Library Work with Children
Alice I. Hazeltine
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PREFACE
HISTORY AND GENERAL DISCUSSION
PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND THE YOUNG
CHOICE OF BOOKS
BOYS' AND GIRLS' READING
READING OF THE YOUNG
HOW LIBRARY WORK WITH CHILDREN HAS GROWN IN
HARTFORD AND CONNECTICUT
A CHAPTER IN CHILDREN'S LIBRARIES
THE CHILDREN'S LIBRARY IN NEW YORK
THE WORK FOR CHILDREN IN FREE LIBRARIES
THE GROWING TENDENCY TO OVER-EMPHASIZE THE
CHILDREN'S SIDE
LIBRARY WORK WITH CHILDREN
VALUES IN LIBRARY WORK WITH CHILDREN
LIBRARY MEMBERSHIP AS A CIVIC FORCE
DESCRIPTION OF FOLDER
HOW TO JOIN THE LIBRARY
THE CIVIC VALUE OF LIBRARY WORK WITH CHILDREN
ESTABLISHING RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CHILDREN'S
LIBRARY AND OTHER CIVIC AGENCIES
VALUES IN LIBRARY WORK WITH CHILDREN
VALUES IN LIBRARY WORK WITH CHILDREN
ADMINISTRATION AND METHODS; REFERENCE WORK;
DISCIPLINE
THE CHILDREN'S ROOM AND THE CHILDREN'S LIBRARIAN
WORK WITH CHILDREN IN THE SMALL LIBRARY
PERSONAL WORK WITH CHILDREN
THE LIBRARY AND THE CHILDREN: AN ACCOUNT OF THE
CHILDREN'S WORK IN THE CLEVELAND PUBLIC LIBRARY
PICTURE BULLETINS IN THE CHILDREN'S LIBRARY
HOW TO INTEREST MOTHERS IN CHILDREN'S READING
REFERENCE WORK AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN
REFERENCE WORK WITH CHILDREN
LIBRARY FACILITIES
CHOICE OF TOPICS
USE MADE OF THE MATERIAL BY THE CHILD
SYSTEMATIC INSTRUCTION IN THE USE OF THE LIBRARY
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL WORK
INSTRUCTION OF SCHOOL CHILDREN IN THE USE OF
LIBRARY CATALOGS AND REFERENCE BOOKS
ELEMENTARY LIBRARY INSTRUCTION
THE QUESTION OF DISCIPLINE
MAINTAINING ORDER IN THE CHILDREN'S ROOM
PROBLEMS OF DISCIPLINE
SYNOPSIS
SPECIAL METHODS AND TYPES OF WORK:
STORY-TELLING; READING CLUBS; HOME LIBRARIES, PLAYGROUNDS, ETC.
THE STORY HOUR
LEGENDS OF CHARLEMAGNE AND HIS PALADINS
LEGENDS OF ROBIN HOOD
STORY-TELLING IN LIBRARIES
STORY TELLING—A PUBLIC LIBRARY METHOD
STORY TELLING AS A LIBRARY TOOL
REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON STORY-TELLING
BROOKLYN
CHICAGO
CLEVELAND
JAMAICA, LONG ISLAND
NEW YORK CITY
PITTSBURGH
ST. LOUIS
STORYTELLING IN OTHER COMMUNITIES
THE SPECIAL STORYTELLER AND THE REGULAR ASSISTANT
LIST OF FIFTY STORIES AND A LIST OF BOOKS FOR
READING ON THE PLAYGROUND
EXPERIENCES IN STORYTELLING
STORY PROGRAM
SUGGESTIONS
READING CLUBS FOR OLDER BOYS AND GIRLS
LIBRARY CLUBS FOR BOYS AND GIRLS
LIBRARY READING CLUBS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
HOME LIBRARIES
HOME LIBRARIES
LIBRARY DAY AT THE PLAYGROUNDS
LIBRARY WORK IN SUMMER PLAYGROUNDS
THE SELECTION OF BOOKS FOR SUNDAY SCHOOL
LIBRARIES AND THEIR INTRODUCTION TO CHILDREN
THE CHILDREN'S MUSEUM IN BROOKLYN
WORK WITH CHILDREN AT THE COLORED BRANCH OF THE
LOUISVILLE FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
THE FOREIGN CHILD AT A ST. LOUIS BRANCH
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Library Work with Children
Classics of American Librarianship
Edited by ARTHUR E. BOSTWICK, Ph.D.
LIBRARY WORK WITH CHILDREN
REPRINTS OF PAPERS AND ADDRESSES
SELECTED AND ANNOTATED BY
ALICE I. HAZELTINE
Supervisor of Children's Public Library
St. Louis, Mo.
This second volume in the series of Classics of American
Librarianship is devoted to library work with children. As stated in
the preface to the first volume, on "Library and school," the papers
chosen are primarily of historic rather than of present-day value,
although many of them embody principles which govern the practice of
today. They have been grouped under general headings in order to
bring more closely together material relating to the same or to
similar subjects. Several different phases of children's work are thus
represented, although no attempt has been made to make the collection
comprehensive. Book-selection for children has not been included
except incidentally, since it is expected that this subject will be
treated in another volume as part of the general subject of
book-selection. In the same way, material on training for library work
with children has been reserved for a volume on library training. The
present volume is an attempt to bring together in accessible form
papers representing the growth and tendencies of forty years of
library work with children.
ALICE I. HAZELTINE.
The history of library work with children is yet to be written. From
the bequest made to West Cambridge by Dr. Ebenezer Learned, of money
to purchase "such books as will best promote useful knowledge and the
Christian virtues" to the present day of organized work with children
—of the training of children's librarians, of cooperative evaluated
lists of books, of methods of extension— the development has been
gradual, yet with a constantly broadening point of view. A number of
libraries have claimed the honor of being the first to establish
children's work—a fact which in itself seems to show that the
movement was general rather than sporadic. The library periodicals
contain many interesting accounts of these beginnings, a number of
which have been mentioned in the articles included in this volume.
Certain personalities stand out very clearly in the history of the
early days, and many of the same ones are still closely associated
with children's work in its later developments. The Library Journal
says editorially in 1914: "Probably the credit of the initiative work
for children within a public library should remain with Mrs. Sanders
of the Pawtucket Library, who made the small folk welcome a generation
ago, when, in most public libraries, they were barred out by the rules
and regulations and frowned away by the librarian." Three articles
from Miss Caroline Hewins's pen have been chosen for this collection,
the last written thirty-two years later than the first. They not only
give details of the history of children's work, but reflect Miss
Hewins's personality and opinions. A paper given by Miss Lutie E.
Stearns at the Lake Placid Conference of the American Library
Association in 1894 has been referred to as one of the most important
contributions to the development of work with children. This paper was
printed in the first volume of this series, "Library and school" (New
York, 1914). The leading editorial in The Library Journal for April,
1898, says: "Within the past year or two the phrase 'the library and
the child'—which was itself new not so long ago—has been changed
about. It is now 'the child and the library,' and the transposition is
suggestive of the increasing emphasis given to that phase of library
work that deals with children, either by themselves or in connection
with their schools." Mr. Henry E. Legler, in the last paper in this
group, traces the growth of the "conception of what the duty of
society is to the child"; claims that the children's library should be
one in a union of social forces, and asserts that it contributes to
the building of character, the enlargement of narrow lives, the
opening of opportunity to all alike. Thus the modern viewpoint
includes the ideals of democracy in addition to Dr. Learned's emphasis
on "knowledge" and "virtue" and probably points the way to the future
development of library work with children.
The special report on "Public Libraries in the United States of
America," published in 1876 by the U. S. Bureau of Education includes
the following paper by Mr. W. I. Fletcher, in which he advocates the
removal of age-restriction and emphasizes the importance of choosing
only those books which "have something positively good about them."
This and the following eight papers give, in some measure, a history
of library work with children. William Isaac Fletcher was born in
Burlington, Vermont, April 28, 1844. He was educated in the
Winchester, Mass., schools, and received the honorary degree of A.M.
from Amherst in 1884. He served as librarian of Amherst College from
1883 to 1911, when he was made librarian emeritus. Mr. Fletcher was
joint editor of Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, and editor of
the continuation from 1882 to 1911; edited the A. L. A. Index to
general literature in 1893 and 1901; the Cooperative Index to
periodicals from 1883 to 1911, and in 1895 published his Public
Libraries in America. He was president of the A. L. A. in 1891-1892.
What shall the public library do for the young, and how? is a
question of acknowledged importance. The remarkable development of
"juvenile literature" testifies to the growing importance of this
portion of the community in the eyes of book producers, while the
character of much of this literature, which is now almost thrust into
the hands of youth, is such as to excite grave doubts as to its being
of any service, intellectual or moral. In this state of things the
public library is looked to by some with hope, by others with fear,
according as its management is apparently such as to draw young
readers away from merely frivolous reading, or to make such reading
more accessible and encourage them in the use of it; hence the
importance of a judicious administration of the library in this
regard. One of the first questions to be met in arranging a code of
rules for the government of a public library relates to the age at
which young persons shall be admitted to its privileges. There is no
usage on this point which can be called common, but most libraries fix
a certain age, as twelve or fourteen, below which candidates for
admission are ineligible. Only a few of the most recently established
libraries have adopted what seems to be the right solution of this
question, by making no restriction whatever as to age. This course
recommends itself as the wisest and the most consistent with the idea
of the public library on many grounds. In the first place, age is no
criterion of mental condition and capacity. So varying is the date of
the awakening of intellectual life, and the rapidity of its progress,
that height of stature might almost as well be taken for its measure
as length of years. In every community there are some young minds of
peculiar gifts and precocious development, as fit to cope with the
masterpieces of literature at ten years of age, as the average person
of twenty, and more appreciative of them. From this class come the
minds which rule the world of mind, and confer the greatest benefits
on the race. How can the public library do more for the intellectual
culture of the whole community than by setting forward in their
careers those who will be the teachers and leaders of their
generation? In how many of the lives of those who have been eminent in
literature and science do we find a youth almost discouraged because
deprived of the means of intellectual growth. The lack of appreciation
of youthful demands for culture is one of the saddest chapters in the
history of the world's comprehending not the light which comes into
it. Our public libraries will fail in an important part of their
mission if they shut out from their treasures minds craving the best,
and for the best purposes, because, forsooth, the child is too young
to read good books. Some will be found to advocate the exclusion of
such searchers for knowledge on the ground that precocious tastes
should be repressed in the interests of physical health. But a careful
investigation of the facts in such cases can hardly fail to convince
one that in them repression is the last thing that will bring about
bodily health and vigor. There should doubtless be regulation, but
nothing will be so likely to conduce to the health and physical well
being of a person with strong mental cravings as the reasonable
satisfaction of those cravings. Cases can be cited where children,
having what seemed to be a premature development of mental qualities
coupled with weak or even diseased bodily constitutions, have rapidly
improved in health when circumstances have allowed the free exercise
of their intellectual powers, and have finally attained a maturity
vigorous alike in body and mind. This is in the nature of a
digression, but it can do no harm to call attention thus to the facts
which contradict the common notion that intellectual precocity should
be discouraged. Nature is the best guide, and it is in accordance with
all her workings, that when she has in hand the production of a giant
of intellect, the young Hercules should astonish observers by feats of
strength even in his cradle. Let not the public library, then, be
found working against nature by establishing, as far as its influence
goes, a dead level of intellectual attainments for all persons below a
certain age. But there is a much larger class of young persons who
ought not to be excluded from the library, not because they have
decided intellectual cravings and are mentally mature, but because
they have capacities for the cultivation of good tastes, and because
the cultivation of such tastes cannot be begun too early. There is no
greater mistake in morals than that often covered by the saying,
harmless enough literally, "Boys will be boys." This saying is used
perhaps oftener than for any other purpose to justify boys in doing
things which are morally not fit for men to do, and is thus the
expression of that great error that immoralities early in life are to
be expected and should not be severely deprecated. The same
misconception of the relations of youth to maturity and of nature's
great laws of growth and development is seen in that common idea that
children need not be expected to have any literary tastes; that they
may well be allowed to confine their reading to the frivolous, the
merely amusing. That this view is an erroneous one thought and
observation agree in showing. Much like the caution of the mother who
would not allow her son to bathe in the river till he had learned to
swim, is that of those who would have youth wait till a certain age,
when they ought to have good tastes formed, before they can be
admitted to companionship with the best influences for the cultivation
of them. Who will presume to set the age at which a child may first be
stirred with the beginnings of a healthy intellectual appetite on
getting a taste of the strong meat of good literature? This point is
one of the first importance. No after efforts can accomplish what is
done with ease early in life in the way of forming habits either
mental or moral, and if there is any truth in the idea that the public
library is not merely a storehouse for the supply of the wants of the
reading public, but also and especially an educational institution
which shall create wants where they do not exist, then the library
ought to bring its influences to bear on the young as early as
possible. And this is not a question of inducing young persons to
read, but of directing their reading into right channels. For in these
times there is little probability that exclusion from the public
library will prevent their reading. Poor, indeed, in all manner of
resources, must be the child who cannot now buy, beg, or borrow a fair
supply of reading of some kind; so that exclusion from the library is
likely to be a shutting up of the boy or girl to dime novels and story
papers as the staple of reading. Complaints are often made that public
libraries foster a taste for light reading, especially among the
young. Those who make this complaint too often fail to perceive that
the tastes indulged by those who are admitted to the use of the public
library at the age of twelve or fourteen, are the tastes formed in
the previous years of exclusion. A slight examination of facts, such
as can be furnished by any librarian of experience in a circulating
public library, will show how little force there is in this objection.
Nor should it be forgotten, in considering this question, that to
very many young people youth is the time when they have more leisure
for reading than any other portion of life is likely to furnish. At
the age of twelve or fourteen, or even earlier, they are set at work
to earn their living, and thereafter their opportunities for culture
are but slight, nor are their circumstances such as to encourage them
in such a work. We cannot begin too early to give them a bent towards
culture which shall abide by them and raise them above the work-a-day
world which will demand so large a share of their time and strength.
The mechanic, the farmer, the man in any walk of life, who has early
formed good habits of reading, is the one who will magnify his
calling, and occupy the highest positions in it. And to the thousands
of young people, in whose homes there is none of the atmosphere of
culture or of the appliances for it, the public library ought to
furnish the means of keeping pace intellectually with the more favored
children of homes where good books abound and their subtle influence
extends even to those who are too young to read and understand them.
If it fails to do this it is hardly a fit adjunct to our school
system, whose aim it is to give every man a chance to be the equal of
every other man, if he can. It is not claimed that the arguments used
in support of an age limitation are of no force; but it is believed
that they are founded on objections to the admission of the young to
library privileges which are good only as against an indiscriminate
and not properly regulated admission, and which are not applicable to
the extension of the use of the library to the young under such
conditions and restrictions as are required by their peculiar
circumstances. For example, the public library ought not to furnish
young persons with a means of avoiding parental supervision of their
reading. A regulation making the written consent of the parent a
prerequisite to the registration of the name of a minor, and the
continuance of such consent a condition of the continuance of the
privilege, will take from parents all cause for complaint in this
regard. Neither should the library be allowed to stand between pupils
in school and their studies, as it is often complained that it does.
To remove this difficulty, the relations of the library to the school
system should be such that teachers should be able to regulate the use
of the library by those pupils whose studies are evidently interfered
with by their miscellaneous reading. The use of the library would thus
be a stimulus to endeavor on the part of pupils who would regard its
loss as the probable result of lack of diligence in their studies.
Again, it must be understood that to the young, as to all others, the
library is open only during good behavior. The common idea that
children and youth are more likely than older persons to commit
offenses against library discipline is not borne out by experience;
but were it true, a strict enforcement of rules as to fines and
penalties would protect the library against loss and injury, the fear
of suspension from the use of the library as the result of
carelessness in its use, operating more strongly than any other motive
to prevent such carelessness. If there are other objections to the
indiscriminate admission of the young to the library, they can also be
met by such regulations as readily suggest themselves, and should not
be allowed to count as arguments against a judicious and proper
extension of the benefits of the library to the young.
But when the doors of the public library are thrown open to the
young, and they are recognized as an important class of its patrons,
the question comes up, What shall the library furnish to this class in
order to meet its wants? If the object of the library is understood to
be simply the supplying of the wants of the reading public, and the
young are considered as a portion of that public, the question is very
easily answered by saying, Give them what they call for that is not
positively injurious in its tendency. But if we regard the public
library as an educational means rather than a mere clubbing
arrangement for the economical supply of reading, just as the gas
company is for the supply of artificial light, it becomes of
importance, especially with reference to the young, who are the most
susceptible to educating influences, that they should receive from the
library that which will do them good; and the managers of the library
appear not as caterers to a master whose will is the rule as to what
shall be furnished, but rather as the trainers of gymnasts who seek to
provide that which will be of the greatest service to their men. No
doubt both these elements enter into a true conception of the duty of
library managers; but when we are regarding especially the young, the
latter view comes nearer the truth than the other. In the first place,
among the special requirements of the young is this, that the library
shall interest and be attractive to them. The attitude of some public
libraries toward the young and the uncultivated seems to say to them,
"We cannot encourage you in your low state of culture; you must come
up to the level of appreciating what is really high toned in
literature, or we cannot help you." The public library being, however,
largely if not mainly for the benefit of the uncultivated, must, to a
large extent, come down to the level of this class and meet them on
common ground. Every library ought to have a large list of good
juvenile books, a statement which at once raises the question, What
are good juvenile books? This is one of the vexed questions of the
literary world, closely allied to the one which has so often been
mooted in the press and the pulpit, as to the utility and propriety of
novel reading. But while this question is one on which there are great
differences of opinion, there are a few things which may be said on it
without diffidence or the fear of successful contradiction. Of this
kind is the remark that good juvenile books must have something
positively good about them. They should be not merely amusing or
entertaining and harmless, but instructive and stimulating to the
better nature. Fortunately such books are not so rare as they have
been. Some of the best minds are now being turned to the work of
providing them. Within a few months such honored names in the world of
letters as those of Hamerton and Higginson have been added to the list
which contains those of "Peter Parley," Jacob Abbott, "Walter
Aimwell," Elijah Kellogg, Thomas Hughes, and others who have devoted
their talents, not to the amusement, but to the instruction and
culture of youth. The names of some of the most popular writers for
young people in our day are not ranked with those mentioned above, not
because their productions are positively injurious, but because they
lack the positively good qualities demanded by our definition. There
is a danger to youth in reading some books which are not open to the
charge of directly injurious tendencies. Many of the most popular
juveniles, while running over with excellent "morals," are unwholesome
mental food for the young, for the reason that they are essentially
untrue. That is, they give false views of life, making it consist, if
it be worth living, of a series of adventures, hair-breadth escapes;
encounters with tyrannical schoolmasters and unnatural parents; sea
voyages in which the green hand commands a ship and defeats a mutiny
out of sheer smartness; rides on runaway locomotives, strokes of good
luck, and a persistent turning up of things just when they are wanted
—all of which is calculated in the long run to lead away the young
imagination and impart discontent with the common lot of an uneventful
life. Books of adventure seem to meet a real want in the minds of the
young, and should not be entirely ruled out; but they cannot be
included among the books the reading of which should be encouraged or
greatly extended. In the public library it will be found perhaps
necessary not to exclude this class of juvenile books entirely. Such
an exclusion is not here advocated, but it is rather urged that they
should not form the staple of juvenile reading furnished by the
library. The better books should be duplicated so as to be on hand
when called for; these should be provided in such numbers merely that
they can occasionally be had as the "seasoning" to a course of good
reading. But the young patrons of the library ought not to be
encouraged in confining their reading to juveniles, of no matter how
good quality. It is the one great evil of this era of juvenile books,
good and bad, that by supplying mental food in the form fit for mere
children, they postpone the attainment of a taste for the strong meat
of real literature; and the public library ought to be influential in
exalting this real literature and keeping it before the people,
stemming with it the current of trash which is so eagerly welcomed
because it is new or because it is interesting. When children were
driven to read the same books as their elders or not to read at all,
there were doubtless thousands, probably the majority of all, who
chose the latter alternative, and read but very little in their
younger years. This class is better off now than then by the greater
inducements offered them to mental culture in the increased
facilities provided for it. But there seems to be danger that the
ease and smoothness of the royal road to knowledge now provided in
the great array of easy books in all departments will not conduce to
the formation of such mental growths as resulted from the pursuit of
knowledge under difficulties. There is doubtless more knowledge; but
is there as much power and muscle of mind? However this may be, none
can fail to recognize the importance of setting young people in the
way of reading the best books early in life. And as the public library
is likely to be the one place where the masters of literature can be
found, it is essential that here they should be put by every available
means in communication with and under the influence of these masters.
It only remains now to say that, as we have before intimated the
public library should be viewed as an adjunct of the public school
system, and to suggest that in one or two ways the school may work
together with the library in directing the reading of the young. There
is the matter of themes for the writing of compositions; by selecting
subjects on which information can be had at the library, the teacher
can send the pupil to the library as a student, and readily put him in
communication with, and excite his interest in, classes of books to
which he has been a stranger and indifferent. Again, in the study of
the history of English literature, a study which, to the credit of our
teachers be it said, is being rapidly extended, the pupils may be
induced to take new interest, and gain greatly in point of real
culture by being referred for illustrative matter to the public
library.
This first of a series of yearly reports on "Reading for the young"
was made by Miss Caroline M. Hewins at the Cincinnati Conference of
the A. L. A. in 1882. It embodies answers from twenty-five librarians
to the question, "What are you doing to encourage a love of good
reading in boys and girls?" Caroline Maria Hewins was born in Roxbury,
Mass., October 10, 1846. She attended high school in Boston; received
her library training in the Boston Athenaeum; taught in private
schools for several years, and took a year's special course in Boston
University. In 1911 she received an honorary degree of M.A. from
Trinity College, Hartford. She has been librarian in Hartford, Conn.,
for many years, from 1875 to 1892 in the Hartford Library Association,
since that time in the Hartford Public Library. She has done editorial
work for various magazines and has contributed many articles to the
library periodicals. Her list of "Books for boys and girls," of which
the third edition was published in 1915, represents the result of many
years' thoughtful and appreciative study of children's literature.
Library work with children owes to Miss Hewins a debt of gratitude for
her unusual contribution to the establishment of high standards, the
development of a broad vision, and the maintenance of a wholesome,
sympathetic, but not sentimental point of view. About the first of
March I sent cards to the librarians of twenty-five of the leading
libraries of the country, asking, "What are you doing to encourage a
love of good reading in boys and girls?" and soon after published a
notice in the New York Evening Post and Nation, saying that statements
from librarians and teachers concerning their work in the same
direction would be gladly received The cards brought, in almost every
case, full answers; the newspaper notice has produced few results.
The printed report of the Thomas Crane Public Library, Quincy, Mass.,
says: "The trustees have recently made a special effort to encourage
the use of the library in connection with the course of teaching in
the public schools. Under a rule adopted two years ago the teachers of
certain grades of schools are in the practice of borrowing a number of
those volumes they consider best adapted to the use of their scholars,
and keeping them in constant circulation among them. During the year
two lists of books for the use of the children in the public schools
were printed under the direction of the trustees. One of these lists
contained works in juvenile fiction; the other, biographies,
histories, and books of a more instructive character. All the works
included were selected by the trustees as being such as they would put
in the hands of their own children. The lists thus prepared were then
given to the teachers of the schools for gratuitous circulation among
their scholars." Mr. Green, of the Worcester, Mass., Free Public
Library, writes: "The close connection which exists between the
library and the schools is doing much to elevate the character of the
reading of the boys and girls. Many books are used for collateral
reading, others to supplement the instruction of text-books in
geography and history, others still in the employment of leisure hours
in school. Boys and girls are led to read good books and come to the
library for similar ones. Lists of good books are kept in the
librarian's room, and are much used by teachers and pupils." Mr.
