LIBRARY ESSAYS
PAPERS RELATED TO THE WORK OF PUBLIC LIBRARIES

LIBRARY ESSAYS
PAPERS RELATED TO THE WORK
OF PUBLIC LIBRARIES

ARTHUR E. BOSTWICK, Ph. D.
· ·
·
THE H. W. WILSON COMPANY
NEW YORK
1920

PREFACE

The author of these papers began his service in librarianship in April, 1895. He celebrates his silver jubilee by gathering them into a single volume. Before becoming a librarian he had worked for many years as teacher, editor and journalist, and the use of the pen having become second nature, he took it up in behalf of libraries and librarians, somewhat sooner, perhaps, than experience would warrant. However, the papers reflect to a certain extent the progress of library work during the past quarter century.

A. E. B.

CONTENTS

LIBRARY ESSAYS
PAPERS RELATED TO THE WORK
OF PUBLIC LIBRARIES

PAINS AND PENALTIES IN LIBRARY WORK[1]

In somewhat the same way as Irving makes Diedrich Knickerbocker begin his history of New York with the creation of the world, so we may open a discussion of this subject with a word on the theory of punishment. We all know that neither moral philosophers nor penologists are agreed in this matter. Do we inflict punishment to satisfy our eternal sense of justice, to prevent further wrong-doing on the part of the person punished, as an example to others, or to reform the delinquent? So far as the justicial theory goes, it is unnecessary here to discuss whether it is founded merely on the old savage feeling of revenge, which having done its part in ensuring punishment to the wrong-doer in the uncivilized past, should now be put aside. As a matter of fact the rule, “Let no guilty man escape,” is a very good one for practical purposes, whatever its theoretical implications. Why should it be necessary to proceed according to any one theory in administering punishment? Practically in the home, at school, and in the courtroom the simple administration of justice does very well for us, and when we go a little farther into the matter we see that each of the other elements enters into consideration. Certainly it is so in the library.

Penalties for the infraction of our rules should be so inflicted that future wrong-doing both on the part of the culprit and on that of the remainder of the public becomes less likely than before. Whether we always do this in the most satisfactory way may be queried.

Punishable acts committed in a library may be divided, according to the old ecclesiastical classification, into mala prohibita and mala in se; in other words, into acts that are simply contrary to library regulations and those that are absolutely wrong. To steal a book is wrong anywhere and does not become so merely because the act is committed in a library; but the retention of a borrowed book for fifteen instead of fourteen days is not absolutely wrong, but simply contrary to library regulations.

The keeping of books overtime is a purely library offence, committed against the library and to be punished by the library; and with it may be classed such infractions of the rules as failure to charge or discharge a book, loud talking or misbehavior below the rank of really disorderly conduct, such injury to books as does not constitute wilful mutilation, the giving of a fictitious name at the application desk, etc.

For all these strictly library offences the favorite penalties seem to be two in number—the exaction of a fine and exclusion from library privileges—temporary or permanent. The former is more used than the latter, and I venture to think unjustly so. From the sole standpoint of punishment the great advantage of a fine is that it touches people in their most sensitive point—the pocket. But this is a ganglion whose sensitiveness is in inverse proportion to its size; in one case the exaction of a cent means the confiscation of the possessor’s entire fortune; in another the delinquent could part with a hundred dollars without depriving himself of a necessity or a pleasure. Of course this lack of adaptability to the conditions of the person to be punished is not confined to this one method. Imprisonment, for instance, may be the ruin of a life to the hitherto respectable person, while to the tramp it may simply mean a month’s shelter and food. But in the case of a money penalty the lack of adaptability is particularly noticeable, and hence wherever it is exacted a large portion of the public comes to forget that it is a penalty at all. Instead of a punishment exacted in return for the commission of a misdemeanor and intended to discourage the repetition thereof, it is looked upon as payment for the privilege of committing the misdemeanor, and it in fact becomes this very thing. Thus, in states where there is a prohibitory law, and periodical raids are made on saloons with the resulting fines, these fines often become in effect license fees, and are so regarded by both delinquents and authorities. Where a municipality provides that automobiles shall not be speeded in its streets under penalty of a heavy fine, the wealthy owners of motor-carriages too often regard this as permission to speed on payment of a stated amount, and act accordingly. So in the library, the fine for keeping books overtime is widely regarded as a charge for the privilege of keeping the books longer than the formal rules allow. Being so regarded, the fine loses a great part of its punitive effect, and largely becomes in fact what it is popularly thought to be. Thus we have a free public library granting extra privileges to those who can afford to pay for them and withholding the same from those who cannot afford to pay—an extremely objectional state of things.

In making this characterization I am aware that the sale of additional facilities and privileges by a free library is regarded as proper by a large number of librarians, and that the extension of systems of which it is a feature is widely urged. It is found in the St Louis plan for fiction, which has been so successful, and still more in Mr. Dewey’s proposed library bookstore. That all these plans are admirable in many ways may be freely acknowledged. In so far as they may be adopted by endowed libraries they are certainly unobjectionable. But in spite of their advantages, it seems to me that their use in an institution supported from the public funds is a mistake. The direct payment of money to any institution so supported, even if such payment is logically justifiable, is open to so much misconstruction and is so commonly misunderstood or misinterpreted, that I would hold up as an ideal the total abolition of all money transactions between the individual members of a public and institutions supported by that public as a whole.

The present subject evidently does not justify further discussion of this point, but its mention here is proper because if library fines have become in many cases payments for a privilege, that very fact should lead those who agree with what has been said above to strive for their abolition.

Another objection to the fine, which is, curiously enough, also the chief reason why it is almost hopeless to look for its abolition, is the fact that wherever fines have been applied they have become a source of revenue that cannot well be neglected. In a village not far from New York the receipts from bicycle fines at one time nearly paid the running expenses of the place. Agitation in favor of substituting other methods of punishing the cyclists who ride on the sidewalks and fail to light their lamps at sundown would evidently be hopeless here. In the same way receipts from fines have become a very considerable source of income in large libraries, and are not to be neglected even in small ones. This is apparent in the following table[2]:

Evidently the abolition of fines in these cases would mean a reduction of income that would make itself felt at once.

Now, of course, the knowledge that the detection of wrongdoing is financially profitable to the detector results in increased vigilance. So far, that is a good thing. But it goes farther than this: it makes the authorities strict regarding technicalities; it may even lead to the encouragement of infraction of the law in order that the penalties may reach a larger amount. In the town that is supported by bicycle fines we may fairly conclude that no resident calls the attention of the unwary cyclist to the warning sign, past which he wheels toward the sidewalk. To do so would decrease the village revenue and raise taxes. So too, what librarian would wish to adopt any course that will certainly reduce the money at his disposal for salaries and books?

Supposing, however, that this loss can be made up in some way, is there anything that can be substituted for the fine? It has already been stated that suspension from library privileges is in use as a penalty to a considerable extent, and there seems to be no reason why this should not be extended to the case of overdue books. There might, for instance, be a rule that for every day of illegal retention of a book the holder should be suspended from library privileges for one week. The date of expiration of the suspension would be noted on the holder’s card, and the card would not be returned to him before that date.

This plan would probably have interesting results which there is not time to anticipate here. But as long as books cost money and librarians refuse to work altogether for love, financial considerations must play a large part in library changes. The only way in which fines can be abolished without decreasing income is to make the abolition a condition of an increased appropriation, which, of course, could be done by the appropriating body. The making of such a condition is extremely unlikely. Hence, if we agree that fines are undesirable we must regard their abolition as an unattainable ideal. We may, however, treat them so as to minimize their bad effect, and this, I believe, may be done in either or both of the following two ways:

(1) We may emphasize the punitive value of the fine and at the same time increase its value as a source of revenue by making it larger. This would doubtless decrease the number of overdue books, and the exact point where the increase should stop would be the point where this decrease should so balance the increase of fines as to make the total receipts a maximum; or, if this maximum should greatly exceed the revenue received from fines under the old arrangement, then the rate could be still farther increased until the total receipts fell to the old amount. The practical method would be to increase the fines by a fraction of a cent per day at intervals of several months, comparing the total receipts for each interval with that of the corresponding period under the old arrangement; and stopping when this sum showed signs of decrease.

(2) We may give the librarian the option of substituting suspension for the fine whenever, in his judgment, this is advisable. This is the course pursued by the law when it gives to the trial judge the option of fining or imprisoning an offender. In cases where a fine is no punishment at all, and where books are kept overtime deliberately, suspension from library privileges would probably prove salutary. A variant of the second plan would be to allow the culprit himself to substitute suspension for his fine. This in effect is what the offender in the police court does when he avows that he has not the money to pay his fine and is sent to jail to work it off. At present when a library offender is manifestly unable to pay his fine there is usually no alternative but to remit it or to deny the culprit access to the library until it is paid—in many cases an unreasonably heavy punishment.

Of course there is no reason why all these modifications of existing rules should not be made together. According to this plan fines would be raised and suspension would be substituted in any case at the librarian’s option and in all cases where the person fined avows that he is unable to pay his fine. The rates can be so adjusted that under this plan there is no decrease of revenue, but rather a net increase.

Of course the adoption of such rules would be regarded by a large portion of the public as a curtailment of privileges, but such an outcry as it would probably raise ought not to be objectionable as it is a necessary step in the instruction of the users of a library regarding the proper function of penalties for infraction of its rules. These rules are for the benefit of the majority and the good sense of that majority ought to, and doubtless would, come to the rescue of the library authorities on short notice.

As long as the library fine is a recognized penalty, numerous petty questions will continue to arise regarding its collection, registration, and use. Any exhaustive treatment of these is impossible in the limits of a single paper and I have chosen to neglect most of them in order to dwell on the question in its larger aspects. It is the exaction of the fine, after all, that is the library penalty—the money is part of the library income and its collection and disposition are properly questions of finance. One point, however, regarding the disposition of the fines bears directly on what has been said. In municipal public libraries like that of Boston, where the city requires that the fines shall be turned directly into the public treasury and not retained for library use, the substitution of a different penalty would presumably involve no diminution of income. From ordinary considerations of equity, however, it seems to me that this disposition of the fines is objectionable. If the fines are to be turned into the city treasury they should be placed to the credit of the library appropriation as they are in Brooklyn.

Regarding the collection of fines there are one or two points that bear directly on their efficiency as a punitive measure. First, shall fines be charged? It seems a hardship to refuse a well-known member a book because he does not happen to have with him the change to pay a 15 cent fine. This point of view, however, loses sight again of the element of punishment. When the delinquent who is fined a dollar in the police court does not have the money with him, does he request the magistrate to charge it and send in a bill for the month’s penalties all at once? The true method, I am convinced, is to insist on cash payment of fines, and if this is done promptly their character as penalties will be more generally recognized.

Another point in regard to the collection of fines is their effect on the assistants themselves. In every library a stream of money passes in at the desk in very small amounts. This must all be accounted for, and we have the alternative of requiring vouchers for every cent or of simply keeping a memorandum account and seeing that the cash corresponds with it at the close of the day.

This latter plan, in some form, is usually adopted. To misappropriate funds under these circumstances is not difficult, and I submit that it is not right to place a large number of young girls in a situation where such misappropriation is easy and safe. In spite of Mark Twain, who prays that he may be led into temptation early and often, that he may get accustomed to it, I do not believe that this is a good general policy to pursue. We all know of cases where assistants have fallen into temptation, and we should not hold the library altogether blameless in the matter. But on general principles such a plan is not good business. Every one who is responsible for money collected must show vouchers that he turns over every cent that has been given to him. Why should the library assistant be an exception? I look to see some form of cash register on every charging desk in the ideal library of the future, nor can I see that its use would be a reflection on the honesty of the assistants any more than the refusal of a bank to cash an improperly endorsed check is a reflection on the honesty of the holder.

This is on the supposition that we are to retain the fine as a penalty. Such considerations, of course, weigh down the balance still more strongly in favor of its abolition.

I have devoted so much space to the penalty for keeping books overtime because the rule on this subject is the one that is chiefly broken in a free public library. Other offences are usually dealt with by suspension, and very properly so. For the loss or accidental injury of a book, however, a fine is again the penalty, and here, as the offence is the causing of a definite money loss to the library, there is more reason for it The money in this case, indeed, is to be regarded as damages, and its payment is rather restitution than punishment. Even here, however, the argument against money transactions with a free institution seems to hold good. There is no reason in the majority of cases why he who loses or destroys a book should not give to the library a new copy instead of the price thereof, and for minor injury suspension is surely an adequate penalty.

Here we may pause for a moment to ask: What right has a library to inflict any penalties at all? I must leave the full discussion of this question to the lawyers, but I am quite sure that libraries, like some other corporations, often enact and enforce rules that they have no legal right to make. To cite an instance that came under my own observation, the Brooklyn Public Library’s rules were for more than a year, according to good authority, absolutely invalid because they had not been enacted by the Municipal Assembly, and that library had no right to collect a single fine. Yet during this time it did collect fines amounting to several thousand dollars, and not a word of protest was heard from the public. In this and similar cases we are getting down to first principles—the consent of the governed; which, whether based on ignorance or knowledge, is what we must rely on in the end for the enforcement of law in self-governing communities. I am afraid that it is this general consent, in a good many instances, that is enabling us to enforce our regulations, rather than any right derived from positive law. To take a related instance, it is by no means certain that libraries are not breaking the law of libel every time they send out an overdue postal notice. The courts have held that a dun on a postal is libellous, and our overdue cards specifically inform the person to whom they are addressed that he owes money to the library, and threaten him with punishment if the debt is not paid. Yet although occasional delinquents remark that the law is violated by these postals, public libraries in all parts of the United States continue to send them out by thousands daily with few protests. This seems clearly a case where the public consents to a punitive measure of doubtful legality, and approves it for the public good.

The second of the two classes into which we have divided infractions of library rules consists of those that are also contrary to statute law or municipal regulation. How far shall these be dealt with purely from the library standpoint, and when shall they be turned over to the public authorities? If a small boy yells at the desk-assistant through door or window he is a disturber of the peace; if he throws at her some handy missile, such as a vegetable or a tin can, as occasionally happens in certain sections of unregenerate New York, he is technically committing an assault; shall he be handed over to the police?

Of course one must not treat trifles too seriously. Yet probably libraries have been somewhat too timid about dealing with petty offences. There is an unwillingness to drag the libraries into the police reports that seems to be a relic of the days when all libraries were haunts of scholarly seclusion.

The modern public library cannot afford to be considered an “easy mark” by those who wish to indulge in horse play or commit petty misdemeanors, and in some cases it is in danger of getting this reputation.

When we come to more serious offences, the library’s duty is clearer. Theft, wilful mutilation of books, or grave disorder must of course be punished. In many cases, however, the detection of the first two offences is very difficult. Theft from open shelves is easy. For the thousands of books lost yearly in this way hardly a culprit meets punishment. I have known a professional detective to confess that the open shelf baffled him. “If you will only shut the books up,” he said, “I can find out who takes ’em; but here everybody is taking out books and walking around with them.” When the professional acknowledges himself beaten, what shall the librarian do? Mutilation is even harder to detect. In both these cases the offender has simply to wait his opportunity. Sooner or later there will be a second or two when no assistant is looking, even if the man is under long-standing suspicion, and in that brief time the book is slipped into the pocket or the leaf is torn out. Even when the offender is caught in the act, the magistrate may not hold, or the jury may fail to convict. A persistent mutilator of books in one of our branch libraries escaped punishment last winter because the custodian of the reading-room where he was caught did not wait until the leaf on which he was working was actually severed. The man asserted that the sharp lead pencil that he was using to separate the leaf was merely being employed to mark a place, and thus by confessing to a minor defacement he escaped the penalty of the more serious offence.

For a library that is thus forced to appeal continually to the law to protect its assistants, its users, and its collections, a manual of library law would be useful, and I am not sure that the appointment of a committee of this Association to take the matter in charge would not be eminently justified.

It is the misfortune of this paper that it has been obliged to dwell on the darker side of library work. It is hardly necessary to remind an audience of librarians that this is not the prominent side. All users of a library are not delinquents or law-breakers, and the assistants have other and better work than to act as fine-collectors and detectives. The sombre effect of what you have just heard should have been dispelled by a paper on “Rewards and delights of library work,” but this the Program Committee has seen fit to omit, probably because it is not necessary to emphasize the obvious.

HOW LIBRARIANS CHOOSE BOOKS

The form in which this subject is stated removes it from the region of ethics and brings it down to the hard realms of fact I am not to tell you how librarians ought to select books, but how they do select them. I shall assume, however, that you do not care to have this paper filled with instances of abnormal and unprofitable selection, but that you wish to hear of the normal and the unobjectionable. Booksellers tell us that many buyers of books are governed in their choice by the color of the covers, and I have suspected that some librarians are influenced in the same way. Some librarians appear to object to works that are less than one century old; others are on record as discouraging the purchase of fiction less than one year of age. Some librarians have a prejudice against certain classes of books and an inordinate love for others.

The only things that should be considered by the librarian in buying books for his library are the needs of the community that he serves, the capability of the various books under consideration to satisfy those needs, and the financial ability of the library to secure what is needed.

I shall take up these points in order. First, the needs of the community. These are not necessarily to be measured by its demands, otherwise the librarian’s labor would be considerably lightened. Unfortunately, when a community needs a given class of books very desperately it is often serenely unconscious of the fact. To the librarian falls the task not only of determining what the need is and of filling it, but also of arousing a wholesome consciousness of it. In this educational work he may be, and often is, aided by the teacher, the clergyman, or even by the users of the library themselves. Hence the importance of getting in touch with all the agencies that may do work along this line. There is nothing that calls for more tact. With the children it is comparatively easy to point out a deficiency, but a direct attempt with a self-respecting adult may end in disaster, and a season or two of well-meant effort may result in weakening the librarian’s influence or even in losing him his position. But one can rarely teach tact to the tactless, and tact is something that every librarian must have, so that this lopping-off process, after all, may simply be regarded as a phase of nature’s elimination of the unfit. One way of ascertaining the proportional demand for various classes of literature in a community, is by examining the class-percentage of circulation. By comparing these with the corresponding volume percentages we may see whether the demands of the community are being met, and by comparison with the percentages of an ideal library we may see whether such demand ought to be met or not. Of course, the ideal is somewhat indefinite. One may accept the suggested proportions in the A.L.A. catalog, or average those of several libraries of high class; or one may construct an ideal of one’s own. In any case, the ideal proportions will evidently vary with conditions of place and time. To show how this test may be applied, consider the percentage of science circulated last year in the New York Public library. This varied from 3 to 28 per cent in the various branches, and was 9 per cent for the whole library. The percentage of science on the shelves similarly varied from 6 to 18 per cent, and was also 9 for the whole library. In our library sociology and philology are included in the science report, and the percentage of these three classes combined in the old A.L.A. catalog is 17. If this is to be taken as the standard, therefore, the library as a whole falls below it, though individual branches approach or even exceed it. As a whole, however, the demand and the supply balance pretty well. There is no doubt, however, that in this and most other libraries the demand in this class is too small and needs stimulation. Of course, this is brought up merely as an instance of how fertile this comparison of percentages is in information, and how valuable in ascertaining whether the demands of a community are supplied, and whether they ought to be supplied, along any given line.

We will assume that either in the ways indicated, or in some other, the librarian has satisfied himself that he understands what his community needs. How shall he find the books that will satisfy that need, and when they are found (or, still more, when they obtrude themselves on his notice) how shall he know that they are what they claim to be?

In order to find what he wants, the librarian naturally turns at first to such classed bibliographies as he has at hand, including publishers’ trade lists. Unfortunately, books very rapidly become out of print, and if his bibliography or list is even two or three years old he cannot be sure that his work of selection is not in vain. The value of the A.L.A. catalog has been much impaired by its inclusion of out-of-print books, and as, now that it is several years old, the number of these is increasing daily, its use has become more and more vexatious, both to librarians and publishers. It is to be hoped that in the new edition now preparing the out-of-print books will be omitted. Fortunately we now have at our disposal yearly alphabetical lists of in-print books. Such are the index to the Trade list annual and the United States catalog for American editions, and the Index to the reference catalog of current literature for British books.

If the needs of your library require that some one class should be largely replenished, you may call in expert knowledge. Some teacher or student who is a specialist in that subject is generally not hard to find, and his advice will be of the greatest value. Special bibliographies are valuable in inverse ratio to their length—a complete list of works on Egyptology, for instance, is hardly more valuable to the ordinary small library than a full, unclassified list of books in-print on all subjects.

The majority of the small library’s purchases are books as currently issued. For these the Publishers’ weekly is indispensable. Some librarians prefer to look at every book before purchasing, and arrange with publishers or booksellers to send large numbers of books weekly or even daily on approval. This, if there is sufficient time, is a good plan, but it is certainly wasteful. There are many books which we can surely reject or accept from the author and title entry in the Publishers’ weekly as well as if the actual book were in hand. If a mistake is made it will be, or should be, discovered as soon as the book is received, and the volume can then be exchanged. Only the doubtful books need be asked for on approval, and these will generally be found to constitute a relatively small percentage of the whole.

The data on which the librarian may rely to accept or reject from a mere list of books are: 1) the author’s name; 2) the title, with such brief annotation as may follow it; 3) notices in the book magazines; 4) the publisher’s name. The author stands for much—the style, method of treatment, the fitness to print of what he has to say, the readableness of his book, and so on. We all know that there are authors whom we can absolutely rely on in these respects, either for acceptance or rejection. It is thus necessary that the librarian may know the uniformly good author and the uniformly bad ones; but experience must be his guide, as this lies somewhat without the scope of the present paper. The title should tell us something about the contents of the book, but, unfortunately, the aim of the title-maker is too often not to give information but to stimulate curiosity. In some cases this is carried so far that the title of a book leaves us in absolute ignorance as to whether it is sociology, travel, or fiction. One is, therefore, generally obliged to refer to some kind of descriptive note to get the desired information. Such notes are often appended to lists and the librarian does well to remember that they are generally not intended to be critical. For criticism we must go to the reviews, and here I have always felt, and still feel, that the librarian has a real grievance. The book periodicals are many, and every daily paper has its critical page. This mass of matter is made accessible through the recently issued Index to books reviewed. Yet with it all there is not one place where the librarian may look for brief notes on current books, telling him just what he wants to know and no more, and with the confidence that the information is quite free from bias. In saying this I am quite ready to give credit to our best book reviews for their many good qualities. What I mean is, that the reviews are written for the reader or the bookseller, never for the librarian. In making use of those at his disposal the librarian must learn to discriminate, to weigh authorities, and to pick out the occasional sharp needle of valuable criticism from the haystack of discursive talk.

