branch in the foreign section of New York, "and we have had the Italian books taken out because of the lack of demand. The young people read English, but they want nothing but the cheapest and trashiest books." It is this younger generation which supports the commercial lending libraries, which give them books that even the public libraries refuse to supply.
If the public libraries stopped here in their refusal to supply books it would be bad enough. But the censorship which begins on the level of good taste inevitably works into a criticism of morals, and as such it irks even the most doltish reader. Let a new work be a truthful one, and down comes the censorship. "Jurgen" is hardly to be found in any public library in the country. Ambrose Bierce is set down as immoral in many cities, Frank Harris in others, and Dreiser in nearly all. As far as the public libraries are concerned, "Susan Lennox" simply does not exist. Even the classics feel the edge of this censorship. Many libraries maintain a double-star case in which Rabelais, the Arabian Nights, and Boccaccio are permanent tenants, under lock and key, to be issued only when the librarian in charge has looked over the applicant and decided that his appearance indicates a moral character sufficiently stout to withstand such poisonous stuff. In the Buffalo Library the Decameron was long kept in the private office of the librarian, where the reader had to peruse it under that worthy's watchful eye, lest, incited by the fiery words of the Italian, he dash out and perpetrate a statutory crime on the first female he met.
III
But censorship is only one manifestation of the lush growth of the new library technique, which has been invented apparently with the idea of making an easy thing as difficult as possible. Nothing is more curious to the outside observer than the typical librarians' preoccupation with the infinitely little. Recently, for example, an angry controversy raged through the library world as to whether Radio or Wireless should be the heading under which books on the subject were classified. A long paper in a library magazine discusses the question whether the titles on the backs of thin books should run up or down the back, and solemnly rehearses arguments on both sides, gathered in an elaborate referendum on the subject. In a library where the writer once worked hours of discussion at a staff meeting were given over to the absorbing question as to whether it was better to hold a book in the left hand and insert the charge slip with the right, or vice versa.
Classification is naturally another field wherein library technique runs riot. In some libraries, such as the New York Public's great reference department, old and bad classification schemes are a serious hindrance. The system at this library grew out of an old private library scheme; it has no particular logic or arrangement, and one must spend hours searching for information that should be available in minutes. The trouble increases with the number of books that have to be shoe-horned into the antiquated arrangement, and as time, money and cataloguers are lacking for a re-classification, no abatement is in sight.
Happily, this is not the general condition. In 1876 Melvil Dewey announced his Decimal Classification plan, and it is now in use in 96% of the American public libraries. It is so simple that its essentials can be learned in a day and so elastic that libraries running all the way from 5,000 to 5,000,000 volumes use it. Only the great system of the Library of Congress can compare with it, and this system, recently perfected, is regarded quite rightly as one for big libraries only. But whatever the classification scheme, the librarians find time to wrangle over its details. A recent survey of public libraries lists a long line of topics over which there is violent disagreement as to classification. Is a diplomatic history of the Papacy to be classified
