Part 3

“The jug and bottle department,” as it has been cynically called by illiberal critics, is the oldest and, in a sense, the fundamental part of a public library service. There were lending libraries before 1850, but none that could be regarded as its prototype. It was a consequence of the new democratic idea. In earlier times a library simply provided books to be read on the spot. Circulating libraries, such as began to be common in the eighteenth century, were shops that lent out books, chiefly light literature, to subscribers of the leisured classes. The literary and scientific institutions allowed their books to be borrowed, without troubling to divide their stock into distinct collections, or worrying themselves with the standing puzzle of the modern librarian, should this book, which is neither a novel nor an encyclopædia, go on the lending or the reference shelves?

The strongest argument for rate-supported libraries was that the studious person who could not afford to buy books, or the no less meritorious person who wished to enjoy good literature in an armchair but could not pay a subscription, should be enabled to read at home. Access to libraries was an excellent thing, and every seeker after knowledge was entitled thereto, but a supply of books in the home was a greater boon, and one that would have a far deeper effect on the mental life of the nation. Even a Freeman could not work in a reference library, but had to borrow--or buy. Circumstances of a different kind make the library of the British Museum, and even the local reading room inaccessible, or at any rate insufficient, to most busy people. The existence of the London Library--the finest lending library in the world--is proof enough of the most serious kind of reader’s need for a home supply of books.

Catering for all classes, for all ages, and for users having all sorts of motives for reading, the municipal lending library will not admit any petty or restricted purpose to limit the scope of its contents. Costly books, if it acquires such by purchase or gift, and works of the atlas or dictionary type, will for different but equally obvious reasons go into the reference department, however small that may happen to be. Very cheap books, with certain exceptions, it will not supply. College text-books may be refused, on the score that students should have them for their own, unless there are circumstances that justify a different course. Some books may be rejected for reasons of public morality, though a narrow-minded puritanism must not be tolerated. Otherwise, the lending library should develop on the most catholic lines.

The light literature that was the staple of the old-fashioned circulating library will, with the rubbish sternly and drastically sifted out, form a considerable proportion of the stock-in-trade. In the minds of some short-sighted people, indeed, the public library is identified with over-thumbed and dog-eared novels, and supposed to be a purveyor chiefly of books for private amusement at the public expense. The statistics that seem to authorize such a view are misunderstood. Half-a-dozen novels usually take less time to read than does a single substantial work of science, history, or even the other kinds of belles-lettres; and make six times as much show in the record of issues. If allowance be made for this obvious fact, study of the figures will usually reveal that a greater amount of reading having a serious value is going on than of reading for mere pastime. One ought to apply a different kind of calculus; but till a sort of mental foot-pound, a unit of energy expended effectively in self-development, has been fixed, we can merely ask that statistics should be interpreted with a due consciousness of what humane literature is, and with common sense. Over-thumbed novels are no argument against public libraries, but a very strong argument for making sure that the supply of fiction is of the best, and for doubling, quadrupling, and multiplying further the supply of first-rate novels. If there are always enough of these to go round, critics on the one hand and grumblers on the other may be disregarded.

The workshop theory, which is on the face of it a sound guide for the development of the reference library, though by no means a complete statement of its functions, applies also to the lending department. On the one hand, this should minister to our recreations and our æsthetic and spiritual needs; it will be well-stocked with excellent novels, the best poetry, drama, essays, and humane literature in general. On the other hand, it will cater for the student and serious reader in all branches of knowledge, and will provide all the books it can of general use for industrial and amateur craftsmen, shopkeepers and other business people, and the professional classes. The librarian and the book-selecting committee will have a keen eye for the needs of teachers, journalists, ministers of religion, and all who are in any way intellectual leaders. One healthy consequence of the workshop theory is the rule that a library must never be cumbered with dead stock. Books that have been superseded or have outlived their interest must be ruthlessly discarded. The workshop library has no room for any but live books. Such from the first have been the aims of the great bulk of our public libraries, with, naturally, some laxity here and there, and in rarer instances too much strictness in regard to education and mental improvement or the cult of mere utilitarian efficiency.

