Part 5

In this country, the Junior Library at Croydon is perhaps as near an approach as any we have made to the American idea. It occupies one of the largest rooms in the central building, and combines the functions of lending and reference library and magazine room. There is a platform and a lantern screen; ferns and other plants are dotted about. Any child of school age is admissible on the recommendation of a teacher. The librarian in charge and the one assistant do nothing but work for children; the children make it possible for them to carry out an extremely full and varied programme by acting as voluntary helpers, and are trained to serve at the counter, put books back in classified order on the shelves, and act as monitors. Others are drilled in groups for various duties, such as cutting out and mounting pictures for the great cyclopædia of illustrations, lettering posters, writing up bulletins of topical information for their fellow-readers. Lectures are delivered once a week at least, and story hours come much oftener. The children’s librarian takes classes brought from the schools, and explains the value of classification or the use and pleasures of books. Teachers, also, are allowed to use the children’s library at times as a class-room, illustrating lessons from the books and other exhibits there. Sometimes a class is brought and the children are simply allowed to browse at will. The collection of pictures is utilized in many ways. Sets of illustrations are hung on green baise screens to illustrate current events, the seasons of the year, the birthdays of notable men, and so on, with lists of the books in the library on the subjects to which the children have been introduced. A large part of the librarian’s time is taken up with showing the young readers how to find their way about among the reference books, and how to make the easiest and most remunerative use of these in their school lessons and their private hobbies. But the children are also gradually trained to help each other, and eventually to help the librarian in the daily routine of what they soon come to regard as their own library; they grow, in fact, into a sort of union society, running all sorts of affairs on their own account, with the official but not too officious eye directing and assisting rather than controlling their efforts. They might be compared to a group of patrols under a scoutmaster. The library in the children’s room contains about 4,000 volumes, and issues from 1,000 to 1,200 every week; in the period of five months from the report on which many of these details are taken, 1,200 new borrowers enrolled themselves.

Discipline, of course, must be maintained; this is essential to smooth working; but it must be evoked rather than imposed. Only the right sort of person, having had the right sort of training, even if born with the right disposition, is competent to evoke it and at the same time keep the children friendly, happy, and occupied with interesting things. Scores of children’s reading rooms have been a failure from the lack of this well-qualified superintendent. It is a waste of time to try running them as a minor department, to be committed to the hands of each junior assistant as his turn comes on the time-sheet. A mob of youngsters idling their time away and making the pleasant place a bear-garden would be the certain result. One common mistake that has a bad initial effect is to make the junior readers enter the library at a separate door, usually guarded by a special custodian who is a martinet. This preliminary insult to a child’s dignity is, perhaps unconsciously, resented; it strikes a wrong note. The idea that he or she must be segregated from grown-up readers subtly provokes a spirit precisely the opposite of that which needs to be cultivated. It is more fatal than the contrary mistake of pampering and idolizing children. Put him or her on nearly the same footing as their elders; mutual deference is infinitely better than the eighteenth century doctrine that every child is either a limb of Satan or a little imbecile.

To attain full success, librarian, teacher, and parents must learn to co-operate. Few parents take any interest in what their children read, and those few often take too much; they do not understand that coercion, or even a too didactic purpose, is fatal to the true object of an apprenticeship to reading, and will assuredly not lead children to love and enjoy reading, or to discover for themselves the values it can give to their own interests and pleasures. Until parents in general are capable of taking a wise interest, it is better perhaps that they should remain as indifferent as most parents are. In the fulness of time, when our children’s rooms are less markedly inferior to those across the Atlantic, when each has an adequate staff of persons trained for this highly specialized work, and teachers understand how much can be done by suggestion to direct the child’s reading and so lighten their own labours in teaching, by then the parent will doubtless have learned to take a proper share of interest and responsibility. All this cannot be achieved in one generation. We have now had public libraries for three-quarters of a century; but, for the arrears of intelligent use we have to make up, we might have only just begun experimenting with them.

The secret of success is to bring out the child’s own initiative. This, it may be taken for granted, is not a tendency to original sin. Good taste, like good art, is at bottom a natural thing: a misguided belief that it must be painfully instilled has done more than aught else to pervert it. Children perceive as much instinctively; hence their suspicion of well-meant efforts to put them on the right paths. A boy will hate even _Robinson Crusoe_ if he is told he must read it; rather let him discover the realms of gold for himself. All which means that children want handling in matters of taste with a refined skill to which the mere common sense and tact required by the adult reader in a library is nothing. It means, again, that though the children’s librarian is sometimes born, when he, or rather she, has to be made, the making is an important and highly specialized process.

