Miss Stearns: It is always a good plan to put in the publisher and price of the book; if the person gets interested in the book he can find out how much it would cost and where he can get it.
Mr. Brigham: It would be well also to put in the number of pages, so that people know how large a volume it is—150, 250, or 350 pages.
Mr. Dewey: Has any one else tried the use of a wagon, as described by Miss Stearns—going right to the people and reaching the homes? That means going out into the rural districts and dealing with the farmhouses as individual homes. There must be the right person in the wagon, of course, who can stand and speak for an hour perhaps and leave half a dozen or a dozen books to start the work along.
Miss Stearns: That is the only way in the world by which you can find what the people like to read—it is only by visiting the people, getting acquainted with them, going right into their homes. The idea of sending a box of books off in a freight car, not knowing anything about the country or the people it is going to! If you want those books to do good work, you must know where they are going.
Mr. Dewey: That is the way men sell goods. The librarian is just as anxious to place his books to advantage as the merchant is to sell his wares. If he is dealing with the rural community he follows just that method. I am inclined to think that somebody is going to make a great success with those wagons.
Mr. Galbreath: Where the demand for books is strong, as it is in Ohio, and you have all that you can do to supply that demand, should not that be attended to before you go out in a wagon to enlarge your field?
Mr. Dewey: Oh, yes; but in Ohio everybody expects to be President sooner or later.
Mr. Hutchins: Isn't the point this: Where you only supply a demand you reach the intelligent communities first and the neglected communities are left out; but the libraries should reach the neglected communities. We spend too much money in buying books and not enough in educating the people to use the books. It is the same old story. You spend $10,000 for books and not $200 for administration, and the administration is the important point.
Mr. Dewey: There is another analogy. We used to have the schools only for the bright boys. It is a modern idea to give education to the dull, the backward, the blind and the deaf, but nowadays they are all being trained. And we keep finding men who are among the strongest citizens of their age, but who, if we get at their early history, we find were once dull, backward boys that somebody hunted up and started along the right lines.