The reports received represent only a small part of the
storytelling that is being done in different parts of the
country.
In New Jersey, the organizer of the State Library Commission has
found her ability to tell stories and to choose books containing
a direct appeal to the people who are to read them, or to listen
to the reading of them, an open sesame in the pine woods
districts, the farming communities, and the fishing villages,
where grown people listen as eagerly as children. In a paper
entitled, "The Place, the Man, and the Book," Miss Sarah B. Askew
gives a vivid picture of the establishment of a library in a
fishing village. (Proceedings of the American Library
Association. 1908.)[4]
[4] Reprinted as a pamphlet by The H. W. Wilson Company.
Recognizing a similar need for the interpretation of books to the
communities where libraries had already been established, the
Iowa Library Commission appointed in 1909 an advisory children's
librarian, who is also a professional storyteller and lecturer
upon children's literature.
In the Public Lecture courses of New York City, it has been found
that storytelling programs composed of folk tales draw large
audiences of grown people who enjoy the stories quite as much as
do the children.
In various institutions for adults as well as for children, where
the library has been a mere collection of books that counted for
little or nothing in the daily life of the institution,
storytelling is making the books of living interest, and is
giving to children, and to grown men and women, new sources of
pleasure by taking them out of themselves and beyond the
limitations of a prescribed and monotonous existence. Just as the
games and folk dances are making their contribution to
institutional life, so storytelling is bringing the play spirit
in literature to those whose imaginations have been starved by
long years of neglect, and is showing that what is needed is not
an occasional entertainment, but the joy of possessing literature
itself.
Professional storytellers who have recently visited towns and
cities of the Pacific Coast, the Middle-Western, the Southern,
and the Eastern States, not covered by this report, bear
testimony to an interest in storytelling that seems to be as
genuine as it is widespread. It is apparent that more thought is
being given to the subject than ever before. Wherever
storytelling has been introduced by a "born storyteller" who has
succeeded in kindling sparks of local talent capable of
sustaining interest and accomplishing results, storytelling is
bound to be a success. All reports testify to the need of a well
defined plan for storytelling related to the purpose and the aims
of the institution which undertakes it, and to the varying
capacities and temperaments of the persons who are to carry it
on.