Other obvious points must be borne in mind, by teachers, parents, and librarians. The mere posture in reading, and the need for a good light at the proper angle, are not minor points, for bad habits in this respect are ruinous and alarmingly common. Many children read far too much. They must not be allowed to become bookworms; the parent ought to see that they have a healthy outdoor life, and the teacher that the charms of the book-world do not lead to the neglect of tasks set at school. Steady co-operation with the teachers in leading children to find in books aids to the business and the pleasures of life, is characteristic of those library systems where the children’s department has been given its due place in the scheme, and is not a mere side-show, ignorantly mismanaged and not thought worth spending money on. It is characteristic, for instance, of the admirable group of children’s libraries and reading rooms in the Islington Public Libraries, with its stock of 10,000 volumes set aside for the junior clients. There are numerous others in London and the provinces where co-operation is carried on in some form or another; but differences of opinion on the comparative merits of school libraries and of the library in the children’s reading room make for differences of method. Yet access to a school library does not render the public library any the less valuable to an intelligent child; and there ought to be the fullest mutual understanding and the keenest desire to help each other between librarian and teacher.

The fare provided in the children’s department consists, not only of books, but also of the best juvenile magazines, together with a sprinkling of illustrated weeklies and monthlies intended by the producers for readers of any age. Easy French magazines are sometimes provided. On the reference shelves stand suitable encyclopædias, atlases and gazetteers, dictionaries of several languages, works on local history and topography, illustrated natural histories, the works of the poets, and many other books that are likely to prove useful to children in their home work. The choice of books for children is a different thing now from what it was before the advent of Kingsley, Kingston, and Kipling. With a few exceptions, the didactic trash that constituted the whole stock of children’s literature a century ago may now be jettisoned, along with a still greater volume of more recent lumber depressingly written down to the childish intellect. Any modern author, for children or any one else, knows, if he knows his business at all, that the first thing to avoid is the habit or affectation or process of writing down to an inferior mind. Lewis Carroll, Sir James Barrie, Walter de la Mare conquered the child by writing as children themselves, and writing their best, writing with all their genius and with all the gusto due to things that are high and serious. Didactic writing is always bad. It cannot help being bad. The moment a writer begins to think of his audience instead of his subject, he becomes self-conscious and artificial. Worst of all when he has the effrontery to think of that audience as inferior to himself, and tries to adapt his thoughts to feebler understandings. Children are not slower than those of riper age to detect the false note, and be insulted by the condescension. Thus it is far better to offer children books that have been written for their elders than such as have been manufactured on the plan of mild adulteration. In fact, a very large proportion of the best books in the junior library belong to this higher category. _Robinson Crusoe_ and _Gulliver_ are obvious examples; _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ is another; _Kidnapped_ will be received as warmly as _Treasure Island_ or _The Black Arrow_, and if _Lavengro_ has not such a universal appeal there will be no hesitation about _The Cloister and the Hearth_. Many of the novels of Blackmore and Stanley Weyman, most of Dickens’s, some of Thackeray’s and all of Scott’s are on the shelves of every good children’s library; and Jane Austen, Mrs. Gaskell, and some at any rate of George Eliot’s novels will meet the taste of girls. Many works of travel, some histories, and biographies not a few, such as the delightful life of Frank Buckland, are as much in place here as in the senior library; and among the poets and essayists the same freedom of choice may safely be exercised. Both publishers and librarians are now at one in seeing that there is nothing shoddy in the format of the books provided for children any more than in their contents; good paper, readable print, and illustrations of artistic merit, are becoming the rule. In the last-named particular children’s books at the present day are immensely superior to the volumes of popular fiction that seem to be perfectly satisfactory to thousands who are obviously their elders, but hardly their betters.

