Ernest Cushing Richardson

“ Even a one book library is, in fact, a library just as much as a one cell plant is plant or a one cell animal is animal. A one book library is a very insignificant affair compared with the New York Public Library with its many books and many branches, but it is just as truly a library—or else you must find some other word. ”

“ In a sense, and in a very real sense, the key to the scientific pedagogy of the future lies in the group of studies summed up as library science, for the library is the late and complex object which sums up in itself the sciences of the book, the word, and all simpler elements of human expression and record, if there be any such. A fourth reason for the study of beginnings is, therefore, that it is the natural method of study and teaching. ”

“ As therefore the field of science and general activities is the Universe, so the field of library science and education is libraries—libraries top and bottom, inside and out, beginning, middle and end and looked on as a whole. ”

“ It is a little figurative to say that a tree which carries in itself a hundred annual records of its growth is a library in the sense of a public record office which keeps the annals of a nation’s growth for a like period. There is however a certain analogy which the discussions of natural records and object writing suggests may even have some slight germ of scientific interest. ”

“ The commonly recognized ways of human utterance are gesture and oral speech—the one appealing to the eye, the other to the ear, and each leaving its record probably at different points and in different molecular form in the brain. Hand gesture came in course of time to be the highest type of gesture language, evolving as it did into a highly complex and adaptable type of language, and modern hand writing is simply a form of hand gesture which, by means of ink or lead or chisel, or some other material or instrument, leaves a trail of the hand movement in permanent record. ”

“ The sample or specimen whole object record as distinguished from the individual record is in modern times extensively known and used in the sale of goods by travelling salesmen. In its rudiments as a means of visible communication of ideas it was doubtless as old and perhaps older even than the keeping of trophies for record. If e.g. man was herbivorous before he was carnivorous then doubtless primitive man scouting for food would bring back specimens for his family just as a modern boy may bring in specimens of the wild grapes or berries that he has found for information of the folks at home. ”

“ Whether or not future psychology discovers anything like actual record collections and memory libraries among the animals, it remains true that the study of comparative psychology does lead into the beginnings of memory and helps therefore to the study of the real nature of human memory-books and memory libraries, while again it leads into the question of the nature of gesture language, and gesture is the own father of hand-written books. When true libraries have been discovered among animals it will be time enough to take up the question of plant libraries. ”

“ On the other hand again, every now and then we find that some method or idea, discovered long ago but neglected meantime, is far better than those in common use. This has often been true of great scientific ideas and we have in Mendelism a striking recent example. One must needs therefore study earlier ideas in any field, both in order to be sure that so-called new ideas are not exploded old ones and in order to find whether common practice in any field at a given time is not really the development of an inferior line of evolution. ”

“ On the whole, by and large, the latest ideas are in fact best, for they tend to sum up in themselves the total of the useful variations of all preceding ideas, and the main time and attention of a course of education must of necessity therefore be given to the latest and best experience, because it does sum up all that has gone before. This does not, however, lessen the value of the study of earlier ideas on any subject back to the very beginnings, for at any given time and place, the latest idea or method in any field is not necessarily the best. ”

“ As investigating science must trace every complex idea back to its simplest beginnings, so teaching traces the idea forward from those beginnings to its latest form. The law by which man in his individual development of ideas must retrace the history of the race applies to every idea or group of ideas and it is doubtful therefore if any one ever learns anything rightly in life unless he patiently follows the idea of it from its simplest beginnings to its latest form—the path being sometimes a steady growth in value, sometimes a rise and fall again towards extinction. ”

“ Perhaps the simplest and most natural transition from pictorial object to image writing is suggested by the trophy records of an African chief as described by Frobenius. The actual record trophies of leopard hunting—the leopard’s teeth—are taken and worn in a necklace by the chief and form a tribal record. The individual making the killing has, however, a wooden model of the tooth which he wears as an individual trophy. This very simple and natural proceeding has in it the germ of picture writing,—is indeed picture writing. ”

“ There are however in this matter two factors—one’s self and the library. In order to sketch out one’s life work as librarian and live it, one must needs first know what libraries are, what they are capable of becoming and how one can best apply such knowledge and energy as one may have to making these libraries accomplish what they were intended to do for human society. This involves looking at libraries as a whole as well as at one’s life work as a whole, and the task of the library school is to give this view of the situation. ”

“ It is a long step, however, from even developed oral and gesture language to record, and it is still generally denied that among the traits of our kinship with the beasts any evidence has been discovered of what can be called record keeping. If this were true, then it would seem to follow that the animal ceased to be animal and became man precisely when he invented and began to practice record keeping—in short that libraries mark the very beginning of the human race! ”

“ It does not take much of a prophet to foresee a radical development in some of our American library schools within a very few years. When for example, the Columbia Library school was starting, manuscripts were so few in this country that their science and economy was a negligible element in instruction—and as for archives, we had plenty of documents but the very name archive, with what it connotes, was foreign and almost unknown in America. Now there are many well recognized archives and some of our collections of ancient manuscripts are numbered by the thousands. ”