Upton, of the Peabody Library, Peabody, Mass., gives as his opinion:
"If teachers did their duty, librarians would not be troubled as to
good reading. My experience of about thirty- five or forty years as a
public grammar-school teacher is, that teachers can control, to a
great extent, the reading of their pupils, and also that, as a class,
teachers are not GREAT readers. We should have little trouble in
changing to some degree our circulation, but our thirteen-foot shelves
and long ladders prevent the employment of the best help. We print
bulletins and assist all who ask aid." Miss Bean, of the Public
Library, Brookline, Mass., says: "I have no statistics of results
relative to my school finding-list. Its influence is quietly but
steadily making itself felt. The teachers tell me that many of the
pupils use no other catalogue in selecting books from the library, and
I know there are many families where the children are restricted to
its use. We keep two or three interleaved and posted with the newest
books when I think them desirable. Several of the teachers have told
me personally that they had found the list useful to themselves; but
teachers are mortal and human. Many of them think duty done when the
day's session is over, and the matter of outside reading with their
pupils is of little moment to them. I want to get out a revised list,
with useful notes." Mr. Rice, of the City Library, Springfield, Mass.,
writes: "We have a manuscript catalogue of the best and most popular
books for boys and girls. We call attention to the best books as we
have opportunity when the young people visit the library. We endeavor
to influence the teachers in our public schools to aid us in directing
the attention of boys and girls to the best juveniles, and such other
books as they can appreciate." Mr. Arnold, of the Public Library,
Taunton, Mass., says: "What I am doing is to indicate in the margin of
my catalogues the works which are adapted to the taste and
comprehension of young people, so that not only their own attention
may be diverted from the fiction department, but that their parents
and teachers may easily furnish them with proper lists. We aim at
excluding from the library books of a sensational character, as well
as those positively objectionable on the score of morality." Miss
James, librarian of the Free Library, Newton, Mass., in speaking of
the catalogue, without notes, of children's books, published by that
library in 1878, and given to the pupils of the public schools, says:
"I do not think that catalogue ever influenced a dozen children. We
have just completed a very full card-catalogue which the children use
a great deal in connection with their studies. Eleven hundred zinc
headings are a great help. I frequently speak to the children to get
acquainted with them, so they are quite free to ask for help. Our
local paper has offered me half a column a week for titles and
notices. I shall, of course, notice children's books as well as
others." Mr. Peirce, the superintendent, says in his last report: "It
is only from homes where the intellectual and moral character of
childhood is neglected, as a rule, that the library with us is in any
wise abused by the over-crowding of the mind with novels. In many of
even these cases kind and wise restraint can be, and is, exercised by
the librarian." Mr. Cummings, curator of the Lower Hall card-catalogue
of the Boston Public Library, and Miss Jenkins, assistant librarian in
the same place, have kindly sent me the manuscripts of their
forthcoming reports to the trustees. These reports are wholly on the
methods and results of their personal intercourse with readers, and
the increase in special reading during the last few years. Concerning
boys and girls Mr. Cummings writes: "I must not forget the juvenile
readers, school-boys and school- girls, and the children from the
stores and offices about town. These latter are smart, bright, active
little bodies, often more in earnest than their more fortunate fellows
of the same age. They are an object of special solicitude and care.
The school children come for points in reading for their compositions
and for parallel reading with their lessons in school; and such books
are suggested as may be found useful. The two most available
faculties in children to work upon are the heart and the imagination.
Get a hold on their affections by encouraging words and manifesting a
readiness to help them, and you command their devotion and confidence.
Give them interesting books (Optic and Alger, if needs be), and you
fix their attention. Above all, let the book be interesting; for the
attention is never fixed by, nor does the memory ever retain, what is
laborious to read. But, once assured of their devotion, with their
confidence secured and their attention fixed, there is nothing to
prevent the work of direction succeeding admirably with them." Miss
Jenkins says: "The use of the library by the young people is
increasing every year. The change in the character of children's
books has been a great help to us, fairly crowding out many of the
trashy stories so long the favorite reading. One of the first things
that attracted my attention was their perseverance in seeking certain
authors, and their continual exchange of books. I soon found their
difficulties with the catalogue. They read only stories, and wanted
those full of incident and excitement; when their favorite author
failed, they sought for something else that sounded right in the
catalogue, or sometimes wrote only the numbers without much reference
to the titles, trusting, I suppose, to luck. Not liking the looks of
the books they would return them. A steady recurrence of this made it
a nuisance. One of my first steps was to join one of the many groups
around the room, and look over with them, suggest this author, or
this, that, and the other book, until they were furnished with a list
of books fairly suited to their age, and then, suggesting that the
list should be kept for future reference, pass on to another group.
This is now a general practice, and seems to suit the little folks;
if, after several applications, they are unsuccessful, it is my custom
to get them a book. My young people began to ask me to help their
friends, also to help others themselves; so gradually the bright faces
of my boy and girl friends have grown familiar, and as they gain
confidence in me we strike out into other paths, and many bright,
readable books, historical or containing bits of geography or
elementary science, have been read. It so happened that many of my
young friends grew quite confidential, and told me about their school
and lessons. It was not very difficult to induce them to read some
things bearing upon their studies; these books were shown to their
teachers, and many were ready to cooperate at once; this led to an
acquaintance with several, and the teachers' plan of study became a
basis of selection for reading in history, biography, travel, and
natural science. From books suited to their capacity much effective
work has been done. Several classes have studied English history, and
their reading has been made supplementary from the topics. Later, when
a list of notable persons was given to them, they showed the effect of
their reading by giving very good short sketches of these persons.
American history—colonial, revolutionary, administrations, civil war,
reconstruction—has been treated similarly, and the teachers are much
gratified at the result. We find that these boys do not fall back to
trashy reading, but ask for better reading in place of their old
favorites. Several girls of the high school have sought assistance in
their various studies, especially in Greek and Roman history, and have
read, in connection with the histories recommended, novels and some
interesting travels, and have spent much time over engravings and
photographs illustrative of their reading. Two of these girls, having
asked me for a novel, meaning something like their former reading, I
made tests by giving them exactly what they asked for. Very soon both
books were returned, with the remark, 'I couldn't read it.' In a
little talk that ensued, and in which I drew from them a criticism of
their reading, it dawned upon them that they had developed, or grown,
as they said. I could go on giving instances of this gradual
development in individual cases, and of its influence upon others to
whom these readers recommended what they had read, the increased call
for the better books of fiction, biography, history, travel,
miscellany, and science. In four years' work books of sensational
incident, so long popular, have lost much of their charm. They have
been crowded out by better books and personal interests in the young
people themselves." Mr. Foster of the Public Library, Providence, R.
I., has sent an account in detail of his work among pupils and
teachers, which may be thus condensed: Soon after the opening of the
library, in 1878, he held a conference with the grammar-school masters
of the city, and through them met the other teachers. He printed for
the use of pupils a list of suggestions, some of the most important
of which were summed up in the following words: "Begin by basing your
reading on your school text-books;" "Learn the proper use of
reference-books;" "Use imaginative literature, but not immoderately;"
"Do not try to cover too much ground;" "Do not hesitate to ask for
assistance and suggestions at the library;" "See that you make your
reading a definite gain to you in some direction." Mr. Foster soon
gained influence among the teachers by personally addressing them, and
began to publish annotated lists of books for young readers. A reading
hour was established in the public schools, and pupils learned to give
in their own language the substance of books which they had read. Mr.
Foster says: "Our plans were by no means limited to the public
schools, but included Brown University, the Rhode Island State Normal
School, the Commercial College, the private schools for girls, and the
two private boys' schools preparatory for college, one of which has
ten teachers and some two hundred and fifty pupils. One morning I met
the boys of this school in their chapel, and gave them a twenty
minutes' talk on reading, particularly on the question how to direct
one's current reading, as of newspapers, into some channel of
permanent interest and value. Since my address before the teachers of
the State (published in the papers and proceedings of the Rhode Island
Institute of Instruction for 1880) we have had many calls for
assistance from outside the city, from teachers in the high schools
and grammar schools of other places. In 1878 I began the preparation
of a bulletin of new books, issued quarterly by the State Board of
Education, and there have been several instances of a series of
references in connection with school-work. In July, 1880, I sent to
the different teachers a series of suggestions about the reading of
their pupils, covering such points as preserving a record of the
books read, books not being read and returned at too frequent
intervals, and the inspection of these matters by the teacher, or
rather establishing communication between the teacher and pupil so
that these things shall be talked over." Finding-lists have been
checked for the schools, appeals have been made by Mr. Foster in
public addresses for supervision of children's reading by teachers and
parents, and duplicate copies of books have been placed in the library
for school use. In conclusion, Mr. Foster adds: "There has been a
gradual and steady advance in methods of cooperation and mutual
understanding, so that now it is a perfectly understood thing,
throughout the schools, among teachers and pupils, that the library
stands ready to help them at almost every point." Mrs. Sanders, of
the Free Public Library, Pawtucket, R. I., writes: "I am circulating
by the thousand Rev. Washington Gladden's 'How and What to Read,'
published as a circular by the State Board of Education of Rhode
Island. I am constantly encouraging the children to come to me for
assistance, which they are very ready to do; and I find that after
boys have had either a small or a full dose of Alger (we do not admit
'Optic'), they are very ready to be promoted to something more
substantial— Knox, Butterworth, Coffin, Sparks, or Abbott. I find
more satisfaction in directing the minds of boys than girls, for
though I may and generally do succeed in interesting them in the very
best of fiction, it is much more difficult to draw them into other
channels, unless it is poetry. I should like very much to know if this
is the experience of other librarians. My aim is first to interest
girls or boys according to their ability to enjoy or appreciate, and
gradually to develop whatever taste is the most prominent. For
instance, I put on the shelves all mechanical books for boys; works
upon adornments for homes—painting, drawing, music, aids to little
housekeepers, etc., for the girls." Mr. Fletcher, of the Watkinson
Library, Hartford, Conn., says, in a recent address on the public
library question in its moral and religious aspect: "Many of our
public libraries beg the whole question, so far as it refers to the
youngest readers, by excluding them from the use of books. A limit of
fourteen or sixteen years is fixed, below which they are not admitted
to the library as its patrons. But, in some of those more recently
established, the wiser course has been adopted of fixing no such
limitation. For, in these times, there is little probability that
exclusion from the library will prevent their reading. Poor, indeed,
in resources must be the child who cannot now buy, beg, or borrow a
fair supply of reading of some kind; so that exclusion from the
library is simply a shutting up of the boy or girl to the resources of
the home and the book-shop or newspaper. A slight examination of the
literature found in a majority of homes and most prominent in the
shops is enough to show what this means, and to explain the fact, that
the young persons first admitted to the public library at fourteen
years of age come to it with a well-developed taste for trash and a
good acquaintance with the names of authors in that department of
literature, but with apparently little capacity left for culture in
higher directions." Mr. Winchester, of the Russell Free Library,
Middletown, Conn., said in his report, last January: "A departure from
the ordinary rules governing the use of the library has been made in
favor of the teachers in the city schools, allowing a teacher to take
to the school, a number of books upon any topic which may be the
subject of study for the class for the time, and to retain them
beyond the time regularly allowed." In a letter three months later he
writes, "I cannot trace directly to this arrangement any change in the
reading of young folks. We have taken a good deal of pains to get good
books for the younger readers, and I make it a point to assist them
whenever I can. I feel quite sure that, if trash is shut out of the
library and withheld from young readers, and, if good and interesting
books are offered to them, they will soon learn not to care for the
trash." Mr. Bassett, of the Bronson Library, Waterbury, Conn., says in
his printed report: "The librarian can do a little towards leading
young book-borrowers towards the selection of proper books, but it
does not amount to much unless his efforts are seconded by parents and
teachers. It is of little use, I fear, to appeal to parents to look
after their children's reading. It is possible that they do not know
that, in not a few cases, boys and girls from eight to sixteen years
of age, even while attending school, draw from three to six volumes a
week to read, and often come for two volumes a day. That they fail to
realize the effects of so much reading on their children's minds is
evident when we hear them say, and with no little pride, too, 'Our
children are great readers; they read all the time.' Such parents
ought to know that instead of turning out to be prodigies of learning,
these library gluttons are far more likely to become prodigious
idiots, and that teachers find them, as a rule, the poorest scholars
and the worst thinkers." He adds an appeal to teachers: "Give out
questions that demand research, and send out pupils to the library for
information if necessary, and be assured that a true librarian enjoys
nothing so much as a search, with an earnest seeker, after truths that
are hidden away in his books. Do not hesitate even to ask questions
that you cannot answer, and rely upon your pupils to answer them, and
to give authorities, and do not be ashamed to learn of your pupils.
Work with them as well as for them. But, whatever else you do, do not
waste your time in urging your pupils to stop story-reading and to
devote their time to good books. A parent can command this, you
cannot; but you can make the use of good books, and the acquisition of
knowledge not found in books, attractive and even necessary, and your
ability to do this determines your real value as a teacher. Your work
is to change your earth-loving moles into eagle-eyed and intelligent
observers of all that is on, in, above, and under the earth." Mr.
Bassett writes that as a result of this appeal there was in November,
December, January, and February, an increase of nineteen (19) per cent
in the circulation of general literature, science, history, travel,
and biography, and a decrease in juveniles of ten (10) per cent for
January and February, 1882, as compared with the same months of 1881,
For the first nineteen days of March the increase of the classes
first-named was thirty-seven (37) per cent over last year, and the
decrease in juvenile fiction twenty-seven (27) per cent. He ends his
letter: "As a school officer and acting school visitor, I find that
those teachers whose education is not limited to textbooks, and who
are able to guide their pupils to full and accurate knowledge of
subjects of study, are not only the best, but the only ones worth
having." Mr. Rogers, of the Fletcher Free Library, Burlington,
Vermont, says: "I have withdrawn permanently all of Alger, Fosdick,
Thomes, and Oliver Optic. I have for some time past been making the
teachers in the primary schools my assistants without pay. I give them
packages of books to circulate among their respective schools. Very
good results have been obtained. The Police Gazette and other vile
weeklies have been discarded for books from the Fletcher Library. Most
of the young folks are not old enough to draw at the library
themselves, and this method has to be used, as in many instances the
parents will not or cannot draw books for their children. Each teacher
has a copy of Mr. Smart's excellent book, 'Reading for Young People.'
Such books as are in our collection are designated in their copies."
The New York Free Circulating Library is quietly doing good by the
establishment of carefully selected branch libraries in the poorest
and most thickly settled parts of the city In the words of the last
report: "The librarian has been constantly instructed to aid all
readers in search of information, however trivial may be the subject,
and, while the readers are to have free scope in their choice of
books, librarians have attempted, when they properly could do so, free
from seeming officiousness, to suggest books of the best character,
and induce the cultivation of a good literary taste." Miss Coe, the
librarian, adds, "Boys will read the best books, if they can get
them." Mr. Schwartz, of the Apprentices' Library, New York, says: "We
are always ready and willing to direct and advise in special cases,
but have not as yet been able to come across any general plan that
seemed to us to promise success. The term 'good reading' is relative,
and must vary according to the taste of each reader, and it is just
this variety of standards that seems to present an unsurmountable
obstacle to any general and comprehensive system of suggestions."
Miss Bullard, of the Seymour Library, Auburn, N. Y., reports a
decrease in fiction from sixty-five (65) to fifty-eight (58) per cent
in the last five years. She says: "I have endeavored, year by year, to
gain the confidence of the younger portion of our subscribers in my
ability to always furnish them with interesting reading, and have thus
been able to turn them from the domain of fiction into the more useful
fields of literature. Another noticeable and encouraging feature of
the library is the increasing use made of it by pupils in the high
school in connection with school-work." Mr. Larned, of the Young
Men's Library of Buffalo, N. Y., writes: "I think the little catalogue
is doing a great deal of good among our young readers and among
parents and teachers. We exert what personal influence we can in the
library, but there are no other special measures that we employ." The
catalogue, a carefully chosen list of books for young readers, with
stars placed against those specially recommended, includes, besides
books mentioned in other letters, the Boy's Froissart and King Arthur,
Miss Tuckey's Joan of Arc, Le Liefde's Great Dutch Admirals,
Eggleston's Famous American Indians, Bryan's History of the United
States, Verne's Exploration of the World, Du Chaillu's books, What Mr.
Darwin Saw, Science Primers, Faraday's Chemical History of a Candle,
Smiles's Biographies, Clodd's Childhood of the World, Viollet Le
Duc's Learning to Draw, Dana's Household Book of Poetry, Uncle Remus,
Sir Roger de Coverley, several pages on out and in door games, hunting
and fishing, with plenty of myths and fairy tales, an annotated
selection of historical novels, and a short list of good stories. The
Friends' Free Library, Germantown, Pa., still excludes all fiction
except a few carefully chosen stories for children. The report of the
committee says: "Our example has been serviceable in stimulating some
other library committees and communities to use more discrimination in
their selection of books than may have been the case with them in the
past. From our own precious children we would fain keep away the
threatening contamination, if in our power to do so, the divine law of
love to our neighbor thence instructs us to use the opportunity to put
far away the evil from him also." The representatives of the religious
Society of Friends for Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, have
published during the year a protest against demoralizing literature
and art, taking the ground that the national standard of moral purity
is lowered, and the sanctity of marriage weakened, by most of the
books, pictures, and theatrical exhibitions of to-day. The current
report of the Cincinnati public schools gives a full account of the
celebrations of authors' birthdays in the last two years, and the
superintendent, the Hon. John B. Peaslee, LL.D., in an address on
moral and literary training in school, urges that the custom, so
successfully begun, shall be kept up, and that children in all grades
of schools shall be required to learn every week a few lines of good
poetry, instead of choosing for themselves either verse or prose for
declamation. Mr. Merrill asks in his last report for coooperation
between the school and the library, and says in a letter: "I read a
paper some time ago which was published in a teachers' magazine, and
have addressed our Cincinnati teachers. We purchased a number of the
catalogues of the Young Men's Library of Buffalo, and have written in
our corresponding shelf numbers. A few of our teachers have also
obtained these catalogues. I judge that the children are beginning to
take out better books than formerly. The celebration of authors' days
in the schools has been very beneficial in making the children
acquainted with some of the best literature in the libraries as well
as with the use of books of reference." Miss Stevens, of the Public
Library, Toledo, Ohio, says: "We are fond of children, and suggest to
them books that they will like. Give a popular boy a good book, and
there is not much rest for that book. Librarians should like
children." Mr. Poole, of the Chicago Public Library, writes: "I have
met the principals of the schools, and have addressed them on their
duties in regulating the reading of their pupils, and advising their
pupils as to what to read and how to read. My talk has awakened some
interest in the teachers, and a committee has been appointed to
consider what can be done about it." Mr. Carnes, of the Odd Fellows'
Library Association, San Francisco, fires this shot in his report:
"Even the child knows that forbidden fruit is the sweetest on the
branch. If you wish to compel a boy to read a given book, strictly
forbid him even to take it from the shelves. The tabooed books will
somehow be secured in spite of their withdrawal." Mr. Metcalf, of the
Wells School, Boston, who told at the conference of 1879 of his work
in encouraging a love for good, careful, and critical reading, writes:
"My girls have bought Scott's Talisman, and we have read it together.
I have now sent in a request for forty copies of Ivanhoe. My second
class have read, on the same plan, this year, Mrs. Whitney's We Girls,
and the third class have finished Towle's Pizarro, and are now
reading Leslie Goldthwaite. The City Council refused, last year, to
appropriate the $1,000 asked for. When we have the means, all our
grammar and high school masters will be able to order from the library
such books as are suited to their classes. This plan introduces the
children to a kind of reading somewhat better than would otherwise
reach them, and, best of all, it gives them great facility in
expression." Hartford, which has now no free circulating library, but
hopes for one within two years, still keeps the old district system of
schools, and several of these schools have a library fund. Mr.
Barrows, principal of the Brown School, writes: "Our library contains
the usual school reference-books. Recently we have added quite a
number of books especially adapted to interest and instruct children,
such as The Boy Travellers, Miss Yonge's Histories, Butterworth's
Zigzag Journeys, Forbes's Fairy Geography, etc. The children are not
permitted to take these books away from the building. Pupils are
invited to bring such additional facts in geography, or history, as
they may obtain by reading. Topics are assigned. Should spices be the
topic, one pupil would read up concerning cloves; another nutmeg, etc.
Again, pupils are allowed to make their own selections, and invited
to give, at a specified time, any facts in geography, history, natural
science, manufactures, inventions, etc. For this extra work extra
credits are given. Our object is to cause pupils to realize the
conscious and abiding pleasure that comes by instructive reading; to
encourage such as have not been readers to read, and to influence such
as have been readers of trash to become readers of profitable books.
The result, so far, is very encouraging. Many have become enthusiastic
readers, and can give more facts and information thus obtained than we
have time to hear. As the Christmas holidays approached, many
signified a desire that their presents might be books, such as we
have in our library; for they do not have time at school to exhaust
the reading of these books, and consequently do not lose their
interest." Within the last few months Mr. Northrop, Secretary of the
Board of Education of Connecticut, has distributed in the high schools
and upper classes of the grammar schools of the State, blanks to be
filled by the pupils with the kind of reading that they like best, and
the names of their favorite authors. Several hundred of these
circulars were destroyed when the Hartford High School was burned last
winter. The publication of a list of books suitable for boys and girls
has been delayed, but Mr. Holbrook, of the Morgan School, Clinton,
Conn., who prepared the list, writes concerning his work in school: "I
have the practical disbursement of three or four hundred dollars a
year for books. In the high school, in my walks at recess among the
pupils, I inquire into their reading, try to arouse some enthusiasm,
and then, when the iron is hot, I make the proposition that if they
will promise to read nothing but what I give them I will make out a
schedule for them. A pupil spending one hour, even less, a day,
religiously observing the time, will, in five years, have read every
book that should be read in the library. Those who agree to the above
proposition I immediately start on the Epochs of History, turning
aside at proper times to read some historical novel. When that is
done I give them Motley, then Dickens, or Prescott, or Macaulay,
Hawthorne, Thackeray, Don Quixote. Cooper I depend on as a lure for
younger readers. When they have read about enough (in my opinion), I
invite them to go a little higher. Whenever they come to the office
and look helplessly about, I immediately jump up from my work, and,
solving the personal equation, pick out two or three books which I
think adapted first to interest, and then instruct. I try to welcome
their appearance, assuring them that the books are to be read, urging
the older ones to read carefully and with thought. Some I benefit;
others are too firmly wedded to their idols, Mrs. Holmes and
Southworth. Finally, it is my aim to send them away from school with
their eyes opened to the fact that they have, the majority, been
reading to no purpose; that there are better, higher, and nobler books
than they ever dreamed of. Of course I don't always accomplish this;
but he who aims at the sun will go higher than one aiming at the top
of the barn." A commission of sixteen ladies was appointed last year,
by the Connecticut Congregational Club, to select and print a
catalogue of books for Sunday Schools. During the year it has examined
one hundred and eighty-four, almost all reprints of well-known books,
and has selected one hundred. At least one annotated Sunday-School
catalogue was prepared before the appointment of the commission,
directing the attention of children to such books as Tom Brown's
School Days and Higginson's Young Folks' Book of American Explorers,
and of older readers to Stanley's Jewish Church, Martineau's Household
Education, Robertson's Sermons, Sister Dora, Hypatia, Charles
Kingsley's Life, and Atkinson's Right Use of Books. The conclusions
to which these opinions, from libraries and schools in ten different
States, lead us, are these: 1. The number of fathers and mothers who
directly supervise their children's reading, limiting their number of
library books to those which they themselves have read, and requiring
a verbal or written account of each before another is taken, is small.
