Presentations of Library questions to the general reading
public from authoritative sources are exceptionally hard to
find, even at the present day. The one reprinted below was
contributed to _The North American Review_ for June, 1898,
by Herbert Putnam, then librarian of the Boston Public
Library.
Herbert Putnam was born in New York, Sept. 20, 1861, the
youngest son of the founder of the publishing house. He
graduated at Harvard in 1883 and studied law. He served as
librarian in Minneapolis, first of the Atheneum and then of
the Public Library in 1884-91, meanwhile being admitted to
the bar in 1886. He practised law in Boston in 1892-95, but
in the latter year became librarian of the Boston Public
Library, serving until appointed in 1899 Librarian of
Congress. His administration has been marked by the
development of this institution along the line of service of
a national library. During the great war he was Director of
Library War Service.
Free libraries have existed for less than a half a century. Their
establishment assumed that books are beneficial: but it involved also
the assertion that it is the proper function of government to supply
books to such of its citizens as may require them at the expense of the
community as a whole.
Libraries of this special type do not yet form the major portion of the
institutions supplying books on a large scale to groups of persons.
Under the head of "Public, Society and School Libraries," these
institutions in the United States aggregate 8,000 in number, with
35,000,000 volumes, with $34,000,000 invested in buildings, with
$17,000,000 of endowments, and with over $6,000,000 of annual income. Of
these the free public libraries supported by general taxation number
less than 2,000, with 10,000,00 volumes, and with less than $3,500,000
of annual income. They are, however, increasing with disproportionate
and amazing rapidity. In Massachusetts, but 10 of the 353 cities and
towns, but three-fourths of one per cent. of the inhabitants now lack
them. One hundred and ten library buildings there have been the gift of
individuals. No form of private memorial is now more popular; no form of
municipal expenditure meets with readier assent. Nor are the initiative
and the expenditure left wholly to local enterprises. The Commonwealth
itself takes part: extending, through a State Commission, State aid in
the form of books and continuing counsel. And Massachusetts is but one
of eight States maintaining such commissions. New York State, in its
system of traveling libraries, has gone further still in supplementing
initial aid with a continuing supply of books, and even photographs and
lantern slides, purchased by the State and distributed through the
Regents of the State University from Albany to the remotest hamlet.
The first stage of all such legislation is an enabling act--authorizing
the establishment of a library by the local authorities; the next is an
act encouraging such establishment by bounties; and New Hampshire has
reached a third by a law actually mandatory, requiring the local
authorities to establish free libraries in proportion to their means and
the population to be served. This seems to mark the high-water mark of
confidence in the utility of these institutions. It indicates that free
public libraries are to be ranked with the common schools, as
institutions indispensable to good citizenship, whose establishment the
State for its own protection must require.
So the movement has progressed, until now these 2,000 public
libraries combined are sending out each year over 30 million books, to
do their work for good or ill in the homes of the United States. The
entire 2,000 result from one conviction and a uniform purpose. Yet
among them there is every variety in scope and in organization. There
is the hamlet library of a hundred volumes, open for a couple of hours
each week in some farm house, under a volunteer custodian, maintained
by the town, but enlisting private contribution through bazaars and
sociables--sending out its books by the local provision dealer to its
remote and scattered constituents. There is the library of the great
city, with elaborate equipment and complex organization to meet a vast
and complex need. Such a library as you may find at Chicago; a city
which, though it has two great endowed reference libraries, still
considers its million and a half people entitled to a municipal
library, with a two million dollar building, studded with costly
mosaics, and aided by forty branches and stations in bringing the
books nearer each home. Or such a library as exists at Boston;
organized as a City Department, under Trustees appointed by the Mayor,
maintained, like the schools, or the police, or the fire department,
by general taxation; with a central building which has cost the city
two and one-half million dollars, with ten branch libraries and
seventeen delivery stations scattered through the city and reached
daily by its delivery wagons; with 700,000 books; and accommodations
for over 2,000 readers at one time; including in its equipment such
special departments as a bindery and a printing office; requiring for
its administration over 250 employes, and for its maintenance each
year a quarter of a million dollars, in addition to the proceeds of
endowments; and representing in its buildings, books and equipment an
investment of over five millions of dollars, the interest on which, at
four per cent., to the expenditure for maintenance, is equivalent to
an annual burden of $450,000 for its creation and support.
