it at the close of what I am saying. A library, used for teaching
purposes in a school, is indeed, “a composite textbook.” It insures
contact with a composite instead of a single mind. The old idea was
that contact of this kind always resulted in confusion--in mental
instability. There was a time when the effort was to protect the mind
through life from any such unbalancing contact. The individual
was protected from familiarity with more than one set of
opinions--religious, political, social, philosophical, scientific. He
was taught facts as facts and no emphasis was placed on the more
important fact that there are degrees of certainty and points of view.
The next step was to give the individual a free head after the formal
processes of education had terminated. Getting out of college was like
escaping from a box, where one had been shut up with Presbyterians and
Free Traders and Catastrophists and Hegelians--or their opposites, for
the contents of all the boxes were not alike. Now, we set the boy free
when he enters college and we are beginning to give him a little fresh
air in the high school. Why not go back to the beginning? Why not, at
any rate, avoid the implication that there is the same backing behind
all that we teach or tell? Some teachers, and some parents, have made
this plan succeed. One of them is Mr. H.R. Walmsley, who writes in the
_Volta Review_ (Washington, April, 1915), on “How I Taught My Boy the
Truth.” Says he:
I pondered over these things, and determined that I would never
tell a falsehood to my child; that I would tell him the truth upon
every subject, and that I would not evade or refuse to answer any
question. I kept my resolution and have obtained most excellent
results. The child doubted nothing I told him. He knew that as far
as I was able I would reply truthfully to any question he might
care to ask. In answering him I was always careful to qualify my
statements thus: “This is so,” “I believe so,” “It is believed to
be,” “It is claimed to be,” “Those who should know say,” etc. So he
knew the basis from which I spoke. Throughout his life, when he was
told anything that looked doubtful, he would say, “I will ask
father.”
This plan is practicable from the child’s earliest years. As soon as he
learns to read we may begin to supplement it by reference to original
documents. This means a library at the very beginning, and at high
school age it means a large library. It need not all be in the school.
In the smallest towns there are now respectable public collections; the
school may confine itself to the subjects in its own curriculum. But
whatever we do, let us not teach the child, with the implication of
equal authority, that twice two is is four, that material bodies are
composed of molecules, and that the Tories in the Revolution were all
bad. Tell him that there are other aspects, if they exist, and as soon
as he is able let him examine those aspects. He will be able far sooner
than some of us are willing to admit.
We librarians feel somewhat strongly on this matter because our own
institutions possess by their very nature that form of neutrality that
exposes both sides without advocating either. It seems to be assumed by
some persons that neutrality means ignorance. Of course, ignorance is
one method of insuring it. If a fairy story opens with the announcement
that the King of Nowaria is at war with the Prince of Sumboddia, you
cannot take sides until you know something about the quarrel. The
trouble is that we do not live in fairyland. In my home city the school
authorities have been trying to cultivate this kind of neutrality by
cautioning principals not to discuss the European war with their pupils.
What is the result? One of my branch librarians says in a recent report:
“I have been greatly interested by the fact that the high-school boys
and girls never ask for anything about the war. Not once during the
winter have I seen in one of them a spark of interest in the subject. It
seems so strange that it should be necessary to keep them officially
ignorant of this great war because the grandfather of one spoke French
and of another, German.” With this I thoroughly agree. I am not sure
that I do not prefer a thorough and bigoted partisanship to this
neutrality of ignorance. Better than both is the opportunity for free
investigation with enlightened guidance. The public library offers the
opportunity for the fullest and freest contact with the minds of the
world. We try to give guidance, also, as we can; but we have not the
opportunities of you teachers. Guidance is your business and your high
privilege; and if some of you have in the past guided as the jailer
guides his prisoners--for a walk around the prison yard with ball and
chain--let us be thankful that this oppressive view is giving place to
the freer idea of a guide as a counselor and friend. Such guidance means
intellectual freedom. Freedom means choice, and choice implies a
collection from which to choose. This means a library and the school
library is thus an indispensable tool in the hands of those teachers to
whom education signifies neutral training, the arousing of neutral
energies, and a control of the imponderables of life--those things
without physical weight which yet count more in the end than all the
masses with which molecular physics has to deal.
THE LIBRARY AND THE BUSINESS MAN[16]
The electricians have a word that has always interested me--the word and
the thing it signifies. It is “hysteresis,” and it means that quality in
a mass of iron that resists magnetization, so that if the magnetizing
force is a moving one the magnetism always lags a little behind it. We
see this quality in many other places besides magnetic bodies--the
almost universal tendency of effects to lag behind their causes. I like
to watch it in the popular mind--the failure to “catch on” quickly--the
appreciation that comes just a little after the thing to be appreciated.