2. The number of teachers who read and appreciate the best books, or
take pains to search in libraries for those which illustrate lessons,
or are good outside reading for the pupils, is also small. 3. The
high schools, normal schools, and colleges are every year sending out
young men and women with little knowledge of books except text-books
and poor novels. 4. In towns and cities with free libraries, much may
be and has been done by establishing direct communication between
libraries and schools, making schools branch libraries. 5. This can
be done only by insisting that teachers in such towns and cities shall
know something of literature, and by refusing to grant certificates to
teachers who, in the course of an hour's talk, do not show themselves
well enough informed to guide children to a love of good books. The
classes now reading under Mr. Metcalf's direction in Boston, or
celebrating authors' days and the founding of their own state in
Cincinnati, will be, in a few years, the teachers, the fathers, or the
mothers of a new generation, and the result of their reading may be
expected to appear in the awakened intelligence of their pupils and
children. 6. Daily newspapers may be used with advantage in schools to
encourage children to read on current events and to verify
references. 7. Direct personal intercourse of librarians and
assistants with children is the surest way of gaining influence over
them. Miss Stevens, of Toledo, has put the secret of the whole matter,
so far as we are concerned, into four words: "Librarians should like
children." It may be added that a librarian or assistant in charge of
circulation should never be too busy to talk with children and find
out what they need. Bibliography and learning of all kinds have their
places in a library; but the counter where children go needs no
abstracted scholar, absorbed in first editions or black-letter, but a
winsome friend, to meet them more than halfway, patiently answer their
questions, "and by slow degrees subdue them to the useful and the
good."
Miss Hewins made a later report on the same subject [see the previous
article] in a paper presented before the World's Library Congress in
1893. In this paper, given below, she has summarized several of the
early yearly reports made at the meetings of the A. L. A., all of
which are of great interest as a record of the work of various
libraries. In the Government report on libraries, 1876, the relation
of public libraries and the young was treated by Mr. W. I. Fletcher,
who discussed age-restrictions, direction of reading, choice of
books, and incidentally the relation of libraries to schools,
referring to librarians and trustees as "the trainers of gymnasts who
seek to provide that which will be of greatest service to their men."
The report was suggestive, and called for several radical changes in
the usual management of libraries. No statistics were given, for none
had been called for, and the number of libraries which were working in
the modern spirit was not large. Mr. Green, in his paper at the
Philadelphia conference of 1876 (L. j. 1: 74), gave some suggestions
as to how to teach school boys and girls the use of books, and in one
or two of the discussions the influence of a librarian on young
readers was noticed, but the American Library Association did not
give much time to the subject till the Boston conference of 1879,
when a whole session was devoted to schools, libraries, and fiction
(L. j. 4:319), the general expression of opinion being similar to the
formula expressed in the paper by Miss Mary A. Bean, "Lessen the
quantity and improve the quality." In 1881, Mr. J. N. Larned, of the
Buffalo Young Men's Library, issued his pamphlet, "Books for young
readers." The report on "Boys' and girls' reading" which I had the
honor of making at the Cincinnati conference of 1882 has answers from
some 25 librarians to the question "What are you doing to encourage a
love of good reading in boys and girls?" (L. j. 7:182.) Several speak
of special catalogs or bulletins, most of personal interest in and
friendship with young readers. One writes, "Give a popular boy a good
book, and there is not much rest for that book. Librarians should like
children." It was in 1883 that, by the suggestion and advice of our
lamented friend, Frederick Leypoldt, I published a little classified
pamphlet, "Books for the young." In January of the same year the
Library Journal began a department of "Literature for the young,"
which was transferred at the end of the year to the Publishers'
Weekly, where it still remains. The report on the subject, made for
the Buffalo conference by Miss Bean, is on the same lines as the
former one, with the addition of the experience of some smaller
libraries. She says, "I believe the Lynn library has hit a fundamental
truth, and applied the sovereign remedy, so far as the question
concerns public libraries, in its 'one-book-a-week' rule for pupils of
the schools." Miss Hannah P. James's report at the Lake George
conference in 1885 (L. j. 10:278) sums up the information received
from 75 sources in some suggestions for work in connection with school
and home, suggesting the publication of book lists in local papers,
supervision of children's reading if authority is given by parents,
and the limitation of school children's book to one or two a week. At
the St. Louis conference of 1889 Miss Mary Sargent reported on
"Reading for the young" (L. j. 14:226), One librarian fears that lists
of books prepared for boys and girls will soon become lists to be
avoided by them, on account of young people's jealous suspicion of
undue influence. Sargent's "Reading for the young" was published just
after the White Mountain conference of 1890, and the subject was not
discussed in San Francisco in 1891 or at Lakewood in 1892 except in
relation to schools. The Ladies' Commission on Sunday school books is
at least five years older than the American Library Association. It
has done good service in printing lists of books specially adapted to
Unitarian Sunday schools, others unfitted for them only by a few
doctrinal pages or sentences, and a third class recommended as
household friends on account of their interests, literary value, and
good tone. The Church Library Association stands in the same relation
to Episcopal Sunday schools, recommending in yearly pamphlets: 1.
Books bearing directly on church life, history, and doctrine. 2. Books
recommended, but not distinctly church books. The Connecticut Ladies'
Commission has, at the request of the Connecticut Congregational Club,
published since 1881 several carefully chosen and annotated lists.
The National Young Folks' Reading Circle, the Chautauqua Young Folks'
Reading Union, and the Columbian Reading Union, the latter a Catholic
society, the others undenominational, have published good lists for
young readers. The Catholic Church also recommends many recent stories
for children which have no reference to doctrines or differences in
belief. One hundred and fifty-two out of 160 libraries have answered
the following questions: 1. Are your children's books kept by
themselves? 2. Are they classified, and how? 3. Have they a separate
card catalog or printed finding list? 4. Are they covered? 5. Do you
enforce rules with regard to clean hands? 6. Have you an age limit,
and if so, what is it? 7. Do you allow more than one book a week on a
child's card? 8. Are children's cards different in color from others?
9. What authors are most read by children who take books from your
library? 10. What methods have you of directing their reading? Have
you a special assistant for them, or are they encouraged to consult
the librarian and all the assistants? 11. Have you a children's
reading room? Seventy-seven reply to the first question that their
children's books are kept by themselves, 22 that stories or other
books are separate from the rest of the library, and 53 that there is
no juvenile division. Three answer simply "Yes" to the second
question, 24 have adopted the Dewey system, in two or three cases with
the Cutter author marks, 4 the Cutter, and 1 the Linderfelt system; 10
arrange by authors, 18 by subjects, 4 by authors and subjects, 42
report methods of their own or classification like the rest of the
library, and 46 do not classify children's books at all. In answer to
the third question, 6 libraries report both a separate card catalog
and finding list, 43 a finding list for sale or distribution, 15 a
card catalog for children, and 88 no separate list. Of the printed
finding lists 4 are Sargent's, 1 Larned's, 2 Hardy's, and 2 Miss
James's. The fourth question relates to covering books for children.
Eighty-five libraries do not cover them, 30 cover some, either those
with light bindings or others that have become soiled and worn, 35
cover all, and 2 do not report. In reply to the fifth question, 45
libraries require that children's hands shall be clean before they
can take books from the library, or at least when they use books or
periodicals in the building, and 50 have no such rules. Others try
various methods of moral suasion, including in one instance a janitor
who directs the unwashed to a lavatory, and in another a fine of a
few cents for a second offense. The sixth question, whether there is
an age limit or not, brings various replies. Thirty-six libraries have
none, five base it on ability to read or write, one fixes it at 6, one
at 7, and one at 8. Ten libraries allow a child a card in his own name
at 10, two at 11, forty-seven at 12, six at 13, thirty-three at 14,
four at 15, and six at 16. They qualify their statements in many cases
by adding that children may use the cards of older persons, or may
have them if they bring a written guarantee from their parents or are
in certain classes in the public schools. Question 7 deals with the
number of books a week allowed to children. Ninety-five libraries
allow them to change a book every day; one (subscription) gives them a
dozen a day if they wish. Fifteen limit them to two, and 3 to three a
week, and 16 to only one. Several librarians in libraries where
children are allowed a book a day express their disapproval of the
custom, and one has entered into an engagement with her young readers
to take 1 book in every 4 from some other class than fiction. Others
do not answer definitely. A few libraries issuing two cards, or
two-book cards, allow children the use of two books a week, if one is
not a novel or story. Question 8 is a less important one, whether
children's cards are of a different color from others. There is no
difference between the cards of adults and children in 124 libraries,
except in case of school cards in 2. In 4 the color of cards for home
use varies, and 4 report other distinctions, like punches or
different charging slips. Eight do not charge on cards and 12 do not
answer. With regard to question 9, "What authors are most read by
children who take books from your library?" the lists vary so much in
length that it is impossible to give a fair idea of them in in few
sentences. Some libraries mention only two or three authors, others
ten times as many. Miss Alcott's name is in more lists than any other.
Where only two or three authors are given, they are usually of the
Alger, Castlemon, Finley, Optic grade. These four do not appear in the
reports from 35 libraries, where Alden, Ballantyne, Mrs. Burnett,
Susan Coolidge, Ellis, Henty, Kellogg, Lucy Lillie, Munroe, Otis,
Stoddard, and various fairy tales fill their places. Seven are
allowing Alger, Castlemon, Finley, and Optic to wear out without being
replaced, and soon find that books of a higher type are just as
interesting to young readers. Question 10 asks what methods are used
in directing children's reading, and if a special assistant is at
their service, or if they are encouraged to consult the librarian and
all the assistants. Many librarians overconscientiously say, "No
methods," but at the same time acknowledge the personal supervision
and friendly interest that were meant in the query. Only nine do not
report something of this kind. Six have, or are about to have, a
special assistant, or have already opened a bureau of information.
Five say that they pay special attention to selecting the best books,
4 of the larger libraries have open shelves, and 2 are careful in the
choice and supervision of assistants. In answer to question 11, 5
report special reading rooms, present or prospective, for children; 3
more wish that they had them, while others believe that the use of a
room in common with older readers teaches them to be courteous and
considerate to others. Most reading rooms are open to children, who
sometimes have a table of their own, but in a few cases those under
are excluded. My own opinion on the subjects treated in the questions
are: 1. It is easier for a librarian or assistant to find a book for a
child if whatever is adapted to his intelligence on a certain subject
is kept by itself, and not with other books which may be dry, out of
date, or written for a trained student of mature mind. 2. It is
easier to help a child work up a subject if the books which he can use
are divided into classes, not all alphabeted under authors. 3. A
separate card catalog for children often relieves a crowd at the other
cases. A printed dictionary catalog without notes does not help a
child. A public library can make no better investment than in printing
a classified list for children, with short notes on stories
illustrating history or life in different countries, and references
to interesting books written for older readers. Such a list should be
sold for 5 cents, much less than cost. 4. The money spent in paying
for the paper and time used in covering books is just as well employed
in binding, and the attractive covers are pleasant to look at. 5. The
books can be kept reasonably clean if children are made to understand
that they must not be taken away, returned, or if possible, read with
unwashed hands. City children soon begin to understand this if they
are spoken to pleasantly and sent away without a book till they come
back in a fit state to handle it. 6. As soon as a child can read and
write he should be allowed to use books. A proper guarantee from
parent or teacher should, of course, be required. 7. A child in
school cannot read more than one story book a week without neglecting
his work. If he needs another book in connection with his studies he
should take it on a school teacher's, or nonfiction card. 8. It is
best, if a child has only one book a week, for his card to be of a
different color from others, that it may be more easily distinguished
at the charging desk. 9. It has been proved by actual experiment that
children will read books which are good in a literary sense if they
are interesting. New libraries have the advantage over old ones, that
they are not obliged to struggle against a demand for the boys'
series that were supplied in large quantities fifteen or twenty years
ago. 10. As soon as children learn that in a library there are books
and people to help them on any subject, from the care of a sick
rabbit to a costume for the Landing of the Pilgrims, they begin to
ask advice about their reading. It is a good thing if some of the
library assistants are elder sisters in large families who have
tumbled about among books, and if some of the questions asked of
applicants for library positions relate to what they would give boys
or girls to read. If an assistant in a large library shows a special
fitness for work with children, it is best to give it into her charge.
If all the assistants like it, let them have their share of it. 11.
The question of a children's reading room depends on the size of the
room for older readers, and how much it is used by them in the
afternoons. Conditions vary so much in libraries that it is impossible
for one to make a rule for another in this case.
The Library Journal for February, 1914, says: "One of the pleasantest
features of 'Library week' at Lake George in 1913 was the welcome
given to Miss Hewins, that typical New England woman, whose sympathy
with children and child life has made this relation of her public
library work a type and model for all who have to do with children....
Miss Hewins's paper was really a delightful bit of literary
autobiography, and she has now happily acceded to a request from the
Journal to fill out the outlines into a more complete record." Not
long ago I went into the public library of a university town in
England and established confidence by saying, "I see that Chivers does
your binding," whereupon the librarian invited me inside the railing.
A boy ten or twelve years old was standing in a Napoleonic attitude,
with his feet very far apart, before the fiction shelves, where the
books were alphabetized under authors, but with apparently nothing to
show him whether a story was a problem-novel or a tale for children.
My thoughts went back many years to the days when I first became the
librarian of a subscription library in Hartford, where novels and
children's stories were roughly arranged under the first letter of the
title, and not by authors. There was a printed catalog, but without
anything to indicate in what series or where in order of the series a
story-book belonged, and it was impossible when a child had read one
to find out what the next was except from the last page of the book
itself or the advertisements in the back and they had often been torn
out for convenient reference. My technical equipment was some
volunteer work in a town library, a little experience in buying for a
Sunday-school library, and about a year in the Boston Athenaeum. The
preparation that I had had for meeting children and young people in
the library was, besides some years of teaching, a working knowledge
of the books that had been read and re-read in a large family for
twenty-five years, from Miss Edgeworth and Jacob Abbott, an old copy
of "Aesop's fables," Andersen, Grimm, Hawthorne, "The Arabian
nights," Mayne Reid's earlier innocent even if unscientific stories,
down through "Tom Brown," "Alice in Wonderland," Our Young Folks, the
Riverside Magazine, "Little women," to Scott, Dickens, Thackeray,
George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte and Mrs. Gaskell. These books were in
the Hartford Young Men's Institute, but they were little read in
comparison with the works of the "immortal four," who were then
writing series at the rate of two or more volumes a year—Optic,
Alger, Castlemon and Martha Finley—and still refuse to be forgotten.
The older girls demanded Ouida, a new name to me, but I read some of
her novels before I had been in the library many weeks, and remember
writing a letter to a daily paper giving an outline of the plot of one
of them as a hint to fathers and mothers of what their schoolgirl
daughters were reading. I think that there was something about boys,
too, in the letter, and a plea for "Ivanhoe" and other books of
knightly adventure. The Young Men's Institute Library in Hartford was
a survival from the days of subscription libraries and lecture
courses. The city had then a population of about fifty thousand, of
whom some five or six hundred were subscribers to the library, paying
three dollars for the use of one book at a time or five dollars for
two, including admission to the periodical room. Hartford had a large
number of Irish inhabitants, some Germans, a few of whom were
intelligent and prosperous Jews, a few French Canadians, possibly
still fewer Scandinavians. It was several years before the first
persecution of the Russian and Polish Jews sent them to this country.
In the year when I came, 1875, there were forty-six boys and girls in
the high school graduating class, all, from their names and what I
know of some of them, apparently of English descent, except one whose
name is Scotch. The class which was graduated last June had about 650
members on entering, and 250 at the end of its course. Among the names
are Italian, Hebrew, Swedish, Irish, German, Danish, Spanish,
Bohemian, Armenian—the largest percentage from families not of
English descent being Hebrew. It is fair to say that at least half of
the boys and girls of the earlier graduating class, or their families,
had library subscriptions, but little use of the library was
recommended even by the high school teachers, and none by the teachers
of the graded schools. How could there be? Five dollars is a large sum
in most families, and children at that time had to read what they
could get at home or from the Sunday-school libraries, which were no
better nor worse than others of the period. The first effort that I
remember making for a better choice of books was showing the library
president some volumes by Thomes, a writer for the older boys, whose
stories were full of profanity and brutal vulgarity. There was no
question about discarding them and some of Mayne Reid's books like
"The scalp hunters" and "Lost Lenore," which are much of the same
type, very different from his earlier stories, and in a short time we
did not renew books by some other authors, but let them die out,
replacing them if possible by stories a little better, giving
preference to those complete in themselves. Within a short time, in
1878, we began to publish a quarterly bulletin. In the first number
"Library notes" begins: "Much time and thought have been given to
suggesting in this bulletin good books for boys and girls. As a rule,
they read too much. Our accounts show that one boy has taken 102
story-books in six months, and one girl 112 novels in the same time.
One book a week is certainly enough, with school studies. Within the
last month one boy has asked us for Jack Harkaway's stories, another
for bound volumes of the Police News, and a third for 'The murderer
and the fortune teller,' 'The two sisters and the avenger' and 'The
model town and the detective.' These are not in the library and will
not be. The demand for girls for the New York Weekly novels is not
small. We shall gladly cooperate with fathers and mothers in the
choice of children's books." Of what we now call nature-books there
were very few written or well illustrated for children, though the
library had John Burroughs, Harris's "Insects injurious to vegetation"
and Samuels's "Birds of New England and the adjacent states." There
was little interest in out-of-door study, and I have never forgotten
the contempt on the face of one boy when instead of Mayne Reid's "Boy
hunters," which was out, he was offered "The butter- fly hunters," or
the scorn with which he repeated the title. All that is changed,
thanks to the influence of schools and teachers, and children are no
longer ignorant of common birds and insects. St. Nicholas helped in
opening their eyes, when a librarian, Harlan H. Ballard, of
Pittsfield, organized the Agassiz Association with a monthly report in
the magazine. We had a chapter, Hartford B., that met for years out of
doors on Saturday mornings through the spring, early summer and
autumn, and even through one winter when some specimens of the
redheaded woodpecker were on the edge of the city. Usually our winter
meetings were in the library, and we often had readings from
Burroughs, Thoreau, Frank Buckland and others of the earlier
nature-lovers. The children came from families of more than usual
intelligence, and some of them who now have well-grown children of
their own often refer with pleasure to our walks and talks. I had
taught for three years in a school where the children and I were taken
out of doors every week in spring and autumn by an ornithologist and
an entomologist. At this time we were beginning to buy more books on
out-of-door subjects, and I had learned enough in my teaching to be
able to evaluate them in a bulletin. The years went on, with once in a
while an encouraging report about a boy who had made experiments from
works on chemistry or beguiled a fortnight's illness with Wordsworth's
"Greece," or Guhl and Koner's "Life of the Greeks and Romans," or had
gone on from Alger and Optic to Cooper, Lossing, Help's "Life of
Columbus" and Barber's "History of New England." Both boys and girls
were beginning to apologize for taking poor stories. In one of our
bulletins, January, 1881, is an acknowledgment of Christmas material
received from the advance sheets of Poole's Index, then in preparation
in the Watkinson Library, on the other side of the building. Imagine
life in a library without it, you who have the Readers' Guide and all
the debates and Granger's Index to Poetry and the Portrait Index!
Nevertheless, we were not entirely without printed aids, for we had
the Brooklyn catalog, the Providence bulletins, and the lists of
children's books prepared by the Buffalo and Quincy libraries. In
1882, at the request of Frederick Leypoldt, editor of the Publishers'
Weekly, I compiled a list of "Books for the young," some of which are
of permanent value. In a second edition, in 1884, I reprinted from our
bulletin a list of English and American history for children, between
twelve and fifteen, based on my own experience with boys and girls. I
can laugh at it now, after years of meeting child-readers,
seventy-five per cent of whom have no books at home, and can also find
food for mirth in my belief that a list of books recommended for
vacation reading in another bulletin would attract most boys and girls
under sixteen. One school, under a wise and far-seeing principal, who
is now an authority on United States history and the author of several
school books on the subject, had in 1884 an arrangement with us for a
supply of historical stories for reading, and we printed a list of
these and of other books on American history which would be
interesting if read by or to the older pupils in the grammar grades.
Sets of fifty copies each of books for supplementary reading in
school were bought by the library in 1894, and apportioned by the
school principals at their monthly meetings. Several new sets were
bought every year till 1905, when the collection numbered about three
thousand, and was outgrowing the space that we could spare for it. The
schools then provided a place for the school duplicates, and relieved
the library of the care of them. Since 1899 the graded schools have
received on request libraries of fifty books to a room, from the third
grade to the ninth, to be kept until the summer vacation, when they
are returned for repairs and renewal. The number circulated during the
school year has grown from 6,384 in 1899-1900 to 17,270 in 1912-13.
The children's applications are sent to the main library, and no
child may have a card there and in a school branch at the same time.
There were rumors for several years that the library would be made
free, and when it was at last announced in 1888 that $250,000 had been
given by the late J. Pierpont Morgan, his father and two families
related to them, on condition that $150,000 more should be raised by
private subscription to remodel the Wadsworth Athenaeum, which then
housed three libraries and a picture- gallery, and to provide for its
maintenance, the rumor bade fair to come true. That the money came in,
is largely due to the personal efforts of Charles Hopkins Clark,
editor-in-chief of the Hartford Courant, for many years treasurer of
the Athenaeum, the Watkinson Library and the Hartford Public Library,
and the sum required was promised in 1890. Later the library offered
the free use of its books, and also the income of about $50,000 to
the city, on condition of keeping its form of government by a
self-perpetuating corporation. The first step towards the enlarged
use of the library was to separate the children's books and classify
them. We had had a fixed location up to that time, and I had not yet
broken loose from it, but I numbered them according to the best light
I had, though in a very short time I saw that with the increased
number of duplicates we had to buy, only a movable location was of the
least practical use. It was several years before the Dewey
classification was finally adopted for the children, although we
classified our grown-up books by it before we opened to the public.
When the library became free, in 1892, the annual circulation of
children's books rose at once to 50,000, 25 per cent of the whole,
and as large as the largest total in the subscription days. We
immediately had to buy a large supply of new books, carefully chosen,
and printed a too fully annotated list, which we found useful for some
years and discarded when we were able to open the shelves. We had only
a corner for children's books, almost none for children under ten, and
no admission to the shelves. We struggled on as well as we could for
the next few years. A dialogue between a reader and the librarian in
1897 shows what we were trying to do at this time. It is really true,
and illustrates the lack of knowledge in one of the most intelligent
women in the city of the many points of contact between the library
and the boys and girls of the city. Reader: "There ought to be
somebody in the library to tell people, especially children, what to
read." Librarian: "Have you ever seen the children's printed list,
with notes on books connected with school work, and others written for
older readers but interesting to children, hints on how and what to
read, and a letter R against the best books?" Reader: "No, I never
heard of it." Librarian: "It was ready the day after the library
opened, was sold for five cents, and the first edition of a thousand
copies was exhausted so soon that a second had to be printed. Have you
ever heard of the lists of interesting books in connection with
Greek, Roman and English history given to high school pupils' or the
records kept for years by the North School children of books which
they have read, and sent to the librarian to be commented on and
criticised in an hour's friendly talk in the school room, or the
letters written on the use of the library by pupils in the other
schools?" Reader: "No." Librarian: "Have you ever seen the lists of
good novels for boys and girls growing away from books written for
children and also a list of interesting love-stories for readers who
have heard of only a few authors?" Reader: "No." Librarian: "Have
you ever noticed the printed lists of new books, with notes, hung on
the bulletin board every Monday?" Reader: "No." Librarian: "Do you
know that the library has twelve hundred volumes of the best books by
the best authors, fifty of each, for use in the public schools?"
