which it is maintained. A collection for scholars alone should certainly
be in a separate room, with an expert custodian. But when we regard the
collection as a means of popularizing music and of improving popular
musical taste, the matter takes on another aspect. 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. What he does do is to place them conspicuously in the
most frequented spot in his library.
This is, of course, only one side of the question. No one can browse in
a collection of books unless he knows how to read; and so long as music
readers can not read “to themselves”, the reading of instrumental pieces
can not be done without the aid of the actual instrument. Even when one
can read music to himself well enough to pick out what he wants it may
aid him to be able to perform the piece on the instrument for which it
was written. Now the most frequented spot in the library, where I
recommend that the music collection shall be displayed, is not the place
for a piano or for its use. This must necessarily be in a separate
room.
These are not, however, absolutely irreconcilable requirements. It is
not necessary that the music and the instrument should be in the same
room. A sound-proof or a distantly-located room, for the instruments,
may be used by those who wish to perform pieces before selecting them,
even if no music at all is shelved in the room. This room should
preferably be as near as possible to the music shelves, and if it is it
must of course be sound proof.
Going back again for a moment to our analogy, the provision of a sound
proof music room corresponds to the creation of a similar room for the
ordinary reader, where he may take his books and read them aloud to see
how they sound. The mere statement shows us how far behind our ability
to read language is our ability to read music.
When I first began to present these ideas, which seemed to me to be
absurdly self-evident, it was gradually borne in upon me that most
people considered them new and strange, both those who agreed with me
and those who disagreed. But without going into the question of what
music can and can not convey to the human mind, it seems clear to me
that both music and language succeed in conveying _something_ to the
human organism, and do it principally by sound-waves. In the case of
both, there is a way of writing down what is to be conveyed, so that the
record may be used by another person who wishes to convey it by sound,
or so that a person, sufficiently skilled, may convey it to himself,
without making an audible sound. These facts seem to me to establish so
complete an analogy that we may treat music in a library precisely as we
treat ordinary books, both in selection, distribution and use. If to
complete the analogy we must insist on certain changes in the attitude
toward music of both educators and readers, this kind of missionary
work is after all no more and no other than that which the modern
librarian, especially in America, is often called upon to do.
I am a believer in the mission of music. The public library can do no
more helpful thing to our modern life than to assist the public to
understand and love it. The fact that it is not a representative art
makes it all the more valuable as a means of detaching the mind from the
things of this earth and transporting it to a separate world. A
beautiful picture or statue or poem is anchored to the ground by the
necessary associations of its subject matter. Music has no such anchor.
It is free to soar, and soar it does, bearing with it the listening soul
into regions that have no relations with the things of every day life.
It may rest or it may stimulate; it may gladden or depress; but it does
so by means of its own, not by reminding us of the stimulating or
depressing things of our own past experience.
In the multifarious mission of the Public Library, as we Americans see
it, surely the popularization of good music is to assume no unimportant
place.
TWO CARDINAL SINS
The sins of which I purpose to speak are Duplication and Omission. They
are peculiar to no one class of persons, to no one business, profession
or institution. They are ubiquitous and omnipresent. Those who use the
Book of Common Prayer acknowledge them when they confess that they have
done those things that they ought not to have done and have left undone
those things that they ought to have done. This statement covers other
sins, both of commission and omission, than those that I have specified
above, but it includes both of them. The peculiarity of Duplication and
Omission is that they are complementary so far as the labor and expense
involved in them is concerned. Their existence is like that of a surplus
and a debt in the same purse. To bewail them is like complaining because
you have a thousand dollars that you know not how to invest and at the
same time because you owe a thousand that you can not pay. The whole
world is out of joint because it is doing twice things that need to be
done only once, and at the same time is not doing at all things that
ought to be done. The man with the thousand-dollar surplus and the debt
of the same amount may obtain quick relief by paying his indebtedness
with his balance. The world will be relieved when it takes the energy
and the money now expended in wasteful duplication and puts it into the
doing of those things that are now left undone because the energy and
money necessary to do them are expended wastefully. It is very easy, is
it not? As easy as adding plus 10 to minus 10 and getting zero. The
surplus and the debt, the duplications and the omissions, extinguish
each other and neither of them bothers us any more. Unfortunately there
are practical obstacles that do not present themselves in the case of
the algebraic sum. These difficulties might occur in the case of the man
with the surplus who owed money, if he could be supposed ignorant both
of his balance and of his debt, while suffering the inconveniences due
to both. This ignorance is the rule, rather than the exception, in the
case of ordinary duplications and omissions. Either the duplication is
not noticed, because at first sight it does not appear to be a
duplication, or when recognized as such, its existence does not seem to
be of any consequence. Besides this, both duplications and omissions
seem to some to be part of the natural order of things ordained for us
and not to be disturbed by the hand of impiety.