Lag everywhere, in apprehension, in knowledge, in the realization of a
situation. Everywhere hysteresis. Of course, sometimes the lag is great
and sometimes it is slight. It may be affected by physical distance, as
when the European thinks that Indians camp in the suburbs of Pittsburg
and that the citizens of Indianapolis hunt the buffalo of an evening; or
it may be a function of mental distance, as when the Wall Street
financier fondly imagines that this country is still populated chiefly
by lambs, as it undoubtedly was fifty years ago. I like to watch it as
it affects the idea of the public library as some people hold it. Now of
course, without progress, change, motion of some kind, there could be no
lag. In a permanent magnet there is no hysteresis. If the Indians and
the buffalo were still with us, the European would be thinking the
truth. If we had not learned that the gold-brick and the green goods
were frauds, we could still be fleeced. And if libraries were still what
they were fifty years ago, there would be no lag in the ideas that some
people hold about them. Libraries have changed. Some of you know it and
some of you do not. Libraries have changed in the kind of printed matter
that they collect and preserve; in the kind of people to whom they make
their appeal; in the way in which they try to make the former available
to the latter. They have utterly changed in their own conception of
their status in the community, of what they owe to the community and how
they ought to go about it, to pay the debt.
The old library was first and foremost a collection of material for
scholars; the new is for the busy citizen, to help him in what he is
busy about, to make it possible for him to do more work in less time. It
has taken some time for the library to see itself in this light, but it
has taken the great body of our citizens still longer to recognize and
act on the change--else I should not be talking to you to-day about the
library and the business man. The modern library is concerned, much more
largely than the old, with contemporary relations, with what is
happening and what is just going to happen. It sympathizes with the men
who do things. It tries to let them know what is going on about them,
and to assist them in what they are attempting--whether it be to achieve
a world-wide peace or to devise a new non-refillable bottle.
The library has placed itself in a position where it can do this better
than any other institution, for it is essentially non-partisan. Probably
it is our only non-partisan institution. Mr. Bryan’s impartial
government newspaper has not yet printed its first number. The school
must take sides, for its deals solely with children. The library alone
can store up material on all sides of every mooted question and offer it
to him who reads, without in any way taking sides itself. It may run the
risk of misconception. We had a big exhibit of war pictures last year.
The Pacifists protested. It was very dreadful, they said, to see a
library encouraging the militaristic spirit. This year we have a peace
exhibit--prepared by the Union Against Militarism. The Preparedness
people are horrified. They hate to see a library siding with those who
would drag our country in the dust of humiliation. The trouble with all
these good people is just hysteresis--lag. It may have been fifty years
ago that a portrait of a monarch in a library meant that the institution
was for him, body and soul. Now it means simply that he is an
interesting contemporary thing. Display of a cartoon representing
Woodrow Wilson doing something disgraceful does not imply on our part
detestation of the president, but only a willingness to let the public
see a good bit of drawing or perhaps to show them how some part of the
community is thinking and feeling. It is all a part of our efforts at
up-to-dateness--our struggles to brush off the dust and sweep away the
cobwebs of medievalism.
As an incident of these struggles, we have discovered the existence of
the Business Man. We have tried to find out what he is driving at and to
help a little--to stock the kind of information that he wants and to
help him get at it. An obstacle in the way has been the fact that much
of what he wants is to be obtained best from material that the older
libraries knew nothing of and would have despised had they known
it--partly, printed matter that had no existence in those days, like the
huge trade catalog and the informative railway folder; partly material
that was ignored because it had no connection with scholarly
pursuits--time tables, statistical schedules, directories, lists of
names and addresses, commercial publications, maps, information
regarding trade-routes and conditions. If the scholar of fifty years
ago wanted to be set right about a Greek preposition or to find the
color of Henry VII’s hair, he knew where to go: the library was the
proper and inevitable place for such data. He brushed the dust from a
pile of books and proceeded to look them up. But if he wanted to know
the quickest way to ship goods to Colombo, Ceylon, or the comparative
exports of cereals from Russia during the last decade, or the design of
the latest machine for effecting a given result, did he go to the
library? Remember that this is supposed to be fifty years ago. I am
afraid I must confess that I don’t know where he went. I fear that in
most cases he didn’t go at all, for business men as well as libraries
have grown in the last half century--but I am quite sure that he went
nowhere near the library.
The reason was that printed information of this kind either did not then
exist or was thought improper for collection by a scholarly institution.
