In no case does the course extend beyond two years, and the pedagogues have had to drag in such subjects as the History and Philosophy of Printing to make it last that long. Before these schools got under way the libraries trained rather better staffs than they have now on a month's lectures with practical experience. The truth is that there is very little to teach; any literate person can learn all there is to a library system in a few weeks. Consequently the library schools have to drill their future B.S.'s and M.A.'s in the beautifully vague principles of "library economy," and to impress them with the importance of such details as inserting the charging slip with the right hand, or lettering the title on a thin book in the proper direction.
That the salaries earned in library work are lower than those of reliable telephone operators is not important to the fledgling bibliophiles. Their jobs, in the main, are only a stop-gap between education and marriage. When the library worker has reached her late twenties without being discovered by an eligible male, she begins to take it seriously and cries to be placed in charge of a branch where she can really earn a living.
There are never enough branches to go round, but the head librarians, pushed from below by their staffs and from above by aldermen anxious for pork, do their best, and so new branches are added apace. The fund established by the obliging Mr. Carnegie makes it easy; all the city has to do is furnish the books; the Carnegie fund will put up the imitation Greek temple and even the funerary vegetation around it. Los Angeles now has forty-three of these tiny libraries, beside eighty-six deposit stations, which are branches in embryo; Buffalo has added four since 1914; St. Louis has added nine, including seven Carnegie branches; Detroit ten, including eight Carnegies; Cincinnati ten, including nine Carnegies; the Enoch Pratt of Baltimore nine, in addition to rebuilding others; and even little Akron, which spent half as much money for books last year as it did thirteen years before, has put in three new branches.
These branches are as alike as so many pumpkins. In each is a tiny reading-room, a diminutive children's department, a bulletin board for the announcements of the local ladies' clubs, and a small collection of books. Obviously, neither the collections of the branches nor that of the main library can increase very fast when every book must be duplicated twenty-five times, one copy for each branch. Still the branches grow, and with them the process of splitting good, big libraries into small, bad ones.
IV
Once in a while, even a public library gets a good man—one of those rare souls in whom a romantic devotion to literature or the public service is combined with administrative talent of a high order. Walter L. Brown, of Buffalo, is such a man. He meets the branch problem by vigilantly keeping down the branch collections, concentrating on the main library and making temporary loans from the big collection to meet the requirements of the back blocks.
Herbert Putnam has wrought similar marvels with the Library of Congress, though he has no branch problem. The service system there, the special exhibits and collections, and the classification system make it in the truest sense what it should be, a great national library. St. Louis, Detroit, Los Angeles and San Francisco stand out in the library world, the two former because of the administrative talent of Dr. Bostwick and Adam Strohm respectively, the two latter because California libraries generally seem to have found the secret of cozening almost unlimited funds out of their city councils.
But it is in Newark, N.J., that library administration touches what is probably its highest peak. There, John Cotton Dana, working with a small city and a limited appropriation (compared to St. Louis,
