What a librarian may do to direct the attention of his
readers to the really great writers and thinkers--a plea for
original work and for innovation in the library--a note
frequently heard in 1920, but new in 1899 when Mr. Foss,
librarian and popular poet, sounded it in _Public Libraries_
for March.
Sam Walter Foss was born in Canadia, N.H., June 19, 1858,
graduated at Brown University in 1882 and served on the
editorial staff of various papers. In 1895 he left that of
the _Boston Globe_ and from 1898 to his death, Feb. 26,
1911, he was librarian of the Somerville, Mass., Public
Library. He published several volumes of popular verse.
A library has no especial reason for self-felicitation simply because it
distributes a large number of books. In fact, it is possible for it to
give out a very large number of books and do more harm than good. The
test question to ask is: Is it grinding out a product of enlightened and
symmetrical men and women? Is it transforming the community into
intellectual, thoughtful, better equipped, more roundly developed
citizens? Is it making life any ampler, is it making men any manlier, is
it making the world any better? If there is any library that cannot
answer these questions affirmatively, its librarians are doddering their
lives away in useless activity, and receiving a salary without rendering
any real service in return. The activities of such a library are useless
contortions, and the taxpayers have a right to protest its further
existence.
What can a librarian do to make his library an inspirational force? In
the first place he must be as accessible as a turnpike road. It seems to
me that he can do more good by talking to people than in any other way.
To do this, of course, it is a prerequisite that he should know
something. I have no faith in the miserable heresy that a librarian who
reads is lost. A librarian who does not read would better not be found
in the first place. A librarian who does not read is simply a stable
keeper for books. He may see to it that they are well blanketed,
groomed, and put in the proper stalls, and that the various implements
about his stable are kept in good order; but such a librarian will never
be mistaken for an intellectual giant in his community. Let him know the
books he handles so that he can talk with schoolgirls about Sophie May
and Virginia Townsend, and with boys about Henty and Brooks and Knox and
Butterworth. Let him be able to discuss Herbert Spencer and David Harum
with equal zest, and know something about Kant and a good deal about
Kipling, and venerate Marcus Aurelius, and not despise Mark Twain. His
mind should be a live coal in its love for books, and then nestle up to
other minds and let them get ignited also.
But it may be said that a librarian hasn't the time for such extensive
reading. Did you ever know a boy who couldn't find time to play? One
always finds time to do the thing he loves to do; and a man who has a
genuine love for reading will find time for it even in a library.
One of the greatest longings that any soul can have is a longing for
some one to talk with who is interested in identical subjects.
A librarian, through personal intercourse, can become a powerfully
educative influence in his community, and start intellectual impulses
that will not subside during his lifetime, but go on widening and
blessing indefinitely. Let him become the father confessor of minds in
his town or city; the priest of the intellect, to whom all men shall
bring all their mental problems, all their dubious enigmas of the brain.
He will not be able to solve all their puzzles or untie all their knots;
but perhaps he will be able to hold the candle for a little while, while
they struggle with the knots themselves. Let him always hold the candle,
and talk pleasantly while he is holding it.
This matter of being pleasant in a library is really the first and
great commandment. There should be an air of welcome inside that is
pleasanter than the sunshine outdoors. The deathlike stillness and
tomblike hush, the sepulchral gloom, the graveyard silence that
sometimes prevails in libraries, should not be encouraged. Make people
feel at home. The library here can learn a good lesson from the barroom.
There are no signs up in a barroom intimating that loud talking is not
allowed, nobody walks on tiptoes, everybody is welcomed heartily and
encouraged to stay, and men find a sympathetic friendliness there who
find it nowhere else. John Wesley said we should not allow the devil to
monopolize all the good tunes. The library should not allow the barroom
to monopolize all the spirit of human friendliness and good cheer. I am
sincerely glad that the old type of librarian is passing out--a man so
dignified that children were afraid of him, whose face was so long that
his chin dragged on the floor. We want human men with blood in them in a
library; men who like men and love children; men who can make themselves
agreeable to men, women, children, and dogs. Let us make life as
pleasant in a library as a mother's twilight hour with her children, and
we shall raise up great families for the afterdays, who shall look back
upon us as their intellectual parents, and rise up after we are gone and
call our memories blessed.
