A Book for All Readers Part 16

5. Dictionaries, cyclopaedias, statistical annuals, and other books of reference will be needed in abundance.

6. A small but select number of approved works in law, medicine, and theology should be embraced in the library.

7. I need not add that the poets and novelists should be well represented, as that goes without saying in all popular libraries.

And special attention should be paid to building up a collection of the best books for juvenile readers, such as have pa.s.sed the ordeal of good critical judgment among the librarians, as eminently fit to be read.

There are several useful catalogues of such reading, as: Caroline M.

Hewins' "Books for the Young," G. E. Hardy's "Five Hundred Books for the Young," and the admirable "List of Books for Girls and Women" by Augusta H. Leypoldt and Geo. Iles, contributed to by many experts, and copiously supplied with notes describing the scope and quality of the books. The last two are published by the Library Bureau.

With this broad equipment of the best books in every field, and vigilance in constant exercise to add fresh stores from the constantly appearing and often improved text-books in every science, the library will be a treasury of knowledge both for teachers and pupils in the schools. And the fact should not be overlooked, that there will be found as much growth for teachers as for scholars in such a collection of books. Very few teachers, save those of well-furnished minds and of much careful reading, are competent to guide their scholars into the highways and byways of knowledge, as the librarian should be able to do.

To establish a relation of confidence and aid with teachers is the preliminary step to be taken in order to make the library at once practically useful to them and to their scholars. In case there are several public schools in charge of a general superintendent, that officer should be first consulted, and tendered the free aid of the library and its librarian for himself and the teachers. In some public libraries, the school superintendent is made an _ex officio_ member of the library board. Then suitable regulations should be mutually agreed upon, fixing the number of books to be drawn on account of the schools at any one time, and the period of return to the library. It is most usual to charge such books on teachers' cards, or account, to fix responsibility, although the teachers loan them to the scholars at their option.

In places where there are no school libraries proper, the public library will need to provide a goodly number of duplicates, in order to meet the special school demand. This, however, will usually be of low-priced rather than costly books, as the elementary text-books do not draw heavily upon library funds.

A very attractive feature in providing books for the young is the large number of ill.u.s.trated books now available to all libraries. All the kingdoms of nature are depicted in these introductory manuals of science, rendering its pursuit more interesting, and cultivating the habits of observation of form and of proportion, in the minds of the young. Pupils who have never accomplished anything in school have been roused by interest in ill.u.s.trated natural histories to take an eager interest in learning all about birds and animals. This always leads on and up to other study, since the mind that is once awakened to observation and to thought, needs only a slight guidance to develop an unappeasable hunger for finding out all about things.

The ancient maxim that "it is only the first step that costs" is especially true in the great art of education. It matters little what it is that first awakens the intellect--the great fact is that it is awakened, and sleeps no more thenceforward. A mottled bird's egg, found on the way to school, excites the little finder to ascertain the name of the bird that laid it. The school or the teacher supplies no means of finding out, but the public library has books upon birds, with colored plates of their eggs, and an eager search ensues, until the young student is rewarded by finding the very bird, with its name, plumage, habits, size, and season, all described. That child has taken an enormous step forward on the road to knowledge, which will never be forgotten.

Instances might be multiplied indefinitely of such valuable aids to research, afforded by libraries, all along the innumerable roads travelled by students of every age in search of information. One of the most profitable of school exercises is to take up successively the great men and notable women of the past, and, by the effective and practical aid of the libraries, to find out what is best worth knowing about Columbus, Franklin, Walter Scott, Irving, Prescott, Bancroft, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Whittier, Emerson, Lowell, Victor Hugo, or others too numerous to name. Reading Longfellow's Evangeline will lead one to search out the history and geography of Acadia, and so fix indelibly the practical facts concerned, as well as the imagery of a fine poem. So in the notable events of history, if a study is made of the English Commonwealth, or the French Revolution, or the war between the United States and England in 1812-15, the library will supply the student with copious materials for ill.u.s.tration.

Not alone in the fields of science, history, and biography, but in the attractive fields of literature, also, can the libraries aid and supplement the teachings of the school. A fine poem, or a simple, humorous, or pathetic story, told with artless grace or notable literary skill, when read aloud by a teacher in school, awakens a desire in many to have the same book at home to read, re-read, and perhaps commit to memory the finer pa.s.sages. What more inspiring or pleasing reading than some of Longfellow's poems, or the Vicar of Wakefield, or Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, or Saintine's Picciola, or selections from the poems of Holmes, Whittier, Kipling, or Lowell? For all these and similar wants, the library has an unfailing supply.