Lastly, the selector may rely on the name of the publisher. This may tell him much or little, but it may at any rate guarantee good paper and type, and it may also assure him that the book contains no improprieties. Unfortunately, it cannot insure against dullness—publisher’s readers are but mortal, and the best will occasionally reject a pearl and take in a pebble.

When all is said and done, of course the intelligent man who has read a book carefully knows more about it than he could have found out by reading all the annotations and reviews in the world. The librarian of a small library can read every book under consideration. The head of a large library cannot do this; the larger his daily or weekly order, the more he must rely on the recommendations and opinions of others, and even the books that he orders on approval he cannot read himself.

Here, perhaps, is the place to note that not every librarian is his own selector. The responsible decision in these matters rests, of course, in most libraries, with a committee of some sort; but if the librarian is one in whose judgment this committee has confidence (and no other should hold the position at all) he will have a practically free hand. For decision in regard to doubtful books, especially current fiction, some libraries have special reading committees, often composed of ladies, but it can hardly be said that the results arrived at in this way are satisfactory. It is vastly better for the librarian to select a few persons, either on his staff or outside of it, on whom he can rely to give him information, after reading a book, on specific points regarding which he may require it. Especially in considering current fiction should the reader be able to distinguish between mere outspokenness, such as we find in the Bible or Shakespeare, and immoral or degrading tendency. The ordinary woman reader, especially the young woman, will often condemn a book for frankness when its tendency is decidedly good, and pass a clever, pleasant tale whose influence on many persons is bad, though conveyed entirely by indirection. Of course the librarian or the committee may make a general rule to exclude frankness, which, personally, I think is a mistake, though I am free to acknowledge that there are boundaries beyond which even a well-meaning writer should not be allowed to go.

Of course, I can say but a word here on the trash question in fiction. But be not, I pray, too stern a censor. When selecting for a free public library judge books largely by their fruits. If a story sends a boy out with a pistol to play robber—somewhat too much in earnest—it is surely bad; if it makes him love justice and incline to pity, it cannot be altogether out of place in a library though it may be unreal and inane. Its characters may be wooden puppets to you, while to the young reader they are heroes, full of the divine qualities of courage, sympathy, and tenderness. As the reader thinketh so is the book—not as you, wise critic, in your plentitude of knowledge, would have it to be.

The third consideration that must govern us in our choice, though I have put it last, is really the controlling one. Unless there is something in the treasury we may choose books all day, and our selection is as unavailing as the street child’s choice of jewels in a shop window; and the more money one has at one’s disposal, the easier it is to spend it. I must speak of the library’s finances here, however, only as they affect the librarian’s choice of books. Given a specified book appropriation, the librarian must often have to decide upon the best way to spend it, and upon the proper distribution of expenditure over the year.

All these things influence his choice more or less. From one point of view it seems well to expend the greater part of the amount as soon as it becomes available, especially if a large number of pressing needs have been waiting for satisfaction. The trouble is that one cannot foresee what needs will also press for satisfaction during the coming year. Another plan is to distribute the expenditure pretty evenly without making any too strict rule in the matter.

With the first arrangement the librarian will be apt to buy a good many of the larger and more expensive works—and, perhaps, be sorry for it afterward. With the latter he will purchase more current literature and satisfy his readers better, though the general quality of his purchases may not be so high.

Perhaps a compromise may bring the best results. He who decides at the outset what reference works he can afford to buy during the year, and how much he must spend at once on replacements and duplicates, and after deducting these fixed charges from his appropriation divides the remainder into weekly or monthly portions for current purchases, will not go far wrong.

To the financial section of this discussion belongs also the question of editions. Shall the librarian choose the best or the cheapest? Which is the best and which is the cheapest for his purpose? In the first place, we may exclude the extremes. Editions de luxe have no place in the ordinary free library, and, on the other hand, we should not think of offering to a self-respecting reader books printed on bad paper with worse type, simply because they can be purchased at a phenomenally low figure. But between these two there are many grades of beauty and durability. Here, as elsewhere, there is safety in the golden mean. As far as bindings of exceptional durability go, the question of paying extra for them depends on the use that is to be made of the book. If it will circulate so little that the ordinary binding will last twenty years, why spend money for anything stronger? Again, if it get such hard treatment that it must be replaced in a year’s time, why put on it a binding that would outlive ten years of such vicissitudes? Still again, with current books of popular interest, the library cannot wait to have them put into special bindings, but for standard, popular works, which will have steady but not hard use, and which can be ordered three months before they are to be used, money spent on special bindings may be economy in the end. Here, however, we are drifting a little way from our subject.

The three points that we must take into consideration in selecting books, namely, the community’s need, the determination of what books will satisfy it, and the consideration of how far the library’s financial condition will allow it to go in that direction, have been treated separately, but it must be evident that they are in reality so closely connected that they act and react on each other. No one of them can in practice be considered apart from the others. Thus the first necessity of the library may be books on music, and a secondary need may be books on water supply. It may so happen, however, that a complete and up-to-date work on the latter subject, we will say, has just been issued at a moderate price, while the works on music most needed are expensive. The result would be quite different from that reached by a consideration of the first point alone. Again, we will take the case of a large library with a book appropriation large enough to buy practically all that it wants in current literature. This fact drops point third out of consideration entirely and modifies both the others considerably. If the library wants both music and hydraulics, and has money enough for only one, we must consider carefully which can best be spared; but if the funds are at hand for both, all this thought is not needed. In like manner, even if there are funds for both, but only for one or two books on each subject, we must select the books we need most, which we need to do if we have money to buy all we want on both subjects. In short, the work of selecting is more difficult, as has been said, with a few books than with many, but the consolation must be that the result is better. The temptation, when one has plenty of money, is to let selection go by the board altogether and to garner in wheat and tares alike, trusting to the public to do the sorting.

We may be almost alarmed to learn from the physiologist of the complicated vital processes that go on within us, of which the cessation means death, and yet of which we remain in daily ignorance. These things often regulate themselves. The selection of books, like the inflation of the lungs, may be performed almost automatically, yet with substantial success. It is instructive to see how nearly the class percentages in the ordinary library approximate to the average without any conscious regulation by the librarian. The community is apt to get about what it needs in fairly good quality and without running its library into debt. Yet there can surely be no harm in analyzing a little the work of selection, nor can there be any objection to supplementing by conscious action work that has gone on, however well, chiefly in the combined subconsciousness of a librarian and the community.

Especially is this desirable in making the distinction, already emphasized at the opening of this paper, between what the community wants and what it needs. The fever patient who needs acid sometimes cries for a pickle, and thus cures himself in spite of his nurse; but it is more commonly the case that the patient’s need is masked by some abnormal desire, and that he cries for pork-chops or lobster, or something else that would kill him. We can hardly give up the nurse, therefore, provided she knows her business, and part of that business is to realize the difference between a mere want and a vital need.

So with the librarian, the nurse of the reading public. Left altogether to themselves her patients may kill themselves with pork or lobster; it is her business to see that such an untoward event does not occur.

Those of us to whom this duty has been intrusted, whether we are librarians, trustees, or the members of book-committees, deserve both the good-will and the sympathy of the public; and, like the western organist, I pray that we may not be shot. We are doing our best.

THE WORK OF THE SMALL PUBLIC LIBRARY

We cannot too often remind ourselves of the fact that a circulating library is a distributing agency, and as such has points in common with other such agencies. The whole progress of civilization is dependent on distribution—the bringing to the individual of the thing he wants or needs. The library’s activities are, therefore, in the same class with commerce, and the tendency of modern changes in the library is to make the analogy closer and closer. To recognize this fact is by no means to degrade library work. All workers fall into the two great classes of producers and distributors. Civilization can get along without neither; we must have the farmer to grow the wheat and the railway to market it; we must have the author to write the book and the publisher and the bookseller and the librarian to place it in the hands of those who can use it. The librarian is not a producer; he takes the product of other people’s brains and distributes it; and his problem is how to do this most effectively.

Do not misunderstand me. There have been some recent protests against treating the library as a commercial instead of an educational institution. The free library is not a commercial institution, but it is an agency for distributing something, and there are also hundreds of other agencies for distributing other things. The objects and the methods of distribution are various, but certain laws apply to all kinds of distribution. Hence we may learn a good deal about library work by examining to see what it has in common with other kinds of distribution and in what respect it differs from them.

Now, the prime factors in any kind of distribution are: 1, the products to be distributed; 2, the persons to whom they are to be distributed; 3, the distributors and methods of distribution. I know no better way of laying the basis of an efficient and successful distribution than the brief study, in order, of these three factors.

First let us consider the things that we are to distribute, namely, books. And at the outset let us remember that although these things are apparently material, as much so as butter or hats, they are much more than this. They are the vehicles for conveying ideas, so that a library is a concern for the dissemination of ideas. This brings it in line with another great intellectual and moral distributing agency—the school. In the school the distributor is more often a producer than in the library, especially in the universities, where the discoverer of new facts or laws himself imparts them to his students. Yet the school is essentially a distributing rather than a producing agency. In the school, however the means of distribution are not limited, while in the library they are pretty strictly confined to the printed book. I know that there are some people who believe that the library is growing out of such restrictions, and that its mission is to be the distribution of ideas through any and all mediums—the spoken word, in lectures; the pictures, in exhibitions of art; the museum specimen; and so on. We should welcome all these as adjuncts to our own business, and when we have mastered that business thoroughly perhaps we may take them up each on its own account. Those who love books, however, will want to see the distribution of books always at the head of the library’s activities.

And it may be kept there, provided we make everything else in the library serve as guide-posts to the printed records on the shelves. A picture bulletin, for instance, may be both beautiful and useful, but it should never be an end in itself. It is the bait, if we may so speak, for the list of books that accompanies it. The pictures excite the interest of a child who sees them and he wants to know more about them. The list tells him where he can find out, and the result is increased use of the library. In like manner if you have a lecture course, or a loan exhibition in your library, see that it is made a means of stimulating interest in your books.

I have said that in distribution we bring to the individual what he wants or what he needs. That sounds a little tautological, but it is not. A man often wants whiskey when he doesn’t need it at all, and conversely a boy sometimes needs a whipping—but he doesn’t want it. So with the reading public. They often want fiction of a class that they do not need, and have no longing for books that would really benefit them. Here we may mote a difference between the free library and all merely commercial systems of distribution. As the purpose of the latter is to make money, wants are regarded rather than needs. But even with a store there are limitations. If any one wants an injurious article—for instance, a poison or an explosive—the law steps in to prohibit or regulate. And even outside the limits of such regulation, the personal sense of responsibility to the community that governs the actions of an honest merchant will prevent his attempting to satisfy certain wants that he believes would better remain unsatisfied. So, too, certain books are without the pale of the law—they would be confiscated and the librarian would be punished if they were circulated. Beyond these there are many books that we do not circulate simply from our sense of general responsibility to the community.

The difference between our work and that of the merchant in this regard lies chiefly in the more extended scope left for our own judgment. No librarian thinks of circulating illegal literature; his only care is to exclude such of the allowable books as he believes should not, for any reason, be placed on his shelves. Here, sometimes, popularity and usefulness part company. The librarian may yield entirely too much to the wants—the demands—of the community and neglect its needs. His aim should be to bring the wants and the needs into harmony so far as possible, to make his people want what will do them good. This might be dubbed “the whole duty of a librarian.” Few, I am afraid, attain to the full measure of it, and too many fail even to realize its desirability. Of course if you can bring the full force of a reader’s conscience to bear on his reading—if you can make him feel that it is his duty to read some good book that strikes him as stupid, you may make him stick to it to the bitter end, but such perfunctory reading does little good. The pleasure one gets in reading is a sign of benefits received. Even the smile of the boy who reads George Ade is a sign that the book is furnishing him with needed recreation. The pleasure experienced, we will say, in reading Shakespeare is of course of a far higher type; yet I venture to say that if that pleasure is absent, the benefit is absent too. Nine-tenths of the distaste felt for good standard books by the average reader is the result of the mistaken efforts of some one to force him to read one of these books by something in the nature of an appeal to duty. There is no moral obligation to read Shakespeare if you do not like it, and if a friend persuades you of such an obligation you are apt to end by rightly concluding that he is wrong. But with this conclusion comes an unfortunate distaste for good literature; a conviction that standard works are all dull, and that the only kind of pleasure to be had from reading is the most superficial kind. The moral for librarians is: cultivate in your readers a taste for good literature; get them into the frame of mind and the grade of culture where they like Shakespeare and then turn them loose. No injunctions will be necessary; they will not cease to read until they have devoured the utmost sentence.

But how shall this taste be cultivated? I wish I knew. I wish I could give you a formula for causing the flower of literary appreciation to unfold. The rule is different in every case. First and foremost there must be something to cultivate. You cannot go out into the desert with watering-pot and raise strawberries or asparagus. But you can take a poor little spindling plant and dig about it and fertilize it until it waxes into a robust tree whose branches are laden with big, juicy ideas. If you are skilful enough to find out what intellectual germs there are in your reader’s mind you can cultivate them little by little, but if you throw Shakespeare and Milton at the heads of all alike they will be likely to fall on barren ground. The golden rule for making your library both attractive and useful (the two things go hand in hand) is to adapt your books to those aptitudes of your readers that need and will bear cultivation.

This means that in selecting books for your library you must not disregard the demands and requests of your readers. It also means that you must have the acuteness to detect what they ought to request. It may be, for instance, that near your library is the home of some great industry employing large numbers of intelligent mechanics who would gain both enjoyment and benefit by reading some of the technical literature bearing on their work. Only it has never occurred to them to think that this literature, much of it perhaps expensive or inaccessible, can be obtained at the public library. It is your business to get it, if you can, and to let them know that you have it and that they are welcome to read it.

Remember, too, that he gives twice who gives quickly. Much of the ephemeral literature of the day, which is purchased for recreative purposes, is rightly and properly read for curiosity. People like to read the latest book and talk to each other about it. We are all embryo critics. This desire to read the last thing out, just because it is the last, has had anathemas piled on it until it ought to be crushed, but it is still lively. I confess I have it myself and I cannot blame my neighbor if he has it too. Unless we are wholly to reject the recreative use of the library or to accept it with a mental reservation that the public shall enjoy itself according to a prescribed formula or not at all—we shall have to buy some of these books. I am afraid that otherwise some future historian of literature may say of us in parody of Macaulay’s celebrated epigram on the Puritans and bearbaiting, that the twentieth-century librarian condemned the twentieth-century novel, not because it did harm to the library, but because it gave pleasure to the reader. Now, if we are going to buy this ephemeral literature, we must get it quickly or not at all. The latest novel must go on your shelves hot from the presses, or stay off. And this is true of much other literature that is not ephemeral but that depends for its effect on its timeliness. It will certainly lose readers if it is not on your shelves promptly, and if it deserves readers, as much of it does, the net result is a loss to the community.

So we come next to the question of readers. How shall we get them? What kind do we want, and how shall we reach that kind? In commercial systems of distribution the merchant gets customers in two ways: by giving good quality and good measure and by advertising. Some kind of advertising is generally essential. Even if your community is a very small one it is right that you should occasionally remind it of your existence and of what you have to offer. Legitimate advertising is simply informing people where they can obtain something that they are likely to want. The address of your library should be in your railway station; in the schools; in the drug store. Your latest accessions should be announced in the local papers and bulletined in the same places. When you have an item about your library that would interest the reader send it yourself to the paper. There is nothing undignified about this. Do not forget that you are in charge of certain articles that the public needs and desires and that it is your business to let the public know it. The new-comer to your town cannot know intuitively that your library is at such and such an address; the old resident who likes to read Howells cannot ascertain by telepathy that you have just received the last volume by his favorite author. You may even send a special card of information to a reader who you know will be glad to get it.

One would think that if there was anything distinctive about our systems of distribution, commercial or otherwise, it was the great degree to which we advertise and the money that we spend in so doing. But with it all, this feature in its misdirected energy and lack of method is the weak point of the whole system. Much of the money spent in advertising is devoted to attempts to get people to buy what they do not want. Any one knows that when he desires a very special or definite thing it is often impossible to find it, though it may be next door. In our library work, so far as readers are concerned, our weak points are two: first, failure to make known our presence and our work to all who might use the library; second, failure to hold our readers. These things are both serious. We ourselves see so much of libraries that we find it difficult to understand how large a proportion of any community is ignorant of them and their work. In large cities, of course, this is more likely to be the case than in small towns. Yet if you will compare the number of names on your registration list with the population you serve, even making allowance for the fact that each book withdrawn may be read by several persons, and deducting young children who cannot read, you will be surprised at the discrepancy. There are many people who do not know of your library’s existence or who do not realize what it means. Your first duty is to find some way of giving them the information and of seeing that they shall not forget it.

Regarding the second failure, you may get some idea of that if you will compare the growth of your registration list with that of your circulation. The circulation never grows as fast as the membership. It may even be stationary or decreasing while new users are coming in daily. The fact is, of course, that former users are all the time dropping off. Why do they drop off? It is your business to find out and to keep them if you can. The librarian in a small community has a great advantage in this respect, for she can know her constituency personally and keep track of them individually.

But the personal relations of the librarian and her assistants with the public belong as much in the third section of our subject as in the second. The importance of them cannot be exaggerated. I am not sure that I should not prefer a sunny-faced, pleasant-voiced, intelligent, good-tempered assistant in a tumble-down building with a lot of second-hand, badly arranged books, rather than the latest Carnegie library stocked with literary treasures if these had to be dispensed by a haughty young lady with monosyllabic answers and a fatigued expression. I know of no more exasperating duty than that of continually meeting a library public—and I know of no pleasanter one. For the public is just you and me and some other people, and like you and me it is various in its moods. The mood of the public in a library is often a reflection of that of the librarian. The golden rule here is direct personal contact; and don’t forget the last syllable—tact. Don’t force your services or your advice on people that neither wish nor require them, but don’t forget that you may have pleasant, intellectual intercourse without offering either aid or advice. When an aged man who knows more of literature than you dreamed of in your wildest visions wants “The Dolly dialogues,” don’t try to get him to take “Marius the Epicurean” instead. But if you get into the habit of talking with him it may make the library seem pleasant and homelike to him, and, besides, he may tell you something that you do not know—that is a not remote and certainly fascinating possibility.

I need not say that no library can be useful or attractive unless it is properly arranged and cataloged, and unless it has a simple and effective charging system; and unless the public is admitted directly to the shelves and allowed to handle and select the books. But I do need to say—because some of us are apt to forget it—that these things are not ends in themselves, but means to an end, namely, the bringing together of the man and the book, the distribution of ideas. Do not assume that for some occult reason you must classify and catalog your library precisely like some large public library with which you are familiar. Do not assume, if you are a trained cataloger, that there is any virtue, for instance, in subject cards. One subject heading that brings the book in touch with your public outweighs a dozen that do not affect it. To bring together man and book break all rules and strike out in all kinds of new directions. Your particular locality and your particular public may have special requirements that are present nowhere else. Rules were made for the aid and comfort of the public, not for their confusion and hindrance. Methods are the librarian’s tools, not his handcuffs and shackles. To do anything well we must do it with method and system; but these, like a growing boy’s clothes, need frequent renewal. If your library has stopped growing and has reached senility, then the same suit will fit it year after year, but premature old age is not a good goal to strive for.

LAY CONTROL IN LIBRARIES AND ELSEWHERE[3]

The system by which the control of a concern is vested in a person or a body having no expert technical knowledge of its workings has become so common that it may be regarded as characteristic of modern civilization. If this seems to any one an extreme statement, a little reflection will convince him to the contrary. To cite only a few examples, the boards of directors of commercial or financial institutions like our manufacturing corporations, our railways and our banks, of charitable foundations like our hospitals and our asylums, of educational establishments like our schools and colleges, are now not expected to understand the detail of the institutions under their charge. Their first duty is to put at the head of their work an expert with a staff of competent assistants to see to that part of it. Even in most of our churches the minister or pastor—the expert head—is employed and practically controlled by a lay body of some kind—a vestry, a session or the like. Government itself is similarly conducted. Neither the legislative nor the executive branch is expected to be made up of experts who understand the technical detail of departmental work; all this is left to subordinates. Even the heads of departments often know nothing at all of the particular work over which they have been set until they have held their position for some time.

It is hardly necessary to say that this system of lay control is of interest to us here and now, because it obtains in most libraries, where the governing body is a board of trustees or directors who are generally not experts, but who employ a librarian to superintend their work.

To multiply examples would be superflous. Lay control, as above illustrated, is not universal, but I postpone for the present a consideration of its antitheses and its exceptions. It looks illogical, and when the ordinary citizen’s attention is brought to the matter in any way he generally so considers it. In certain cases it is even a familiar object of satire. The general public is apt, I think, to regard lay control as improper or absurd.

With the expert and his staff, who are concerned directly with the management of the institution in question, the feeling is a little different. It is more like that of President Cleveland when he “had Congress on his hands”—a sort of anxious tolerance. They bear with the board that employs them because it has the power of the purse, but they are glad when it adjourns without interfering unduly with them.

Are either of these points of view justified? Should lay boards of directors be abolished? Or, if retained, should those without expert knowledge be barred?

Now at first sight it certainly seems as if the ultimate control of every business or operation should be in the hands of those who thoroughly understand it, and this would certainly bar out lay control. I believe that this view is superficial and will not bear close analysis.

