The blessings rather than the limitations of the small library
are portrayed and the "possibility of personal, individual,
first-hand contact with the children" is emphasized in this paper
presented by Miss Clara W. Hunt at the Niagara Conference of the
A. L. A. in 1903. A sketch of Miss Hunt appears on page 135.
As the young theological student is prone to look upon his first
country parish as a place to test his powers and to serve as a
stepping-stone to a large city church, so the librarian of the
country town who, visiting a great city library and seeing books
received in lavish quantities which she must buy as sparingly as
she buys tickets for expensive journeys out of her slender
income, a beautifully furnished, conveniently equipped apartment
especially for the children, for the student, for the magazine
reader, evidences everywhere of money to spend not only for the
necessities but also for the luxuries of library life--so it is
quite natural for such a visitor to heave a deep sigh as she
returns to her library home and contrasts her opportunities, or
limitations as she would call them, with those of the worker in a
numerically larger field; and quite natural is it for her to long
for a change which she feels would mean a broadening and
enlarging of outlook and opportunity.
It is encouraging sometimes to look at our possessions through
other people's spectacles, and perhaps I may help some worker in
a small field to see in what she calls her limitations, not a
hedging in but an opening, by drawing the contrast from another
point of view--from that of one who is regretfully forced to give
up almost all personal, individual work with the children and
delegate to others that most delightful of tasks, because her
library is so large and she has so much money to spend that her
services are more needed in other directions. With a keen
appreciation of the privilege it is to have charge of a small
library, I am going to enumerate some of my reasons for having
this feeling.
I should explain, in this connection, that my thoughts have
centered about the small town library, the library whose citizen
supporters do not yet aggregate a population large enough to
admit to dignifying their place of residence with the name of a
city, a place, therefore, where the librarian may really be able
to know every citizen of prominence, every school principal and
teacher, the officers of the women's clubs, many of the mothers
of the children she hopes to reach, and a very large number of
the children themselves.
What are the attractions in a spot like this, the compensations
which make up even for the lack of a large amount of money to
spend? Let me begin first with the less apparent advantages, the
"blessings in disguise," I should call them.
The first is the necessity for economy in spending one's
appropriation. I imagine your astonishment and disapproval of the
judgment of a person who can count the need of economy as any
cause for congratulation. But let us look for a moment at some of
the things you are saved by being forced to be "saving." The
greatest good to your public and to yourself is that you must
think of the ESSENTIALS, the "worth while" things first, last and
always. You cannot afford to buy carelessly. Every dollar you
spend must bring the best return possible and to the greatest
number of people. Every foolish purchase means disappointment to
your borrowers and wear on your own nerves. So, instead of being
able to order in an off-hand way many things which may be
desirable but which are really not essential, one gets a most
valuable training in judgment by this constant weighing of good,
indifferent and indispensable. To apply this to the principle of
the selection of children's books--and nothing in work with
children, except the personality of the worker with them is so
important as this, we cannot buy everything, we must buy the
best, and we therefore have an argument that must have a show of
reasonableness to those borrowers who advocate large purchases of
books you tell them your income will not cover.
What are the essentials in children's books if your selection
must be small? Our children can grow up without Henty. They must
not grow up without the classics in myth and fable and legend,
the books which have delighted grown people and adults for
generations, and upon the child's early acquaintance with which
depends his keen enjoyment of much of his later reading, because
of the wealth of allusion which will be lost to him if he has not
read aesop and King Arthur and the Wonder Book, Gulliver, Crusoe,
Siegfried and many others of like company, in childhood. Then the
librarian cannot afford to leave out collections of poetry. Her
children must have poetry in no niggardly quantity, from Mother
Goose and the Nonsense Book to our latest, most beautiful
acquisitions, "Golden numbers" and the "Posy ring." And American
history and biography must be looked after among the first things
and constantly replenished. So must fairy tales, the best fairy
tales--Andersen, Grimm, the Jungle books, MacDonald, Pyle, "The
rose and the ring." Much more discrimination must be exercised in
selecting the nature and science books than is usually the case.
But, of course, most of the problems come when we are adding the
story books. Here, most of all, the necessity for economy ought
to be a help. It is a question of deciding on essentials, and
having nerve enough to leave out those books whose only merits
are harmlessness, and putting in nothing that is not positively
good for something. The threadbare argument that we must buy of
the mediocre and worse for the children who like such literature
(principally because they know little about any other kind) will
look very thin when we squarely face the fact that by such
purchases we shut out books we admit to be really better, and
when we honestly reflect upon the purpose of the public library.