As a practical ill.u.s.tration of the extensive, use of books by schools in some advanced communities, I may note that Librarian Green, of the Worcester (Ma.s.s.) Public Library, said in 1891 that his average daily account of the books loaned to schools in two busy winter months showed over 1,600 volumes thus in daily use. This too, was in addition to all that were drawn out by pupils on their own independent cards as borrowers. Such a record speaks volumes.

In the same city, where the Ma.s.sachusetts State Normal School is located, sixty-four per cent. of the scholars visited the library to look up subjects connected with their studies.

A forcible argument for librarians taking an interest in reading for schools is that both parents and teachers often neglect to see that the young get only proper books to read. The children are themselves quite ignorant what to choose, and if left to themselves, are likely to choose unwisely, and to read story papers or quite unimproving books. Their parents, busied as they are, commonly give no thought to the matter, and are quite dest.i.tute of that knowledge of the various cla.s.ses of books which it is the province of the librarian to know and to discriminate.

Teachers themselves do not possess this special knowledge, except in rare instances, and have to become far more conversant with libraries than is usual, in order to acquire it.

That the very young, left to themselves, will choose many bad or worthless books is shown in the account of a princ.i.p.al of a school in San Francisco, who found that sixty per cent. of the books drawn from the public library by pupils had been dime novels, or other worthless literature. The wide prevalence of the dime novel evil appeared in the report of the reading of 1,000 boys in a western New York city. Out of this number, 472 (or nearly one-half) were in the habit of devouring this pernicious trash, procured in most cases by purchase at the news stands.

The matter was taken up by teachers, and, by wise direction and by aid of the public library, the reading of these youthful candidates for citizens.h.i.+p was led into more improving fields. To lead a mind in the formative stage from the low to the high, from tales of wild adventure to the best stories for the young, is by no means difficult. Take a book that you know is wholesome and entertaining, and it will be eagerly read by almost every one. There is an endless variety of good books adapted to the most rudimentary capacity. Even young minds can become interested in the works of standard writers, if the proper selection is made. Wonderful is the stimulus which the reading of a purely written, fascinating book gives to the young mind. It opens the way for more books and for infinite growth. All that is needed is to set the youth in the right direction, and he will go forward with rapid strides of his own accord. This teaching how to read is really the most profitable part of any education.

To recite endless lessons is not education: and one book eagerly read through, has often proved more valuable than all the text-books that ever were printed.

THE USES OF THE LIBRARY TO THE UNIVERSITY.

Closely allied to the benefits derived from the library by the teachers and scholars in public schools are its uses to all those engaged in the pursuit of higher education. For our colleges and universities and their researches, the library must have all that we have suggested as important for the schools, and a great deal more. The term university implies an education as broad as the whole world of books can supply: yet we must here meet with limitations that are inevitable. In this country we have to regret the application of the word "university" to inst.i.tutions where the training is only academical, or at the highest, collegiate. The university, properly speaking, is an inst.i.tution for the most advanced scholars or graduates of our colleges. Just as the college takes up and carries forward the training of those who have been through the academy, the seminary, or the high school, so it is the function of the university to carry forward (we will not say complete) the education of the graduate of the college. No education is ever completed: the doctor who has received the highest honors at the university has only begun his education--for that is to go on through life--and who knows how far beyond?

Now the aid which a well equipped library can furnish to all these higher inst.i.tutions of learning, the academy, the seminary, the college, and the university, is quite incalculable. Their students are constantly engaged upon themes which not only demand the text-books they study, but collateral ill.u.s.trations almost without number. The professors, too, who impart instruction, perpetually need to be instructed themselves, with fuller knowledge upon the themes they are daily called upon to elucidate.

There is no text-book that can teach all, or anywhere near all there is upon the subject it professes to cover. So the library, which has many books upon that subject, comes in to supply its deficiencies. And the librarian is useful to the professors and students just in proportion as he knows, not the contents, but the range of books upon each subject sought to be investigated. Here is where the subject catalogue, or the dictionary catalogue, combining the subjects and the authors under a single alphabet, comes into play. But, as no catalogue of subjects was ever yet up to date in any considerable library, the librarian should be able to supplement the catalogue by his own knowledge of later works in any line of inquiry.

