The Library and Society Part 1

The Library and Society.

by Various.

PREFACE

It may be desirable to repeat here the warning that the word "cla.s.sics"

in the t.i.tle of this series is to be understood as meaning early and standard expressions of ideas that have later developed into prominence.

The papers and addresses in this volume have been chosen especially with this in view, and as they emphasize social relations an effort has been made to include expressions from men of eminence whose names would not probably occur to the student of library economy as having expressed an opinion about the work of libraries or as having influenced it in any permanent way.

I desire to acknowledge the kindly a.s.sistance rendered in the selection and grouping of the articles by Mrs. Gertrude Gilbert Drury, chief instructor in the St. Louis Library School. It has been most valuable.

The original suggestion of this volume, and of the character of its contents, I owe to Dr. James I. Wyer, Jr., Director of the New York State Library.

ARTHUR E. BOSTWICK

THE LIBRARY AND SOCIETY

Recent progress in all directions--political, educational, industrial, hygienic--has been marked by the growth and strengthening of a social consciousness. It is this chiefly that has differentiated the modern library from its predecessors and has made prominent our present insistence on the reader as well as the book, as a fundamental element in what we are doing. At first evident only in a general and somewhat vague recognition, by writers and speakers, of a vital relation between libraries and the communities that they serve, it later crystallized into definite discussions of their reciprocal service--that of the community to the library, consisting of financial, material and moral support expressing itself partly in the appointment of adequate boards of trustees and their proper backing, and that of the library to the community, showing itself largely in the provision of books, the collection of information, the control and guidance of reading, and so-called "community-centre" service. These facts have guided the grouping and sequence of the papers and addresses that make up the present volume. The authors, it will be noticed, include more statesmen, publicists, and professional men, and fewer librarians, than was the case with the two previous volumes, thus reflecting the greater generality and wider interest of the subject.

GENERAL COMMUNITY RELATIONS

In the following group have been included papers and addresses largely by publicists or educators interested in libraries from the general civic standpoint, and affected by the general trend toward what has been termed here "socialization." They have been loosely arranged in three groups--general ideas on the field, function and possibilities of the library, papers on books and their uses, as affected or promoted by the library, and general addresses, chiefly at the opening of library buildings.

Within these groups they are given in general in their chronological order, although with some exceptions whose purpose will be self evident. Through them all runs the thread of consciousness that service to the community must be the primary object of the library, although the breadth and extent of that service, as it was destined later to grow and develop is not generally realized and in some cases doubtless would have been deprecated by the writers or speakers, could they have foreseen it. But in all these p.r.o.nouncements we may clearly see the dawning light of a new library day.

THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF THE FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY IN AMERICA AND ITS TRUE FUNCTION IN THE COMMUNITY

This comprehensive sketch, by Professor Tyler of Cornell University, forms part of an address delivered at the dedication of the Sage Library, at West Bay City, Michigan, Jan. 16, 1884.

Moses Coit Tyler was born in Griswold, Conn., Aug. 2, 1835 and graduated at Yale in 1857. He was professor of English at Michigan University in 1867-81 and from the latter year to his death, Dec. 28, 1900, held the chair of American History at Cornell.

In this address, Prof. Tyler has added to his equipment as a philosophical historian his personal knowledge and experience of the service that a properly administered collection of books may render to a community.

Looking over the entire course of American society, from its rough and hardy beginning, in the first years of the 17th century, I find six distinct stages of development with reference to the possession and use of books by the people. The first stage is that of private libraries; the second is that of special inst.i.tutional libraries, like those of colleges and other learned corporations, and intended for a limited and rather scholastic cla.s.s in the community; the third is that of a.s.sociation or joint stock libraries, _i.e._, libraries of a more miscellaneous and general character, but for the use only of those whose names are on the subscription list; the fourth is that of common school libraries; the fifth is that of endowed libraries, _i.e._, public libraries founded and sustained entirely by private endowment and thrown open to the public without any cost whatever to the public; and finally, the sixth is that of free public libraries created, it may be, by private benefaction, but sustained in part at least at the public cost, _i.e._, uniting the two elements of private help and public selfhelp, and cherished by the public only as people will cherish that which costs them something, and of which they have some sense of real ownership.

