Part 34

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.

THE PUBLIC LIBRARY: ITS USES TO THE MUNICIPALITY