There are between five and six hundred library buildings under the Public Library Acts in this country, and with few exceptions each contains a lending library, and some hardly anything else. A corollary of this distributing service is the branch library. Liverpool had two branches by 1853, and other towns quickly followed suit. A very large proportion of these buildings are branch libraries, established so as to bring a stock of books for lending as near as may be to your door. To-day, the biggest provincial cities have each from a dozen to a score such district libraries; the average town or metropolitan borough has two or three. Some places are content with delivery stations; some have these and branches as well. The delivery station is a device for bringing books that have been asked for from the central reservoir to the nearest point, and is a convenience to readers who have not the time, or do not think it worth while, to visit the library in person. Given a first-class catalogue and intelligent readers, the delivery station is a useful makeshift. But there are weighty reasons why it is much better to invite Mahomet to the mountain--why a service through district libraries will have more valuable results than one through delivery stations. The best systems combine the advantages of both methods, making the reader free of all the branch libraries in a town, with the right of direct access to the book-shelves, and at the same time bringing books from other branches to the one nearest the reader who is unable or finds it inconvenient to visit the library in person. Manchester and Glasgow, for example, have a motor-service whereby all the books in a score of district libraries are pooled as one vast stock, accessible, with a minimum of expense, difficulty, or delay, to the borrowers situated at any point in the civic area. Make your library area big enough, and you can provide the maximum of opportunities at the minimum cost.

During the last two decades, public libraries have been reverting to that old and sensible mode of working which, on its reintroduction, was styled “Open Access.” Practice varied in former times between letting the reader loose among the books and shutting these behind doors or shutters. When the new era began in 1850, the new race of librarians beheld themselves confronted with an unprecedented and hazardous problem. Here was the multitude of famished readers, who had never experienced the civilizing influence of libraries, who might be dishonest, and who certainly had to be served expeditiously and in large numbers; and there was the stock of books, which must be kept in working order and unpilfered. Hence the closed library--the books on one side of a counter and the reading proletariat on the other. Then, in an ill-omened moment, indicators were invented, and the proletariat could not even see the books at a distance, but must try to find out, first, what it wanted from a catalogue, perhaps an abbreviated form of hand-list conveying little meaning to the unbookish and then, through a numerical system compared to which Bradshaw or a census competition is an intellectual delight, whether there was a chance of getting what it wanted. The library movement would have spread with far greater rapidity, and its results on the national mentality would have been far deeper and more extended, but for the long reign of the closed system.

Very large libraries must keep the main bulk of their accumulations in a place apart; otherwise they could not contain them at all. When the stock begins to approach six figures, a librarian begins to think of having a stack, or some analogous form of magazine, accessible to none but officials and attendants. But in libraries of moderate dimensions there is no reason why the public should be locked out, and the most convincing reason why it should be invited and persuaded to come in. One must be something of a book-expert to know always precisely what book one wants; and then one may fail to obtain it through the mechanism of a catalogue and an indicator. The ordinary person will assimilate more mental food from browsing among the shelves than he would in thrice the time from reading what the chance of the indicator brought him under this discredited system. It may be that more books will disappear; but a certain percentage of losses may be faced with equanimity; it is one of the running expenses of true efficiency, and the results are well worth the cost.

In all the most recent public libraries, and in a very large number of the older, reorganized in the light of this reform, the public have the inestimable advantage of handling the books, and seeing, as it were in a bird’s-eye view, their relations to the other books in the sphere of knowledge or of art, before deciding what they want now and will want later on. This has had an immeasurable effect on the quality of the reading--on the education of the public taste. Only librarians know how difficult it used to be to lift a certain class of reader out of an old rut, to persuade him, or more often her, to try an unfamiliar author. Once get over the difficulties of an introduction to George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, or Tolstoy, and the devotee of Guy Boothby and Charles Garvice, who was stone-blind to the blandishments of the printed catalogue, will march on steadily in the new world that has been opened. It is the first step that counts in his literary salvation, and in an open access library the first step is pretty sure to be taken, if the contents have been well and tactfully selected.

An inducement to read other things than fiction is offered in many progressive libraries. This is a general permission to borrow two books at a time, provided only one is a novel. Teachers and other privileged persons are often allowed as many as half-a-dozen at once. There is indeed no reason except insufficiency of stock why any intelligent reader should not be able to have three or four books together, and a great many arguments for liberality. Three are regularly allowed at Coventry, and in American libraries, generous concessions are made on any reasonable grounds; in some the daring principle of “Take as many as you like” is in vogue, and many libraries lend freely to all comers without the irritating insistence on local residence or local guarantee which rules over here. To a man pursuing a serious course of study it is a manifest advantage to have several works in hand; the habit should be encouraged. The cost will be considerable; but it will be a cost in books not buildings, since the extra books will usually be in the hands of readers and not in need of house-room and larger premises. The cost can and ought to be borne now that library incomes are more elastic, if authorities take a serious view of their responsibilities and the part they should play in the business of education. Look at the empty shelves in almost any popular library, and the nature of the problem will be apparent.

