Library

“ The Pears' soap plan of printers' ink is one of the finest and best.
If a library has or is a good thing for the community let it so be said, early, late, and often, in large, plain type. So doing shall the library's books enter—before too old to be of service—into that state of utter worn-out-ness which is the only known book-heaven. Another way, and by some found good, is to work the sinfully indifferent first up into a library missionary, and then transform him into a patron. A library is something to which he can give an old book, an old paper, an old magazine, with no loss to himself. ”

“ Your library has had good leadership and it is to continue, adding the force and freshness of the new to the strength and experience of the old. The memory of your dearly loved poet will be brought to the mind of each library user—by the children’s room that bears his name, by the land that he gave to enlarge its site, by this enduring portraiture—by a thousand and one things, none the less cogent for being intangible. I look to see this library, in the home city of James Whitcomb Riley, grow into a place in the public heart comparable with that which was attained by Riley himself. ”

“ It may be that the exclusion operates through features that are in themselves excellent. I have seen, in a small community, a library building so fine, with such an atmosphere of quiet good-taste and so lady-like a librarian, that the great public no more dared to enter therein than if a fierce lion had stood in the doorway. ”

“ What, moreover, would be the object of these precious collections, gathered at so great expense by fortune or by science, if they were not consecrated, according to the intention of their generous founders, to the advancement, the glory, and the perfection of science and literature?
But that a library may fully attain the end of its foundation,—that it may be in reality useful, and useful with equal certainty and facility,—it should be administered by a librarian distinguished for soundness of judgement no less than for the readiness and accuracy of his memory. ”

“ Every librarian of experience, every administrator of traveling libraries, will recall such instances. One boy comes upon the right book, and the current of his life is changed; another reads a volume, and in his brain germinates the seed that blossoms into a great invention; in a chance hour of reading, a third finds in a page, a phrase, a word, the inspiration whose expression sets aflame the world. ”

“ A library being but a collection of books, it becomes business men to assemble as many as possible in the shortest time, in order, perhaps, to outshine an adjoining township, or to satisfy the ratepayers that they are hard at work in the interests of education! To many library committeemen a book is just a book, and like bricks, or paving stones, or potatoes, or other realizable stock, the bigger the accumulation the better. ”

“ Purposes of a Library.—The purposes of a school library should be not only to provide laboratory material for the pupils’ work in literature and history, to enable the teacher to instruct them in the use of books as sources of information, and to assist the teacher in other ways, but also to instil in the pupils an interest in books as books, to cultivate a taste for reading. Too many high school graduates have no conception of a book, other than fiction, as anything but a task or a text. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ But I have shown you enough for you to see that our library is not a mere cemetery of dead books, but a living power, which supplies amusement for dull times, recreation for the tired, information for the curious, inspires the love of research in youth, and furnishes the materials for it in mature age, enables and induces the scholar not to let his study end with his school days. ”

“ If all the books are in the 'Library' one has to endure the nuisance of demands for particular works, coming from the kitchen, drawing-room, or bedroom, and the difficulty of securing their prompt and accurate return. It also imposes upon the butler, the maid-of-all-work, or whoever admits and attends upon callers, the awful responsibility of procuring from the library a pass-time book to amuse the waiting visitor in the drawing-room. ”

“ There are relics of the age before circulating libraries, there are fragments of the lettered store of some scholarly great-grandfather, and these, with a few odd numbers of magazines, a few primers and manuals, some sermons and novels, make up the ordinary library of an English household. But the amateur, whom we have in our thoughts, can never be satisfied with these commonplace supplies. He has a taste for books more or less rare, and for books neatly bound; in short, for books, in the fabrication of which art has not been absent. ”

“ Reference work in libraries large and small has for its first rule: Meet the inquirer more than half way. To the stranger a library is often an oppressive place, an awesome place—in his imagination. He comes in shyly; everyone appears busy, his question suddenly seems to him trivial; he won't trouble these wise and busy people with it—and goes out. ”

“ He should make the library a school for the young, a college for adults, and the constant center of such educational activity as will make wholesome and inspiring themes the burden of the common thought. He should be enough of a bookworm to have a decided taste and fondness for books, and at the same time not enough to be such a recluse as loses sight of the point of view of those who know little of books. ”

“ Every library ought to be supplied with at least one librarian in each department, stuck all over with books, like burrs, so that nobody can touch him or be near him without carrying away a book on him that he's got to read and that he will long to read and will read until somebody drives him to bed! ”

