Another method used successfully by a number of libraries to
interest older boys and girls as they grow away from the story
hour is that of the reading circle or reading club. Miss Caroline
Hewins' contribution to the Child Conference at Clark University
in 1909 was an account of this work in the Hartford Public
Library, of "book-talks at entirely informal meetings." A sketch
of Miss Hewins appears on page 23.
The boys and girls who are growing up in libraries where
story-telling is a part of the weekly routine, at thirteen or
fourteen are beginning to feel a little too old to listen to
fairy tales or King Arthur legends, and look towards the
unexplored delights of the grown-up shelves. Many librarians are
taking advantage of this desire for new and interesting books to
form boys' and girls' clubs with definite objects. One whom I
know after a training with large numbers of children in a city
branch library, became librarian in a manufacturing town where
there were no boys' clubs, and soon formed a Polar Club, for
reading about Arctic exploration. She was fortunate in having an
audience hall in the library building, and before the end of the
winter the boys had engaged Fiala, the Antarctic explorer, to
give a lecture, sold tickets and more than cleared expenses.
This, be it remembered, is in a town with no regular theatre or
amusement hall, and the librarian is young, enthusiastic, and of
attractive personality. The branch libraries in Cleveland have
been successful in their clubs, and in back numbers of the
Library Journal and Public Libraries, you will find records of
organizations of young folk who meet out of library hours, under
parliamentary rules, for more or less definite courses of
reading. For the reason that the experiments are in print and
easily accessible, I shall merely give you a record of my own
book-talks at entirely informal meetings.
Long ago, before there were library schools, Harlan H. Ballard,
now librarian of the Pittsfield Athenaeum, used St. Nicholas as
the organ of the Agassiz Association, which had been in existence
for several years with about a hundred members in Berkshire
County. The Association grew and soon had chapters all over the
world. In the number of St. Nicholas for December, 1881, I find
the record of ours, and the name of the first secretary, then a
boy of ten or twelve years, now a prominent citizen, a member of
the Board of Park Commissioners and School Visitors. We used to
go out of doors looking for birds and insects through the spring
and fall, and meet in the library in winter for reading from
authors like John Burroughs, Dr. C. C. Abbott and Frank Buckland,
or the lives of Thomas Edward, Robert Dick, Agassiz and other
naturalists, or sometimes a story from a grown-up magazine like
one of Annie Trumbull Slosson's or an account of real pets like
Frank Bolles's owls. The children in "A. A. Chapter B" all had
good homes, good vocabularies and reading fathers and mothers,
and listened with interest to books that are far in advance of
the children of their age who began to come to the library after
it was made public. The chapter lived long enough to admit the
children of at least one of its original members, and only died
because Saturday morning, the only morning in the week when
children are free, had important business engagements for the
librarian, who feels that "Nature-study," too, plays an important
part in schools now-a-days, and that in the language of "My
Double", "there has been so much said, and on the whole so well
said," that there is less need than there used to be of such a
club, although it is a great deprivation not to have the long
country walks and the Saturday readings and talks with the
children. A librarian or a settlement worker who sees only
children from non-English speaking homes is in danger of
forgetting that there are others who can use books in
unsimplified form.
This is the only club connected with the library which had a
formal organization, but in giving a talk one day several years
ago to the upper grades of a school, I asked how many boys and
girls were going to stay in town through the summer, and invited
all who were to come to the library one afternoon a week for a
book-talk. The next year I sent the same invitation to several
schools, and gave in both summers running comments and reading of
attractive passages from books on Indians, animals, the North
Pole, adventures, machines, books of poetry, stories about
pictures and some out-of-the-way story books, with a tableful of
others that there was not time to read from. The titles of the
books are in Public Libraries, June, 1900, and are largely from
the grown-up shelves. This was five or six years before our boys'
and girls' room was opened and the children had free access to
all their own books.
