The Library and Society: Reprints of Papers and Addresses

by Unknown

In the place, therefore, of books inferior in quality, the more modern public library seeks to attract by the freest possible access to books of the best quality. Not that this practice is universal. But the opinion and tendency are in this safe direction.

However, quality assumed, the general question as to the reading of recreative literature remains. What shall we say of the fact that sixty per cent. of the circulation of the free public libraries still consists of fiction?

In the first place, that this percentage takes no account of reference use, which is almost wholly of serious literature; second, that as to home use the ratio in circulation of fiction to serious literature does not represent a similar ratio of trivial to serious service. Fiction is the small coin of literature. It must circulate more rapidly to represent the same volume of real business done. A volume of fiction may be issued, returned and reissued three times while a biography or history or work of science is issued once. It will then count seventy-five per cent. in the circulation. But the serious book has during the entire period been out in the hands of the reader; and the service which it has performed—the period of attention which it has occupied—equals that of the novel in its three issues. And, finally, there is to be considered the influence of the best fiction toward general culture (if the library is not merely to inform but also to cultivate)—in broadening the sympathies, giving a larger tolerance, a kindlier humanity, a more intelligent helpfulness; in affording the rest that is in itself an equipment for work, and the distraction that may save from impulse to evil.

However, the amount of fiction circulated in proportion to the total work of the library is on the average steadily decreasing. At the same time the quality is improving; in part through critical selection, in part as a happy result of the fact that the inferior novels are also, as a rule, inferior books, so poorly manufactured that libraries cannot afford to buy them.

But there is standard fiction and current fiction; and it is the current fiction that constitutes by itself a special problem still perplexing. It is a problem that concerns not the uneducated child, nor the illiterate adult; it is caused by the people of intelligent education who are avid to read the latest novel by Mr. X. or Mrs. Y. while it is still the latest novel by Mr. X. or Mrs. Y. It is being talked about at dinner or afternoon tea. Well-informed people are reading it; to read it is a social necessity.

The reason that presses the public library to supply promptly every most recent book in the domain of scientific literature is apparent enough. Such literature contributes facts which are the data for action. But novels in general belong to the literature of power. Their purpose is not to furnish information but to give pleasure. Literature of this sort adds no new fact, nor is it superseded, nor does it lose any of its value by lapse of time. To assume that it does would be to assume that beauty of form could become obsolete. This is not so in painting, in sculpture, in architecture; why should it be so in prose fiction, in poetry, in the drama? Was there, in fact, an aesthetic value in the Canterbury Tales in 1380, in Hamlet in 1602, in Ivanhoe in 1819, that is not to be found in them in 1898?

But a large portion of latter day fiction is fiction with a purpose; another way of saying that it is a work of art composed for the dissemination of doctrine. This element promotes it at once to the dignity of a treatise; a new view of politics, a new criticism of social conditions, a new creed! Here is something that concerns the student of sociology. And surely his needs are worthy of prompt response.

In fact, his needs and the general curiosity do get prompt response, and the new novels are freely bought. How freely I have recently sought to ascertain. I asked of some seventy libraries their yearly expenditure for current fiction in proportion to their total expenditure for books. The returns show an average of from ten to fifteen per cent. In one case the amount reached fifty per cent., in others it fell as low as two per cent. The ratio for fiction in general is much higher on the average; but fiction in general includes Scott and Thackeray and other standards, an ample supply of which would not usually be questioned. At Providence and Worcester, two of the most active and popular of public libraries, the purchases of fiction, current and standard, formed last year but seven and eleven per cent., respectively, of the entire expenditure for books.

At Boston there were selected but 178 titles of current fiction (out of nearly 600 read and considered). But some dozen copies were bought of each title, so that the entire purchases reached 2,300 volumes and cost about $2,300. This was about six and a half per cent. on a total expenditure for books of $34,000. At St. Louis the practise is to buy but two copies out of the general funds to be circulated free. Nearly a hundred more are added which are rented out and thus pay for themselves.

The statistics do not seem to show that the initial expenditure for current fiction is very alarming. But the purchase price of these books is but a fraction of the expense of handling them. They cannot be supplied in adequate quantities; for while the frenzy of curiosity persists, an adequate supply is beyond the resources of any library. But since the attempt to supply is futile the pretense is injurious. The presence of the titles in the catalogues misleads the reader into a multitude of applications which are a heavy expense to the library without benefit to him. And the acquisition of the single book means to the library the expense of handling a hundred applications for it which are futile to one that can be honored. In this sense a current novel involves perhaps a hundred times the expense of any other book in being supplied to but the same number of readers.