Part 21 (1/2)

Under the head of ”Public, Society and School Libraries,” these inst.i.tutions in the United States aggregate 8,000 in number, with 35,000,000 volumes, with $34,000,000 invested in buildings, with $17,000,000 of endowments, and with over $6,000,000 of annual income. Of these the free public libraries supported by general taxation number less than 2,000, with 10,000,00 volumes, and with less than $3,500,000 of annual income. They are, however, increasing with disproportionate and amazing rapidity. In Ma.s.sachusetts, but 10 of the 353 cities and towns, but three-fourths of one per cent. of the inhabitants now lack them. One hundred and ten library buildings there have been the gift of individuals. No form of private memorial is now more popular; no form of munic.i.p.al expenditure meets with readier a.s.sent. Nor are the initiative and the expenditure left wholly to local enterprises. The Commonwealth itself takes part: extending, through a State Commission, State aid in the form of books and continuing counsel. And Ma.s.sachusetts is but one of eight States maintaining such commissions. New York State, in its system of traveling libraries, has gone further still in supplementing initial aid with a continuing supply of books, and even photographs and lantern slides, purchased by the State and distributed through the Regents of the State University from Albany to the remotest hamlet.

The first stage of all such legislation is an enabling act--authorizing the establishment of a library by the local authorities; the next is an act encouraging such establishment by bounties; and New Hamps.h.i.+re has reached a third by a law actually mandatory, requiring the local authorities to establish free libraries in proportion to their means and the population to be served. This seems to mark the high-water mark of confidence in the utility of these inst.i.tutions. It indicates that free public libraries are to be ranked with the common schools, as inst.i.tutions indispensable to good citizens.h.i.+p, whose establishment the State for its own protection must require.

So the movement has progressed, until now these 2,000 public libraries combined are sending out each year over 30 million books, to do their work for good or ill in the homes of the United States. The entire 2,000 result from one conviction and a uniform purpose. Yet among them there is every variety in scope and in organization. There is the hamlet library of a hundred volumes, open for a couple of hours each week in some farm house, under a volunteer custodian, maintained by the town, but enlisting private contribution through bazaars and sociables--sending out its books by the local provision dealer to its remote and scattered const.i.tuents. There is the library of the great city, with elaborate equipment and complex organization to meet a vast and complex need. Such a library as you may find at Chicago; a city which, though it has two great endowed reference libraries, still considers its million and a half people ent.i.tled to a munic.i.p.al library, with a two million dollar building, studded with costly mosaics, and aided by forty branches and stations in bringing the books nearer each home. Or such a library as exists at Boston; organized as a City Department, under Trustees appointed by the Mayor, maintained, like the schools, or the police, or the fire department, by general taxation; with a central building which has cost the city two and one-half million dollars, with ten branch libraries and seventeen delivery stations scattered through the city and reached daily by its delivery wagons; with 700,000 books; and accommodations for over 2,000 readers at one time; including in its equipment such special departments as a bindery and a printing office; requiring for its administration over 250 employes, and for its maintenance each year a quarter of a million dollars, in addition to the proceeds of endowments; and representing in its buildings, books and equipment an investment of over five millions of dollars, the interest on which, at four per cent., to the expenditure for maintenance, is equivalent to an annual burden of $450,000 for its creation and support.

When this function was first proposed for a munic.i.p.ality, the argument used was that in this country books had come to be the princ.i.p.al instruments of education; that the community was already supporting a public school system; that this system brought a youth to the threshold of education and there left him; that it qualified him to use books, but did nothing to put books within his reach; and finally that it was of ”paramount importance that the means of general information should be so diffused that the largest possible number of persons should be induced to read and understand questions going down to the very foundation of social order, which are constantly presenting themselves, and which we, as a people, are constantly required to decide, and do decide, either ignorantly or wisely.”

A glance at the libraries now in operation in the United States shows that the ends proposed for them fall far short of the service which they actually perform. They begin with the child before he leaves school; while he is still in his elementary studies they furnish to him books which stir his imagination, and bring the teaching of the text books into relation with the art and with life. They thus help to render more vivid the formal studies pursued; but they also prepare the child to become an intelligent const.i.tuent hereafter. This work cannot begin too early, for four-fifths of the children pa.s.s out into active life without reaching the high schools. It need not be deferred, for now the number is almost countless of books that touch with imagination and charm of style even the most elementary subjects; and the library can add ill.u.s.trations which through the eye convey an impression of the largest subjects in the most elemental way.