One hardly knows when to begin with illustrations where there is such a
wealth of material, whether we seek it in civics, or history, or
science, or business or in domestic economy. As you have doubtless
surmised I intend to take the Public Library as my chief field of
research, but I must maintain or at least justify my thesis of
universality by a preliminary trip through a much broader field.
First let us take the age-old universal grievance, the unequal
distribution of wealth, which from our present standpoint we may
simplify by saying that one man has two dollars where he needs only one
and another has no dollars at all--omission in his case where there is
duplication in the other. I know there are some people who fail to see
two sins in these simple and well-known facts, but most of us nowadays
are recognizing that it is at least an unsatisfactory state of affairs.
Where we disagree is that some feel that however unsatisfactory it may
be there is nothing to be done about it; that others who agree that it
is unsatisfactory are unable to agree on what they would consider
satisfactory; and that even those who think they know this are unable to
get together on a method of attaining what they desire. These various
kinds and degrees of disagreement constitute the reason why these two
particular sins of duplication and omission continue to be committed.
Now let us take a very big jump, from the general theory of socialism
down to the golf-clubs of Middlefield, Mass.--a real place, though I
have taken the liberty to change its name. With a population of about a
thousand, this model village supported until recently two of these
institutions for no other reason than the general tendency to wasteful
duplication, already noted. The links on the West Side and those on the
East Side had both their ardent partisans. Each club considered the
existence of the other a shame and an outrage and each was only too
willing to abolish duplication by consolidation, always provided its own
particular links should be the ones to survive.
For years this small place supported these two clubs, each with its
club-house, grounds, dues and assessments. Those who were not partisans
had to belong to both, to keep the peace. Meanwhile, the town greatly
needed a small social club where the retired city merchants,
professional men and artists who largely made up its population could
assemble occasionally, have a game of pool or bridge and drink a cup of
tea. But their incomes were not large and they had to keep up those two
golf clubs. The situation is so typical that I am enlarging on it a
little. I wish that the outcome were typical too. That outcome was that
after years of discussion the clubs were merged, one of the links was
discontinued, and the village now enjoys the little social club that it
needed. An omission has been filled by doing away with a duplication.
The church history of many a small place is very much to the point. We
see three or four denominational bodies struggling with small
congregations, inadequate buildings and general poverty when by uniting
they might fill all these lacks simply by saving what they are now
spending on duplication. Doctrinal differences are said to keep them
apart; but to the non-theological mind these differences are not greater
than these that must always exist between thoughtful men in the same
religious body. It is pleasant to see an occasional lapse into sanity,
shown by the union of such churches and the consequent strengthening and
growth of a town’s religious life. Probably it is not too much to say
that the whole problem of Christian Unity is but a phase of this general
question of duplication and omission.
In the business world our two sins flourish like green bay trees. Small
villages have two groceries and no hardware store; large cities may be
overrun with one trade while there is lack of another. These things
ought to adjust themselves, but they do not. One can pick out
duplication and omission in the stock of a single institution. On asking
for something at a department store recently I was met with the remark,
“Isn’t that funny? You are the fifteenth person who has asked for that
in the last three days!” The fact was noted as merely curious and
interesting and there was apparently no intention of remedying the
omission, even by cutting out some of the superfluous styles of
neckties.
The most flagrant example I know of duplication in the business and
industrial world is the duplicate telephone company. A telephone company
is a good example of a mutual enterprise; its value to any subscriber
depends on the existence of all the other subscribers. If a man could
afford to buy up the company and discontinue all the telephones but his
own, the value would disappear. Two companies are simply a nuisance,
involving duplication of plant with no resulting convenience. The same
is not true of gas or water companies, because here one user does not
depend on the others. You would get just as good service if the electric
company concluded to serve you, and you alone. There is, to be sure,
wasteful duplication in these cases also, but in the instance of the
telephone it is accompanied with necessary deterioration of service.