The idea that those who control an institution should be familiar with its details appears to originate in an analogy with a man’s control of his own private affairs, when his occupation and income make it necessary that he should attend to all those affairs personally. The citizen who digs and plants his own garden must understand some of the details of gardening. The man who does his own “odd jobs” about the house must be able to drive a nail and handle a paint brush. This necessity vanishes, however, as the man’s interests become more varied and his financial ability to care for them becomes greater. At a certain point personal attention to detail becomes not only unnecessary but impossible. To expect the master of a great estate to understand the details of his garden, his stable, his kennels, as well as the experts to whom he entrusts them, is absurd. He may, of course, as a matter of amusement, busy himself in some one department, but if he tries to superintend everything personally, still more to understand and regulate matters of detail, he is wasting his time.

We must seek our analogy, then, both for lay control and for the attitude of the ordinary citizen toward it in that citizen’s management of his private affairs. He knows his own business—or thinks he does—and he finds it hard to realize that the details of that business could ever grow beyond his personal control.

But, after all, this progress is one towards the normal. Attention to details in the case of the poor man is forced upon him. Except in rare cases, he does not really care to shovel his own snow; he would prefer to hire a man to do it, and as soon as he can he does do so. So long as his sidewalk is properly cleared he is willing to leave the details to the man who clears it. He does not care whether that man begins at the north or the south end, or whether his shovelfuls are small or large.

Here, if we examine, we shall find a common characteristic of those kinds of work where laymen are in control—the persons for whom the work is done care very much about results; they are careless of methods so long as those results are attained. And in a very large number of cases the persons for whom the work is done will be found to be the public, or so large a section of it that it is practically a group of laymen so far as the particular work in question may be concerned.

A lay board of directors or a lay departmental head, then, is simply and properly a representative of a greater lay body that is particularly anxious for results and not particularly anxious about methods. Lay control is thus not illogical, but is the outcome of a regular and very proper development. But, as has been said, it is not the only method of controlling a great institution. An institution may be managed by a graded body of experts. So were the old guilds of craftsmen managed. So are many ecclesiastical bodies, notably the Roman Catholic Church. We may call this method of control hierarchical. It has some advantages over lay control and some disadvantages. We may imagine such a system applied to libraries. All the libraries in a state, we will say, would then be managed by the state librarian, and all these officers would be subject to the orders of the librarian of the national library, who would be supreme and accountable to no one. Without going into detailed discussion of this extremely supposititious case, we may say that the objection to it would be that the persons who are especially interested in the results of the work done are not represented in the controlling hierarchy. Where the persons interested are all experts, as in a guild of craftsmen, there can perhaps be no objection to control by experts; though even in this case we are leaving out of consideration the persons, generally laymen, for whom the craftsmen do their work.

In fact, any trouble that may arise from the lay control of a body of expert workers lies just here—in the failure either of the controlling authority or the trained subordinates to recognize and keep within their limitations. It should be the function of the supreme lay authority to decide what results it wants and then to see that it gets them—to call attention to any deviation from them and to replace those who cannot achieve them by others who can. It should be the part of the expert staff of subordinates to discover by what methods these results can best be reached and then to follow out these methods.

When the lay head attempts to direct the details of method, or when the trained subordinate thinks it his duty to influence the policy of the institution, then there is apt to be trouble.

Such results are apt to follow, on the one hand, the inclusion in a board of trustees of a man with a passion for detail and a great personal interest in the work under him, but without a keen realization of the necessity for strict organization and discipline in his expert staff; or, on the other hand, from the presence in that staff of a masterful man who cannot rest until he is in virtual control of whatever he concerns himself about.

I say trouble is apt to follow in such cases. It does not always follow, for the organization may adapt itself to circumstances. The interested trustee may play with ease his two roles, fitting into his board as a lay member and becoming practically also a part of the expert staff. The masterful subordinate may dominate his board so as to become its dictator, and thus do away for a time with his lay control. We have all seen both these things happen, not only in libraries, but in banks, in hospitals, in charitable institutions. In some cases it has been well that they have happened. But although an occasional stick is flexible enough to be tied into a knot, it would be hazardous to try the experiment with all sticks. Some may bend but more will break.

Is it not better to accept frankly the division of labor that seems to have been pointed out by the development of our institutions for the guidance of their management?

Boards of trustees in this case would find it necessary to decide first on the desirable results to be reached in their work. This is a phase of library discussion that has been somewhat neglected. What is the public library trying to get at? Not stated in vague terms, but in concrete form, so that the trustees can call the librarian to account if he fails to accomplish it? It is only fair to the librarian that he should be informed at the outset precisely what he is expected to do, and then it is only fair that he should be left to do it in his own way.

This is an unoccupied field, and it would be an eminently proper one for the Trustees’ Section of the American Library Association. We librarians should be very glad to know just what you expect us to accomplish, for on that depends our manner of setting to work. Do you wish us to aim at decreasing the percentage of illiteracy in the community? or the arrests for drunkenness? Are we to strive for an increased circulation? And will an absolute increase be satisfactory, or must it be an increase proportionate to population? Is it definitely demanded of us to decrease our fiction percentage? Shall we, in any given case, devote our attention chiefly to the home use or the reference use of the library? Shall we favor the student or the ordinary citizen? These questions, of course, cannot receive a general answer; they must be decided differently in different cases, but at least we may agree on the type of question that it is admissible to answer at all and on the degree of detail to which it is permissible to go in stating a requirement.

For instance, is it admissible for a board to say to its librarian, “The results that we require you to show include the following: A well-ordered collection of books classified according to the Dewey system, bound in half duck and distributed with the aid of the Browne charging system?” I think it will be granted that this would be an attempt to control the details of method in the guise of a statement of desired results. But where shall we draw the line? How specific may be the things that a board may properly require of its expert staff? That is the question whose solution by this Section would be an inestimable benefit to all libraries and librarians. At present there is wide difference of opinion and of practice on this point. Many people would not agree at all with the limitations that have just been laid down; even those who do agree would differ widely over their interpretation.

There is hardly time to anticipate and meet criticism. I shall be reminded, I suppose, that the funds for carrying on the library’s work are in the hands of the trustees, and that one of the main objects of their existence is to see that the money is honestly spent, not stolen or wasted. How can they do this without close oversight of methods? To this I would reply that this important function of the board is distinctly the requirement of a result, that result being the honest administration of the library. The method by which it may be administered most honestly is best left to the expert head. Naturally, if evidence of peculation or waste comes before the board the librarian will be held to account as having failed to achieve the required result of honest administration. In this and in other respects the necessity that the board should know whether or not the desired results are being attained means that the work of the executive officer should be followed with attention. It must be evident, however, that this does not involve control and dictation of methods.

It must also be remembered that what has been said refers only to the administrative control of the institution. The duties of trustees as custodians of an endowment fund, if such there be, or in soliciting and receiving contributions as well as other financial considerations, are separate from this and have not been considered.

Again, I shall be told that the head of the executive staff is not only a subordinate but also an expert adviser of his board. This is true; and as a consulting expert it is his duty to give advice outside of his own administrative field if he is asked for it. It may even be his duty to give it unasked occasionally, but this comes very near to the interference that I have deprecated. He who would tread this borderland must tread softly. On the other hand, the expert may and should ask the advice of members of his board as individuals or of the board as a whole when he needs it and when he feels that it would give him confidence or strengthen his hand. In this whole matter there is a clear distinction between the advisory and executive function on one hand and on the other.

In short, the view taken in this paper may be briefly summed up as follows: Lay control in libraries and elsewhere is a logical and proper development. It would not, on the whole, be well for one who should wish to endow a library to make an expert librarian sole trustee for life with power to select his successor. That would be a fine thing for the librarian, but it would be neither desirable nor proper. It is well that the trustees should be responsible representatives of the lay public, for whose benefit the library is to be conducted. But as the public is interested chiefly in results, the trustees should confine themselves largely to the indication and requirement of these results, leaving methods in the hand of their expert staff of subordinates. And it is eminently desirable that librarians should hear from a representative body of trustees some expression of opinion regarding the extent of this limitation.

THE WHOLE DUTY OF A LIBRARY TRUSTEE: FROM A LIBRARIAN’S STANDPOINT[4]

At a former meeting of this section the present writer had the honor of reading a paper in which he made an attempt to show that the trustee of the public library is the representative of the public and, as such, interested especially in results as distinguished from methods, which are the business of the librarian as an expert administrator. In making this distinction I urged trustees to give particular attention to the formulation of such results as they should consider desirable, that librarians on their part might confine themselves more to the consideration of appropriate methods for the attainment of these results. So far as I know, however, this work remains to be accomplished, and it is because I still think it desirable that I welcome this opportunity of restating the situation and making some attempt to illustrate it and to indicate what may and should be done in the premises. According to this view it is not only the duty of a board of trustees to consider what should be the results aimed at by its library, to formulate its conclusions, to communicate them to the librarian and then to hold him responsible for their attainment, but everything that the board may properly do may be brought under this head; and to state it broadly is therefore to set forth comprehensively the “whole duty of a trustee,” which may serve as the justification of my somewhat ambitious title.

The layman’s influence, control exercised by and through the viewpoint of the general public, is a most excellent thing, however much the expert may chafe under it. This is apparent in every art and craft. The expert, the man who has made a study of technique, of the way to do it, comes more and more to think of the method rather than the result—to elaborate detail and manner and to take keen joy in their recognition and comparison. So it is with the worker in art or in literature, and thus we have what are called painter’s pictures and musician’s music and poet’s poems—works that interest and delight those whose business it is to produce them, but which leave the general reader or hearer cold. It is evident that these, no matter how valuable or interesting they may be from one standpoint, are not the highest examples of their class. Better are the crude attempts of native genius which kindle enthusiasm and arouse the best impulses while breaking every canon of art. Best of all, of course, are the works where the technique and the result are both admirable and where the technical resources of the workers are brought to bear consciously, directly and successfully upon the attainment of the result. And to produce such works two forces must generally co-operate—the trained skill and enthusiasm of the artist and the requirement of the general public that his work must appeal to them, interest them, take them a message. Now this is of interest to us here and now, because, just as we occasionally have “composer’s music” and “architect’s buildings,” so, it is “to be feared, we may have librarian’s libraries—institutions that are carried on with the highest degree of technical skill and with enthusiasm and interest and yet fail of adequate achievement because the librarian makes the mistake of regarding the technique as an end instead of as a means—of thinking that if his methods be precise, systematic and correct, good results must needs follow, instead of aiming directly at his results and adapting his methods to their attainment.

It is here that the trustee, as the official representative of the general public, may apply a corrective influence. In the case of the artist or the writer this influence is brought to bear generally in a financial way—by a wealthy patron who will order a picture or statue provided it accords with his own ideas—by hostile criticism, public or private, that drives away purchasers. In a public library, public opinion rarely makes itself felt in this way; indeed, it could do so only in cases where disregard of the public amounted to mismanagement and led to the reduction of appropriations or the discharge of the librarian. Public criticism, as in the press, might also affect a librarian’s course; it undoubtedly often does, but it need not; and he may safely disregard it as a general thing. When, however, his board of trustees calls him to account, he must listen, and when it tells him what he is expected to do, it is then his business to devise the best way to do it.

A rough classification and analysis of the results that a librarian may be expected to accomplish may not be out of place here. We may treat them under four heads: financial, educational, recreational and social.

Financial results.—A library must show a good material return for money expended. By this is meant that its books and supplies must be purchased at fair rates, its salaries reasonably proportioned to quantity and quality of services rendered, its property economically administered. A board of trustees is derelict in its duty if it does not require all this, and also hold its librarian rigidly to such requirement. This means that it must, along the broadest lines, know the ratio of expenditure to return in these various departments; it does not mean that the librarian should be hampered by the prescription of details. It means, for example, that the expert administrator should be called to account if his bills for lighting and heating are excessive, and that he should be asked to show cause why they should not be kept within bounds; it does not mean that he should be required to use lights of a certain candle-power or turn off the light in a particular room at a given hour. In most libraries, the making of annual appropriations under designated heads and the requirement that cause shall be shown for a transfer from one of these categories to another, are sufficient measures of financial control.

Among the financial results that have already attracted the attention of the public and hence engaged the interest of boards of trustees is the attainment of a proper ratio of expenditure for books to the expense of administration. This ratio is generally regarded by the lay critic as abnormally small, but trustees have generally acquiesced in the librarian’s explanation of the causes that seem to him to make it necessarily so. It is undoubtedly the trustee’s duty to call his expert administrator’s attention to this and all other seeming discrepancies in expenditure, and to make sure that they are not carrying the library too far toward technical perfection at the expense of practical efficiency.

Educational results.—It is only right to require that a library should be able to show that it is increasing the educational content of the community, or raising its educational standard, or at least that it is exerting itself to do so, both directly and by co-operation with other agencies, especially with the public schools. A board of trustees is certainly justified in ascertaining by any means in its power whether this is being done, and if not, in asking an explanation of its librarian. Does everyone in the community know where the library is? Is everyone who would be benefited by it making use of it? Is it a help to the schools, and do the teachers recognize this fact? Does the community in general regard it as a place where material for the acquisition of knowledge is stored and discriminatingly given out? These are questions that can be settled not so much by the examination of statistics as by ascertaining the general feeling of the community. It is much easier for a trustee to find this out than it is for a librarian; and trustees, both individually and as a body, should continually bear in mind the value to them of information along this line. Librarians are apt to talk a good deal about the educational function of the library as an adjunct and supplement to the school. It is to their credit that they have made it an educational force not under pressure but voluntarily, as a recognition of the necessities of the situation. But where such necessities have not yet been recognized or where their full import has been slow of realization, the educational side of library work remains undeveloped. Let the board of trustees notify its executive officer that it expects him to look to this feature of his work as thoroughly as to the condition of his building or the economical expenditure of his lighting appropriation, and all such institutions will experience a change of heart.

Recreational results.—Nothing is more important to the physical and moral health of a community, as of an individual, than the quality of the recreation that it takes. The question of whether recreation is or is not taken need not be considered. Everyone takes recreation; if means for the healthy normal variety are not provided, the other kind will occupy its place. And the healthy normal individual—child or adult—prefers the first kind if he can get it. With the physical variety the library has nothing to do; but to purvey proper intellectual recreation is one of its most important provinces. Is this adequately done? Is it done at all? Does the librarian exalt other functions of his great machine and neglect this one? The large amount of fiction circulated in most public libraries is generally taken as an indication that the quantity of its recreational content is considerable, whatever may be said of the quality; but this is a very superficial way of looking at the matter. There is educational material of the highest value in fiction and nearly every non-fiction class contains books of value for recreation. Moreover, what may be recreation to one man may be the hardest kind of study to another. The enthusiast in higher mathematics may extract as pure amusement from a book on the theory of functions as his neighbor would from the works of “John Henry.” In short, it is very difficult to separate education and recreation. Good work presupposes good play. It is simply our duty to view the library as a whole and to decide whether it contains the means of satisfying so much of the community’s demand for recreation as is wholesome and proper. Whether it does this may be judged from the freedom with which the library is used for recreational purposes compared with other agencies. A proper admixture of physical and intellectual amusement is required by everybody; is the library doing its share toward the purveying of the latter form? I do not know any better way of finding out than for the library trustees to use their eyes and ears, nor any more effective remedy for inadequate results along this line than the pressure that they can bring to bear on their librarian.

Social results.—Under this head we may group a very large number of results that are apt to be overlooked or taken for granted. They may perhaps be summarized in the statement that the library should take its proper place in the institutional life of the community. What this is will depend largely on the community’s size and its social content. In many small towns the library naturally assumes great social importance; in a city it may be relatively of less weight, though perhaps its influence in the aggregate may be even greater. Whether it is doing this part of its work properly may probably be best ascertained by comparison with the work of other institutions that go to build up the social fabric—the church, the home, the club, the social assembly. Does the dweller in the community turn as naturally to the library for intellectual help as he does to the church for religious consolation? Does he seek intellectual recreation there as he seeks physical recreation at his athletic club or social entertainment at a dance? And so seeking, does he find? Does he come to regard the library as his intellectual home and the librarian and his assistants as friends? What, on the other hand, is the attitude of the library staff toward the public? Is it inviting or repellent, friendly or coldly hostile, helpful or indifferent? Here is a whole body of results that are, in a way, the most important that a library can produce, and yet it is impossible to set them down in figures; they can scarcely even be expressed in words. The social status of a library is like a man’s reputation or his credit; it is built up by thousands of separate acts and by an attitude maintained consistently for years; yet a breath may blast it Of this position a board of trustees should be particularly proud and its members should do their best to uphold it. If they realize by those many delicate indications that we all recognize but cannot formulate, that the library is failing to maintain it, the librarian should hear from them. They should let him know that something is wrong and that they expect him to right it. If he does not know how, that is an indication that his personality and ability are parts of the failure.

This, then from the writer’s standpoint, is the whole duty of a trustee—or rather of a board of trustees—to see clearly what it wants, to give the librarian his orders, and to require an accounting.

I am frequently struck with the attitude of librarians toward their boards of trustees, not as shown in their public acts, but as revealed in conversation among themselves. A board is apt to be adjudged good or bad, satisfactory or unsatisfactory, as it takes a more or less passive part in the administration of the library. If it acts simply to approve what the librarian does and to see that he gets the necessary funds, it is regarded as ideal. All that most librarians seem to want is to be given plenty of money and then to be let alone. This is a view of the whole duty of a trustee with which I do not sympathize. On the other hand, it is not to be denied that boards of trustees have done much to encourage this attitude because when they are really active in their interest their activity looks too closely to detail. They are then apt to interfere in the regulation of methods rather than to require results and afterward ascertain whether and in what degree these results have been reached.

A board of trustees is the supreme authority in a library. I would have this fact realized in its fullest meaning by both trustees and librarian. And I would have the board exercise its supremity in what may be called the American manner. The people constitute the supreme authority both in Great Britain and in the United States. In the former country, however, this authority is symbolized by the person of a monarch, who reigns but does not govern; and the minutest details of administration are attended to by the people in the persons of their parliamentary representatives and of the cabinet, which is, in effect, a parliamentary committee. In this country, on the other hand, we entrust administrative details very largely to our chief magistrate and his personally appointed advisers. We tell him what to do and leave him to do it as he thinks best; and though Congress is disposed at times to interfere in the details of administration, these usually consist more largely of departmental decisions and rulings than of definite provisions of a legislative act. The President of the United States is the people’s general executive officer and administrative expert in precisely the same sense that the librarian occupies that office in his own library. Congress and the board of trustees bear similar relations to these officers. And although this may be carrying the comparison of small things with great to the point of absurdity, it shows clearly that the American idea of delegated authority is to make the authority great and the corresponding responsibility strict. That the best results have been attained in this country by following out this plan in all fields, from the highest government positions to the humblest commercial posts, seems to be undoubted; and I believe that the library has been a conspicuous example.

Appoint a good man, then, as your administrative expert; give him a free rein, but not in the sense of following him to dictate the whole policy of your library. Decide for yourselves the broad lines of that policy, relying on your own common sense together with his expert advice; require him to follow out those lines to a successful issue, and hold him responsible for the outcome. So doing you shall fulfil, so far as the limited vision of one librarian enables him to see, the whole duty of a trustee.

THE DAY’S WORK: SOME CONDITIONS AND SOME IDEALS[5]

What is the library for? What are we, who are in charge of it, to do with it? What point are we striving to reach, and how shall we get there?

First of all, the library is a collection of books. Books are to be used by reading them. The whole machinery of the library, its buildings, its departments, its regulations, its disciplined staff, are to bring together the reader and the books. Whatever auxiliary work the library may undertake, this must be its first task.

Now to what end is this done? A book from the material point of view is so much leather, paper and printer’s ink, but on the intellectual and spiritual side it is a storage battery of ideas. To put a book into a reader’s hand is to complete a mysterious circuit between the writer’s and the reader’s mind. This charging of the mind with ideas is what we call education. To the physiologist it is a mere modification of brain structure; to the economist and the historian it spreads further out; it is a modification of the individual’s action toward the whole world; it is the alteration of the world’s present status and future history. Education cannot be accomplished by books alone; it can even be accomplished wholly without them; but if they are used properly, there is no one agent that can do more for education than these devices for the storage and transmission of ideas. That the library is an educational institution is now generally recognized. It is common to call it an adjunct to the school, or to speak of it as continuing the work of the school. That the school and the library should work hand in hand where it is possible, goes without saying. But I think we may properly object to any phraseology that implies the subordination of the library to the school. The library stores books and makes them available. Part of the school’s work also is to make available the contents of books. The library may continue the work of the school; but so in some cases may the school merely complete the work of the library. Many a student has received his first inspiration and instruction in the library and has been thereby stimulated to enter a regular course of study. It is better to let the library stand on its own merits as an instructional agent. The difference between it and the school, fundamentally, is that the library’s educational energy is chiefly potential while that of the school is, or should be, dynamic. Yet though the library is only a potential force—energy in storage—the library plus the librarian may and should be dynamic too. We then have in both school and library the book and the teacher, with the difference that in the school the book is only the teacher’s tool, while in the library the librarian exists to care for the book, to place it in his hands who needs it, and to make it effective.

But when we have emphasized the educational side of the library’s activity we have by no means exhausted its field. Its recreative function is hardly less important. A very large proportion of the library’s users go to it for recreation or relaxation. They obtain this, of course, in the same way that they obtain education from books, namely, by the acquisition of new ideas or mental images. The recreation comes in from the fact that these ideas temporarily distract the attention from other ideas connected with daily work and worry, and that they ease the brain in the same way that a strained muscle may be eased by gentle exercise. Evidently it is impossible to draw a line between these two classes of a library’s activity. A zoological or a botanical garden is an educational institution, so is an art museum. Yet the large majority of those who go to them do so for amusement, and the educational benefits obtained are incidental. Those benefits, however, are none the less real, and it would evidently be impossible to give separate statistics of those who have made educational and recreative use of the institution. Yet we find people trying to do this very thing in the case of the public library, which case is quite comparable with those stated above. It is assumed, in the first place, that the use of fiction is purely recreative, while that of non-fiction is educational; and, in the second place, that the recreative use of the library is to be condemned or at least discouraged, in comparison with the other. That either of these can be sustained is very doubtful. The attempted subordination of the recreative work of the library to the educational is at best invidious. Each has its place in the scheme of things and comparison in this case is worse than odious, it is misleading. Further, it is positively impossible to draw a line between educational and recreative books. So far as motives go, one may read Gibbon for entertainment and Madame de Stael’s “Corinne” as an Italian guide book. So far as results are concerned, the intelligent reader always acquires new ideas as he reads; and in most cases the very same idea may and does have both an educational and a recreative function. But although we can draw no line, it is quite possible to pick out books on the one side and on the other, and to assert that these are read chiefly for educational purposes and those for recreation. On which side shall the library throw its influence? There are many good librarians who feel that the popular tendency is too strong towards recreation and that the library should restore the balance by throwing its weight on the other side. Others see in the popular desire for recreative reading only a hopeful reaction from the mental tension and overwork with which, as a nation, we are doubtless chargeable. Between these two points of view I believe that the equilibrium of the public library is safe, and that it is in no danger of developing unduly either on the recreative or on the educational side.