Reader: "No." The library opened in 1895 a branch for children in the
Social Settlement, and in 1897 reading rooms in connection with
vacation schools, established by the Civic Club and afterwards taken
in charge by the city. The Educational Club, an organization of
parents, teachers and others interested in education, began in 1897
with very informal meetings, suggested by the school section of the
Civic Club, which were held in my office for three years, until they
outgrew it and needed a more formal organization. The directors of the
Civic Club and managers of the Social Settlement have met there for
years, and the Connecticut Public Library Committee found it a
convenient meeting place until it seemed better to hold sessions in
the Capitol, where its office is. The history classes of the North
School, of whose principal I have spoken, used to make a pilgrimage
every year to points of interest in the city, ending with an hour in
the rooms of the Historical Society in the building, where they
impersonated historical characters or looked at colonial furniture and
implements. After the hour was over they used to come to the office
for gingerbread and lemonade, which strengthened their friendly
feeling for the library. This lasted until the principal went to
another city. In 1898, in a talk to some children in one of the
schools just before the summer vacation, I asked those who were not
going out of town to come to the library one afternoon every week for
a book-talk, with a tableful of books such as they would not be
likely to find for themselves. The subjects the first year were:
Out-of-door books and stories about animals, Books about Indians,
Travellers' tales and stories of adventure, Books that tell how to do
things, Books about pictures and music, A great author and his friends
(Sir Walter Scott), Another great author and his short stories
(Washington Irving), Old-fashioned books for boys and girls. The talks
have been kept up ever since. The series in 1900 was on Books about
knights and tournaments, what happened to a man who read too much
about knights (Don Quixote), Books about horses, Two dream-stories,
(The divine comedy and The pilgrim's progress), Some funny adventures
(A traveller's true tale and others), Some new books, How a book is
made, Stories about India, Pictures and scrap-books. The next year,
1901, the talks were about stories connected with English history, the
Old-English, the Normans, the Plantagenet times, King Henry V., the
Wars of the Roses, King Henry VII, and King Henry VIII, Queen
Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots, the Stuarts, and the English
Revolution and eighteenth- century England. The year after, 1902, the
talks were on "Books that you have not read," under the titles Sea
stories, Indian stories, Horse stories, Wonder stories, Hero stories,
African stories, South Sea stories, School and college stories, Old
stories. A table of books was in the room, and I took them up one by
one and told a little about the story, sometimes reading aloud and
stopping at a very interesting point. In 1903, the subjects were
Stories about dragons, Stories about soldiers, Stories about
shipwrecks, Stories about out-of- doors, Stories of real people told
by themselves, Stories about adventures, Stories about pictures,
Stories about the West, the object being to give the children of the
upper grammar grades a glimpse into interesting books of which they
might otherwise never hear. In that year we printed a list of novels
for young readers that is now ten years old and needs revision, but
still has its uses. The use of the reference-room by children
steadily increased, until the need of a room for them became evident,
both on weekdays and Sundays. The Bulletin for March 1, 1900, says:
"On Sunday, Feb. 25, there were eighty-one children in the small
room, filling not only chairs too high for their short legs, but
benches extending into the circulation room. They were all quiet and
orderly, and some of them read seriously and absorbedly for several
hours on 'The twentieth century,' 'The boundaries of the United
States,' and 'The comparative greatness of Napoleon and Alexander.'
The younger children read storybooks in the same quiet manner. A
children's room would relieve the pressure on all three departments of
the library." The "last straw" that led to the grant of rooms was a
newspaper article illustrated by a photograph of the reference-room on
a Sunday afternoon with one man, one woman and fifty-one children in
it. In 1904, the library came into possession of two large, bright
sunny rooms and a smaller one adjoining in an old-fashioned house
next door, which belonged to the Athenaeum and had been released by
the removal of the Hartford Club to a large new house across the
street. We opened rooms in November, just before Thanksgiving, and
from then till New Year's Day we received gifts from many friends: a
pair of andirons for the open fireplace, several pictures, a check
"for unnecessary things" from one of the women's clubs, another for
wall-decoration from teachers, students and graduates of the Albany
Library School, fifty Japanese color-prints of chrysanthemums from the
Pratt Institute children's room, a cuckoo clock that is still going,
though it demands a vacation about once a year, and a Boston fern that
is now in flourishing condition. A large Braun photograph of the
Madonna del Granduca came later from the Pittsburgh School for
Children's Librarians. The furniture is of the simplest kind. We used
some tables that we had, and bought one new one, some bentwood chairs
for the older children and others such as are used in kindergartens
for the younger. Pratt Institute lent us that first winter the very
attractive illustrations by the Misses Whitney for Louisa Alcott's
"Candy country." Some friends who were breaking up housekeeping gave
the room a case of native and foreign stuffed birds with the hope that
they might be as great a source of pleasure to the children as they
had been to them in their childhood. Another friend sent us two trunks
of curiosities from Europe, Asia, Africa and North America, which are
shown a few at a time. The next summer, 1905, the book-talks were
about pictures in the room, most of which had been bought with our
friends' gifts. Windsor Castle, Kenilworth, Heidelberg Castle, The
Alhambra, St. George, King Arthur, Sir Walter Scott, the Canterbury
Pilgrims, some Shakespeare stories. On the Alhambra afternoon, a girl
who had spent her first year out of college in Spain described the
palace and showed curiosities from Granada. One day a Civil War nurse
who happened in was persuaded to tell the boys and girls in the room
about the three weeks she spent in the White House, taking care of Tad
Lincoln through a fever. Some years later we were fortunate enough to
hear her again in the room above, on Abraham Lincoln's hundredth
birthday, when she held the attention of a large number of boys and
girls for more than an hour. The next summer "What you can get out of
a Henty book" was used as an excuse for showing books and pictures
about the Crusades, Venice, the knights of Malta, the Rebellion of the
Forty-five, the East India Company, the siege of Gibraltar, the
Peninsula war, and modern Italy. That summer we had a puzzle-club to
show younger children how to work the puzzles in St. Nicholas and
other magazines and newspapers. We held our first Christmas exhibition
that year, 1906, in the room itself, for one day only, before the hour
of opening. After an exhibition of lace in the Athenaeum the next
spring, the specialist who arranged it held the attention of her
audience of girls between ten and fourteen, giving a practical
illustration of the making of pillow-lace, showing specimens of
different kinds, pointing out the use of lace in old-fashioned
costumes for children, and exhibiting a piece of Valenciennes which
had been stolen by a catbird and recovered before it was woven into a
nest. This talk was given at my request, because we could find almost
nothing on lace in books for children, and the exhibit was then
attracting much notice. That year our first children's librarian, who
had given only a part of her working hours to the room, the rest to
the loan- desk, left us to be married. The school work had grown so
fast that it had become necessary for us to find a successor who was
equal to it, and whose sole time could be given to that and the care
of the room, which is open only from 3.30 to 6 on school- days, except
on Wednesdays, Saturdays and in vacations, when we have all-day hours.
The children in vacation-time may change story-books every day if they
like—practically none of them do it—but in school time they are
allowed only one a week. This is not a hardship, for they may use
their non-fiction cards, which give them anything else, including
bound magazines. Our children's librarian makes up for lack of library
technique by her acquaintance with teachers, and experience in day,
evening and vacation schools, that have brought her into contact with
children of all sorts and conditions. The summer before her coming I
had charge of the room for a part of every day, and observing that
children under fourteen were beginning to think that they had read
everything in the room and were asking to be transferred, I made a
collection of books, principally novels, from the main library, marked
them and the bookcards with a red star, and placed them on side
shelves, where the younger children soon learned that they would find
nothing to interest them. This keeps the older boys and girls in the
room until they are ready for the main library, and when they are
transferred they are sent to me in my office, where they are told
that some one is always ready to give them help if they ask for it.
The list of books for the first year after coming into the library is
handed to them, and they are also referred to the high school shelves,
to be mentioned later. We insist on a father or mother coming with a
child and leaving a signature or mark on the back of the
application-card. This is placing responsibility where it belongs, and
as we always have at least one of the staff who can speak Yiddish, and
others who speak Italian, the parents are usually willing to come. We
are very strict in exacting fines as a means of teaching children to
be responsible and careful of public property. One summer the children
acted simple impromptu plays, Cinderella, Blue Beard, Beauty and the
beast, on the lawn outside the long windows. The lawn has been in bad
condition for nearly two years, on account of the building of the
Morgan memorial, but has now been planted again. One May-day we had an
old English festival around a Maypole on the green, with Robin Hood,
Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlett, the hobby- horse, the dragon
and all the rest, including Jack in the Green and an elephant. This
was such a success that we were asked to repeat it across the river
on the East Hartford Library green, where it was highly complimented
on account of being so full of the spirit of play. Our Christmas
exhibits have been held every year, at first, as I have said, for one
day only, then for two or three in the rooms above, and for the last
two years in a large room used by the Hartford Art Society as a studio
until it moved to a whole house across the street. This room has space
for our school libraries, and the room which they had outgrown was
fitted up at no expense except for chairs and a change in the
lighting, as a study-room for the older boys and girls, who also have
the privilege of reading any stories they find on the shelves, which
are on one side only. The other shelves, placed across the room, were
moved to the studio, which is so large that it has space for
story-telling, or oftener story-reading. The winter of the Dickens
centennial, through the month of February, the beginnings of "David
Copperfield," "Nicholas Nickleby," "Dombey and son" and "Great
expectations" were read. In 1911, a gift of twenty-five dollars from a
friend was spent for the boys' and girls' room, and has bought
specimens of illustration, Grimm's "Fairy tales," illustrated by
Arthur Rackham; Kate Greenaway's "Under the window," "Marigold
garden," "Little Ann" and "Pied piper", Laura Starr's "Doll book," and
a fine copy of Knight's "Old England," full of engravings, including
a morris dance such as has been performed here, and Hare's "Portrait
book of our kings and queens." The rest of the money bought a globe
for the older boys' and girls' reading-table, and sent from Venice a
reproduction of a complete "armatura," or suit of Italian armor,
eighteen inches high. In 1912 the boys and girls of grades 7 to 9 in
the district and parochial schools were invited to listen to stories
from English history in the Librarian's office of the Hartford Public
Library on Tuesday afternoons in July and August. Some of the subjects
were The Roman wall, The Danish invasion, King Alfred and the white
horses said to have been cut to commemorate his victories, The
Crusades, and The captivity of James I. of Scotland. The Longman
series of colored wall-prints was used as a starting point for the
stories. Children in grades 4 to 6 listened at a later hour to stories
from Hawthorne's "Wonderbook" and "Tanglewood tales." The Hartford
Public Library had an exhibit at the state fair, September 2-7, 1912,
in the Child-welfare building. In a space 11 by 6 were chairs, tables
covered with picture-books, a bookcase with libraries for school
grades, probation office, and a settlement, and another with
inexpensive books worth buying for children. Pictures of countries and
national costumes were hung on the green burlap screens which enclosed
the sides of the miniature room. At about the same time we printed a
list of pleasant books for boys and girls to read after they have been
transferred to the main library. They are not all classics, but are
interesting. The head of the high school department of English and
some of the other teachers asked the library's help in making a list
of books for suggested reading during the four years' course. This
list has been printed and distributed. Copies are hung near two cases
with the school pennant above them, and one of the staff sees that
these cases are always filled with books mentioned in it. The high
school has a trained librarian, who borrows books from the Public
Library and tries in every way to encourage its use. From Dec. 3 to
24, 1912 and 1913, the exhibit of Christmas books for children and
young people was kept open by the library in the large room in the
annex. The exhibit included three or four hundred volumes, picture
books by the best American, English, French, German, Italian, Danish,
and Russian illustrators, inexpensive copies and also new and
beautiful editions of old favorites, finely illustrated books
attractive to growing-up young people, and the best of the season's
output. It had many visitors, some of them coming several times. We
sent a special invitation to the students in the Hartford Art Society,
some of whom are hoping to be illustrators, and appreciate the
picture- books highly. The boys' and girls' room received last winter
a fine photo- graphic copy of Leighton's "Return of Persephone," in
time for Hawthorne's version of the story, which is usually read when
pomegranates are in the market and again six months later, when
Persephone comes up to earth and the grass and flowers begin to
spring. One day John Burroughs made an unexpected visit to the room,
and it happened that when the children reading at the tables were
told who he was, and asked who of them had read "Squirrels and
furbearers," the boy nearest him held up his hand with the book in
it. That boy will probably never forget his first sight of a real live
author! Last winter we received a gift of a handsome bookcase with
glass doors, which we keep in the main library, filled with finely
illustrated books for children to be taken out on grown-up cards
only. This is to insure good care. For several years we have been
collecting a family of foreign dolls, who are now forty-five in
number, of all sorts and sizes, counting seventeen marionettes such as
the poor children in Venice play with, half a dozen Chinese actors,
and nine brightly colored Russian peasants in wood. The others are
Tairo, a very old Japanese doll in the costume of the feudal warriors,
Thora from Iceland, Marit the Norwegian bride, Erik and Brita from
Sweden, Giuseppe and Marietta from Rome, Heidi and Peter from the
Alps, Gisela from Thuringia, Cecilia from Hungary, Annetje from
Holland, Lewie Gordon from Edinburgh, Christie Johnstone the Newhaven
fishwife, Sambo and Dinah the cotton- pickers. Mammy Chloe from
Florida, an Indian brave and squaw from British America, Laila from
Jerusalem, Lady Geraldine of 1830 and Victoria of 1840. Every New
Year's Day, in answer to a picture bulletin which announces a
doll-story and says "Bring your doll," the little girls come with
fresh, clean, Christmas dolls, and every one who has a name is
formally presented to the foreign guests, who sit in chairs on a
table. Lack of imagination is shown in being willing to own a doll
without a name, and this year the subject of names was mentioned in
time for the little girls to have them ready. Mrs. Mary Hazelton Wade,
author of many of the "Little cousins," lives in Hartford, and lately
gave us a copy of her "Dolls of many countries." I told her about the
party and invited her, and she told the fifty children who were
listening about the Feasts of Dolls in Japan. The doll-story was E.
V. Lucas's "Doll doctor," and it was followed by William Brightly
Rands's "Doll poems." In 1893, the year after the library became free,
the Connecticut Public Library Committee was organized. For about ten
years it had no paid visitor and inspector, and I, as secretary of the
committee, had to go about the state in the little time I could spare
from regular duties, trying to arouse library interest in country
towns. Now most of the field work is done by the visitor, but I have
spoken many times at teachers' meetings and library meetings. We began
by sending out pamphlets—"What a free library can do for a country
town"—emphasizing what its possibilities are of interesting children,
and "What a library and school can do for each other." Every year the
libraries receive a grant of books from the state, and send in lists
subject to approval. We often found the novels and children's books
asked for unworthy of being bought with state money by a committee
appointed by the Board of Education, and began to print yearly lists
of recommended titles of new books, from which all requested must be
chosen. The standard is gradually growing higher. The Colonial Dames
have for years paid for traveling libraries, largely on subjects
connected with colonial history, to be sent to country schools from
the office of the committee, and have also given traveling portfolios
of pictures illustrating history, chosen and mounted by one of their
number. The Audubon Society sends books, largely on out-of-door
subjects, and bird-charts, to schools and libraries all over the
state. Traveling libraries, miscellaneous or on special subjects, are
sent out on request. A Library Institute has been held every summer
for five years under the direction of the visitor and inspector. It
lasts for two weeks, and several lectures are always given by
specialists in work with children. The choice of books, sources of
stories for children, and what to recommend to them are frequently
discussed in meetings for teachers and librarians. A book-wagon has
for the last two or three years gone through a few towns where there
is no public library, circulating several thousand books a year for
adults and children, and exciting an interest which may later develop
into the establishment of public libraries. The committee has now 105
which receive the state grant. Wherever a new library is opened, a
special effort is made through the schools to make it attractive to
children. At this time of year the mothers' clubs in the city and
adjoining towns often ask for talks on what to buy, and boxes of books
are taken to them, not only expensive and finely illustrated copies,
but the best editions that can be bought for a very little money.
These exhibitions have been also given at country meetings held by
the Connecticut Public Library Committee. A library column in a
Hartford Sunday paper is useful in showing the public what libraries
in other states and cities are doing, and in attracting attention to
work with children. Letters to the children themselves at the
beginning of vacation, printed in a daily paper and sent to the
schools, invite them to book-talks. Other printed letters about visits
to places connected with books and authors, sent home from England and
Scotland with postcards, have excited an interest in books not always
read by children. This year the Hartford children's librarian has read
the letters and shown the books referred to, post-cards and pictures,
to a club of girls from the older grammar grades, who were invited
through the letters just spoken of to leave their names with her. A
club of children's librarians from towns within fifteen miles around
Hartford meets weekly from October to May. Meetings all over the state
under the Public Library Committee have stimulated interest in work
with children, and Library Day is celebrated every year in the
schools. The visitor and inspector reports visits to eight towns in
December, and says: "Somewhat more than a year ago, at the request of
the supervisor, I made out a list of books for the X—— school
libraries. These were purchased, and this year the chairman of the
school board requested my assistance in arranging the collection in
groups to be sent in traveling library cases until each school shall
have had each library. I spent two days at the town hall working with
the chairman of the school board, the supervisor, a typist and two
school teachers. "A new children's room has been opened in the Y——
library since my visit there. It is double the size of the room
formerly in use, and much lighter and more cheerful. The first grant
from the state was expended entirely for children's books, the
selection being made in this office. "In Z—— I gave an Audubon
stereopticon lecture, prefacing it with an account of the work on the
Audubon Society, and an enumeration of the loans to schools. The
audience in a country schoolhouse, half a mile from Z—— village,
numbered 102."
The following account of the beginning of children's work in
Arlington, Mass., in 1835, marks the earliest date yet claimed for
the establishment of library work with children, and was written for
the January, 1913, number of The Library Journal. Alice M. Jordan was
born in Thomaston, Maine, and was educated in the schools of Newton,
Massachusetts. After teaching for a few years she entered the service
of the Boston Public Library in 1900, Since 1902 she has been Chief of
the Children's Department in that library, and since 1911 a member of
the staff of Simmons College Library School. "In consequence of a
grateful remembrance of hospitality and friendship, as well as an
uncommon share or patronage, afforded me by the inhabitants of West
Cambridge, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in the early part of
my life when patronage was most needful to me, I give to the said town
of West Cambridge one hundred dollars for the purpose of establishing
a juvenile library in said town. The Selectmen, Ministers of the
Gospel, and Physicians of the town of West Cambridge, for the time
being shall receive this sum, select and purchase the books for the
library which shall be such books as, in their opinion, will best
promote useful knowledge and the Christian virtues among the
inhabitants of the town who are scholars, or by usage have a right to
attend as scholars in their primary schools. Other persons may be
admitted to the privilege of said library under the direction of said
town, by paying a sum for membership and an annual tax for the
increase of the same. And my said executors are directed to pay the
same within one year after my decease." This "extract from the last
will and testament of Dr. Ebenezer Learned, late of Hopkinton, N. H.,"
forms the first book plate of the Arlington (Mass.) Public Library,
founded in 1835. It appears to be the earliest record we have of a
specific bequest for a children's library, free to all the children of
the town receiving it. In the late eighteenth century it was the
custom at Harvard College to grant a six-weeks' vacation in winter and
summer, when students could earn money for college expenses. The
popular way of doing this was to teach school. Ebenezer Learned, a
young man in the class of 1787, availed himself of this opportunity
and taught in West Cambridge, or Menotomy. His associations there
were pleasant ones, and the memory of the friends then made persisted
through his later successful career. Dr. Learned became a practicing
physician, first in Leominster (Mass.) and later in Hopkinton, N. H.
He is said to have been warmly interested in education and science
throughout his life, and was the originator of the New Hampshire
Agricultural Society and vice-president of the New Hampshire Medical
Society. And yet with all these later interests, his thought, toward
the end of his life, was of the little town where he taught his first
school. At the time of receiving this legacy there were in West
Cambridge two ministers—a Unitarian and a Baptist—and one physician.
Together with the selectmen, they formed the first board of trustees,
which met on Nov. 30, 1835, and voted that the books selected for the
library should be such as were directed by Dr. Learned's will, "the
same not being of a sectarian character." Selection of books was left
largely to Mr. Brown, of the newly formed firm of Little Brown,
publishers. He was directed to spend at least half of the bequest for
books suitable for the purpose, and these were sent to the home of Dr.
Wellington, the physician on the board. Then followed the task of
selecting a librarian, and the obvious choice was Mr. Dexter, a hatter
by trade and already in charge of the West Cambridge Social Library.
This was a subscription library, founded in 1807, and consisting
mainly of volumes of sermons and "serious reading." The question of
the librarian's salary was the next care, for the state law
authorizing towns to appropriate tax money for libraries was yet ten
years in the future. At town meeting, in 1837, however, one of the
trustees called attention to the clause in Dr. Learned's will which
provided that others, beside children, might use the library by
paying a sum for membership and an annual assessment. "Why should not
the town pay the tax, and thus make it free to all the inhabitants?"
he asked. And this was done. The town at once appropriated thirty
dollars for the library, and the right to take books was extended to
all the families in town. From this time the institution has been a
free town library, the earliest of its class in Massachusetts. The
little collection of books for the West Cambridge Juvenile Library
traveled to its first home on a wheelbarrow. "Uncle" Dexter would make
hats during the week, and on Saturday afternoons open the library for
the children. Three books were the limit for a family, and they could
be retained for thirty days. That the books were actually read by the
children is vouched for by those who remember the library from its
beginning. Even free access to the shelves was permitted for a while.
But we come to a period, later, when the by-laws declare, "No person
except the librarian shall remove a book from the shelves." One would
like to know just what those books were for which one-half of that
precious bequest was first spent. The earliest extant catalog of the
juvenile library is dated 1855, though there exists an earlier list
(1835) of the Social Library. Tradition has handed down the names of
two books said to be in the first collection, but one of these is
certainly of later date. The first is still in existence, a copy of
the "History of Corsica," by James Boswell. One who as a boy read this
book, years ago, in the West Cambridge Juvenile Library, recalled it
with delight when he visited Corsica years afterward. The other
title, mentioned as belonging to the first library, is "The history of
a London doll." But this delightful child's story, by Richard Hengist
Home, was not published until 1846. Some of the Waverley novels are
also remembered as being among the earliest purchases. Of course, we
realize that books which "will best promote useful knowledge and the
Christian virtues" in school children are not necessarily children's
books. So we may be tolerably sure that Rollins' and Robertson's
histories, as well as Goldsmith and Irving, would have appeared in the
catalog had there been one. The juvenile library remained a year in
its first home, the frame house still standing near the railroad which
runs through Arlington. There have been five library homes since then,
including the meeting house, where the collection of books was nearly
doubled by the addition of the district school libraries and a part of
the Social Library. In 1867 the town changed its name to Arlington,
discarding the Indian name of Menotomy, by which it was known before
its incorporation as West Cambridge. The library then became known as
the Arlington Juvenile Library, and, in 1872, its name was formally
changed to Arlington Public Library. With the gift of a memorial
building, in 1892, the present name, the Robbins Library, was adopted
by the town. It is characteristic of our modern carelessness of what
the past has given us, that we have lost sight of this first
children's library. Not Brookline in 1890, not New York in 1888, but
Arlington in 1835 marks the beginning of public library work with
children. Here is one public library, with a history stretching back
over seventy-five years, which need not apologize for any expenditure
in its work with children. Its very being is rooted in one man's
thought for the children of the primary schools. Dr. Learned could
think of no better way of repaying the kindnesses done to a boy than
by putting books into the hands of other boys and girls. A children's
librarian may well be grateful for the memory of this far-seeing
friend of children, who held the belief that books may be more than
amusement, and that the civic virtues can be nourished by and in a
"juvenile library."