I suppose I need say little about the existence of our two sins in the
household. We are honeycombed with them from the rural dinner table
where there are no soup and three kinds of pie, to the housewife who
yields to the temptation to buy another evening dress and “can not
afford” an outing costume. What we need everywhere is some kind of a
Board of Equalization, with autocratic powers, that will rigourously
suppress all our duplication and with the money saved supply our
omissions for us.
We may learn something from the efforts that have recently been made to
minimize these two sins in charitable work and social service. Every
city contains numerous charitable bodies, all trying to relieve want and
alleviate suffering. They are frequently the prey of unscrupulous
persons who manage to get their wants alleviated by three or four
societies at once--by each, of course, without the knowledge of the
others. The result is that there are no funds to relieve many worthy
persons who accordingly suffer. The two sins in this case are being
avoided by the simple establishment of a card-index at a central point.
When an application is made for relief the index-office is informed by
telephone, the index is consulted, and if it is found that the applicant
is already receiving aid from some other source his request is politely
but firmly refused.
The present production of books gives us an instructive example of the
existence of duplications and omissions on a large scale; and the
elucidation of these will bring us a little nearer to the application of
our principles to the library, toward which we are tending. I know not
which is the more striking fact in connection with the publishing
business--the continual issue of useless books--fiction and non-fiction,
or the non-existence of works on vital subjects regarding which we need
information. Of course this is due partly to the fact that the men who
know things are also the men who do things. They are too busy to write
them down. It is also due to the abnormal appetites of the
semi-educated, which create a demand for the trivial and fatuous. The
semi-educated person is intellectually young; he has the peculiarities
of the child. Foremost among these is the love of repetition. The little
one would rather hear his favorite fairy tale for the hundredth time
than risk an adventure into stranger fields of narrative. There is
something admirable about this when it leads to the adult’s love of
re-reading great literature. But in the semi-educated it appears as an
unlimited capacity for assimilating unreal fiction with the same plots,
the same characters, the same adventures and the same emotions, depicted
time after time with slight changes in names and attendant
circumstances.
An African explorer told me recently that the events attending the
southward progress of the French through the Sahara and down into
Central Africa were the most thrilling and the most important, from the
standpoint of world history, among those of recent times. The story of
them remains unwritten, except for a few episodes in French that have
not been thought worthy of translation into other tongues. Yet in this
period how much trivial incident, how much banal reminiscence, has been
thought worthy of enshrinement in bulky octavos, selling at four dollars
each! The money spent in putting forth the same idle stuff that has
oppressed the world for centuries would have supplied great gaps in our
catalogues of history, travel and science and have given us vital
literature that we may now have lost forever.
In fiction, the sin of repetition is largely due to the substitution of
imagination for observation. No two actual things are alike and no two
events happen in the same way. Observation and accurate description will
never result in duplication. But the semi-educated imagination sees
always the same things and sees them in the same way; and its use in the
writing of fiction results as we have seen.
Would that we had, to-day and here, realism like that of Turgenief in
his “Memoirs of a Sportsman”--the detailed account of every-day
happenings; the hardest thing in the world to write interestingly. When
we try it, which we seldom do, we seem to revert at once to the dreary
side of life, which doubtless exists but surely not to the exclusion of
other things. Turgenief’s book helped toward the emancipation of the
serfs. I will not dwell on that, for Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin--a
very different sort of book, performed a like office for us. I will
rather insist that Turgenief wrote simple, vital descriptive
literature; something that you will look far to find in our modern
fiction.
Our books of reference are full of duplications and omissions. Search
the commoner dictionaries and cyclopedias on the library shelves and you
will find countless instances of items of information given twice or
thrice and others left out altogether--of words entered under more than
one form and completely defined under each, while cross-references lead
the seeker to nothing at all. After working a good many years on books
of this kind I am convinced that the art of making a perfect dictionary
or cyclopedia is the art of avoiding duplication and omission. This can
not be done until publishers are willing to allow sufficient time to
elaborate a plan before beginning work on one of these books. This, so
far, has never been done, and the two sins continue to be committed,
here as elsewhere.
It is doubtless time for our application of these principles to the
library. We have not to look far to begin.