Personally I have never felt that the user of libraries or any other type of the average American was in danger from too much recreation. If there is any use of a library that may have a vicious tendency it is its use for pure pastime in the etymological sense—the reading of books with absolutely no aim at all save to make the time pass. Now to make time pass pleasantly or profitably may be a most legitimate object. Not that, and not any lawful aim is objectionable. But aimlessness—the lack of an aim—the taking out of books to skim or to glance at, or to look at the pictures, with no desire for amusement, or profit, or anything else—that is certainly worthy of condemnation. There is more of it than we know, and it constitutes a menace to our intellectual future. Newspaper reading fosters it, but not necessarily. Newspaper reading with an aim is far better than aimless skimming and skipping of a literary classic, and I should rather see a boy of mine reading the most sensational dime novel he could lay hands on, with the definite desire and intention of finding out how Bloody Bill got his revenge, than lazily turning over the pages of Scott with no idea of what the story was about. The first would be the case of a good reader and a bad book; the second that of a good book and a bad reader. The library can easily deal with the book; it cannot so easily manage the reader, though it may try to do so. In the case of the bad reader the storage battery of ideas has lost its connection. It would be well for some of us if we should forget for the moment the difference between fiction and non-fiction and should try to mend this broken link.

And now a word about ourselves. What are we, who are engaged in this work, laboring for? Why are we working, and what do we expect to accomplish? In answering this question it will be better for us to free ourselves entirely from the bondage of words that mean nothing. Some of us—I hope very many of us—are in the library work solely because we love it and cannot keep out of it. Others are trying with more or less success to persuade themselves that this is their reason. Still others cannot truthfully say that they have had a “call to library work,” and some of these are conscientious enough to fear that they are in the wrong place and that the work is suffering thereby. To these I desire to address a word of consolation and encouragement. The impression is very general that the greatest work of the greatest minds had no motive but the productive impulse. The poet, according to this view, sings because he cannot help singing; the artist paints solely to satisfy the creative longing within him; the musician composes for the same reason. Now the fact is that a man who is capable of great work, or of ordinarily good work, may produce it under a variety of impulses. Some act more strongly on one man; others on another; or the same man may be more susceptible to a given impulse at one time or place than at another. Without a doubt, many of our immortal works were the result of simple inability to keep from producing them. But just as certainly, others were the work of men who had to school themselves by long practice and then to hold themselves to the work with iron determination. “Genius” says Carlyle, “is nothing but an infinite capacity for taking pains.” To which a modern critic replies, “On the contrary, genius is an infinite capacity for doing things without taking any pains at all.” Both are right. There are both these kinds of genius—and many others. The writer who attempts to bind down genius to rules and formulae will have a hard task. And what is true of genius is also true of ordinarily good work—the work that you and I are trying to do in our libraries. Some of us do it easily because we cannot help it; others do it with more or less difficulty under the pressure of one or another need. One, though the work itself comes hard to him, loves the result to be accomplished; another, perhaps, is toiling primarily to support himself and those dependent on him. What of that? We have been placed where we are, to secure certain results. We want the help of every one who can contribute a share of honest, intelligent work toward the attainment of these results, and we shall not ask for motives or inquire into the exact amount of effort that was necessary, provided the work has been done and done well.

I have the greatest sympathy for the conscientious library assistant who feels that she ought to love her work in the same way perhaps that she loves music or skating, or a walk through the autumn woods, and who, because she does not sit down to paste labels or stand up to wait on the desk with the feeling of exhilaration that accompanies these other acts, is afraid that library work is not her métier.

Such workers should possess their souls in peace. It is very common for routine work to pall upon him who does it, and we are all apt to think that no work but ours has any routine. Our weary eyes see only the glorious moments of success in the lives of other toilers; we are blind to the years of drudgery that led to them. The remedy is to look forward. You may not enjoy climbing the mountain step by step, but the view from the summit is glorious. And if to sustain yourself on the climb you think of the bread and cheese that you have in your lunch basket, I cannot see that there is aught to complain of.

All over the world there are workers who feel that they are not worthy of their work. It is dull; it palls on them. But if their lot had only been different! If their work had been that of the musician or the artist! Then toil would become pleasure, and the hours that now drag heavily would flit on wings. Very little of this feeling is justifiable, and these dissatisfied workers will do better work if they are made to realize that it is only the favored few who can bring enthusiasm to the daily routine. The most that we can ask of the average worker is a conviction of the usefulness of his work and a determination to make it as useful as possible. More: such a determination honestly lived up to is sure to beget interest—that concrete interest in one’s work that is worth much more, practically, than an ideal love for it. The woman who goes into slum work impelled only by a vague love for humanity is apt to give up after a little when she discerns that humanity in the concrete is offensive in so many ways. But if she forces herself to keep on, and to make herself as useful as possible, there comes the personal interest that will bind her to her task and that will increase its usefulness. So it is with library work; you need not love it ideally to succeed in it; you need only buckle down to it until you feel the personal interest that will carry you through triumphantly.

And what is it all about? In the broadest sense, as I have already said, we librarians are the purveyors of ideas stored up in books. These ideas are more to man than mere education—they are life itself. Life is growth, not stagnation—it involves change and acquisition. “Life is change,” says Cardinal Newman, “and to be perfect, one must have changed many times.” To contribute the opportunity and the stimulus for such change is our business. The child cries out to his environment—“Give me ideas and experiences; good and pleasurable if you can, bad or painful, if you must, but give me ideas and experiences.” Part of this craving it is the duty of the public library to satisfy. The craving may grow less keen as we grow older, but it never really ceases to exist. To satisfy that craving in legitimate ways and to guide and control it if we can is our business, stated in the broadest possible terms. That is what we are aiming at. The librarian should be the broadest minded of mortals. He should be a man in the widest sense—to him nothing human should be alien.

This is decidedly broad and correspondingly vague. Being so, it may be interpreted by every worker in the way that appeals to him most. To one, the educational work of the library will make the strongest appeal; to another its recreational function. One may prefer to lay stress on the guidance of children’s reading; another on reference work with adults. These are all phases of one and the same general class of acts—the imparting of ideas by means of books—and there is no reason why each worker should not gain interest in that work by and through the particular phase that appeals to him.

“I wish,” says one of James Lane Allen’s characters, “that some virtue—say the virtue of truthfulness—could be known throughout the world as the unfailing mark of the American. Suppose the rest of mankind would agree that this virtue constituted the characteristic of the American! That would be fame for ages.” We librarians, in like manner, not only wish but strive to make some one virtue characteristic of our work—say the virtue of usefulness. “As useful as a librarian,” “As indispensable as the public library”—these are not yet, I am afraid, household phrases. But why should we not make them so?

LIBRARY STATISTICS

It is a valuable exercise to examine into the origin and uses of the things that we have been accustomed to take for granted and to regard almost as part of the accepted order of nature. The result will often be startling and it will always be salutary, if the examiner be sane and conservative. Therefore a very good way to begin a discussion of statistics is to query whether they are of present value at all, or whether they are old fashioned rubbish and had better be discarded.

Statistics are the numerical statements of results or facts. Now thousands of individuals and thousands of bodies—families, clans, associations, that accomplish much in this world, go on very well without keeping any record at all of what they do. This is indisputable. On the other hand we shall see that as work is done well and carefully there is an increasing disposition to make and keep a record of results; and as the work extends in scope and complexity, the record, too, becomes more complex. Take, for instance, the record of so apparently simple a transaction as the payment and receipt of money. The individual who has little of it to receive and disburse may go all his life without keeping so much as a cash account, much less a set of books. He may even spend a considerable income in the same way, including the maintenance of a household and the support of a family, and he may, on the whole, do it wisely and well. Yet of two men of the same means, one of whom should conduct his affairs thus, while the other kept a rational system of household and personal accounts, the latter would universally be regarded as pursuing the better course. And as we pass from this to the conduct of a business we recognize that the man who engages in commerce without keeping proper accounts is a fool and courts failure, and that the larger the business and the more widespread the interests, the more complicated and extensive must be the bookkeeping. A large commercial concern may thus employ a special department with a large staff of men simply to keep record of its financial transactions. This is probably the most ancient kind of statistical record and the one whose usefulness is most generally recognized.

In like manner another common and useful statistical record—the inventory, or list of articles on hand—although not commonly and regularly taken by the individual, becomes absolutely necessary in the smallest kind of business, and without it the merchant can have absolutely no idea, of whether he is conducting his business at a profit or a loss. When we go on further and examine, the conduct of great commercial or manufacturing concerns we find that the statistical department becomes of increasing importance, the details collected by it multiply and the staff of persons whose sole duty it is to collect and to discuss them may be very considerable. That a great manufacturing company would waste time and money on a task of no value is inconceivable, and there is thus a very strong presumption that statistics are worth something. Even where bodies of men have so little power or corporate action that they cannot collect statistics for themselves, it is generally deemed a proper expenditure of the public money to do so at the common cost, hence governments maintain great census bureaus, whose duty it is not only to count heads every few years but to tell the farmer how much he raises, the merchant how much merchandise he exports, and so on.

Is the free public library an institution that will be benefited by the collection, tabulation and discussion of the results of its work, so far as they can be numerically expressed? What are the objects of such collection in the instances above enumerated? In the first place, they are to satisfy mere curiosity. If such curiosity is trivial, the collection of statistics is evidently useless, and I am afraid that more than a little of it, public and private, falls under this head. But curiosity, even when it goes no further, may be perfectly legitimate. Especially is this so about one’s own affairs. When a man is attempting anything he is naturally curious to know whether he has succeeded or not; and to find out, if possible, precisely how far he has gone in the desired direction. He may have property enough to support him beyond all doubt, but it is quite right that he should want to keep a list of his stocks and bonds and to know whether they have risen or fallen in value during the year. Still further, curiosity about other people’s affairs may be legitimate, as, for instance, when one is responsible for their proper conduct in greater or less degree. In the same way the trustees of a free public library, representing the public at large, by whom the library is supported and carried on, have a right to know all possible particulars regarding the way in which their librarian has carried on his work and the results he has reached in it, and the municipality in turn should require of the trustees a strict account of the funds that they have administered. All this information, as far as it can be stated numerically, constitutes a mass of statistics, and this one reason amply justifies its collection and would justify a much larger number of tables than is usually given in a library report, provided only that the information is to the point and is or should be in public demand.

But we cannot stop here. A free library, it is true, is not a money-making concern, but it certainly should be run on business principles. The public puts into it a large sum of money and has a right to expect certain returns, which are none the less definite that they cannot themselves be represented in dollars and cents. The library statistic books are therefore, in a way, the records of the business; they show whether it is being conducted conservatively or wastefully, at a profit or at a loss. And as all these record books are open, they enable us, or should enable us to make instructive comparisons between the methods and results of one institution and those of another.

But even this is not all. It is a maxim of this strenuous age that all things are good or bad according to the results to which they lead, not in the narrow sense that “the end justifies the means,” but in the broader sense that we must know things by their fruits. The man who said “I go, sir,” and went not, was judged by his acts, not by his words; and no matter how much knowledge we store up and how many tables of data we collect we shall be derelict in our duty if we regard this as an end in itself. The state of mind in which the Mahatma spends his life in impassivity, contemplating inward things and making no outward motion, may have certain advantages, but it is not consonant with the spirit of this age and this land. By which I mean that when we have found out something from our statistics we must do something with it. More; we must so direct our statistical investigations that they bear directly on a possible course of action. This is done by the great manufacturing concerns that maintain statistical departments; but we all use statistics in this way. If a boy wants to go to the circus he first looks through his pockets to see whether he has enough cash. Here is the germ of a statistical investigation conducted for the specific purpose of getting information on which future action is to be based. Here sometimes, where the opportunity of collecting statistics is very great, and expense is no object, is a good excuse for gathering a great deal that would seem to be useless, with the expectation that some of it may turn out to be interesting and may suggest some line of work that had not previously been thought of. To go as far as this, the institution must be large and rich.

But how many of us do anything with our statistics? How many collect statistics along special lines to assist in deciding what we shall do along those lines? How many of us, rather, consider that, when our statistics have been collected a disagreeable task has been done, and put them behind us till the year rolls round again?

Perhaps we have had enough now of the philosophy of statistics. Let us see what concrete kinds of statistics are necessary and in what order of importance.

First comes an itemized account of receipts and expenditures. This is so obvious that it is not generally considered as library statistics at all. But it may and should be extended a little. Look at all your other tables of statistics through financial spectacles. Compare your receipts with your population. How much does your town give per capita for library work? Compare this figure with the same for other towns. Compare your expenditures with your circulation. How much has your library cost you per book circulated? Compare your expenditure for books with the number purchased and tell us the average cost of a book and how this compares with the cost in former years. Do this for a half-dozen other phases of your work and put the result in as many brief, crisp sentences. If you haven’t room in your report, cut out some of the platitudes; we all insert them in moments of weakness and, once in, it sometimes requires an earnest search to detect and expunge them.

Next in importance comes an account of your books—how many there are in the library, on what subjects, and how many have been added during the year in each subject; how many gifts you have had; how many books have been lost. This involves taking a careful inventory at least once a year. You see I am putting this before any account of circulation. A good many libraries take no inventory or take it at too infrequent intervals, because they have no time. You might as well say you have no time to keep a cash account. This is business and comes first. Leave off counting your circulation if you must, but keep count of the public property in your care as conscientiously as you keep count of the money in your cash drawer. If you can do nothing else make a simple enumeration of volumes without taking account of classes, but do it thoroughly. The trouble with the inventory is that, like the old-fashioned housecleaning, it is usually done all at once and becomes an annual bugbear. One way of making it easier is to spread it over the year, counting and reporting one class every month and treating it as a part of the regular routine. In this category of statistical records comes the list of your books, which you must surely have in some form, even though you may not have accession book, shelf list and dictionary catalog. For statistical purposes indeed, the last-named may be left out of account.

Next in order of importance come statistics of circulation. You should know how many books are given out for home use every day and how these are distributed among the classes. Do not adhere too strictly to your classification. Subdivide and combine your classes so that the results will be of interest to your particular public. Always remember in discussing these statistics that they are not so much a record of work done as a rough proportional indication of that work, and are therefore of relative, not of absolute interest. You are not to attach any meaning to the fact, taken by itself, that your circulation was 5280 for the month of May, but if you find that it was only 3120 in the previous May you may justly conclude that the work of your library is increasing.

In the circulation category comes the record of the hall or library use of books, the reference use, and the books outstanding at any particular time. Hall use is very difficult to keep in a free access library, but an attempt should be made to do so. It is not quite synonymous with reference use. If a man sits down in your library and actually reads a novel without taking it home, that is hall or library use, but not reference use. If he merely refers to the same book to find out about some character, that is reference use. It is evidently hard to separate these and many libraries do not attempt to do so. In others, where there is a separate reference room, any use of books in this room is recorded as “reference use.” The number of books outstanding should be taken at least once a month, simply by counting the cards in the circulation tray. This item is very easy to ascertain, very accurate, and is interesting and useful in more than one way.

Last in the list of the necessary items of statistics comes that of readers or users of the library—the most interesting in some ways, and the most disappointingly vague. Presumably your users fill out some kind of blank form of application and have their names entered in a book. It is therefore easy to give, as is usually done, the total registration and its annual increase. But this is evidently not the number of actual users of the library. Who are the “actual users”? The expression itself is vague. To be complete you should have the numbers of those who have used the library within one, two, and three days, and so on back indefinitely. There is no place where the line may be drawn between “live” and “dead” cards. But such statistics are too elaborate to collect regularly, so that the ordinary library leaves this subject in its pristine mistiness. There are some pretty variations of it, however, which may be gone into if there is time. For instance, how are your users divided, according to occupation? This you can ascertain from your applications provided the applicant is required to state his occupation. Here again the result is for registered users, not actual users. Again, how are your users distributed topographically? The result of this inquiry may be shown graphically on a map, and it is particularly valuable when one is thinking of moving or of establishing a branch; but it takes more time than is at the disposal of most librarians.

Here, I believe, ends the enumeration of necessary kinds of statistics. In each kind the collection may be reduced to a minimum; but the librarian must, if the library is to be maintained at all, keep a cash account, count the books, and make some kind of a list of them. Also, if at all possible she or he must be able to tell how many books are circulated and how many users’ names are on the books. This is the minimum; the maximum is fixed only by considerations of time and usefulness. First among the kinds of statistics that are not absolutely necessary, but interesting and often useful, is that of routine work done—letters written, visits made, cards written. This may easily be carried to excess. Then there is the enormous class in which the data are obtained not directly, but by comparison of other data. To this class belong the financial comparisons already noted. For instance, by comparing the circulation of separate classes with the total we get class percentages—a very useful type of statistics; by comparing circulation with books on shelves we get the average circulation of each book, etc. There is no end to the varieties of this class of statistics, and they may be rated all the way from “very valuable” to “useless” or even “nonsensical”. The whole class would require a separate paper to discuss.

Let all these statistics tell the truth. Let them be clear. Tell exactly what they mean. Otherwise they will certainly mislead and are worse than useless. It is well to accompany every table with an explanatory note telling exactly how the data were obtained and whether they are of a high or a low degree of accuracy. In case you do not know, for instance, whether the word “juvenile” as generally used means the entire circulation among children, or the circulation in the children’s room, or is merely short for “juvenile fiction,” decide what it shall mean in your case and then state distinctly what it means. Read over other library reports critically and when you find any statistics that are vague, see to it that that particular kind of vagueness does not occur in your own tables.

And after it is all over, ask yourself, Now what shall I do with all this? In this paper only a few suggestions can be made. Take first, the financial data. If you find that your town is giving less per capita or less per book circulated than the average, let it be your business to make it give more. There is a task that will fill up your spare moments. If you are paying for books more per book than other libraries, try to buy more cheaply. If your inventory shows a great loss of books by theft, try to reduce it next year by greater vigilance. If your circulation is decreasing ask the reason why. Get at it if you can and remedy it if possible. If your circulation shows a sudden increase in a particular class, investigate that and meet it, if proper, by increased purchases in that class. If a class that should circulate well has fallen, try to find out why. Is your collection in this class small and poor? Make it richer and larger. Has interest in the subject fallen off? Try to stimulate it.

In short, instead of regarding your work in connection with statistics as done when they have been collected, think that it has not yet begun. So far as your own work is concerned, let them serve only as an indication of the weak spots that must be strengthened and of the promising growths that must be encouraged. There are statistics and statistics. Some are dead; some are alive—vitalised and vitalizing. Not all of the library’s work can be stated in figures. The largest part, the best part, you cannot put into statistical tables at all. Yet rightly used, your statistics may so guide and direct you along the lines of least resistance, even in this broader and finer work, that your energies may be put forth in it to the best effect—that you may aim right and that your shots may not go astray.

OLD PROBABILITIES IN THE LIBRARY—HIS MODEST VATICINATIONS[6]

“Don’t never prophsey onles ye know,” says Hosea Bigelow. I beg to call attention to the fact that this means “Don’t prophesy at all”—perhaps it was so meant by the shrewd Hosea. We never can know—and yet we continue to prophesy. The best we can do, of course, is to estimate probabilities. Probabilities! That is a good word. They have dropped it from the weather reports and call their estimate a “forecast.” I like the old word better. Let us see, then, what some of the probabilities are in library work.

“Everything flows,” said the Greek philosopher. Nothing in the world is stable; change is the order of the day. But note the word he uses. That which flows is in a state of orderly change in a definite direction. Everything progresses; and the library and its work are being borne along in the general current. Now the writers on hydro-dynamics, who are experts on blow, tell us that there are two ways of studying a current, which they name the “historical” and the “statistical”: In the former the attention is fixed on a definite particle of the moving fluid whose change of velocity and direction is noted as it passes along; in the latter a definite locality of the stream is selected and the fluid’s changes of form and density at that particular place are observed. In like manner we may study the library movement historically or we can select a definite point in its course—the present time—and note the conditions and their alteration. The latter plan, I venture to think, is the more favorable one for the would-be prophet.

Let us, then, take a few of the salient features of library work as they exist to-day and inquire: (1) What is the present situation with regard to each; (2) Is that situation changing; and whither and how fast; (3) Is its rate of change altering, and (4) are the conditions that affect it and its alteration, likely to remain as they are. If we can answer all these questions we can at least make an attempt at estimating the probable situation at a given future time. We must bear in mind, however, that in the library world, as elsewhere, there are sudden or abrupt changes, or catastrophes, and that these generally defy prediction. And this is equally true of unexpected aids or beneficient influences. The library benefactions of Mr. Carnegie would have upset the most careful and logical estimate of library progress made twenty years ago.

First let us take up the status of our stock in trade—our supply of books. President Eliot warned us two years ago that our books are piling up too fast. His warning has met with scant heed because experience has not brought it home to most of us. Malthus warned us long ago that the progress of population was toward overcrowding the world. We laugh at him because there is still plenty of room and means of utilizing it unknown in his time. Yet population increases, and it will overcrowd the world some day unless something occurs to prevent. In like manner our stock of books increases faster and faster. The ordinary American public library is a thing of yesterday; small wonder that it does not yet begin to feel plethoric. Our oldest large libraries are those of our universities, and Harvard’s president has told us that to them the evil day is within sight. Librarians have not received with favor President Eliot’s plea for getting us out of our future difficulty but this is neither here nor there. To judge by our present attitude either our library buildings must increase indefinitely in size or our stock must be weeded out. It must be remembered, however, that our books are perishable, and are growing more so. I do not regard this as an unmixed evil. Rather than to make our books unwieldy for the purpose of preserving them we prefer to make them usable and to rely on reprinting for their perpetuation. Thus what is not wanted will pass away. Perhaps this will solve our problem for us. But in any case it looks as if the future library building and its contents were to be greatly larger than those of to-day.

