The Library and Society: Reprints of Papers and Addresses

by Unknown

The first stage of all such legislation is an enabling act—authorizing the establishment of a library by the local authorities; the next is an act encouraging such establishment by bounties; and New Hampshire has reached a third by a law actually mandatory, requiring the local authorities to establish free libraries in proportion to their means and the population to be served. This seems to mark the high-water mark of confidence in the utility of these institutions. It indicates that free public libraries are to be ranked with the common schools, as institutions indispensable to good citizenship, whose establishment the State for its own protection must require.

So the movement has progressed, until now these 2,000 public libraries combined are sending out each year over 30 million books, to do their work for good or ill in the homes of the United States. The entire 2,000 result from one conviction and a uniform purpose. Yet among them there is every variety in scope and in organization. There is the hamlet library of a hundred volumes, open for a couple of hours each week in some farm house, under a volunteer custodian, maintained by the town, but enlisting private contribution through bazaars and sociables—sending out its books by the local provision dealer to its remote and scattered constituents. There is the library of the great city, with elaborate equipment and complex organization to meet a vast and complex need. Such a library as you may find at Chicago; a city which, though it has two great endowed reference libraries, still considers its million and a half people entitled to a municipal library, with a two million dollar building, studded with costly mosaics, and aided by forty branches and stations in bringing the books nearer each home. Or such a library as exists at Boston; organized as a City Department, under Trustees appointed by the Mayor, maintained, like the schools, or the police, or the fire department, by general taxation; with a central building which has cost the city two and one-half million dollars, with ten branch libraries and seventeen delivery stations scattered through the city and reached daily by its delivery wagons; with 700,000 books; and accommodations for over 2,000 readers at one time; including in its equipment such special departments as a bindery and a printing office; requiring for its administration over 250 employes, and for its maintenance each year a quarter of a million dollars, in addition to the proceeds of endowments; and representing in its buildings, books and equipment an investment of over five millions of dollars, the interest on which, at four per cent., to the expenditure for maintenance, is equivalent to an annual burden of $450,000 for its creation and support.

When this function was first proposed for a municipality, the argument used was that in this country books had come to be the principal instruments of education; that the community was already supporting a public school system; that this system brought a youth to the threshold of education and there left him; that it qualified him to use books, but did nothing to put books within his reach; and finally that it was of “paramount importance that the means of general information should be so diffused that the largest possible number of persons should be induced to read and understand questions going down to the very foundation of social order, which are constantly presenting themselves, and which we, as a people, are constantly required to decide, and do decide, either ignorantly or wisely.”

A glance at the libraries now in operation in the United States shows that the ends proposed for them fall far short of the service which they actually perform. They begin with the child before he leaves school; while he is still in his elementary studies they furnish to him books which stir his imagination, and bring the teaching of the text books into relation with the art and with life. They thus help to render more vivid the formal studies pursued; but they also prepare the child to become an intelligent constituent hereafter. This work cannot begin too early, for four-fifths of the children pass out into active life without reaching the high schools. It need not be deferred, for now the number is almost countless of books that touch with imagination and charm of style even the most elementary subjects; and the library can add illustrations which through the eye convey an impression of the largest subjects in the most elemental way.

If the library begins with the citizen earlier than was foreseen, it is prepared to accompany him further than was thought necessary. It responds not only to the needs of the general reader, but also to those of the student and even, to the extent of its means, to those of the scholar engaged in special research. The maintenance of universities at the common expense is familiar in the West; it is less so in the East. And there is still contention that institutions for highly specialized instruction should not be charged upon the community as a whole. But no one has questioned the propriety of charging upon the community the support of a library whose leading purpose may be the encouragement of the higher scholarship.

Finally, to the services just above described the public library has added another: the supply of books for proposes purely recreative. This service, if anticipated, was certainly not explicitly argued for; nor was it implied in Edward Everett's prediction that the public library would prove the “intellectual common” of the community. The common that Mr. Everett had in mind was a pasturage, not a baseball ground, or lover's walk, or a loafing place for tramps.

But as regards certain of the books customarily supplied, the ordinary public library of to-day is furnishing recreation rather than instruction. In fact, if we look at the history of free public libraries in this country, we find that the one point of practice on which they have been criticised is the supply of merely recreative literature. The protest has come from thoughtful persons, and it means something, lightly as it has been waved aside.

The excuse that used to be given for the supply of inferior books was that they would entice to the use of the better books. There was to be reached a mass of persons of inferior taste and imperfect education. These persons must be introduced gradually to an acquaintance with the better class of reading through the medium of the familiar. And, at all events, it was better that they should read something than not read at all.

I am not quite so confident of the regenerating virtue of mere printed matter as such; and I am confident that the reading of a book inferior in style and taste debases taste, and that the book which sets forth, even with power, a false view of society does harm to the reader, and is so far an injury to the community of which he is part. But even granting the premises, the conclusion is doubtful. We do not deliberately furnish poor art at public expense because there is a portion of the public which cannot appreciate the better. Nor when the best is offered, without apology, does the uncultured public in fact complain that it is too “advanced.” Thousands of “ordinary” people come to see and enjoy the Abbey and Chavannes and Sargent decorations in the Boston Public Library. No one has yet complained that the paintings are too advanced for him. The best of art is not too good for the least of men, provided he can be influenced at all. Nor are the best of books too good for him, provided he can be influenced, and provided they are permitted, as are the pictures to make their appeal directly. They must not be secluded behind catalogs and formal paraphernalia. The practice which admitted the scholar to the shelves, and limited the general reader to the catalogues, gave the best opportunity to him who least needed it. The modern practice sets before the reader least familiar with good titles a selection of good books. It places them on open shelves where he can handle them without formality. The result is almost invariably, that he is attracted to a book in advance of his previous tastes. Perhaps a chance paragraph appeals to some experience or ambition, or an illustration stirs his imagination. The books themselves draw him outside of his previous limitations.