The evolution of the book is therefore the history of the unfoldment
of human rights. The chained tome in its medieval prison cell has
been supplanted by the handy volume freely sent from the hospitable
public library to the homes of the common people. The humblest citizen,
today, has at his command books in number and in kind which royal
treasuries could not have purchased five hundred years ago. In the
sixteenth century, it took a flock of sheep to furnish the vellum for
one edition of a book, and the product was for the very few; in the
twentieth, a forest is felled to supply the paper for an edition,
and the output goes to many hundred thousand readers. As books have
multiplied, learning has been more widely disseminated. As more people
have become educated, the demand for books has increased enormously.
The multiplication of books has stimulated the writing of them, and the
inevitable result has been a deterioration of quality proportioned to
the increase in quantity. In the English language alone, since 1880,
206,905 titles of books printed in the United States have been listed,
and 226,365 in Great Britain since 1882. Of these 433,270 titles,
84,722 represent novels--36,607 issued in the United States and 48,115
in Great Britain. Despite the inclusion of the trivial and the unsound
in this vast mass of printed stuff, no one can doubt the magnitude
of the service performed in the advancement of human kind. The
universities have felt the touch of popular demand, and in this country
at least some of them have attempted to respond. Through correspondence
courses, short courses, university week conferences, summer schools,
local forums, traveling instructors, and other media of extension, many
institutions of higher learning have given recognition to the appeal of
the masses. Logically with this enlargement of educational opportunity,
the amplification of library facilities has kept pace. The libraries
have become in a real sense the laboratory of learning. Intended
primarily as great storehouses for the accumulation and preservation
rather than the use of manuscripts and books, their doors have been
opened wide to all farers in search of truth or mental stimulus.
In a report to the English King, Sir William Berkeley wrote as governor
of Virginia in 1671: "I thank God there are no free schools nor
printing, and I hope we shall not have them these hundred years; for
learning has brought disobedience into the world, and printing has
divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from
both."
Governor Berkeley's sentiments, expressed by him in turgid rhetoric,
were held in his day by most men in authority, but that did not prevent
the planting of little schoolhouses here and there, and men of much
vision and little property bequeathed their possessions for maintaining
them. Many a school had its origin in a bequest comprising a few
milch kine, a horse or two, or a crop of tobacco; in some instances,
slaves. From such beginnings, with such endowments, was evolved three
hundred years ago the public system of education which today prodigally
promises, though it but niggardly realizes, sixteen years of schooling
for every boy and girl in the land.
If the span of years needed for the development of the free library
system has been much shorter, the hostile attitude of influential men
and the privations that attended pioneer efforts were no less marked.
As recently as 1889 the writer of an article in the _North American
Review_ labeled his attack: "Are public libraries public blessings?"
and answered his own question in no uncertain negative. "Not only have
the public libraries, as a whole, failed to reach their proper aim of
giving the means of education to the people," he protested, "but they
have gone aside from their true path to furnish amusement, and that in
part of a pernicious character, chiefly to the young." And he added: "I
might have mentioned other possible dangers, such as the power of the
directors of any library to make it a propaganda of any delusive _ism_
or doctrine subversive of morality, society or government; but I prefer
to rest my case here."
And it was somewhat later than this that the pages of the _Century_
gave space to correspondence in opposition to the establishment of a
public library system for the city of New York.
These were but echoes of earlier antagonisms.