0&.0 university of IHirto Library School. University of the State of New York [Extract from Proceedings of 34th Convocation] UNIVERSITY CONVOCATION LIBRARY SESSION, 1896 Thursday morning, June 25 PUBLIC LIBRARIES Inspector W: R. Eastman — The University law of 1892 con- tained 17 sections devoted exclusively to public libraries, indicating how they might be organized, chartered and maintained, providing for the lending of books by the regents, the granting of state and local subsidies and general supervision by the University. Since that date the Uni- versity has chartered 98 public libraries. In addition to these, 21 libraries having obtained charters under other laws have been admitted,, so that there are now in the University 119 public libraries. The University has also registered 35 other libraries as meeting the minimum standard for such institutions and therefore entitled to state aid, making the total number of libraries to-day under supervision of the University 154; and it is to deal with this great and growing interest that this session has been planned. THE MISSION AND THE MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK SUP'T J. N. LARNED, BUFFALO LIBRARY For the most part, that lifting of the human race in condition and character which we call civilization has been wrought by individual energies acting on simply selfish lines. When I say this, I use the term selfish in no sense that is necessarily mean but only as indicating the un- questionable fact that men have striven, in the main, each for himself more than for one another, even in those strivings that have advanced the whole race. Within certain limits there is no discredit to human nature in the fact. A measure of selfishness is prescribed to man by the terms of his individuality and the conditions of his existence. His only escape from it is through exertions which he must employ at first in his own behalf in order to win the independence and the power to be helpful 'to his fellows. So it seems to me quite impossible to imagine a process that would have worked out the civilization of the race otherwise than by the self-pushing energy that has impelled individual men to plant, to build, to trade, to explore, to experiment, to think, to plan, primarily and immediately for their own personal advantage. R24gm-N96-2ooo 9 2 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 But if the more active forces in civilization are mainly from selfish springs, there are two, at least, which have nobler sources and a nobler historic part. One is the sympathetic impulse which represents benevo- lence on its negative side, pained by the misfortunes of others and active to relieve them. In the second, which is more rare, we find benevolence of the positive kind. Its spring is in a purely generous feeling, which strongly moves one to communicate to others some good which is pre- cious to him in his own experience of it. It is a feeling which may rise in different minds from different estimates of good, and be directed toward immediate objects that are unlike, but the disinterested motive and ultimate aim are unvarying, and it manifests in all cases the very noblest enthusiasm that humanity is capable of. There seems to be no name for it so true as that used when we speak of a missionary spirit in efforts that aim at the sharing of some greatly cherished good with people who have not learned that it is good. At the same time we must remem- ber that mere propagandisms put on the missionary garb without its spirit, and spuriously imitate its altruistic zeal; and we must keep our definition in mind. There are always true missionaries in the world, laboring with equally pure hearts, though with minds directed toward many different ends of benefaction to their fellows. But only two objects — the spiritual good of mankind, contemplated in religious beliefs, and the intellectual good, pursued in educational plans — have ever wakened the missionary spirit in a large, world-moving way. The supremely great epochs in human history are those few which have been marked by mighty waves of altruistic enthusiasm, sweeping over the earth from sources of excitation found in one or the other of these two ideals of good. Naturally the first wakening was under the touch of beliefs which con- template a more than earthly good; and those beliefs have moved the missionary spirit at all times most passionately and powerfully. But even the religious wakening was not an early event in history. I think I may safely say that no trace of it is to be found among the worshipers of remote antiquity. The Hebrew prophets never labored as dispensers of a personal blessing from their faith. It was for Israel, the national Israel, that they preached the claims and declared the requirements of the God of Israel. The priests of Osiris and Bel were still more in- different to the interest of the worshiper in the worship of their gods, thinking only of the honor demanded by the gods themselves. So far as history will show, the first missionary inspiration would seem to have been brought into religion by Gotama, the Buddha, whose pure and ex- i8 9 6] THE MISSION AND THE MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 93 alted but enervating gospel of renunciation filled Asia with evangelists and was carried to all peoples as the message of a hope of deliverance from the universal sorrow of the world. Then, centuries later, came the commission more divine which sent forth the apostles of Christianity to tell the story of the Cross and to bear the offer of salvation to every human soul. As religiously kindled, the missionary spirit has never burned with more fervor than it did in the first centuries of Christian preaching. But nothing akin to it was set aflame in the smallest degree by any other eagerness of desire for the communication of a blessing or good to mankind. Until we come to modern times, I can see no mark of the missionary motive in any labor that was not religious. The one object which, in time, as I have said, came to rival the religious object as an inspiration of missionary work, the modern zeal for education, was late and slow in moving feelings to an unselfish depth. Enthusiasm for learning at the period of the renaissance was enthusiasm among the few who craved learning, and was mostly expended within their own circle. There was little thought of pressing the good gift on the multitude who knew not their loss in the lack of it. The earliest great pleader for a common education of the whole people was Luther ; but the school was chiefly important in Luther's view as the nursery of the church and as a health-bringer to the state, and he labored for it more as a means to religious and political ends than as an end in itself. Almost a century after Luther there appeared one whom Michelet has called " the first evangelist of modern pedagogy " John Amos Comenius, the Moravian. The same thought of him, as an evangelist, is expressed by the historian Raumer, who says : " Comenius is a grand and venerable figure of sorrow. Wandering, persecuted and homeless during the terrible and desolating thirty years war, he yet never despaired, but with enduring truth and strong in faith he labored unweariedly to prepare youth by a better education for a better future. He labored for them with a zeal and love worthy of the chief of the Apostles." And the education for which Comenius labored was no less, in his own words, than "the teaching to all men of all the subjects of human concern." Proclaiming his educa- tional creed at another time he said : 11 I undertake an organization of schools whereby all the youth maybe instructed save those to whom God has denied intelligence, and instructed in all those things which make man wise, good and holy." Here then had arisen the first true missionary of common teaching, who bore the invitation to learning as a gospel proffered to all childhood and all youth and who strove in its behalf with apostolic zeal. The 94 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 period of the active labors of Comenius was before and a little after the middle of the 17th century. He made some impression upon the ideas and the educational methods of his time, but Europe generally was cold to his enthusiasm. In one small corner of it, alone, there was a people already prepared for and already beginning to realize his inspiring dreams of universal education. That was Holland, where the state, even in the midst of its struggle for an independent existence, was assuming the sup- port of common schools and attempting to provide them for every child. In that one spot the true missionary leaven in education was found work- ing while the 17th century was still young, and from Holland it would seem to have been carried to America long before the fermentation was really felt in any other country. Elsewhere in the old world, if Comenius found any immediate suc- cessor in the new field of missionary labor which he had practically dis- covered and opened, it was the Abb6 La Salle, founder of the great teaching order of the Christian Brothers. But the zeal kindled by La Salle, which has burned even to the present day, was essentially religious in its' aims and dedicated to the service of his church. The spirit in common teaching still waited generally for that which would make a secular saving faith of it, urgent, persisting, not to be denied or escaped from. The world at large made some slow progress toward better things in it; schools were increased in number and improved; Jesuits, Jansenists, Oratorians and other teaching orders in the Roman church labored more intelligently; middle-class education in England and other countries received more attention. But the conscience of society in general was satisfied with the opening of the school to those who came with money in their hands and knocked at its door. There was no thought yet of standing in the door and crying out to the moneyless and to the indif- ferent, bidding them come. Far less was their thought of going out into the highways and hedges to bring them in. Another century of time was needed and a long line of apostolic teachers, agitators and adminis- trators like Pestalozzi, Father Girard, Frobel, Humboldt, Brougham, Horace Mann, to inspire that feeling for education which warms the western nations of the world at last: the feeling for education as a supreme good in itself, not merely as a breadmaking or a moneymaking instrument; not merely for giving arithmetic to the shop-keeper, or book- keeping to the clerk, or even political opinions to the citizen; not merely for supplying preachers to the pulpit, or physicians to the sick-room, or lawyers to the bench and bar; but in and of and for its own sake, as a good to humanity which surpasses every other good, save one. This is 1896] THE MISSION AND THE MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 95 what I call the missionary spirit in education, and it has so far been wakened in the world that we expect and demand it in the teaching work of our time, and when we do not have it, we are cheated by its counterfeit. But this zeal for education was animated in most communities sooner than the thought needed for its wise direction. There was a time not long ago when it expended itself in schoolrooms and colleges and was satisfied. To have laid benignant hands on the children of the genera- tion and pushed them, with a kindly coercion, through some judicious curriculum of studies was thought to be enough. That limited concep- tion of education as a common good sufficed for a time, but not long. The impulse which carried public sentiment to that length was sure to press questions upon it that would reach further yet. " Have we arrived," it began to ask, " at the end for which our public, schools are the means ? We have provided broadly and liberally — for what ? For teaching our children to read their own language in print, to trace it in written signs, to construct it in grammatical forms, to be familiar with arithmetical rules, to know the standards and divisions of weight and measure, to form a notion of the surface-features of the earth and to be acquainted with the principal names that have been given to them, to remember a few chief facts in the past of their own country. But these are only keys which we expect them to use in their acquisition of knowledge, rather than knowledge itself. When they quit the school with these wonderful keys of alphabet and number in their possession, they are only in the vestibule chambers of education. Can we leave them there, these chil- dren and youth of our time, to find as best they may, or not find at all, the treasuries we would have them unlock ? n To ask the question was to answer it. Once challenged to a larger thought of education, the missionary spirit of the age rose boldly in its demands. The free school, the academy, the college even, grew in importance, when looked at in the larger view, but they were seen to be not enough. They were seen to be only blessed openings in the way to knowledge, garlanded gates, ivory portals, golden doors ; but passage-ways only, after all, to knowl- edge beyond them. And the knowledge to which they led, while much and of many kinds may need to be gleaned in the open fields of life, out of living observations and experiences, yet mainly exists as a measureless store of accumulated savings from the experience and observation of all the generations that have lived and died, recorded in writing and pre- served in print. There then in the command and possession of that great store, the end of education was seen to be most nearly realized ; and so the free public library was added to the free public school. 9 6 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 But strangely enough, when that was first done, there happened the same halting of spirit that had appeared in the free public school. To have collected a library of books and to have set its doors open to all comers, was assumed to be the fulfilment of duty in the matter. The books waited for readers to seek them. The librarian waited for inquirers to press their way to him. No one thought of outspreading the books of the library like a merchant's wares, to win the public eye to them. None thought of trying by any means to rouse an appetite for books in minds not naturally hungry for learning or poetry or the thinking of other men. So the free or the nearly free public libraries, for a time wrought no great good for education beyond a circle in which the energy of the desire to which they answered was most independent of any public help. But this stage of passive existence in the life of the free public library had no long duration. Soon the missionary passion began to stir men here and there in the library field, as it had stirred teachers in the schools before. One by one the inspiration of their calling began to burn in their hearts. They saw with new eyes the greatness of the trust that had been confided to them and they rose to a new sense of the obligations borne with it. No longer a mere keeper, custodian, watchman, set over dumb treasures to hold them safe, the librarian now took active functions upon himself and became the minister of his trust, commanded by his own feel- ings and by many incentives around him to make the most in all possible ways of the library as an influence for good. The new spirit thus brought into library work spread quickly, as a beneficent epidemic, from New Eng- land, where its appearance was first notably marked, over America and Great Britain and into all English lands, and is making its way more slowly in other parts of the world. The primary effort to which it urged librarians and library trustees was that towards bettering the introduction of books to readers; towards making them known, in the first instance, with a due setting forth of what they are and what they offer; then toward putting them in right relations with one another, by groupings according to subject and literary form and by cross-bindings of reference; then towards establishing the easiest possible guidance to them, both severally and in their groups, for all seekers, whether simple or learned. When serious attention had once been given to these matters there was found to be need in them of a measure of study, of experiment, of inventive ingenuity, and of individual collective experience, of practical and philosophical attainments, that had never been suspected before. These discoveries gave form to a concep- tion of "library science," of a department of study, that is, entitled to i8 9 6] THE MISSION AND THE MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 97 scientific rank by the importance of its results, the precision of its methods, the range of its details. The quick development of the new science within the few years that have passed since the first thought of it came into men's minds, is marked by the rise of flourishing library schools and classes in all parts of the United States, east and west. For more efficiency in their common work, the reformers of the library were organized at an early day. The American library association on this side of the sea and the Library association of the United Kingdom on the other side, with journals giving voice to each, proved powerful in their unifying effect. Ideas were exchanged and experiences compared. Each was taught by the successes or warned by the failures of his neigh- bors. What each one learned by investigation or proved by trial became the property of every other. The mutual instruction that came about was only equaled by the working cooperation which followed. Great tasks, beyond the power of individuals, and impossible as commercial undertakings, because