What are to be the style and arrangement of the future library building? The present situation can hardly be described in general terms. As in all building operations, there is a strife between the architect, representing aesthetics, and the administrator, representing utility. At present the architect seems to be having his way outside and the librarian his way inside. But why this contest? Is it not the architect’s business to make utility more beautiful but not less useful? And should not the administrator wish his surroundings to please the eye? Apparently the two are drawing a little closer together of late. We are having fewer temples of art that have to be made over to fit them for use as libraries and fewer buildings that are workable but offensive to the eye. The tendency seems to be toward simple dignity, although we certainly have some surprising departures from it. Probably the library of the future will be a simple and massive structure of much greater size than at present, with its decorations largely structural, and combining ample open-shelf and reading facilities with greatly increased capacity for book-storage.

There is one particular in which the architect has been specially out of touch with the administrator. The open-shelf is now all but universal, but many architects seem not to have heard of it. Many buildings, actually intended for administration on the free access system, seem yet to have been planned as closed-shelf libraries and opened to the public as an afterthought. A library without a special stack-room for book-storage is an unthinkable thing to most architects. And yet in many small libraries book-storage is not necessary, and in most branch libraries, where only books in general use are to be placed, it will never be necessary. To get the maximum advantage from open shelves, with a minimum of risk, the books should be placed on the walls as far as possible and such book-cases as stand on the floor should be as low as an ordinary table, so as to be easily overseen. A stack-room, it seems to me, is distinctly a closed-shelf arrangement. I believe this is coming to be recognized and that in the future library the books will be on or near the walls.

But how about the open-shelf system itself? At present there are few libraries that do not have it in some form, and some of these are libraries that continued strongly to disapprove of it even after it had become well and widely established. The indications are nearly all that it has come to stay. I say nearly all; for there is still a feeling among many people that it is not good administration to abandon so large a percentage of our books to thieves. In libraries in small communities where the loss is small, this question does not arise; but in New York, for instance, where we lost 5000 books last year, it is serious. We librarians may say and believe that the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages, but trustees and municipal authorities are hard to convince. In New York we have taken what many will consider a backward step, by partially closing, as an experiment, the shelves of two of our branches. So that although we may safely say that free access has come to stay, I do not look to see it applied very generally to large collections. One thing seems to me clear. Library administration is becoming increasingly business-like, and it is not business-like to accept a large annual loss without an attempt to minimize it. We must at least investigate regularly and rigidly the sources and character of this loss.

As for the other features that we have become accustomed to regard as distinguishing the new library era from the old—special work with children, co-operation with schools, travelling libraries, etc.—it is evident that these, too, have come to stay. Their spheres are widening and their aims are diversifying, however, so that he who should venture to predict their precise status in the future would be rash.

In fact, the library idea itself is beginning to suffer a sort of restless change that is quite distinct from its orderly progress. The activities of the library are at present a good deal like those of the amoeba—stretching out a tentacle here, withdrawing one there; improvising a mouth and then turning it into a stomach; shifting and stretching about; somewhat vague and formless, yet instinct with life, appetite and caution, and vitalized with at least the germ and promise of intelligence. Such a state is an unpromising one for prophecy. Is this or that new development of activity the beginning of an orderly march in a straight line, or is it to be withdrawn or reversed to-morrow? Is our work with children to include much that now seems to belong to the kindergarten, the museum, and the art gallery? Are our travelling library departments to sell books in the future as well as lend them? Are we to deliver books free at our user’s homes? Are our Boards of Education to turn over to us the superintendence of all such work as deals with books and their use? Many questions like these would have been answered in the affirmative yesterday but in the negative to-day. I might be inclined to say “yes” to some of them now, when to-morrow would prove them out of the question. But there is one assertion that we can make boldly. Whatever the library has tried to do or to be, whether success or failure has attended it, it has never ceased to be a library—a keeper and purveyor of books. Whatever else it may undertake, we may be sure that this will continue to be its chief reason for existence, and that its other activities, if such there be, will grow out of this and group themselves around it. Is the library to grow into a bookstore? I do not know, but if so its commercial functions are likely to be subsidiary. Certain libraries have already added to their duties as free institutions the functions of pay-libraries, and the commercial feature has thus been introduced. It seems to be spreading, and it may prove an entering wedge for a system of actual sales to supplement that of paid loans. A powerful deterrent, however, will be the influence of the book-trade. Following the line of least resistance, the activity of the library as an aid to the ownership as well as the reading of books is perhaps more likely to manifest itself in advice than in actual trade. Some libraries are now making special effort to give their readers information about book-prices, and about places and methods of purchase; and it seems likely that this kind of aid, since it can arouse no opposition, will increase.

The position in which we find ourselves, of opposition to those who make and sell books, is unfortunate. The situation has been growing more and more tense and it may continue so to grow, perhaps up to the point where all discount will be withheld from libraries and where new legislation may discourage importation, but I do not believe that it will keep on indefinitely. No one who looks into the matter closely can help believing that in the long run libraries advertise the book-trade and help it by promoting general interest in literature. This view of the matter was taken by a majority of the New York Booksellers’ League at a recent dinner at which the question was discussed. Even purely as a matter of business, the library deserves special privileges and it will doubtless continue in some measure to receive them.

It does not, however, seem probable that the average cost of books to a public library will ever be as low again as it was, say, ten years ago. In fact this may be said of all library expenses. Salaries are rising and ought to rise higher; our buildings are larger and finer and demand more expensive care. We are heating them with more costly apparatus and lighting them with electricity. The library of the future will doubtless cost more to maintain in every item than the library of the past—but the public will receive more than the difference.

As regards children’s work there seem to be at present two tendencies—one toward complete isolation and one in the opposite direction. Will our grandchildren, when they go to the public library, be segregated in a separate room, perhaps in a separate building; or will they be treated as a distinct class only so far as may be absolutely necessary for good administration? Probably complete separation is best for the library and best for the adults; I hesitate to say that it is best for the children. After all, childhood is but a stage and not a resting state at that—rather restless and progressive. Any special conditions that we provide for it must themselves be subject to constant change. In our schools the child passes from grade to grade. In our libraries the grades are only two; let us not make the leap from one to the other too great. I look to see special library work for children increase in importance, but with due recognition of the fact that some of the needs and aspirations of a “grown-up” are present in many a twelve-year-old and that it is better that the clothes of a growing child should be a size too large than an exact fit.

The travelling library deserves a special word, because its success is indicative of the tendency to bring the book and its user into closer contact. In New York we began, only seven years ago, to circulate a few hundred books monthly in this way among half a dozen schools. Now we give out nearly half a million a year from nearly 500 different points. We hear the same tale from all sides. And the cost of circulation per book is surprisingly small. In New York the circulation through travelling libraries is equal to that of three branches of the first class, while the number of assistants employed is about half the number required in one of those branches. The cost of operating three large branches in Carnegie buildings is about $40,000 yearly, whereas our travelling libraries for the last fiscal year cost us but $6400. Of course it must be remembered that a very large amount of the work of circulation in this case is done by volunteer assistants and that the users of the books have not the facilities and resources of a branch library—the number and variety of books, the pleasant surroundings, the trained aid. Of course the travelling library can never take the place of the fully equipped branch, but in supplementing branch work and in reaching those who live in sparsely settled communities its capabilities are great and it may be expected that its use will increase.

The broadening of library work illustrated by the successive appearance of the reference library, the circulating library, the delivery station, the branch and the travelling library suggests the thought that this series may be carried further in the future by the addition of some working plan that will bring the book still closer to its user. Such a plan would be the system in which books are delivered free of charge at the houses of those who use them, or the provision of a real library on wheels—a van supplied with shelving for a thousand books or more from which selection can be made as it moves about from house to house. It does not seem probable that any such device as this will be generally adopted for districts adequately provided with regular libraries, but for thinly settled regions they may supplement or take the place of our present travelling or home libraries. I believe for instance, that a moving library of 1000 books, calling once a week at each house in a farming district would be preferable to four travelling libraries of 250 books each, stationed at points in the same district, although, of course, the cost would be correspondingly greater.

The library’s status as an educational institution seems now to be well established. No one disputes it, and as this appears to be the chief ground on which its support by public funds is justified we may regard it as settled that the library is to continue to play its part in public instruction. This part, though not so definite and positive as that of the school, extends over a far longer period. While the library’s work is parallel and supplementary to that of the school in the case of those of school age, it must continue its work alone after its users have left school. Here it may settle its methods for itself, but in its earlier work when it deals with pupils, it has the teacher to reckon with. The necessity for constant consultation and co-operation between the authorities of two public institutions, whose work is so similar and can so easily result in wasteful duplication or still more wasteful conflict, is obvious. We need not be surprised that librarians and teachers are getting nearer together and we may confidently predict that the rapprochement will be closer in the future. But although the school is ceasing to look upon its younger sister as an interloper in the pedagogical family, there is still plenty of room for the definition of their respective spheres. And we have no right to complain that the school is still doing much library work, when we have ourselves sometimes tried to do school work. I look in the future for the definition of two clearly separated spheres of activity, one filled by the library and the other by the school, and for the closest co-operation between the two that is consistent with confining each to its own work. It is probably too much to expect that the school will give up the custodianship of books. It must at least control its own text books, and its collection of reference works should be complete enough to constitute a thorough guide and aid to proper study. But the distribution of supplementary reading should be the part of the public library. This and other related points are to be settled, if at all, in the future by two kinds of mutual understandings; namely, between the governing boards of library and school and between librarian and teacher. The due definition of spheres of work can come only from an official agreement between library board and school board; helpful aid on both sides can come only from an official agreement between library board and school board; helpful aid on both sides can come only from personal contact and acquaintance between teachers and library assistants—such a degree of acquaintance between teachers and library assistants—such a degree of acquaintance that each comes to have a practical knowledge of the other’s problems, trials and limitations. Most librarians have made more or less effort in this direction; some have met with distinguished success. We may safely predict further progress along this line.

The lessons of the past and of the present all point to the increasing use of the library as a great engine of popular education, using the noun in its broadest sense and emphasizing the adjective. The library is more and more a great humanizing influence; if this is so, nothing human must be alien to it. And much that is human and humanizing is nevertheless ephemeral. With some the implications of this word are wholly contemptuous. Of a day! Does nothing valuable pass quickly away, having done its little work? The day itself is a day only and vanishes with the evening and the morning; yet it has its part in the record of the years. So with “ephemeral” literature. As we have seen, a great deal of what we are wont to consider as standard and permanent will ultimately perish. Yet be its life that of a year or a century, a book may play its little part in the mental development of those who read it. Just at present the favorite vehicle of literary expression is fiction. People put into stories what they have to say of history, sociology and ethics; they embody in romance their theories of aesthetics, economics and politics. There is good doctrine with a poor literary setting and there are paste jewels in pure gold. But taking it by and large the much decried deluge of modern fiction has undoubtedly been educative in its tendency. This is why I cannot yield to logic and predict the gradual disappearance of all but a small residuum of fiction from the public library. There is a tendency in that direction but there are some signs of a reaction. The seer may hope, even if he dare not predict, that the great public library that can afford to do so will continue to purchase such fiction as will interest or entertain the average person of education, even if it is to stay on the shelves but a few months.

What will be the future distribution of libraries in this country? At present their numbers are large in the northern states and comparatively small in the southern. Growth has been unexampled in its rapidity and has been stimulated by large benefactions. So far as this growth may be looked upon as the direct result of Mr. Carnegie’s gifts it may doubtless be regarded as abnormal, although it should be noted that every Carnegie building means a present and future outlay on the part of the community in which it stands, of many times the amount given by the donor. Primarily, library expansion is the result of a popular conviction that the public library is a public necessity. Expansion has proceeded in proportion to the spread of that conviction and along the lines of its progress. If there are fewer public libraries in the South than in the North it is because the need for them is not felt there, even if it exists. Doubtless the race problem is a powerful inhibitory influence. Two things are certain; that library expansion is to go on for some time, and that a time will come when it must stop. When that time arrives, the library will have attained its majority and we shall have an opportunity to address ourselves to problems that can not be attended to during our period of growth.

Who will use our great library of the future? Who uses the library of to-day? I have been asked that question by reporters and have been puzzled to answer it. For whose use is the public library intended? It will be logical to answer “the Public, of course,” but there are a great many people who will give this answer with mental reservations. With them “the Public” means some particular part of the public. Some think that the libraries are for the poor, or at any rate for those who cannot afford to buy books for themselves. This is a survival of the origin of some of our circulating libraries, which were originally charities. But a public foundation and a charitable foundation are two different things. Our parks are free, yet we do not object to their free use by the wealthy, nor do the wealthy classes themselves seem to shrink from it. Some again would limit the use of a library to students, or at all events to those who do not care to withdraw books for home use. These are people who do not believe in the circulating library—and there are still such. Others again would have the public library cater only to those of educated literary taste. For these reasons and for others it is a fact that our public libraries, even those with the largest circulations, are not used by the entire public. Probably, however, they are being used more and more freely. In a library that uses the two-book system it is impossible to tell exactly from statistics, how many persons are drawing from the library at one time. Assuming, however, that the number is proportional to the number of books outstanding, we find in the New York Public Library that it has been increasing a little faster of late years than the circulation. In other words, individual reading has not increased, and the great recent increase of circulation in our library and presumably in others also, is due to an increase of readers. The size of the library’s public is therefore increasing and there is no reason to suppose that it will not continue to do so. Of course there must be a limit. For instance, certain sections of the public will not use a library—as they will not use a school—in conjunction with other sections. This may be because of social or racial feeling, or personal uncleanliness or offensiveness, even when the latter is not carried to the point where the librarian can properly object to it. In such cases the lower element will drive out the higher. The remedy seems to be sought in segregation. This may be either open and acknowledged as in those southern cities where the library has a separate department for colored people, or it may be virtual, as where a convenient lounging room with newspapers is provided for the tramp element, sometimes with the privilege of smoking. In large cities the branch library system acts in the same way. The character of the card-holders is determined by that of the surrounding district and we thus get practically separate libraries for separate sections of the community. I look to see this separation proceed to a somewhat greater degree, not perhaps systematically but automatically and almost involuntarily. In spite of the apparent concession to class feeling, it will certainly increase the aggregate use of the library and thus make it more truly a public institution. So far as the branch system is concerned, of course, this is only one of the ways in which it increases the size of the library’s public. Even in a section where the population is perfectly homogeneous, more people will always be served by two libraries than by one. The number of branch library systems is rapidly increasing and the prospects are that the greatest possible use is to be made of them in the future. And they will be made up of true branches. Delivery stations have their uses, but they can never take the place of buildings with permanent stocks of books and all the conveniences of a separate library. Where a branch building is also a delivery station, as it always should be, that is, where the users of a branch are allowed to draw on the stock of the Central Library or of the other branches, it is found that the branch use vastly exceeds the station use. In our own library a branch that circulates 500 to 1000 of its own books daily will give out only two or three from other branches. This is sufficiently indicative of the preferences of the public, and in a matter of this kind public preference will ultimately govern. These branch libraries will have limited stocks of books, mostly, though not entirely, on open shelves, and will include small reference collections which will be more important as the branch is farther removed from the central library. These predictions, it seems to me, are all warranted by present tendencies.

How will the future library be governed and administered? The governing body at present is almost universally a board of trustees who are men of standing and responsibility but usually without expert knowledge. These are sometimes semi-independent and sometimes under the direct control of their municipal government. The present tendency seems to be to minimize municipal control but to increase the number of governing bodies subject to it. In other words private libraries are doing more public work than formerly under contract with municipalities, becoming thereby subject to the control of the city or town but not so closely as to bring politics into the management. This state of things is so desirable that we may expect it to be multiplied in the future. As regards the lay or inexpert character of the governing board, though it is looked upon by some as objectionable, it is shared by the library with great numbers of other public and semi-public institutions. Such a board may be regarded as representative of the great lay public, on whose behalf the institution must be operated, and whose members are interested in results rather than in the special methods by which these results may be obtained. That the members of such a board should be mere figure-heads is certainly not to be desired; that they should, either as individuals or collectively, take part in the details of administration is equally undesirable. There are boards that are doing the one or the other of these things, but the tendency is to lean neither in the direction of laxity nor of undue interference—to require definite results and to hold the librarian strictly responsible for the attainment of those results, leaving him to employ his own methods.

And the librarian of the future; who and what will he be? The difference between the modern librarian and him of the old school has often been the subject of comment. The librarian nowadays is less the scholar and more the man of affairs. Is change to go on in this direction? There are rather, it seems to me, signs of a reaction. Perhaps reaction is hardly the word. The librarian, while keeping in touch with the times, is reaching back for a little of the spirit of the old-time custodian and incorporating it with his own. Is it too much to hope that the heads of our future libraries, will keep in the forefront of library progress, alert to appreciate the popular need and to respond to it, may yet have something of the sweet and gentle spirit of the old scholars who used to preside over our storehouses of books?

Who are to be the assistants in our library of the future? At present our staffs are recruited from the following sources:

(1) The library schools. The best of these have supplied chiefly the heads of the smaller libraries, and heads of departments or assistants of the higher grades in the larger libraries. Few heads of the large libraries are school-graduates and few lower-grade assistants. There are, however, schools of the second class whose graduates have gone into the lower grades both in small and large institutions.

(2) Apprentice classes, generally formed to instruct untrained persons in the work of a particular library, so that those who enter its lower grades may be at least partially fitted for their work. The best of these rise by promotion to the upper grades.

(3) Appointment of totally untrained persons. If such persons are thoroughly well educated they may enter the work in the higher grades or even as the heads of libraries. B If not they generally enter at the bottom, although of course some obtain higher positions through political or local influence.

This, I believe, states the situation fairly. What are the tendencies? There can be no doubt that the library school is growing in favor. The increasing numbers of those who apply for school courses, the raising of requirements, both for entrance and for graduation, the second class schools that have sprung up in limitation of those of higher grade, making necessary the appointment of committees by various library bodies to examine and report on them—all point in this direction. At the same time we have had numerous instances, of late, of the selection of non-graduates to fill high library positions and at least one instance of frank statement on the part of a librarian of acknowledged eminence, in favor of taking college men of ability into the library immediately on graduation, instead of putting them through a library school. The library schools aim, and very properly so, at occupying the same position toward the library profession that the medical and law schools do toward the medical and legal professions. Statistics show that they have not yet reached that position. Still, it is probable that they will continue to approximate to it as a limit. In the future, more and more of the higher library positions will doubtless be filled by library-school graduates—and so also will more of the lower positions. When the demand for assistants in the higher grades begins to slacken, proportionately to the supply, as it is sure to do some day, the library school graduates will be willing to enter the library force in the lower grade, and will thus crowd out the untrained or partially trained applicants to some extent. They may even make the apprentice class a superfluity, in which case I am sure librarians will abandon it without a sigh.

In these somewhat desultory forecasts the object of the prophet has been not so much to impress upon others his own beliefs as to stimulate a taste for prophecy—a desire to glance over the rail and see which way the current is setting. Without being fatalists, we may hold that there are certain great tendencies in human affairs, vast social currents, against which it is well-nigh hopeless to struggle. Those who desire to accomplish results must work with these currents, not against them. Success has almost always been won in this way. Even when a few bold spirits have seemed to stem and turn back the whole tide, it will generally be found that an unseen undercurrent was in their favor. Learn therefore to judge of the currents; so shall we avoid the rocks and shoals and bring our craft safely to port.

THE LOVE OF BOOKS AS A BASIS FOR LIBRARIANSHIP[7]

Is the love of books a proper or necessary qualification for one who is to care for books and to see that they do the work for which they were made? First, let us ask a question or two. What is the love of books; and what is there in books that one may love? The same question might be asked and answered of the love of human beings; for between it and the love of books there are curious analogies. Of what, then, do man and book severally consist as objects of interest and affection?

First of all there is the man himself, the ego, the soul—which cannot indeed exist on this earth without its material embodiment, but which most of us realize is in some way distinct from that embodiment. So the book has its soul. The ideas or facts that it sets forth, though dependent for their influence on the printed page, exist independently of that page and make the book what it is. Next we have the material embodiment; that without which the man or the book could not exist for us; which is a necessary part of him or it, but necessary only because it is the vehicle through which man or book may be known by the senses. The body of the book is thus so much, and only so much, of its material part, its paper and its ink, as is necessary to present the contents properly to the eye. Lastly, we have the clothing of man and of book, having the function of protection or of decoration, or both; in the case of the book the protective cover, often highly decorated, and so much of interior elaboration as cannot be said to be strictly necessary to the presentation of the idea. The “body” and the clothing of the book, let it be noted, are not strictly separable as are those of the man. The line between them may be drawn in different places by different people. The same illustration, we will say, may be considered by one reader an absolutely necessary part of the book—an organ of its body—while to another it is but an ornamental embellishment—a decorative gewgaw. In spite of this vagueness, however, there is here an undeniable distinction between those material parts of the book that are necessary to its existence and those that merely embellish it or protect it.

The book therefore, like the man, is made up of soul, body and clothes. Which of these is the entity that may be loved? Now there are many kinds of lovers and many kinds of love. The belle of the ball may be surrounded with admirers, but if clad in rags and seated in a gutter she might excite no favorable notice. Still more may a pretty face be loved when it has no mental or spiritual qualities behind it. Yet these types of affection are inferior—no one would deny it. In like manner those who love the book merely for its fine clothes, who rejoice in luxurious binding and artistic illumination, and even those who dwell chiefly on its fine paper and careful typography, are but inferior lovers of books. The one loves his book for its clothes, and the other for its bodily perfection; neither cares primarily for its contents, its soul.