When this function was first proposed for a municipality, the argument
used was that in this country books had come to be the principal
instruments of education; that the community was already supporting a
public school system; that this system brought a youth to the threshold
of education and there left him; that it qualified him to use books, but
did nothing to put books within his reach; and finally that it was of
"paramount importance that the means of general information should be so
diffused that the largest possible number of persons should be induced
to read and understand questions going down to the very foundation of
social order, which are constantly presenting themselves, and which we,
as a people, are constantly required to decide, and do decide, either
ignorantly or wisely."
A glance at the libraries now in operation in the United States shows
that the ends proposed for them fall far short of the service which they
actually perform. They begin with the child before he leaves school;
while he is still in his elementary studies they furnish to him books
which stir his imagination, and bring the teaching of the text books
into relation with the art and with life. They thus help to render more
vivid the formal studies pursued; but they also prepare the child to
become an intelligent constituent hereafter. This work cannot begin too
early, for four-fifths of the children pass out into active life without
reaching the high schools. It need not be deferred, for now the number
is almost countless of books that touch with imagination and charm of
style even the most elementary subjects; and the library can add
illustrations which through the eye convey an impression of the largest
subjects in the most elemental way.
If the library begins with the citizen earlier than was foreseen, it is
prepared to accompany him further than was thought necessary. It
responds not only to the needs of the general reader, but also to those
of the student and even, to the extent of its means, to those of the
scholar engaged in special research. The maintenance of universities at
the common expense is familiar in the West; it is less so in the East.
And there is still contention that institutions for highly specialized
instruction should not be charged upon the community as a whole. But no
one has questioned the propriety of charging upon the community the
support of a library whose leading purpose may be the encouragement of
the higher scholarship.
Finally, to the services just above described the public library has
added another: the supply of books for proposes purely recreative. This
service, if anticipated, was certainly not explicitly argued for; nor
was it implied in Edward Everett's prediction that the public library
would prove the "intellectual common" of the community. The common that
Mr. Everett had in mind was a pasturage, not a baseball ground, or
lover's walk, or a loafing place for tramps.
But as regards certain of the books customarily supplied, the ordinary
public library of to-day is furnishing recreation rather than
instruction. In fact, if we look at the history of free public libraries
in this country, we find that the one point of practice on which they
have been criticised is the supply of merely recreative literature. The
protest has come from thoughtful persons, and it means something,
lightly as it has been waved aside.
The excuse that used to be given for the supply of inferior books was
that they would entice to the use of the better books. There was to be
reached a mass of persons of inferior taste and imperfect education.
These persons must be introduced gradually to an acquaintance with the
better class of reading through the medium of the familiar. And, at all
events, it was better that they should read something than not read at
all.
I am not quite so confident of the regenerating virtue of mere printed
matter as such; and I am confident that the reading of a book inferior
in style and taste debases taste, and that the book which sets forth,
even with power, a false view of society does harm to the reader, and is
so far an injury to the community of which he is part. But even granting
the premises, the conclusion is doubtful. We do not deliberately furnish
poor art at public expense because there is a portion of the public
which cannot appreciate the better. Nor when the best is offered,
without apology, does the uncultured public in fact complain that it is
too "advanced." Thousands of "ordinary" people come to see and enjoy the
Abbey and Chavannes and Sargent decorations in the Boston Public
Library. No one has yet complained that the paintings are too advanced
for him. The best of art is not too good for the least of men, provided
he can be influenced at all. Nor are the best of books too good for him,
provided he can be influenced, and provided they are permitted, as are
the pictures to make their appeal directly. They must not be secluded
behind catalogs and formal paraphernalia. The practice which admitted
the scholar to the shelves, and limited the general reader to the
catalogues, gave the best opportunity to him who least needed it. The
modern practice sets before the reader least familiar with good _titles_
a selection of good _books_. It places them on open shelves where he can
handle them without formality. The result is almost invariably, that he
is attracted to a book in advance of his previous tastes. Perhaps a
chance paragraph appeals to some experience or ambition, or an
illustration stirs his imagination. The books themselves draw him
outside of his previous limitations.
