Part 1 (1/2)
The Library and Society.
by Various.
PREFACE
It may be desirable to repeat here the warning that the word ”cla.s.sics”
in the t.i.tle of this series is to be understood as meaning early and standard expressions of ideas that have later developed into prominence.
The papers and addresses in this volume have been chosen especially with this in view, and as they emphasize social relations an effort has been made to include expressions from men of eminence whose names would not probably occur to the student of library economy as having expressed an opinion about the work of libraries or as having influenced it in any permanent way.
I desire to acknowledge the kindly a.s.sistance rendered in the selection and grouping of the articles by Mrs. Gertrude Gilbert Drury, chief instructor in the St. Louis Library School. It has been most valuable.
The original suggestion of this volume, and of the character of its contents, I owe to Dr. James I. Wyer, Jr., Director of the New York State Library.
ARTHUR E. BOSTWICK
THE LIBRARY AND SOCIETY
Recent progress in all directions--political, educational, industrial, hygienic--has been marked by the growth and strengthening of a social consciousness. It is this chiefly that has differentiated the modern library from its predecessors and has made prominent our present insistence on the reader as well as the book, as a fundamental element in what we are doing. At first evident only in a general and somewhat vague recognition, by writers and speakers, of a vital relation between libraries and the communities that they serve, it later crystallized into definite discussions of their reciprocal service--that of the community to the library, consisting of financial, material and moral support expressing itself partly in the appointment of adequate boards of trustees and their proper backing, and that of the library to the community, showing itself largely in the provision of books, the collection of information, the control and guidance of reading, and so-called ”community-centre” service. These facts have guided the grouping and sequence of the papers and addresses that make up the present volume. The authors, it will be noticed, include more statesmen, publicists, and professional men, and fewer librarians, than was the case with the two previous volumes, thus reflecting the greater generality and wider interest of the subject.
GENERAL COMMUNITY RELATIONS
In the following group have been included papers and addresses largely by publicists or educators interested in libraries from the general civic standpoint, and affected by the general trend toward what has been termed here ”socialization.” They have been loosely arranged in three groups--general ideas on the field, function and possibilities of the library, papers on books and their uses, as affected or promoted by the library, and general addresses, chiefly at the opening of library buildings.
Within these groups they are given in general in their chronological order, although with some exceptions whose purpose will be self evident. Through them all runs the thread of consciousness that service to the community must be the primary object of the library, although the breadth and extent of that service, as it was destined later to grow and develop is not generally realized and in some cases doubtless would have been deprecated by the writers or speakers, could they have foreseen it. But in all these p.r.o.nouncements we may clearly see the dawning light of a new library day.
THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF THE FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY IN AMERICA AND ITS TRUE FUNCTION IN THE COMMUNITY
This comprehensive sketch, by Professor Tyler of Cornell University, forms part of an address delivered at the dedication of the Sage Library, at West Bay City, Michigan, Jan. 16, 1884.
Moses Coit Tyler was born in Griswold, Conn., Aug. 2, 1835 and graduated at Yale in 1857. He was professor of English at Michigan University in 1867-81 and from the latter year to his death, Dec. 28, 1900, held the chair of American History at Cornell.
In this address, Prof. Tyler has added to his equipment as a philosophical historian his personal knowledge and experience of the service that a properly administered collection of books may render to a community.
Looking over the entire course of American society, from its rough and hardy beginning, in the first years of the 17th century, I find six distinct stages of development with reference to the possession and use of books by the people. The first stage is that of private libraries; the second is that of special inst.i.tutional libraries, like those of colleges and other learned corporations, and intended for a limited and rather scholastic cla.s.s in the community; the third is that of a.s.sociation or joint stock libraries, _i.e._, libraries of a more miscellaneous and general character, but for the use only of those whose names are on the subscription list; the fourth is that of common school libraries; the fifth is that of endowed libraries, _i.e._, public libraries founded and sustained entirely by private endowment and thrown open to the public without any cost whatever to the public; and finally, the sixth is that of free public libraries created, it may be, by private benefaction, but sustained in part at least at the public cost, _i.e._, uniting the two elements of private help and public selfhelp, and cherished by the public only as people will cherish that which costs them something, and of which they have some sense of real owners.h.i.+p.