“ In general men seldom remember the exact phraseology when they listen to a sermon or a story. On the other hand, however, the actor or the professional story teller can summon at will the exact verbal form of a great number of works and each of these works is properly a book. This permanent fixing of form undoubtedly implies some substance in which the words are recorded, but if that substance is the human brain the result is no less a book, a real record in the real substance, than if recorded in outward substance such as stone or ink. ”

“ All hieroglyphic and alphabetic writing is, therefore, in a way ideographic, but we are accustomed to distinguish phonetic writing and to leave for ideograms proper only those pictures which appeal to eye rather than ear. Some people read even alphabetical printed words as ideograms—the word suggests its object directly without being translated into its sounds. Some, on the other hand, cannot read even to themselves without thinking in sounds or even moving the lips. ”

“ Probably we have as little notion of what record keeping will be a few thousands of years hence, as the inventor of the knotted cord had of this library school—and yet what we do may perhaps affect the state of things then as the inventor of the quipu, the alphabet, papyrus, vellum, printing, the photograph, phonograph, or any of the great inventions in the evolution of books and their keeping, has affected the present state of things. ”

“ The question whether gesture language preceded sound language may perhaps be settled by the answer to the question whether in the evolution of living beings the eye preceded the ear. If in the age of reptiles one saw the other glide or the grass move before he heard a swish or hiss, and if he himself first stayed still in order to escape being seen rather than heard, then doubtless gesture language began before sound language, and doubtless again also language began among men with simple gestures rather than simple cries. ”

“ The practice of keeping such inward records of exact fixed forms of words is not only the oldest form of record keeping and one extensively practised in illiterate periods, but it is commonly practised in modern life by orators who speak without notes, and as a method for the teaching of children before they learn to read (“memorizing”) as well as afterwards in the schools.
Among savage peoples the medicine man is often a library of tribal tradition although the modern ethnologists agree that he was by no means the only professional repository of tribal records. ”

“ The inward record may no more be a microscopic picture than the stenographic sign is. Nevertheless it is not hard to realize that there is somehow within a series of recorded impressions which may be called images, some of which recall sounds and others objects or gestures. The inward language may or may not have to do with sounds. Modern pantomime and the sign language of deaf-mutes and Indians are languages, and it is entirely possible to store in one’s mind an exact series of signs telling a story in gesture language, just as it is possible to store the symbols for sounds or oral speech. ”

“ Preadamite libraries Whatever psychologists and mythologists may have to say about libraries before the existence of the human race, there seems to be a surprising consensus of opinion that book collections must have started at latest very soon after man himself. A great number of such libraries are claimed by the ancients for the period between Adam and Noah, and if there were human beings before Adam, as many say, it is likely that there were at least memory libraries, for, as will be seen later in discussing memory libraries, these are almost inseparable from human nature. ”

“ Research, however, as now understood, is the product of modern natural science and goes hand in hand with the doctrine of evolution. In this sense there has already been much good research work in palaeography and other branches of the book sciences in European countries. In America a little real scientific work has been done in palaeography, more in the history of printing and a trifle in some other branches of library science, but the total is small and little or none of it directly connected with the library school. ”

“ Even phonetic writing, so called, is not sound record but a record of sounds translated into gestures; writing is a gesture sign which stands for a sound, not a record of sound. It is only within our own generation that, through the invention of the phonograph, oral or other sound utterance has been recorded in permanent material and libraries of sound records made possible.
The written recording of even signs for sounds did, however, in the evolution of record keeping mark a very decided advance over all previous methods. ”

“ The first attempt at expression or the effort of one individual to communicate an idea to another by signs may have been a mere movement to attract the attention of the other to the simple fact of its existence, and the first record of expression may have been the simple memory of this movement in the other’s mind. ”

“ The evolution of record keeping These four classes of libraries, memory libraries, pictorial object libraries, “mnemonic” libraries, and picture book libraries, form thus the field. All of them existed before what may be called historical libraries; all are found among uncivilized peoples of all times; all have their faint remainders in popular custom among modern civilized nations, and suggestions of all may be found in child-study. Three of these classes, memory libraries, mnemonic libraries and picture book libraries, correspond to well recognized book forms. ”

“ Among the many definitions of the library which do not recognize use as the library’s chief distinction, the commonest are perhaps those which adopt plurality or collection as the distinguishing factor. Many however adopt the building as chief factor. ”

“ It is entirely natural that when a man is writing the same picture several times, one after another, and knows that others will know it to be a repetition, the process of conventionalizing, which goes on so fast under ordinary circumstances, should go even faster, until pictures four and five become simple scrawls and in the course of time the whole is reduced to practically a single picture and four straight lines. Here we have the individual record and the sample record combined. ”

“ Evolution has taught us to expect a genealogical series back and back to very simple forms and the method of all science has become what is called historical or genetic. Natural science is not satisfied until the most complex animals and plants have been traced back through all their complexities to single cell origins, and, if Browning may be believed, the aim of humane and ethical science too does not rest short of the same effort “to trace love’s faint beginnings in mankind”. ”