, and that is the lecture course. It is generally affirmed that the American people no longer care for lectures. Forms of popular entertainment wax and wane. The New Englander of the middle nineteenth century was an enthusiastic attendant of lectures and there can be no doubt that he owed much in an intellectual way to the habit. Almost all of the best-known literary and public men of that period either went on lecturing tours or gave readings from their works. Their influence was thus greatly extended and an interest awakened in things worth while to an extent otherwise impossible. The old-fashioned lecture certainly compares favorably in its results with many methods of entertainment in vogue today. It is to be feared that the latter, far from stimulating mental life, are conducive to inertia of thought. It would be an interesting experiment for the libraries to attempt a series of lectures on literary lines and see if their old popularity could be revived.
Another way of calling attention to the best in literature seems wholly neglected by libraries; and, surprising as it seems, this is through their bulletins. Nearly all large, and many small, libraries publish a bulletin, but little has been done to develop this important library agency. Here is a field that may well be cultivated. Most publications have to put much money and work into the task of securing readers. Our clientele is already provided by the patrons of our institutions. Because the bulletin gives a list of new books, and because many of the reading public are interested in new books, they read our bulletins. Why do we not give them something more than a bare list of accessions? If we wish to make our influence felt in the character of the reading in our communities, this is our opportunity. The work may be difficult, but it is certainly worth attempting.
All librarians have viewed with mingled feelings of wonder and amusement those ingenious literary ladders, by which the unsuspecting reader is triumphantly led from Mary J. Holmes to Thackeray. During the library experience extending over a number of years, the present writer has hopefully watched for an instance of some individual reader climbing this amazing structure, but she has watched in vain. It is not my aim to show how the reader of Ella Wheeler Wilcox's poems may be induced to change to Milton; or how a devoted lover of Gaboriau may follow a blazed trail that shall lead via Münsterburg's study of criminal psychology to William James; or by what methods Jack London's "Call of the wild" might eventually end in Darwin's "Origin of species." This puzzling task must be left to some more ambitious soul. But in every community there is a class of people, be it smaller or larger, to whom an attractive presentation of the stimulating qualities of real literature would appeal; and if such a presentation was rightly made, they would respond. Will not some library make trial of this method? Let it publish in its bulletin a series of brief articles about the great books, telling what they have meant in the past, what they mean today; showing them as sources of inspiration and of consolation; making it clear that any one who has made himself master of their treasures can never be mentally poor. Then let that library report the outcome and tell us whether, in its opinion, it paid. The trouble with too many library experiments is that the experimenters never seem to follow them up and tabulate their results. The schemes sound fine, but as to their actual working there is much haziness. Librarians are notably ready and anxious to learn from one another, and a plan reported as being tried in one place is likely to be immediately started in many others. If libraries would carefully investigate the actual results achieved by their various devices, and report their failures as well as their successes, much wasted effort might be avoided.