promising no pecuniary reward, were planned and laboriously performed by the union of many coworkers, widely scattered in the world, but moved by one disinterested aim. From 122 libraries, in that mode of alliance, there was massed the labor which indexed the whole body of general magazine literature, thus sweeping the dust from thousands of volumes that had been practically useless before, bringing the invaluable miscellany of their contents into daily, definite service, by making its subjects known and easily traced. The same work of co- operative indexing was next carried into the indeterminate field of general miscellaneous books. By still broader cooperation, a selection of books was made from the huge mass of all literature, with siftings and resiftings, to be a standard of choice and a model of cataloguing for small new libraries. And now topical lists on many subjects are being prepared for the guidance of readers by specialists in each subject, with notes to describe and value the books named. The possibilities of co- operation in library work are just beginning to be realized, and the great tasks already accomplished by it will probably look small when compared with undertakings to come hereafter. But, after all, it is the individual work in the libraries which manifests most distinctly the new spirit of the time. The perfected cataloguing, which opens paths for the seeker from every probable starting-point of inquiry not only to books, but into the contents of books; the multiplied reading lists and reference lists on questions and topics of the day, which are quick to answer a momentary interest in the public mind and direct it to the best sources for its satisfaction ; the annotated bulletins of cur- 9 8 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 rent literature, which announce and value as far as practicable, by some word of competent criticism, the more important publications of each month; the opening of book shelves to readers, to which libraries are tending as far as their construction and their circumstances will permit; the evolution of the children's reading-room, now become a standard feature to be provided for in every new building design, and to be striven for in buildings of an older pattern; the invention of traveling libraries and home libraries; the increasing provision made in library service for the helping of students and inquirers to pursue their investigations and make their searches; the increasing cooperation of libraries and schools, with the growing attraction of teachers and pupils toward the true litera- ture of their subjects of study, and the waning tyranny of the dessicated text book; in all these things there is the measure of an influence which was hardly beginning to be felt a quarter of a century ago. I have named last among the fruits of this potent influence the coopera- tion of libraries and schools, not because it stands least in the list, but be- cause the whole missionary inspiration from every standpoint of solicitude for the educational good of mankind is united and culminated in it and is doing its greatest work. The missionary teacher and the mis- sionary librarian come together in these new arrangements, work- ing no longer one in the steps of the other — one carrying forward the education which the other has begun — but hand in hand and side by side, leading children from the earliest age into the wonderful and beautiful book world of poetry, legend, story, nature-knowledge or science, time-knowledge or history, life-knowledge or biography, making it dear and familiar to them in the impressionable years within which their tastes are formed. The school alone, under common conditions, can do nothing of that. On the contrary, its text books, as known generally in the past, have been calculated to repel the young mind. They have represented to it little but the dry task of rote learning and recita- tion. They have brought to it nothing of the flavor of real literature nor any of that rapturous delight from an inner sense of rhythmic motions which real literature can give : neither the dancing step, nor the swinging march, nor the rush as with steeds, nor the lift and sweep as with wings, which even a child may be made to feel in great poetry and in noble prose, and which once experienced is a beguiling charm forever. The whole tendency of the text book teaching of schools is towards deadening the young mind to that feeling for literature, and alienating it from books by a prejudice born of wrong impressions at the beginning. Just so far as the school reader, the school geography, 1896] THE MISSION AND THE MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 99 the school history and their fellow compends, are permitted to remain conspicuous in a child's thought during his early years, as representative of the books which he will be admonished by and by to read, so far he will be put into an opposition never easy to overcome. The tenderest years of childhood are the years of all others for shaping a pure intellectual taste and creating a pure intellectual thirst which only a noble literature can satisfy in the end. We have come at last to the discernment of that pregnant fact and our schemes of education for the young are being reconstructed accordingly. There is no longer the division of labor between school and library which seemed but a little time ago to be so plainly marked out. Schools are not to make readers for libraries, nor are libraries to wait for readers to come to them out of the schools. The school and the world of books which it makes known to him are to be identified in the child's mind. There is to be no dis- tinction in his memory between reading as an art learned and reading as a delight discovered. The art and the use of the art are to be one simul- taneous communication to him. That is the end contemplated in the cooperative work of libraries and schools, which, recent in its beginning, has made great advances already and which especially appeals. to what I have called the missionary enthu- siasm in both libraries and schools. It contemplates what seems to be the truest ideal of teaching ever shaped in thought, of teaching not as educating but as setting the voung in the way of education ; as starting them on a course of self-culture which they will pursue to the end of their lives, with no willingness to turn back. The highest ideal of education is realized in that lifelong pursuit of it, and the success of any school is measured not by the little portion of actual learning which its students take out of it, but by the persisting strength of the impulse to know and to think, which they carry from the school into their later lives. But there are people who may assent to all that is said of education in this life-lasting view of it, who will deny that there is a question in it of books. " We," they say, " find more for our instruction in life than in books. The reality of things interests us more and teaches us more than the report and description of them by others. We study men among men and God's works in the midst of them. We prefer to take knowl- edge at first hand, from nature and from society, rather than second- handedly, out of a printed page. Your book-wisdom is from the closet and for closet-use. It is not the kind needed in a busy and breezy world." Well, there is a half-truth in this which must not be ignored. To make everything of books in the development of men and women is a greater 100 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 mistake, perhaps, than to make nothing of them. For life has teachings, and nature out-of-doors has teachings, for which no man, if he misses them, can find compensation in books. We can say that frankly to the contemner of books and we yield no ground in doing so; for then we turn upon him and say : " Your life, sir, to which you look for all the enlightenment of soul and mind that you receive, is a brief span of a few tens of years ; the circle of human acquaintances in which you are satisfied to make your whole study of mankind is a little company of a few hun- dred men and women, at the most; the natural world from which you think to take sufficient lessons with your unassisted eyes is made up of some few bits of city streets and country lanes and seaside sands. What can you, sir, know of life, compared with the man who has had equal years of breath and consciousness with you, and who puts with that experience some large, wide knowledge of forty centuries of human history in the whole round world besides ? What can you know of mankind and human nature compared with the man who meets and talks with as many of his neighbors in the flesh as yourself and who, beyond that, has companion- ship and communion of mind with the kingly and queenly ones of all the generations that are dead ? What can you learn from nature compared with him who has Darwin and Dana and Huxley and Tyndall and Gray for his tutors when he walks abroad, and who, besides the home-rambling which he shares with you, can go bird- watching with John Burroughs up and down the Atlantic states, or roaming with Thoreau in Maine woods, or strolling with Richard Jeffries in English lanes and fields ? " Truth is, the bookless man does not understand his own loss. He does not know the leanness in which his mind is kept by want of the food which he rejects. He does not know what starving of imagination and of thought he has inflicted upon himself. He has suffered his interest in the things which make up God's knowable universe to shrink until it reaches no farther than his eyes can see and his ears can hear. The books which he scorns are the telescopes and reflectors and reverberators of our intellectual life, holding in themselves a hundred magical powers for the overcoming of space and time, and for giving the range of knowl- edge which belongs to a really cultivated mind. There is no equal substitute for them. There is nothing else which will so break for us the poor hobble of everyday sights and sounds and habits and tasks, by which our thinking and feeling are naturally tethered to a little worn round. Some may think, perhaps, that newspapers should be named with books as sharing this high office. In truth, it ought to be possible to rank the i8 9 6] THE MISSION AND THE MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK IOI newspaper with the book as an instrument of culture. Equally in truth, it is not possible to do so, except in the case of some small number. The true public journal — diary of the world — which is actually a news- paper and not a ^ww^-paper, is most powerfully an educator, cultivator, broadener of the minds of those who read it. It lifts them out of their petty personal surroundings and sets them in the midst of all the great movements of the time on every continent. It makes them spectators and judges of everything that happens or is done, demands opinions from them, extorts their sympathy and moves them morally to wrath or admiration. In a word, it produces daily, in their thought and feeling, a thousand large relations with their fellow men of every country and race, with noble results of the highest and truest cultivation. But the common so-called newspaper of the present day, which is a mere rag-picker of scandal and gossip, searching the gutters and garbage- barrels of the whole earth for every tainted and unclean scrap of personal misdoing or mishap that can be dragged to light j the so-called news- paper which interests itself and which labors to interest its readers, in the trivialities and ignoble occurrences of the day — in the prize fights, and mean preliminaries of prize fights, the boxing matches, the ball games, the races, the teas, the luncheons, the receptions, the dresses, the goings and comings and private doings of private persons — making the most in all possible ways of all petty things and low things, while treating grave matters with levity and impertinence, with what effect is such a news- paper read ? I do not care to say. If T spoke my mind I might strike harshly at too many people whose reading is confined to such sheets. I will venture only so much remark as this : that I would prefer absolute illiteracy for a son or daughter of mine, total inability to spell a printed word, rather than that he or she should be habitually a reader of the com- mon newspapers of America to-day, and a reader of nothing better. I could say the same of many books. So far, in speaking of books, I have been taking for granted that you will understand me to mean, not everything without discrimination which has the form of a book, but only the true literature which worthily bears that printed form. For if we must give the name to all printed sheets, folded and stitched together in a certain mode, then it becomes necessary to qualify the use we make of the name. Then we must sweep out of the question vast numbers of books which belong to literature no more than a counterfeit dollar belongs to the money of the country. They are counterfeits in literature— base imitations of the true book; that is their real character. Readers may be cheated by them precisely as buyers and sellers may be cheated by 102 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 the spurious coin, and the detection and rejection of them are effected by identically the same process of scrutiny and comparison. Every genuine book has a reason for its existence, in something of value which it brings to the reader. That something may be information, it may be in ideas, it may be in moral stimulations, it may be in wholesome emotions, it may be in gifts to the imagination, or to the fancy, or to the sense of humor, or to the humane sympathies, or indefinably to the whole conscious con- tentment of the absorbing mind 5 but it will always be a fact which those who make themselves familiar with good and true books can never mis- take. Whether they find it in a book of history, or of travel, or of biography, or of piety, or of science, or of poetry, or of nonsense (for there are good books of nonsense, like Alice in Wo?iderland, for example) they will infallibly recognize the stamp of genuineness upon it. The readers who are cheated by base and worthless books are the readers who will not give themselves an expert knowledge of good books, as they might easily do. Here, then, opens one of the greater missionary fields of the public library. To push the competition of good books against worthless books, making readers of what is vulgar and flat acquainted with what is whole- some and fine, is a work as important as the introduction of books among people who have never read at all. There is a theory which has some acceptance, that any reading is better than no reading. It rests on the assumption that an appetite for letters once created, even by the trash of the press, will either refine its own taste or else will have prepared a susceptibility to literary influences which could not otherwise exist Those who hold this doctrine have confidence that a young devourer of dime novels, for example, may be led on an ascending plane through Castlemon, Optic, Alger, Mayne Reid, Henty, Verne, Andersen, De Foe, Scott, Homer, Shakspere, more easily than a boy or girl who runs away from print of every sort can be won into any similar path. For my own part, I fear the theory is unsafe for working. It will probably prove true in some cases; I am quite sure that it will prove dangerously false in many others. There are kinds of habit and appetite in reading which seem to be as deep-rooted in unhealthy states of mind and brain as the appetite for opium or alcohol. They grow up among the habitual readers of such newspapers as I have been speaking of, and equally among readers ol the slop-shop novels, vulgar or vile, with which the world is flooded in this age of print. The newspaper appetite or the trash-novel appetite, once fastened on the brain of its victim, is not often unloosed. It masters all other inclinations, permits no other taste or interest to be i8 9 6] THE MISSION AND THE MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK. wakened. The stuff which produces it is as dangerous to tamper with as any other dream and stupor making narcotic. To bait readers with it, expecting to lure them on to better literature, is to run a grave risk of missing the end and realizing only the mischiefs of the temptation. Far safer will it be to hold the public library as strictly as can be done to the mission of good books. And that is a vague prescription. How are "good books" to be defined? — since their goodness is of many degrees. The mere distinction between good and bad in literature I believe to be easily recognized, as I have said, by every person who has tasted the good and whose intellectual sense has been cultivated by it to even a small extent. But between the supremely good and that which is simply not bad, there are degrees beyond counting. From Bulwer to Shakspere, from Trumbull to Homer, from Roe to Thackeray, from Tupper to Marcus Aurefius, from Talmage to Thomas a Kempis or Thomas Fuller, from Jacob Abbott to Edward Gibbon, the graduation of quality is beyond exact marking by any critical science. How shall we draw lines to distinguish the negatively from the positively good in letters ? We simply can not. We can only lay down loose lines and put behind them the never relaxing spring of one elastic and always practi- cable rule. Strive unceasingly for the best. Give all the opportunities to the best literature of every class. Give front places on all possible occasions to the great writers, the wise writers, the learned writers, the wholesome writers ; keep them always in evidence ; contrive introduc- tions for them; make readers familiar