The most profitable studies carried on in libraries are, beyond all question, what we may term topical researches. To pursue one subject though many authorities is the true way to arrive at comprehensive knowledge. And in this kind of research, the librarian ought to be better equipped than any who frequent his library. Why? Simply because his business is bibliography; which is not the business of learned professors, or other scholars who visit the library.

The late Librarian Winsor said that he considered the librarian's instruction far more valuable than that of the specialist. And this may be owing largely to the point of view, as well as to the training, of each. The specialist, perhaps, is an enthusiast or a devotee to his science, and so apt to give undue importance to the details of it, or to magnify some one feature: the librarian, on the other hand, who is nothing if not comprehensive, takes the larger view of the wide field of literature on each subject, and his suggestions concerning sources of information are correspondingly valuable.

In those constantly arising questions which form the subjects of essays or discussions in all inst.i.tutions of learning, the well-furnished library is an unfailing resource. The student who finds his unaided mind almost a blank upon the topic given out for treatment, resorts at once to the public library, searches catalogues, questions the librarian, and surrounds himself with books and periodicals which may throw light upon it. He is soon master of facts and reasonings which enable him to start upon a train of thought that bears fruit in an essay or discourse. In fact, it may be laid down as an axiom, that nearly every new book that is written is indebted to the library for most of its ideas, its facts, or its ill.u.s.trations, so that libraries actually beget libraries.

Some of the endlessly diversified uses of a well-equipped library, not only to scholars but to the general public, may here be referred to.

Among the most sought for sources of information, the periodical press, both of the past and the current time, holds a prominent rank. When it is considered how far-reaching are the fields embraced in the wide range of these periodicals, literary, religious, scientific, political, technical, philosophical, social, medical, legal, educational, agricultural, bibliographical, commercial, financial, historical, mechanical, nautical, military, artistic, musical, dramatic, typographical, sanitary, sporting, economic, and miscellaneous, is it any wonder that specialists and writers for the press seek and find ready aid therein for their many-sided labors?

To the skeptical mind, accustomed to undervalue what does not happen to come within the range of his pet idols or pursuits, the observation of a single day's multifold research in a great library might be in the nature of a revelation. Hither flock the ever-present searchers into family history, laying under contribution all the genealogies and town and county histories which the country has produced. Here one finds an industrious compiler intent upon the history of American duels, for which the many files of Northern and Southern newspapers, reaching back to the beginning of the century, afford copious material. At another table sits a deputation from a government department, commissioned to make a record of all notable strikes and labor troubles for a series of years, to be gleaned from the columns of the journals of leading cities.

An absorbed reader of French romances sits side by side with a clergyman perusing homilies, or endeavoring to elucidate, through a ma.s.s of commentators, a special text. Here are to be found ladies in pursuit of costumes of every age; artists turning over the great folio galleries of Europe for models or suggestions; lawyers seeking precedents or leading cases; journalists verifying dates, speeches, conventions, or other forgotten facts; engineers studying the literature of railways or machinery; actors or amateurs in search of plays or works on the dramatic art; physicians looking up biographies of their profession or the history of epidemics; students of heraldry after coats of arms; inventors searching the specifications and drawings of patents; historical students pursuing some special field in American or foreign annals; scientists verifying facts or citations by original authorities; searchers tracing personal residences or deaths in old directories or newspapers; querists seeking for the words of some half-remembered pa.s.sage in poetry or prose, or the original author of one of the myriad proverbs which have no father; architects or builders of houses comparing hundreds of designs and models; teachers perusing works on education or comparing text-books new or old; readers absorbing the great poems of the world; writers in pursuit of new or curious themes among books of antiquities or folk-lore; students of all the questions of finance and economic science; naturalists seeking to trace through many volumes descriptions of species; pursuers of military or naval history or science; enthusiasts venturing into the occult domains of spiritualism or thaumaturgy; explorers of voyages and travels in every region of the globe; fair readers, with dreamy eyes, devouring the last psychological novel; devotees of musical art perusing the lives or the scores of great composers; college and high-school students intent upon "booking up" on themes of study or composition or debate; and a host of other seekers after suggestion or information in a library of encyclopedic range.

CHAPTER 15.

THE HISTORY OF LIBRARIES.