There are three classes of books--books that give pleasure, books that
give information, and books that give inspiration. The first class has
its thousands of readers, the second its hundreds, and the third its
tens. It is a good thing to read books for pleasure--it is the most
innocent kind of drunkenness I know about; but that reading books merely
for pleasure may develop into a kind of intellectual dissipation is
something that we know from experience; for who is there of us who has
not sinned? But reading books merely for pleasure is something we should
outgrow in childhood, just as we do stilts and marbles and the game of
tag. It is a better thing to read books for information. It is one of
the healthiest joys of the normal mind to be forever learning something;
forever learning and forever coming to the knowledge of the truth. It is
the best thing, however, to read books for inspiration. And this is a
class of readers into which many of the frequenters of the public
libraries never graduate. Ah! the pity of it! Books that lift us out of
ourselves and the fogs and fumes and dust of our little treadmill
routines into the ampler ether of loftier altitudes--into the grandeurs
of life! Emerson and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Whitman--do men love
such as these and remain little men? No, this is the meat from which
giants are grown; here is the food for souls. Now it seems to me it is
the duty of the good librarian, one who believes in the august nature of
his profession, to lead up his readers by all devices within his power,
by imperceptible gradations, through the books that please and the books
that inform, to the books that inspire. And the librarian who drops a
boy before he learns to love John Milton has only brought him half his
journey, and has dropped him before he has reached the destination to
which his fare was paid.
Why do not people read the best books? One reason is they never see
them. It is a librarian's business to keep them in sight, his next
business is to read them himself, and his next business is to talk about
them whenever he can get an audience of fifty, or five, or one; to write
about them in his monthly bulletins and let every man know he can get
them, and welcome, by stretching out his hand. We all know how Tom
Sawyer got his fence painted. He made all the boys in his neighborhood
believe that fence painting was great fun. The librarian should make all
the boys in his neighborhood believe that reading the best books is
genuine pleasure. They can be brought to an appreciation of this
pleasure as one is brought to the height of a tableland of a great
continent, by gradations so gradual that they seem to be walking on a
flat surface.
I believe that the great destiny of the public library is as yet but
faintly foreseen. The plain truth is that the library has not tried yet
to do its best. It has opened it doors and let people come in, if they
so desire, or if they happen to be passing that way. No successful
auctioneer does business according to any such method. On the contrary
he lifts up his voice to all it may concern, and to all that do not care
that there are about to be great bargains at his place. The business man
who opens his store and then forever holds his peace has his solitude
very infrequently interrupted by customers. The church that has no
missionary spirit is as tepid as the old church of Laodicea. The
schoolmaster whose pupils absent themselves too frequently collects his
daily audience, even if he has to call in the services of the truant
officer. All this is written with something of the same wisdom. I do not
believe it should always wait for people to come to it; it should go to
the people. Every family in every city or town where there is a library
should be offered a library card, or as many cards as it has adult
members. Sometimes there is so much red tape prerequisite to obtaining a
library card that a bashful man does not dare to make the attempt. Let
us not shut the people off from the books that they have paid for by a
barbed wire fence of red tape. Let every man or woman, yes, or child,
too, that is old enough, be personally canvassed and offered a library
card. Then sell him a catalog at cost price, or better still, at less
than cost, and tell him how to use it. Ah, but our trustees will say,
this will cost something. Yes, it will cost something, but it will be a
tremendously profitable investment, and pay immense dividends later on
in a more intelligent citizenship and wiser and happier men.
From all this I wish it might be inferred that no librarian can be too
great for his position. It is not easy for him to have too much
knowledge, too much tact, too much consecration to his work, too exalted
an estimate of his possibilities. He should not have a mind with a
flange on it, so that it forever runs on the small rail along the dusty
roadbeds of routine. Let him originate, let him innovate, let him blaze
his path with the pioneers--let him think.