A Glance at the Public Libraries
by Fletcher Pratt
Every public library in the United States now places restrictions on the use of fiction. In the reading-rooms (reference-rooms, in library jargon) the reading of it is under the interdict as far as possible. The Buffalo library allows only one book of fiction to be drawn by a reader at a time; Newark has announced that it will buy no more of the frivolous stuff for its main library; New York removes the chairs from the room in which fiction is on display ("Grab it and get out of here!"); Baltimore keeps its fiction shelves closed and makes readers select the exact book they want from a catalogue; Brooklyn buys but ten or twelve new novels a month out of the hundred or more published; and Dr. Arthur E. Bostwick, one of the big men of the library profession, defends the policy of allowing readers to take books home by saying that "books used in the building are used trivially and consist of light fiction, while those taken home are studied seriously."
American librarians, in fact, have become obsessed with the idea that the national literature will go to the dogs unless they persuade their customers to read something beside fiction. Indignant papers in the library journals and long discussions at librarians' meetings are given over to the great question of how to keep the public from reading what it likes and how to induce it to read the mouldering stacks of books it doesn't care about. It is not a question of literary excellence, for in these discussions the fiction of Joseph Conrad and the fiction of Harold Bell Wright get exactly the same treatment. In the librarian's scale of values Milton Work on bridge and Emily Post on how to hold a fork are serious authors, while Sinclair Lewis on Babbitt is a mere frivolous butterfly.
Three classes of books—travel, biography and history—are held in orthodox library circles to be the best antidotes to this depraved fondness for works of the imagination. To these the best shelves are given, for them the special bulletins are printed, and on them the lady attendant spends the best efforts of her cajolery to make her percentage of non-fiction circulation high. Since biography began to be popular with the publication of "Six Eminent Victorians," even this highly respectable class has got a certain bad odor; one must read the older biographies, or, better still, books of travel, to really win a librarian's heart.
But the American public annoyingly refuses to appreciate these efforts to raise its literary taste, and so turns from the public libraries to the two-and-three-cent-a-day lending libraries, from which it can get whatever it wants. The growth of these commercial libraries is the salient feature of the American library landscape today. A compilation by the Publishers' Weekly lists sixty-seven new ones established in 1927. They outnumbered the new bookstores by five to three and the new free libraries by seven to one. More, each of the sixty-seven is provided with an attendant chain of deposit stations in drug-stores, stationery shops, and news-stands.
The librarians explain their failure to keep abreast of the times by saying that since they can't buy everything, they prefer to get books for scholars, and point to