with their rank and standing. There is little else to be done. The public library would be false to its mission if it did not exclude books that are positively bad either through vice or vulgarity; but much beyond that it can not easily go. Happily, it can not force the best literature upon its public ; for if it could, the effect would be lost. But it can recommend the best, with an insisting urgency that will prevail in the end. I am by nature an optimist. Things as they are in the world look extremely disheartening to me, but I think I can see forces at work which will powerfully change them before many generations have passed. Among such forces, the most potent in my expectation is that which acts from the free public library. Through its agency, in my belief, there will come a day — it may be a distant day, but it will come — when the large knowledge, the wise thinking, the fine feeling, the amplitude of spirit that are in the greater literatures, will have passed into so many minds that they will rule society democratically, by right of numbers. I see no en- couragement to hope that the culture which lifts men from generation to 104 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [Jutie 25 generation, little by little, to higher levels and larger visions of things, will never be made universal. Under the best circumstances which men can bring about, nature seems likely to deny to a considerable class of unfortunates the capacity, either mentally, or morally, or both, for refine- ment and elevation. But if that be true at all, it can not be true of any formidable number. Among the progressive races, the majority of men and women are unquestionably of the stuff and temper out of which any- thing fine in soul and strong in intellect can be made, if not in one genera- tion, then in two, or three, or 10, by the continual play upon them of in- fluences from the finer souls and greater minds of their own times and of the past. It is not by nature but by circumstance, heredity itself being an offspring of circumstance, that light is shut from the greater part of those who walk the earth with darkened minds. Man is so far the master of circumstance that he can turn and diffuse the light almost as he will, and his will to make the illumination of the few common to the many is now fully manifested. All the movements that I have reviewed are marks of its progressive working. It translates into active energy that desire for others of the good most precious to one's self, which is the finest and noblest feeling possible to human nature. All the forces of selfishness that race men against one another from goal to goal of a simply scientific civilization, would fail to bring about this supreme end of a common culture for the race. Nothing but the missionary inspiration could give a reasonable promise of it. Let us thank God for the souls He has put into men, having that capability of helpfulness to one another. CORRELATION OF LIBRARY AND SCHOOL ON THE PART OF THE LIBRARY BY A. L. PECK, GLOVERSVILLE PUBLIC LIBRARIAN Were this a gathering of librarians, the consideration of a subject of this kind would seem to me almost superfluous, as during the last 20 years at every meeting of librarians the subject of relations of libraries and schools has been considered and discussed. The records of these meetings as found in the Library journal account for 20 different papers, while in two special numbers of the Library journal 13 additional articles are to be found, four of these written by teachers. On the other hand, as far as I was able to examine the records of teachers meetings, the dis- cussion of the relations of schools and libraries has not found as yet much consideration on the part of educators. I am aware that here and 1896] CORRELATION OF LIBRARY AND SCHOOL IO5 there some prominent superintendents and teachers have given to this subject considerable attention, and being in position to make it more effectual have rendered valuable services to this branch of public educa- tion. I need to mention only the work of such educators as Chas. Francis Adams, jr, Quincy, Mass., Prof. Robert C. Metcalf, Boston, Mass., Prof. James M. Sawin, Providence, R. I., Prof. George E. Hardy of New York, and Sup't Sherman Williams of Glens Falls, N. Y. For the very reason that the state of New York more than any other state has given encouragement to libraries and officially recognized them as educational institutions, we are invited to discuss this matter once more in the presence of the leading educators of the state. While it was always my desire to have this matter brought to the at- tention of the principals and superintendents present at a gathering like this, now when this desire has been realized, I almost fear that the one who has been chosen to speak on this subject is unable to present it sufficiently well. But with your kind permission, I will endeavor to bring before you the most salient points regarding the correlation and cooperation of library and school. The library is the school's natural ally, its complement and supple- ment; both are forces working to the same end, acting in the same direc- tion. The relation of the public library to the public school also is that of a large storehouse to the individual consumer. If the teacher is called the builder of the mind, the librarian can furnish the timber for its building. And since the library has the goods to offer, it is its duty to seek its customers. For this reason, I have always maintained that the librarian has to take the first step, indeed go half way and more than that to meet the teacher and his pupils. Hence you also can explain that the literature concerning the cooperation of library and school gives more evidence of the zeal of the librarian than that of the teacher. Teachers are naturally timid and with their inborn modesty will not readily ask for assistance at the library, and for this reason it is the librarian's duty to make himself fully acquainted with the curriculum from the kindergarten to the high school, m order to meet the first requirements of the school, which must consist in aiding the teacher's work in the daily lessons. The teachers should draw from the library all such books as bear upon the lessons in hand, make their pupils early acquainted with the fact that there is more knowledge to be had from books in general than from the text book alone. In this manner at a very early age, children can be taught that reading may be made useful to school work, which fact alone will lead the child to research, the basis of true scholarship. Under this 106 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 2$ head should also be mentioned early instruction in the proper use of refer- ence books, dictionaries, cyclopedias and indexes. This is the first func- tion of the library, to be helpful to the public school in its daily work. The second point under consideration must be the united efforts of library and school to lead young people to the best reading matter. Here the librarian alone can do but little. The teacher however knows more of the individual pupil in her school than the library official, who only occasionally meets him at the delivery desk. A word of advice and guidance is received with better grace from the teacher than from the librarian who, as young people believe, has no other duty than to give them what they ask for without criticism or comment. A great improvement in the general character of the reading of young people has taken place during the past years since the introduction of the regents reading courses. I myself have conducted several such classes, consisting of students from our schools as well as young people from our factories; and I have found that all of these young people have not only been benefited, but have really enjoyed the good reading which was so brought before them. Whether the credits were of some stimulus or not, is materially indifferent. The facts are these : the young people who have read these books together and discussed them, enjoyed them; and after reading them a large number have stated to me that they never sup- posed that good reading was such pleasant reading and that hereafter they will not read books of any other character. I am also very glad to see that the regents have introduced a course of historical reading, and I do firmly believe that classes in higher geogra- phy could be formed and be required to read selections from the very best books of travel. The school you see, has the functions to prepare our young people for the actual duties of life, for the duties of citizenship, for the high aspira- tion to an ideal manhood. You must admit that the lives of noble men inspire the average boy or girl to emulation, that the reading of books containing noble thought will reproduce in the mind of the reader high and noble thoughts, and noble thoughts will lead to acts unsullied by selfish- ness, will give to mankind a higher aim in life, and something better to strive for than the almighty dollar and ward politics. Good citizen- ship, noble manhood and womanhood will be the result of such training, and blessed will be the teacher who has sown the seed for such aspirations. The next step is obvious; after the teacher has made her pupils acquainted with the fact that the text book alone contains but meager in- formation, that there is an abundance of books which bear on the subject 1896J CORRELATION OF LIBRARY AND SCHOOL 107 taught in the class, some of the pupils will voluntarily read up and pre- pare their lessons from outside sources, and in this way the library will aid the teacher's work. There is one more step ; it is evident that pupils trained in this manner will be trained to investigate independently and will acquire that desire for knowledge which produces true scholarship and original research. This desire if properly cared for will never leave them, and the school having laid the foundation, they will continue to improve themselves when their school days are over. Such utilization of libraries by public schools is already found in many places in which there are either public libraries or school libraries. Boston has recently appropriated $10,000 for the purpose of making a more intimate connection between the public libraries and the public schools. Chicago makes it obligatory for public school teachers to visit the public library with their classes at least once every term. The New York free circulating library, the libraries of Providence, R. I., Worcester,. Mass., Yonkers, Jamestown, Glens Falls, and Gloversville have well organized systems of cooperation with the schools. Wisconsin which annually provides selected lists for its school libraries, has recently appointed a commission to aid in establishing and maintain- ing public libraries. In their circular they say, " There is not only a growing interest in the foundation of free libraries, but a provision to make those already established more helpful to the public schools." But after all, no matter how well selected the library is, no matter how zealous and enthusiastic the librarian may be, this alone will accomplish but little. Success will mainly depend on the part taken by the superin- tendent and the teachers in this cooperation of school and library. The best work of this kind, it seems to me, has been done in Glens Falls, where Sup't Williams has planned a complete course in literature and reading, running through the entire curriculum of 12 years. He insists that pupils shall read good literature in the schools, that good literature shall be read to them by their teachers, that they shall read good litera- ture at home, that they shall commit to memory and be drilled in the oral delivery of selections from good literature. Permit me to quote from the introduction to his course in literature : " Three years experience with the plan has produced better results than we expected." To his teachers Sup't Williams says, " You can do no more valuable work in school than to develop in your pupils a love for good reading." He also stated to me that he has frequently refused to promote pupils if the required amount of reading has not been satisfactorily done. io 8 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 The method pursued by the Gloversville library is simply this : the librarian attends teachers meetings, visits the schools as often as it seems advisable, specially those rooms to which the teachers invite him, believ- ing that his personal influence may do some good; the teachers also send to the library requests for books on certain topics, for which the librarian prepares special lists; the books are then held for the use of the children. Teachers are also permitted to take a number of books for the use of their classes, and these books are then circulated by the teachers just as if they formed a part of the school library. Classes of pupils visit the library accompanied by their teachers. During these visits, a topic is suggested by the teacher and the manner in which information on the subject may be gained from books contained in the library is shown and explained by the librarian, with special attention to the proper use of indexes, reference books and catalogues. While this work was always encouraged by the superintendent and he generally found most of the teachers willing to cooperate, yet owing to the fact that a course in read- ing and literature has never been included in the curriculum, the work probably lacks that strength and efficiency which it may have in Glens Falls. During the school year just closed, the 57 teachers employed in the various schools of Gloversville have used 1,200 books, 590 of which have been taken directly for their work, while the pupils have drawn during the same period of time, in addition to geneial reading matter, 645 vol- umes supplementary to their studies. As said before, the success of work of this kind will simply depend upon what use our teachers and superintendents will make of the library. I received from time to time letters in which enthusiastic librarians will ask the question " What can I do to rouse the teachers' interest and make them less indifferent to the home reading of their pupils and to the pos- sibilities of making the library useful in their daily work ? " My reply is, try to interest the superintendent and principals ; and for this reason, I welcome this opportunity to come face to face with the assembled principals and superintendents, the members of this convocation. And I would earnestly plead with you to give to this matter of cooperation of library and school your kind and serious attention. You will find that a word of advice and guidance from you will bring teachers in line in this important educational work. You will also find that the library officials will be ready to listen to your advice, be grateful for your suggestions and willing to cooperate with you. They will arrange their purchases of books in such a manner as to make their libraries useful to all classes and grades of schools. i8 9 6] CORRELATION OF LIBRARY AND SCHOOL IO9 I think the time has come when carefully planned cooperation of library and school will enter upon the curriculum of every school, and that there shall be no school, however small, in this state without access to at least a small library. In order to bring this about, I would humbly beseech you, and through you the regents, that at the next session of the legislature the University law be so amended as to include a comprehensive compulsory library law, similar to that of New Hamphshire (N. H. laws of 1895, ch. 118) with the additional provision that wherever the amount raised by tax does not exceed $10, or be not sufficient to support even a small library, such school district shall apply to the regents for a traveling library. These carefully selected traveling libraries will become powerful factors of public education in the state of New York. There has been as yet too little appreciation expressed for this benefaction introduced by our friend, the honored secretary of the University, and his efficient co- laborer, Mr Eastman, to whose zeal and activity the schools as well as the libraries of the state of New York owe a lasting debt of gratitude. I am also gratified to see that in the latest report of the department of public instruction, Sup't Skinner calls attention to this important coopera- tion of library and school. He says "When skilful teachers no longer consider it their chief duty to pour information into minds not always re- ceptive, but rather to stimulate and direct research into the history of human experience and observation, to quicken perception and strengthen the power to reason, then the existence and character of school libraries become matters of very high importance." With your kind cooperation and the cooperation of all the teachers of this land, the time will come when the schools will prepare our youth in due appreciation of the very best books, so that every child who leaves the school will be so imbued with the desire for knowledge, that after leaving school he will continue his studies. Then will the library become the true college, the true university of the people, and will, so to say, supple- ment the work well done in our lower schools. ON THE PART OF THE SCHOOL BY SUP'T JAMES A. ESTEE, GLOVERS VI LLE The X rays responded to the fiat " Let there be light." During all the ages past they have been literally a " light shining in darkness though the darkness comprehended it not." The analogy to the public libraries of the past and present is obvious. The Alexandrian library, containing from 400,000 to 700,000 volumes rich with the lore of India, Egypt, Greece and Rome, existed and perished no UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 at the hands of religious fanaticism, while thousands living within its shadow were not the wiser nor the better for its existence. The Pisistra- tan library of Athens, the Ulpian library of Rome were not in reality the property of the populace. The fall of Constantinople released the art and literature imprisoned in the Byzantine empire, and the intellectual and moral renaissance of the western world with its rich heritage for the present age was the result. The most valuable portion of the public libraries of the present time is a vaulted treasure, accessible cnly to the relatively few cultured minds who have learned the combinations of the safe. The value of a public library consists not in its possession, but in its use by the public. What- ever of enjoyment, refinement, culture and power it has in the past con- ferred upon the few is equally the privilege of all. Our system of public schools is the only agency by which the people can be prepared to use the literary wealth stored in our libraries, and if the teachers are equal to their present opportunities, an intellectual and moral awakening not second to that of the middle ages will be the result. Until the effort has been faithfully and persistently made, we shall never know how much can be accomplished in the way of u spiritualizing the lives of the people" by bringing them while children in contact with the best literature. It was formerly supposed that only a collegiate education could pre- pare a man to appreciate and utilize the resources of the library, but since only a small per cent of our students ever enter college, we must prepare them to pass from the public schools into the true university, as Carlyle terms the library. To accomplish this object, the students must be taught, not only how to read, but what to read, and to read, to read till it becomes a second nature, a part of life. The subject of English literature must be placed not at the last, but at the beginning of the curriculum of studies and be continued throughout the entire course, from the kindergarten to the classical diploma. The time is short in which to lay the foundation taste of a life time. It is the testimony of all who have engaged in this work that the antidote for the virus of immoral literature is prevention. Pernicious books are the food of idle minds and find no place where time, attention, and interest^ e early and healthfully employed. Every valuable book with which the young become acquainted is an unchangeable friend secured, and as "the mind sinks or rises to the level of its habitual society," let the children make friends only with those books which com- mand their respect, and the friends of their youth will be the friends of a i8 9 6] CORRELATION OF LIBRARY AND SCHOOL III lifetime. The problem of correlating the schools and the library can be solved only by so arranging and conducting the work of the schools that the library becomes an indispensable adjunct of every department. Out- line plans for the study of literature should be as thoughtfully prepared as are those for nature work and arithmetic. A certain amount will necessarily be generalized, but a portion should be specified and definite, while the courses in other subjects are such as to make an alliance with the library necessary. The interest of the teachers must be aroused to enthusiasm and every facility afforded for the successful prosecution of the work. Above all they must feel assured of respect and encourage- ment for original devices and methods, and furnished with ready informa- tion upon any subject. Earnest teachers will eagerly avail themselves of library aids in supplementing their class work pleasantly and effectively, in arousing interest and warding off apathy or indifference in their pupils; but, if a teacher has no use for the library either in her own interest or in behalf of her pupils, evidently she has no call to teach. Neither does this work afford occasion of display for a machine teacher — for one who worships system and forgets the child, for it is necessary to individualize the pupils, to study the tastes, environment, needs and possibilities of each. A teacher's success can not be estimated by the attitude of the bright adaptable pupils toward the subject, but by the encouragement which she gives to the indifferent, by her ability to create a desire for good reading where none existed or where home influences antagonize those of the school. The same winning tact which is an indispensable qualification of the successful music teacher is required in this work. Children will read as they sing, not because compelled to do so, but because it is a privilege and a delight. The cultivation of judgment and discrimination in the choice of books should characterize the entire course. No stereotyped system should preclude individual choice. A teacher should quote and teach from her favorite authors. She may ride her literary hobby if she be so fortunate as to have a good one. She will then serve her pupils not by her weak- ness but by her strength. Each pupil has a right within limits of right to select those books which are in harmony with his natural tastes and abilities. The benefits derived from a book or a course of reading are enhanced if the scholar be allowed the just satisfaction of having chosen to read it. It is a greater achievement to have inspired a boy to choose well for himself than to have required the reading of the same or even better. JI2 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 A girl in the sentimental haze, when all the world is to love or to be loved needs a sympathetic hand to guide her away from the quicksands of those novels which suggest a questionable morality, but which by some strange freak of public taste seem more acceptable at the present time than those which, like Black's Briseus, furnish the required sentiment in health giving purity. Beecher rightly said "The children are not so much to be taught as to be trained." To teach a child is to give him ideas — to train him is to enable him to reduce those ideas to practice. This is particularly appli- cable to library work. Children can not be expected to avail themselves spontaneously of library privileges, but they must be trained for it just as in the lower grades they are introduced to the subjects which follow in the higher. In the Gloversville schools the means employed for interesting the pupils in library work are as various as the ingenuity of the teachers may devise. Supplementary reading holds first rank among the influences which in our schools lead up to the use of the library. For this purpose suitable books are furnished by our board of education in sets of from 35 to 50 copies each, which touch upon almost every range of thought within the comprehension of the pupils. The number of sets is augmented year by year, and by exchange among the schools, new books and subjects are constantly read and discussed under the supervision of the teacher in regular class work. With these are introduced books from the library suggested by the school work, which are frequently used for sight read- ing, the more difficult portions being read and explained by the teachers. In this way interest and endeavor are stimulated and the children are led to appreciate and enjoy books which would seem beyond their com- prehension. Imagination is the key without which much of the best literature is a sealed book, and the guidance and direction of this faculty are a part of the early literature work. It must be made certain that the exercise of the imagination does not antagonize absolute truthfulness. They are elements in the chemistry of intellect, and though they may adhere, the one must rot alloy or destroy the other. The failure of parents and teachers to understand the relation between the two, has wrought con- fusion and terror to many an innocent child. Encouraged to draw on his imagination for games and amusements, he peoples his little world with brownies and animals of every clime, but, a "little older grown" and continuing the same mental process, he is suddenly arraigned before the bar of parental justice for having told an 1896] CORRELATION OF LIBRARY AND SCHOOL II3 untruth. The child can not explain and the parents fail to analyze or comprehend, and there results a mysterious alienation, all for want of a nicety of touch in adjusting the relationship between imagination and truthfulness. To correlate these is the first responsibility of the teacher when introducing fiction to a young child's mind. Recreation books are quite as essential as are books of instruction and are freely distributed in recognition of good conduct or tasks completed. School room museums are second only to supplementary reading as in- centives to the use of the library. These museums are furnished largely by the children with curios of all kinds brought from their homes or lent to them by their friends ; hence, they are constantly changing and give renewed interest and zest to the work of both teachers and pupils. They include marine specimens, petrified mosses and woods, curios of Japanese art, Chinese gods, gold and other ores, old coins, laces, china, old papers and books representing some of the earliest types of printing. Indian im- plements and foreign specimens ad infinitum. They serve as so many in- terrogation points and in classifying them and tracing them to their original homes in the earth, the air or the sea, in discovering their uses and the country or period to which they belong a large number of children's books upon natural science, adventure, travel and history are consulted and read by the children. Their window gardens, insect collections and well stocked aquariums still farther increase the demand. Frequently questions suggested by their nature or geography woik are placed on the board, and library books bearing upon the subject are dis- tributed among the children. They are shown how to use the indexes and readily learn to glean information from books other than their own textbooks. As an encouragement to home and recreation reading, in- teresting extracts or short stories are read and commented upon by the teachers, and the children mention for the others some of the most in- teresting books which they have obtained from the library and tell why they like them. Reproduction exercises and reports upon their home reading are given whenever requested. A teacher of the fourth grade states that during the year the number of pupils who take books from the library has increased sixfold, while the reading of second rate stories has correspondingly decreased. The demand for juvenile books which has been created by this feature of the new education, has resulted in large accessions to this department of literature, and the field is wide and rich from which to choose. For this reason the greater care is necessary in selection. ii 4 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 The " goody-goody " books are not limited to Mark Twain's Sunday school library, they are found among books of science for children, among mythological stories, children's classics and sometimes even in pseudo- temperance literature. They may apparently be all that could be desired, but recommendation fails to awaken any enthusiasm for them in the minds of the children. We wish books which do not preach but which teach forcibly and irre- sistably lessons in morality, each one of which contributes something towards the ultimate object of this work, the building of character. Only a writer who loves children, some special children perhaps, as a nucleus of the broader child love, can enter the "holy of holies" of a child's sympathy and affection. To compete successfully in the lists of authorship for children, the conditions are those required for entering the kingdom of Heaven. One must become as a little child, must see with the eyes of children, hear with their ears, with pulses bounding with their joy. Most of the really successful books for children have been tried on children in the process of their construction, have like Kingsley's Water babies or Little Lord Fanntleroy grown out of child life. Children of unvitiated tastes are good judges of literature for children, and to some degree, they may be permitted to select for themselves, pro- vided that while young they have none but the safe and best from which to choose. If each of the primary principals of this and other states who have had successful experience in this work were to furnish a list of those books which she had used most advantageously, and from these lists, those designated by a consensus of favorable opinion were selected, the nucleus of a valuable working library would be formed, to which accretions would be added from year to year by a continuation of test plan and the sur- vival of the fittest. The custom of teaching memory gems from standard authors is a fruit- ful source of library work, provided these " gems" are not separated from their setting. Preserve the association with the author, the poem, the time or the circumstance, and the gem will not get lost but will increase in value by leading to further search. The extract from Hiawatha affords illustration, where he Learned of every bird its language, . . . Talked with them whene'er he met them, Called them Hiawatha's chickens. i8 9 6] CORRELATION OF LIBRARY AMD SCHOOL In the choruses were given the chirps and songs with which Hiawatha's chickens answered his call and the association with the author was pre- served, whose portrait was before them framed in dainty flowers and grasses by the children. Pictures of the three little children who loved and were beloved by Longfellow were shown in connection with the Children's hour. While cultivating memory, the imagination and affections were stirred and Longfellow had a permanent place in each little heart. The logical sequence of this exercise was witnessed in one of the high school rooms. First was given an illustrated description of Longfellow's native place. Then a biographic sketch, followed by essays giving a history of the preparation and influence of his chief poems with the object which he had in view in their preparation, and an abstract of Evange- line. His prose works were discussed and selections from them given by the other students. The declamations and readings were from his works and a box of questions and comment was skilfully handled by one of the students. A brief summary of the lessons to be learned from the study of his character was illustrated by incidents connected with his home and student life and public career, showing his heart kindliness even under unfavorable or unjust criticism. In the preparation of these and similar exercises, not only are the works of the author called for, but works on American literature, magazine articles, literary criticism and correspondence. Exhaustive demands are frequently made on the library in similar studies of artists, statesmen or questions of public interest. For a time, declamations are selected from a specified group of authors, necessitating at least an inciting acquaintance with their writing, and specially with " those passages which have made some men immortal." They are also frequently required to glean the salient points from many authorities on a given subject, and with only a few notes to guide them, present an unwritten article for rhetorical exercises, after which the views of other students on the same or related subjects are given. The studies in English reading, English literature, composition and rhetoric are largely augmented by selections from the library, and the classes in ancient and modern history by reference to the different sources of information learn to weigh the value of differing opinions and to draw their own conclusions from contradictory statements. In the study of the natural sciences students are in constant consulta- tion with the books and periodicals of the library for the latest opinions of different authorities on the subjects under discussion and are conversant with the progress of scientific investigations, inventions and discoveries. Il6 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 A lyceum organized and maintained by the high school is also in con- stant communication with the library and reading room in the prepara- tion and presentation of its weekly programs and public debates. These are a few of the many methods employed for coordinating the work of the schools and the library. The question becomes not how may students be induced to use the library ? but how would it be possible to prosecute the different departments of school work without its aid ? Our high school students give evidence of the effect of this early train- ing in the lower grades. The use of the library is growing perceptibly from year to year and the classes which now graduate from the high school are better than ever before prepared to appreciate, appro- priate and assimilate the advantages still open to them in the library university. The new education has no more practical feature than this training. It brightens many homes; it forestalls desultory reading; it gives to the reading habit permanence and purpose; it lightens the tedium of class work and supplements the text books in every department, and in its reflex influence on the teachers tends to broaden their intellectual horizon. It is the most important as it is the most comprehensive in its results of any department of our work, for the most valuable portion of a man's education will be gained all through life by what he reads. In his later experiences other subjects are discontinued, the world comes to be bounded north, east, south and west by the