But before proceeding to inspect these successive forms of library evolution, the fact should be distinctly brought out as applicable to them all, that the American people started on their career in this country with an uncommon interest in books; and say what one will about American philistinism and American devotion to the practical, this people have always retained that ancient and primitive homage for books.

To an extent, I think, unapproached elsewhere, they are, and they always have been, a bookish people. In some other nations there is, undoubtedly, a larger leisurely cla.s.s; and among persons of that cla.s.s there is a profounder and more extensive contact with books than is the case with us. But while among most other nations, the craving for books is the propensity of one cla.s.s, with us it may be fairly described as the propensity of all cla.s.ses. A certain tincture of bookishness has pervaded the American people from the beginning. Perhaps the most decided quality of American civilization has been its effort to unite the practical with the ideal; its pa.s.sion for material results enn.o.bled by the intellectual and the spiritual; its fine reverence for studiousness, even amid the persistent fury of dollar-hunting.

And not only was this bookish trait visible in our colonial infancy but it may be said to have had an ante-natal origin. The two Englishmen who in the latter half of the 16th century did most to make possible the birth of American civilization in the first half of the 17th, were Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh; and both were men possessed by this large zest for ideas as well as for deeds; both were contemplative men as well as active men. The last glimpse that any surviving mortal had of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, before his ship went down in the sea, was of that stern hero sitting calmly on the deck, with a book in his hand, cheering his companions by telling them that heaven is as near by water as by land; and the last labor of Sir Walter Raleigh, before his judicial murder in the Tower, was to write one of the learnedest and stateliest books to be met with in the literature of modern men.

And this flavor of bookishness which belonged to these two great pioneers and martyrs of American colonization, seems to have pa.s.sed on to the men who successfully executed the grand project in which they had failed. When you run your eyes along the st.u.r.dy list of the great colony-founders of the 17th century--the men who carried out the fierce task of conveying English civilization across the Atlantic, and of making it take root and live in this wild soil--Captain John Smith, and William Bradford, and Winslow, and Robert Cushman, and the Winthrops, and Dudley, and Hooker, and Davenport, and Roger Williams, and William Penn, you will find them all, in some special sense, lovers of books, collectors of books, readers of books, even writers of books.

And what is true of the leaders of that great act of national transmigration is true also of the men of less note who followed in it.

The first American immigrants were reading immigrants--immigrants who brought in their hands not only axes and shovels, but books. Their coming hither was due to the restlessness inflicted by the possession of ideas. Books were to them a necessary part of the outfit for the voyage and the settlement. And so rare and so precious were books in those days that they were cherished as family treasures, and handed down as heirlooms; nay, they were so dealt with in wills and in contracts as if they rose almost to the dignity of real estate. In fact, in those days, the possession of an unusual number of books, with the reputation of using them, const.i.tuted a sort of patent of gentility, and seemed to bridge the chasm between the most widely separated cla.s.ses in society; as when, in 1724, a young mechanic, named Benjamin Franklin, arriving in New York on a sloop from Newport, is invited to the house of the Governor of New York and is honored by him with a long and friendly interview, for no other reason than that the captain of the sloop had told the governor of a lad on his vessel who had with him "a great many books." "The governor received me," says Franklin in his autobiography "with great civility, showed me his library, which was a considerable one, and we had a good deal of conversation relative to books and authors. This was the second governor who had done me the honor to take notice of me, and for a poor boy, like me, it was very pleasing." So I think I am justified in saying that we started on our career as a people with this underlying intellectual quality--a pretty general respect for books, love for them, habit of using them; and this is the impelling moral force which prompts to the several efforts which society has made for providing itself with books. Now, the first stage in the process of library evolution--and I have called it that of private libraries--was the prevailing condition of the American colonies during the whole of the 17th century and the first third of the 18th. This is the picture: Everywhere books, but few, costly, portly, solemn, revered, read over and over again; every respectable family, however poor, having at least a few hereditary treasures in the form of books, as in that of silver and choice furniture; and here and there up and down the colonies, an occasional luminous spot, drawing to itself the wide-eyed wonder of the surrounding inhabitants, the seat of a great private library, belonging to some country gentleman, or clergyman, or publicist, like that of Colonel William Bird, of Westover, or of the Reverend James Blair, of Williamsburg, or of Dr. Cotton Mather, of Boston, or of James Logan, of Philadelphia, or of Cadwallader Colden, of New York.