The leading editorial in The Library Journal for May, 1887, says:
"The plan of providing good reading for very little children begins
at the beginning, and the work of the Children's Library Association,
outlined in a paper in this number, may prove to be the start of a
movement of great social importance." This interesting personal
account was written by Miss Emily S. Hanaway, principal of the primary
department of Grammar School No. 28, in New York City, to whom came
the thought, "Why not give the children reading-rooms?", and through
whose efforts the Association was organized. Emily S. Hanaway was
married in 1891 to the Reverend Peter Stryker. She died in 1915 in her
eightieth year. Her library was ultimately forced to close its doors,
but its influence remains. For several years it had caused me much
pain to find that many of the children in our school were either
without suitable reading or were reading books of a most injurious
kind. The more I pondered the matter the more I became convinced that
much of the poison infused into the mind of a child begins at a very
early age. As soon as a child takes interest in pictures the taste
begins to be formed. Give him only common comic or sensational ones,
and he will seize them and look no higher. On the other hand, give him
finely-wrought sketches and paintings, tell him to be very careful how
he handles them, and he will despise the trash of the present day.
Place in his hand clear print, and he will never want the vile copy of
a sensational paper often thrown in at our doors. Place in his hand
Babyland, tell him that he is an annual subscriber, and the importance
of having his name printed on the copy will induce him to do as a
little relative of mine has frequently done. He will run after the
postman and ask him how long before the next number will arrive. Upon
one occasion we endeavored to find out what sort of books our
school-children were reading, and asked them to bring a few for us to
examine. Some of them, having been directed in their reading by
discreet, faithful parents, brought such periodicals as St. Nicholas,
Chatterbox, Harper's Young People, etc., while others brought the
vilest kind of literature, and one little fellow brought a large copy
of the "Annual Report of the Croton Aqueduct." In the summer of 1885,
while seated in a room where the National Association of Teachers had
assembled, a thought, as if some one had leaned over my shoulder and
suggested it, came suddenly into my mind: "Why not give the children
reading- rooms?" There was no getting rid of the thought. All that
afternoon and evening it followed me. After the meeting, in the
evening, I asked Prof. E. E. White, of Ohio, if he thought such an
undertaking could be carried out. He answered, "Yes; but it is
gigantic." I came home fully persuaded that it must be tried; but
where should I begin? As soon as school opened in September, it
occurred to me that almost opposite our school- building there was a
day-nursery, the lady in charge of which appeared to be a very earnest
worker. She said she would be very glad to help, as she had a small
library at that time, which her children used in the nursery. On
visiting the publishers, generous donations were promised from Treat,
Scribner, Taintor Merrill, Barnes, and others. These were sent to the
nursery. A few years before, a former principal in our school, Miss
Victoria Graham, had worked with great energy to have a library in P.
D., G. S. 28, and the proceeds of an entertainment given in 1872 in
the Academy of Music had furnished two or three hundred books. Miss
Graham died the same year, and as we had no regular librarian, many of
the books were lost. About sixty were left. These also were sent to
the nursery, and our children went over every week to draw books. This
was the first attempt. But we felt that it was but a small beginning,
and that if we wished to bring in all creeds we must free the public
mind from suspicion, and have a representation from every
denomination, Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Hebrew. Accordingly, we
planned that when a committee should be organized, every religious
faith should be represented among those who were to choose the books.
As we wished to have many of these rooms throughout the city, and as
our friends at the day-nursery, under their arrangements, could not
have a committee, we thought it would do no harm to start anew. So we
conferred with the various clergymen of all denominations, in a
neighborhood well known to us, and received great encouragement. Dr.
Mendez became a member of our organization committee, and has been
present at very many of our business meetings. We then visited the
persons named by these gentlemen, for our organization committee, and
when we had found eleven willing to serve, a kind friend in West 22d
St., Mrs. Hanford Smith, gave us the use of her parlors for our
meeting. A more gloomy committee has been seldom seen. "Have you a
room for a library?" was asked. "No." "Any money?" "No." "Any books?"
"No." "Absurd! How do you expect to start such a work?" "On faith."
Next a vote was taken whether to organize or not. It was decided to
organize. Mr. Edward Chichester was elected president, Mr. Edward
Vanderbiit secretary, and Mr. E. P. Pitcher to the very responsible
position of treasurer, without a cent in the treasury. Here it is
only due to Rev. Dr. Terry to speak of the encouragement he gave. The
Y. M. C. A. connected with the South Reformed Church, on 21st St. and
5th Ave., were talking of taking rooms at 243 9th Ave., for a young
men's club, and through the doctor's efforts we were allowed to come
into these rooms from 4 to 6 p. m., all through the season, from
December to May, with the understanding that we might pay or not,
according to our success in obtaining funds. One trouble was over. We
then began our circuit once again through the city, after school
hours, visiting every publishing-house named in the directory, beside
making many personal visits to friends, who encouraged us by gifts of
books. We are largely indebted to Dodd, Mead Co., Carter, Taintor,
Merrill Co., and many others, who have given most liberally; also to
friends, who have given us many $5 bills, and enabled us not only to
pay expenses, including librarian, tickets of admission, covers for
books, circulars, etc., but also to hand over most joyfully to Dr.
Terry $40 for the use of room at the close of the season. Last fall
we tried to begin our work once more, and after walking from 40th to
23d St., along 8th and 9th Avenues, I at last found rooms on W. 35th
Street. Dr. Terry kindly loaned us furniture, and the Women's
Christian Temperance Union shared with us the modest rent of $13 per
month, $6.50 each. Last year P. D. No. 45, in West 24th St., sent a
large representation from their school. This year they asked for and
received tickets. We had about 350 books, and issued about 700
admission tickets. At one time during the winter the librarian sent
me this message: "Only eight books are left on the shelves. Do you
think it best to close the room to-day?" I returned word: "Get in all
the books you can; do not give out any for a short time, but let the
children come in and look at the stereoscopic views, play games, look
at or read pamphlets. When they have returned a sufficient number,
begin to distribute again." That week we received several parcels of
books, and started up again. We had applications for tickets from P.
D., G. S. No. 11, 37th St. Prim. Deptt, 34th St. R. Ch. S. School,
Ind. School, West 415t St., and others. Male Dep't, G. S. No. 67,
asked for 91 tickets. Some of the children in P. D., G. S. No. 28,
shed tears when their teacher informed them that we had no more
tickets. The children stood on the sidewalk on a Friday afternoon, not
long ago, from 2:30 until 5:30, patiently waiting for their turn to
enter the room, as the librarian could only allow a certain number to
enter at one time. Dr. Barnett visited the rooms with the intention of
putting up chest-expanders for exercise, but he found them too small,
and the woodwork too frail, for any such purposes. We have a number
of subscribers at $1 per year, although some have gone far beyond this
in subscriptions. We closed on May 1, to reopen in the fall. One
great reason for keeping open through the year is that many parents
are obliged to work all day, and the children run the risk of getting
into all sorts of crime. As an instance, not long since I found a
little girl in our department who had been frequently caught
pilfering. At last we thought it necessary to send for the mother. She
burst into tears and said: "What am I to do? My children are alone
after school hours until I return, and I do not know what they are
doing." I asked if the children had tickets for the reading-room, and
here found another difficulty. "Not on the same day," she said. We had
been obliged to send the girls on three days of the week, and the boys
on two days, because of the lack of room, and of helpers. Several
teachers have since come forward and offered their services. Two
teachers in our department have gone every Monday, and two others
every Friday, and appeared to take great pleasure in the work. All
honor to such young, earnest workers, for they deserve it! We have
recently received a box of books, toys, etc., from the "Little
Helpers" in Elyria, Ohio, and Columbia College is taking an active
interest in our work. We are leaning upon our friends of the college
library for support and help, in time to come. All our meetings are
held at Columbia College. We hope for liberal donations, and we feel
quite sure—yes, as sure as we felt on that gloomy evening last
winter, when we decided to go on—that from the kind words of
encouragement, and the liberal gifts that we have received in the
past, the gifts are coming in the future; and when we are resting from
our labors, others yet unborn shall rise up and call those blessed
who have strengthened our hands. And we believe that when this comes
the prison doors will open less frequently.
In the following paper, read in 1897 before the Friends' Library
Association of Philadelphia, and the New York Library Club, Miss Mary
W. Plummer discussed some of the "experiences and theories" of a
number of libraries and the "requisites for the ideal children's
library." Mary Wright Plummer was born in Richmond, Indiana, in 1856,
was graduated from the Friends' Academy there, and was a special
student at Wellesley College, 1881-1882. She entered the "first class
of the first library school," and in 1888 became a certified graduate
of the Library School of Columbia College. For the next two years she
was the head of the Cataloguing department of the St. Louis Public
Library. She was Librarian of the Pratt Institute Free Library from
1890 to 1904, and Director of the Pratt Institute of Library Science
until 1911. She then became Principal of the Library School of the New
York Public Library, the position she held until her death in 1916.
Miss Plummer was President of the A. L. A. in 1915-1916. She
contributed many articles to library periodicals, and has written
numerous books, several of which are for children. It is so early in
the movement for children's libraries that by taking some thought now
it would seem possible to avoid much retracing of steps hereafter, and
it is for this reason that even at this early day a comparison of
experiences and theories by those libraries which have undertaken the
work is desirable and even necessary. It is as well, perhaps, to begin
with a few historical statistics, gathered from questions sent out
last December and from perusal of the Library Journal reports since
then. Many libraries, probably the majority, have had an age-limit
for borrowers, and the admission of children under 12 to membership
is of comparatively recent date. The separation of children from the
adult users of the library by means of a room of their own was
probably originated by the Public Library of Brookline, which in 1890
set aside an unused room in its basement for a children's
reading-room. In 1893 the Minneapolis Public Library fitted up a
library for children, from which books circulate also, where they had
(as reported in December, 1896) 20,000 volumes, the largest children's
library yet reported. In 1894 the Cambridge Public Library opened a
reading-room and the Denver Public Library a circulating library for
children. An article on the latter undertaking may be found in the
Outlook for September 26, 1896. In 1895 Boston, Omaha, Seattle, New
Haven and San Francisco, all opened either circulating libraries or
reading-rooms for children, and in 1896 Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh,
Pratt Institute of Brooklyn, Everett (Mass.) and Kalamazoo (Mich.)
followed suit. The libraries of Circleville (O.), Milwaukee,
Cleveland, and Helena (Mont.) are all projecting plans for the same,
and probably this year will show a notable increase. The new Public
Library of Chicago has made no especial provision for children, from
the fact that its situation in the heart of the business district of
the city will prevent many children from coming to it, but provision
of some sort will be made for them at the various branch reading-rooms
throughout the city. In the new building of the Providence Library
considerations of cost made it necessary to give up the addition of a
children's library, a matter of great disappointment to every one.
From all these libraries except the last two, reports were received
by us in December, 1896, on comparing which we found considerable
similarity of usage, though as there had been but little in print on
the subject up to 1896 this probably arose not from communication
between the libraries but from the fact that like circumstances and
causes produced like effects in different places. Of the 15 libraries
reporting, 11 circulated books from the children's room, three making
an age-limit for this, while the four remaining contented themselves
with giving the children a reading-room, in which a number of
books—about 300—were placed, for reading on the premises. The
temptation for a child who becomes interested in a book, to carry it
off when closing- hour comes, in order to finish it, is a strong one,
and of these four libraries one reported 35 books missing in its first
six months, or over one-tenth of its stock. Two others which circulate
from open shelves to all borrowers lost 100 children's books in a
little over 12 months. A number of others reported that as yet they
had taken no inventory of the books in the room, and were evidently
willing that ignorance should remain bliss a little longer. Several
report that very few books are unaccounted for, and one or two that
not a book has been taken. Free access to the children's books is
allowed in all the 15, and in about half of them the room is open all
day, and in two cases in the evening also. The number of volumes
shelved ranges all the way from 300 to 20,000, the average number
being from 3,000 to 4,000. An age- limit for the use of the room is
set by seven libraries, three of these making the limit for
circulation only, while eight admit children of any age, and doubtless
make provision for the very youngest The circulation of these rooms
that lend books ranges from 65 to 350 as a daily average, frequently
exceeding this. As a rule, one attendant is kept in the room, with
assistance when necessary, two libraries only reporting two regular
assistants and the Boston Public Library three. The Detroit Library
has two attendants in order to give the children personal attention.
The library at Kalamazoo has for one of its assistants a trained
kindergarten. Eight libraries report no reference-books on the
children's shelves and the majority of the others only a few such
works. The largest number of periodicals taken appears to be our own
list of 10, though by this time the libraries reporting in 1896 may
have increased their number. Instead of taking a variety of
periodicals, they seem to prefer duplicating a few favorites. One
library reports a number of copies of Puck taken for children, the
wisdom of which I should doubt, and two subscribe for Golden Days. The
Minneapolis Library circulates 10 copies of St. Nicholas. The Boston
Public Library, having a large foreign clientele among children as
well as adults, takes one German and one French periodical for them.
In the Detroit Library the Scientific American is on the list, and in
our children's library we take a copy of Harper's Weekly. A number of
libraries report crowding and lack of time and space. In one no
periodicals can be kept in the children's library, because there is no
room for the children to sit down to read them. Another reports as
many as 75 children frequently in the room at once, a third that the
room is so full children have often to be sent out, and a fourth,
which at the time was only a reading-room, that the attendance was so
large very little could be done except to keep order. Most of the
libraries report a fair proportion of foreigners among the children,
and one speaks of having many colored children among the readers.
Turning from these reports to a general consideration of the subject,
we must admit, first, that a definite decision as to the object of a
children's library is the first thing needful. This decision will
doubtless vary in different libraries, and the results will differ
accordingly, but almost any decision is better than none, since one
cannot be arrived at without giving much thought to the subject, and
the desirable thing is that the work should be entered upon
thoughtfully. We have passed the time when reading in itself was
considered a vast good. The ability to read may easily be a curse to
the child, for unless he be provided something fit to read, it is an
ability as powerful for evil as for good. When we consider the
dime-novels, the class of literature known as Sunday- school books,
the sensational newspapers, the vicious literature insinuated into
schools, and the tons of printed matter issued by reputable
publishers, written by reputable people, good enough in its intention
but utterly lacking in nourishment, and, therefore, doing a positive
harm in occupying the place of better things— when we consider that
all these are brought within a child's reach by the ability to read,
we cannot help seeing that the librarian, in his capacity as selector
of books for the library, has the initial responsibility. Certain
classes of the printed stuff just spoken of do not, of course, find
their way into children's libraries, since they are barred out from
all respectable shelves; but we are still too lenient with print
because it is print, and every single book should be carefully
examined before it goes into a library where children should have
access to the shelves. But given an ideal selection of books, or as
near it as we can get and still have enough books to go around, is
just the reading of them—that is, the passing of the eye over the
types, gaining a momentary impression—the most desirable thing to be
got out of them? Are there not here and there children who are reading
to the lasting detriment of their memories and powers of observation
and reflection, stuffing themselves with type, as it were? Nearly
every observant librarian knows of such cases. Are there not days
when the shining of the sun, the briskness of the air, the greenness
of the turf and of the trees, should have their invitation seconded by
the librarian, and the child be persuaded AWAY from the library
instead of TO it? We are supposed to contribute with our books toward
the sound mind, but we should be none the less advocates of the sound
body—and the child who reads all day indoors when he ought to be out
in the fresh air among his kind, should have our especial watching.
But, granted the suitable book and the suitable time for reading,
what do we know of the effect our books are having? We count our
circulation just the same whether a book is kept two days—about long
enough for the family to look at the pictures— or a week. Whether it
has been really read we do not know. Sometimes I think those pencilled
notes on the margin, recording the child's disgust or satisfaction,
should have more meaning for us than they do. At least, they prove
that the book has taken hold of the reader's imagination and
sympathies. Don't let us be too severe with a criticism written in the
honest feeling of the moment (if it be in pencil); we are really
gathering psychological and sociological data for which the
child-study clubs would thank us, perhaps. I see only one way in
which we can be enabled to estimate fairly the value of what we are
doing, and that is by so gaining the good-will and confidence of the
children as to get them to answer our questions as to their reading or
to tell us of their own accord what they get from it. From this
information we may make our inferences as to the value of our books in
themselves, and may be enabled to regulate their use. A child whose
exclusive diet is fairy-tales is evidently over-cultivating the
imagination; a girl who has outgrown children's books and dipped into
the premature love-stories that are written for her class needs our
most careful guidance; a boy whose whole thought is of adventure, or
who cannot read anything but jokes, is also in a critical condition.
In short, the judicious regulation of the children's reading should
be made practicable for the librarian, if the children's library is to
be the important agency in education which it may be made. In regard
to the desirability of amusements in the library, I own that I am
somewhat sceptical. The library has its own division of labor in the
work of education, and that division is the training of the people to
the use and appreciation of books and literature. An argument in favor
of games is that they draw in children who might not otherwise come,
but I should fear they would be drawn in finally in such crowds as to
be unmanageable. Books properly administered should have the same
drawing power, and their influence, once felt, is toward quietness and
thought, rather than toward activity and skill with the complications
of dispute and cheating that may arise from the use of games.
Children are natural propagandists. Let one child find that at the
children's library he may select his own books from a good-sized
collection, may find help in his composition-work, the news of what is
going on in the world in the shape of an attractive illustrated
bulletin-board, different every week—and tomorrow 10 children will
know of it, and each of these will tell other 10, and so on. The
library will have all the children it can attend to eventually, and
they will have come gradually so that the assistants shall have been
able to get a proper grasp of the situation, while the earlier
children will have been somewhat trained to help, like the elder
brothers and sisters in a family. Certain freedoms may be granted in
the children's library as an education for the adult constituency of
the future; for instance, the guarantee may be done away with, thus
putting the child on his honor to pay his own fines and damages—the
only penalties for not doing so being those which society naturally
inflicts on offenders—the debarring from privileges and from
association. If there is nothing injurious or doubtful on the shelves,
freedom in choice of books may be allowed to the smallest child, only
he must know that help and guidance are at hand if he wishes them,
and if a tendency to over-read in any one direction or in all is
noticed, the librarian should feel at liberty to make suggestions.
And as to freedom of action, the maxim should be that one man's
liberty ends where another man's begins. No child should be allowed to
disturb the room or to interfere with the quiet of those who are
studying, for many children, more than one would think, really come to
study. But the stiffness and enforced routine of the school-room
should by all means be avoided. There should be no set rules as to
silence, but consideration for others should be inculcated, and in
time the room will come to have a subduing, quiet atmosphere that will
insensibly affect those who enter. Whispering, or talking in a low
tone, where several little heads are bent together over picture-books,
is certainly admissible, and the older heads are very soon quiet of
their own accord, each over its own book or magazine. After the
selection of the books themselves there is nothing so important as
thoughtful administration, a practical question, since the employment
of assistants comes in under this head. Educators have for some time
seen the mistake of putting the cheapest teachers over the primary
schools—kindergartners have seen it—and it remains for the library
to profit by their experience without going through a similar one. If
there is on the library staff an assistant well read and well
educated, broad- minded, tactful, with common sense and judgment,
attractive to children in manner and person, possessed, in short, of
all desirable qualities, she should be taken from wherever she is, put
into the children's library, and paid enough to keep her there. There
is no more important work in the building, no more delicate, critical
work than that with children, no work that pays so well in immediate
as well as in far-off results. Who that has met the fault- finding,
the rudeness and coldness too frequent in a grown-up constituency,
would not expand in the sunshine of the gratitude, the confidence, the
good-will, the natural helpfulness of children! And it rests partly
with the assistant to cultivate these qualities in them, and so modify
the adult constituency of the future. I say THOUGHTFUL administration
because the children's library is no sooner opened than it begins to
present problems. Some of these are simply administrative and
economic, others take hold of social and ethical foundations. There
will be scarcely a day on which the librarian and the children's
librarian will not have to put their heads, and sometimes their
hearts, together over puzzling cases—cases of fraud, of
mischief-making, of ignorant evil-doing, of inherited tendencies,
physical, mental, and moral— and sometimes it will seem as if the
whole human creation were incurably ailing, and the doctrine of total
depravity will take on alarming probability. But at this point some
sound, smiling, active boy or girl comes in with a cheerful greeting,
and pessimism retires into the background. And all this reminds me of
one more quality which the children's librarian must have—a sense of
humor. It is literally saving in some circumstances. Our own
experience has led to the following suggestions, made by the
children's librarian in our library to those who come in at given
hours from the other departments to take her place or to assist her.
It will be seen that most of them are the product of observation and
thought arising from the daily evidence of the room itself: "Always
tell a child how to fill out his application-blank, even when you are
busy. Tell him just where to write his name in the register and stay
near him till it is completed. Whenever it is possible, go to the
shelves with a child who has just received his card of membership.
Show him where different kinds of books are to be found. Ask him what
kind of book he likes. Show him one or two answering to his
description and then leave him to make his own selection. "Explain
the routine carefully and fully to children just beginning to use the
library. "Let no child sign the register, look at a book, receive or
present an application, with soiled hands. Soiled and crumpled
applications are considered defective and cannot be accepted. "Do not
expect or demand perfect quiet. Frequent tapping upon the desk excites
the children and betrays nervousness on the part of the person in
charge. Let the discipline of the room seem to be incidental; let the
child feel that it is first and foremost a library where books are to
be had for the asking, and that you are there to make it easier to get
them. "Never call children's numbers, but use their names if
necessary, though a glance of recognition pleases them better. Do not
force acquaintance. Children like it even less than grown people. Be
sympathetic and responsive, but beware of mannerism or effusiveness.
Remember, too, that questioning is a fine art, and one should take
care not to offend. "Speed is not the first requisite at a children's
desk. Children have more patience with necessary formalities than
grown people. "Let some of the children help in the work of the room,
but do not urge them to do so. "Avoid stereotyped forms of expression
when reproving a child or conversing with him. Let him feel you are
speaking to him personally; he will not feel this if he hears the same
words used for 50 other boys." For evening work, when there is no
circulation of books: "read to them sometimes; talk to them at others;
and sometimes leave them quite alone. They are more appreciative when
they find you are leaving work to give them pleasure than they would
be if they found you were making their pleasure your work." These are
a few of the instructions or suggestions consequent upon daily
observation and experience. Doubtless every children's librarian could
supplement them with many more, but they are enough to show what I
mean by "thoughtful administration." Occasionally the librarian who
serves children will have to take account of stock, sum up the changes
for better or for worse in the use and treatment of the room, in the
manners and habits of the children and in their reading. She will have
to retire a little from her work, take a bird's-eye view of it, and
decide if on the whole progress is making toward her ideal. Without
identifying itself with any of the movements such as the
kindergarten, child-study, and social settlement, without losing
control of itself and resigning itself to any outside guidance, the
children's library should still absorb what is to its purpose in the
work of all these agencies. "This one thing I do," the librarian may
have to keep reminding herself, to keep from being drawn off into
other issues, but by standing a little apart she may see what is to
her advantage without being sucked in by the draft as some
enthusiastic movement sweeps by. Must she have no enthusiasm? Yes,
indeed; but is not that a better enthusiasm which enables one to work
on steadily for years with undiminished courage than the kind that
exhausts itself in the great vivacity of its first feeling and effort?
