Part of an address by President Angell of the University of Michigan—educator, diplomat and statesman—at the dedication of the Ryerson Library Building in Grand Rapids, Mich., Oct. 8, 1904. To advise a reader, Pres. Angell thinks, one must know something of his personal aptitudes. General advice about “good reading” is seldom of great service. A modern note by a great man.
James Burrill Angell was born in Scituate, R.I., Jan. 7, 1829, graduated at Brown University, and after studying abroad, became eminent as an educator, holding first a professorship in his alma mater and then serving successively as president of the Universities of Vermont and Michigan. He was U.S. minister to China in 1880-81 and served on important international commissions. His works on international law and on education are standard. He died on April 1, 1916.
Now that your benefactor has so nobly done his part, it remains for the city to see that the library is maintained and managed in an effective manner. It would not only be an act of ingratitude, but it would be a mockery, if in such an edifice as this we should not find a good and growing and well administered library. There is no more important commission in your city than the commission charged with the care of your library. Let us hope that they will always be chosen with special regard to their fitness for their official duty and without regard to their party affiliations.
Especially is wisdom needed in the selection of your books. It is not so difficult to choose books for the cultivated and scholarly readers. But in a city library you must provide for all your population. Particular care should be had to procure books attractive and useful to your artisans and mechanics and common laborers. They should be led to feel that this is the place where they can most profitably spend a spare hour and can find something to bring new brightness into their monotonous lives. The efforts which you have already initiated to make the library serviceable to the pupils in your schools must now be redoubled. The teachers and the library authorities must always contrive to cooperate heartily. The multiplication of libraries in this country has already elevated the work of the librarian to the dignity of a distinct profession. And no profession promises to be more useful. In addition to the proper organization and care of the library, the influence which a competent librarian can wield in his guidance of the reading and studies of the young is seldom outweighed by that of the teacher or the preacher. In no manner can a generous appropriation of funds for the support of a library be more wisely expended than in securing a competent librarian.
Judging by my own experience and by my observation of others, I doubt whether the guide books which have been written to tell one what works to read have been of great service. The simple reason why they are not very helpful is that to advise one what to read, you should know something of his aptitudes and taste and something of his plans of life. General advice is a shot in the air. It may hit nothing.
But a competent person may give helpful counsels to the young concerning useful methods of reading whatever one does read, and may indeed specify what are some of the best books on certain topics. A good librarian, if leisure enough is left him, may attract and help willing auditors by occasional lectures or informal talks on how to read in a library. But personal suggestions, to meet particular needs, are the most fruitful of good. And just here the school teachers, if competent to advise, can be of the utmost service. In no way can the library be made so valuable as by the hearty and systematic co-operation of the librarian and the teachers. It would be very useful if they could from time to time meet to confer upon the best methods of securing harmonious action. For it is the generation now coming on to the stage who are chiefly to profit by the use of this library. It is through them that the city is to receive its chief benefit. To incite them to read, to train them to right habits of reading, to inspire them with high ideals of what one should seek and love in reading, should be the aspiration of parents and teachers, if this library is to yield its largest harvest of good.
Like all good things, this library may to some persons bring no good; it may even be made an instrument of harm. It may bring no good, because it may be utterly neglected. No doubt there are many families who have never drawn a book from its shelves. It may bring no good, it may even cause intellectual, not to say moral injury, if it is misused. It is possible to choose from any great library such passages from works and to peruse them in such a spirit as to gratify and stimulate prurient desires, or if one does not descend to so unworthy and shameful an act, one may read in such a manner as to be guilty of intellectual dissipation. What we may call the desultory readers are exposed to this danger. They pick up whatever book or magazine comes first to hand, provided they are sure that it makes no tax upon their mental powers. They spend their time dawdling over a chapter of this book, then over a chapter of that, as men of the town now join this gay companion for an hour and then another for the next hour for frivolous talk and profitless gossip, and so wander aimless through the day without any fruitage to show for their time. They lose the power, if they ever had it, of consecutive study and thought and discourse on any theme whatever.
I do not mean to intimate that we should never come to this library to read for pleasure and entertainment. One of the great and proper uses of books is to refresh and amuse us in our hours of weariness and depression. Like the society of our choicest friends, they may wisely be sought for the sole purpose of diverting our minds from the flood of cares and troubles which come in upon all of us. The library may well be