There are three classes of books—books that give pleasure, books that give information, and books that give inspiration. The first class has its thousands of readers, the second its hundreds, and the third its tens. It is a good thing to read books for pleasure—it is the most innocent kind of drunkenness I know about; but that reading books merely for pleasure may develop into a kind of intellectual dissipation is something that we know from experience; for who is there of us who has not sinned? But reading books merely for pleasure is something we should outgrow in childhood, just as we do stilts and marbles and the game of tag. It is a better thing to read books for information. It is one of the healthiest joys of the normal mind to be forever learning something; forever learning and forever coming to the knowledge of the truth. It is the best thing, however, to read books for inspiration. And this is a class of readers into which many of the frequenters of the public libraries never graduate. Ah! the pity of it! Books that lift us out of ourselves and the fogs and fumes and dust of our little treadmill routines into the ampler ether of loftier altitudes—into the grandeurs of life! Emerson and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Whitman—do men love such as these and remain little men? No, this is the meat from which giants are grown; here is the food for souls. Now it seems to me it is the duty of the good librarian, one who believes in the august nature of his profession, to lead up his readers by all devices within his power, by imperceptible gradations, through the books that please and the books that inform, to the books that inspire. And the librarian who drops a boy before he learns to love John Milton has only brought him half his journey, and has dropped him before he has reached the destination to which his fare was paid.
Why do not people read the best books? One reason is they never see them. It is a librarian's business to keep them in sight, his next business is to read them himself, and his next business is to talk about them whenever he can get an audience of fifty, or five, or one; to write about them in his monthly bulletins and let every man know he can get them, and welcome, by stretching out his hand. We all know how Tom Sawyer got his fence painted. He made all the boys in his neighborhood believe that fence painting was great fun. The librarian should make all the boys in his neighborhood believe that reading the best books is genuine pleasure. They can be brought to an appreciation of this pleasure as one is brought to the height of a tableland of a great continent, by gradations so gradual that they seem to be walking on a flat surface.
I believe that the great destiny of the public library is as yet but faintly foreseen. The plain truth is that the library has not tried yet to do its best. It has opened it doors and let people come in, if they so desire, or if they happen to be passing that way. No successful auctioneer does business according to any such method. On the contrary he lifts up his voice to all it may concern, and to all that do not care that there are about to be great bargains at his place. The business man who opens his store and then forever holds his peace has his solitude very infrequently interrupted by customers. The church that has no missionary spirit is as tepid as the old church of Laodicea. The schoolmaster whose pupils absent themselves too frequently collects his daily audience, even if he has to call in the services of the truant officer. All this is written with something of the same wisdom. I do not believe it should always wait for people to come to it; it should go to the people. Every family in every city or town where there is a library should be offered a library card, or as many cards as it has adult members. Sometimes there is so much red tape prerequisite to obtaining a library card that a bashful man does not dare to make the attempt. Let us not shut the people off from the books that they have paid for by a barbed wire fence of red tape. Let every man or woman, yes, or child, too, that is old enough, be personally canvassed and offered a library card. Then sell him a catalog at cost price, or better still, at less than cost, and tell him how to use it. Ah, but our trustees will say, this will cost something. Yes, it will cost something, but it will be a tremendously profitable investment, and pay immense dividends later on in a more intelligent citizenship and wiser and happier men.
From all this I wish it might be inferred that no librarian can be too great for his position. It is not easy for him to have too much knowledge, too much tact, too much consecration to his work, too exalted an estimate of his possibilities. He should not have a mind with a flange on it, so that it forever runs on the small rail along the dusty roadbeds of routine. Let him originate, let him innovate, let him blaze his path with the pioneers—let him think.
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