The advantages of a closer relationship between education authorities and library authorities are manifest both in children’s rooms in libraries and children’s libraries in schools. The library is certainly part of the educational fabric. On the one hand, the teacher is aided enormously by the child’s work in the library, all the more if that work is spontaneous and enjoyable; on the other hand, the children who find out the vital part a library can play in their work and recreations, who have become familiar with books of reference and periodicals, with the uses of catalogues, the vistas opened by files, albums, and indexes, and the order and intelligibility brought about by a clear system of classification, will have acquired something of inestimable value in the process of self-development to be carried on long after school-days are over. The Adult Education Committee were of opinion that the intimate relationship required could not exist without a common administration; and they would accordingly have placed all our public libraries under the care of the education authorities. There is no need at this point to discuss their proposals, beyond assenting to the argument for the closest bond between school and library. Even if they continue to be managed by different authorities, all library activities in the schools should be worked from the library. Whether school libraries are stationary or circulating collections, they should be administered from the children’s library as the base, and their complementary relation thereto should be an important fact in the mind of every child reader.

In England it must not be hastily assumed that every town or even the majority are blessed with all the facilities described above for the benefit of children. Only a few have faced the problem seriously, and hardly any have faced the expense of a thorough service. A town like Toronto employs twenty-one assistant-librarians in the mere work of supervising the school libraries, and many American cities have much larger staffs engaged on this alone. It is obvious, at all events, that no library authority can be expected to carry on such an undertaking except at the cost of the sister authority, ready though it may be to furnish the knowledge and experience of a trained staff. Common administration, or at least harmonious administration under departments of the same supreme body, seems a logical consequence.

COMMERCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL LIBRARIES.

Libraries, like the books they house and distribute, have multiplex reasons for their existence. Their highest aim, like that of education itself, is to promote the mental and spiritual life of the community; they are humanist foundations. But the race must be conserved; our daily needs must be satisfied. National safety, liberty to develop ourselves, the economy of our physical existence, must be assured, or humanism is a chimera. Our libraries must perform their necessary part in the functions we label utilitarian, without, however, omitting or slackening in their higher purposes. A general library, in short, is concerned not only with human knowledge, but also with every human interest and activity; not only with science, philosophy, theory, but with all the practical arts, those which are for the preservation, as well as those which are for the highest development of humanity. In the department of the public library now to be considered these material objects are the main concern. A modern commercial library is something utterly different from any library heretofore considered. Here, as an advocate of more and better commercial and technical libraries puts it, “The humanist will have to give way to the economist and man of science.”

[Illustration: PATENT OFFICE LIBRARY.]

From their earliest years, public libraries have admitted these claims, and they have put forth special efforts to supply the peculiar needs of the working classes. The nature of the industries carried on has been the chief factor determining the directions in which the stock of books should differ in any given locality from what may be described as the standard selection. Text-books on such industries and their subsidiary subjects, illustrated treatises and other expensive works of reference, have been provided as liberally as funds permitted; and the same attention has been paid to the local trades and professions. Certain obvious restrictions must be allowed for, besides limited resources. Few places have been able to provide a law library or an extensive collection of medical books. The solicitor usually has his own book-case of legal literature, and so with the physician and surgeon; they also have access to large professional libraries. Nevertheless, if the public library seems to disregard certain professions, it is rather on the score of expense and of limited demands than that it disclaims its duty. A national system of libraries would certainly have to provide for these classes, probably by organizing a central supply and loans to the nearest library, in the way proposed for dealing with the more advanced and costly technical works for industries.

The working mechanic, the small manufacturer, the factory workman, the technical student, and the tradesman are in a more necessitous condition; they cannot give a standing order for all the newest manuals, they have no professional library from which to borrow. In highly technical industries, only the largest firms can afford to keep abreast of the rapid growth in scientific knowledge; and to do it they must install, not only a costly arsenal of books, digests, and periodicals recording the fruits of research, but also a special staff to extract, register, and index the most recent information. So rapid is the rate of progress in all departments of knowledge that books are quickly left behind, and the proceedings of scientific societies, technical periodicals, and even the daily press, must be systematically ransacked by the information bureau, if a progressive firm is to be sure of utilizing every invention and improvement in the fullest economic way. Andrew Carnegie said that his own firm wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars through failing at first to provide their managers with the fullest information on what had been done throughout the world in their departments. Is the public library to confine itself to the narrower mission of assisting the needy worker, or to launch out on this more ambitious project, and compete with the skilled staff work employed by the wealthy industrial corporation? After all, the wealthy corporation has contributed in proportion to its rateable assets to the upkeep of the library, and has, on the face of it, as good a claim to some return as the meanest ratepayer, unless the original idea that the public library was only for the working classes is still to prevail. If the public library were, in the full sense, a working part of the machinery for national welfare, there could be no doubt about the answer. As it is, only a few of the more prosperous and energetic libraries have accepted the larger obligation; and, even so, no British library can be compared with the great commercial libraries of America, with such a foundation as the Commercial Museum of Philadelphia, with its exhaustive collections of technical and business information and its staff of consulting specialists, or with the Institute of Commerce at Antwerp.