If anyone had asked for it I know what the librarian would have said,
for the same thing is occasionally still said by librarians, and I hear
it at department stores and everywhere else where there is distribution
of objects necessary to our lives. They would have said--“There has been
no demand for it, so we don’t need to keep it.” Demand for it! Of course
not. Is there any demand for fish in a sand-bank or for free-trade
arguments in a stand-pat Republican newspaper? People go for things
where they know the things are to be found; and they knew well fifty
years ago that none of these things were to be found in a library. The
sad thing is that altho the libraries have reformed, hysteresis is still
getting in its deadly work. There is a lag of apprehension and
appreciation among our business men, many of whom think the library is
still the same old dusty, cobwebby institution of 1850. Take my word
for it, it is not. It stocks all the things that the librarian used
contemptuously to call _biblia abiblia_--books that are no books--city
directories by the hundred, trade maps, commercial information, trade
catalogs, advertising folders, railway announcements, hundreds of things
that will answer the questions that every business man wants, or ought
to want, to know. We, or any other library, may not have precisely what
you want. We are not yet perfect and we have much to learn. But we are
buying and putting at the business man’s disposal the kind of material
that will help him in his business.
The modern library is democratic, not autocratic. It does not hand you
down a volume from a very high shelf and tell you that is exactly what
you want and you mustn’t ask for anything else. It says: we are the
agents of a co-operative concern. For convenience sake, just as in the
case of the public schools, you conclude to tax yourselves to maintain a
public collection of books, instead of having to form private
collections of your own, smaller and vastly more expensive. We are in
communication with every one of you by telephone. The machine for which
you have paid is all ready to work--stoked and cleaned and oiled. Why
don’t you press the button? Those who don’t are just suffering from
hysteresis--lag of apprehension. They think the library is what it was
in 1850. They are behind the times.
Am I not afraid that if all the business men should press the button at
once, the library would be swamped? There would be a little swearing at
first, I fear. But ultimately there would be a realization that a
library built and stocked and manned to serve perhaps 50 business men at
once cannot serve 500 or 5000. There would be pressure on the
legislature; we should have the necessary funds and in short order we
should be serving our 5000 as smoothly as we served our 50.
Now let us get down to something concrete. Just what information are we
prepared to give to business and industrial houses? Here are some actual
questions asked lately and answered in our reference departments--many
of them by telephone:
The uses of lye in baking powder. History and development of the
plow.
Substitute for such commercial products as dyes, sealskin,
fertilizers, etc.
Receipts for preparing in the wholesale manner mustard and
salad-dressing, and for bottling olives.
Methods of installing a refrigerating plant.
Addresses of the manufacturers of toys in the United States.
How far from the curb may vehicles be parked in St. Louis.
Names of manufacturers of bottled buttermilk.
Dates of traffic legislation in England.
Names of the officers of the Wabash R.R.
How to calculate the depreciation in shop fittings in taking
inventory.
Change in prices in Wall Street for the last year.
History of speculation in the 16th century.
Examination of the State Board of Pharmacy relating to the laws of
the State of Missouri on the sale of narcotics.
Pictures for advertising posters, such as “a Pullman porter,”
“Hops,” used in a Bevo ad.
“Two dogs playing” for the title-page of a piece of music entitled
“Puppy love.”
Designs for book-covers, posters, letter-heads, by the million.
I think I hear someone say--“Do you call that library work? One man at a
telephone and a pile of circulars at the other end?” Yes. I do; didn’t I
tell you that libraries had changed? When Archbishop Glennon first
visited our new building, he walked into the magnificent central hall
and, looking around him said: “Where are the books?” The books were all
in their places, but they were not in the delivery hall. The books in a
library are quite as important as ever. There could be no library
without them. They are the library. But we are laying more and more
emphasis on the man behind the book. In nine cases out of ten he is a
woman, and increasingly often he is at the end of a telephone wire. We
find that information slips over a telephone wire quite easily. It saves
the business man an annoying trip and sometimes it saves our assistant
from hearing all about the business man’s last attack of sciatica. Not
always; for sufferers have been known to seek sympathy even by
telephone. The more they do it, the more trunk lines we have to pay for,
so the telephone company doesn’t mind.
But it is true that in meeting the business man’s needs the library is
assimilating itself more and more to a huge information bureau. This is
the case especially at our Municipal Reference Branch in the City Hall,
where we have few books, properly so called, many reports, pamphlets and
clippings, properly indexed, and a great deal of manuscript material,
gathered by correspondence in answer to queries and waiting for more
queries on the same subject.
It matters little whether what you want is bound between covers, or
slipped into a pamphlet case, or slipped into a manila envelope; it
really matters little whether it is printed at all, so long as it is
indexed so that it can be found quickly. We may perhaps look forward to
the day when all the bound books in the library will be for home use,
and will give information at second hand, too late for the business man
to act promptly on it. The real sources of up to date knowledge will be,
as they often are now, manuscript letters, circulars, newspaper
clippings and trade catalogs. With their inevitable index they form a
huge encyclopedia, absolutely up to date.