The Library, from very early times, has enlisted the enthusiasm of the learned, and the encomiums of the wise. The actual origin of the earliest collection of books (or rather of ma.n.u.scripts) is lost in the mists of remote antiquity. Notwithstanding professed descriptions of several libraries found in Aulus Gellius, Athenaeus, and others, who wrote centuries after the alleged collections were made, we lack the convincing evidence of eye-witnesses and contemporaries. But so far as critical research has run, the earliest monuments of man which approached collections of written records are found not in Europe, but in Africa and Asia.

That land of wonders, Egypt, abounds in hieroglyphic inscriptions, going back, as is agreed by modern scholars, to the year 2000 before the Christian era. A Papyrus ma.n.u.script, too, exists, which is a.s.signed to about 1600 B. C. And the earliest recorded collection of books in the world, though perhaps not the first that existed, was that of the Egyptian king Ramses I.--B. C. 1400, near Thebes, which Diodorus Siculus says bore the inscription "Dispensary of the soul." Thus early were books regarded as remedial agents of great force and virtue.

But before the library of Ramses the Egyptian king, there existed in Babylonia collections of books, written not on parchment, nor on the more perishable papyrus, but on clay. Whole poems, fables, laws, and hymns of the G.o.ds have been found, stamped in small characters upon baked bricks.

These clay tablets or books were arranged in numerical order, and the library at Agane, which existed about 2000 B. C. even had a catalogue, in which each piece of literature was numbered, so that readers had only to write down the number of the tablet wanted, and the librarian would hand it over. Two of these curious poems in clay have been found intact, one on the deluge, the other on the descent of Istar into Hades.

The next ancient library in point of time yet known to us was gathered in Asia by an a.s.syrian King, and this collection has actually come down to us, _in propria persona_. Buried beneath the earth for centuries, the archaeologist Layard discovered in 1850 at Nineveh, an extensive collection of tablets or tiles of clay, covered with cuneiform characters, and representing some ten thousand distinct works or doc.u.ments. The a.s.syrian monarch Sardanapalus, a great patron of letters, was the collector of this primitive and curious library of clay. He flourished about 1650 B. C.

In Greece, where a copious and magnificent literature had grown up centuries before Christ, Pisistratus collected a library at Athens, and died B. C. 527. When Xerxes captured Athens, this collection, which represents the earliest record of a library dedicated to the public, was carried off to Persia, but restored two centuries later. The renowned philosopher Aristotle gathered one of the largest Greek libraries, about 350 B. C. said to have embraced about 1400 volumes, or rather, rolls.

Plato called Aristotle's residence "the house of the reader." This library, also, was carried off to Scepsis, and later by the victorious Sulla to Rome. History shows that the Greek collections were the earliest "travelling libraries" on record, though they went as the spoils of war, and not to spread abroad learning by the arts of peace.

Rome having conquered Athens, we hear no more of the Athenian libraries, but the seat of ancient learning was transferred to Alexandria, where were gathered under the liberal sway of the Ptolemies, more books than had ever been a.s.sembled together in any part of the world. Marc Antony presented to Cleopatra the library of the Kings of Pergamus, said to have contained 200,000 rolls. There is no s.p.a.ce to sketch the ancient libraries, so scantily commemorated, of Greece. Through Aristotle's enthusiasm for learning, as it is believed, the Ptolemies were fired with the zeal of book-collecting, and their capital of Alexandria became the seat of extensive libraries, stored in the Brucheion and the Serapeum.

Here, according to general belief, occurred the burning of the famous Alexandrian library of 700,000 volumes, by the Saracens under Omar, A. D.

640. If any one would have an object lesson in the uncertainties of history and of human testimony, let him read the various conflicting accounts of the writers who have treated upon this subject. The number of volumes varies from 700,000, as stated by Aulus Gellius, to 100,000 by Eusebius. The fact that in ancient times each book or division of an author's work written on a roll of papyrus was reckoned as a volume, may account for the exaggeration, since the nine books of Herodotus would thus make nine volumes, and the twenty-four of Homer's Iliad, twenty-four volumes, instead of one. So, by an arbitrary application of averages, the size of the Alexandrian Library might be brought within reasonable dimensions, though there is nothing more misleading than the doctrine of averages, unless indeed it be a false a.n.a.logy. But that any library eight hundred years before the invention of printing contained 700,000 volumes in the modern sense of the word, when the largest collection in the world, three centuries after books began to be multiplied by types, held less than 100,000 volumes, is one of the wildest fictions which writers have imposed upon the credulity of ages.