This is the first stage of library evolution. And, of course, it has its pleasant aspects; but surely there is here no adequate provision for the intellectual wants of the entire community. Very few persons in any community are rich enough to buy and own all the books they ought to have access to; and the existence of great private libraries in a few wealthy households can no more supply this general need of books than the great private dinners which are given in the same households can keep the entire community from going hungry.

Accordingly, the second stage in the evolution of libraries is away from mere private ownership and use, and is toward complete public ownership and use; but it stops far this side of it; it is the stage of special scholastic libraries, collected by colleges and other learned corporations, and intended for the particular use of the learned cla.s.s--students, investigators, and specialists. The earliest library of that sort ever formed in this country was begun at Harvard College in 1638; near the close of the 17th century, another was begun at William and Mary College, and still another at Yale; thenceforward, and especially during the past eighty years, such libraries have been multiplying in the land, so that at the present moment there are more than three hundred of them, and a few of them are now really vast library collections. The value of these libraries--who can doubt? Yet their direct value is only for a cla.s.s; they are scholars' libraries, not people's libraries. This will not suffice; society cannot rest satisfied, and will not rest satisfied until everywhere good books for all are placed within the reach of all. The complete popularization of books is the goal.

So we come to the third stage of library evolution--that of libraries gathered and controlled by voluntary a.s.sociations of people, _e.g._, joint stock a.s.sociations, but of course for the use only of those who subscribe to them and share in the expense.

Here we have a natural step forward; a goodly step; a step in the right direction, but still not far enough. We shall all agree that this is the strong and hearty modern method of doing difficult things--the method of clubbing together to do something; it is self-reliant, social, cooperative, mutually, helpful, What the individual cannot do alone a club of individuals can do together. Thus the hardest and grandest achievements of our time have been brought about--vast railroads, vast manufacturing and commercial enterprises. And so men and women, who could not singly get the books they wanted, have joined forces and have got them by combination.

It is a notable fact, however, that this third stage of library evolution was not reached until more than a hundred years after the first colonies had been settled.

Many of you, doubtless, in wandering about Philadelphia--perhaps during our great centennial visit to that city--may have noticed the venerable building of the Philadelphia Library company, and in the walls of it an old tablet with this inscription: "Be it remembered in honor of the Philadelphia youth (then chiefly artificers) that, in 1731, they cheerfully, at the suggestion of Benjamin Franklin, one of their number, inst.i.tuted the Philadelphia Library, which though small at first, is become highly valuable and extensively useful, and which the walls of this building are now destined to contain and preserve." Now, in reality, that year 1731, when that first subscription library was started in America, begins a new epoch in the intellectual life of the American people, the epoch of systematic cooperation for the procurement by the people of the great intellectual and spiritual boon of books.

Immense results have followed from that example set in 1731. Therefore, let us stop a moment longer, and listen to Benjamin Franklin's own account of the way in which he came to think of that capital project.

"At the time I established myself in Pennsylvania, there was not a good bookseller's shop in any of the colonies to the southward of Boston.

Those who loved reading were obliged to send for their books from England; the members of the Junto had each a few. We had left the alehouse, where we first met, and hired a room to hold our club in. I proposed that we should all of us bring our books to that room; where they would not only be ready to consult in our conferences, but become a common benefit, each of us being at liberty to borrow such as he wished to read at home. This was accordingly done, and for some time contented us. Finding the advantage of this little collection, I proposed to render the benefit from the books more common by commencing a public subscription library. I drew a sketch of the plan and rules that would be necessary, and got a skilful conveyancer to put the whole in form of articles of agreement to be subscribed; by which each subscriber engaged to pay a certain sum down for the first purchase of the books and an annual contribution for increasing them. So few were the readers at that time in Philadelphia, and the majority of us so poor, that I was not able with great industry to find more than fifty persons, mostly young tradesmen, willing to pay down for this purpose forty shillings each and ten shillings per annum. With this little fund we began. The books were imported; the library was opened one day in the week for lending them to the subscribers, on their promissory notes to pay double the value if not duly returned. The inst.i.tution soon manifested its utility, was imitated by other towns and in other provinces. The libraries were augmented by donations; reading became fashionable; and our people, having no public amus.e.m.e.nts to divert their attention from study, became better acquainted with books; and in a few years were observed by strangers to be better instructed, and more intelligent, than people of the same rank generally are in other countries."