interests of the counting room or office; higher mathematics has as fictitious a value as the co- efficient of x in an indeterminate equation and is summed up in the ledger. Without its higher significance, language comes to be parsed by the type writer, but if the best literature is the source of his taste, knowledge, habit and desire, it is within him a well of water, vivifying all the streams of life. i8 9 6] HOW TO DEVELOP INTEREST IN THE LIBRARY II 7 HOW TO DEVELOP INTEREST IN THE LIBRARY BY WILLIAM E. FOSTER, PUBLIC LIBRARIAN, PROVIDENCE, R. I. In what has already been said this morning, the possibility of making the collections of books in our public libraries an appreciable factor in the intellectual life of the community has been sufficiently shown. Obviously this will not be the result, however, where interest is absent, and where no lines of attraction seem to be operative between the books, on the one hand and the readers on the other hand; and it is therefore a practical question, for any of you to ask who find in your own communities so unfavorable a set of conditions as this, namely the question which has been assigned me to speak upon — " How to develop interest." This language has been chosen advisedly, rather than, for instance, " How to create interest; " and my purpose therefore is to emphasize the natural rather than artificial character of the methods to be employed. In other words, the librarian and library committee who feel the need of greater progress in the direction already indicated are not called upon to evolve materials out of nothing. They are rather to study the resources which they already have; and, having discovered their possibilities, to use them. I suppose that in all intellectual work, whether with libraries or schools, something analogous to force of gravitation in mechanics is constantly to be reckoned with and guarded against — namely, a tendency to regard the matter in an unintelligent, mechanical manner, scarcely con- ceiving of the individual reader or the individual book, but only of them both in the mass, precisely as one would speak of a thousand of brick. Now, the closer we get to a study of the individual, and to a choice of methods based on a knowledge of the individual— whether book or man the better we shall get on in this matter. I am convinced that too many occasions for interesting our readers in the contents of our libraries slip past us because we do not thoroughly know what is in ihem. Take this as a concrete illustration. A librarian of a small library receives in the mail one morning a letter from one of the library's most frequent benefactors, which reads as follows : " Being about to leave unexpectedly for Europe for an absence of many months, I send your library a dozen volumes of recent essays which I had hoped to have the pleasure of reading this summer myself.' 7 The librarian, giving a hurried glance at the backs of the books— " Critical Kit-Kats," " Retrospective reviews," etc. makes this mental comment : " Of course he meant well, but there is not a single book in the whole lot which our readers will ever touch." Three months later, some one belonging to a club which has taken up 1*8 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 the study of Cuba, states incidentally to the librarian that his own part in it is to be the poetry of Cuba, on which he has been disappointed to find so little, adding that if he could only find something worth while on Heredia, the greatest of the Cuban poets, he would feel a little consoled. " Of course that is out of the question in this library," he says, and the librarian assents. After three months more, as the librarian is moving some books from one shelf to another, one of these unappreciated volumes of recent essays (Mr Gosse's '-' Critical Kit-Kats,") opens unexpectedly, and, still more unexpectedly, lies open at an extended essay on Heredia. Conceive of the librarian's dismay at thus learning that, quite unknown to him, the very thing that had been most wanted had been in his hands all the while. Such an instance as this is typical. It shows the notable opportunities for developing and maintaining interest which are constantly slipping past, if one has not fully improved the opportunities existing. It shows what delightful surprises are continually in store for the librarian who, on the other hand, is able to put his finger on the very thing wanted, at the very time when it is wanted. Let me go further, and say a word in regard to small libraries. Let not those in charge of these libraries sup- pose that these suggestions are not for them. If the books are few, then so much more nearly can the librarian approach — approach, I say — to the always impossible standard of knowing them all — or, at least pluck- ing out the heart of their mystery. It may be that the library is partly composed of books no longer new. But I know an instance of a library which received a few years ago the gift of the George Philip 11 Atlas " of the world, published in London more than 40 years ago. For most pur- poses, this atlas is now entirely superseded, but a librarian who remem- bered that it was almost alone in giving so full, almost lavish, an allowance of space to some of the smaller West India islands, was able to delight a prospective traveller bound for Trinidad, by placing before him that island on a larger scale than he had dared to hope for. If, however, the first requisite in developing interest is that the librarian shall know his books, the second most certainly is that he shall know his public ; and the library methods which have a bearing on this phase of the subject are of two kinds — the general and the specific. Under the head of the general methods in reaching the public, are to be named the catalogue, the finding-list, the bulletins, etc. ; and the reference lists, whether monthly, weekly, or daily. Under the head of specific methods are those which take into account the lectures, concerts, plays, operas, etc., in the city or town; the study-clubs, university extension centers, i8 9 6] HOW TO DEVELOP INTEREST IN THE LIBRARY II 9 etc. ; the relation of the library to the schools, to the natural history museum, the art museum or art school, the local industries, and the departments of the local government, the press, etc. ; also correspondence with individual readers; and verbal conversation with them at the information desk. Now in looking at these two groups of methods in succession, let us take first the more general of the two, as being that which is capable of being put into operation at any or all times, and as not requiring the more intimate knowledge of individual conditions which will come later and with fuller opportunity for leisure. In the library, for instance, with which I am most familiar, it is a part of each morning's routine work to post on the bulletin-board references to some subject of current interest. As an instance, during the last week in May the newspapers are occu- pied with the festivities connected with the czar's coronation. Such a paragraph, after being cut from the newspaper, and mounted, has, entered below it, such references as these : For a plan of the city of Moscow, see Reclus's " Europe," v. 5, P- 393- 400.13.5 Murray's Handbook of Russia. A plan of the Kremlin and its immediate neighborhood is at p. 335 of Prime's " From the Alhambra to the Kremlin." 406.10 There is a striking view of the Kremlin, from a distance, at p. 130 of C. A. Stoddard's "Across Russia." 4067.40 The Cathedral of the Assumption is shown in Scribner's Monthly, v. 5, p. 669. 054.17.5 The crowns of the emperor and empress, respectively, are shown at p. 387 of Jones' " Crowns and coronations." 8021.48 The " Orloff diamond " of the imperial sceptre is described in chapter 10 of Streeter's " Great diamonds of the world." 6053.10 The coronation ceremonies of 1856 are described by Count Moltke. Those of 1883 are described in the May (1896) Century. 4067.26 So frequently has it happened, from the very first, that references on a subject like this — of universal interest — have only stimulated rather than satisfied the interest of the public, that many of these brief lists, prepared for a daily reference, are developed into the fuller and more inclusive lists for the monthly bulletin. The principle underlying this method and similar methods is that, " being precisely in the line of what is at the time uppermost in the thoughts of the public, it commends itself to their notice with more than 120 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 ordinary directness."" While, under ordinary circumstances the chances might be about one in 20 that a reader would make an effort to take out the books on the subject in question, under these conditions they are about one in 10, or even one in eight. These references are posted in the library in a place where they will necessarily be seen daily by a large number of readers. They are occasionally reproduced in the daily news- papers, where they come under the eye of a very much larger number of readers ; and later, as already stated, are printed with even fuller detail, in the library bulletin, which, going as it does, into the hands of many school teachers and others interested in directing the reading of pupils, young people and others, greatly widens the circle of influence. Nevertheless, widespread and effective as is the influence thus secured, it needs to be supplemented by the more specific methods ; for other- wise the library's efforts are " like using a rake with teeth too far apart," as I have had occasion to express it elsewhere. 5 I would urge therefore that the librarian should constantly make his conception of assistance to readers so definite and so specific, that in considering the use possible to any given book, he shall tiring of an individual reader rather than of read- ers in the mass. I have already tried to meet one very real objection which would be encountered by the small library in endeavoring to put these principles into practice. Let me touch on one which would at once present itself to the librarian of a larger library — namely that as the library grows larger, it becomes increasingly difficult even to meet and speak with the individual readers. This is a very real difficulty and it is one which we have successfully met in our own case (the Providence public library) by establishing what is known as the information desk. In this connection, we take occasion to reprint an account 3 of the in- formation desk, prepared more than a year ago : Information desk work is a development; not a creation out of wholly new materials. The underlying principles are familiar ones doubtless in most libraries, but the particular form in which the information de-k has developed in the library with which I am most familiar, has been the result of a recognition of certain difficulties and of the effort to meet them in the most effective manner. For instance, demands of the same kind which are now' brought to the information desk, have from the be- ginning been brought to the library; but it was formerly found that they came with a sort of " scattering fire" all along the line of clerks who a " Libraries and readers," Library Journal, 3:26, p. 51. b TJ. S. Com'r educ. rep't, 1892-93, v. 1, p. 990-91 3 A paper before the Massachusetts library club, by the writer Oct. 3, 1894. It is here reprinted from the Library journal, Nov. 1894, v. 19, p. 368-70. i8 9 6] HOW TO DEVELOP INTEREST IN THE LIBRARY 121 might happen to be in sight, in frequent instances interfering materially with the performance of their routine work. It was consequently a distinct gain to concentrate this upon one person whose exclusive duty it should be to supply this assistance. But not all the questions which were m the minds of the readers even, were asked under the former method. _ Long observation confirmed us in the belief that many readers were continually drifting in and diifting out again, without venturing to bring their inquiries to the notice of any of the clerks, all of whom seemed absorbed in routine work. As at present arranged, however, the position of the information desk is such that it necessarily catches the eye of every reader on enter- ing, and the cordial, interested reception which he receives almost invari- ably emboldens him to make known his wants. In establishing such a department in a library certain precautions need to be kept in mind. First, it would be obviously unfortunate if it should be interpreted as a proclamation of ability to answer any and all ques- tions. It is rather a tender of willingness to go as far in this direction as may be found possible. In our case we estimated at the beginning that about 10 per cent of the questions would probably be found insoluble, an estimate which has proved to be ludicrously in excess of the true amount. Secondly, it would be a most unfortunate result of this concentration upon a single clerk if it should have the effect of rendering the work an un- wonted or unfamiliar one to the remainder of the staff— a difficulty that would settle itself, however, by the necessity in every library of providing substitutes for the regular clerk at meal times, or during illness, or when called away from the desk for a longer search than usual, or when a "line" of applicants forms at the desk, requiring reinforcements to attend to them And, conversely, it would be equally unfortunate if there should be any possibility that questions should be answered by those incompe- tent to do so. One of the first requisites, in fact, in connection with this work, is the recognition of one's limitations, so that the light which one may be trying to furnish may not prove to be darkness. There must be a distinct understanding among all the members of the force on this point, so that a question recognized as "beyond the depth" of the one to whom it may chance to be brought may be appealed to a higher or still higher authority — to some one outside the library if need be. Once more, it would be unfortunate if the effect of this feature should be to encourage laziness in the reader. There is, however, no inherent reason why it should do so, and if the aim of the clerk in charge shall be, so far as pos- sible, to "help readers to help themselves," initiating them into the use of reference books and of cataloguing helps, it will not have this result. The demands which concentrate on such a point show a strikingly wide range, from asking for a time-table of Boston trains, to verifying the titles of books blindly named in 17th century wills, in connection with the printing of early records. Much use of the mails is involved, queries being thus received and also answered, both in the case of resident and non-resident inquirers. A part of the benefit of such a desk is, of course, in serving as a " steerer " to the reader visiting the library for the first time, attracting his eye at first, referring him to the registration desk, to obtain a card, with the invitation to come back afterwards for assistance in connection with* the catalogues, etc. An even greater benefit is per- haps that of breaking into the aimless attitude often characterizing a visitor, and, by answering questions in regard to the best books on a sub- 1.2 2 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 ject, or the best edition of an author, getting a reader started on a course where genuine interest compels his continuance. Nor is there less differ- ence in the extent to which the information sought is readily found, or the reverse While in some cases it is contained in some one of those indispensable tools which such a desk should have within reach, in other cases it is to be had only by going outside the limits of the library itself, in some book to be obtained either by purchase, gift, or temporary loan from some other library. Much of the work of such a desk results in this way, and thus performs the additional service of indicating some of the library's weak spots. An important share of the time of such a desk is occupied with more extended lists of references, whether in the shape of the daily or weekly lists on current subjects, or those prepared from time to time for study clubs or other classes. In general, it is safe to assume that a question on a. current topic, asked by one reader, will be worth answering m such a form as to serve for other readers who may subse- quently ask it. It is true that, for the clerk regularly at the desk, the in- voluntary action of the mind soon comes to serve the purpose of mentally " pigeon-holing " the information ; yet, particularly for the benefit of those who may temporarily fill the place, it will be worth while to put down in black and white the most of what is found by searching. In this connec- tion some sort of alphabetical index to the materials accumulated will be found almost inevitable, even if so planned as to avoid duplicating the various published helps of the Poole's Index type. Such a point in a library will be found to have many lines of con- nection with important and even widely separated fields. Besides those represented by the schools, university extension centers, and study clubs, some of the most obvious are the local industries, the local newspaper offices, the more advanced researches prosecuted by scholars either within or outside the local community, etc. It is obvious that work of this kind will have an important bearing on the library's collection of reference- books, necessitating the strengthening of the latter wherever a need is found to exist. Some indispensable requisites in connection with any individual who fills the position should be named. First, a marked facility, not only in "tracing," but in "pigeon-holing" the materials of a subject. Not infre- quently some of the most signal successes in answering an inquiry are by the use of what had been incidently observed when looking for some- thing else, but now remembered to good purpose. Second, an invincible hunger for thoroughness. The point of view of the true searcher is -that one can never come to the end of a subject. Third, a sort of sixth sense for accuracy. Fourth, unbounded tact. Information and assistance should be supplied where obviously desired, but if Mr Lowell should make application, he would not be met with officious instruction or explanations, but the information desk would be merely a channel through which he would obtain the books of which he would be the best judge. Tact also will enable a clerk at this post to keep steadily at work on the business in hand, and yet to keep an eye out, so to speak, for all casual readers, to see that they do not miss the advantage here to be gained. Lastly, there must be an utter absence of the perfunctory spirit. Here, as everywhere, work which is done from a love of the work counts for most. Not a little of the value of the service rendered at this desk is due to the manner as well as the matter — the bright face of the attend- i8 9 6J HOW TO DEVELOP INTEREST IN THE LIBRARY 123 ant in welcoming the inquirer, the evident and hearty interest with which the subject is taken up, and the quiet hospitality which puts the timid reader cit his Ccisc* It remains to say a few words in regard to the attitude of the public towards such help. The first and most emphatic feeling is probably that of surprise that the library should aim to supply help of so definite and comprehensive a nature. This initial surprise over, there is likely to be a constantly increasing utilization of the facilities afforded. The reason- ableness of the average reader is another interesting fact. When the information desk wjs first established in the library which I represent, it was more than once remarked: "What a lot of foolish questions you are going to have brought to you." But these anticipations have been strikingly wide of the mark, and nothing is so exceptional as a question of that nature. Sometimes, indeed, one has seemed to be coming to the surface, as when the question was asked — how many toothpicks are annually exported from this country ? but a few moments' conversation revealed the fact that the inquirer was a lumber dealer, and that the in- quiry was exactly in the line of his business. Another constant feature is the gratitude of the public. It has been repeatedly the case that the inquirer has wished to pay for the service rendered. It has then been necessary to explain that there would be no more appropriateness in tak- ing money for this service than for the issue of a book at the delivery desk. One is as much a part of the regular work of the library as the other. Sometimes, indeed, as was the case a few weeks ago, the grateful inquirer, determined not to be baffled, declares that there is nothing to prevent his sending his check to the treasurer, "for the general uses of the library," and does send it. Work of this kind is constantly developing in usefulness and scope, and it would be hazardous to set limits to its possibilities in the future. But the view which has just been presented of the possibilities of the information desk does not tell the whole story. The personal contact of the library officer with the individual reader is still needed after all else has been said and done.. In the word "vital," indeed, is the essence of the whole problem. It is not merely " the precious life-blood of a master spirit," coming in contact with the human lives represented in the readers of the books, but it is this contact brought about through the intervention of a human life and human interest on the part of the library officer. The library, in brief, at the point where it introduces the reader to the books must present a vital, not a mechanical aspect. It is entirely true that when in 1891 the feature of an information desk • was introduced in this library, it was thought of chiefly from the side of its possible usefulness, in the field of " the literature of knowledge." In that field indeed, it has been useful and effective far beyond the expecta- tions entertained in regard to it; but it is an instructive fact that, more and more, its beneficent agency, in the field of " the literature of power " 3 124 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 is coming to be recognized. It is along this line indeed that the library's strongest possibilities for usefulness lie in the future. Again the consideration of specific methods must take into account not merely the separate individuals, but the aggregations of these individuals in the shape of clubs, of schools, colleges, etc. ; of persons engaged in manufacturing, in the local industries ; of persons interested, we will say, in the bicycle, the camera, in wood-carving, or in some other nucleus of interest and study. Is it among the possibilities that these interests, innumerable and widely varied as they are, should not be connected by lines of interest with the contents of the library's collection of books ? It is incredible. But it is absolutely necessary that the librarian should know his collection thoroughly, in order to bring it to bear where it is needed. Indeed, one of the first things which a librarian, on going into a new pla£e, should address himself to the study of, is an exhaustive examination of the complex organization of his community. The direc- tory will give him a starting point, with its list of societies, organizations, etc., public or semi-public. But this will only serve to start him on the process, acquaintance with members of one organization leading to an incidental mention of some other and less public organization, and so on, until he has an approximately complete record of them all, alphabetically filed. He should then provide a u registry-book," in which, at the begin- ning of the season, all the local study-clubs (debating societies, university extension centers, reading-circles, etc.) shall have an opportunity to register their subjects for the coming season. We have already had occasion to notice with how much regret the librarian would find that he had failed to supply the one thing most desired, from failure to know the contents of the book; but it would be an almost equal source of regret if he " failed to connect" solely from failure to know what little knot of students wanted the material. So that if he has observed in the Engineering magazine in 1895, for instance, Mr Gilbert's interesting illustrated article on " The architecture of railway stations," it would be a pity not to be ready to supply a guide to that when the local high school debating society reaches the question of " Railway stations and their surroundings." In more than one locality, scattered throughout New England and New York, the local public library has come to be recognized as the natural local center of the community, around which revolve the local studies, the local industries, and all the various local interests of the town or village. Here, for instance, is the home of the local historical or antiquarian society; here also is the home of the local camera club; of 1896] HOW TO DEVELOP INTEREST IN THE LIBRARY 1 25 the natural history society; of the schoolmasters' club, etc. Why is this? It is because those in charge of the library have so thoroughly realized the fact that in a community the interests of all are the interests of each, and that while this is true of other institutions as related to each other — of the natural history museum, for instance, as related to the public schools — yet there is no one of them on which the lines of interest so invariably converge from all the others — as "all roads lead to Rome"— as is the case with the public library. The town of Brookline, Mass., is a somewhat notable instance of this. It is a community of about 15,000 people, almost entirely surrounded by the city of Boston. Gradually there has grown up around its public library (which now has about 40,000 volumes) a combination of almost all the systematic joint study lines represented in the place. The Brookline education society, which holds its meetings there, has among its sections one each on music, child study, history, reading, etc. There is one more point of view from which I would like to touch briefly on this subject, namely, the steps preceding the opening of any public library, taken in preparation for the opening of one. How shall we best develop interest in the community under these conditions ? Here the question is how most effectively to place before the community the possibilities of such an institution, still largely an unknown institution to the most of the community. Obviously, in thus proceeding from the known to the unknown, all possible agencies should be utilized which may tend to make the matter real to the people. If a public meeting is to be held, most certainly any speaker from abroad who is to address it should be one who has been in vital contact with the beneficent in- fluences of a well-directed public library and can speak feelingly and from first-hand experience with it. Both " sides " of this experience, so to speak, should be represented, if possible, in such a showing as this. That is to say, it will be well to hear, under such circumstances, not only from the librarian of a library which has been making a place for itself in the affections of a community, but from some beneficiary of the library's good offices, some teacher, for instance, who can speak from experience, not merely of what the library has aimed to accomplish, but of what it actually has accomplished in his own experience time and time again. In every such community, moreover, where no public library has as yet been established, there are at least many chances that it will contain some members —whether teachers or others — who, having been accustomed elsewhere to the benefits of a public library, can speak feelingly of the deprivation experienced on coming to a new community where none 126 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 exists. Such public spirited citizens will be among the best and most effective missionaries of the new movement. Your community more- over will constitute a rather marked exception to communities generally if you do not find the local press ready and willing to cooperate in all these measures, and to open its columns to testimonies such as I have instanced. Lastly, care and judicious attention will be needed when the library is fairly opened and during the first few months of its operation, until, in short, it is well past what may be called the " broken reed and smoking flax " period. If I were to be asked what is the most frequent occasion for failure or flagging of interest here, I should reply, " The too common practice of building and equipping the library first, and engaging the librarian second; " and thus relying upon the books, unaided, to present their effective influence upon the community. No mistake could be greater, as may be seen from those instances in which the well directed effectiveness of the librarian's personality has counted for so much. At the . outset, when novelty is a leading motive, much reliance may ap- propriately be had on the fresh interest of current periodicals, and of the latest published books ; but a' library which should remain indefinitely in this stage, as a chronic condition, would be like a child who has grown into manhood without abandoning his childish toys. Novelty, recreation, serviceableness, these three — all these are legitimate and appropriate aims, at some time in the development of a public library, but the third has a potency, in establishing the library in the deep affections of the community, to which the other two can never approach. At the end of 10 years it will be not so much the number of people whom the library's books have amused, as those who have found it capable of rendering them a real and most appreciated service, to which its officers will look with pleasure and satisfaction. It is sometimes a help to the understanding of an institution to resort to analogy ; and to say that in character or aim A is analogous to B. There is however a peculiar difficulty in selecting any other institution as one whose analogy the public library may be said to follow. We may turn, and naturally do turn, to the public schools, and we find in both, as common aims, a distinct educational purpose. Both also are free, as well as educational. But the public school is for but one portion of the com- munity — the younger portion, while the public library is for all — young as well as old — for those of limited knowledge and the more learned and accomplished alike. The public park suggests itself as analogous, but there are large portions of the community who not only do not use the T896] HOW TO DEVELOP INTEREST IN THE LIBRARY I27 parks, but have no desire to do so. Moreover, while the general tendency of a park system is towards the better sanitary condition of the city, the one idea distinctly uppermost in the provision of the parks for the people is recreation ; and in this it differs from the public library, where recrea- tion holds a decidedly subordinate place. There is perhaps a closer analogy in the case of the art museum. Some element of entertainment undoubtedly enters — and most properly — into the underlying purpose of an art museum, just as it does in the case of the public library, but the predominant idea is that of advancing the intellectual life of the com- munity. Both are among the great civilizing forces of our time, the art museum as containing within itself that which is best of the art of all time, and the public library that which is best of the literature of all time. And yet, while the public library is invariably free to the public, the art museum is so, as yet, only in exceptional instances. And so this analogy also fails to hold entirely good. The truth is — and it is a strik- ing testimony to the universality of the public library's influence — that it is sui generis, and stands alone in the extent to which it concentrates upon itself the lines of interest from all other centers of interest in the community. There is then a failure somewhere if those in charge of it fail to recognize these possibilities and not merely develop but maintain the interest of the entire community in its contents. Counsel for the librarian in this matter must, one might almost say, begin and end with this : study your books until you know the secrets of their contents ; study your community until you are sure that you know its needs, indi- vidually and collectively. Above all, study to see that the right reader secures the right book, and that the right book gets into the hands of the right reader. D scussion Mary Emogene Hazeltine — In an early volume of Sf Nicholas there is a picture of a procession of school-children marching in close ranks, carrying books and slates. This picture is not large but it reveals in perspective an array that is apparently endless, and in its suggestion is of wonderful power, showing as it does most effectively the number and strength of the school children of this country. The illustration represents the line as constant. But you and I know that in reality there are many breaks in this procession ; that whole bands are being discharged in some districts to join the great company of working people, that individuals drop out all along the line for this cause or that, while there are many that totally abandon keeping pace with their comrades from sheer want I2 8 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 of awakened interest, that comparatively few reach the high school, and fewer yet enter the colleges and universities. Teachers and schools do not and can not supply complete educational advantages. It is here that the library and the librarian come to aid the teacher and supplement the work of the school. The correlation of school and library has been ably shown, and it is not necessary that I should dwell longer on this point, except to say that the sooner the child learns the way to the library and is taught the use of it by the librarian or an assistant in sympathy with children, the more incentive there is for good school work. The young people gain a knowledge of books as a whole, not the fragments that they find in their text books, and the true students among them are thoroughly roused and inspired to future study. The scholar that is indifferent and goes to school only under compulsion and hopes to get out of it the easiest way, finds that he has many a com- panion and friend in the books at the library. Best of all, those that must become wage earners at no distant day have learned the way of self in- struction. The free library is the people's university. It is the librarian's work to bring the people to this university and to show them their inheritance. The librarian, as has been said, must know his community. He must lead in its ways and unfold to the people other lines of thought and raise them above themselves. If it is a manufacturing community in which he is working, books must be supplied concerning manufactures, books on textile fabrics, books giving designs and color values as well as books on machines ; if it is an iron region, books must be provided on the iron and steel industries, not only technical books for those far advanced in their profession, but books for beginners, that the boys who enter the mills at an early age may study and learn to be superintendents, leaders in their departments ; books on shoemaking and