In the place, therefore, of books inferior in quality, the more modern
public library seeks to attract by the freest possible access to books
of the best quality. Not that this practice is universal. But the
opinion and tendency are in this safe direction.
However, quality assumed, the general question as to the reading of
recreative literature remains. What shall we say of the fact that sixty
per cent. of the circulation of the free public libraries still consists
of fiction?
In the first place, that this percentage takes no account of reference
use, which is almost wholly of serious literature; second, that as to
home use the ratio in circulation of fiction to serious literature does
not represent a similar ratio of trivial to serious service. Fiction is
the small coin of literature. It must circulate more rapidly to
represent the same volume of real business done. A volume of fiction may
be issued, returned and reissued three times while a biography or
history or work of science is issued once. It will then count
seventy-five per cent. in the circulation. But the serious book has
during the entire period been out in the hands of the reader; and the
service which it has performed--the period of attention which it has
occupied--equals that of the novel in its three issues. And, finally,
there is to be considered the influence of the best fiction toward
general culture (if the library is not merely to inform but also to
cultivate)--in broadening the sympathies, giving a larger tolerance, a
kindlier humanity, a more intelligent helpfulness; in affording the rest
that is in itself an equipment for work, and the distraction that may
save from impulse to evil.
However, the amount of fiction circulated in proportion to the total
work of the library is on the average steadily decreasing. At the same
time the quality is improving; in part through critical selection, in
part as a happy result of the fact that the inferior novels are also, as
a rule, inferior books, so poorly manufactured that libraries cannot
afford to buy them.
But there is standard fiction and current fiction; and it is the current
fiction that constitutes by itself a special problem still perplexing.
It is a problem that concerns not the uneducated child, nor the
illiterate adult; it is caused by the people of intelligent education
who are avid to read the latest novel by Mr. X. or Mrs. Y. while it is
still the latest novel by Mr. X. or Mrs. Y. It is being talked about at
dinner or afternoon tea. Well-informed people are reading it; to read it
is a social necessity.
The reason that presses the public library to supply promptly every
most recent book in the domain of scientific literature is apparent
enough. Such literature contributes facts which are the data for action.
But novels in general belong to the literature of power. Their purpose
is not to furnish information but to give pleasure. Literature of this
sort adds no new fact, nor is it superseded, nor does it lose any of its
value by lapse of time. To assume that it does would be to assume that
beauty of form could become obsolete. This is not so in painting, in
sculpture, in architecture; why should it be so in prose fiction, in
poetry, in the drama? Was there, in fact, an aesthetic value in the
Canterbury Tales in 1380, in Hamlet in 1602, in Ivanhoe in 1819, that is
not to be found in them in 1898?
But a large portion of latter day fiction is fiction with a purpose;
another way of saying that it is a work of art composed for the
dissemination of doctrine. This element promotes it at once to the
dignity of a treatise; a new view of politics, a new criticism of social
conditions, a new creed! Here is something that concerns the student of
sociology. And surely his needs are worthy of prompt response.
In fact, his needs and the general curiosity do get prompt response, and
the new novels are freely bought. How freely I have recently sought to
ascertain. I asked of some seventy libraries their yearly expenditure
for current fiction in proportion to their total expenditure for books.
The returns show an average of from ten to fifteen per cent. In one case
the amount reached fifty per cent., in others it fell as low as two per
cent. The ratio for fiction in general is much higher on the average;
but fiction in general includes Scott and Thackeray and other standards,
an ample supply of which would not usually be questioned. At Providence
and Worcester, two of the most active and popular of public libraries,
the purchases of fiction, current and standard, formed last year but
seven and eleven per cent., respectively, of the entire expenditure for
books.