The utter inability of the public library service to cope with the requirements of industry and commerce was growing more manifest before the war. It was true then as now that no single library could satisfy the technical needs even of its own district, and that some system of mutual aid and central supply must be devised to supplement the finest local provision. With the violent awakening to the lack of organization of our resources which the war brought about, the problem came into clearer focus. The Library Association took the matter up with due seriousness in 1916, first inquiring into the best methods of developing the scientific and technical departments of public libraries, and then into the collateral problem of commercial libraries. The dual subject was before the important annual conference of 1917, and strong resolutions were passed in favour of establishing commercial libraries in the chief centres of trade, and technical libraries in all large manufacturing towns, in both cases as an integral part of the public library systems.[7] Since then, the Technical and Commercial Libraries Committee appointed by the Association has put together a mass of evidence on the subject, and has carried on a vigorous propaganda. Their views did not, however, meet with the full approval of the Adult Education Committee, who inclined to the representations of the Committee of the Privy Council for Scientific and Industrial Research that an independent series of technical libraries should be created in connexion with industries rather than with the existing libraries.[8] The weak point of the Library Association’s case had been a certain vagueness as to the methods by which, and the particular authority by whom, their admirable proposals should be carried into effect. Although they acknowledged that the work could not be done on a proper scale by the public libraries unassisted, or without some measure of co-operation, they hesitated to recommend that the public libraries should be organized into a reciprocating system for the purpose. They declined to say who, in their opinion, should set up and who should control the machinery of co-operation, or precisely what the “measures of co-operation” should be. This, of course, is the essential point of any scheme for concerted action, and the rival project of the Adult Education Committee, unfortunate as it must appear to any one experienced in the working of libraries and alive to the wastefulness of duplication, at any rate was free from this defect.

The question between the rival proposals now lies in abeyance. It is as well that it should lie there, till a more constructive plan is put forward on behalf of the public libraries. The country cannot afford to set up an independent system of libraries at a time when expenditure must be adjusted to strict necessities; it would be uneconomic to do so at any time. Whatever the shortcomings of the nation’s libraries, shortcomings due to the nation’s neglect in the past, these libraries are a going concern, a machine well able to carry a larger load, under which indeed they would run all the better and at a lower rate per output. How absurd to erect new machinery when the old wants only a little oiling! The proposals of the Adult Education Committee are mistaken; those of the Library Association are defective. The theorist failed to call in the expert: the expert suffered from obtuseness of vision. Will they come together now to talk it over?

Meanwhile, the public libraries have been strengthening their collections of technical literature, and commercial libraries have actually been established as an offshoot of the central library at Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, Leeds, Bradford, Bristol, and Manchester, whilst at Norwich, Northampton, Bolton, Croydon, and Rochdale parts of the library have been set aside as business sections, and catalogues or guide-books printed showing how their contents may be utilized with the maximum of ease and profit. The advent of the commercial library has done more at a single blow to rouse the public imagination than any other event in the history of public libraries. Business men, who had been indifferent to mere accumulations of literature, found in this new species of library, containing hardly a single volume that Charles Lamb would have dignified with the name of a book, a bureau performing gratis all the useful services that the wealthy business concern obtains at exorbitant expense from its large office library or department of information. Within a year, the Glasgow librarian was able to report that 30,000 visits had been paid to the new establishment by business people, and a large number of inquiries by letter, telephone, or telegram satisfactorily answered. The average daily consultations during the first year at Manchester, by all sorts of persons from managing directors to messengers, was three hundred.[9] In Bristol last year the consultations of books, periodicals, files, and indexes totalled 51,181. Elsewhere the tale is the same.