leather must have their place in the library if it is a shoe manufacturing district; if it is a literary com- munity, books must be supplied on subjects that lead out in literature, in art, in music. More than supplying the books for the community, the librarian must bring the people to the library. As has been said, he must not wait for the people to come to him, he must prove to them that it is their property and for their use. Personal work must be done, and till the city becomes too large, much can be done if the librarian is willing to go out among the people. He must be willing to be stopped on the street and asked whether he has such and such a book. We hardly expect a merchant to be stopped and asked if he has goods of such a character and how much HOW TO DEVELOP INTEREST IN THE LIBRARY 129 it is a yard, but the librarian must expect it. He must know his books. Somebody will ask, " If I come to the library will you give me 's book on birds?" "I am sorry, but we have not that book; however, if you will come I will give you something that will answer your purpose just as well" or "We have that book and if you will come I will get it for you." When the artisan who is laboring with a gang of workmen finds trouble with a tall chimney that he is building and, leaving work and workmen, comes to the library to see if he can find a book on the subject of drafts in tall chimneys, special pains must be taken that he shall find what he wishes without loss of time. The house painter who comes to find a book on color that he may know how better to combine his colors, or the one who wishes to know a few more designs for sign painting, must have special attention. The merchant who wishes to do artistic advertising can be helped with the plates of Scotch plaids that he may advertise plaids by their proper names, and with other things in his line. Then there are the masses, people who do not wish help in any special direction but who need culture, who need to be brought to a knowledge of what there is in the fulness of life for them. These must be awakened. And how shall we awaken interest in the community ? How shall we bring to people this knowledge of their needs ? for alas, few people know that they need what we have for them. First, we depend on the school children. We work with them personally, and the next generation is coming without very much urging. But in the present generation the children will bring their parents. Many a time a father comes to the library and says, "My boy has had books here and I would like some for myself." Or a mother says, " My daughter or son has had books ; can I not get some for myself?" We depend much upon the children to interest and lead the parents, so that we can truly say the child is father of the man. In smaller libraries we depend on the local papers. If necessary we do our own reportorial work, writing up our books for the news columns. If we have not many new books to offer from time to time we write up our old ones, books of travel, delightful summer journeys or European trips; books dealing with topics of the day, Cuba, money, politics ; books on birds, or flowers ; anything that we think may interest and reach some one. The papers are always glad to help. Many lines of industry are represented in our busy manufacturing city. Because I can not go personally to the factories, as I can to the schools and meet the operatives, cards giving information concerning the library X^O UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 are posted in conspicuous places throughout the mills. In headlines of black and red we tell them that the library is for them, that we have books for recreation, books on their special subject, and that we have a free art gallery. These cards of information are also in the post office and in the hotels. When study clubs or university extension centers are organized, we make it a point to meet once with them and bid them welcome to all that we have ; frequently we order special books for them, if we have not what is needed for their work. We give to each member preparing a paper special help in the use of magazine indexes, and other reference books. Then we arrange for special attractions. We have an art gallery, not large but well selected, which is always a source of interest, and helps very much in bringing the people to us. In May we had on exhibition for two weeks the water color collection of F. Hopkinson Smith, which brought 3600 people to the library. It was a great inspiration to artists and awakened interest in many directions. At the time, we kept in a special case, free of access, books on art, color, designs, etc., also books on Hol- land, Venice and Constantinople, for the paintings were sketches from these countries, and many made selections from this case for their home reading. With the collection came a large and artistic signboard, of which several sign painters of the city took special note. During the winter, several young men had read and examined all that we had on architecture; they came many times to study the wonderful archi- tectural effects that Mr Smith gives in his pictures; mosques with all their details, Venetian palaces, the perspective of the canals, the towers and buildings of Holland. We are planning to circulate pictures, as they do in other libraries, among the schools and among people that have very little in their homes. We already circulate copy plates for the artist, doing all that we can for art because of our gallery. So I might enumerate numerous ways that we have of arousing inter- est. The possibilities of a library are excellent. The opportunities of a librarian are unspeakable. It is missionary work; it is as truly missionary work as anything that has ever been undertaken and, were there time, I could tell you how librarians are trying to be foreign missionaries, not to other countries but to communities near them. This afternoon you have a study of ways and means whereby city and union school systems can relieve rural schools. Librarians are studying that question too. How can a larger library aid a smaller one ? in buy- ing and selecting books, and in placing those books properly in the library. There is a neighborhood cooperation among the libraries like j8^6] state guidance of reading 13 1 that that you are trying to have among the schools. Personal aid is given by the librarian of the larger library to the librarian of the smaller one and patrons sent from the one receive special attention at the other. Library work is a work of peace. It is giving much to people that have little, and endeavors to ennoble and elevate their lives. It is for the poor and for the rich. It is for the beginner and the college gradu- ate, for the artisan and the student, and in days to come, when the branches of education in New York are given as primary, secondary, collegiate and special, we hope that the libraries will be added; that the list will read, primary, secondary, collegiate, and special libraries. For it is the librarian's purpose to aid in all branches of education, and besides, to gather in and help those that must fall from the ranks at 14 years of age and in aiding them, to aid the great cause of education. Prin. Fred Van Dusen — Perhaps I was asked to take part in this discussion because I am a fair concrete specimen of the correlation between the school and the public library, having to fulfil the duties of both principal and librarian. There has been an impression in the past that the University of the State of New York was a sort of myth, a sort of unreality partially realized, or at best a tormentor of innocents three times in the year. I wish to refute that notion and say that I know it to be true that the connection between this University of the State of New York and all parts of the state is vital. The life and the energy which has its origin at this place and in the brain of our honorable secretary pulses and throbs through every part of the state of New York. Up on the northern confines of the state we have felt the impulse and we have accomplished something. We have established a beautiful library plant which may be valued at about $50,000. The particular point on which I should like to speak this morning is one that has been briefly referred to in some of the excellent papers; that is, the work of the university extension clubs. It is well known that it is the library department of the University which is fostering the organiza- tion of these clubs throughout the state. It has been my privilege to assist somewhat in the organization of clubs of that kind in the city of Ogdensburg, and I think the movement is one of great importance in connection with the public library. It is enough to say that an organiza- tion of 25 of the most cultured ladies of our city was formed a few years ago and that they have done excellent work in preparing papers on the art, literature, sociology and history of Great Britain. Since that time there has been another branch organization of 25 younger ladies, and 132 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 during the past year they have also been doing splendid work. The night before last in addressing the alumni association of my academy I suggested that more work of that kind should be done and that it would be an admirable thing if the graduates of that school should organize a branch in the name of the school during the coming year. That sug- gestion was taken up with a great deal of enthusiasm, some of the ladies asking if it would be necessary to wait till fall before they could begin this work. I have never felt a greater pride in the Empire state and in the University of the state than when I found that these clubs could avail themselves of the choicest literature, the finest collection of books that could be had in the market, for the particular line of work which they had laid out. I hope that this university extension movement is spreading over all the state, for there is a grand possibility for good work in this direction. Prof. John F. Woodhull — It is apparent that the librarian should be a most thoroughly educated person as well as a man of affairs and should possess a very congenial personality. I wish particularly to speak of the first point. The librarian needs not only a very liberal supply of general information but a very thorough and complete education. He or she has the opportunity of doing what we teachers in the classroom wish we could do: meet our pupils as individuals and give them the personal help they need and not be obliged to stand before a class of 50 and talk to them as a class. The librarian has better opportunities to teach and more kinds of teaching to do than any other one teacher in the town. I believe the time is coming when that will be recognized; when the librarian will be selected with greater care and will receive the greatest salary of any one educator in the place. I know of one college library, where such a person is now in demand, where it would be possible for a librarian to become the most influential member of the faculty of that college, and what is true of college libraries must be true I am sure of city and town libraries. The librarian should be the missionary of education to the citizens. Sec. Melvil Dewey — Some of you may remember that when I came here eight years ago I said to you that I was a librarian because I had devoted my life to education, not at all that I would come into the regents office because I was a librarian. I have taken an intense interest in this development, and as time allows I would like for a few minutes to call your attention to what has been done in New York. Few of you realize how much we have already accomplished and to know it !8g6J STATE GUIDANCE OF READING 133 may stimulate you to more active cooperation. As a matter of fact, New York state stands to-day in many respects at the head in what it is doing for the public library movement as a distinct factor in education. It was the first state or government to recognize the library as an institution of higher education, to give the representatives of the library a seat in the University convocation, and in all respects to recognize the library as just as much a part of the educational system as the college or academy. In our laws there is not only this recognition but also provisions broader and more comprehensive than those of any other state, which are being copied by state after state. In our appropriations we lead all other states. It is possible to have laws and do nothing for lack of money, and it is possible to have appro- priations and secure inadequate results. We have now in this state for various library purposes $121,900 a year. No other state approximates even remotely this amount, and that does not include the large sums given to our various law libraries scattered throughout the state. First, there is the appropriation for the state library, $22,900 for administrative purposes, $15,000 for books, $3500 for the state medical library; $25,000 for the public libraries division the work of which ramifies throughout the state; and $55,000 given to the state department of public instruction and made available by the law of two years ago for introducing the traveling library principle. I hope we shall hear from Mr Skinner of the work they have now organized in that department with its great possi- bilities in making available to every teacher in the state of New York the best books without expense. The leadership of New York is recognized not only in laws and appro- priations, but in methods. There is no other state that gives so much promise for the future, and best of all, there is no other state achieving to-day so much in results. Our good neighbor Massachusetts has justly the reputation of doing more for public libraries than any other section of the world. 97 per cent of all their population is supplied with public libraries. There is hardly a township in the old state, even back in the mountain towns where the farms have been deserted, that is not provided with public library privileges. Yet it was a great pleasure to me the other day at the meeting of their state association to hear a half dozen leading members say, " Whatever Massachusetts has done in the past and whatever it does now, it is to New York that we must look for the most advanced views and the most active work in promoting the public library interests of the country." 134 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 Now as to the work that we are doing. The building of the state library, more than doubling the hours of opening, making it available not only to the citizens of Albany but to all parts of the state, the great in- crease in the number of volumes, all that is interesting, but not so signifi- cant to you as some of the other features. We have the Library school, the first of its kind in the world, which is copied widely and is each year growing stronger. Its standards of admission have been raised steadily and it is not only drawing students from every part of the country from Maine to California, but some from abroad, and is sending them as mis- sionaries of the library and the book to almost every state in the Union where they are working in a spirit of which you would all be proud. We have, most significant of all, the public libraries division. Several states have public library commissions, serving without salary and doing excellent work in giving advice, but we alone have a distinct department, well organized, well manned and actively at work. A dozen people are working throughout the year with enthusiasm and intelligence and with the best results in the interests of public libraries in the state of New York. Nearly 300 libraries are traveling from one part of the state to the other, inspiring an interest in the best literature and doing a work such as has never been done so effectively anywhere in the world for the same amount of money. Compliments are pleasing in regard to these things, but they weigh very little compared with imitation. A number of the most prominent states in the Union are copying our system. I have in mind two that have recently taken not only our ideas and our methods, but our blanks and cases and lists of books, striking out the words New York and substitut- ing the name of their own state, with our entire approval and consent, in that way utilizing our labors for these other states. Pennsylvania is doing this ; Michigan, Wisconsin, and a half dozen other states have had samples of our libraries and have taken up this means of providing public libraries more widely and at much less expense than by any other method hereto- fore devised. Many people forget that it is not enough to be full of enthusiasm for these matters. The first thing in the enormous body of literature before us is to let people know which are the best books. It is a hard problem in a great library of more than 300,000 volumes, a quarter million manuscripts, etc. when a man comes in and wishes information on any subject — information or inspiration, whatever it maybe — to give him the book or the pamphlet or the article that then and there and to him will be most useful. It is an infinitely hard task, and if we can not wholly accomplish it we must approximate it. !8g6] STATE GUIDANCE OF READING 135 First is the selection, and for that we have specially trained assistants who select lists for study clubs,, extension courses, schools and other purposes. We are sending thousands of these little lists throughout the state ; and also outside the state, but not at the cost of New York tax- payers. After a list has been made, there is no extra cost for making it available to people outside who pay the cost of the printer's bills, and