The actual situation is significant. The need is for more books, and better books, rather than more buildings. The one essential to a successful library service exists, a great public demand--wanting more guidance, perhaps, and susceptible of education in the wiser use of books, but still vigorous, spontaneous, and unsatisfied. There is an unprecedented demand for books, fully commensurate with the demand, all over the country, for educational facilities. And there is an unprecedented shortage of books on the lending library shelves. During the war, expenses were kept down, and the gaps due to wear and tear were not filled up. Binding was allowed to fall into woeful arrears. Now, the cost of bookbinding has gone up threefold, the price of books has doubled. Yet under these disabling conditions, many a provincial town and a number of London boroughs have an annual issue of a million or thereabouts. Manifestly, the municipal lending library is a mighty power in the land. One librarian, in a borough where, it has recently been affirmed, the average intelligence is eighty under proof, tells me that out of 690 volumes of Rider Haggard’s various novels, which have to be duplicated over and over again, he would not expect to find more than sixteen on the shelf at a given moment. Sir Henry Rider Haggard is not a classic; he lies on the border between the kind of fiction to be tolerated and the kind to be encouraged. Nevertheless, empty shelves are a powerful argument.

The following paragraph surely speaks with a most convincing eloquence of the work public libraries are performing; it is from the prospectus of the latest London borough to set up a library system, the borough that has the largest population of the lower middle class and the poor. This system is still in its infancy, yet it has achieved an annual issue of nearly a million volumes, and the separate uses of its libraries and reading rooms are estimated, on a count, to number 3,496,000 during the year.

“The cost of the Public Libraries to each inhabitant of Islington is one-fifth of a penny per week. For this outlay each person has at his or her disposal: Lending libraries containing 75,000 volumes; Reference Libraries containing 10,000 volumes; Children’s libraries containing 10,000 volumes; Reading rooms containing all the best current newspapers, magazines and periodicals of importance; and all these resources are constantly increasing.

“A penny newspaper daily costs 35 times as much as this extensive service.”

Books are not the only wares in which the lending library deals. Most of them circulate music in bound volumes, in sheets, in portfolios; some lend pianola records. Ordnance Survey maps are issued to ramblers and tourists, geological maps to students; prints and technical diagrams and other articles of use to the scientist, craftsman, or student are sometimes among the circulating stock.

REFERENCE LIBRARIES.

The lending library is for study and recreation, the reference library for study and information, the latter term covering the sources to be explored by the research student. A reference library is a much more expensive thing than a lending collection of the same numerical extent. Dictionaries, miscellaneous modern encyclopædias, atlases, many-volumed treatises, books having costly illustrations, and the numerous and rapidly multiplying books of inquiry, directories, year-books, and other compendiums of information, bibliographies and other registers--all these find their appropriate home in this department, where also are stored calendars of state papers, Annual Registers, Hansard, bound periodicals, transactions of learned societies, and other long sets, the risk of mutilating which renders them unsuitable for lending out. Such works as the Cambridge History of English Literature and the Mediæval and Modern Histories are usually duplicated, one set at least being available for lending; a host of smaller works, even the expensive ones, are likewise duplicated when it can be afforded.

In the large centres of population, reference libraries were opened soon after the passing of the Ewart Act, and they have grown apace, to no small extent as the result of windfalls in the shape of gifts or legacies of private collections amassed by amateurs and other experts. In the lesser towns, the lending department bulks large in comparison with the reference department, which too often has had perforce to be neglected. The one has been regarded as a necessity, the other as a luxury that must wait for better times. The places in the kingdom where a scholar could live and pursue his tasks with most of his material within easy reach, in public or semi-public libraries, can still be counted on the fingers of one hand: London and Edinburgh, the two ancient university cities, perhaps Manchester, and possibly Dublin. These towns have been favoured by other dispensations than the Public Library Acts. Yet Liverpool, Birmingham, and Glasgow each command at least a quarter of a million books in their reference libraries; and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Leeds, Bristol, Cardiff, Nottingham, and indeed most towns with over 100,000 inhabitants, possess reference collections respectable in the size and quality of their contents.

