The British museum acquires the new novels as published; but it withholds them from the readers until five years after their date of publication. It is my personal belief that a one year limitation of this sort adopted by our free libraries generally would relieve them of anxiety and expense and their readers of inconvenience and delusion.
But as regards current light literature in general it is worth while to consider whether the responsibility of public libraries has not been modified by the growth and diffusion of the newspaper and periodical press. In 1850, when the free public library was started, the number of newspapers and periodicals published in the United States was about 2,500; now it is nearly 20,000. The total annual issues have increased from 400 million to over 4-1/2 billion copies.
The ordinary daily of 1850 contained perhaps a single column of literary matter. To-day it contains, for the same price, seven columns. In 1850 it gave no space to fiction; now it offers Kipling, Howells, Stockton, Bret Harte, Anthony Hope, Crockett, Bourget and many others of the best of the contemporary writers of fiction.
Then there are the cheap magazines, which tender a half dozen stories for the price of a cigar or a bodkin. There are, also, the cheap “libraries,” which have flooded the United States with engaging literature available to almost any purse.
In short, conditions have altered. A vast mass of light literature is now cheaply accessible to the individual which formerly could be acquired only painfully or at great expense. Why then should the public libraries struggle to supply it in book form at the public expense?
But as to a certain percentage of current light literature there is an embarrassment that I have not touched. It is the embarrassment of making selection without giving offense. All cannot be bought. A choice must be made. With reference to standard literature authoritative judgement is not difficult to obtain. But here there has been no lapse of time to balance opinion. An anticipatory estimate must be attempted and attempted by the library itself.
Now, if the library decide against the book it is very likely held to blame for “dictating” to its readers. “It is one thing,” says a journal commenting on an adverse decision, “it is one thing to consider this novel pernicious, but it is another and more serious thing for the foremost library in the country maintained at public expense, to deny to a large and respectable portion of the public an opportunity to judge for itself whether the work of a man of (this author's) calibre is pernicious or not.”
The author in this case was, of course, not Mr. X., but rather Mr. A., an already known quantity.
So a library is not to be permitted to apply a judgement of its own! It is not protected by the fact that this judgment coincides with the judgment of professional critics—so far at least as these may be ascertained. The author may have turned perverse and written a book distinctly bad. Yet this book is to be bought and supplied to enable each member of the public to form a judgment of his own upon it. And it is to be so bought out of public funds entrusted to the library for educational purposes. Censorship has to us an ugly sound; but does the library act as censor when it declares a book beyond its province? Does it dictate what the people shall read when it says, “We decline to buy this book for you with public funds”?