But before proceeding to inspect these successive forms of library evolution, the fact should be distinctly brought out as applicable to them all, that the American people started on their career in this country with an uncommon interest in books; and say what one will about American philistinism and American devotion to the practical, this people have always retained that ancient and primitive homage for books.
To an extent, I think, unapproached elsewhere, they are, and they always have been, a bookish people. In some other nations there is, undoubtedly, a larger leisurely cla.s.s; and among persons of that cla.s.s there is a profounder and more extensive contact with books than is the case with us. But while among most other nations, the craving for books is the propensity of one cla.s.s, with us it may be fairly described as the propensity of all cla.s.ses. A certain tincture of bookishness has pervaded the American people from the beginning. Perhaps the most decided quality of American civilization has been its effort to unite the practical with the ideal; its pa.s.sion for material results enn.o.bled by the intellectual and the spiritual; its fine reverence for studiousness, even amid the persistent fury of dollar-hunting.
And not only was this bookish trait visible in our colonial infancy but it may be said to have had an ante-natal origin. The two Englishmen who in the latter half of the 16th century did most to make possible the birth of American civilization in the first half of the 17th, were Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh; and both were men possessed by this large zest for ideas as well as for deeds; both were contemplative men as well as active men. The last glimpse that any surviving mortal had of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, before his s.h.i.+p went down in the sea, was of that stern hero sitting calmly on the deck, with a book in his hand, cheering his companions by telling them that heaven is as near by water as by land; and the last labor of Sir Walter Raleigh, before his judicial murder in the Tower, was to write one of the learnedest and stateliest books to be met with in the literature of modern men.
And this flavor of bookishness which belonged to these two great pioneers and martyrs of American colonization, seems to have pa.s.sed on to the men who successfully executed the grand project in which they had failed. When you run your eyes along the st.u.r.dy list of the great colony-founders of the 17th century--the men who carried out the fierce task of conveying English civilization across the Atlantic, and of making it take root and live in this wild soil--Captain John Smith, and William Bradford, and Winslow, and Robert Cushman, and the Winthrops, and Dudley, and Hooker, and Davenport, and Roger Williams, and William Penn, you will find them all, in some special sense, lovers of books, collectors of books, readers of books, even writers of books.
And what is true of the leaders of that great act of national transmigration is true also of the men of less note who followed in it.
The first American immigrants were reading immigrants--immigrants who brought in their hands not only axes and shovels, but books. Their coming hither was due to the restlessness inflicted by the possession of ideas. Books were to them a necessary part of the outfit for the voyage and the settlement. And so rare and so precious were books in those days that they were cherished as family treasures, and handed down as heirlooms; nay, they were so dealt with in wills and in contracts as if they rose almost to the dignity of real estate. In fact, in those days, the possession of an unusual number of books, with the reputation of using them, const.i.tuted a sort of patent of gentility, and seemed to bridge the chasm between the most widely separated cla.s.ses in society; as when, in 1724, a young mechanic, named Benjamin Franklin, arriving in New York on a sloop from Newport, is invited to the house of the Governor of New York and is honored by him with a long and friendly interview, for no other reason than that the captain of the sloop had told the governor of a lad on his vessel who had with him ”a great many books.” ”The governor received me,” says Franklin in his autobiography ”with great civility, showed me his library, which was a considerable one, and we had a good deal of conversation relative to books and authors. This was the second governor who had done me the honor to take notice of me, and for a poor boy, like me, it was very pleasing.” So I think I am justified in saying that we started on our career as a people with this underlying intellectual quality--a pretty general respect for books, love for them, habit of using them; and this is the impelling moral force which prompts to the several efforts which society has made for providing itself with books. Now, the first stage in the process of library evolution--and I have called it that of private libraries--was the prevailing condition of the American colonies during the whole of the 17th century and the first third of the 18th. This is the picture: Everywhere books, but few, costly, portly, solemn, revered, read over and over again; every respectable family, however poor, having at least a few hereditary treasures in the form of books, as in that of silver and choice furniture; and here and there up and down the colonies, an occasional luminous spot, drawing to itself the wide-eyed wonder of the surrounding inhabitants, the seat of a great private library, belonging to some country gentleman, or clergyman, or publicist, like that of Colonel William Bird, of Westover, or of the Reverend James Blair, of Williamsburg, or of Dr. Cotton Mather, of Boston, or of James Logan, of Philadelphia, or of Cadwallader Colden, of New York.