“ In those constantly arising questions which form the subjects of essays or discussions in all institutions of learning, the well-furnished library is an unfailing resource. The student who finds his unaided mind almost a blank upon the topic given out for treatment, resorts at once to the public library, searches catalogues, questions the librarian, and surrounds himself with books and periodicals which may throw light upon it. ”

“ A library, of the kind with which we are now concerned, is first of all—and after all—a collection of books, selected and assembled by the librarian. It may be so administered as to become a great civic force, a social instrument, an educational agency, but first of all it is a collection of units, brought together upon certain principles as they operate in the mind of the library's administrator. ”

“ CHOICE OF BOOKS But when the doors of the public library are thrown open to the young, and they are recognized as an important class of its patrons, the question comes up, What shall the library furnish to this class in order to meet its wants? If the object of the library is understood to be simply the supplying of the wants of the reading public, and the young are considered as a portion of that public, the question is very easily answered by saying, Give them what they call for that is not positively injurious in its tendency. ”

“ The library, however, is generally the place in the community in which is to be found the greatest amount of information about books in general, the purchasing of them, the proper handling of them in fitting them for the shelves, cataloging, binding, etc., and the selection of those best adapted to young people. It is quite appropriate therefore, that, as is in many cities the case, the public library should supply the schools with these schoolroom libraries from its own shelves, buying therefor special books and often many copies of the same book. ”

“ As for the volumes of the library, they are wired within the cases, and turn their gilded backs upon the visitor, keeping their treasures of wit and wisdom just as intangible as if still in the unwrought mines of human thought. ”

“ A person who comes to the library for the purpose of visiting the music room will find it, no matter where it may be, but the reader who needs to have his attention called to it or in whose case it must compete for use with other books, will never do so. Going back to our analogy with general literature we may note that when a librarian wishes to promote the circulation of some special class of literature or call attention to some particular book or books, the last thing he would think of doing would be to set them apart in a special room. ”

“ No novels are [Pg 82] admitted into the library. The following is a passage from the librarian's report of 1874: "In watching the use of our library as it is more and more resorted to by the younger readers of our community, I have been much interested in its influence in weaning them from a desire for works of fiction. On first joining the library, the new comers often ask for such books, but failing to procure them, and having their attention turned to works of interest and instruction, in almost every instance they settle down to good reading and cease asking for novels. ”

“ Ordinary visitors to the library may from one point of view be divided into two classes, those who are astonished that it has not got every book in the world, and those who marvel that it possesses so many books as it does. ”

“ The dim, dusty room, with the busts staring down from the tall bookcases, the cozy chairs, the globes, and best of all, the wilderness of books in which she could wander where she liked, made the library a region of bliss to her. ”

“ The first thing, naturally, when one enters a scholar's study or library, is to look at his books. One gets a notion very speedily of his tastes and the range of his pursuits by a glance round his bookshelves.
Of course, you know there are many fine houses where the library is a part of the upholstery, so to speak. Books in handsome binding kept locked under plate-glass in showy dwarf bookcases are as important to stylish establishments as servants in livery; who sit with folded arms, are to stylish equipages. ”

“ That the public library is a part of the educational system should never be lost sight of in the work of establishing it, or in its management. To the great mass of the people it comes as their first and only educational opportunity. ”

“ A library can often very happily advertise itself, and encourage the use of its books, by establishing a series of lectures. Entertainments, somewhat of the nature of receptions, or exhibits of the library's treasures in the library itself, will sometimes add to the institution's popularity, and will always afford a good excuse for sending to leading people in the community a note reminding them of the library's existence and perhaps of its needs. ”

“ What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard. ”

“ For the rest, the library is a shallow room, very much like any other library in the home of any other rich and well educated man. It is a little richer and more luxurious than most, perhaps, with—here and there—priceless things from palaces in Venice or art collections in Rome. The obsession of business is suggested by various utilities, transient and otherwise—a row of law books, a small file, and a pile of papers upon the substantial library table. ”

“ But something more than this is required by the librarian who is faced with the task of building up a great modern library, and is limited in his selection to books of the most enduring merit, and those which most completely and accurately record the state of the science or subject to which they are devoted. ”

“ We must first understand that the nature of the library is changing. Traditionally, libraries have been conceived as protective vessels in a world where information is scarce. Our iconic library stories are romances of destruction, decay, and amnesia. ”

“ I was, in fact, in the reading-room of the great British Library, an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or “pure English, undefiled,” wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought. ”