Detroit or Los Angeles), has made the public library a model to be imitated. He has met the restricted purchase and branch questions by putting his fiction into the branches and keeping the main library for students; the appropriation problem by boldly spending some of his money for advertising and thus forcing the library on the attention of the public and city council; the staff problem by making the requirements for entrance to the service so stiff that to have worked in Newark is to have won a diploma of merit in the library world. The public's side of it is that any book and almost any information is instantly available. Few libraries are used so much.
Right across the Hudson is the great New York Public, in any one of whose vaulted corridors Newark's whole collection would be lost. The contrast is striking. In the New Jersey institution one watchman is at the door and a whole corps of eager assistants stand ready to help the visitor; in the marble monument to the Astors one may count a dozen policemen in neat horizon blue idling about to enforce the library rules, while one poor boy struggles vainly with requests for information.