The sanest piece of advice that I ever heard given to those
librarians who argue in favor of buying all the bootblack stories
the boys want, was that of Miss Haines at a recent institute for
town libraries. She asked that those men and women who enjoyed
Alger and "Elsie" in childhood and who are arguing in their favor
on the strength of the memory of a childish pleasure, take some
of their old favorites and re-read them now, read them aloud to
their young people at home, and then see if they care to risk the
possibility of their own children being influenced by such
ideals, forming such literary tastes as these books illustrate.
Most of us desire better things for our children than we had
ourselves. If a man was allowed to nibble on pickles and
doughnuts and mince pie and similar kinds of nourishment before
he cut all his teeth, miraculously escaping chronic dyspepsia as
he grew older, he does not for that reason care to risk his boy's
health and safety by allowing him to repeat the process. A
child's taste, left to itself, is no more a safe guide in his
choice of reading than is his choice of food. What human boy
would refuse ice cream and peanuts and green pears and piously
ask for whole-wheat bread and beefsteak instead? Or choose to go
to bed at eight o'clock for his health's sake, rather than enjoy
the fun with the family till a later hour? It seems such a
senseless thing for us to feel it our duty to decide for the
children on matters relating to their temporary welfare, but to
consider them fit to decide for themselves on what may affect
their moral and spiritual nature.
Not only in the selection of books as to their contents, but in
the study of the editions the most serviceable for her purposes,
will the town librarian gain valuable training from the necessity
of being economical. The point is worth enlarging upon, but the
time is not here.
It will perhaps be harder to look upon the impossibility of
having a separate room for the children as a blessing which
enforced economy confers. It will doubtless seem heresy for a
children's librarian to suggest the thought. Yet while we
recognize the great desirability, the absolute necessity in fact,
for the separate room in order to get the best results in a busy
city library, we can see the many advantages to the children of
their mingling with the grown people in the town library. It is
good for them, in the public as in the home library, to browse
among books that are above their understanding. It is better for
the small boy curiously picking up the Review of Reviews to
stretch up to its undiluted world news than to shut into his
Little Chronicle or Great Round World. It is good for the
American child to learn just a little of the old fashioned
"children should be seen and not heard" advice, to learn at least
a trifle of consideration for his elders by restraining his voice
and his heels and his motions within the library, saving his
muscles for the wildest exercise he pleases out of doors. The
separate children's room is too apt to become a place for so
persistently "tending" the child that he loses the idea of a
library atmosphere which is one of the lessons of the place he
should NOT miss. I am of the opinion that, while we want to do
everything in the world to attract the children to the library
and the love of good reading, they should have impressed upon
them so constantly the feeling that the children's room is a
reading and study room that when a child is wandering around
aimlessly, not behaving badly but simply killing time, he should
be, not crossly nor resentfully, but pleasantly advised to go out
into the park to play, as he doesn't feel like reading and this
is a LIBRARY. I know that this has an excellent effect in
developing the right idea of the purpose of the place.
Sometimes the town library has a building large enough to admit
of a separate room for the children, and books and readers in
such numbers as would make the use of this room desirable, but
there is not money enough to pay the salary of an attendant to
watch the room. Here indeed is a blessing in disguise. This idea
that the children must be watched all the time, that they cannot
be left alone a minute, is fatal to all teaching of honor and
self-restraint and self-help. It will take time and
determination and tact, but I know that it is possible to train
the children--not the untrained city slum children perhaps, but
the average town children--to behave like ladies and gentlemen
left almost entirely to themselves through a whole evening.
I must hardly allude to further blessings which to my mind the
need of economy insures. It all comes under the head, of course,
of forming the habit of asking "What is most worth while?" before
rushing headlong into thoughtless imitation of the larger
library's methods, regardless of their wisdom for the small one.
The town librarian will thus be apt to use some far simpler but
equally effective style of bulletin than the one that means hours
of time spent in cutting around the petals of an intricate flower
picture, or printing painstakingly on a difficult cardboard
surface what her local newspaper would be glad to print for her,
thus making a slip to thumb tack on her board without a minute's
waste of time.
The question of having insufficient help gives an excuse for
getting a personal hold on some of the bright older boys and
girls who can be made to think it a privilege to have a club
night at the library once in a while, when they will cut the
leaves of new books and magazines, paste and label and be useful
in many ways. Of course they have to be managed, but you can get
a lot of fine work out of assistants of this sort, and do them a
great amount of good at the same time.