The third year the programme was a little varied. Some of the
subjects were "Books that tell how to do things," "A great author
and his friends (Sir Walter Scott)," "Another great author and
his short stories (Washington Irving)." I have always made a
great deal of the friendship between these two authors, and as
most of our children are Jewish, I have often told the story and
shown the portrait of Rebecca Gratz, the Philadelphia Jewess, who
was too true to her religion to marry a Christian, and whose
story as told by Irving, whose promised wife had been her friend,
gave Scott his noble ideal of the character of Rebecca.
One year we had an afternoon about knights and tournaments, and
by an easy transition, the subject for the next week was "What
happened to a man who read too much about knights," giving an
opportunity for an introduction to Don Quixote. After that two
dream-stories opened the way to a fine illustrated edition of the
Pilgrim's Progress, and stories from Dante.
The next year, I tried stories of English history, in nine or ten
different periods, reading from one book every week and
suggesting others. After the opening of the boys' and girls'
room, the book-talks for one or two summers for seventh and
eighth grade pupils, were upon some of the pictures in the room:
Windsor Castle, Kenilworth, Heidelberg Castle, the Alhambra, the
Canterbury Pilgrims and some Shakespeare stories. Afterwards,
"What you can get out of a Henty book" gave a chance for
interesting picture bulletins, and the use of other books
referring to the times of "Beric the Briton," "The Boy Knight,"
"Knights of the White Cross," "Bonnie Prince Charlie,"
"In the Reign of Terror." Last year and this I have been reading
Scott and Dickens aloud.
We have some of the Detroit colored photographs of places of
historic interest, Windsor Castle for which I used Lydia Maria
Child's story of "The Royal Rosebud," although most of the little
princess's early life was passed in sanctuary at Westminster. On
the afternoon when Kenilworth was the subject, I read all of
Scott's novel that we had time for. Once on the Alhambra day, we
have had Irving's story of the Arabian astrologer, and again a
description of the palace and the Generalife who had just come
from Spain. There was little in print about Heidelberg that I
could use, and I had to write out the whole story of the Winter
King and his Queen, James First's daughter Elizabeth, ancestress
of the present king of England and mother of a large family.
Two years ago, in the interim between one children's librarian
who was married in June and her successor who could not come till
September, I spent most of the summer in the boys' and girls'
room, and learned two things. Some of the children thought that
they had read all the books on the shelves, and were asking for
grown-up cards. They were kept in the room by transferring some
duplicate copies of novels best worth reading from the main
library and putting red stars on the back and the book-card. Then
I was able to talk with girls who had read all of Laura
Richards's Hildegarde books, but had never thought of looking up
one of the poems or stories that she loved, or one of the
pictures in her room. I have sometimes read the description of
the room to a class in a schoolroom, and put on the blackboard
all the names of places, persons, books and poems in it. One
year I invited girls to form a Hildegarde Club for reading these
very things, and in writing to Mrs. Richards on another subject,
mentioned it. She wrote me an answer that I have had framed for
the girls to see. The Club lived for a few months and used to
meet on Saturday afternoons for reading "The Days of Bruce," but
at the Christmas holidays the girls went into the department
stores for a few weeks and forgot to come back. However, I am
very happy to tell the story of another Hildegarde Club that is
still flourishing. The teacher of a ninth grade class loves
books, and was quick to seize the hint of such a club, which she
organized from the girls in her room, and asked permission to
bring to my office for its weekly meetings. She is keeping them
up to their work because she sees them every day, and they are
interested and learning how much they can find in a book besides
the story. Besides this, they are observant and appreciative of
whatever they see on the walls of my room. The girls to whom I
gave a general invitation by means of a newspaper article were
not from the same school and did not all know each other. It is
better in organizing a club to have some common ground of
interest and begin with a small number. It cannot always be done
in a city in or through the library, except indirectly, by means
of a Settlement or other club. One that I know does very good
work in its meetings with the Settlement headworker and has a
small collection of books and pictures from the main library for
six months, and a more elementary bookshelf for a younger club
with whom one of the members is reading the same subject.