At Boston there were selected but 178 titles of current fiction (out of
nearly 600 read and considered). But some dozen copies were bought of
each title, so that the entire purchases reached 2,300 volumes and cost
about $2,300. This was about six and a half per cent. on a total
expenditure for books of $34,000. At St. Louis the practise is to buy
but two copies out of the general funds to be circulated free. Nearly a
hundred more are added which are rented out and thus pay for themselves.
The statistics do not seem to show that the initial expenditure for
current fiction is very alarming. But the purchase price of these books
is but a fraction of the expense of handling them. They cannot be
supplied in adequate quantities; for while the frenzy of curiosity
persists, an adequate supply is beyond the resources of any library. But
since the attempt to supply is futile the pretense is injurious. The
presence of the titles in the catalogues misleads the reader into a
multitude of applications which are a heavy expense to the library
without benefit to him. And the acquisition of the single book means to
the library the expense of handling a hundred applications for it which
are futile to one that can be honored. In this sense a current novel
involves perhaps a hundred times the expense of any other book in being
supplied to but the same number of readers.
The British museum acquires the new novels as published; but it
withholds them from the readers until five years after their date of
publication. It is my personal belief that a one year limitation of this
sort adopted by our free libraries generally would relieve them of
anxiety and expense and their readers of inconvenience and delusion.
But as regards current light literature in general it is worth while to
consider whether the responsibility of public libraries has not been
modified by the growth and diffusion of the newspaper and periodical
press. In 1850, when the free public library was started, the number of
newspapers and periodicals published in the United States was about
2,500; now it is nearly 20,000. The total annual issues have increased
from 400 million to over 4-1/2 billion copies.
The ordinary daily of 1850 contained perhaps a single column of literary
matter. To-day it contains, for the same price, seven columns. In 1850
it gave no space to fiction; now it offers Kipling, Howells, Stockton,
Bret Harte, Anthony Hope, Crockett, Bourget and many others of the best
of the contemporary writers of fiction.
Then there are the cheap magazines, which tender a half dozen stories
for the price of a cigar or a bodkin. There are, also, the cheap
"libraries," which have flooded the United States with engaging
literature available to almost any purse.
In short, conditions have altered. A vast mass of light literature is
now cheaply accessible to the individual which formerly could be
acquired only painfully or at great expense. Why then should the public
libraries struggle to supply it in book form at the public expense?
But as to a certain percentage of current light literature there is an
embarrassment that I have not touched. It is the embarrassment of making
selection without giving offense. All cannot be bought. A choice must be
made. With reference to standard literature authoritative judgement is
not difficult to obtain. But here there has been no lapse of time to
balance opinion. An anticipatory estimate must be attempted and
attempted by the library itself.
Now, if the library decide against the book it is very likely held to
blame for "dictating" to its readers. "It is one thing," says a journal
commenting on an adverse decision, "it is one thing to consider this
novel pernicious, but it is another and more serious thing for the
foremost library in the country maintained at public expense, to deny to
a large and respectable portion of the public an opportunity to judge
for itself whether the work of a man of (this author's) calibre is
pernicious or not."
The author in this case was, of course, not Mr. X., but rather Mr. A.,
an already known quantity.
So a library is not to be permitted to apply a judgement of its own! It
is not protected by the fact that this judgment coincides with the
judgment of professional critics--so far at least as these may be
ascertained. The author may have turned perverse and written a book
distinctly bad. Yet this book is to be bought and supplied to enable
each member of the public to form a judgment of his own upon it. And it
is to be so bought out of public funds entrusted to the library for
educational purposes. Censorship has to us an ugly sound; but does the
library act as censor when it declares a book beyond its province? Does
it dictate what the people shall read when it says, "We decline to buy
this book for you with public funds"?