The printed cyclopedia in umpty-seven volumes is lucky if it catches up
with year before last; it may do for your private library where the
skilful agent has induced you to put it, but it is worthless in the
Business Man’s collection, except on the rare occasions when he wants
the life of Epictetus or the location of the Dobrudja. For the Business
Man we want this morning’s material. Shall we deny it, collectively, the
name of a library just because the book-binder has not been at work on
it, and in many cases will never get the chance?
Not that the Business Man may not read books if he wants them--books on
commerce, the industries, transportation, salesmanship, advertising,
accounting. He may have them sent to his home if he likes, with no more
trouble than sitting down again to his telephone. We use Uncle Sam’s
messenger service--his parcel post. The only annoying thing about it is
that he will not deliver C.O.D. and we are accordingly forced to ask for
a postage deposit in advance--anything you choose, from the postage on
one book one way to several dollars. We will notify you when the money
is used up. This combination of telephone and parcel post seems to me
the ideal of library service when you can name the book you want and
don’t care to be merely browsing along the shelves. If the book is out,
you will be put on the waiting list and will get it automatically when
your turn comes. Why does not every citizen of St. Louis avail himself
of this easy service? Hysteresis, I suppose; thinking of the old library
of 1850 and neglecting that of 1917. Or perhaps it is that provoking
little advance payment. Pay beforehand may be a poor paymaster, but
those who work with Uncle Sam have to make his acquaintance.
So much for the information to be obtained from the library by business
men. You are advertising men. Your business is the dissemination of
information. Your boast is that it is your business to tell the truth,
and I believe it. How can the Library help you tell it? Well--I believe
the Library to be the greatest publicity field in the world--largely a
virgin field, for you men, like everybody else, have got the
hysteresis--you are suffering from brain lag--not brain fag. You think
the library is back where it was in 1850, when it was the last place in
the world where any sane man would go for publicity. It was a good place
to hide. They tell the story of a library in Philadelphia, a beautiful
old mausoleum, where an escaped criminal once stayed in its public
reading room for three days before the police found him. We don’t covet
that reputation. The modern library, I repeat, is the very best
publicity field in the world. First, as we have seen, it is absolutely
non-partisan. If you get your publicity material into the library it is
because the library thinks it is good for something, not because you
have some kind of a pull. Next, the people who frequent the library are
intelligent. Publicity there is like that obtained from a high-class
periodical: it is gilt-edged. Last and not least, the publicity given by
the library is incidental. It accepts your publicity material and makes
it available, not because it wants to boom your product at the expense
of some other, but because it thinks that your material contains
something of value to the business man. In most cases its publicity is
general, not specific. You know that splendid Eastman ad--“There’s a
photographer in your town.” That makes a thrill run down my spine
whenever I see it, just as Tschaikovsky’s Sixth symphony does or Homer’s
description of Ulysses fighting the Cyclops; and for the same reason--it
is a product of genius.
Advertising is more and more bending this way. Why couldn’t we have seen
it before? For the same reason that we can’t all write plays like
Shakespeare’s or compose Wagner’s operas. When two shoemakers, Smith and
Jones, had little shops opposite each other, Smith’s chief idea of
advertising was to tell what trash Jones was making, and Jones’s to
assure people that nothing good could come out of Smith’s store. What
was the result? The same that induced the darky to say after he had
heard the political orators: “If bofe dese fellers tells de trufe, what
a pair of rascals they must be!” The net effect was to put people’s
minds on the worthlessness of the product, instead of its excellence.
Nowadays Smith and Jones are getting together, even if they haven’t been
gobbled up by the Trust, and are assuring people that shoes are good
things to have--that we ought to wear more of them; more kinds and
better quality. The result is to fix the public mind on the excellence
of shoes and both Smith and Jones sell more of them than under the old
method. The library is willing to boom shoes for you, and labor-saving
machinery, and food-products, and textiles and seeds, and lighting and
heating devices. It does this to some extent without your co-operation,
by the books that it places on the shelves; but no one who knows will go
to a book for up-to-date information of this sort. If you want a
description of the very latest device for any purpose, go to the
publicity material of the concern that makes it.
We trust to you ad-men and your campaign for truth in advertising, that
it is no fake. Here is where you can help us and help your clients by so
doing. We stock every bit of good, informative publicity that we can
find. We miss much of it. You can help us get it all. Your clients will
get more publicity and better publicity for nothing than they have often
bought for hundreds of dollars. Perhaps it is another effect of
hysteresis that makes us afraid of anything that is offered free. You
remember the story of the man who all day long, on a bet, offered
sovereigns unsuccessfully in exchange for shillings on London Bridge.