Charles Ammi Cutter

“ As to appearance, the outside of the building is very effective; inside everything is sacrificed to utility. The great stack, with its rows of shelves, each two feet wide, separated by alleys of three feet width and cut apart horizontally by seven floors, is entirely without beauty; indeed it cannot be seen as a whole. But it stores a vast number of books in a very small space, and close to where they are wanted. The reading-halls, 150 feet long, 20 feet wide, only 16 feet high and cut up by desks, offer as little chance to the architect as any room you can imagine. ”

“ Some take to the exercise as ducks to water, some manifest the most perfect indifference. There is the same variety throughout education. But, on the whole, no part of our library work is more effective. I do not hesitate to say that the useful reading is quadrupled in any city where such a course is pursued, for the children with whom the method takes grow up as real inquirers instead of being desultory amusement-seekers. The ordinary novel-reader is not done away with, though his tribe may be diminished. ”

“ The desks had every convenience that could facilitate study; but what most caught my eye was a little key-board at each, connected by a wire with the librarian's desk. The reader had only to find the mark of his book in the catalog, touch a few lettered or numbered keys, and on the instant a runner at the central desk started for the volume, and, appearing after an astonishingly short interval at the door nearest his desk, brought him his book and took his acknowledgment without disturbing any of the neighboring readers. ”

“ I prefer to do my own reading, but there are many whose eyes are weak, or who do not read with ease, or have not comfortable homes, or do not own the book that is to be read, or prefer to listen in company. We are very particular about the ventilation. We do not want any one to go to sleep.” I asked him whether he thought these readings gave any real instruction, or only amusement. He admitted that an exciting novel would draw better than anything else, but said that they did not allow the selection to run too much to fiction. ”

“ Dull books must be rigidly excluded; but that is not difficult, because no dull book is published in reading-machine editions. Yes, I think a great deal of information is spread that way, and at any rate they are a valuable rival to the dram-shops, and keep many a young man out of bad places. The readings are usually in the evening. Where a school-room is used for the purpose it must be so; but, for our own branches, we have a rule that if ten people ask for a reading in the day-time it shall be granted, with any book they choose. When trade is dull there are readings going on all day. ”

“ But the main advantage of this system of separate reading-rooms is that it compels the appointment of just as many competent librarians. There must be one for each floor, and in fact there is one for each great subject, — a scientific man for the science, an art lover for the art, an antiquarian for the history, and a traveller for the geografy ”

“ In the circulation of books we have to follow the public taste, but in these listening-rooms we have the matter more in our control. Of course we must select bright books which the people will come to hear. ”

“ That city was not then one of the largest of the United States, having about two millions of inhabitants; but it yielded to none in the attention it gave to popular education, part of the remarkable commercial energy which distinguished the first century of its existence, having naturally, with the acquisition of wealth, been turned into the channels of literature, art, and science. ”

“ The rooms are distributed all over the city, fifty or more, and we are intending to increase the number. People go to them with their whole families, except to those where smoking is allowed, which are frequented for the most part by men alone. There they listen to the reading of a story or an entertaining history or biografy, or book of travels, or a work of popular science. Sometimes one work occupies the whole evening, sometimes selections are read. The program for the whole city is advertised in the papers each day. ”

“ In the building there is nothing to start a fire and next to nothing to feed it.”
“Have you any branches?” I asked. “Yes, several; in the outlying parts of the city are branch libraries, each containing a small store of books and a study-room, and connected by telefone to the central library, so that books can be ordered for delivery or use there, which is a considerable relief for the central reading-rooms, to say nothing of the accommodation to the distant suburbs.” ”

“ From the delivery-room my guide led me down into a basement running under the whole building, — the newspaper-room. I found there an apparently full collection of the Buffalo press and the journals of the neighboring towns, but no other American papers. I expressed my surprise. My guide said that half a century before the preservation of newspapers had become one of the most perplexing problems of library economy. “For local history they are invaluable, but if kept with any completeness they occupy an enormous amount of room; they soon fill up the largest building. ”