It will not be long after the opening of the children's library
before an insight will be gained into domestic interiors and private
lives that will make the librarian wish she could follow many a child
to his home, in order to secure for him and his something better than
the few hours' respite from practical life which they may get from the
reading of books. When the boy who steals and the girl who is vicious
before they are in their teens, have to be sent away lest other
children suffer, it is borne in upon the librarian that a staff of
home-missionaries connected with the library to follow up and minister
in such cases would not be a bad thing—and she has to remind herself
again and again that it is not incumbent on any one person to attempt
everything, and that Providence has other instrumentalities at work
besides herself. The humors of the situation, on the other hand, are
many. The boys who, being sent home to wash their hands, return in an
incredibly short time with purified palms and suppressed giggles, and
on persistent inquiry confess, "We just licked 'em," present to one
who is "particular" only a serio-comic aspect; and the little squirrel
who wriggles to the top of the librarian's chair until he can reach
her ear, and then whispers into it, "There couldn't be no library here
'thout you, could there?" is not altogether laughable; but incidents
of pure comedy are occasionally to be set over against the serious
side. Last spring, with a view to gaining information directly in the
answers to our questions and indirectly in the light the answers
should throw on the character of the children, we chose 150 boys and
girls who were regularly using the library and sent to them a series
of questions to be answered in writing. They were apparently greatly
pleased to be consulted in this way, and it seemed to us that very few
of the replies were insincere in tone, or intended merely to win
approbation. From the 100 replies worth any consideration I have drawn
these specimen answers: One of the first questions we asked was, "How
long have you been using the library?" Of 100 who answered, 25 had
used the library more than six months, 33 more than a year, 22 more
than two years, 11 more than three years, nine more than four years,
and one six years, since books were first given out to children. Many
children first hear of the library when they are 13 and over, and
after 14 they have the use of the main library, so that in their case
the time of use is necessarily shorter. However, if a child has not
done with the children's library by the time he is 14, we allow him to
continue using it until he wishes to be transferred. Of 100 children,
68 reported that other members of their families used the library,
while 32 reported themselves the only borrowers. This is interesting
in connection with their answers to the question, "Does any one at
home or at school tell you good books to read?" 71 reported yes and 29
no, about the same proportion. In many families the parents are of a
mental calibre or at a stage in education to enjoy books written for
children, and we have found that children often drew books with their
parents' tastes in view. One little girl whose own tastes led her to
select a charming little book on natural history was sent back with it
by an aunt who said it was not suitable and requested one of the
semi-demi-novels that are provided for quite young girls, as being
much more appropriate. The difficulty in keeping "hands off" in a case
where grown people are thus influencing children injuriously can be
fully appreciated only by one who knows and cares for the children.
Fifty-seven children reported that they were read to at home or that
they read to their younger brothers and sisters, while 43 stated that
their reading was a pleasure all to themselves. The large number who
shared their reading was a pleasant surprise to us, evincing a
companionship at home that we had hardly anticipated. Twenty-eight
children stated that they preferred to have help in selecting their
books, 63 that they preferred to make their own choice, while nine
said it depended. 49 said that they came to the library to get help in
writing their compositions or in other school-work, while 51 said they
did not, one proudly asserting, "I am capable of writing all my
compositions myself," and another, seeming to think help a sort of
disgrace, "I do not come to the library for help about anything at
all." Seventy out of the 100 children answering used no library but
ours—the others made use of their Sunday-school libraries also. An
inquiry as to the books read since New Year's, the questions being
sent out in May, brought out the fact that an average of six books in
the four and a half months had been read—not a bad average,
considering that it was during term-time in the schools, when studies
take up much of the child's otherwise spare time. Boys proved to
prefer history and books of adventure, travel and biography, to any
other class of reading; girls, books about boys and girls, fairy
stories and poetry. The tastes of the boys on the whole were more
wholesome, and the girls need most help here. It is not at all
unlikely that it is chiefly the wars and combats in history which make
it interesting to the boys, as they seem to go through a sanguinary
phase in their development that nothing else will satisfy; but many of
them will get their history in no other way, and since wars have been
prominent in the past it is of no use to disguise the fact. Fairness
to both sides would seem to be the essential in the writing of these
children's histories and historical tales, since the ability to stop
and deliberate and to make allowances is rare even in grown people
and needs cultivation. The question as to the best book the child had
ever read brought in a bewildering variety of answers, proving beyond
a doubt that there had been no copying or using of other children's
opinions. While no list can be given, the reasons they offered in
response to a request for them were often interesting. Girls wrote of
"Little women": "It is so real, the characters are so real and
sweet." "I feel as if I could act the whole book." "This story has
helped me a very great deal in leading a better and a happier life."
"It shows us how to persevere," etc. Boys like "The Swiss family
Robinson" "because it describes accurately the points of a shipwreck
and graphically describes how a man with common sense can make the
best of everything." Another, "because it shows how some people made
the most of what they had." Another, "It shows how progressive the
people were." One liked "Uncle Tom's cabin" "because it describes life
among the colored people and shows how they were treated before the
war"; another, "because it is a true story and some parts of it are
pitiful and other parts are pleasant." A boy of 12 says of "Grimm's
fairy tales," "They are interesting to read, and I learn there is no
one to give you wings and sandals to fly—you have to make your own."
Another likes "John Halifax" "because it tells how a boy who had pluck
obtained what he wanted and made his mark in the world." "Pluck," I
imagine, in a boy's mind stands for the old virtue of the poets,
"magnanimity," that included all the rest. Harper's story-books are
still read and appreciated "because they tell me about different kinds
of people's ways, about animals, and a little about history." Another
child "learned games out of them, and how to tell the truth and the
use of the truth." A child of eight puts in a pathetic plea worth
considering for the Prudy books, "because I understand them better
than any books I have read." An incipient author says that she uses
the library because "I make a good deal of stories and find pretty
ideas." Perhaps the most enlightening replies came in answer to the
question, "Can you suggest anything which would make the library more
interesting that it is now?" One delightfully reassuring boy says, "I
like the children's library to stay just the same, and a boy who never
went there would like it. I'll bring more boys." "Pictures of art" are
requested, and "a set of curiosities from all parts of the world." As
we regard the children of all nationalities and types crowding about
the desk on our busy days we sometimes think we already have this
latter item. "A prize for the best story every month." "More
histories." "Pictures of noted men on the walls." "More fairy-tales."
"More magazines." "Books showing how to draw." "A pencil fastened to
each table." "Stories in Scottish history." "More books of adventure."
"More funny books." "A chart of real and genuine foreign stamps."
"Lectures for children between 10 and 14, with experiments
accompanying them." "A one-hour lecture once a week by noted men on
different subjects." "A book giving the value of celebrated
paintings." "More books. The shelves look bare," as indeed they do
after a rush-day. "Rules to keep the children in order," from a
nine-year-old who has doubtless suffered. "Not to be disturbed by
other boys for unknown crimes," says one mysterious victim of
something or other. "Historical fiction." "Catholic books." "Tanks
with fishes, in the windows." "An aquarium; children would enjoy
seeing pollywogs change to frogs every time they came to the library."
This is the comment of a little girl, I am glad to say.
"School-books." "More amusement for little children." This was before
we bought our linen picture-books. And the "Elsie books," and Oliver
Optic, and Castlemon are vainly desired by two or three. The general
sentiment is pretty well voiced by one child who says, "The library is
just perfect in about every respect." We feel that with this
enumeration of desiderata, the children's library has its work cut out
for it for some time to come, and that these evidences of the
children's likings and needs have removed a certain vagueness from our
ambitions. With lectures and experiments, reading clubs, and possibly
original stories, in contemplation, there is no danger of rust from
inaction, especially as to obtain any one of these there are serious
obstacles to overcome. But always and everywhere the library should
put forward its proper claim of the value and use of the book—though
in the word book I by no means include all that goes under the name.
If there are lectures with experiments or lantern-slides, they should
be attended by information as to the best literature on the subject
and the children encouraged to investigate what has been printed, as
well as to take in through the ear. There is no "digging" in
lecture-going, and it is "digging" that leaves a permanent impression
on the mind. The lecture should stimulate to personal research. From
reading aloud together at the library in the evening, reading clubs
may come to be formed, each with a specialty, decided by the tastes of
the members. The writing of stories, particularly if the library
selected the subject, might be made the occasion of the use of
histories, biographies, travels, etc. Quiet games in the evening for
the older children, of a nature to require the use of reference-books,
would be strictly within the library's province. Personal talks with
the children about their reading, if judiciously conducted, are always
in order. With a generation of children influenced in this way to use
books as tools and a mental resource as well as for recreation, and to
find recreation only in the best-written books, the library
constituency of the future would be worthy of the best library that
could be imagined. The bulletin-board is attracting attention
generally as a means of interesting children in topics of current
interest, and such a periodical as Harper's Weekly is invaluable when
it comes to securing illustrations for this purpose. Sandwiched in
among the pictures, we have occasionally smuggled in a printed
paragraph of useful information or a set of verses, and our latest
move, to induce more general reading of the periodicals, has been to
analyze their contents on the bulletin, under the head of "Animals,"
"Sports," "Engines," "Short stories," "Long stories," etc. Boys who
"know what they like" are beginning to turn to this analysis to see if
there is anything new on their favorite topic and to explain the
workings of the board to other boys, and the desired end is gradually
being brought about. As the references are taken down to make way for
new ones, they are filed away by subject, making the beginnings of a
permanent reference list. Birds, the new magazine with its colored
plates, is a boon for the children's room, The Great Round World is
good for the assistant-in-charge and the teachers who come to the
room, as well as for the children. In order to add to the number of
books without overstepping our rules as to quality, we are beginning,
though not yet very systematically, to look over the works of certain
authors of grown-up books with a view to finding material that can be
understood sufficiently by children to interest them. A number of
Stevenson's books can be given to boys and girls, and we hope to find
many others. Most children, I think, read books without knowing who
has written them, and if we can induce them to learn to know authors
and can interest them in a writer like Stevenson, we can feel fairly
secure that they will not drop him when they are transferred from the
children's room to the main library. Perhaps it is best always to have
a working hypothesis to begin with, in children's libraries as
elsewhere; but we can assure those who have not tried it that facts
are stubborn things, and the hypothesis has frequently to be made over
in accordance with newly-observed facts, and theories may or may not
be proven correct. The whole subject is as yet in the empirical stage,
and the way must be felt from day to day. If the children's librarian
lives in a continual rush, what "leisure to grow wise" on her chosen
subject does she have? and if she is hurried constantly from one child
to another, what chance have the children for learning by contact with
the individual? which, as Mr. Horace E. Scudder truly says, is the
method most sure of results. This contact may be had most naturally,
it seems to us, through the ordinary channels of waiting on the
children, provided it is quiet, deliberate waiting upon them. We go
out of our way to think out new philanthropies and are too likely to
forget that, as we go about our every-day business, natural
opportunities are constantly presenting for strengthening our
knowledge of and our hold upon the people who come to us—who are sent
to us, I might almost say. The registry and the charging-desks offer
chances for acquaintance to begin naturally and unconsciously and for
much incidental imparting of seed-thoughts. And it is in these
every-day chances, if appreciated and made the most of, that the work
of the children's library is going to tell. The necessity of especial
training in psychology, pedagogy, child study, and kindergarten ideas,
has been treated of recently in a paper before the A. L. A. There is
no doubt that the "called" worker in this field will be better for
scientific training, but let him or her first be sure of the call. It
is quite as serious as one to the ministry, if not more so, and no
amount of intellectual training will make up for the lack of patience
and fairness and of a genuine interest in children and realization of
their importance in the general scheme. To sum up, the requisites for
the ideal children's library, as we begin to see it, are suitable
books, plenty of room, plenty of assistance, and thoughtful
administration. Better a number of children's libraries scattered over
a town or city than a large central one, since only in this way can
the children be divided up so as to make individual attention to them
easy. But if it devolves upon one library to do the work for the
entire town, and branches are out of the question, something of the
same result may be obtained by providing at certain hours an extra
number of assistants. I can imagine a large room with several desks,
at each of which should preside an assistant having charge of only
certain classes of books, so that in time she might come to be an
authority on historical or biographical or scientific or literary
books for children, and the children might learn to go to her as
their specialist on the class of books they cared most for. Perhaps
this may sound Utopian. I believe there are libraries present and to
come for which it is entirely practicable.
An investigation of rural libraries in North Carolina and of library
work with children in Boston and New England towns led Miss Caroline
Matthews, a member of the Examining Committee of the Public Library of
Boston to believe that "exaggerated leaning toward one phase of
library work must throw out of the true the work as a whole." The
following paper explaining her conclusions was read before the
Massachusetts Library Club in October, 1907. Caroline Matthews was
born in Boston in 1855. She has contributed articles to the
Educational Review and to the Atlantic Monthly. Miss Matthews is at
present living in Switzerland. I have been asked to speak on this
subject, not because I have professional or technical knowledge of the
subject to be discussed, but rather because I have not. This does not
mean that I have no knowledge whatever of this or other phases of
library work. It simply means that the little knowledge I do possess
is non-professional, and that my impressions, points of view,
conclusions, are wholly those of an outsider. Up to three years ago I
had had no connection with public libraries beyond being an occasional
borrower of books. Then suddenly, through making a comparative study
of the financing of public school systems here and in France, I found
myself in touch with the public schools of an American city, and
through them with the school deposits of the Public Library of the
same city. Even so, I did not come in touch with the library side of
the work. It was always the school or teachers' side, or the pupils'
side, never any other. The second year I became a member of the
Examining Committee of the Public Library of the city of Boston. My
position on this committee for my first year of service was a minor
one. There was never anything very important to do, certainly not
enough to keep up one's interest to the point of being a live
interest. Moreover, I spent the winter away from town. But I had the
great good fortune to pass it in the mountains of North Carolina.
There I lived for weeks at a time in the homes and cabins of the
mountain whites. I knew the men their wives, their children. I
visited the logging camps, the mines, the missions, the mills, the
schools. The life was rough, but it was worth while. It gave me an
intimate knowledge of the social surroundings of the people, and I
found the one vital problem, the problem touching the citizen the
nearest, to be that of the rural school, and affiliated with the rural
school, though affiliated in a crude way, was the library. Thus, for
the second time in my life, I came into contact with the library by
means of the school. This coincidence led me to think, and I reasoned
out that library workers North and South must be working along similar
lines toward unity in practice. Both were doing educative work. And
both, apparently, had the same goal—the reaching of the parent or
adult through the child or through child growth. How far such work
was legitimate work, how far such work had intellectual or educational
value, how far such work lacked or had balance, I now wished to
determine. To do this it was necessary to assume some line of active
investigation; also to study results from the standpoint of the
library, as well as from that of the school and the citizen. There
was no need to search for a subject. I had it at hand. Living as I did
with the people I found myself in the very center of the rural library
movement—a movement so splendid in conception; so successful in
results, if statistics are credited; so direct as to method, the
entire appropriation being expended on but two things, books and
bookcases; so naively simple as to administration, there being neither
librarians, libraries, or pay-rolls—that a study of it could not fail
to prove helpful. What were the actual conditions? First, the name
"rural libraries" I found a misnomer. It in no sense represents facts.
The words imply community interests, interests alike of adult and
child, whilst the reality is that these libraries are simply school
deposits, composed wholly of "juvenile books," graded up to but not
beyond the seventh grade. When one realizes that these books reach a
total of 200,000 volumes, that they are sent to people living in
scattered communities strung shoe-string fashion high along mountain
ridges—back and apart from civilization— to a people of rugged
character, demanding strength in books as in life, capable of
appreciating strength, one sees what a stupendous opportunity for
community uplift has been wasted, and one stands aghast at the folly,
economic and intellectual, of the limitations imposed. Why should
children alone be considered? And if they alone are to be considered
why should they be fed nothing but "juvenile" literature? It is both
over-emphasis and false emphasis of the most harmful kind. Second,
far and away the most interesting phase of this library work in North
Carolina is that the whole movement lies outside of the hands of
professionally trained librarians. To understand why this is so it is
necessary to turn to the Department of Education. Education in North
Carolina is a state affair and centralized, the state being for all
practical purposes autocratic in every educational matter.
Decentralization has set in to the extent of admitting local taxation;
otherwise education in North Carolina to-day is as highly centralized
as it is in France. There is no difference whatever between the power
of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction at Raleigh, and
that of the Minister of Public Instruction in France. Such being the
case it is but natural that the rural library movement should be
absorbed by the state, incorporated into the Department of Education,
and administered by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction.
Neither would it be wise to change this. It would be wise, however, to
appoint as one of the county superintendents of public instruction a
trained librarian, having as his charge the entire supervision and
administration of library interests. Third, all responsibility for
the care of these libraries rests with teachers. The teachers should
never have such responsibility. It is entirely beyond and outside of
their proper work. I feel sure that this problem of how to care for
school deposits of library books, a problem which is an issue North as
it is South, is not so difficult of solution as library workers would
have us believe. Disabuse yourselves of the notion that it is the
teachers' work, and a way out of the difficulty will be found.
Fourth, not only is there a growing dissatisfaction with the library
act as administered, but there is actually active opposition to it—on
the part of some teachers, and on the part of certain public-spirited
citizens. So much so is this a fact that a counter movement is already
in progress. This consists in the establishment of rural libraries by
private gift, by the citizens at large, and by certain societies.
Tryon has such a library, a delightful building with two rooms and an
ample supply of standard books; Lenoir has one; Boone has one. Yet
these are small towns, two of them not exceeding 300 inhabitants
each. An interesting feature of one of these libraries is that it
serves largely as a social center for community life. Afternoon tea
is served in it; musicals held; club papers read; even the Woman's
Exchange meets and exhibits once a week. I had no means of discovering
how general this movement was, nor yet of determining the ratio of
emphasis laid on the social side of the work. But I want you to note
one point—the movement starts with the adult and with standard works,
and only by means of the adult, or through the parent, is the child
reached. It is the exact antithesis of the state movement. Fifth, the
libraries are neglected. In no school did I find a well-appointed one,
and where there were bookcases they were tucked aside in corner or
entry, thick with dust, unused. The state statistics as to the growth
of this movement ignore absolutely the facts I have mentioned.
Therefore, I claim that in no true sense are these statistics
representative. The movement, however, has interest. It is alive. It
is sweeping through the state. It spends thousands of dollars a year.
It concerns itself wholly with children. These are its
characteristics. There can be no two opinions as to its lack of
balance, for the adult is not even considered. There can be no two
opinions as to its intellectual and educational values. Buying only
"juvenile literature" they are of the smallest. There can be no two
opinions as to its morality: the people are taxed, yet only a
fraction of the people, only those who have children below the
seventh and above the first grades, receive a return. How far North
Carolina was seeking guidance of the North, how far the North was also
over-emphasizing, if it was, the children's side in library work, I
next wished to determine. This brought me back to Boston, and to my
second and final year of service on the Examining Committee. The
chairmanship of the sub-committee on branches gave me opportunity for
studying library work as it touched the child and the school in
cities. This I supplemented by a less intensive study of library
conditions in towns, in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire,
seeking to make my knowledge comprehensive. The first impression I
received was that of the many interpretations put upon library work.
These were almost as numerous as were the librarians and custodians.
Viewing the work as a whole such divergence in practice seemed an
error. There is power in unity; results worth while follow. There is
loss in the frittering away of time caused by casual experiment;
moreover, it bears heavily on the child. To this you may be inclined
to answer that social and moral conditions vary so in each city and
town that the individual condition must be faced individually.
Granted, but not to the extent you might wish. To illustrate: there
is wisdom in allowing a certain station of the Boston system complete
liberty of action. But the situation at this station is unique. It
could not be duplicated even in Boston. The work is in the hands of a
skilled leader, and it forms part of a large private work, financed by
a philanthropist noted for leadership in wise experimentation. The
library shows breadth in accepting the situation. But it is not wisdom
to allow the introduction of the story hour, or, as is the case in a
neighboring town, the throwing wide open of the children's room to
tots so tiny that picture blocks have to be furnished them to play
with—before the educational authorities have pronounced such work
necessary and just. I next noticed and with some alarm the
feminization of the library corps. And I confess that I see no remedy.
The schools are facing the same difficulty, but eventually it will be
solved for them in the raising of certain salaries to a man's
standard. This is not likely to happen in library work. Consequently
we have this feminization to reckon with, and to me it is an active
factor in the diversity of library practice to which I have referred,
for women far more than men are prone to indulge individual fads. A
third impression was the lack of fitness of some library workers for
their posts. This is particularly unfortunate when it occurs in a
children's room. Unless the person in charge possess the requisite
qualifications, better far close the room. The fault lies perhaps with
the colleges offering library courses. It may well be that the
training in these should be more specialized than it is. Take the case
of a student intending to pursue a given line of work—say children's
departments. Something definite should be offered her, something
corresponding in worth to the graduate courses in practice and
observation offered students of education in departments of education
at universities. This is a practical suggestion; it only requires on
the part of colleges and libraries similar agreements to those
already existing between universities and schools. A second phase of
this question is that of libraries whose employees are not drawn from
library schools or colleges, but who reach the several posts by a
system of promotion based on efficiency and faithful service. Is there
any reason why employees of such a system, specializing in children's
work should not serve an apprenticeship in the children's department
at central and be required to return to it again and again for further
instruction? As far as I know the heads of these children's
departments have no duties of this kind. But would not the value of a
library corps be increased tenfold if they had? They seize eagerly the
opportunity to go out and instruct the teacher, to go out and
instruct the parent. They have classes for the schools in the use of
the library. But they neglect utterly the training of the library
employee who is to serve as assistant first, as chief later, in the
children's room at branch or station. Yet the knowledge acquired by
only one day of observation under skillful guidance in the children's
department at central would prove invaluable to these women. Broaden
the training given employees, and centralize experimentation. I found
no TRUE affiliation with the schools. There was none in North
Carolina; there is none here. In countless ways the library and the
school are overlapping. Why there should not be a clearer vision as to
what is library work and what is school work is incomprehensible to an
outsider. I grew to have a horror of children's rooms—as distinct
from children's departments. Intellectually, physically, morally, I
believe them harmful. Neither can I see their necessity. As regards
classification of books, I received the impression that the broad
division into "adult" and "juvenile" is too dogmatic, too arbitrary.
Whatever other forms or divisions are necessary, this particular one
should be abolished. It lowers the intellectual standing of the
library with the community. The splendid character of library work in
tenement districts stood out strongly. It is vigorous, alive, with an
ever-broadening opportunity. More vivid, however, than any other
impression, stronger still, was that of the time and thought and care
bestowed on the Child. Everywhere, in city, town and suburban library,
the effort to reach the Child is apparent. Special attendants are in
readiness to meet him the instant he comes into reading room and
station after school hours. Thoughtful women are assigned to overlook
and guide his reference work. Entertainment is offered him in the
form of blocks to play with, scrap-books to look at, story hours to
attend. Books specially selected with regard to his supposedly
individual needs are placed on the shelves. Picture bulletins are
made for his use in the schools. Where he is not segregated he is
allowed to monopolize tables and chairs. I find no corresponding
effort made to reach the adult, to reach the young mechanic, to draw
to the library the parent. I at times wonder whether librarians and
custodians are even aware that exaggerated leaning toward one phase of
library work must throw out of the true the work as a whole. Nothing
has astonished me more than this new development in library
practice—the placing of the child in importance before the adult. The
old belief that the library is primarily for adults and only
incidentally for children still holds good at the central buildings of
large city public library systems. In these we find the children's
department only one of many departments—the child always subordinate,
the adult dominant—the result of a well balanced, admirable whole,
each unit in its proper place, all forces pulling together. I fail to
see why the same relative balance should not be maintained throughout
the entire system, from branch to station, not always in kind and
measure, but approximately. A second thought to which I cannot adjust
myself—is that of the parent as a factor in school and library work.
The parent believes in the public school, and he pays heavily in taxes
for the education of his children by means of it. The parent believes
in the establishment of public libraries and he pays heavily in taxes
for their equipment. Both sums raised are sufficiently generous to
enable school and library to furnish trained, capable, efficient
teachers and librarians. Such being the case does not the parent show
intelligence in turning over to the public care the direction of his
children's education and reading? Is he not justified in so doing? Why
then should he be held ignorant or selfish? Eliminate the parent as a
factor in library practice. Give the children quality in books. Strike
off 50 per cent., if you only will, of the titles to be found on the
shelves of children's rooms. Substitute "adult" books, and you will
not need to appeal to the parent to guide the child's choice. That
there is similarity of practice in library work, in North Carolina and
here, you can hardly deny. Point by point, in so far as the work
relates to the child, the problems are mutual. Their solution lies in
the getting together of school and library authorities, and the
setting aside of the modern thought that library work is primarily
educative and primarily for the child. Let the schools educate the
children; and, if you can, let the adult once more dominate in library
practice. You will then have a well-balanced whole, free from
over-emphasis on the child's side.