I think you will agree with me that this is a very striking bit of testimony, too much so to permit us to hurry past it. Note these few things about it.

In the first place, that device of Franklin's, started in 1731--what does it really signify in our history? It signifies this. It signifies a new departure for mankind--the application of the democratic spirit to the distribution of intellectual advantages. These things called books--these bewitched and bewitching fabrics of paper and ink, which somehow contain the acc.u.mulated thought of all nations and of all centuries, and can communicate to us the n.o.blest pleasures and the most G.o.dlike powers--these potent things, in all the ages before, had been accessible only to some few fortunate human beings--to a privileged cla.s.s--to rich men who wished them--to scholars who could win their way to them--in short, to an aristocracy of intellectual privileges. But in 1731, by that modest device of Benjamin Franklin, the democratic spirit--the modern humane spirit--the spirit which in its true nature is a levelling spirit only in this grand sense that it levels upward and not downward, and raises the general average of human intelligence and felicity--this benign and mighty democratic spirit, I say, which was then marching with gentle but invincible footsteps along all avenues and pathways of modern life, and was laying its miraculous touch on church and state, on kings and priests and peasants, on the laws and law-makers and law-breakers, on all the old activities of society, on the old adjustments of human relations, that spirit then began to touch this relation also, the relation of man to the superb and royal realm of books. And the first effect of that touch was what? It was enlargement, liberalization, extension of intellectual opportunity for man simply as man. Hitherto books had been the privilege of the privileged cla.s.s. In effect, Franklin says: They shall be so no more. In this year 1731 I set agoing a device concerning books which shall abolish the privileged cla.s.s by making all cla.s.ses privileged, and shall finally result in placing the blessings of books within the reach of all.

But, in the second place, in that year 1731, who was Franklin who did all that, and who were the persons who helped to do it? He and they were young men; obscure men, poor men, laboring men; mechanics and tradesmen of the town where they lived; young men just getting a start in the world. So this new era in the brain life of the American people had its beginning with such as they were. Who of us, therefore, however modest be our lot in life, has any right to say to himself, "I am not in position to do anything for the advancement of my race"? Nay; my brother, think of young Ben Franklin, the printer, and his 50 brother mechanics; remember what they accomplished; and do not despair of being useful in your time also. And in the third place, this movement came from those young men a.s.sociated together in a social debating club. It was their experience in the actual discussion of the problems of human thought which made them feel the need of books and suggested this great measure for popularizing books: a fact which fits in well with Mr.

Sage's idea of blending the two things together here; of giving perpetual house-room and hospitality to a debating club, here, in the very midst of this library. And now the fourth point is, that the plan started by Franklin and those other young mechanics in Philadelphia, in 1731, the plan of joint-stock library a.s.sociations, worked so well there that, as Franklin tells, it was taken up in other provinces. Naturally, the new plan was adopted first in the towns where it was heard of first--the towns nearest to Philadelphia. But before many years, the news of it had travelled far, to the southward and the northward, and whether consciously or unconsciously the model set up in Philadelphia, was imitated, with more or less closeness, in scores of places far away.

One curious example springs up in South Carolina. It is in the Georgetown district, then given to the growth of indigo. A number of the planters came together and formed the Winyaw Indigo Society. Their chief business was to have a pleasant time together and talk indigo; they paid their initiation fees in indigo; they paid their annual dues in indigo; and presently they found their treasury so full and overflowing with indigo, that they resolved to devote their surplus in part to the formation of the Indigo Society Library. Then, too, at about the same time in Charleston, seventeen young men, of very limited means, desirous of seeing the best and freshest English magazines, formed a club for that purpose, and started with a fund of ten pounds sterling, not venturing at first to hope to be able to purchase books also. Soon, however, their plan grew and took in books; and from this small beginning arose the great "Library Society" of Charleston, which has ministered to the pleasure and benefit of the people of that place for nearly a century and a half.

But the Philadelphia plan travelled northward as well as southward. In 1747, at Newport, Rhode Island, was formed, also out of a discussion club, the famous Redwood Library, which lives and flourishes still. In 1753 the Providence Library was started on the same general plan; in 1754, the New York Society Library; in 1760, the Social Library at Salem, Ma.s.sachusetts; in 1763, similar libraries at Lancaster and at Portland, Maine; in 1753, a similar one at Hingham; and so on throughout the country.