“ For horizontal transmission we tried various little railroads, but came to the conclusion that a smart boy was the best and the quickest railroad in a library. For carrying many books at a time, of course, we use trucks; and, as the attendants in each room have two stories of shelves to go to, to save the fatigue of climbing even the small height of 8 feet, each room has several little lifts just large enough for one person, driven, like everything else in the library, by Falls-power. ”

“ With electric illumination we are both light and cool. We can store the greatest number of books in the closest proximity to the reading-room, and extend our storage-room indefinitely. There is no way in which books can be packed in closer nearness to the place where they are used. We have now room for over 500,000 volumes in connection with each of the four reading-rooms, or 4,000,000 for the whole building when completed. In the present reading-room there are 9,000 square feet on the front of the building, without counting the special rooms under the art-galleries on the side. ”

“ If he let the heat get above 70 in the reading-room or above 60 in the stack, or if the dryness or the impurity went beyond a certain point, there was the tell-tale record to accuse him, and that record was examined every day by the chief librarian. After a time one of these ventilators invented an arrangement by which the rooms regulated their own dryness and heat. The air is nearly as good as out-of-doors. Every one must be admitted into the delivery-room, but from the reading-rooms the great unwashed are shut out altogether or put in rooms by themselves. ”

“ On the groundfloor is a selection from all classes of books that are in most active circulation, many of them duplicated in their proper places on higher floors. On the same floor is the class literature, because it is, on the whole, the most sought for. We have not yet escaped the preponderant use of fiction though we have diminished it since your day. It used to be 75 per cent. Thanks to our training the school children in good ways it has fallen to forty. I doubt if it goes much lower. The next two stories are given to the historical, geografical, and social sciences ”

“ In selecting them we take into account aptitude, so far as it can be discovered, but we find that a librarian who is himself interested will train even his runners into a very considerable degree of capacity to assist readers. This we think an extremely important matter. It is a more glorious thing to organize and administer a great library, but full as good results may be got even in very small collections of books by a sort of spade husbandry. ”

“ In the first experiments in stack-building, which were made a century ago, if the light came from the sides, either the stack could not exceed 20 feet in width, or the middle was dark; if one wanted to use a wide lot of ground, it was necessary to have light-wells about as wide as the stack, which sacrificed valuable space and neutralized the sole advantage of a stack, which is compact storage of the books. ”

“ A few exceptions were made of newspapers which were to the United States what the 'Times' is to England; these any library that chooses is allowed to keep for the use of its patrons.” “For others,” said he, “the plan works in this way: if I want a Cincinnati paper I telefone to the public library there to set a searcher at work to hunt up the matter in question. When she has found it she may either copy it or read it off to me through the telefone, or, better still, read it to a fonograf and transmit on the foil. ”

“ A main object of the system is to teach them to help themselves. So, although when, in their school course, they reach the time at which they first visit the library, he gives them such lists, he does it not so much to assist them in that particular case as to show them by an example what can be done. ”

“ In the latter case, a duplicate, made by a new process, is kept at the library, so that librarians gradually accumulate fonografic reproductions of all their rarest books, and when they are called for have only to put the foil in the machine and have it read off through the wires to the end of the Union. All the libraries in the country, you see, are practically one library. ”

“ When he leaves the grammar school, it receives him into the people's university, taking also those who graduate from the university and giving them too more work to do. Its mottoes are always 'plus ultra' and 'excelsior.' There is not an institution in the country more democratic, not one which distributes its benefits more impartially to rich and poor, and not one, I believe, in which there is less taint of corruption and less self-seeking in those who administer it. ”

“ What with assisting scholars when they come, keeping their accounts of special loans, preparing reference-lists on subjects given out for compositions, meeting classes who come on every day from some one of the schools to receive what might be called an object lesson in bibliokresis, — the use of books, — not only is his time fully occupied, but he has to have assistants. ”

“ We are not likely to burn. Our electric lights are absolutely safe; our elevator and other machinery are run by power from the Falls, brought in by wire, and all our heat is supplied from the outside by the City Heat Company. ”