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Show THE BOOK TABLE AN ASTONISHING AMERICAN COMMONPLACE IN the great European libraries-Paris, Berlin, London, Frankfort-you work as a student. You obtain formal permission; you are admitted with due ceremony; you can make inquiries at the central desk, which are very courteously answered; sometimes you can take books home and sometimes you can't. In any case, your studentship carries you through-even if you are ,only reading novels or a guide to the turf. By virtue of being a student you are admitted to the charmed circle of books; you have become a member of a bibliographical aristocracy. In the New York libraries you may be a student. Quite as often you are a mere parent, a business woman, a loiterer-even a child. You may want Westermarck on "Human Marriage" or you may merely want an "easy" book- which is to say that you are not all too sure of your spelling and don't like long words. But it doesn't matter. You are equally a citizen of an enchanted country in which naturalization is automatic, in which there is room for everybody, in which everybody, no matter who, is made more than welcome. The enchanted kingdom is served, not by officials whose officialdom reminds you all the time of the privilege that is yours, but by hosts and hostesses, who regard your visit as something eminently desirable. It is this attitude on the part of the authorities which is the greatest among many differences between the libraries of the Old World and the New. The European has -still to get over the monastic attitude with regard to books-an attitude acquired when they were scarce, for one thing, and also Avhen knowledge was deemed a dangerous weapon. Seekers after knowledge at the great libraries are given facilities, but they are not specially helped and encouraged to make use of them. Methods exist chiefly because they have existed, and man is made for the method rather than, the method for the man. It is significant that in England the term "free library" is used rather than "public library," as is the case in New York. And, like most "free" things, the "free" library, has a less proud suggestion about it than has the "public" library. The children's room as it exists in New York is in England almost unknown. Libraries, indeed, are provided liberally, dumped down here and there, as if they were pieces of furniture necessary for the respectability of the family, but not to be used too much. Except in settlements there is hardly any attempt to teach or help people how to use them, and in small towns, indeed, they are apt to become something of a white elephant. New York of course started its libraries free from the monastic tradition. With its cosmopolitan population, it had to make wide provision, and it did it. 306 BY MURIEL HARRIS In the absence of a specially student aristocracy, it had to evolve a system which would apply with the utmost breadth. With its Babel of languages, that system had to be as simple as possible. To work at the British Museum or at the Sorbonne is a liberal education -always provided that you have education in the first instance. Both would be nearly impossible of access to the casual Syrian or Jew or Italian or Bohemian or any other of the multitudinous nationalities that frequent New York who have not the best facilities either for making themselves understood or for making themselves felt. The British Museum, for instance, with its world-famous collection of books, has a system of cataloguing to decipher which is in itself a science. Instead of the card index of the New York libraries, there are huge tomes, which are sometimes more alphabetical and sometimes less, according to the number of insertions recently made. The press, marks, instead of being composed of two or three letters, are as long as a government filing reference, and as easily mistaken. In addition to the great general catalogue there are sundry supplementary catalogues, all of which need to be known and quite often to be consulted. And when the whole ceremony is complete, it is usually half an hour before the books appear. In the reading-room itself, with its picturesque if murky atmosphere, with its ancient students and its well-known literary figures most, days to be seen there, with the great dome reducing its readers to the mere specks that they are, a certain number of books can be approached by the readers themselves. But. not nearly as many as is the case in the New York library, where as many books as possible are on open shelves to be fingered and selected according to pleasure. To be able to walk into the reading-room without formality is in itself an almost unheard-of thing in Europe. To obtain almost any book in ten minutes or so makes possible much reading for otherwise bdsy people. To have the simplest method in filling out the book slips saves time both for the visitor and the attendant. And to have a large degree of choice, where you can freely look at the book yourself and need not judge of its usefulness merely from the title, offers all the advantages of a first-class private library. The New York library has of course the inestimable advantage of being really central, and working with branches. One of the most impressive things about the whole system is the co-operation possible between center and branches. In Paris and London, for instance, libraries are in water-tight compartments. If you want medical books, you go to one kind of library; you cannot be sure of obtaining them at the great central libraries, and if you do, they are mostly not up to date. Again, if you live in Chelsea, London, you obtain a reader's ticket for the free library; but if you move to Bloomsbury, London, the Chelsea ticket has no significance and you have to begin all over again in Blooms-bury. It follows that there is no interchange of books between such self-contained institutions. If the book isn't there, it simply isn't there. In actual practice, a high state of efficiency as regards book purchase exists in the various libraries in London, but this is in spite of, rather than because of, any system in the matter. Also of course it means a great deal of duplication, and money thus spent might well be devoted to salaries and the insuring of a better type of librarian. Now in New York State I have worked continuously at Forty-second Street and also in the library of a little town of some six or seven thousand inhabitants. What do I find? If I want a book that does not chance to be available, the central library obtains it for me from one of the branches where it happens to be visiting. Incidentally a central filing system enables this to be done in the shortest possible time. In the country-town library I find many special books that I ask for. When I want a book that is not there, the librarian, not being dependent upon a little-town grant, has only to send up to Albany to get it from the State library there. Most impressive perhaps of all to the foreigner are the facilities offered by the traveling libraries in country districts. There is a fascinating suggestion of George Borrow in these itinerant libraries, all worked from the center and bringing books to those who cannot come to the books. European countries, being on a smaller scale, have not of course quite the same need for such an institution. To them it sounds more like a Utopian scheme than an actual working system readily accepted in the Newer World as a matter of course. In Europe, again, the lending library is conducted in quite a different spirit from that obtaining in New York. To be lent books is something of a privilege, and many safeguards are adopted. There is far more of a feeling over there that man is made for books and not books for man. Either you may pay -and pay quite heavily-for the loan of a number of books or you can borrow two, or at most three, from the free libraries in England. In France there is still more formality. There is nothing of the gladness of lending-because it contributes towards the general standard of education-which obtains in the New York institutions. Also the few books obtainable cannot compare with |
