USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Somerville > Report of the city of Somerville 1885 > Part 12
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It was the day of beginnings throughout New England. There was at Plymouth a small, struggling colony : and on a shelf, half hidden by his breast-plate and his swords, Miles Standishi had a few books, conspicuous among which were "Bariffe's Artillery." "Cæsar's Commentaries," and a ". History of the World." His neighbor. Elder Brewster, had something more considerable for a library, chiefly made up of polemical treatises, some of which he had doubtless printed himself. when, during his exile in Holland, he had gained his livelihood at the printer's case. I fear we should deem
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to-day the books of the Pilgrim soldier more precious, if we had to read them, than the weightier shelves of their religious guide.
Our Puritan Massachusetts governor too, who sang here his psalms, had his books, as we know by the rather dreary list of such which he gave to the young college. Hardly more than one of them would be read to-day, except by an antiquary. - for we find among them the perennial Livy, - unless the " Institutes of Calvin." a French Bible, and the " Life of the Virgin Mary " might have on some a special claim. In a list of books which belonged to Winthrop's associate, Thomas Dudley, there is the same for- bidding aspect to the modern scholar. unless the " Vision of Piers Plowman " attract his archaic sense.
And yet this was a time when the proportion of what are called liberally educated men was probably greater in this vicinity than it has ever been since ; for of the forty graduates of Oxford and Cambridge which came to New England before 1639. one-half of them settled in this immediate neighborhood.
Here, then, were the signs, if anywhere on this broad continent, that England and English literature had gained a foothold ; for Raleigh's venture in North Carolina had come to nought, and the spirit which had settled Jamestown has never flourished in letters. To the North the French were threading the Valley of the St. Law- rence. but they were seeking peltries rather than the inspiration which produces a literature. To the far South. indeed, the printing- press was already a century old. Just one hundred years before the New-England Puritans expressed their discontent with the ver- sion of the psalms which Winthrop sang, by setting in type at Cambridge what we now speak of as the old Bay Psalm-book. - just a century earlier the Spaniard, in Mexico. had begun the printing of books.
Somebody has said that the world's song of praise, rising to the skies, solidified in those Gothic cathedrals with which the religious sense spotted the map of Europe during the middle ages. We may call it typical of our later ages in the newer world, that the floating cadence of that midnight psalm, two centuries and a half ago, has hung over New England ever since, and become manifest in the schoolhouse and the library.
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It took a long time, however, for the relations of a library to broaden into sympathy with the great mass of the people. In the eighteenth century, Boston and a few other towns acquired a small number of books in their corporate capacities ; but the volumes seem to have had no functions except to be lent for special uses under the sanction of the selectmen. In the next century it was the private libraries of the Mathers, Hutchinsons, Princes, and Greens, which, by the liberality of their owners, afforded most of the literary help that was given in Boston ; while the few books of the ministers of the country towns granted the same privileges in their neighborhoods. It was before the Revolution, and just as the seething of political passion began to manifest itself, that the first circulating library was established in Boston, as a book-seller's venture. It took a half a century more before an impulse to com- bine and administer more widely to the needs of reading people, particularly of young men, caused the institution of a class of libra- ries known as mercantile and apprentices' libraries, some of which still survive in those parts of the country where the later develop- ment of the free library has not yet possessed the public mind.
It is now hardly forty years since public sentiment began to ripen to the necessity of supplying free books to a community which had had a free education. There was the instance of one town in Massachusetts, where they began to do it by voluntary taxation, before there was any enabling Act of the legislature to legalize appropriations of money for such purposes. In 1848 the city of Boston received special legislative authority to found a library ; and three years later a general law opened the way to all municipalities, at first under restrictions, but in the end leaving all to the wisdom and aspirations of the individual towns.
It was peculiarly a New England, even a Massachusetts, move- ment, so far as this country was concerned, but almost at the same time it had gathered head in England. Though successful beyond the sea, the movement has never attained the proportions there which it has acquired here in Massachusetts ; and in no other part of the Union, not even in the other New-England States, has the system attained the significance which characterized it in Massa- chusetts. I do not think that, taking the country through, it ever promised so well for the future as now. The system has become specially attractive to private benefactors ; it has re-acted upon the higher seminaries of learning, and at no time have colleges and
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universities felt so much as now the necessity of making their libra- ries the centre of their educational system.
It must not be denied that a system of free libraries is not with- out some evils, as a system of free schools is. - as, indeed. every system of ameliorating humanity is, which has to work on a basis of averages. The college world at this moment is agitated by a question, which has, for its cardinal interest, what is called the elective system. This is nothing more than an attempt to coun- teract the evil tendencies of averages, - a purpose to let character and ability assert its own, unimpeded by the yoke which the dull- ards of every class impose. It would indeed be unwise to assert that there may not be great evils in that direction also ; but the discussion of such a question may well be omitted here.