I cannot even touch upon the libraries of the Romans, though we have very attractive accounts, among others, of the literary riches of Lucullus, of Atticus, and of Cicero. The first library in Rome was founded 167 B. C.

and in the Augustan age they multiplied, until there were twenty-nine public libraries in Hadrian's time, 120 A. D. The emperor Julian, in the fourth century, was a founder of libraries, and is said to have placed over the doors this inscription: "_Alii quidem equos amant, alii oves, alii feros; mihi vero a puerulo mirandum acquirendi et possidendi libros insedit desiderium._"

The libraries of the middle ages were neither large nor numerous. The neglect of learning and of literature was wide-spread; only in the monasteries of Europe were to be found scholars who kept alive the sacred flame. In these were renewed those fruitful labors of the _scriptorium_ which had preserved and multiplied so many precious books in cla.s.sic times among the Romans. The monks, indeed, were not seldom creators as well as copyists, though the works which they composed were mainly theological (as became their sacred profession and ascetic life). The Latin, however, being the almost universal language for so many centuries, the love of learning conspired to widen the field of monastic study. Many zealous ecclesiastics were found who revived the cla.s.sic authors, and copies of the works of poets, historians, philosophers and rhetoricians were multiplied. Then were gradually formed those monastic libraries to which so many thousands of mediaeval scholars owed a debt of grat.i.tude. The order of Benedictines took a leading and effective part in this revival of learning. Taxes were levied on the inmates of monasteries expressly for furnis.h.i.+ng the library with books, and the novices in many houses must contribute writing materials upon entering, and books at the close of their novitiate, for the enrichment of the library. Among notably valuable libraries, several of which still survive, were those of Monte Ca.s.sino in Italy, the Abbey of Fleury in France, St. Gall in Switzerland, and that of the ill.u.s.trious congregation of St. Maur in France. The latter had at one time no less than one hundred and seven writers engaged in multiplying books.

The first library in England is recorded (in the Canterbury Chartulary) to have been given by Pope Gregory the Great, and brought by St.

Augustine, first Archbishop of Canterbury, on his mission to England about A. D. 600. It consisted of nine precious volumes on vellum, being copies of parts of the Scriptures, with commentaries, and a volume of Lives of the Martyrs. The library of the Benedictine Monastery at Canterbury had grown in the 13th century to 3000 t.i.tles, being very rich in theology, but with many books also in history, poetry and science. At York had been founded, in the 8th century, a n.o.ble library by Archbishop Egbert, and the great scholar Alcuin here acquired, amidst that "infinite number of excellent books," his life-long devotion to literature. When he removed to Tours, in France, he lamented the loss of the literary treasures of York, in a poem composed of excellent hexameters. He begged of Charlemagne to send into Britain to procure books, "that the garden of paradise may not be confined to York."

Fine libraries were also gathered at the monasteries of Durham, of Glas...o...b..ry, and of Croyland, and at the Abbeys of Whitby and Peterborough.

Nor were the orders of Franciscans and Dominicans far behind as book-collectors, though they commonly preferred to buy rather than to transcribe ma.n.u.scripts, like the Benedictines. "In every convent of friars," wrote Fitzralph to the Pope, in 1350, "there is a large and n.o.ble library." And Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, and Chancellor of England in 1334, whose "Philobiblon" is the most eloquent treatise in praise of books ever written, said, when visiting places where the mendicants had convents; "there amid the deepest poverty, we found the most precious riches stored up." The Pope, it appears, relaxed for these orders the rigor of their vows of poverty, in favor of ama.s.sing books--mindful, doubtless, of that saying of Solomon the wise--"Therefore get wisdom, because it is better than gold."

Richard de Bury, the enthusiast of learning, wrote thus:

"The library, therefore, of wisdom is more precious than all riches, and nothing that can be wished for is worthy to be compared with it.

Whosoever, therefore, acknowledges himself to be a zealous follower of the truth, of happiness, of wisdom, of science, or even of the faith, must of necessity make himself a lover of books."

And said Joseph Hall, Bishop of Norwich--"I can wonder at nothing more than how a man can be idle--but of all others a scholar; in so many improvements of reason, in such sweetness of knowledge, in such variety of studies, in such importunity of thoughts. To find wit in poetry; in philosophy profoundness; in history wonder of events; in oratory, sweet eloquence; in divinity, supernatural light and holy devotion--whom would it not ravish with delight?"