One of the most curious of these joint-stock library a.s.sociations was one formed in 1751 in three parishes in the towns of York and Kittery, Maine, and called the "Revolving Library." It was not a circulating library--that being the name of a library from which the books circulate singly and in units; but it was called a "revolving library" because the entire library was to revolve, in bulk, on its own axes, in an orbit including the parsonages of the three parishes embraced in the scheme.

And thus this library began to revolve from parsonage to parsonage more than 130 years ago; and it has been revolving ever since, occasionally encountering some queer experiences, as when, about 15 years ago, it was found by the new pastor of Kittery Point in the garret of the parsonage, "dumped down on the attic floor like a load of coal," the wife of the former inc.u.mbent having had a prejudice against books for sanitary reasons, "considering them unhealthy, and so being unwilling to have them in any living room" where their presence might communicate diseases to the family.

This, of course, is a rather eccentric specimen of the cla.s.s of libraries now under view. A very good normal example of the cla.s.s is furnished us by the social library of Castine, Maine, organized in 1801; and its articles of a.s.sociation I desire to read to you as exhibiting the scope and spirit of this whole movement for supplying the public with books through jointstock companies. The articles of a.s.sociation are as follows: "It is proposed by the persons whose names are here subjoined to establish a social library in this town. It is greatly to be lamented that excellent abilities are not unfrequently doomed to obscurity by reason of poverty; that the rich purchase almost everything but books; and that reading has become so unfashionable an amus.e.m.e.nt in what we are pleased to call this enlightened age and country. To remedy these evils; to excite a fondness for books; to afford the most rational and profitable amus.e.m.e.nt; to prevent idleness and immorality; and to promote the diffusion of useful knowledge, piety, and virtue, at an expense which small pecuniary abilities can afford, we are induced to a.s.sociate for the above purposes; and each agrees to pay for the number of shares owned, and annexed to his name at $5 per share."

The first public library in the north-west was established by an a.s.sociation formed at Marietta, Ohio, in 1796. Then followed similar libraries at Cincinnati, and at Ames, Athens County. The latter, which was formed as early as 1802, had a curious origin. It was popularly known as the "c.o.o.n-skin Library." The hardy pioneers of that township of Ames met together, it seems, to consider the subject of roads; and, having considered it, they proceeded to consider also the subject of books--a fine ill.u.s.tration, I think, of the blending of the practical and the ideal in the American character and in American civilization.

Here were these st.u.r.dy pioneers projecting a public library even before they had got their public roads cut out and put in order. What is called money hardly existed among them; but they knew how to shoot bears and to catch c.o.o.ns and to take their skins, and these skins could be sent to Boston and sold for cash, and the money invested in books. This accordingly was done. The noted politician, Thomas Ewing, then a boy at Ames, gives this account of the affair: "All my acc.u.mulated wealth, ten c.o.o.n-skins, went into the fund," the total amount of which proved to be about $100. "Squire Sam Brown, of Sunday Creek, who was going to Boston, was charged with the purchase. After an absence of many weeks, he brought the books to Capt. Ben Brown's, in a sack on a pack-horse. I was present at the untying of the sack and pouring out of the treasures.

There were about 60 volumes, I think, and well selected; the library of the Vatican was nothing to it, and there never was a library better read. This, with occasional additions, furnished me with reading while I remained at home."

That is the stuff of which strong men are made, and strong communities, and mighty nations. And what was done at Marietta, and at Cincinnati, and at Ames, was done in a mult.i.tude of other towns all over the north-west. At Vincennes, Indiana, a library was started by similar means in 1807; and one of the founders was Gen. Wm. Henry Harrison, the hero of Tippecanoe and hard cider. That was the first public library established in Indiana.

So, too, in Michigan, far back in its territorial days, similar libraries were formed, especially that of the Young Men's Society of Detroit. But in Michigan, by far the greatest service in this direction has been rendered more recently by the ladies, whose admirable library a.s.sociations in such towns as Ann Arbor, Flint, and Kalamazoo have done much, especially during the past twenty years, for the literary improvement and enjoyment of the people.

But this third stage of library evolution, good and useful as it has been during the past 150 years, has this defect: it does not offer books freely to all who would like books; it is limited to those who partic.i.p.ate in its privileges by paying for them.