Take any city of average size and inquire how many libraries it
supports. Is there any necessity in a town for more than one library? I
am open to conviction, but I doubt. There are excellent reasons for the
duplication in each case, I know, just as there were for the two golf
clubs in our little town. The duplication in buildings, staff and books
is very costly, and the service, no matter how good it may be, is not
bettered by this duplication. The trouble may be minimized by
co-operation, but it still exists. Take, if you please, the one item of
book-purchase. I shall not speak here of private owners, though they
must bear their share of blame and of punishment for our two sins; but
add together the book funds of the two or three large libraries--public
or subscription--and of the dozen small ones--special, denominational,
associational--in a community, and see to what a considerable sum it
amounts. If it could be administered and expended as a unit, is there
any one who will maintain that the precise books would be bought that
actually are bought? We find all these libraries buying copies of the
same book when one copy is all that the community needs, each ignoring
the others and each lamenting the insufficiency of its funds. I have not
forgotten such conspicuous instances of co-operation in book-purchase as
that of the three large libraries in Chicago, but I also do not forget
that it is rare, and that even in Chicago it has been found difficult to
carry it out in the perfection in which it is to be found on paper. If
we add private purchasers to the libraries I have little hesitation in
saying that the money spent on books in any community is quite enough to
buy all that the community needs. The lacks are due to the fact that the
sum needed to supply them is spent on useless duplicates.
I am not proposing plans, here or elsewhere, to perform the addition of
plus and minus quantities that is so easy in pure algebra; I am merely
pointing out their existence. From my point of view the ideal situation
in a community is the administration by a single body of all its library
activities, even private owners co-operating to a certain extent. Let us
refresh our memories with a bit of library history. There are at present
a great many separate libraries in greater New York. That is, from my
point of view, a bad thing. But there were once a great many
more. New York and Brooklyn were full of small circulating
libraries--denominational, charitable and associational; and many of
them had succeeded in obtaining small subsidies from the city. The sum
of these was considerable--or would have been considerable had it been
administered as a sum, instead of in separate driblets. All the
considerations noted above applied in this case, but the Board of
Equalization for which we have been sighing actually existed here. It
was the city government, which bestowed and controlled a large part of
these institutional incomes. A city comptroller with a business-like
mind saw all this and proceeded to act upon it. The small libraries
became branches of the public libraries of New York and Brooklyn. The
city subsidy, in a lump sum went to those institutions. If there is any
one who now wishes to return to the old system of separate control and
duplication of effort, I am unacquainted with him; notwithstanding the
fact that I know many trustees of the consolidated institutions who were
filled with rage at the summary action of the city. That action was in
the nature of both a threat and a bribe--a threat to discontinue the
appropriation of city funds for a library that should refuse to
consolidate and a bribe in the shape of a hint of additional favors to
come if it should not refuse. Mr. Andrew Carnegie’s offer to build
branch libraries, coming at about this time, made it possible to
reinforce this hint very effectively.
Our federal government is being held up as the model for a future world
federation, and its successful operation confutes the fears of those who
doubt the workability of any such plan. In like manner I beg to point to
the library consolidations in New York and Brooklyn as an evidence that
such removal of duplication elsewhere would enable us to supply
omissions in library service. All we need is a motive--if not the
threats and bribes that forced the New York consolidation, then
something of equal effect. But as I have said I am not proposing plans.
The abolition of this kind of duplication requires pressure from an
outside body or agreement among those concerned; no one of us, acting
alone, can do away with it. But there are duplications and omissions in
the work of every library that it is in the power of the librarian to
remedy. Many of these are the result of growth. I know of no profession
whose members are more continually and consistently looking for more
work to do than that of librarianship. This quest is rarely carried on
cooperatively in a library. The head of each department grasps every
opportunity to enlarge her sphere of influence, with the result that her
sphere first touches that of another department and then intersects it,
so that they possess certain parts of the field of service in common.
The departments concerned may not know of this duplication, or they may
realize that it is going on and be unwilling to stop it for various
reasons. Each department-head, like the golf-clubs mentioned above, may
be willing to abolish duplication by driving her fellow-worker out of
the field, but not otherwise; and her fear lest she herself may have to
be the one to retire may induce her to keep silence. Sometimes the
librarian himself, observing the interference, contents himself with
seeing that individual items of service are not duplicated, leaving the
two departments to do, in part, the same kind of work, though not in
precisely the same items. This is but a partial atonement for our two
sins. Although there is, perhaps, no longer actual duplication of work,
there is duplication of administration, duplication of thought and
planning. All this is waste of effort that should be devoted to doing
some of the things that every library leaves undone. I have elsewhere
treated of what I call “conflicts of jurisdiction” in libraries. This
comes under the same head, though there may be no actual clash of
authorities.