Another of the blessings for which the town librarian may be
thankful is that her rules need not be cast iron, but may be made
elastic to fit certain cases. Because the place is so small that
she can get to know pretty well the character of its inhabitants,
she need not be obliged to face the crestfallen countenance of a
sorely disappointed little girl who, on applying for a library
card, is told that she must bring her father or mother to sign an
application, and who knows that that will be a task impossible of
performance. The town librarian may dare to take the very slight
risk of loss, and issue the card at once, enjoying the pleasure
of making one small person radiantly happy.
Then there is the satisfaction of doing a little of everything
about your library with your own hands and knowing instantly just
where things are when you are asked. To illustrate from a recent
experience of my own. At one of the small branches or stations
rather, of the Brooklyn Public Library, a certain small boy used
to appear at least two or three times a week and ask the
librarian, "Have you got the 'Moral pirates' yet?" And over and
over again the librarian was forced wearily to answer, "No, not
yet, Sam." Now, although the library's purchases of children's
books are very generous, running from 1,500 to 2,000 volumes a
month for the 20 branches, of course with such large purchases it
is necessary to systematize the buying by getting largely the
same 50 titles for all branches, varying the number of copies per
branch according to each one's need. The branch librarian of whom
I am speaking did not feel like asking often for specials,
realizing that she was only one of many having special wants, and
knowing that we would in time reach the "Moral pirates" in the
course of our large, regular monthly purchases. But one afternoon
I went up to this station and helping at the charging desk, this
small boy appeared asking me for the "Moral pirates." The
librarian told me of the hopeful persistence of his request, and
it did not take long after that to get the "Moral pirates" into
the small boy's hands. I only hope the realization of a long
anticipated wish did not prove to him like that of many another,
and that his disappointment was not too unbearable in finding a
pirate story minus cutlasses and black flags and decks slippery
with gore.
The point of this tale is, that in a great system it is
impossible often to get as close to an individual as in this
case, while the town librarian, who does everything from
unpacking her books to handing them out to her borrowers, can
many a time have the personal pleasure of seeing a book into the
right hands.
I have only indirectly alluded to the greatest joy of all, the
possibility of personal, individual, first-hand contact with the
children whom you can get to know so well and to influence so
strongly, and another joy that grows out of it--seeing results
yourself.
We are so ready to be deceived and discouraged by numbers! The
town librarian reads of a tremendous circulation of children's
books in a city library, and straightway gets the blues over her
own small showing. But I beg such an one to think rather of what
the QUALITY of her children's use of the library may be as
compared with that of the busy city library. A great department
must be so arranged for dispatching a large amount of work in a
few minutes of time, that in spite of every effort, something of
the mechanical must creep into its administration.
The town librarian may know by name each child who borrows her
books. Not only that, but she may know much of his ancestry and
environment and so be able to judge the needs of each one. She
will not be so rushed with charging books by the hundred that she
cannot USE that knowledge to help him in the wisest, most tactful
manner. But the joy of watching her children develop, of seeing a
boy or girl whom she helped bring up, grow into a manhood and
womanhood of noble promise, of feeling that she had a large
influence in forming the taste of this girl, in sending to
college that lad who wouldn't have dreamed of such a thing had he
not been stirred to the ambition through the reading taste she
awakened in him--these are pleasures the city children's
librarian is for the most part denied.
The latter can see that her selection of books is of the best,
she can make her room as attractive as money will admit, she can
choose her staff with great care. She knows that good must result
in the lives of many and many a child from contact even in brief
moments with people of strong magnetic personality, and from
constantly taking into their minds the sort of reading she
provides. But very rarely will she be permitted to see the
results in individual cases that make work seem greatly worth
while, and that compensate in a few brief minutes, for weeks and
months and years of quiet, uninspiring, plodding effort.
And so I congratulate the worker with children in the small
library. It would be a delight to me if I could feel that my
appreciation of the blessings that are yours might help you to
look upon your opportunity as a very great and worthy one. The
parents of the small town need your help, the teachers cannot
carry on their work well without you, the boys and girls would
miss untold good if you were not their friend and counselor, the
library profession needs the benefit of the practical judgment
your all-round training gives. And so you may believe of your
position that though in figures your annual report does not read
large, in quality of work, in power of influence it reads in
characters big with significance, radiant with encouragement.