[Illustration:

_Photo by Donald Macbeth._

READING ROOM IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM.]

To regard this department as merely a luxury is a bad mistake. True, it is not a daily necessity of life to the average man; but there was a time--there still is a time in many parts of the country--when even a lending library is not supposed to be that. Yet the more lending libraries are used to good purpose, the greater will be the average man’s need for a place where he can seek or verify information of every sort; where the student may consult the larger works of which his text-books are but elementary abstracts or expositions, and find encyclopædias, lexicons, atlases, and commentaries to aid and elucidate his reading; where the busy worker, whatever his occupation, may see the expensive technical treatises and illustrated monographs that are indispensable to an intelligent pursuit of his calling. The political and social worker will find here the statistical returns, the inventor the Patent Office specifications, the researcher, if he cannot get all he wants, will discover where it is to be found from a liberal supply of catalogues and bibliographies.

Reference libraries are the obvious complement to a service of books for home consumption. The boundary between their domains is not easy to mark out, nor will any attempt be made here to answer the favourite question of the gravelled examiner in library routine: What distinguishes a reference book from one for the lending library? In most cases the distinction is obvious; in the more difficult, local circumstances may settle the point. Librarians in charge of comparatively small libraries may well shirk a final verdict, and allow much latitude in the use of reference books for lending, and the converse when the lending library book is in. Thus the whole stock of books on the premises is at the reader’s disposal without any pedantic restrictions. As an American authority sensibly puts it, “Obviously there is no book that may not be used for ‘reference.’ A reader who consults one of Anthony Hope’s stories to ascertain the name of a character or to refresh his memory in regard to some incident, without reading it consecutively, is using it as a reference book.”[4] Even a magazine or review may be a work of reference. Back numbers of all that are worth taking in are worth preserving for reference purposes; and these, with the bound sets of past years, should be always available for use. Energetic librarians index all the important articles as they come out; the published indexes to periodicals forming a key to the older numbers. Lastly, the very newsroom has its place in the reference scheme, its contents being a daily appendix to the stores of information in the library. No department of the library economy should work in isolation.

In London, principally through the circumstance that the twenty-eight boroughs now existing were preceded by eighty-two parishes, two-thirds of which had set up libraries for themselves before the present library districts and borough authorities came into being in 1902, there are far too many reference libraries in proportion to lending libraries. Most of these are of indifferent or inferior quality, and, if they were suppressed and their collections centralized in a series of large district reference libraries, few would miss them, and the general gain would be enormous. All the same, more numerous ready-reference libraries are wanted. Every branch library should have a collection of dictionaries, atlases, and general encyclopædias, in short all the books that a business firm, a school, or the like usually provides for daily use. But, since reference libraries are so expensive, it is a vain and wasteful policy to duplicate them at random; and the result is merely a scattered series of middling libraries, far inferior to those open to all the world in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester, with a crippling of resources in other directions. This is not said to belittle local effort. The point is that, though Islington, Westminster, or Chelsea may each build up a reference library not inferior to that found in the average provincial town of like population, Islington, Westminster, and Chelsea are, after all, parts of London, and the Londoner ought to be vastly better off than the average provincial--else why should he stay there?

Though to one acquainted with the exacting needs of all grades and varieties of readers the deficiencies of our reference libraries are evident enough, it is none the less true that the richness of their contents and the value they yield to judicious users are realized by only a fraction of the public. Librarians have never been allowed to advertize their wares; a notice in the press such as a university or a State department would not consider beneath its dignity would have called down a reprimand and probably a surcharge from the Government auditor. In a strange town, the visitor may have some trouble to find out, first whether a public library exists, and then where. Advertisements in tramcars and finger-posts in the street are usually looked for in vain. Things being so, it is better to lay stress on what the reference library can and does do than on any delinquencies, since public opinion is sure to learn in time from the books that are there to be read, the immensity of the desiderata. In the cities previously mentioned as possible abodes for a worker among books, one may acquire a competent idea of this immensity. In other large towns and in several London boroughs, one may find reference libraries sufficing for the ordinary demands of all but the specialist and the researcher, and, in addition, one commonly finds special collections that attract readers from far away.