This is a question which is far larger than the selection or rejection
of a novel or two. It involves the whole question of authority, and it
concerns not merely the extremes, but the varying degrees of worth in
literature. Most departments of educational work are founded upon
principles, cautiously ascertained, and systematically adhered to. Their
consistent maintenance upon principle is the easier because each other
such department deals with a special constituency, limited either in age
or perhaps in sex, or at least in purpose, and one which accepts as
authoritative the system provided for it. The free public library,
however, has to satisfy a constituency practically unlimited, including
every age of both sexes, whose intellectual need ranges from that of the
most illiterate to that of the most highly accomplished, whose education
in books ranges from that of the person who has never entered a library
to that of the scholar whose life has been a perpetual training in the
use of the library; the assertive classes, the bashful classes. And if
toward this vast and heterogeneous constituency it seeks to assume the
position of an educator, it finds that its authority is one which the
constituents themselves are unanimously unwilling to concede. Each
constituent deems himself not a beneficiary accepting some service, but
a proprietor demanding it. Now, within each community there are persons
who would have every kind of printed matter published. If, therefore, a
public library exists simply to respond to the demands of its readers,
we must have, instead of an educational system devised by experts and
administered with reference to general principles, a system fluctuating
with each eccentric requirement of individuals, indefinite in number,
various in taste and culture, inexpert, except as each may be competent
to judge his own need, incapable of expression in the aggregate, and as
individuals without responsibility for the general results.
If, on the other hand, an authority is to be vested in the library, what
limits shall it set upon itself, upon what principles of discrimination
shall it proceed, in what directions may it expediently control? I but
state the problem. I shall not endeavor to answer it. But it is one of
the most important involved in the relation of the public library to the
community.
From such questions an ordinary educational institution stands aloof. It
is content to represent the judgment of the majority in matters of
morality and to inculate the lesson of tried truths as against untried
fancies in matters of opinion affecting the social order. It thus throws
its influence in favor of the established order of things. But its
right, nay, its duty, to do this is unquestioned. Nor is it regarded as
disparaging the opinion which it does not teach.
But a public library is not so exempt. In addition to the doctrine
which is accepted, it is held to have a duty to the opinion which is
struggling for recognition. As to minority opinion, it is not so much a
university as a forum. Nay, it is to give every advantage to minority
opinion, for--in our resentment of intolerance--minority opinion is not
merely tolerated, it is pampered.
Now, it is not for libraries or librarians to act as censors and
denounce this or that publication. Yet it is to be remembered that a
library which circulates a book helps to promulgate the doctrine which
the book contains. And if public libraries circulate books which teach
restless, irreverent or revolutionary doctrines, they offer us the
incongruity of a municipality aiding in the propagation of ideas which
are subversive of social order.
On the other hand, if there is to be exclusion on such grounds, where is
the line of exclusion to be drawn? Shall we say at doctrines which, if
carried into action, would be criminal under the law? Would the public
rest content with this?
Moreover, the principle of exclusion accepted, who is to apply it? Whose
judgment shall determine whether the particular book does or does not
offend? Shall the library determine? But will it not then be "dictating"
to its readers? Will it not be unduly discriminating against a certain
class of opinion when it has undertaken to represent impartially all
shades of opinion? Will it not offend the remonstrant against the
existing order of things who has a grievance, and, therefore, a right to
be heard; and the defender of the existing order of things who must know
the opinion in order to combat it; and the student of sociology whose
curiosity reaches all extremes and regards them simply as phenomena upon
which he is entitled to be informed?
I believe that it will. And yet I do not see how the library can escape
exercising judgment. For there is no other responsible authority which
can be brought to exercise it. We must then expect numerous decisions
which will offend a portion of the community. They will usually be on
the conservative side--of exclusion. And it is for those who believe
that a public library should be a conservative influence in the
community to see that it has the authority and is protected in its
exercise.
Not that in respect of the violent books there is great injury in
present conditions. In the public libraries of to-day there exists no
doubt material sufficiently anarchic to upset society, if it could have
its will upon society. The fact is, that though there is plenty in
literature that is incendiary, there is little in our community that is
inflammable.
The good that the libraries do is obvious and acknowledged. They
represent the accumulated experience of mankind brought to our service.