we are sending these sometimes by the thousand outside the state to those who pay the cost of printing and presswork. There is a great work being done in this way. So we have this great problem of making the state's books available to all parts of the state, not alone to the gov- ernment in the capital or in large cities or towns, not alone in the little communities that take our traveling libraries of 100 or 25 or 50 volumes, but under certain simple restrictions we are sending the individual book to any citizen of this state if he is in the remotest corner and earnestly desires to read the best books. The state will help him and that book is a part of its educational system. But finally and most serious of all, you must not only select and supply these books but you must make the people read them. You may lead a horse to water, but you can not make him drink. I have felt all these years that that is the greatest problem of all. We may have laws and appropriations and methods, but the problem is to make our boys and girls and our men and women anxious to read this literature for which we have made so abundant provision. If a man intended to build a house and did not wish to be bothered with every real estate agent in town and every man that had a speculation in his mind, he would not advertise that he was very anxious to pay $20,000 cash for a house, but he would look quietly to see if he could find just such an establishment as he needed. The regents, who have been warmly interested in this, have not advertised on the treetops that they were looking for a man to ,pay a salary to, but have been looking very closely all these years to find a man who from natural gifts, from education, from tastes, from being full of this . missionary spirit, would give his life to the problem of giving the state of New York justly the reputation of reading more good literature to the acre than any other place on the planet. That is an extreme statement; but will you tell me any reason why the Empire state with its great wealth and its magnificent educational system should be content with anything less ? . I think that our sober thought will say that it is not too much for New York to have before it this high ideal of being known as reading more good literature than any other section; and it is a great delight to me to say that after seven or eight years of 136 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 looking, we believe we have found a man for this particular work. He has been appointed under the title of literature inspector, and his problem is to use our 640 secondary schools, with their courses in English and American literature, modern foreign literature in English dress, the ancient classics in English translations, and their general reading courses, which are constantly branching out, in a way they have never been used before in developing this taste for literature; and not only that but to work also through our public libraries division and through the state library and study clubs springing up all over the state, through all these agencies that in this state are peculiarly adapted to this purpose. This literature inspector will have these facilities all before him like the tools of a master workman, while the regents say to him, " Your problem is to make New York known as reading more good literature than any other section." It is a pleasure to know that we have with us to-day Prof. Richard Jones of Swarthmore college, who from his training at home and in foreign universities, from his work in literature and from his work with his classes we believe, after careful inspection, to be the best man in the United States to do this particular work. Mr Chancellor, I think convocation will join me in asking you to insist that Prof. Jones shall say a few words to us on this subject. Inspector Richard Jones — I was asked to stand before you this morning in order that we may become acquainted. But I was also asked not to say anything; at least not to say much of anything, because there would not be time. 1 may, however, say a personal word. I left the chair of literature in a beautiful little Quaker college, a chair of literature which was in many ways an ideal college professorship, be- cause I was persuaded that here in this great state of New York there is a large work which I may possibly be able to do. It was hard to leave the friendships formed in the little college, and I shall ask your sympa- thetic cooperation and your advice that I may be able to some extent to do the great work to which I have been called. I want to commend most heartily some of the words spoken by Mr Lamed in his paper. What literature shall we read ? I was told by the librarian of one of the Philadelphia libraries that one of the public school teachers in the city of Philadelphia sent to him young ladies from 15 to 16 years of age to read Boccaccio's Decameron. It seems to me that that was a great mistake. In the history of literature Boccaccio's Decameron is a classic, but it is not the classic, as I believe, to be read by young ladies from 15 to 16 years of age. What literature shall we i8 9 6] STATE GUIDANCE OF READING 137 read ? Robert Burns is a classic, but I for my part would not ask a class to read his Jolly beggars. I will not enter upon the discussion of art for art's sake and the relation between beauty and truth, but will only express my conviction that the divorce which is sometimes felt to exist between beauty and truth is found to exist only in second-rate literature and second-rate works of art in general. The great literature, the great works of art, I believe do not contain this divorce. It is true that he who advo- cates art for art's sake may say that the great poet did not intend to produce a sermon, and yet, happily, whether he was conscious or not of it, his work is a great moral teacher. His ethical sense may have been an in- stinct, not an intention; an intuition, not an allegiance to moral law. Yet, happily, so true is his instinct, and so unerring is his intuition that he has enshrined by means of beauty a moral truth, and his work is a guide to conduct. I know very well a professor of literature, a noble- minded woman, who asks the young ladies in her charge to read the works of a certain famous French novelist who describes sin in a realistic, not to say an atrocious manner. She asks her young ladies to read the works of Zola, to read Nana. Her theory is, forewarned, forearmed. But I can not believe that the advice of this noble-minded woman is wise. Zola describes sin too minutely, too sympathetically, too sensu- ously. It is true that he gives in a few insignificant pages at the close the retribution also. But it is the sin that lives on in the mind of the reader, the description of the sin and not the few pages of retribution. How different is George Eliot in Adam Bede. Here the sin is hardly mentioned, but the retribution burns itself into the minds of her readers forever. At the international art exhibition in Munich, Germany, in 1892 I saw a magnificent painting which covered one side of a large room. Its subject was the destruction of Babylon. After a night of revelry and debauch the king and his drunken consorts are lying in drunken slumber. Here is Darius with his army entering the city in the dim early morning light. Some of the revelers are still asleep. Others with terror-stricken eyes are gazing at the oncoming doom — a striking theme portrayed by a master wielder of the brush. Sin, retribution, the subject-matter of great art. This ought to have been a great painting. Why is it not ? Because the artist painted the sin too sympathetically, too sensuously. The French artist, like the French novelist, took more pleasure in describing the sin than the consequences thereof. He would be an artist, not a mor- alist, but, unhappily, his work comes short of greatness as a work of art because it does not teach a moral lesson. Therefore, this painting, which UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 might have been an immortal teacher of righteousness, was, in my opinion, a teacher of vice. How different a conception of literature is this from that of the Colorado millionaire who on being asked what a painting he had bought represented, replied, "That painting, frame and all, represents nigh on to $750." This artistic critic said he had a friend, a poet, visiting him. " Why," said he, " he composes by the hour and produces things that sound beautiful, but," said he, " there is no sense in them. Why, it is nothing in God's world but just literature.' 7 But I am happy in the belief that those who know the most about the world's great literature look upon that which has no sense in it as anything in God's world except literature, literature which in the words of Carlyle is the Thought of thinking souls; in the words of Lowell, is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and imagination, to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moments j which enables us to see with the keenest eye, hear with the finest ears and listen to the sweetest voices of all time ; literature through which, as our commissioner of education, Dr Harris, has said, " the genius of the race appearing in exceptional individuals instructs the multitude, educates man's insight into the distinction of good from evil, reveals to him his ideals of what ought to be, and elevates the banner of his march toward the beautiful good and the beautiful true. Fellow teachers, I ask-your advice and your cooperation that I may not fail in this great work which you have honored me by asking me to do. Prin. J. E. King — Let me express my personal gratification and my gratitude to the regents and their representatives for the wisdom and value of this convocation program. Several of us have noticed that they have been massing their subjects. Yesterday afternoon science was hav- ing a field day. Our thoughts were in one direction in which color, argument, reasons and methods were held within our gaze. This morn- ing, to our advantage and pleasure the library is at the front, and I am sure that of this company of teachers and educators there are very few but have felt their souls stirred as well as their intellects awakened as we have confronted this missionary aspect of the library. In contemplating the far-reaching consequences of this revival of the library, this discovery of its power and this purpose to spread its usefulness among all people, I have felt a kindling of hope and a swelling *of soul akin to that which I have experienced sometimes spiritually when I have confronted the aspect 1896] STATE GUIDANCE OF READING 139 and the effort of Christian ministers, and self-sacrificing missionaries wish- ing to evangelize the world. One gentleman said that it was obvious that the librarian of all men should be a cultivated and educated man. I am gratified that the regents have called to the front to-day representa- tive speakers who are fitting object lessons of what typical librarians ought to be, — educated, cultivated people who are competent to instruct. I have been sitting at their feet with gratitude and with very much pleasure. Dr Noah T. Clarke — Dr King has stolen a little of my thunder, but if you will let me have the rest of it, all right. I was about to express my congratulations to the secretary of this board that he has lived to see the fruition of so much of his labor. I remember there was in an older time a venerable scholar who used this expression : u Reading maketh a full man," and I think we have lived to see that statement verified, and if he had added " woman," very much verified. But I think we might put a new construction upon that old saying of Lord Bacon's, and write the word "fool," "Reading maketh a fool man," and has made hosts of those among us to-day, both men and women. I am glad to see this movement put in force because I think it will straighten out that spelling and bring it back to its true form. When you think of such books as The heavenly twins and a Lady of quality appearing at the rate of 100,000 copies in three months (and who reads them?) I wonder if reading does not make a fool man, and specially a fool woman. There is no difficulty about books. The world is full of them ; there are too many. The very object, as I understand it, of this movement, is to make a distinction and to cut in two this great volume of reading and restore the good old reading to its place and increase the number of its readers. " Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, writing an exact man." Look at the New York World for instance, whose issues reach nearly 400,000 copies a day. And who reads it for the truth it contains ? Reading is not new. When the early settlers came from Massachusetts into western New York they established public libraries before they established churches. I have in my possession one volume of the old town library which was organized within 12 months after our ancestors settled in the western forests of the Genesee. You, all remember the history of the library work set on foot years ago in this state, by James Wadsworth of Geneseo, who put a free public library into every school district in the state. The Harpers published the libraries, and for many years they furnished most of the reading matter of those districts. These libraries have nearly all disappeared. I do not 4 140 UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK [June 25 know that any of them are now in use. And yet after all they sowed a good seed which has been growing and ripening and bearing fruit, as can be seen in this more exact system which Sec. Dewey has for some years been working out and which now is so largely extended throughout the state. I have only this fear. Do not organize too much. You can lead a calf to the water but you can not make him drink. You have to create a taste for genuine books. It must, after all, spring up in the family and in the early life of the child and largely before the child goes to school. The child is not going to wait for the public library to become ■a. reader of public library books. I know a little fellow who before he was seven years old was delighted with Tennyson's poems and could read them as expressively as he ever will. I am very glad to see this movement and I hope the secretary will go on and that the man who is to succeed him will work it out in detail and that we shall all see a line drawn between the good and the bad stock, and that the readers of the coming generation will be readers of good literature. I hope that they will be inspired with good words, good thoughts — good and truthful pictures of real life that tend to make men and women better — and emphasize the truthfulness of that trite aphorism " Reading maketh a full man " — full of all that is good and true, of that which is lovely and of good report, full of the great fundamental facts and of the best types of human life — all the better because they are true. Prin. Marcellus Oakey — I think that the regents might reach out a little further in their supervision of the libraries of the state and see what they can do for our Sunday school libraries. L. O. Wiswell — I have not immediate charge of the teachers' library to which reference has been made. I may say however that a catalogue has been prepared for distribution and it is possible that quite a number here present have already received copies. It is only a few days since distribution was begun. This library is intended primarily for the teachers of this state and the books are lent freely. I might add a word of explanation. If you receive a copy of the catalogue, which contains more than 1000 titles, you will find directions as to the proper procedure in making application. Upon application, the book will be sent to the teacher and he or she may have the reading of that book free, paying only return postage; or if a teacher wishes to retain a book he may return its price which is considerably below the regular list price. This library will be of great value to those who have not ready access to public libraries and are not brought into contact with these enthusiastic 1896] STATE GUIDANCE OF READING I4 1 librarians. Such persons are thus offered assistance which from their isolated situation they would otherwise be denied. Teachers are ex- pected to do a great deal in the way of promoting the reading of good literature, and I must say that in listening to some of the words that have been uttered this morning my heart has vibrated in unison with the sentiments that have been so eloquently presented. There is a great work for us to do, and yet it can not be done by sitting and wishing or simply being enthusiastic over the matter. We should begin at the begin- ning; and if so, we must begin with the little children. I am not sure that the teachers as a whole are ready to make the most of the suggestions that have been offered. One of the first things they need is preparation. Can you interest a little child? How are you going to work to do it the first year, the second year, the third year? What material will you use and how will you present it? There are problems to be studied, but I have considerable hope of the future. After listening to the gen- tleman who is to have charge of this work under the direction of the regents, the outlook appears hopeful indeed. It is the intention of the superintendent of public instruction to issue helps in presenting the sub- jects of literature and reading for the use of teachers under his super- vision. The matter is not ready for distribution as yet but will be probably by the beginning of the new school year. We all ought to work together, the lower and the higher, to uplift the community in which we live.