It is the elective system, however, as developed in connection with the free library, that has given rise to what is known as the " fiction question," and other allied doubts, which have qualified the opinions of not a few respecting the advantages of the free- library system. I suspect the question will never be settled. It springs out of the diversities of the human mind, and out of the contrarieties of experience. As long as there are grades of intel- ligence and education, as long as there are sensitive and obtuse organizations, the wrong book will get into the wrong hands, and what might stimulate in one case will craze in another. There are perennial books in all tongues, which suit all ages and all climes. for they are the exquisite results of an exquisite genius ; but the world is not yet old enough to have produced enough of them to constitute even a small library. New ages develop new wants, which pass away with the age itself; but they are as fixed a necessity to the mind of that age as the books that never die. Therefore the library, be it of the people or of the scholar, takes the impress of the passing time, and makes perpetual one question or another of fitness in the choice of books. I much suspect that a library can never be gathered that will make people of one mind as to the quality of its books, and as to the advantages to classes and individuals to be gained by the reading of some of them. There are, of course, partial remedies ; but the strength of the best regulation lies in the counsel of parents and teachers. I hope the time is not far distant when instruction in the choice of reading will not be foreign to the purposes of our schools We look to
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education to counteract the evil tendencies of an extended fran- chise. We need to devise some special educational check to in- sure that a free range in the choice of books should be wholesome to the individual, and inspiriting to the mass.
There is a tendency in our modern life to devote too much time to the magazine or the book which has a current fame. We read criticisms of it in the newspapers ; and in society we hear com- ments upon it, or tattle respecting the author. One regrets to see the enthralment that these circumstances. place upon too many readers. It was one of Emerson's rules, never to read any books but yearlings at least ; and this philosophy is at the bottom of the rules of the greater European libraries, which do not make a new book accessible under a year, after which time there are but com- paratively few to inquire for it. I suppose of the books published in 1885, we shall find hardly a quarter remembered in a twelve- month. Though the publisher's records are filled with their yearly thousands of titles, it hardly requires a score of years to reduce to a hundred the number of those which the booksellers are ever called upon to supply. Of the books published two centuries ago, there are scarce fifty that would bear reprinting ; and of those of the last century, there are hardly more than a hundred and fifty known to others than special students.
It is always a question of vital importance to a library, how far it shall encumber itself with books of which the chance of use is very small, and of which the care and preservation is a charge. With libraries that are large or destined to become large, the ques- tion is much simplified. The nation, a great municipality, a domi- nant university, can seldom afford to neglect the charge of the minutiæ of the press, whether they be ephemeral or inane. There is an implied obligation in a great library to meet every expecta- tion. To do this is of course impossible, since it is not probable that the most extensive of modern libraries contains a fifth part of all the productions of the press during the last four hundred years, to say nothing of the earlier manuscripts. The chief librarian of the best equipped library in the world once told me that his collec- tion could not satisfy one investigator in ten, if his research was aiming to be exhaustive.
Nevertheless, the implied obligation to which I refer means that
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every great library must use its best opportunities to store up against need every thing that will interest, positively or nega- tively, any one engaged in the study of human action and human characteristic, and of every department of learning in which the human mind is an agent of acquisition. The truth is, the libra- rian of a great library has no conception of what will be the next inquiry to which he is subjected ; and a large part of the instances in which his personal aid is sought touch material, which, without his peculiar experience, he would have burned up as beyond the possibility of demand.
This question of the care of obscure and ephemeral matter is very properly apart from the interests of the lesser public libraries, but not wholly. The history of every town is dear to its people, and so are the lives and fame of its distinguished citizens. The town that gave birth to the inventor of the cotton-gin or the mag- netic telegraph, the sewing-machine or the telephone, is a source whence has issued a power which has moulded a phase of civiliza- tion. That town can well afford to be exhaustive in gathering the records illustrative of such indications in its history.
It would doubtless be too much to say that just the matter which kindles our fires, and supplies our paper-mills, is destined to become the great treasures of our libraries in later centuries ; but there is a good deal of truth in it nevertheless. The great books are reproduced and can always be found, unless the new age has a revolutionary change of sentiment and taste, to bury them under newer interests ; and this is not infrequently the case. It is those books and tracts which are so insignificant in their day of fresh- ness, because we are too near them to discern their relations, that are preserved in obscurity, to become in one time the treasures upon which the binder's skill is exhausted. The commonness which makes us despise them now gives the flavor which makes them representative then.