Now the true lover is he who loves the soul—who sees beyond clothes and bodily attributes, and cherishes nobility of character, strength of intellect, loftiness of purpose, sweetness of disposition, steadfastness of attachment—those thousand qualities that go to make up personality. All these the book has, like the man or the woman—for is it not the essence of its writer? Your true book-lover would rather have a little old dog’s-eared copy of his favorite author, soiled and torn by use, with binding gone, and printed on bad paper with poorer type and worse ink, than a mediocre production that is a typographic and artistic masterpiece.

And yet we call the collector of fine bindings and rare editions a “book-lover,” to the exclusion of the one who loves truly and devotedly. The true book-lover wants to get at the soul of his book; the false one may never see it. He may even refrain from cutting the leaves of the rare first edition that he has just bought, in doing which he is like the ignorant mother who sews her child up in his clothes for the winter—nay, worse; for you cannot sew up the child’s soul.

Now let there be no misunderstanding. As the true lover would have his mistress beautiful—nay, as she is beautiful to his eyes, whatever she may be to others, and as he would, if he could, clothe her in silks and adorn her with gems, so the true book-lover need not be and is not adverse to having his favorite author sumptuously set forth; he would rather than not see his books properly and strongly printed and bound; his love for the soul need not interfere with proper regard for the body and its raiment. And here is where the love of the book has an advantage over the affection whose object is a person. In spite of the advertisements of the beauty doctors, a homely face can rarely be made beautiful; but the book may be embodied and clothed as we will; it is the same, however printed and bound, to him who loves it for its contents.

Thus it will be seen that when I speak in general of “a love of books” I mean not a love of their typography, their illustration, or their bindings, but of their contents; a love of the universal mind of humanity as enshrined in print; a love of the method of recording ideas in written speech, as contrasted with their presentation in the spoken tongue—a love of ideas and ideals as so recorded. Such a love of books is pre-eminently a characteristic of civilized man. It is not synonymous with a love of knowledge—the savage who never saw a book may have that; it is not even the same as a love of recorded knowledge, for knowledge may be recorded in other ways—in the brain by oral repetition, in sculptured memorials, in mere piles of stone. It is a love of the ideas of men recorded in a particular way, in the particular way that has commended itself to civilized man as best.

The very existence of a library presupposes such a love of books. No one who had not an affection for the printed records of his race would care to possess them, much less to collect and preserve them. It would seem, then, that a love of books should be not only a qualification but an absolute prerequisite for entrance upon librarianship. By inquiring how and why it has come to be regarded as a non-essential or as of secondary importance, we may perhaps learn something.

A young woman comes to me to ask for library work; and when I demand sternly, “Have you training or experience?” she timidly answers, “No; but I’m very fond of books.” I smile; you all smile in like case. Why do we smile? What business have we to underrate such a fundamental qualification and exalt above it mere technicalities? The ability to acquire these technicalities exists in ten persons where the ability to love books as they should be loved is found in one. If the love so avowed is real, even if it is only potential, not actual, our feeling in its presence should be one of reverence, not amusement. It should prove the candidate fit, perhaps not for immediate appointment, but for preliminary training with a view to appointment in the future.

If it is real! Candor compels me to confess that, like some other avowals of love, that of a love for books does not always ring true. “What have you read?” I once asked one of these self-styled book-lovers. She fixed me with her eye and after a moment’s impressive pause she replied “Deep thought!” I mentally marked her as a false lover. Proud parents relate how their progeny in childhood would rather peruse E. S. Ellis than play and pore over Alger than eat—this as irrefragable proof of fitness for a library career. Consideration of cases like these makes us wonder whether the smile is so much out of the way after all. Does the true book-lover publicly announce her affection in the hope of gain? Does she not rather, like Shakespeare’s maid, “never tell her love?” It is to be feared that some of these people are confusing a love of books with a love of reading. They are not the same thing. Some persons enjoy the gentle mental exercise of letting a stream of more or less harmless ideas flow through their brains—continuously in and continuously out again—apprehending them one after another in lazy fashion, and then dismissing them. The result is a degree of mental friction, but no permanent intellectual acquisition. How much of our own reading is of this kind I shudder to contemplate. Far be it from me to condemn it; it has its uses; it is an excellent cure for wakefulness after a busy day; but it no more indicates or stimulates a love for books than shaking hands with a thousand callers makes it possible for the Governor or the President to claim them all as intimate friends.

A real love for books, after all, is betrayed rather than announced; it shows itself in the chance remark, the careless action, just as another kind of love may show itself in a glance or a word.

I believe this to be the reason why a love for books is so little considered among the modern qualifications of librarianship; it appears in acts, not in words; it cannot be ascertained by asking questions. He who protests that he has it must needs be an object of suspicion. And yet I venture to say that if any librarian has made a conspicuous success of his work, apart from the mere mechanics of it, he has achieved that success primarily and notably through love of books. This I assert to be the case down to the assistant of lowest grade.

To be good, work must be ungrudging. And though other things than love for one’s task may make one willing to do it and able to do it well, intelligent interest is always a prime factor in securing the best results.

And love of one’s work becomes a very simple matter when there is love of the subject matter of that work. Those who lament that they are doomed to drudgery should remember that drudgery is subjective. All work consists of a series of acts which taken apart from their relationships are unimportant and uninteresting, but which acquire importance and interest from those relationships. It is so also with sports. Think how childish are the mere acts of striking a ball with a racket or of kicking an inflated leather sphere over a cross-bar! Yet in their proper sequence with other acts they may be the object of the breathless interest or enthusiasm of thousands of spectators. And if this may be the case with a mere game, how much more so with an occupation that is part of the world’s life! To dip a brush in color and draw it across a canvas is a simple act, yet such acts in their sequence may produce a work of art. Here the workman understands the position and value of each act in the sequence; hence he is not apt to feel it as drudgery. Drudgery is work in which the elementary acts are performed unintelligently, with little or no appreciation of their position in the scheme of things, as when a day laborer toils at digging a hole in the ground without the slightest knowledge of its purpose, not caring, indeed, whether it is to be a post-hole or a grave. But to the man who is searching for buried treasure the digging ceases to be drudgery; he knows what he is about, and every shovelful as it is lifted brings him nearer to possible gold and gems. To change drudgery into interested labor, therefore, realize what you are doing; know its relation to what has gone before and what is to come; understand what it is you are working on and what you are working for. Learn to love that something; and all that you can do to shape it, to increase its usefulness and to bring it into new relationships will have a vivid interest to you.

What could be duller than the act of writing in a book, hour after hour, certain particulars regarding other books, the author’s name, the title, the publisher, the size, the price? But if you love those volumes, individually or generically, and if you realize that what you are doing is a necessary step in the work of making their contents accessible and useful—of leading others to love them as you have learned to do—then and only then, it seems to me, does such a task as accessioning become full of interest. And so it is with every one of the thousand acts that make up the daily work of a library assistant. I am saying nothing new; you know and we all know that the laborer who does his work well is he who does it con amore. The wage-earner may labor primarily to support himself and his family, but he will never really earn his living unless his work is of a kind that can command his whole-hearted interest—unless he likes it and takes pride in doing it well. This is why the love of books—an intelligent interest in literature and in the world’s written records—is so fundamental a necessity for a librarian.

It should be emphasized that one may love books even if some of the great masterpieces leave him cold, just as one may love humanity though Alexander and Cæsar, we will say, do not happen to stir his enthusiasm. One may even, in a way, love books when that love is expended on what is by nature ephemeral, so long as it is lovable and excellent. Perishability and excellence are not contraries by any means. Indeed, I heard a painter once, indignant because his art had been characterized as less permanent than sculpture, with implied derogation, assert that all beauty is of its nature perishable. If this be so, a thing of beauty, instead of being a joy forever, is a passing pleasure and the more evanescent as it nears perfection. This thesis could hardly be successfully maintained, and yet I conceive that it has in it an element of truth. There are critics who refuse to admire anything in art that has not in it the elements of permanency. A sunset they will acknowledge to be beautiful, though fleeting, but its artistic portrayal, they say, must be lasting. An idea, a passion, may be fine, even when forgotten in a moment, but if enshrined in literary form it must be worth preserving forever or they regard it as without value. These people are confusing mere durability with beauty. “Is anything that doesn’t last three years a book?” asks Mr. Carnegie. We might as well refuse to admire a flower because it fades over night, or turn from our daily food because it is incapable of retaining indefinitely its savor and nutritious qualities. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that a thing may possess beauty and usefulness in a high degree to-day and lose them both to-morrow. That is an excellent reason for discarding it then, but not for spurning it now. What is cast into the oven of oblivion to-morrow may to-day be arrayed, beyond all the glories of Solomon, in aptness of allusion and in fitness of application.

Much of the best that appears in the daily press is of this kind. Along with a good deal that is worthy of long life, there is a host of admirable material in the ephemeral paragraphs that we are accustomed to despise. We may despise them, but still we read; and nothing that is read with interested attention by fifty millions of people is really despicable. The average newspaper writer may well be content to toss off paragraphs for us; he need not care who constructs our leading editorials. The influence of the paragraph is incomparably the greater; it has the raciness of the soil, shrewd wit driven home with our native exaggeration and the sting of the epigram. And much of that which is bound between covers has this peculiar aroma of journalism—its fitness to-day, its staleness to-morrow. This sort of thing may be badly done or it may be well done—inconceivably apt, dainty and well-flavored. If it is of the best, why may we not love it, though it be to-morrow as flat as the sparkling wine without its gaseous brilliancy?

To those who have been accustomed to books from childhood, who have lived with them and among them, who constantly read them and read about them, they seem to be a part of the natural order of things. It is something of a shock then when we awake, as we all must occasionally, to the realization that to a very large proportion of our population, supposedly educated, they are a thing apart—pedantic, useless, silly; to be borne with during a few years of schooling and then cast aside; to be studied perfunctorily but never to be read. When the statistics of reading are analyzed I believe we shall be startled, not by the great increase in it, notable and indubitable as this is, but at the enormous amount of progress that still remains to be made before the use of books by our people indicates any real general interest in them and appreciation of them. An attitude toward books that is very general is indicated by a series of cartoons which has now been running for several years in a New York evening paper—a proof that its subject must strike a responsive chord, for the execution of the pictures is beneath contempt. It is entitled “Book-Taught Bilkins,” and it sets forth how on one occasion after another Bilkins relies on the information that he finds in a book—and meets with a disaster. This is a trifle, but it is one of those straws that tell which way the wind blows. A presumably intelligent man, a graduate of the public schools, occupying a position under the city, recently remarked to one of our library people that he spent his holidays usually at one of the nearby recreation parks. “Why don’t you go sometimes to one of the branches of the public library?” he was asked. He laughed and said, “I’ve never read a book yet, and I don’t think I’ll start now.” How many are there like him? We are educating them by thousands. They leave school with no interest in books, without the slightest appreciation of what books mean—certainly with no love for them. To these people books are but the vehicles and symbols of a hateful servitude. Perhaps this is inevitable; if it is, all that we can say is that far from “continuing the work of the schools,” as we are often told is our function, we may often have to undo a part of it, which consists in creating an attitude of hostility toward books and reading. Can this be done by those who do not appreciate and care for literature?

I do not want to be considered pessimistic. This lack of interest in books I believe to be noticeable largely because we have changed our whole attitude toward the relationship of literature to the people. Love for books used to be regarded as properly confined to a class; that the bulk of people did not care for literature was no more significant than the fact that they had never tasted paté de foie gras. Now we consider that every one ought to love books—and the fact that vast numbers of people do not, no longer seems natural to us. That these people are beginning to show an interest, and that the ranks of the indifferent are growing slowly less, I firmly believe; and it is my opinion that the public library is no inconsiderable factor in the change. Some, it is true, are beginning to care for books by caring for poor and trashy books. These, however, are on the right road; they are on their way up; it is our business not to despise them, but to help them up further. Can we do it without having ourselves a proper appreciation of what is good in books?

But can a love for books be taught? To those who have the aptitude for it, it certainly can. In other cases it cannot. To those who have it in them, however, appreciation for the beautiful may certainly be awakened by precept and example. I have in mind a farmer in the Virginia mountains, dwelling in a lovely region, but among a rural population without the slightest appreciation of the beauties of nature. This particular man had worked for years in and about a summer camp and had thus associated with people from the city whose appreciation of the fine prospects from cliff and summit was unusually keen. In time he actually came to feel such appreciation himself, and he would spend the whole of his rare holidays on a rocky peak 4000 feet above the sea, drinking in the beauties of the scene and eagerly pointing them out to his tousle-headed children, all of whom he took with him. None of that brood will cease to love nature, I am sure, and their lives will be sweeter and better for it. In like fashion, association with people who appreciate good books will awaken a similar love in many an unpromising mind. Mere contact with the books themselves may do it, and so our open shelves have brought it to thousands, but the additional influence of a sympathetic human mind will hasten it wonderfully. The busy assistant at the desk may have a chance to say but a single word. Shall that word relate to the mechanics of librarianship—the charging system, the application form, the shelf-arrangement—or shall it convey in some indefinable way the fact that here is a body of workers, personally interested in books and eager to arouse or foster such an interest in others?

But how may one tell whether the true love of books is in him? To detect it in another, as already noted, requires more than a brief acquaintance. But to test oneself is easier. What would the world be to you without books? Could you go on living your life, physically and mentally, even as you do now, if the whole great series, from big to little, from old to new, from the Bible and Shakespeare down to the latest novel, were utterly wiped away? If you can truthfully say that such a cataclysm would make no difference to you, then you certainly do not love books. If the loss of them, or of some part of them—even the least—would leave a void in your life, then you have that love in greater or less degree, in finer or coarser quality. Let us pity those who have it not. And as for you who have it, you surely have not only a fundamental qualification for librarianship, but that which will make, and does make, of you better men and women. Let us perfect ourselves in all the minutiæ of our profession, let us study how to elevate it and make it more effective, but let us not forget the book, without which it would have no existence. Possibly the librarian who reads is lost, but the librarian who has never read, or who, having read, has imbibed from reading no feeling toward books but those of dislike or indifference, is surely worse than lost—he has, so far as true librarianship goes, never existed.

THE LIBRARY AS THE EDUCATIONAL CENTER OF A TOWN

In using this expression it is not intended to imply that the library is, or should be, the only place in a town where educational processes are going on—perhaps not even the principal place. The center of a circle is not the whole circle; its area is zero, it is simply a point so related to other parts of the figure as to give it supreme importance. The center of a wheel, through which the axle passes, is not the whole wheel, but around it the whole wheel turns. So the educational functions of a town library, while they may not bulk large in a catalog, should be so related to those of other institutions in the community as to give it peculiar importance and authority.

It is not necessary here to remark that education is what its name implies—a drawing out, a development of potentialities. Because it is this, and only this, it will never make a Shakespeare or a Newton out of one who has it not “in him,” as the idiom so well runs, to become one or the other. Because it is this, there are men who do have in them potentialities of usefulness, perhaps even of greatness, but who for lack of it, die undeveloped; “mute” and “inglorious.”

From the moment when the new-born babe feels the contact of the outer world, through his organs of sense, that contact begins to develop his possibilities. Here education begins, and it ceases only with the stoppage of all functions at death. When it has gone on so far that a contact is established with other human minds, this development takes a special turn that differentiates it from any training that the lower animals receive—that makes it a link in the education of the race. Still further is this accentuated when the child begins to have access to the printed records of the race in the shape of books.

Books, or no books, his educational development goes on, at home, among his playmates, in his chosen work in shop, farm or office, but the use of books gives it a wider relationship—a broader outlook. This relation of our formal intellectual records to education which is emphasized especially during the period of attendance at school or college, makes a storehouse of books of peculiar value and importance to a community. Especially should the existence of such a collection direct the attention of every person in the community to the fact that the use of books to develop the mind and broaden the possibilities does not properly end with the close of the school life. It is the misfortune of the school, in too many instances, that its work engenders a hatred of books instead of a love for them. Play, we are told, is “work that you don’t have to do.” It is the merit of the library that there is no compulsion about its use. We dislike what is forced upon us, but the study which is the hardest of work in a school may become recreation when one is free to follow the line of inclination among the books of a well-made collection. In this way the post-scholastic education, if we may call it so, which lasts as long as the life, is kept in touch with the written records, instead of casting those records aside and proceeding haphazard wholly on so-called “practical” lines. The teachers express this, when they admit the public library at all into the educational pantheon, by saying that it may “continue the work of the school.” This is a one-sided way of looking at the matter—as one-sided as it would be to say that the function of the school is to prepare people for the use of the public library—a statement no less and no more true than the other. The proper way to put it is that the school and the library have closely related educational functions, both employing largely the written records of previous attainment, but the school concentrating its influence on a short period of peculiar susceptibility, with the aid of enforced personal discipline and exposition, while the library works without such opportunities, but also freed from these limitations. Thus the library uses books as a means of development, not with the aid of personal influence, but without taskmasters; not without discipline, but without compulsion. During the years of school attendance, it works with the school, and it recognizes the fact that its use is a habit best acquired early. This is the reason for our separate rooms for children, with their special collections and trained assistants, and also for our efforts to co-ordinate the child’s reading with his school work. We are not trying to set up a rival educational system, which by its superior attractiveness may divert the attention of the child from school; we are merely seeing that our young people may become accustomed to use books properly, to love them dearly and to look upon the place where they are housed as in some sense an intellectual refuge through life.

This closeness of contact with a public collection of books is largely a modern idea. In ancient times the safeguarding and preservation of the individual book was far more important than it is today. Greater public security, and especially the improvement in methods of duplication, have now made such care unnecessary, except in the case of volumes kept as curiosities, or for occasional use. The book that does the most for popular education is not kept behind bars, but sent out broadcast for free use, shortly perishing in the flesh to be reincarnated in fresh paper, type and binding. Sending out books for home use has added enormously to the educational value of the library and to the good done by books—to the number of points of contact of mind with mind. Along the same line has been the development of subsidiary centers of distribution—branch libraries, traveling libraries, delivery stations. All these have added to the tendency to look upon the public library as a center of municipal education. In many communities it is being looked to now as such a center in matters having no direct connection with books. It is a museum on a small scale; a lecture bureau; the maker, sometimes the publisher, of lists and bibliographies. In old times the local collector of minerals or of prints turned over his crystals or his pictures to the school; now, as likely as not, he gives them to the library. It is better that he should; for in the educational life of the individual, the school comes and goes, but the library goes on forever.

It is this capacity of the modern library to reach out beyond its own walls in many different directions that makes it proper for us to speak of it as a center. In a similar way the physicist speaks of centers of force. And as a body exerting attraction or repulsion—a magnetic pole, an electrified sphere, a gravitating particle—is surrounded by a field of force which is very real, though invisible, so there are invisible lines that connect such an intellectual center as the library with every interest in the community. We recognize this in our colloquial speech. Did you never hear of a network of branch libraries? Yet on a map they show merely a system of dots. The network is formed of the commingling fields of force, which together enmesh the community in a web of intellectual influences. And as an ordinary force has two aspects, so the influences radiating from our library centers are directed both from and toward them. The up-to-date library strikes out toward every member of the community and it strives to draw each one to itself. It sends its books into every home, its helpful aids to reading and to study, its library news and gossip in the local paper: but on the other hand, its cozy rooms, its well-stocked reference shelves, its willing and pleasant attendants exert on every man, woman and child in the community an intellectual attraction, and having let them taste of the delights it has to offer sends him out again as a willing missionary to lure in others. By such methods should the library strive to be a center of mental development in a community; by such methods is it succeeding, for no other center can vie with it in the universality of its appeal, whether we follow the individual from birth to death, or regard the various members of a community as they exist at one specified time.

But there is another sense in which the library should be and is able to serve as the intellectual center of a community. A community’s moral and intellectual status is not simply the sum of that of its component members. This is true of all aggregates where the components are interrelated in any way. In all such cases the properties of the whole depend, it is true, on the properties of the components, but not by simple addition. The taste of common salt is not the taste of sodium added to that of chlorine; the feelings, thoughts and acts of any aggregate of men may be quite different from those of the men taken individually. This is true whether the aggregate be simply a body of spectators in a theater, mutually related only by the fact of their common presence in the place, or an association, or the members of a municipal community. The human aggregate is in all cases less advanced than the individual; it is more primitive in its emotions, its morals, its acts. This might be expected, since the formal group, of whatever kind, began its evolution later than the individual. A community’s moral sense is thus less advanced than that of its members; it will lie, swindle and steal, when they would hesitate to do so; it will resort to violence sooner than they. Its intellectual ability is also less; its business transactions are looser; its appreciation of artistic values is inferior.

The education of a group of men, as a group, is thus something different from the education of its individual members. In the case of a loose group, such as an audience, it could not be attempted; with a group dwelling together and bound by ties of blood and common interest it is not only possible but quite worth while.

Of course it must be understood that whatever educates the individual also helps to educate the community; but when, as is almost always the case, the community lags behind, something may be done to bring its ideals, feelings and acts nearer to the individual standard, even without altering the latter.

Now we have already been reminded by Prof. Vincent of Chicago university that the library may act as the social memory; the town library should therefore be emphatically the municipal memory. And as memory is the basis of our intellectual life, so a communal memory of this kind will serve as the basis of the community’s intellectual life and as a means through which it may be fostered and advanced. As the individual looks back with interest on his own personal history and refreshes his recollection by means of family portraits, old letters, diaries, scrapbooks and material of all kinds, so the community should retain consciousness of the continuity of its own history by keeping in the public library full records of similar import—files of all local publications, printed memorabilia of all kinds, material for local history, even to the point of imagined triviality; even private letters, when these bear in any way on the community life. The legal and political history, or, at last, its dry bones, is locked up in the official archives or the town or city; we need, in addition, an intellectual and social hall of records out of which the delver in local history may clothe this skeleton with flesh and blood.

A man with a memory has the basis for a mind and a conscience; so a community with this kind of a collective memory is much more ’apt than another to develop collective intelligence and collective morality. It may be asserted, not as a figure of speech, but as a cold fact, that a community whose citizens look back upon an honorable history with records preserved in an accessible place, ought to be much less likely to sanction a trolley steal or to wink-at official graft.