A librarian or library assistant can do some of her best work in
a Settlement club either in connection with the Settlement
library or independently. Readings from Dickens can be
illustrated by scenes acted in pantomime, with very simple
properties. Indeed, we had not even a curtain when Miss La Creevy
painted Kate's miniature, when the Savage and the Maiden danced
their inimitable dance, when Mrs. Kenwigs and Morleena held a
reception for Mrs. Crummles, the Phenomenon and the ladies of
their company, when after they had recited from their star parts,
Morleena had the soles of her shoes chalked and danced her fancy
dance, and Henrietta Petowker took down her back hair and
repeated "The Blooddrinker's Burial." The old man looked over the
wall, too, and threw garden vegetables and languishing glances at
Mrs. Nickleby who encouraged his advances. There was no time for
the girls to learn the parts in the busy, crowded, late-open
holiday evenings of department stores, but they all entered into
the pantomime and interpreted the reading with spirit, as they
did at another time in some of the Shakespeare scenes, Rosalind,
Celia and Touchstone, Hamlet and Ophelia, Bottom and Titania,
with attendant fairies, and Shylock and Portia. The Dickens
scenes were repeated for a younger club, just trying its dramatic
wings in charades, and when May-time came these younger girls of
twelve to fifteen gave a very successful representation of an old
English May-day with Robin Hood and his merry band, a Jester, a
Dragon, a Hobby-horse and Jack in the Green, Maid Marian and the
Lord and Lady of the May on the library green.
The opportunity of a library in a small town, where there is more
leisure than in a city, is in the formation of young people's
clubs. One day, a year or two ago, I visited three libraries on
the Sound shore in Connecticut. In one, the librarian had made
her basement useful out of library hours by organizing a class of
chair-caning for boys who were beginning to hang around the
streets, and were in danger of being compelled to learn the art
in the Reform School if they did not acquire it as a means of
keeping their hands from mischief at home. In the next town, the
librarian mounted and identified all the moths and butterflies
that the children brought to her and gave them insect books. In
the library beyond, the children were formed into a branch of the
Flower Mission in the nearest city. The club need not always be
for reading, but must depend on the resources or interests of the
boys and girls. There is no need of debating clubs in our
library, for the city is full of them, but they may be the very
best thing that the librarian in the next town can form.
A reading club must not necessarily be a club for the study or
enjoyment of stories, history or poetry. Under the guidance of
the kind of librarian who aims far above her audience, it may
turn into something like Mr. Wopsle's quarterly examinations of
his great aunt's school, "when what he did," says Pip, "was to
turn up his cuffs, stick up his hair and give us Mark Antony's
oration over the body of Caesar. This was always followed by
Collins's Ode on the Passions, wherein I particularly venerated
Mr. Wopsle as Revenge, throwing his bloodstained sword in thunder
down, and taking the war-renouncing trumpet with a withering
look." There may be a club for making things out of the Beard
books, for the study of sleight-of- hand, for exchanging
postcards with children in other countries and reading about the
places on them. It may make historical pilgrimages to places of
interest in the town or may collect stones and clay nodules, and
read about them. The important thing is to find children of
nearly the same age and neighborhood with interests in common,
and let them decide whom they shall ask to join the club after it
is formed. Better yet if they ask for the club in the first
place. One not very long-lived Settlement club which I knew was
of boys who wished to read and act Shakespeare, but a very few
evenings convinced them that as they could not even read the
lines without stumbling, they were not on the road to the actors'
Temple of Fame. They were boys who had left school at fourteen in
the lower grades, except one, who had taken his High School
examinations and is now at the head of a department in a large
department store and a prominent member of a political study
club. The others, who had expected to play prominent
Shakespearean parts with little or no work, were easily
discouraged, dropped off and were seen no more. The reading of
very simple plays at first is a good stepping-stone to a study of
Shakespeare later, but the plays must be interesting enough to
hold the attention of boys who do not read fluently.