any too strict rule in the matter.
With the first arrangement the librarian will be apt to buy a good many of the larger and more expensive works—and, perhaps, be sorry for it afterward. With the latter he will purchase more current literature and satisfy his readers better, though the general quality of his purchases may not be so high.
Perhaps a compromise may bring the best results. He who decides at the outset what reference works he can afford to buy during the year, and how much he must spend at once on replacements and duplicates, and after deducting these fixed charges from his appropriation divides the remainder into weekly or monthly portions for current purchases, will not go far wrong.
To the financial section of this discussion belongs also the question of editions. Shall the librarian choose the best or the cheapest? Which is the best and which is the cheapest for his purpose? In the first place, we may exclude the extremes. Editions de luxe have no place in the ordinary free library, and, on the other hand, we should not think of offering to a self-respecting reader books printed on bad paper with worse type, simply because they can be purchased at a phenomenally low figure. But between these two there are many grades of beauty and durability. Here, as elsewhere, there is safety in the golden mean. As far as bindings of exceptional durability go, the question of paying extra for them depends on the use that is to be made of the book. If it will circulate so little that the ordinary binding will last twenty years, why spend money for anything stronger? Again, if it get such hard treatment that it must be replaced in a year’s time, why put on it a binding that would outlive ten years of such vicissitudes? Still again, with current books of popular interest, the library cannot wait to have them put into special bindings, but for standard, popular works, which will have steady but not hard use, and which can be ordered three months before they are to be used, money spent on special bindings may be economy in the end. Here, however, we are drifting a little way from our subject.
The three points that we must take into consideration in selecting books, namely, the community’s need, the determination of what books will satisfy it, and the consideration of how far the library’s financial condition will allow it to go in that direction, have been treated separately, but it must be evident that they are in reality so closely connected that they act and react on each other. No one of them can in practice be considered apart from the others. Thus the first necessity of the library may be books on music, and a secondary need may be books on water supply. It may so happen, however, that a complete and up-to-date work on the latter subject, we will say, has just been issued at a moderate price, while the works on music most needed are expensive. The result would be quite different from that reached by a consideration of the first point alone. Again, we will take the case of a large library with a book appropriation large enough to buy practically all that it wants in current literature. This fact drops point third out of consideration entirely and modifies both the others considerably. If the library wants both music and hydraulics, and has money enough for only one, we must consider carefully which can best be spared; but if the funds are at hand for both, all this thought is not needed. In like manner, even if there are funds for both, but only for one or two books on each subject, we must select the books we need most, which we need to do if we have money to buy all we want on both subjects. In short, the work of selecting is more difficult, as has been said, with a few books than with many, but the consolation must be that the result is better. The temptation, when one has plenty of money, is to let selection go by the board altogether and to garner in wheat and tares alike, trusting to the public to do the sorting.
We may be almost alarmed to learn from the physiologist of the complicated vital processes that go on within us, of which the cessation means death, and yet of which we remain in daily ignorance. These things often regulate themselves. The selection of books, like the inflation of the lungs, may be performed almost automatically, yet with substantial success. It is instructive to see how nearly the class percentages in the ordinary library approximate to the average without any conscious regulation by the librarian. The community is apt to get about what it needs in fairly good quality and without running its library into debt. Yet there can surely be no harm in analyzing a little the work of selection, nor can there be any objection to supplementing by conscious action work that has gone on, however well, chiefly in the combined subconsciousness of a librarian and the community.
Especially is this desirable in making the distinction, already emphasized at the opening of this paper, between what the community wants and what it needs. The fever patient who needs acid sometimes cries for a pickle, and thus cures himself in spite of his nurse; but it is more commonly the case that the patient’s need is masked by some abnormal desire, and that he cries for pork-chops or lobster, or something else that would kill him. We can hardly give up the nurse, therefore, provided she knows her business, and part of that business is to realize the difference between a mere want and a vital need.
So with the librarian, the nurse of the reading public. Left altogether to themselves her patients may kill themselves with pork or lobster; it is her business to see that such an untoward event does not occur.
Those of us to whom this duty has been intrusted, whether we are librarians, trustees, or the members of book-committees, deserve both the good-will and the sympathy of the public; and, like the western organist, I pray that we may not be shot. We are doing our best.
THE WORK OF THE SMALL PUBLIC LIBRARY
We cannot too often remind ourselves of the fact that a circulating library is a distributing agency, and as such has points in common with other such agencies. The whole progress of civilization is dependent on distribution—the bringing to the individual of the thing he wants or needs. The library’s activities are, therefore, in the same class with commerce, and the tendency of modern changes in the library is to make the analogy closer and closer. To recognize this fact is by no means to degrade library work. All workers fall into the two great classes of producers and distributors. Civilization can get along without neither; we must have the farmer to grow the wheat and the railway to market it; we must have the author to write the book and the publisher and the bookseller and the librarian to place it in the hands of those who can use it. The librarian is not a producer; he takes the product of other people’s brains and distributes it; and his problem is how to do this most effectively.
Do not misunderstand me. There have been some recent protests against treating the library as a commercial instead of an educational institution. The free library is not a commercial institution, but it is an agency for distributing something, and there are also hundreds of other agencies for distributing other things. The objects and the methods of distribution are various, but certain laws apply to all kinds of distribution. Hence we may learn a good deal about library work by examining to see what it has in common with other kinds of distribution and in what respect it differs from them.
Now, the prime factors in any kind of distribution are: 1, the products to be distributed; 2, the persons to whom they are to be distributed; 3, the distributors and methods of distribution. I know no better way of laying the basis of an efficient and successful distribution than the brief study, in order, of these three factors.
First let us consider the things that we are to distribute, namely, books. And at the outset let us remember that although these things are apparently material, as much so as butter or hats, they are much more than this. They are the vehicles for conveying ideas, so that a library is a concern for the dissemination of ideas. This brings it in line with another great intellectual and moral distributing agency—the school. In the school the distributor is more often a producer than in the library, especially in the universities, where the discoverer of new facts or laws himself imparts them to his students. Yet the school is essentially a distributing rather than a producing agency. In the school, however the means of distribution are not limited, while in the library they are pretty strictly confined