In a recent striking address, Prof. William James has called attention to the importance of the things that may serve to unlock stores of reserve energy. When the runner’s fatigue has increased up to a certain point he all at once gets, as we say, his “second wind”—something to enable him to draw on a reserve energy. These reserves, Prof. James tells us, we all possess, especially in matters of the intellect and morals; they may be unlocked by ideas, sentiments or objects. The ideas represented by such phrases—catchwords, if you choose to call them so—as love, mother, home, liberty, church, the old flag; righteousness, civic duty—have had a power in setting energy free and accomplishing results, that is beyond estimation. In regarding the library as a center of municipal education we make it a storehouse of objects and records, with their associated ideas and sentiments, that are competent to act in just this way. A man who feels that he is a “citizen of no mean city,” who has been made to realize it from earliest childhood, whose mind turns habitually to the storehouse that has done most to make him realize it, is a nobler man, and the community of which he is a part is a nobler community, than if such a place were non-existent, or if its records and associations were scattered and unheeded. This is a most cogent reason for making the library the intellectual center of the town, as the town hall is the political and the church the religious center; for seeing in it not alone a collection of books, however good, that are given out to those who ask for them but a means for guiding and leading the town’s intellectual progress, for turning it from trivialities to what is worth while, caring for the children’s reading, stimulating public thought by lectures, endeavoring by every legitimate means to attract toward it the public eye in regard to all things that contribute to individual and civic development.

The most important part of our education, says Emil Reich, we gain after we are twenty-five years old. We cannot prevent the acquisition of such a post-graduate education by every young man and young woman in the town. The question is not: Shall the mind be trained? Shall character be developed? It is rather, How and by what means shall the development go on? Under what auspices shall it take place and toward what end shall it point? Shall it deal in trivialities and end in vacuity? Shall it impart insincerity, dishonesty, uncleanliness? Shall its product be a useless citizen, an indifferent one, a positively harmful one?

The answers to these questions depend on the home, the church, the school—a score, perhaps, of minor civic societies. Let us at the very center of the town’s mental and moral life erect an institution, which, having as its basal object the collection, preservation and popularization of the records of what has been worth while in the past, may serve also as a support to what is good in the present, and a ladder on which the community may mount to still better things in the future. Is this too large, too serious a view to take of the importance of the public library? That will depend on what we choose to make of it—a mere pile of books to be turned over by the passerby, or a true center of municipal education.

THE LIBRARIAN AS A CENSOR[8]

“Some are born great; some achieve greatness; some have greatness thrust upon them.” It is in this last way that the librarian has become a censor of literature. Originally the custodian of volumes placed in his care by others, he has ended by becoming in these latter days much else, including a selector and a distributor, his duties in the former capacity being greatly influenced and modified by the expansion of his field in the latter. As the library’s audience becomes larger, as its educational functions spread and are brought to bear on more of the young and immature, the duty of sifting its material becomes more imperative. I am not referring now to the necessity of selection imposed upon us by lack of funds. A man with five dollars to spend can buy only five dollars’ worth from a stock worth a hundred, and it is unfair to say that he has “rejected” the unbought ninety-five dollars’ worth. Such a selection scarcely involves censorship, and we may cheerfully agree with those who say that from this point of view the librarian is not called upon to be a censor at all. But there is another point of view. A man, we will say, is black-balled at a club because of some unsavory incident in his life. Is it fair to class him simply with the fifty million people who still remain outside of the club? He would, we will say, have been elected but for the incident that was the definite cause of his rejection. So there are books that would have been welcome on our library shelves but for some one objectionable feature, whose appearance on examination ensures their exclusion—some glaring misstatement, some immoral tendency, some offensive matter or manner. These are distinctly rejected candidates. And when the library authority, whether librarian, book committee, or paid expert, points out the objectionable feature that bars out an otherwise acceptable book the function exercised is surely censorship.

May any general laws be laid down on this subject?

Let us admit at the outset that there is absolutely no book that may not find its place on the shelves of some library and perform there its appointed function. From this point of view every printed page is a document, a record of something, material, as the French say, pour servir; from a mass of such material neither falsity, immorality nor indecency can exclude it. I do not speak at this time, therefore, of the library as a storehouse of data for the scholar and the investigator, but rather of the collection for the free use of the general public and especially of collections intended for circulation. It is to these that the censorship to which I have alluded may properly apply and upon these it is generally exercised. I know of no more desirable classification of books for our present purpose than the old three categories—the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Those books that we desire, we want because they fall under one or more of these three heads—they must be morally beneficial, contain accurate information or satisfy the esthetic sense in its broadest meaning. Conversely we may exclude a book because it lacks goodness, truth or beauty. We may thus reject it on one or more of the three following grounds; badness—that is undesirable moral teaching or effect; falsity—that is, mistakes, errors or misstatements of fact; and ugliness—matter or manner offensive to our sense of beauty, fitness or decency. The first and third qualities, badness and ugliness, are often wrongly confounded, and as I desire therefore to speak of them together, we will now take up the second, namely, falsity or lack of truth. Strangely enough, among all reasons for excluding books this is perhaps least often heard. Possibly this is because it applies only to non-fiction, and apparently in the minds of many non-fiction is desirable simply because it is what it is. Again, the application of this test to any particular book can generally be made only by an expert. The librarian needs no adviser to tell him whether or not a book is immoral or indecent, but he cannot so easily ascertain whether the statements in a work on history, science or travel are accurate. This lack of expert knowledge is bad enough when inaccuracy or falsity of statement is involuntary on the author’s part. But of late we have in increasing numbers a class of books whose authors desire to deceive the public—to make the reader take for authentic history, biography or description what is at best historical fiction. Again, the increasing desire to provide information for children and to interest the large class of adults who are intellectually young but who still prefer truth to fictitious narrative, has produced countless books in which the writer has attempted to state facts, historical, scientific or otherwise, in as simple, and at the same time as striking, language as possible. Unfortunately, with some noteworthy exceptions, persons with comprehensive knowledge of a subject are generally not able to present it in the desired way. Co-operation is therefore necessary, and it is not always properly or thoroughly carried out, even where the necessity for it is realized. Proper co-operation between the expert and the popularizer involves (1) the selection and statement of the facts by the former; (2) their restatement and arrangement of the latter; and (3) the revision of this arrangement by the former. It is this third process that is often omitted even in serious cyclopedic work, and the result is inaccuracy. Often, however, there is no cooperation at all; the writer picks up his facts from what he considers reliable sources, puts them into eminently readable shape, dwelling on what seem to him striking features, heightening contrasts here and slurring over distinctions or transitions there. This process produces what scientific men call contemptuously “newspaper science,” and we have as well newspaper history, newspaper sociology and so on. They fill the pages not only of our daily press, but of our monthly magazines and of too many of the books that stand on our library shelves. It is unfair to blame the newspapers alone for their existence; in fact, some of the best simple presentations of valuable information that we have appear in the daily press. Then there are the text books. Any librarian who has ever tried to select a few of the best of one kind—say elementary arithmetics—to place on his shelves, knows that their name is legion and that differences between them are largely confined to compilers’ names and publishers’ imprints. In part they are subject to the same sources of error as the popularized works and in addition to the temptation to hasty, scamped or stolen work due to some publisher’s or teacher’s cupidity. This catalog might be extended indefinitely, but even now we begin to see the possibilities of rejection on the ground of falsity and inaccuracy. I believe that the chief menace to the usefulness of the public libraries lies, not as some believe in the reading of frankly fictitious narrative, but in the use of false or misleading history, biography, science and art. Not the crude or inartistic printing of toy money, but the counterfeiting of real money, is a menace to the circulating medium.

Against such debasement of the sterling coin of literature it is the duty of the librarian to fight; and he cannot do it single-handed. Some things he should and does know; he is able to tell whether the subject matter is presented in such a way as to be of value to his readers; he can tell whether the simple and better known facts of history and science are correctly stated; he is often an authority in one or more subjects in which he is competent to advise as an expert; but only the ideal paragon, sometimes described but never yet incarnated, can qualify simultaneously as an expert in all branches of science, philosophy, art and literature. The librarian must have expert advisers.

Nor are these so difficult to obtain. The men who know are the very ones that are interested in the library’s welfare and are likely to help it without compensation. And in the smaller places where the variety and extent of special knowledge is less comprehensive the ground covered by the library’s collection is also less, and the advice that it needs is simpler. The advice should if possible be personal and definite. No amount of lists, I care not who prepares or annotates them, can take the place of the friend at one’s elbow who is able and willing to give aid just when and exactly where it is needed. As well might the world’s rulers dismiss all their cabinet ministers and govern from textbooks on law and ethics. The formula, the treatise, the bibliography—we must still have all these, but they must be supplemented by personal advice. And competent advisers exist, as I have said, in almost every place. The local clergy on questions of religion, and often on others, too; the school principal on history and economics, the organist on music, the village doctor on science—some such men will always be found able and glad to give advice on these subjects or some others; and the place is small indeed that does not include one or two enthusiasts, collectors of insects or minerals or antiquities, who have made themselves little authorities on their pet hobbies and may possibly be the greatest or the only living authorities on those local phases that particularly interest the local librarian. It will do the librarian no harm to hunt these men out and ask their aid; possibly his own horizon will broaden a little with the task and his respect for the community in which he works will grow as he performs it.

But what if two of our doctors disagree? Then follow the advice of both. It might be disastrous for a patient to take two kinds of medicine, but it can never hurt a library to contain books on both sides of a question, whether it be one of historical fact, of religious dogma, or of scientific theory. This may not be pressed too far; the following of one side may be beneath our notice. It is not absolutely necessary, for instance, for a small popular circulating library to contain works in advocacy of the flatness of the earth or of the tenets of the angel dancers of Hackensack; but it is essential that such a library should make accessible to its readers the facts of the Reformation as stated by both Catholic and Protestant writers, histories of the American Civil War written from both the southern and northern standpoints, geological works both asserting and denying the existence of a molten core in the earth’s interior. An impartial book is hard to find; it is a thing of value, but I am not sure that two partisan books, one on each side, with the reader as judge, do not constitute a winning combination. Against violent and personal polemics, of course, the librarian must set his face. All such are candidates for rejection. It is fortunate for us in this regard that we are supplying the needs of all creeds, all classes and all schools. Each must and should have its own literature while each protests against violent attacks on its own tenets. Such protests, while often unjustified, are helping us to weed out our collections.

So much for deficiency in truth as a cause for rejection. Now let us consider deficiency in goodness and deficiency in beauty; or stated positively, badness and ugliness. These two things are confounded by many of us. Is this because the great majority of librarians to-day are of the sex that judges largely by intuition and often by instinctive notions of beauty and fitness? To most women, I believe all ugliness is sinful, and all sin is ugly. Now sin is morally ugly, without doubt, but it may not be esthetically so. And goodness may be esthetically repulsive. Badness and ugliness in books are both adequate grounds for rejection, but they need not coexist. Some of the worst books are artistically praiseworthy and would be well worth a place of honor on our shelves if their beauty alone were to move us. On the other hand, some books that are full of impropriety or even of indecency are absolutely unimpeachable from a moral standpoint.

Shakespeare and the Bible are often indecent without being in the least immoral. “Raffles” is in no wise indecent, but is dangerously immoral. Bernard Shaw is often both indecent and immoral while at the same time so astoundingly clever that we stand gaping at him with our mouths wide open while he tosses down our throats the most unsavory things.

What, then, is the distinction between badness and ugliness? For our present purpose I believe it to be this: badness depends on immutable laws, while ugliness, at any rate that of the kind which concerns us here, is a matter of convention. Virtue, with all due apologies to Mr. Lecky and to many other eminent scholars, has certain standards that do not vary with place or time. Let us grant that a given act may be good to-day and bad to-morrow, good in Tasmania and bad in Pennsylvania; this is beside the question. We have here to do with the classification of this particular act in certain fixed categories that of themselves remain bad or good. The act of cutting off a man’s head may be good if the cutter is the public executioner, and bad if he be a private citizen; one may shoot an attacking highwayman but not an innocent friend. The reason for these differences, however, is that in one case the killing is murder while in the other it is not; murder itself always was and always will be bad.

Impropriety or indecency, on the other hand, is purely arbitrary. Personally I am inclined to think this true of all beauty, but it is unnecessary to obtrude this view here. Impropriety is a violation of certain social customs, and although I should be the last to question the observance of those customs, we must grant, I think, that they rest on foundations quite other than those of right and wrong. In fact decency, instead of being on the same plane with morality, comes nearer to being properly ranked with those fixed categories mentioned above, which are themselves always good or bad, but which may or may not include a given act, according to circumstances. Murder is always bad, but whether the taking of life is or is not murder depends on the circumstances; it may depend entirely on motive. So indecency is always bad, but whether a given act or object is or is not indecent depends on circumstances; it may depend not only on motive but on locality or environment. Objects and acts of the highest sanctity in one country may be regarded as low and vulgar in another—the standard varies from class to class, from one occupation to another; almost from family to family. One may mention, in all innocence, that which may bring a blush to the cheek of some listener, simply because of this instability of standard in the matter of impropriety. To this class of things particularly refers the celebrated dictum: “There is no thing in heaven or earth, Horatio, but thinking makes it so.” This is unexceptionable Christian Science, but it is not quite true. A higher authority than Shakespeare has asserted that by thinking one cannot make a single hair white or black; and this surely accords with the results of experience. Likewise no one by thinking can make badness goodness or the reverse. But whether a thing be improper or not depends entirely on thinking. Thinking makes it so. It is improper for a Mohammedan woman to expose her face in public because she thinks it is, and because that thought is an ingrained part of her existence. But although the Persian sect of Assassins thought with all their hearts that murder was good, it was still very evil. Are we getting too far away from the censorship of books? I think not. See the bearing of all this.

If a book is really bad—if it teaches that evil is good or that it makes no difference—it ought to be rejected uncompromisingly, despite the fact that it is void of impropriety or even artistically admirable. But if it is morally unobjectionable and yet contains that which is improper or indecent, it is then proper to inquire whether the degree and kind of this indecency is such as to condemn it, particularly taking into account the condition, the intelligence and the age of those who would be likely to read it, and also the time and the readers for whom, if it is an old book, its author originally wrote it. With increasing civilization there are certain things that become more and more indecent, and others that become less and less so, owing to the shifting of points of view.

Let us now take up more specifically moral badness as a cause for rejection. We occasionally meet people who hold that the mention of anything morally bad in a book condemns it; while, on the other hand, some would admit books whose atmosphere reeks with evil; whose bad characters live bad lives and speak bad thoughts, so long as the writer in his own person does not commend evil or teach that it is good. Both these extremes are to be avoided. Surely we have outlived the idea that innocence and ignorance are the same thing. “You can’t touch pitch,” says the proverb, “and not be defiled.” Granted; yet we may look at pitch, or any other dirt, and locate it, without harm; nay, we must do so if we want to keep out of it. This is not saying that it is well to seek out descriptions of evil, or to dwell on them, in a work of fiction. Things necessary in the study of medicine, folk-lore or law may be abhorrent in a narrative intended for amusement, although the advent of the “problem” novel—the type of fiction in which the narrative form is often merely the sugar coating for the pill—introduces confusion here into any rule that we may lay down. But however foolish it is to insist that the very existence of evil be concealed from readers of fiction, since evil is a normal constituent of the world as we find it, it is certainly fair to object to a dwelling upon evil phases of life to such an extent that the resulting impression is a distortion of the truth. This distortion may be so great as to make it proper to reject the book wholly on the ground of falsity. A filling of the canvas with lurid tints is apt to convey—or at any rate is often so done as to convey—the idea that the existence of the evil that the writer depicts is a matter of indifference. A man need not stop to assert his belief that theft is wrong whenever he tells the story of a robbery, but it is quite possible to tell a tale of theft in such a way as to leave an impression that it is a venial offense and to weaken in the reader the moral inhibition that must be his chief reliance in time of temptation. And for “theft” here we may substitute any form of moral dereliction that you may desire. One of the most potent vehicles of moral downfall of any kind is the impression that “everybody does it”—that some particular form of wrongdoing is well-nigh universal and is looked upon with leniency by society in general. The man who steals from his employer or who elopes with his neighbor’s wife is nine times out of ten a willing convert to this view. A book that conveys such an idea is really more dangerous than one which openly advocates wrong doing. There can be little difference of opinion here. There may be more in regard to the policy of telling the whole truth regarding a state of things that is morally very bad. It may be fatal to a patient to let him know how ill he is. And may it not also be injurious to a young man or a young woman to expose the amount of evil that really lies before them in this world? There is plausibility in this argument, but it is out of date. There is much philosophy in the modern paradoxical slang phrase: “Cheer up! the worst is yet to come!” And indeed if there is any superlative badness ahead of us, it is better that we should know it, rather than cultivate a false cheerfulness, based on misinformation, with the certainty of disillusionment. The Egyptians were right when they set a skeleton at their feasts. It was not to make the feasts gloomy, but to make the skeleton a familiar object by association; to accustom the feasters to think about death, how to avoid it as long as possible and how to meet it when inevitable. We should therefore welcome the truth in any book, unless it is that “half truth,” which the poet tells us is “ever the blackest of lies,” or unless it is so stated as to violate the canons of decency, in which case, as we have already seen, its rejection must be based on different considerations entirely.

It is these canons of decency, after all, that give the librarian his sleepless nights, not only because they are so frequently confounded with canons of morality, but because, as we have already seen, they are arbitrary and variable. Consider the one case of French fiction. Mr. Wister has told librarians that all subjects are “fit for fiction.” This is interesting as an academic thesis, but when the French proceed to act upon it, the Anglo-Saxon catches his breath. Books, like men, when they are in Rome must do as the Romans do, and whatever may be proper in Paris, an American public library is justified in requiring its books to respect American prejudices. This is true, at any rate, of books in the English language, even if they are translations from a tongue whose users have other customs and other prejudices. But how about these books in the original? Can we assume that books in the French language are for Frenchmen and that our censorship of them is to be from the French and not the American point of view? Or shall we hold that they are to be read wholly or in part by persons whose mother-tongue is English and whose ideas of the proprieties are Anglo-Saxon? And shall we bear in mind also that the reading public of a work of French fiction excludes in France the “young person” of whom the American library public is largely made up? This is only one of the perplexing questions that confront the American librarian in this field. Every one must struggle with it for himself, having in mind the force and direction of his own local sentiment; but few public libraries are treating it consistently and systematically. Probably, however, many librarians are placing on open shelves books in foreign languages, whose translations into English they would be inclined to restrict. In some cases, of course, appeal to a wholly foreign group of readers, with their foreign point of view, may be assumed, as in the case of a Russian collection on the East Side of New York; though even here it is a question of whether this is not a good place to prepare these readers for a change in library “folkways”—to use Professor Sumner’s expressive word.

Nor must we forget that our own ideas of propriety are constantly changing. Take the single instance of the use, in literature, of words regarded as profane or vulgar. Most of us can recollect a time when our acquaintances were likely to be shocked by the occurrence in a book of the expletive “damn”—that is, if it were spelled out. It was generally held to be unobjectionable, or at least less objectionable, if the second and third letters were replaced by a dash. Evidently this is the purest convention. This and worse words appear now, not without shocking some persons, to be sure, but certainly without shocking many of those who formerly would not have tolerated them. On the other hand, it would not be difficult to instance words formerly common in good literature whose use would now cause something of a sensation. There are also good people who will read unmoved surprising words and expressions when put into the mouth of a cowboy or a Klondike miner, but whose gorge would rise if the same words were employed by a writer in propria persona.

What is true of words is true also of subjects. That which could not be touched upon yesterday is discussed freely to-day, and vice-versa. No way of dealing with the situation will fail to offend some one, and the only approximation to satisfaction will be gained by the use of common sense applied to each case as it comes up.

Indecency, of course, is not the only offense against beauty that a book may commit. It may be trashy, that is, its subject matter or the manner in which it is treated may be trivial and worthless. The dust of the street is neither beautiful nor valuable, although it may contain nothing injurious to health or repulsive to the senses. The diction of the book may offend against beauty and order by its incorrectness; its paper, its typography, its binding, its illustrations may all be offensive to the eye. These last are mere matters of outward show, to be sure; it may be necessary to disregard them. They are usually reasons for excluding an edition rather than a book, though sometimes the only obtainable edition offends in so many of these ways as to make it unpurchasable, even if otherwise desirable. So far as they militate against the usefulness of the book rather than its beauty, as in the case of the badly sewed binding or paper that is comely but flimsy, they fall under the head of badness rather than that of ugliness—they are offenses against the Good and not against the Beautiful. Such material grounds for rejection, however, are not peculiar to books, and I do not dwell on them here. Ugliness that consists in mere triviality or in incorrectness of diction has this in common with impropriety—it is arbitrary and conventional. With regard to language, this is obvious. The fact that a certain combination of sounds means one thing in France and another in England and is quite unintelligible perhaps in Spain, is a matter of pure convention, though the convention is sanctioned by long usage. The fact that the double negative is very good Greek and very vulgar English is equally arbitrary. These conventions have become serious things with us; they are of prime importance in the consideration of books, but it is desirable that we should classify them correctly.