It is significant that Sir Thomas Bodley, in founding the library at Oxford which now proudly bears his name, counselled against the accession of the waifs and strays of a London season, and particularly of plays. These very tracts that a few pence could have bought then, I have known the custodians of that library in our day to compete for at scores, and even at hundreds, of pounds. The most costly nuggets of our English libraries to-day are the
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little play-books of Queen Elizabeth's time, when countless thou- sands nearly all perished with the reading. The purifiers and collators of our English texts have taught us their value, and per- haps no one more than Macaulay has made manifest the wealth of historic illustration existing in the ephemera of all ages.
In 1846, Panizzi, the great librarian of the British Museum, said, " If a librarian had been guided by critics, he would have burned the early productions of Byron ; and had he judged from their first reception, he would have thrown away, as worthless, ' Paradise Lost' and Newton's 'Principia.' " The principal English authority on bibliothecal history and experience, who is now, I am glad to say, preparing a new edition of his " Memoirs of Libraries " (I refer to Mr. Edward Edwards), says, " The trash of one generation becomes the highly prized treasure of another." Such a statement is of course open to limitations, and for a library like yours, hardly I suppose aspiring to be one of the great libra- ries of the world, the limitations are obvious ; but it is to-day the rule of the Bodleian, the British Museum, the great library of Paris, not to name some of the other leading libraries in Europe, as well as in this country, to reject nothing, having long ago learned the folly of discrimination. This omnivorousness is of course expensive ; and a policy which may be necessary in a large collection would be simply foolishly extravagant in a small one, unless it be confined to some specialty of local interest.
I think there is no more important purpose of a local library than to preserve its local literature, and the writings of its local authors, as I have already said ; and I would extend the provision to those writers who were born within the local precincts. There is no other sure way of preserving such books ; for the great libra- ries, with their enormous field, must of necessity overlook much. The preservation somewhere of all books of a serious purpose, even if that purpose be nothing more than the creation of a healthy pastime, all students, not only of literature, but of the history of manners, will unite in commending.
It was not till after the beginning of the present century, that any public library of England would admit novels to its shelves ; and there were few safeguards to insure the preservation of this class of books for the later students of manners and social symp-
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toms. What would be known of the manners of England in the last century without Fielding? As little as the twentieth century will know of the nineteenth without Dickens and Thackeray in Eng- land, or Howells and James among ourselves. "The time may come," said Thomas Watts of the British Museum, " when future generations will look back to the English novels of our time with as ineffectual emulation as our generation looks on the drama of the Elizabethan age."
The active question, however, of the modern local library is, the kind of influence it shall have on its immediate constituency. There are two main causes to any useful results, - the librarian and the catalogue ; for without them the books are a mob, and not an army.
We are told of the confectioner that he does not like his comfits, and of the shoemaker's son that he goes unshod. Some years since, Mr. Winter Jones, the principal librarian of the British Museum, in addressing a body of librarians, said that the librarian who reads is lost. That was his way of saying that it is a libra- rian's duty to become master of the scope of his library, and not to give himself up to the reading of the comparatively few books which he could deliberately plod through.
The very presence of many books to a susceptible mind is in- forming, and induces inquisitive and foraging quests. I have often thought. when young persons come to me, that I could tell by their talk if they were accustomed to the surrounding of a con- siderable collection of books in their own homes. I could see it in the glance of recognition which met allusions, and in the quality of their own responses.
. The librarian should be fond, not so much of reading, as of rapid assimilation of what his eye lights upon. You may say, to be a good librarian requires a quick mind, rather than one of that kind which we call slow and sure. Such alertness of mental action adapts itself to the compassing of many books in a short time. He tests a book at once by his familiarity with others of a like charac- ter, and places it above, or below, or beside it, in his estimate. His rapidity of glance pierces the preface, the contents-table, the footnotes, the appendixes, the indexes ; and a few sentences,
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skimmed as he turns the leaves, give him the literary flavor and scope of the book.
Such facility of recognition must of course be supplemented by a knowledge of the ways to approach a subject. He must under- stand his bibliographical and indexical apparatus. He must know how to get at clews through the indexes of periodicals, and through the references in cyclopædias.
That we have not many librarians equal to such exacting in- quiries, as these provisions suppose, is true, and they naturally gravitate to the larger libraries. But the service is steadily im- proving throughout the country ; and our larger institutions are in no small degree sapped by the necessity there is of training their own assistants, to bestow them in the end upon the lesser libraries. It is an evil, which may perhaps be corrected by heeding the advice which a distinguished German gave half a century ago, when he recommended the establishment of schools of librarian- ship, as we have schools of technology. Such a departure will doubtless, if ever attempted, have the drawbacks which for a while attend all experiments ; but, if the fruition is good, we may congratulate ourselves, that our library service will not be in so many instances recruited from spavined physicians, lawyers who have been thrown, and ministers with chronic bronchitis.