A conception of the meaning and the possibilities of children's work
interpreted by means of present day social and industrial conditions
is given by Henry E. Legler, librarian of the Chicago Public Library,
in a paper on "Library work with children," read at the Pasadena
Conference of the A L. A. in 1911. Henry Eduard Legler was born in
Palermo, Italy, June 22, 1861. He was educated in Switzerland and the
United States. In 1889 he was a member of the Wisconsin Assembly; from
1890 to 1894 secretary of the Milwaukee School Board; from 1904 to
1909 secretary of the Wisconsin Library Commission, and since 1909 has
been librarian of the Chicago Public Library. In 1912-1913 Mr. Legler
was President of the A. L. A. Not long since a man of genius took a
lump of formless clay, and beneath the cunning of his hand there grew
a great symbol of life. He called it Earthbound. An old man is bowed
beneath the sorrow of the world. Under the weight of burdens that
seemingly they cannot escape, a younger man and his faithful mate
stagger with bent forms. Between them is a little child. Instead of a
body supple and straight and instinct with freedom and vigor, the
child's body yields to the weight of heredity and environment, whose
crushing influence press the shoulders down. In this striking group
the artist pictures for us the world-old story of conditions which
meet the young lives of one generation, and are transmitted to the
next. It is a picture that was true a thousand years ago; it is a
picture that is faithful of conditions today. Perhaps its modern guise
might be more aptly and perhaps no less strikingly shown, as it
recently appeared in the form of a cartoon illustrating Mrs. Elizabeth
Barrett Browning's verse:
The Cry of the Children
Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers, Ere the sorrow
comes with years? They are leaning their young heads against their
mothers, And THAT cannot stop their tears. The young lambs are
bleating in the meadows, The young birds are chirping in the nest,
The young fawns are playing with the shadows, The young flowers are
blowing towards the west— But the young, young children, O my
brothers, They are weeping bitterly! They are weeping in the
playtime of the others, In the country of the free.
Do you question the young children in the sorrow, Why their
tears are falling so? The old man may weep for his to-morrow
Which is lost in long ago; The old tree is leafless in the
forest, The old year is ending in the frost, The old wound, if
stricken, is the sorest, The old hope is hardest to be lost; But the
young, young children, O my brothers, Do you ask them why they stand
Weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers, In our happy
Fatherland?
Go out, children, from the mine and from the city, Sing out,
children, as the little thrushes do. Pluck your handfuls of the
meadow cowslips pretty, Laugh aloud to feel your fingers let them
through! Only in recent years has there grown into fulness a
conception of what the duty of society is towards the child. For near
two thousand years it was a world of grown-ups for grown-ups.
Children there have been—many millions of them—but they were merely
incidental to the scheme of things. Society regarded them not as an
asset, except perhaps for purposes of selfish exploitation. If
literature reflects contemporary life with fidelity, we may well
marvel that for so many hundreds of years the boys and girls of their
generation were so little regarded that they are rarely mentioned in
song or story. When they are, we are afforded glimpses of a curious
attitude of aloofness or of harshness. Nowhere do we meet the
artlessness of childhood. In a footnote here, in a marginal gloss
there, such references as appear point to torture and cruelty, to
distress and tears. In the early legends of the Christians, in the
pagan ballads of the olden time, what there is of child life but
illustrates the brutal selfishness of the elders. Certainly, no
people understood as well as did the Jews that the child is the
prophecy of the future, and that a nation is kept alive not by memory
but by hope. Childhood to them was "the sign of fulfillment of
glorious promises; the burden of psalm and prophecy was of a golden
age to come, not of one that was in the dim past." So in the greatest
of all books we come frequently upon phrases displaying this attitude:
"There shall yet old men and old women dwell in the streets of
Jerusalem, and every man with his staff in his hand for very age. And
the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the
streets thereof." "They shall remember me in far countries; and they
shall live with their children." And most significant of all: "Suffer
the little children to come unto me." In the centuries intervening,
up to a hundred years ago, the men of pen and the men of brush give us
a few touches now and then suggestive of childhood. However, they are
observers rather than interpreters of childhood and its meaning. In
the works of the great master painters, the dominant note is that of
maternity, or the motive is devotional purely. Milton's great ode on
the Nativity bears no message other than this. In the graphic tale
that Chaucer tells about Hugh of Lincoln, race hatred is the
underlying sentiment, and the innocence of the unfortunate widow's
son appears merely to heighten the evil of his captors and not as
typical of boyhood. Of the goodly company known collectively as the
Elizabethan writers, silence as to the element of childhood is
profound. In all the comedies and the tragedies of the greatest
dramatist of all, children play but minor parts. In none of them save
in King John, where historic necessity precludes the absence of the
princes in the Tower, they might be wholly omitted without impairment
of the structure. In the Merry Wives of Windsor, Mistress Anne Page's
son is briefly introduced, and is there made the vehicle for
conversation which in this age might be regarded as gross
suggestiveness. True, that is a rarely tender passage in the Winter's
Tale wherein Hermione speaks with her beloved boy, and the pathos of
Arthur's plea as he asks Hubert to spare his eyes is of course a
masterpiece of literature; these, however, the sum total of the great
dramatist's significant references to childhood. In the great works on
canvas, save where the Christ-child is depicted, may be noted that
same absence of the spirit of childhood. Wealthy and royal patrons,
indeed, encouraged great artists to add favorite sons and daughters to
the array of portraits in their family galleries. In time, the artists
gave to the progeny of the nobility and the aristocracy generally,
such creations as to them seemed appropriate to their years. These
poses are but the caricature of childhood. Morland, Gainsborough, Sir
Joshua Reynolds and other artists of their day represented the
children of their wealthy patrons in attitudes which savor somewhat of
burlesque, though it may have been intended quite seriously to hedge
them about with spontaneity. It has been said that "a child's life
finds its chief expression in play, and that in play its social
instincts are developed." If this be true, we find in some
contemporary canvases of this English school a curious reproduction of
the favorite pastimes of children. One is called "bird-nesting," the
title descriptive of the favorite diversion thus depicted. Another
bears the legend "Snow-balling," and with no apparent disapproval save
on the part of the little victims, shows a group of larger children
ruthlessly snow-balling some smaller ones who have sought shelter in
the portico of a church. Some distance down the street the form of an
aged woman suggests another victim of youthful playfulness. A century
and a half ago there was born, frail at first but with constant
growth, a perception that the great moving forces of life contain
elements hitherto disregarded. Rousseau sounded his thesis, Pestalozzi
began to teach, and but a little later on, Froebel expounded his
tenets. We need not be concerned as to the controversial disputation
of rival schools of pedagogues whose claims for one ignore the merits
of the other. A new thought came into being, and both Pestalozzi and
Froebel contributed to its diffusion—whether in the form of
Pestalozzi's ideal, "I must do good to the child," or Froebel's, "I
must do good through the child," or perhaps a measurable merging of
the two. Responsive to the note of life and thought around them, the
great authors of prose and verse began to inject the new expression of
feeling into what they wrote. Perhaps best reflected, as indeed it
proved most potent in molding public opinion, this thought entered
into the novels of Charles Dickens. These, in the development of child
life as a social force, not only recorded history; they made history,
and the virile pencils of Leech and Phiz and Cruikshank aided what
became a movement. For the first time in literature, with sympathetic
insight, there was laid bare the misery of childhood among the lowly
and unfortunate, and the pathos of unhappy childhood was pictured
with all its tragic consequences to society as a whole. In the story
of Poor Joe, the street-crossing sweeper, who was always told to move
on, we read the stories of thousands of the boys of to-day. His brief
tenantry of Tom-all-Alones shows us the prototype of many thousands of
living places in the slums of our own time. Conditions which environ
growing boys and girls —not only thousands of men, but many
millions—in the congested cities of the Anglo-Saxon world, are well
suggested by the names which have been given in derision, or brutally
descriptive as the case may be, to such centers of human hiving as the
Houses of Blazes and Chicken-foot Alley, in Providence; Hell's Kitchen
in New York; the Bad Lands in Milwaukee; Tin Can Alley, Bubbly Creek
and Whiskey Row back of the stockyards in Chicago. In these regions
and in others like them darkness and filth hold forth together where
the macaroni are drying; broken pipes discharge sewage in the basement
living quarters where the bananas are ripening; darkness and filth
dwell together in the tenement cellars where the garment-worker sews
the buttons on for the sweat-shop taskmaster; goats live amiably with
human kids in the cob-webbed basements where little hands are twisting
stems for flowers; in the unlovely stable lofts where dwell a dozen
persons in a place never intended for one; in windowless attics of
tall tenements where frail lives grow frailer day by day.
Lisabetta, Marianna, Fiametta, Teresina, They are winding stems
of roses, one by one, one by one— Little children who have never
learned to play; Teresina softly crying that her fingers ache today,
Tiny Fiametta nodding when the twilight slips in, gray.
High above the clattering street, ambulance and fire-gong beat;
They sit, curling crimson petals, one by one, one by one.
Lisabetta, Marianna, Fiametta, Teresina, They have never seen a
rosebush nor a dewdrop in the sun. They will dream of the vendetta,
Teresina, Fiametta,
Of a Black Hand and a Face behind a grating; They will dream of
cotton petals, endless, crimson, suffocating, Never of a wild rose
thicket, nor the singing of a cricket; But the ambulance will bellow
through the wanness of their dreams, And their tired lids will
flutter with the street's hysteric screams
Lisabetta, Marianna, Fiametta, Teresina, They are winding stems
of roses, one by one, one by one; Let them have a long, long
playtime, Lord of Toil, when toil is done; Fill their baby hands with
roses, joyous roses of the sun. Reverting to Poor Tom, well may the
words of Dickens in Bleak House serve as a text for to-day: "There is
not an atom of Tom's shrine, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas
in which he lives, nor an obscurity or degradation about him, nor an
ignorance, nor a wickedness, nor a brutality of his committing, but
shall work its retribution, through every order of society up to the
proudest of the proud and the highest of the high." Whatever of
permanence the ideal democracy which underlies our institutions may
achieve, it will not be the survival of conditions such as these, but
the fruition of their betterment. Recognition of the sinister elements
involved determines the modern type of library work with children.
That work rests upon a knowledge of the background which has been
pictured, upon the use of methods that shall reach sanely and
effectively the contributing causes, upon correlation of all the
social forces that can be brought to bear unitedly. Recognition of
conditions and causation gives power to, and justifies the modern
trend of, library work with children as the most important and
far-reaching of all its great work. Of thirty million men and women,
and their children, who have come from Over-seas in two generations,
83 per cent were dwellers along the rim of the Mediterranean. Largely
from that source have our towns grown overnight into swarming cities.
Their children of to-day will be the men and women who in a generation
will make or unmake the Republic. Ignorance and greed, rather than
necessity, breed the chief menace in our national life. Alone as a
detached social force, the library cannot hope to combat these, but in
correlation with other forces may serve as one of the most potent
agencies. In the children's rooms and in kindred places, the
missionaries of the book take the disregarded bits of life about them
and weave them into a human element of power. The children's rooms in
the library and what they imply in the life of the people, are of such
recent origin and growth that the complete force of their present-day
work will not be fully apparent for a quarter century. What they hope
to do, the instruments they purpose to use, are given succinctly in
the pronouncement of one of our most progressive libraries OBJECTS OF
LIBRARY WORK WITH CHILDREN To make good books available to all
children of a community. To train boys and girls to use with
discrimination the adult library. To reinforce and supplement the
class work of the city schools (public, private, parochial and
"Sunday" schools). To cooperate with institutions for civic and social
betterment, such as playgrounds, settlements, missions, boys' and
girls' clubs; and with commercial institutions employing boys and
girls, such as factories, postoffice special delivery division,
telegraph and telephone agencies and department stores. And first and
last to build character and develop literary taste through the medium
of books and the influence of the children's librarian. Pursuing
these purposes, endeavoring to meet these tests. library work with
children will make for better citizenship. It will take account not
only of the children of the poor, but of the children of the
well-to-do, who may need that influence even more. In the cities,
which now overshadow our national life, there are no longer homes;
there are flats, where the boys and girls are tolerated—perhaps.
"Our problem is not the bad boy, but rather the modern city," says
Prof. Allen Hoben. "The normal boy has come honestly by his love of
adventure, his motor propensities and his gang instincts. It is when
you take this healthy biological product and set him down in the midst
of city restrictions that serious trouble ensues. For the city has
been built for economic convenience, and with little thought for human
welfare. Industrial aim is evidenced to every sense. You smell
industrialism in the far- reaching odors of the stockyards. You hear
it in the roar of the elevated hard by the windows of the poor. You
see it in a water front that people cannot use, and you touch it in
the fleck of soot that is usually on your nose. The proof of
industrial aggression ceases to be humorous, however, when it shows
itself in the small living quarters of many a city flat where boys are
supposed to find the equivalent of the old-time house. Constituted as
he is, the boy cannot but be a nuisance in the flat community. And
because the flat dweller moves frequently, he will be without those
real neighbors of long standing whose leniency formerly robbed the law
of its victims. Furthermore, he has no particular quarters of his own
where he may satisfy his sense of proprietorship and save up the
numerous things he collects with a view to using them in construction.
The flat dwellers will not permit the noise or litter incident to such
building as a boy likes; and he has little if any part in the labor
of conducting the house. He loses dignity as a helpful and necessary
member of the family, he loses that loyalty which attaches to the old
familiar places of boyhood experience and strengthens many a man
to-day, making him more kind and consistent in his living by virtue of
homestead memories." So the boy is driven to the street as his domain.
It is his playground. And here he encounters the policeman. Of 717
children arrested in one month in New York City, more than half were
arrested for playing games. Parenthetically, the fact may be quoted
that in this children's chief playground in a period of ten months 67
children were killed and 196 injured. Unerringly, these facts point to
a union of social forces—the children's library and the children's
playground, a realization of that clear comprehension which the
ancient Greeks had of the unity between the body and the mind. Quoting
Plato: "If children are trained to submit to laws in their plays' the
love of law enters their souls with the music accompanying their
games, never leaves them, and helps them in their development."
Having in thought physical recreation as a stimulus to mental
development, in combination bringing home the joyousness of life, an
ideal union of forces is being effected in some of the larger cities.
In some places, the movement has assumed but an initial stage—a bit
of tent shelter for distribution of books to children gathered at the
sand pile. In some instances co- operation has joined the work of park
breathing centers and library organizations. This has reached
completed form in the placement of branch libraries as part of the
park equipment, either quarters within a general building, or a
separate little building adjacent to or on the athletic field. But
whether in place of high or low degree; whether in rented store or
memorial building of monumental type; whether in the rooms of a school
building or a corner in a factory; whether by this method or by that,
the children's librarian employs the printed page to serve as
instrument to these ends: The building of character, making for the
best in citizenship. The enlargement of narrow lives, bringing the joy
and savour and beauty of life to the individual. The opening of
opportunity to all alike, which is the essence of democracy. And in,
the doing, an incidental and a great contribution is made to society
as a whole. For, as the story hour unfolds a new world to the listener
whose life has been bounded by a litter- covered alley and three bare
walls, or whose look into the outside world has been perhaps a roof of
tar and gravel and a yawning chasm beyond, so the development of the
imagination through the right sort of books shall make possible the
fullest development of the individual boy and girl. In many a life
there has been a supreme moment when some circumstance, some stimulus
has changed that life for good or ill. For want of that stimulus, the
dormant power of many a man has gone to waste. Half the derelicts of
humanity who are but outcasts of the night had in them the making of
good men—perhaps some of them of great men, in science or in art.
There is no waste that is greater than lost opportunity; there is no
loss so great as undiscovered resource. Speaking of imagination in
work, Mr. Hamilton Wright Mabie points out that: "So long as the uses
of the imagination in creative work are so little comprehended by the
great majority of men, it can hardly be expected that its practical
uses will be understood. There is a general if somewhat vague
recognition of the force and beauty of its achievements as illustrated
in the work of Dante, Raphael, Rembrandt and Wagner; but very few
people perceive the play of this supreme architectural and structural
faculty in the great works of engineering, or in the sublime guesses
at truth which science sometimes makes when she comes to the end of
the solid road of fact along which she has traveled. The scientist the
engineer, the constructive man in every department of work uses the
imagination quite as much as the artist; for the imagination is not a
decorator and embellisher, as so many appear to think; it is a creator
and constructor. Wherever work is done on great lines or life is lived
in field of constant fertility, the imagination is always the central
and shaping power." I would have liked in this over-lengthy, but yet
fragmentary survey of the field from the viewpoint of the library, to
say something of the mistakes which have perhaps been made, and which
may still be made unguardedly by reason of over-zeal whereby the
relationship of the work to other things may be ignored or
misunderstood; of the danger that over-strong consciousness as to
possession of high ideals may dictate too urgent use of books that
may have literary style, but do not reach the heart of the
boy—driving him to the comic supplement and to the dregs of print
for his reading hours. These, and other comments must be left for
another occasion. I would also have liked to say something of the
history of work with children in libraries, but Miss Josephine
Rathbone has told the story fully and well. In that history, when it
shall be written a quarter century hence, it will be fitting to give
full meed of honor to Samuel Sweet Greene, Edwin H. Anderson, Mrs. H.
L. Elmendorf, Miss Frances J. Olcott, Miss Linda A. Eastman and some
of the other splendid women of the profession whose presence here
precludes the mention of their names. So, too, I would have liked to
give the result, statistically, of an inquiry, which the helpful
kindness of Miss Faith E. Smith, chairman of this section, has enabled
me to make. It must suffice here to limit the statement to a brief
summary that shows less what has been accomplished than what remains
to be attempted: There are in the United States to-day approximately
1,500 public libraries containing each more than 5,000 volumes. The
number reporting children's work is 525, with a total of 676 rooms
having an aggregate seating capacity of 21,821, and an available
combined supply of 1,771,161 volumes on open shelves. The number of
libraries in which story hours are held is 152, and 304 report work
with schools. Of course, this work is pitifully meager as to many
libraries. The number of children who come more or less under the
direct influence of children's librarians is generously estimated as
1,035,195 (103 libraries, including all the large systems reporting).
There are in the United States of children from 6 to 16 years of age,
approximately thirty-three millions. Behind the work of the children's
librarians there is a fine spirit of optimism—not blind to
difficulties, but courageous, ardent and hopeful. Disregarding
ridicule, which is but a cheap substitute for wit; regardful of
criticism, which is often provocative or promotive of improvement,
inspired with the dignity of their high calling, and with a fine
vision that projects itself into the future, the librarians engaged in
the work with children willingly give thereto the finest and the best
of personality that they possess. Descriptive of their spirit, we may
aptly paraphrase the words of a great humanitarian of our own
generation: "Some there are, the builders of humanity's temples, who
are laboring to give a vast heritage to the children of all the
world. They build patiently, for they have faith in their work. "And
this is their faith—that the power of the world springs from the
common labor and strife and conquest of the countless age of human
life and struggle; that not for a few was that labor and that
struggle, but for all. And the common labor of the race for the common
good and the common joy will bring that fulness of life which sordid
greed and blighting ignorance would make impossible." And you have
the faith of the builders.
The function of library work with children as a factor in community
life is further shown in the following articles. This function
includes, in the minds of the writers, a recognition that the chief
aim in education is character building; the necessity of the careful
selection of books for all classes of children; the understanding of
the personal relationship of the child to the library; the development
of a sense of ownership on the part of the child; the possibility of
being a factor in the assimilation of the foreign element of the
population; and the realization that all are workers in a common
cause, thus bringing encouragement and inspiration.
One of the sessions of the Children's librarians section of the A. L.
A. meeting at Minnetonka in 1908 was given up to the discussion of the
place of children's library work in the community. The library point
of view was presented by Miss Moore. Annie Carroll Moore was born in
Limerick, Maine, and was graduated from Limerick Academy in 1889 and
Bradford Academy in 1891. After completing her work in the Pratt
Institute Library School in 1896 she became children's librarian in
the Pratt Free Library where she remained until 1906. She then
organized the children's department in the New York Public Library, of
which she is still supervisor. Miss Moore has lectured on library work
with children and has contributed many articles on the subject to
library periodicals. Fifteen years ago the Minneapolis public library
opened a children's room from which books were circulated. Previous to
1893 a reading room for children was opened in the Brookline (Mass.)
public library but the Minneapolis public library was the first to
recognize the importance of work with children by setting aside a room
for their use with open shelf privileges and with a special assistant
in charge of it. Since 1893 children's rooms and children's
departments have sprung up like mushrooms, all over the country, and
first in Pittsburg, then in Brooklyn, Cleveland, Philadelphia, New
York City and Queens Borough, children's rooms in branch libraries
have been organized into departments from which a third, at least, of
the entire circulation of the libraries is carried on by assistants,
either trained or in training to become children's librarians. It has
been the inevitable accompaniment of such rapid growth that the work
should suffer growing pains in the form of criticism and even
caricature at the hands of casual observers and clever writers. Those
of us who have been identified with the movement since its inception
have somehow managed to preserve our faith in a survival of the
fittest by remembering that there was a time when everything was new,
and have felt that if we could keep a firm grip on the active
principles which inspire all successful work with children, whether it
is the work of a small independent library or that of a large system
of libraries, our labor was not likely to be lost. The children, the
books and ourselves are the three elements to be combined and the
success of the combination does not depend upon time, nor place, nor
circumstance. It depends upon whether we have a clear vision of our
surroundings and are able to adapt ourselves to them, a growing
appreciation of the value of books to the persons who read them, and
the power of holding the interest and inspiring the respect and
confidence of children. If we can do all these things for a period of
years we have little need to worry about the future success of the
work. The boys and girls will look after that. In many instances they
have already begun to look after it and the best assurance for the
future maintenance of free libraries in America rests with those who,
having tried them and liked them during the most impressionable years
of their lives, believe in the value of them for others as well as for
themselves to the extent of being ready and willing to support them.
In passing from a long and intimate experience in the active work of
a children's room in an independent library to the guidance of work in
the children's rooms of a system of branch libraries, a great deal of
thought has been given to deepening the sense of responsibility for
library membership by regarding every form of daily work as a
contributory means to this end. The term "library membership" is a
survival of the old subscription library but it defines a much closer
relationship than the terms "borrower" or "user" and broadens rather
than restricts the activities of a free library by making it seem more
desirable to "belong to the library" than to "take out books." It is
the purpose of this paper to present in outline for discussion such
aspects of the work as may help to substantiate the claim of its
ambitious and perhaps ambigious title: Library Membership as a Civic
Force. 1. Our first and chief concern is with the selection of books
and right here we are confronted by so many problems that we might
profitably spend the entire week discussing them. In general, the
selection of books for a children's room which is seeking to make and
to sustain a place in the life of a community should offer sufficient
variety to meet the needs and desires of boys and girls from the
picture book age to that experience of life which is not always
measured by years nor by school grade but is tipified by a Jewish girl
under 14 years old, who, on being asked how she liked the book she had
just read, "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm," said to the librarian, "It's
not the kind of book you would enjoy yourself, is it?", and on being
answered in the affirmative, tactfully stated her own point of view:
"Well, you see it is just this way, children have their little
troubles and grown people have their great troubles. I guess it's the
great troubles that interest me." We have been quick to recognize the
claim of the foreign boy or girl who is learning our language and
studying our history but we are only just beginning to recognize the
claims of those, who, having acquired the language, are seeking in
books that which they are experiencing in their own natures. Human
nature may be the same the world over, but there is a vast difference
in its manifestations between the ages of ten and sixteen in a New
England village or town and in a foreign neighborhood of one of our
large cities. The selection of adult books in all classes, especially
in biography, travel, history and literature is too limited in the
children's rooms of many libraries and should be enlarged to the
point of making the shelves of classed books look more like those of
a library and less like those of a school room. Titles in adult
fiction should include as much of Jane Austen as girls will read and
an introduction to Barrie in "Peter Pan" and the "Little Minister."
"Jane Eyre" will supply the demand for melodrama in its best form,
while "Villette," and possibly "Shirley," may carry some girls far
enough with Charlotte Bronte to incline them to read her life by Mrs.