With regard to triviality the case is not so clear, yet I feel strongly that it is a relative, not an absolute, quality. The term should be classed with that other misused word—superficiality. No book, of course, and no mind is absolutely thorough, and the lesser grades of knowledge are as important in their place as the higher. What we should condemn is not that a man, or a book, possesses a certain slight degree of knowledge or of ability, but the fact that, possessing it, he believes or represents it to be a higher degree. A man desires, we will say, to memorize the Russian alphabet, so that he may read the proper names on book titles. Is he to be condemned because he knows no more of Russian? Another wishes to wield a hammer dextrously enough to drive a nail without smashing his fingers. Is he “superficial” because he is not an expert cabinet-maker? Still another has learned to play the piano well enough to amuse himself in his idle hours. Does his lack of skill lay him open to the charge of “superficiality?” These people may, it is true, think that they are respectively a Russian scholar, a skilled carpenter, and a good pianist; then and then only are they culpable. The “superficiality,” in other words, consists in mistaking a lesser degree of knowledge for a higher or in thinking that the lesser degree suffices for something that requires the higher—not in the mere limitation of the possessor. A superficial book is that which, skimming the surface of the subject, persuades the reader that he has gone into its depths; as for the skimming itself, that might be quite adequate and sufficient for some purposes. So with “triviality.” Nothing is trivial that has an aim and accomplishes it; as for the gradation of aims from unimportant up to important, I leave that to others. Who shall say whether the passing of an idle hour or the addition of a few facts to one’s store of knowledge is the more important? The idle hour may be the recreation period of a hard-working mind, without which it might break down from over-pressure, leaving to less competent minds the completion of its useful labor. The few facts might be quite unfruitful. This is why we should hesitate to condemn a trivial book that has beauty of form or some other positive virtue to commend it. Triviality is objectionable only when it masquerades as importance. Perhaps it would be better to say: a book that pretends to excellence along any line where it is really valueless is a dangerous book. This brings us back to Truth as a criterion of excellence, for such a book is a hypocritical or false book, as much as if it definitely asserted as a fact that which is untrue.

When a book, therefore, comes up as a candidate for omission from the purchasing list, or perhaps for exclusion after it has actually been placed on the shelves, the librarian’s first duty is to inquire whether it is objectionable because of falsity, of evil morality or of impropriety. The first question may be determinable only by reference to an expert. If the second is alleged, it is well to inquire whether the supposed immorality of the book be not in fact simply impropriety, and if impropriety is the only objection, whether it is of kind and amount likely to be properly offensive. If the charge of immorality is sustained I see no place for the book on the shelves of a public circulating library.

What has been said may seem to need rounding out with specific illustrations and instances, but it is particularly desirable to avoid here anything in the nature of purely personal opinion and prejudice. It might be possible of course to define the content of certain well-known works by their conformity or non-conformity with the canons above laid down, without attempting to settle the question, at the moment, whether the degree of non-conformity, if it exists, is high enough to make exclusion from a public library desirable or necessary. From this point of view Othello, we will say, is a play teaching a moral lesson, in doing which it discusses sin, but never with approval, expressed or implied. The author uses words and expressions not in accordance with modern standards of propriety, although not contrary to those of his own time. In like manner Boccacio’s “Decameron” may be characterized as a collection of short stories connected by thin narrative, often telling of wrongdoing in a manner clearly implying that it is usual and unobjectionable, with use of words and incidents frequently contrary not only to modern ideas of propriety, but also to those of the author’s time, except in the dissolute circles for which the tales were originally written. Some of the stories, however, teach morality, and the literary style and method are beautiful and commendable, while the pictures of society are truthful. The implications of customary vice are simply reflections of life as the author knew it. “Gil Blas,” by Le Sage, continuing in this vein, we may call a tale of adventure in which everything is set down as it happens, good, bad and indifferent; important and trivial, with a hero who is somewhat of a rogue, although the wickedness is incidental and is described in such a way that the reader never mistakes it for virtue even when the writer tells it with a relish. The implication that wrongdoing is common, though undoubtedly conveyed, leaves the impression only that it is common among the people and under the circumstances of the tale, which is undoubtedly correct.

It would greatly aid the library censor if he could have annotations of this sort on all books intended for promiscuous public circulation. For this purpose, in fact, all literature should be evaluated by the light of this one color of the critical spectrum. The two or three books just noted possess at least some of the elements of greatness; yet good people differ regarding the extent to which they should be made freely accessible to the general public. I have tried to set down regarding them data on which all may agree, for the purpose of impressing upon you the fact that disagreement is not so much regarding the data as regarding the application to them of principles which, if they have been stated correctly, are few, simple and readily accepted.

We have been lightly skimming the surface of a subject vital to all who have to do with the production and distribution of books—to authors, editors, publishers, booksellers, and above all to us librarians. The ranks of readers are swelling to-day; it is our boast that we are doing our best to swell them. They are recruited from classes whose literature—if we may so extend the term—has been oral rather than written, whose standards of propriety are sometimes those of an earlier and grosser age, whose ideas of right and wrong are beclouded by ignorance and distorted by prejudice. And at the same time hosts of our people, with little background of hereditary refinement to steady them, have become suddenly rich, “beyond the dreams of avarice.” The shock has upset their ideas and their standards. Riches have come so suddenly and so vastly even to the educated, to those whose culture dates back for generations, that it has overturned their ideals also. Our literature is menaced both from below and from above. Books that distinctly commend what is wrong, that teach how to sin and tell how pleasant sin is, sometimes with and sometimes without the added sauce of impropriety, are increasingly popular, tempting the author to imitate them, the publishers to produce, the booksellers to exploit. Thank heaven they do not tempt the librarian. Here at last is a purveyor of books who has no interest in distributing what is not clean, honest, and true. The librarian may, if he will—and he does—say to this menacing tide, “Thus far shalt thou go and no farther.”

HOW TO RAISE THE STANDARD OF BOOK SELECTION[9]

If a man is to improve himself, he must first realize his own deficiencies; in other words, he must know what he ought to be, and how and in what degree he falls short of it.

First, then, what are the best books; and do we get them?

“Best” here as always is a relative term; what is best for one may not be best for another, or for all. We hear “good books” gravely recommended to people who will not read them, and who could not extract the good from them if they did read them. When the book fits the man, provided he is a good man, it is a good book, ipso facto.

You remember the tale of the rural parish priest at dinner with his bishop. The host, desiring to poke a little quiet fun, asked him whether it were lawful to baptize a man in soup. “I should make a distinction,” calmly answered the priest; “if it were good thick soup, I should say not; if it were wishy-washy stuff like this we are eating, it would be quite proper.”

So long as we do not realize that the same literary consistency is not adapted both to nutrition and to immersion we shall not be able to decide on what are the best books.

But is there no general line of division between bad and good books?

I can give but a few, but I venture to lay down one or two simple rules for testing. My tests would be—

(1) The test of language. No book can be good that is not written in correct English. By this I mean, of course, that the author himself must speak correctly; his characters may be ignorant persons and he will naturally make them talk accordingly.

(2) The test of simplicity and clearness. No book can be good whose author expresses himself in words that are too large for his subject or in sentences that are so involved that they cannot be easily understood.

(3) The best of good taste. No book can be good whose author uses words or expressions that would not be used by cultivated people.

(4) The test of truth. No book can be good whose subject matter is false; or, in case of fiction, whose manner of telling is such as to make it seem absurdly improbable. The plot of the book may, it is true, lack probability. It may be frankly improbable like a fairy tale, but the author must not seem to lose faith in it himself, and no matter how impossible his foundation the structure that he builds on it must hold together.

I venture to say that if a book survives these tests—if it is simply and clearly expressed in good English and in the best taste and is consistently put together—it cannot be a bad book so far as style goes.

So far as the subject matter of the book is concerned, my test would be simply that of its effect on the reader. If a book makes the reader want to be mischievous, foolish or criminal—to be a silly or bad man or woman, or if it tends to make him do his daily work badly, it is a bad book and all the worse in this case if it is interesting and fascinating in style. But even here the trouble is largely in the manner of treatment. A book may tell of crime and criminals in such a way as to make the reader detest both or feel an attraction toward both. In this case, as the scripture says, “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” If a book sends a boy out to be a burglar, it is bad; if it impels him to take a crying child by the hand and lead it home, it is good. And here let me say that this compelling power, this effective result of a book should speak in its favor though all other tests be against it. Musicians tell us that a great composer may write a work that breaks every rule of harmony and yet be a work of genius. Genius knows no rules.

So much for the general line of cleavage. But the special may for the moment exclude all the claims of the general. A community may be in crying need of books on a given subject—pottery or rowboats or hygiene. This need may or may not be realized by the community, but its existence makes a special class of books the best, for the moment, for that community. To buy a good collection of minor poets for a town that clamors, or ought to clamor, for books on the electric industries, is to get bad books.

Now do we, under our present system, or lack of system, in selection, get these best books—best both in the general and in the special sense?

What is the matter with the books in the average small library? The trouble is not generally that the books are bad, but that they might easily be better, and by “better” it must be borne in mind that I mean more closely adapted to the legitimate needs of the community. If we go over the shelves of the average small library we shall generally be able to note the following facts:

(1) A considerable portion of the books have not been taken out in long periods. This can easily be ascertained by examining the book-cards or dating-slips. Of course, the non-use of a book does not mean that it should not be in the library. The fault may be with the readers, not with the book. Non-use, however, does mean that something is the matter. Either the library public has had taste or is not properly guided, or else a mistake was made in providing it with this particular book.

(2) A considerable number of standard books whose reading should be encouraged will not be found on the shelves. These books are almost always part of the collection, but there are not enough duplicates to supply the demand. At the same time it will be found that the library is adding current books of doubtful value.

(3) Books on large local industries—shoemaking, pottery, agriculture—are often lacking. In such cases there is generally a lack of demand; but this is because the persons who would read such books have learned by experience not to look for them in a public library.

(4) Books in the languages spoken by industrial colonies of foreigners in the neighborhood are usually conspicuous by their absence.

(5) The collections in classes where some technical knowledge is necessary for selection, such, for instance, as the sciences, the arts, or history, often show a lack of intelligence, or, at any rate, a lack of system. There are badly written books and books full of errors; there is lack of uniformity in grade—an advanced mathematical work on electricity, for instance, and very elementary ones on light and sound.

(6) In particular, controverted subjects are represented in a one-sided way; there may be no way for a reader to get at the Catholic story of the Protestant reformation, or the southern view of the civil war, or both sides of the spelling reform or the woman-suffrage movements. Socialism, vivisection, anti-vaccination, the negro question, prohibition, the tariff—all these and a hundred others are represented only in a partisan sense.

(7) There is too much care about the outward garb of decency and too little about the pervading atmosphere of morality. Books that describe in decorous language ingenious methods of shop-lifting are given place, but you look in vain for works of lofty moral tone couched in diction that is occasionally coarse.

How far are these faults due to methods of book selection? One of the troubles seems to be that the book-selecting body does not avail itself of expert advice as much as it ought. The librarian is learning, to be sure, to use lists and printed aids more and more, though they are rarely used with discrimination; but supplementary to such lists as these, especially since they so largely lack the personal element, we need the personal advice of experts. If the lists and reviews will leave us in the dark about the man who advises us to buy books on engineering or art, we must go to someone who we know understands these subjects, at least knows a little more of them than we do ourselves. There are, in general, two grades of expert advice. The first is that received from the man who is personally familiar with the current literature of his specialty, who watches the books as they appear and who sends to the library the titles that he thinks it ought to have. This grade of expert service is very difficult to obtain. I have found few men in my experience who are able and willing to give it. Those who have the good-will and the time have usually not the knowledge; those who have the knowledge are busy men who cannot give the time.

The second grade of expert aid is that which pronounces on concrete cases, which decides whether a given book (either from inspection of the mere title or of the volume itself) is suitable for the library. This kind of aid is not difficult to obtain, and there are persons in almost every place qualified in some degree to give it. It requires, however, a preliminary selection and generally the obtaining of books on approval, which is easier in a large place than a small one.

The library is only one of various institutions that must use expert aid of this kind. The same limitations apply to all. Take, for instance, the work of reference, the cyclopedia, we will say. Its editor cannot write of his own knowledge the articles on Venezuela, and open-hearth steel, and Plato. He must rely on the information, direct or secondhand, of experts. But he cannot allow his experts to write his cyclopedia. Some cyclopedias are written very nearly in that way, and they are not the best. The expert must be coached before he does his work and the work must be edited when finished. It is on the proper combination of expert and editorial work that the value of the finished volumes will depend. So it is with library selection. The librarian is the editor of a big cyclopedia of thousands of volumes. He must have expert aid in selection, but he must not allow his experts to select the library uncontrolled. They must be instructed beforehand, and their advice must be carefully considered after it has been given. It must, in short, be edited. This brings us to the consideration that we have ultimately to face in discussing any phase of human activity—the question of personality. If the librarian and the book committee are incompetent and believe themselves to be competent—then the collection, in spite of all efforts, will reflect their faults—it will be intolerant, or trivial or ill-balanced.

Much, therefore, depends upon the actual book selector for the library. Should this be the librarian, or a committee of the trustees, or the board itself, or an advisory committee of outsiders? Probably the best results are obtained through a preliminary selection made by the librarian with the aid of lists and the advice of individual experts—not committees—as suggested above, and then submitted to some person or committee representing the Board of trustees. This places the final responsibility where it belongs—on the trustees; but with a satisfactory librarian, the duties of the reviewing committee would consist chiefly of deciding on matters of policy—rarely of considering individual titles. It would decide, for instance, on how closely fiction is to be censored, on how far the library is to go in the purchase of recent fiction, on the extent to which foreign languages are to be recognized, on the purchase and duplication of text-books, on the policy of the library with regard to denominational religious works or of controversial books generally—and so on.

Going back for a moment to the question of experts, probably the most difficult advice to procure, with any degree of satisfaction, is regarding fiction, whether in English or in foreign languages. It has been said that one may approve a book simply on the author’s name, or even on that of the publisher, and this is still true in isolated cases, but in these days, when both author and publisher are continually trying experiments, continually varying standards and style, each book must be dealt with individually. I do not see how one can decide whether a given novel should or should not be bought for a library without reading it through from cover to cover or hearing a report from someone who has so read it and who understands the wants and limitations of the American public library. This is a line, it seems to me, along which great improvement in our selection is possible; but I confess I do not see my way to an immediate solution of the problem. Possibly this is a good opportunity to say a word for a method of testing the adequacy of one’s collection which has scarcely been used as it deserves. One of the most difficult things for a librarian to ascertain is whether his collection is properly distributed among the different classes, and by this I mean, as before, distributed in accordance with the legitimate requirements of the community. It is not possible to find by a statistical method exactly what people need, but it is possible to find out what they want, as indicated by the kind of books that they read. The statistical record of this will be found in the class percentages of circulation. Whether or not the library is equipped to supply this need is indicated by the class percentages of books on the shelves. A comparison of these two percentage tables is always most interesting to the book selector. It does not enable him automatically to select books, but it does indicate points for fruitful investigation. To take some actual cases, I find a library with four per cent of history and six per cent of literature on the shelves, whereas the corresponding circulation percentages are five and seven. This is prima facie evidence that the collections in those two subjects are used rather more than the others and could well be increased. In cases where it is not desirable to encourage circulation in a given class, such an indication should evidently meet with no response. The circulation of fiction always runs far beyond its proportion, and it is neither proper nor desirable for the library to try to keep up. Thus in three libraries where the percentage of adult fiction on the shelves is 20, 19 and 17, respectively, I find the corresponding circulation percentages to be 34, 35 and 27. What, let us ask ourselves, are library statistics for? Is all the labor concerned in their collection and assemblage to result simply in a table that is to be glanced at for a moment with more or less interested curiosity, or do we intend to do something with them? It sometimes seems that the foreign reproach that we Americans care only for money, which we are properly disposed to resent, is partly justified by the fact that the only statistics that appear to mean anything to us are financial. When a man learns that he is living beyond his income or that he is getting a smaller per cent for his investments than his neighbor, or that the man at the desk next to him is receiving a larger salary for doing the same work, he does not sit still and say, “Ah! how interesting!” He gets up and does something about it. But statistics that convict him of all sorts of incompetency and foolishness along lines other than monetary ones, he regards simply as objects for intellectual absorption.

These percentages, of course, are not the only indications by which a librarian may adjust the proportions of the classes in his collection. If his library has the reserve system, for instance, the call for books in circulation is an unfailing index of the popular demand. If that demand is one that should be heeded, the number of copies in the library may well be proportionate to the number of names on the reserve list.

But a librarian who keeps in continual touch with the public by contact with users at the desk needs none of these somewhat mechanical indications. It is the inestimable privilege of the librarian of a small library in a small community to know her public, its wants, its needs, its abilities and its limitations in a way that is denied to custodians of huge collections.

In closing, let me suggest the following “Don’ts” for selectors of library books:

(1) Don’t buy books that are intellectually far above your readers, in the hope of improving their minds; a man may walk up stairs, but he can’t jump from the sidewalk to the roof.

(2) Don’t buy fine editions of books that need rather to be extensively duplicated; better two good souls than one fine body.

(3) Don’t buy McGrath and McCutcheon when you have reserves on file for Dickens and George Eliot.

(4) Don’t buy biography in excess because you are fond of it yourself, when a comparison of percentages shows that your supply of travel or applied science is not up to the demand.

(5) Don’t buy books in flimsy bindings that will give out after the first issue; work should not be done in gauzy garments.

(6) Don’t buy books in very strong bindings when their use is to be light and small; overalls are not suitable for an afternoon tea.

(7) Don’t buy “sets” and “libraries;” they are adulterated literature, coffee mixed with chicory.

(8) Don’t buy subscription books of an agent at a personal interview; it is the agent’s game not to let you think; stand up for your rights and think it over.

(9) Don’t estimate public demand by its effect on your own patience; one persistent old gentleman often bulks larger than a crowd of quiet but deserving persons without either push or pull.

(10) Don’t buy books of which you are not in immediate need, when you are morally certain that copies in good condition will be thrown on the markets as remainders at one-quarter the original list price.

(11) Don’t buy costly “new editions” of reference books without assuring yourself that the newness is more than nominal.

(12) Don’t buy novels because you see them advertised in the trolley cars.

(13) Lastly—and this is the most important thing of all—don’t get discouraged. Our methods of selecting books, and their results, doubtless need improvement, but so do those of all the other libraries we know. Let us try to realize our deficiencies, and then try to make this year’s book list just a little better than the last. If we can succeed in this, the standard will take care of itself.

SYSTEM IN THE LIBRARY[10]

It has been said by Mr. W.H. Mallock that what we call labor-organizations are mis-named, because their object is, in most cases, the organization not of labor, but of idleness. This somewhat cryptic statement may be understood to mean that trade unions have endeavored usually not to improve the methods and results of labor, nor to make its output larger and more satisfactory, but rather to improve the condition of the laboring man; to make his life more comfortable and his task easier, to shorten hours and lessen output, and often, as a result, to make that output of lower grade.

This will be regarded as a base slander by many people, and it is doubtless exaggerated; yet there is an amount of truth in it that cannot be overlooked by any worker or any combinations of workers—which is the same as saying that it interests almost all of us in this country; for the only Americans able to work who do not work are tramps and a very few millionaires. We shall try to consider its bearing on library workers, but before doing so, it will be well to look at it a little longer in its more general aspect.

Those who desire to improve the worker’s condition will justify themselves very properly on economic grounds by saying that to do this is also to improve the methods of work and the quality of the product. No one can do good work who is ill-housed, underfed, improperly clothed or overworked. This is true; but it is not also true that if we make it our primary aim to see that the worker is as comfortable as possible, to lift from him all the difficulties and burdens of his task, we shall also improve his output proportionally. Rather should we do away with that output altogether. We should simply be “organizing idleness.” We may consider, as an analogy, the difference between a tariff for revenue and one for protection. The total abolition of import duties is impossible, we are told. They are necessary for revenue. Even England, the world’s greatest free-trade country, has import duties. Very true, but the amount of the duty and the objects on which it is laid will differ absolutely according to its purpose. Again, we will suppose that the same company owns an elevated railway and a surface trolley line. They will naturally, if left to themselves, adjust fares, speed and stops on the former so as to induce a larger proportion of people to travel by the slower surface line, which is less expensive to operate. If the surface line were owned by a rival company, there would be an entirely different schedule of fares, speed and stops on the elevated road, intended to crowd it with passengers and to derive the largest possible revenue from it alone.

In like manner, we must doubtless look out for the worker; and he must doubtless look out for himself. His conditions of life and work must be made such that he will perform his task as well as possible. But those conditions will be adjusted quite differently if we regard the comfort of the worker as the prime object from what they will be if we regard the excellence of the output as the prime object and the worker’s comfort as a means to that end.

This will bear statement in still another way. We are put into this world to do our appointed tasks, and it is our business to do them as well as we possibly can. This means that we must take the proper amount of rest, eat good food, keep happy and contented, and all the rest of it. But he who regards his work simply as a means of furnishing him the wherewithal to be happy, to take expensive vacations, live in a fine house, and so on, will neither do his best work, nor will he enjoy the good things of life as he ought.

Our friends, the Socialists, whose propaganda is receiving more attention from thoughtful men to-day than it did a few years ago, both because of the truths that it presents and the menace that it offers to our present civilization, are making the mistake of dwelling upon the importance of the worker’s comfort rather than that of the worker’s improvement. They promise us that we shall all be in comfortable circumstances and will have to work only three hours a day. Incidentally, the output is to be better. But by putting the matter thus, instead of the other way about, they have appealed to the element of laziness that exists in all men—they have held out the prospect of idleness instead of labor.

I have not lived west of the Mississippi long enough to know whether the same conditions obtain here as in the East; but there, comparing things to-day with what I remember of my boyhood, I seem to see an increasing tendency among all workers to put self first and work second. The policy of “ca’ canny,” as they call it in Scotland—of “go easy”—doing as little as one can and still keep his job—is creeping in and has secured a firm foothold. It is increasingly difficult to get any kind of work, manual or mental, done really well—so well that one feels like saying, “Well done, thou faithful servant.” And yet the shirkers are all anxious to get to the top; and they wonder why they do not. They comfort themselves by saying that success nowadays is solely a matter of pull. But it is not so. Look around you and you will see, for the most part, men in charge of large enterprises who are efficient, and who have put work before self—men who are engrossed in what they are doing, who love it and therefore do it effectively.

There never was a baser slander than the common assertion that we Americans love money. If we loved the dollar for itself alone, we should never sling it about as we do. We love the excitement and the fun of making money. Look at our working millionaires! They want no more money; they can not use what they have. They enjoy the task of owning and running a great railway system, of organizing and managing some great industrial combination. We may find it necessary to clip their wings a little, but we can not call them lazy and inefficient—they make the job too hard for us. There is no “go easy” policy here, and those who favor it will never get to the top.

Let us hope that this pernicious idea that self is worth more than work will never find a foothold in the library. We see it here and there, but I believe that, taken by and large, library workers love their tasks and that they are efficient in proportion to that love.