The one thing a librarian should dread is a sense of self-satisfac- tion. When he feels that his batteries are sufficiently charged, and his machinery perfect, he may be pretty sure of having reached the limit of his usefulness. It is said of Thorwaldsen that he was found one day despondent before a newly finished statue.
" What troubles you ?" he was asked.
" I feel that my genius is gone, because I am satisfied with this statue, and there is no longing in me for any thing better."
The old school of librarians is fast becoming extinct. They were satisfied with being the custodians of books : the modern school aim to be dispensers of books. It is not too much to say that we in America were the earliest to give the effect to this intention, however short of fulfilment we come in practice. The younger school of librarians which is growing up in Europe are greatly in sympathy with us, and may sometimes appeal to us for the countenance that traditional views deny them there. I have
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a correspondent in Germany, the keeper of a royal collection, who turns hither for encouragement. Another, in Italy, has announced as his own invention a catalogue scheme, likely as he thinks to revolutionize the use of libraries ; and, when we read his descrip- tion, we recognize what we have long known in America as the dictionary system of cataloguy. In England the librarians of the lesser libraries, particularly of the free municipal collections, are advancing rapidly in the same direction.
Next to the librarian in importance, and in some respects his superior in helpfulness. is the modern catalogue ; and yet the cata- logue is almost never thought of by those who found libraries, nor until within a few years has it entered at all into the plans of those who build them. Even when so considerable a library was built as that of the city of Boston, its constructors assigned all that they thought necessary for a catalogue-room to a half-story space, dim of light, remote of access, and foul of air, which has long since been made a lumber-room, and a poor one at that.
The catalogue question involves too much of technicalities, and there are too many diverse views to be reconciled, to make it a fit subject for discussion on an occasion like this. The simplicity, which serves for a small library, turns gradually into complexity as the collection grows. Even literary men wonder that when a book is acquired in a large library it becomes such a serious matter to make it fully serviceable. Bibliographers often laugh over the record of the discomfiture of Mr. Payne Collier, who undertook to catalogue twenty-five works for the instruction of the staff of the British Museum, and in what he called the " common-sense method." as opposed to Panizzi's ninety-one rules. The result was that Mr. Collier was quite as much chagrined as ever his Shakspeare folio corrector made him. He committed every conceivable mistake, averaging two to a title, all of them such as would have led him astray had he been an investigator in the departments to which the books belonged. The art of cataloguing, when carried to perfec- tion, is not an easy one ; and every professional cataloguer will say with Panizzi himself, that, deeply impressed as he is with the difficulties of the case, he is still more deeply impressed with the difficulty of communicating to others a sense of it. Your own library may not yet have reached the size which brings with it
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perplexities of this sort, but as you grow you will ; and I cannot better advise any one who desires to know what cataloguing may become than to examine the standard code of rules, as prepared by Mr. Cutter of the Boston Atheneum, and published by the Bureau of Education in Washington, in 1876, for it has been rec- ognized both in this country and in Europe as a fitting outcome of a ripe experience. The contemplation of those rules will no doubt make you feel much as the Scottish Highlanders felt when an English general made their fastnesses traversable : -
" Had you seen these roads before they were made.
You would hold up your hands and bless Marshall Wade."
By comparing your conceptions of the art of cataloguing before and after the perusal of Mr. Cutter's code, you will find yourself much in the same spirit of Keltic wonderment.
There is another thing which a librarian finds it difficult to make clear to others, especially to business people. The men of affairs are accustomed to bulk details as their operations grow ; but in the economy of a library the manipulation of books, and the processes of cataloguing, increase in a larger proportion than the accessions of titles. One of the most experienced officers of the British Museum says, what you may not as yet feel the full force of in a collection like yours, but perhaps you are beginning to feel a part of it, -
" In the case of a large library," says Mr. Watts, " not only must every thing be done more extensively, but many things more minutely. Errors and oversights which are of small consequence in a small catalogue, for instance, are not only more difficult to avoid in a large one, but, when they are not avoided, they are more misleading and more confusing."
What is true of the catalogue is equally true of the general admin- istration and the cost of maintaining a library. It has been found with a growing library that the increase of expense bears rather a geometrical than an arithmetical relation to the increase of books.
With the rapidly growing library of the neighboring university, and with the aggregate expansions of similar institutions in the adjacent metropolis, availing for all, you may congratulate your-
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selves that you have not to confront, in the near future at least, the new requirements which their marvellous growth compels. The novel problem needs unused devices. Library buildings that used to hold a few hundred thousand volumes must be made to hold millions, - as they can be. Library administration which has tried the patience of the public on a small scale must be planned to give even prompter response on a very much larger scale, - as it can be. The infinite abundance of books must have better keys ; bibliographies, digests ; indexes must shorten labor, and they will.
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