If the library begins with the citizen earlier than was foreseen, it is prepared to accompany him further than was thought necessary. It responds not only to the needs of the general reader, but also to those of the student and even, to the extent of its means, to those of the scholar engaged in special research. The maintenance of universities at the common expense is familiar in the West; it is less so in the East.

And there is still contention that inst.i.tutions for highly specialized instruction should not be charged upon the community as a whole. But no one has questioned the propriety of charging upon the community the support of a library whose leading purpose may be the encouragement of the higher scholars.h.i.+p.

Finally, to the services just above described the public library has added another: the supply of books for proposes purely recreative. This service, if antic.i.p.ated, was certainly not explicitly argued for; nor was it implied in Edward Everett's prediction that the public library would prove the ”intellectual common” of the community. The common that Mr. Everett had in mind was a pasturage, not a baseball ground, or lover's walk, or a loafing place for tramps.

But as regards certain of the books customarily supplied, the ordinary public library of to-day is furnis.h.i.+ng recreation rather than instruction. In fact, if we look at the history of free public libraries in this country, we find that the one point of practice on which they have been criticised is the supply of merely recreative literature. The protest has come from thoughtful persons, and it means something, lightly as it has been waved aside.

The excuse that used to be given for the supply of inferior books was that they would entice to the use of the better books. There was to be reached a ma.s.s of persons of inferior taste and imperfect education.

These persons must be introduced gradually to an acquaintance with the better cla.s.s of reading through the medium of the familiar. And, at all events, it was better that they should read something than not read at all.

I am not quite so confident of the regenerating virtue of mere printed matter as such; and I am confident that the reading of a book inferior in style and taste debases taste, and that the book which sets forth, even with power, a false view of society does harm to the reader, and is so far an injury to the community of which he is part. But even granting the premises, the conclusion is doubtful. We do not deliberately furnish poor art at public expense because there is a portion of the public which cannot appreciate the better. Nor when the best is offered, without apology, does the uncultured public in fact complain that it is too ”advanced.” Thousands of ”ordinary” people come to see and enjoy the Abbey and Chavannes and Sargent decorations in the Boston Public Library. No one has yet complained that the paintings are too advanced for him. The best of art is not too good for the least of men, provided he can be influenced at all. Nor are the best of books too good for him, provided he can be influenced, and provided they are permitted, as are the pictures to make their appeal directly. They must not be secluded behind catalogs and formal paraphernalia. The practice which admitted the scholar to the shelves, and limited the general reader to the catalogues, gave the best opportunity to him who least needed it. The modern practice sets before the reader least familiar with good _t.i.tles_ a selection of good _books_. It places them on open shelves where he can handle them without formality. The result is almost invariably, that he is attracted to a book in advance of his previous tastes. Perhaps a chance paragraph appeals to some experience or ambition, or an ill.u.s.tration stirs his imagination. The books themselves draw him outside of his previous limitations.

In the place, therefore, of books inferior in quality, the more modern public library seeks to attract by the freest possible access to books of the best quality. Not that this practice is universal. But the opinion and tendency are in this safe direction.

However, quality a.s.sumed, the general question as to the reading of recreative literature remains. What shall we say of the fact that sixty per cent. of the circulation of the free public libraries still consists of fiction?

In the first place, that this percentage takes no account of reference use, which is almost wholly of serious literature; second, that as to home use the ratio in circulation of fiction to serious literature does not represent a similar ratio of trivial to serious service. Fiction is the small coin of literature. It must circulate more rapidly to represent the same volume of real business done. A volume of fiction may be issued, returned and reissued three times while a biography or history or work of science is issued once. It will then count seventy-five per cent. in the circulation. But the serious book has during the entire period been out in the hands of the reader; and the service which it has performed--the period of attention which it has occupied--equals that of the novel in its three issues. And, finally, there is to be considered the influence of the best fiction toward general culture (if the library is not merely to inform but also to cultivate)--in broadening the sympathies, giving a larger tolerance, a kindlier humanity, a more intelligent helpfulness; in affording the rest that is in itself an equipment for work, and the distraction that may save from impulse to evil.