They are the custodians of whatever is most worthy of preservation in
our own life and literature. They are the natural depositories of what
we have of memorial and of records; the original entries of legislation
and of achievement. They must render history available; they must
adequately exhibit science; they may help to refine by the best examples
in each art, and in this they may also contribute to the industrial life
of the community by educating the artisan into an artist, his craft into
an art. And through record and description of processes and inventions
they may contribute to the foundations of great industries. They touch
the community as a whole as perhaps does no other single organized
agency for good. They offer to the shyest ignorance equality with the
most confident scholarship, and demand no formal preliminary which might
abash ignorance.
They have a profound duty--not generally appreciated--to help render
homogeneous the very heterogeneous elements of our population. Thirty
per cent. of it has come to us from an alien life and alien
institutions. One-third of the people in our six leading cities are of
foreign birth; seventy-one per cent. were either born abroad or born of
foreign parentage. In the assimilation of this foreign element no single
agency is perhaps so potent as our public libraries.
The public libraries deem themselves the allies of formal educational
processes; but also the direct educators of that part of the community
not subject to the formal processes. It is this latter responsibility
which has led them to attempt a broader service than the mere supply of
books. A book is not the only nor necessarily the most effective vehicle
for conveying knowledge. There are illustrations which more directly
convey an impression, and often as fully state a fact. And photographs
and process reproductions are now part of the equipment of a public
library almost as conventional as books. Within the past year 10,000
such have been added to the collections of the Boston Public Library;
not as works of art (they are for the most part cheap silver prints and
the Art Museum is but a hundred feet distant); nor merely as aids to the
study of the fine arts and the useful arts, but also as convenient
auxiliaries to the study of history, of literature and institutions. And
they are used by individuals and by classes not as a substitute for the
text, but as helping to render vivid the lesson of the text.
With these go lectures in exposition. Every building of importance
recently designed for the uses of a public library includes an art
gallery and a lecture hall. What an immense augmentation of function
this implies! It implies that the library is no longer merely an
aggregate of books, each passive within rigid limits; but that it is an
active agent having under its control material which is kept plastic and
which it moulds into incredibly varied shapes to suit incredibly varied
needs.
The experience of the Boston Public Library shows that in the case of
books each increase of facilities creates an increased demand. The
trustees of 1852 boasted that they were providing for as many as fifty
readers at a time; the trustees of 1887 thought themselves venturesome
in providing for 500 readers at a time; and within a month after the new
building was opened it was forced to accommodate over 700 at a time.
Every week over 30,000 persons enter the Central Library building, and
every year 1,200,000 volumes are drawn for home use by the 65,000
card-holders. Yet these figures represent still but a portion of the
persons reached and the work to be done. Nor can facilities for
distribution keep pace with the need. For a city of a half million
people spread over an area of forty square miles adequate library
facilities cannot ever be provided. A municipality which even
approximates the adequate in providing buildings, equipment,
administration and general literature at the public expense must still
look to private gift for the specialized material necessary to a great
reference collection. That the Boston Public Library is next to the
British Museum in Shakespeariana is, to be sure, the result of a special
expenditure by the city. But the larger part of its special collections
which have given it distinction as a great scholars' library, has come
from private gift; the Ticknor collection of Spanish literature, the
Bowditch collection of mathematics, the Chamberlain collection of
autographs, the Brown collection of music and many others. And a city
which erects for its public library a building which is monumental is
putting forward the most attractive invitation to private gift. The
gifts which have come to Boston as the direct result of the new building
have already reached a twelfth of its cost.
With proper organization and a liberal co-operation between municipal
and private effort the opportunities for service are almost limitless.
The risk is the greater of attempts at service either legally
inappropriate or practically inexpedient, and the risk is not lessened
by a popular appreciation which is more enthusiastic than it is apt to
be discriminating. There is, therefore, the greater need of
discrimination on the part of the library itself and of an authority
which will protect its exercise. This authority can be conferred only by
intelligent public opinion on the part of those who are capable of
appreciating constitutional limitations.