However, the amount of fiction circulated in proportion to the total work of the library is on the average steadily decreasing. At the same time the quality is improving; in part through critical selection, in part as a happy result of the fact that the inferior novels are also, as a rule, inferior books, so poorly manufactured that libraries cannot afford to buy them.

But there is standard fiction and current fiction; and it is the current fiction that const.i.tutes by itself a special problem still perplexing.

It is a problem that concerns not the uneducated child, nor the illiterate adult; it is caused by the people of intelligent education who are avid to read the latest novel by Mr. X. or Mrs. Y. while it is still the latest novel by Mr. X. or Mrs. Y. It is being talked about at dinner or afternoon tea. Well-informed people are reading it; to read it is a social necessity.

The reason that presses the public library to supply promptly every most recent book in the domain of scientific literature is apparent enough. Such literature contributes facts which are the data for action.

But novels in general belong to the literature of power. Their purpose is not to furnish information but to give pleasure. Literature of this sort adds no new fact, nor is it superseded, nor does it lose any of its value by lapse of time. To a.s.sume that it does would be to a.s.sume that beauty of form could become obsolete. This is not so in painting, in sculpture, in architecture; why should it be so in prose fiction, in poetry, in the drama? Was there, in fact, an aesthetic value in the Canterbury Tales in 1380, in Hamlet in 1602, in Ivanhoe in 1819, that is not to be found in them in 1898?

But a large portion of latter day fiction is fiction with a purpose; another way of saying that it is a work of art composed for the dissemination of doctrine. This element promotes it at once to the dignity of a treatise; a new view of politics, a new criticism of social conditions, a new creed! Here is something that concerns the student of sociology. And surely his needs are worthy of prompt response.

In fact, his needs and the general curiosity do get prompt response, and the new novels are freely bought. How freely I have recently sought to ascertain. I asked of some seventy libraries their yearly expenditure for current fiction in proportion to their total expenditure for books.

The returns show an average of from ten to fifteen per cent. In one case the amount reached fifty per cent., in others it fell as low as two per cent. The ratio for fiction in general is much higher on the average; but fiction in general includes Scott and Thackeray and other standards, an ample supply of which would not usually be questioned. At Providence and Worcester, two of the most active and popular of public libraries, the purchases of fiction, current and standard, formed last year but seven and eleven per cent., respectively, of the entire expenditure for books.

At Boston there were selected but 178 t.i.tles of current fiction (out of nearly 600 read and considered). But some dozen copies were bought of each t.i.tle, so that the entire purchases reached 2,300 volumes and cost about $2,300. This was about six and a half per cent. on a total expenditure for books of $34,000. At St. Louis the practise is to buy but two copies out of the general funds to be circulated free. Nearly a hundred more are added which are rented out and thus pay for themselves.

The statistics do not seem to show that the initial expenditure for current fiction is very alarming. But the purchase price of these books is but a fraction of the expense of handling them. They cannot be supplied in adequate quant.i.ties; for while the frenzy of curiosity persists, an adequate supply is beyond the resources of any library. But since the attempt to supply is futile the pretense is injurious. The presence of the t.i.tles in the catalogues misleads the reader into a mult.i.tude of applications which are a heavy expense to the library without benefit to him. And the acquisition of the single book means to the library the expense of handling a hundred applications for it which are futile to one that can be honored. In this sense a current novel involves perhaps a hundred times the expense of any other book in being supplied to but the same number of readers.

The British museum acquires the new novels as published; but it withholds them from the readers until five years after their date of publication. It is my personal belief that a one year limitation of this sort adopted by our free libraries generally would relieve them of anxiety and expense and their readers of inconvenience and delusion.

But as regards current light literature in general it is worth while to consider whether the responsibility of public libraries has not been modified by the growth and diffusion of the newspaper and periodical press. In 1850, when the free public library was started, the number of newspapers and periodicals published in the United States was about 2,500; now it is nearly 20,000. The total annual issues have increased from 400 million to over 4-1/2 billion copies.