Gaskell. William Black's "Princess of Thule" and "Judith Shakespeare"
will find occasional readers. "Lorna Doone" will be more popular,
although there are girls who find it very tedious. There should be a
full set of Dickens in an edition attractive to boys and girls. A
complete set of the Waverly novels in a new large print edition, well
paragraphed and well illustrated, with the introductions left out and
with sufficient variation in the bindings to present an inviting
appearance on the shelves would lead, I believe, to a very much more
general reading of Scott. Conan Doyle's "Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes," "The Refugees," "The White company," "Micah Clarke" and "At
the Sign of the four" will need no urging, nor will Dumas' "Count of
Monte Cristo," "The Three guardsmen" and "The Black tulip." "Les
Miserables" and "The Mill on the Floss" will fully satisfy the demand
for "great troubles," treated in a masterly fashion. We should include
Thackeray's "Henry Esmond," "The Newcomes" and "The Virginians";
Bulwer's "Last Days of Pompeii," "Harold," "Rienzi" and "The Last of
the barons"; Charles Kingsley's "Westward Ho," "Hereward the Wake" and
"Hypatia"; Charles Reade's "Cloister and the hearth," "Peg
Woffington," "Foul play" and "Put yourself in his place"; Besant's
"All sorts and conditions of men" and "The Children of Gibeon"; Wilkie
Collins' "The Moonstone" and "The Woman in white" as many of Robert
Louis Stevenson's stories as will be read "Cranford" and "The Vicar of
Wakefield" with the Hugh Thomson illustrations; Miss Mulock's "John
Halifax," "A Noble life," "A Brave lady" and "A Life for a life";
Lever's "Charles O'Malley" and "Harry Lorrequer", Lew Wallace's "Ben
Hur" and "The Fair god"; Stockton's "Rudder Grange," "The Casting away
of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine" and "The Adventures of Captain Horn";
Mrs. Stowe's "Uncle Tom's cabin" and "Oldtown folks"; Howells' "Lady
of the Aroostook," "A Chance acquaintance," "The Quality of mercy"
and "The Rise of Silas Lapham"; Gilbert Parker's "Seats of the mighty"
and "When Valmond came to Pontiac"; Paul Leicester Ford's "The
Honorable Peter Stirling"; Richard Harding Davis' "Van gibber,"
"Gallagher," "Soldiers of fortune" and "The Bar sinister"; Rider
Haggard's "King Solomon's mines" and "Allen Quartermain"; Weir
Mitchell's "Hugh Wynne", Marion Crawford's "Marietta", "Marzio's
crucifix", and "Arethusa"; Kipling's "The Day's work", "Kim" and "Many
inventions" and, if they have been removed as juvenile titles, I think
we should restore "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" under the head
of adult fiction. Other titles will be freely and frequently used in a
children's room, which is taking into active account the interests of
its users and is seeking to establish a genuine taste for good
reading which will not be abandoned later on as artificial or forced.
In general, the principle of selection should be to provide the best
standard novels in order that the boys and girls who go out from the
children's room may know what good novels are and so much of modern
fiction as shall serve to give the collection the appearance of being
interesting and up to date without lowering the standard of that taste
for good reading which is the chief purpose in shelving such a
collection in a children's room. The presence of the books is good for
the children's librarian as well as for the children and it goes
without saying that she must be familiar with them if she is to use
them intelligently. The point to stop in the purchase of books
designed for supplementary reading is with the smallest number that
will meet the active demands which are not met by REAL books. We may
well stop with the third book in most cases of purchase of books in
sets. Does anybody know whether informational readers on the shelves
of a children's room leads to genuine interest in the subject so
presented? To quote one boy's opinion of nature readers, "The nature
you get in books is the most disinteresting subject there is." The
cheapness of these publications has led to a larger duplication of
them in libraries than seems desirable for the best interests of the
work. We need in place of them such books, with certain modifications
in treatment, as were indicated by Dr. Stanley Hall in his recent and
very suggestive address on Reading as a factor in the education of
children (Library Journal, April, 1908). Most of all do we need a
series of books which will put foreign children and their parents in
touch and in sympathy with the countries from which they came by
spirited illustrations in color of street scenes, festivals and scenes
from home life accompanied by simple direct statements and with
translations of such stories and poems as may aid in making and
keeping the impressions of their country vivid and lasting. There has
been a rising wave of production of primers and first reading books
during the past five years. Some libraries have experienced a primer
craze and it becomes exceedingly difficult to decide which ones to buy
and bow freely to duplicate them. Primers and "easy books" have a use
for children who are learning to read but too free a use of them may
be one of the influences responsible for that lack of power of
sustained attention and limitation in vocabulary which is frequently
shown by boys and girls from twelve to fourteen years old. The
edition in which a book for children appears is a matter of very much
greater importance than is realized by those who view the work from a
distance. It is not purely an aesthetic consideration. It has a very
practical bearing on whether the book will be read or not and
libraries which have the least money to spend should be most careful
to spend it for books in editions which are attractive to children.
2. The only thoroughly successful means of securing respect and good
care of library books is for libraries to maintain higher standards of
excellence in respect to intelligent repairing and binding, to discard
promptly a book which is to any extent mutilated or which is so soiled
as to make it seem unwarrantable to ask a boy to wash his hands before
touching it. The books on the circulating shelves should be the most
attractive part of a children's room. That it is possible to make and
to keep them so is not a theory but a demonstrable fact. Three years
ago a branch library was opened in one of the poor districts of a
large city. The usual problems in the discipline of individuals and of
gangs were present. Many of the new books were soiled, others were
mutilated and several were missing at inventory taking. The librarian
believed the moral lesson conveyed to children by training them to
take care of library books to be one of the first requirements of good
citizenship. She determined that no boy or girl should be able to say:
"I took it that way", in returning a soiled or mutilated book. In
order to carry out her ideas to a successful issue it has been
necessary for her to inspire her entire staff with a sense of the
value of such training and to impress upon them that careful handling
of books by library assistants is the first requisite to securing like
care on the part of the children. Every book is examined at the time
it is returned and before it is placed on the shelves it is given such
repair as it may need. By careful washing, skillful varnishing and by
the use of a preparation for removing grease spots many books are
given an extended turn of service without lowering the standards
established. Paper covers are provided as wrappers on rainy days and
on sticky days. Such care of books requires time and sustained
interest but I believe that it pays in the immediate as well as in the
future results, when grown into men and women, the boys and girls who
were taught this first lesson in citizenship will look back upon it
with feelings of respect and satisfaction. The cost to the library is
less in expenditure for books and for service. The library mentioned
affords direct evidence that loss of books by theft is very largely
controlled by such simple means provided the means are consciously and
consistently related to the larger end of regarding the property
rights of others. It is interesting to note that three-fourths of its
membership has been sustained during the three years. 3. In dealing
with large numbers of children of foreign parentage it is evident that
we need to define their relationship to the library more clearly than
we have done as yet. Quite frequently they do not distinguish between
the building and the books and refer to the latter as "taking
libraries". Now "taking a library" home is a very different matter
from playing a part in the life of a civic institution and the parents
as well as the boys and girls are quick to feel a difference which
they are not always able to express in words. Quite early in my
experience this was brought home to me by a visit from the mother of a
Jewish boy who had been coming to the children's room for about a
year. She came on a busy Saturday afternoon and after looking about
the room seated herself near the desk while the boy selected his
books. As Leopold always tested the interest of several books before
committing himself to a choice the visit lasted the entire afternoon.
When they were ready to go she explained why she had come. She had
been curious to discover for herself, she said, what it was Leopold
got from the Library that made him so much easier to get on with at
home. He had grown more thoughtful of his younger brothers and
sisters, more careful of his books and other belongings and more
considerate of his mother. "I wouldn't have him know the difference I
see," she continued, "but he told me you were always asking him to
bring me here and I made up my mind to come and see for myself and I
have. "These children are learning how to BEHAVE in PUBLIC as well as
how to choose good books and I think it comes from the feeling they
have of belonging to the Library, and being treated in the way they
like, whether they are as young as my Simon, who is six years old, or
as old as Leopold, who will be fourteen next month. If they were all
boys of Leopold's age it would be the same as it is at school; but
having the younger ones here makes it more as it is at home." Should
it not be the plan and purpose of a children's room to make every boy
and girl feel at home there from the moment of signing an application
blank? Forms of application blanks and the manner of registration
differ in nearly every library. Whatever form is used, personal
explanation is always essential and it does not seem worth while to
advocate a simplified form for the use of children. I believe there
are very decided advantages in a system of registration which requires
the children to write their own names in a book. The impression made
upon their memories is distinctly different and more binding than that
made by writing the name on a slip of paper and has frequently been of
great service in cases of discipline as the signature is headed by a
reminder of obligations: "When I write my name in this book I promise
to take good care of all the books I read in the Library and of those
I take home and to obey the rules of the Library." Such a method of
registration is not impractical, even in a large library provided the
work is carefully planned to admit of it. Recent inquiries and
investigation show very convincingly that a large proportion of
parents, both foreign born and American, and a considerable number of
educators, social workers and persons connected with libraries in
England and in this country, have exceedingly hazy ideas respecting
the work public libraries are doing for children. The issue of an
admirable illustrated hand book on "The Work of the Cleveland public
library with children" and the means used to reach them, should make
clear to the latter whatever has seemed vague or indefinite in the
work. But there are many parents in large cities and in manufacturing
towns, who cannot be induced to visit libraries and see for
themselves as Leopold's mother did, and they are frequently averse to
having their children go to a place they know nothing about, believing
that they are being drawn away from their school tasks by the mere
reading of story books. How is it possible to stimulate their
curiosity and interest to the point of making a Library seem desirable
and even necessary in the education of their children to become
citizens and wage earners? Printed explanations and rules issued by
libraries are either not read or not understood by the majority of
persons to whom they are addressed. There is something very deadening
to the person of average intelligence about most printed explanations
of library work. Pictures which bring the work before people from the
human side might be more successful and I wish to submit an outline
for a pictorial folder designed to accompany an application blank to
the home of an Italian child.
In size it is five inches long and three inches wide. On the outer
cover appears a picture of the exterior of the library, underneath the
picture the name of the library, its location and the hours it is
open. On the first page a picture of the children's room with this
inscription underneath: Boys and Girls come here to read and to study
their lessons for school. Picture Books for little children. On the
second page a picture of the adult department, showing its use and
giving the information all foreigners seem desirous to have: Men and
Women come here to read and to study. Books on the Laws and Customs of
America. Books, Papers and Magazines in Italian and other foreign
languages. Books from which to learn to read English. On the back of
the cover these simple directions:
The use of the Library is Free to anyone who comes to Read or to
Study in its rooms. If you wish to take Books home you must sign an
application blank and give the name and address of some one who knows
you. The information on the folder should be given in the language or
languages of the neighborhood in which the library is situated. This
folder was designed for a branch library in an Italian neighborhood
but a similar folder might be utilized in any community provided the
information is given in simple, direct form and the pictures show the
Library with people using it. 4. Joining the library is not all.
However carefully and impressively the connection is made we are all
conscious of those files of cards "left by borrower," which indicate
that a connection must be sustained if library membership is to prove
its claim as a civic force. There are those who regard a restriction
of circulation to one or two story books a week as a desirable means
to this end, believing that interest in reading is heightened by such
limitation. That many boys and girls read too much we all know, but I
am inclined to think that whatever restriction is made should be made
for the individual rather than laid down as a library rule. Other
libraries advocate a remission of fines, at the same time imposing a
deprivation in time of such length that it would seem to defeat the
chief end of the children's room which is to encourage the reading
habit. Children who leave their cards for six months at a time are not
likely to be very actively interested in their library. There seem to
be three viewpoints regarding fines for children. 1. Children should
be required to pay their fines as a lesson in civic righteousness.
Persons holding this view would allow the working out of fines under
some circumstances but regard the fine as a debt. 2. Any system of
fines is a wrong one, therefore all fines should be remitted and some
other punishment for negligence substituted. Persons holding this view
would deprive children of the use of the library for a stated period.
3. A fine is regarded as slightly punitive and probably the most
effective means of teaching children to respect the rights of others
in their time use of books. Persons holding this view would reduce the
fine to one cent, wherever a fine is exacted and would exercise a
great deal of latitude in dealing with individual cases, remitting or
cutting down fines whenever it seems wise to do so and imposing brief
and variable time deprivations of the use of the library rather than a
long fixed period. Whatever viewpoint is taken it will be necessary
to remind children constantly that by keeping their books overtime
other boys and girls are being deprived of the reading of them. One
of the most effective means of sustaining and promoting such a sense
of library membership as I have indicated is the extension of
reading-room work by placing on open, or on closed shelves, if
necessary, a collection of the best children's books in the best
editions obtainable, to be used as reading-room books. Children may be
so trained in the careful handling of these books as to become very
much more careful of their treatment of the book they take home and
the experiment is not a matter of large expense to the library. The
reading-room books should never be allowed to become unsightly in
appearance if they are to do their full work in the room as an added
attraction to the children and as suggestive to parents, teachers and
other visitors who may wish to purchase books as gifts. The value of
a well conducted Story hour or Reading club as a means of sustaining
the library connection and of influencing the spontaneous choice of
books by boys and girls has not been fully recognized because it has
been only partially understood. There are various methods of
conducting Story hours and Reading clubs. There are many differences
of opinion as to whether the groups should be large or small,
differentiated by age or by sex, whether the groups should be made up
entirely of children or whether an occasional adult may be admitted
without changing the relation between the story teller and the
children. Those who desire suggestion of material and specific
information as to method and practice will find much that is valuable
and practical in the publication of the Carnegie library of Pittsburg
and in the Handbook of the Cleveland public library. Those who are
seeking to place a Story hour in work already established will do
well to remember that it is a distinctly social institution and as
such is bound to be colored by the personality of its originator
whether she tells the stories herself or finds others to carry out her
ideas. Make your Story hour the simple and natural expression of the
best you have to give and do not attempt more than you can perform. I
believe the Story hour is the simplest and most effective means of
enlisting the interest of parents and of stirring that active
recollection of their own childhood which leads to sharing its
experiences with their children. Folk tales told in the language his
father and mother speak should give to the child of foreign parentage
a feeling of pride in the beautiful things of the country his parents
have left in place of the sense of shame with which he too often
regards it. The possibilities in this field are unlimited if wisely
directed. The value of exhibits depends upon the subject chosen and
the exercise of imagination, good taste and practical knowledge of
children's tastes in selecting and arranging the objects or pictures.
The subject must be one which makes an immediate appeal to the passing
visitor. There should not be too much of it and it should not be
allowed to remain too long in the room. A single striking object is
often more effective than a collection of objects. Some interpretation
of an exhibit in the form of explanation or story is needed if the
children are to become very much interested in reading about a
subject. To those who believe that Story hours, Clubs, Exhibits, and
Picture bulletins are not "legitimate library work," I would say,
suspend your judgment until you have watched or studied the visible
effects of such work in a place where it is properly related to the
other activities of the library and to the needs of the community in
which it is situated. If by the presence of an Arctic exhibit in an
Italian and Irish-American non-reading neighborhood an interest is
stimulated which results in the circulation and the reading of several
hundred books on the subject during the time of the exhibition and for
months afterward, the exhibit certainly seems legitimate. 5. Since it
is true that social conditions, racial characteristics and
individuality in temperament enter very actively into the problems of
the care of children in libraries and since it is also true that the
books children read and the care which is given to them in libraries
are frequently reflected in their conduct in relation to the School,
the Church, the Social settlement, the Playground, the Juvenile court
and to civic clubs as well as to the Home, a more enlightened
conception of the work of all these institutions is essential if the
Children's library is to play its full part in the absorption of
children of different nations into a larger national life. This need
is being recognized and partially met by lecture courses and by the
practice work of students in library training schools but listening to
lectures, reading, and regulated student practice does not take the
place of that spontaneous eagerness to see for one's self, the social
activities of a neighborhood or town which makes a library in its town
a place of living interest. Librarians, en masse, in relation to other
institutions, stand in a similar position to that of the
representative of those institutions. On both sides a firsthand
knowledge of the aims and objects and methods of work of all the
forces at work in a given community and a perception of their
interrelationship is essential if we wish to do away with the present
tendency to duplicate work which is already being carried on by more
effective agencies. How far a library should go in relating its work
to that of other institutions it is impossible to prescribe. The aim
should be to make its own work so clear to the community in which it
is placed that it will command the respect and the support of every
citizen.
The second paper at the Minnetonka sectional meeting, mentioned in
the introduction to the preceding article, was presented by Dr. Graham
Taylor, Director of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, who
believes that "equally with the schools and playgrounds, our library
centers are essential to American democracy." Dr. Taylor was born in
Schenectady, N. Y., in 1851; received the degree of A.B. from Rutgers
College in 1870, and was graduated from the Reformed Theological
Seminary, New Brunswick, N. J., in 1873. He has since been granted the
honorary degrees of D.D. and LL.D. From 1873 to 1892 he remained in
the pastorale; from 1888 to 1892 was Professor of Practical Theology
in Hartford Theological Seminary, and in 1892 became Professor of
Social Economics in the Chicago Theological Seminary. In 1894 he
became the founder and resident warden of the Chicago Commons Social
Settlement. Dr. Taylor is associate editor of the Survey. The child
is coming to be as much of a civic problem as it ever has been a
family problem. Upon the normality of its children the strength and
perpetuity of the state depend, as surely as the dependency and
delinquency of its children undermine the prowess and menace the life
of the state. The education and discipline, labor and recreation of
the child figure larger all the while in our legislation and taxes,
our thinking and literature. Democracy, machine industry, immigration
and child psychology combine to make the child a new problem to the
modern state and city, especially in America. With the problems of the
child's normality and defectiveness, discipline and delinquency, work
and play, and its assimilation into the body politic, our towns and
cities, states and nation have been forced to deal. Hitherto we have
dealt far more with the negative and repressive aspects of these
problems than with any constructive ideal, purpose and method
respecting them. We have, for instance, paid more attention to
defective children than to the prenatal antecedents and early
conditions of child life. We have been too long punishing juvenile
delinquency without trying to help the backward and wayward child. We
have let young children work without regard to the industrial
efficiency of their whole life. We are only beginning to share the
attention we have paid to the education of our children with the
equally serious problem of their recreation. We have been content
merely with their physical exercise and have been stupidly obtuse to
awaking and satisfying the pleasurable interest of the child in his
play and the organization of it. Where there have been an un-American
fear of immigration and feeling against the immigrant there has been
all too little effort put forth to assimilate the foreign elements of
our local population. But we are coming to see that to prepossess is
better than to dispossess. Prevention is found to be a surer and
cheaper solvent of our child problems than punishment. The child's own
resources for self development and self mastery prove to be greater
than all the repressive measures to obtain and maintain our control
over him. Thus our very disciplinary measures have become saner and
more effective. No way-mark of our civilization registers greater
progress than our abandonment of the criminal procedure against
children and our adoption of the paternal spirit and method of our
juvenile courts and reformatory measures. To our agencies for dealing
with defectives and delinquents we have added the kindergarten and all
the kindred principles, methods and instrumentalities of constructive
work with children. Chief among these is the use we are making of the
child's instinct for play and mental diversion as a means of building
up both the individual and the social life. Chicago has made the
discovery of the civic value of recreation centers for the play of
the people. Not since old Rome's circus maximus and the Olympic games
of Greece has any city made such provision for the recreation of its
people as is to be found in these great playfields, surrounding the
beautifully designed and well equipped field houses, which at a cost
of $12,000,000 of the tax payers' money have been built in the most
crowded districts of Chicago. The recreation centers illustrate the
civic opportunity and value of library work with children. For the
Chicago public library was quick to see and seize the advantage thus
offered to serve the city. The delivery stations and reading rooms
established in these field houses are already recognized to be the
most useful of its centers to the child life of the city. The
organized volunteer cooperation of several groups of women has added
the story hour as a regular feature of the library work at these
playgrounds, and at two public school buildings where similar stations
are to be established in cooperation with the Board of education. At
the central library building the work in the Thomas Hughes Young
people's reading room has also been successfully supplemented by the
story hour appointments in a large hall, with the same efficient
cooperation. The quick and large response given by the people to these
civic extensions of library service in every city and town where they
have been offered, demonstrates what a large field of usefulness
awaits public library enterprise and occupancy. But the experiment
has gone far enough to prove the absolute necessity of having
librarians especially trained for work with children; and to that end,
the addition of the position of children's librarian to the classified
civil service lists for which special examinations are set. Equally
with the schools and playgrounds, our library centers are essential to
American democracy. All three are to be classed together as our most
democratic and efficient agencies for training our people into their
citizenship and assimilating them into the American body politic.
Nowhere are we on a more common footing of an equality of opportunity
than in the public schools, the public playground and the public
library. The public school stands upon that bit of mother earth which
belongs equally to us all. The playground is open alike to all
comers. And the public library is not only as free and open to all as
to any of our whole people, but also confers citizenship in that
time-long, world wide democracy of the Republic of Letters. The civic
service thus democratically to be rendered by library work with
children is indispensably valuable. It may be made more and more
invaluable to any community by intelligent insight into the needs of
the people, and by the practical and prompt application of library
resources which are limited only by our capacity, enterprise and
energy to develop and apply them.
A broader idea of library work with children necessitates greater
knowledge of other agencies which work with them and a spirit of
willing cooperation on the part of the children's librarian. From her
experience in the city of Washington Miss Herbert contributed the
following article of The Library Journal. Clara Wells Herbert was born
in Stockbridge, Mass.; was a student in Vassar from 1894 to 1896;
received a special certificate from the Training School for Children's
Librarians in 1904; was children's librarian in the Brooklyn Public
Library from 1904 to 1907, and since that time has been the head of
the Children's department in the Public Library of the District of
Columbia. The children's departments of many city libraries are
carrying on a fine aggressive work and through branch children's
rooms, close work with schools, including deposits of books in
classrooms, deposits of books and story-telling in playgrounds, home
libraries and home visiting, are coming close to the children and
putting good books within their reach. Such work rests upon a large
staff and a generous appropriation. On the other hand, the small town
library has the advantage of informal relations with its people and is
a part of the various activities of the town. Between these two types
of libraries is a third. It is located in a city too large for the
helpful informal relations of the town library. It cannot, on the
other hand, carry on its own aggressive work, for it is hampered by
the smallness of its staff and the meagerness of its appropriation.
To libraries of this sort the effecting of cordial relations with
other civic institutions is of the utmost importance. Upon it depends
largely the outside work of the library and a specialized knowledge of
conditions very essential for intelligent work. Nor is the library the
only one to profit by cooperation. "I never thought of asking for help
there," said a probation officer recently when talking of her
difficulties in keeping a record of the use of the withdrawn books
given to the court by the library. Not more than we need the benefit
of the intimate personal knowledge of conditions of such workers, do
they often need the help the library stands ready and eager to give
but which they do not think to ask. The work of the children's
department should be then twofold in purpose—to reach the children
directly as far as possible, and to establish such relations with
other organizations as will render it a vital interested force in the
community, a place where people will naturally turn for help along the
line of its work. Certain practices which have been found useful in
effecting this cooperation may be suggestive, but the basis of any
satisfactory relationship is interest and the desire to help and has
its beginnings in the children's room. The children's librarian
should keep always in mind that the city is full of workers who,
strong in the belief that the hope of the future is in the children,
are doing devoted work in their behalf. Sooner or later they will
visit the children's room and the opportunity presents itself to know
their particular line of work. It is interesting to note in how many
of such cases the conversation contains something which may be applied
with advantage to the library's activities. At least, the visitor
receives the impression that the library assistant is interested in
any work done for children and, if at some future time a need presents
itself, turns to her for assistance. This interest is also shown if
the children's librarians attend meetings or conferences held in
behalf of children or from which they may gather information on home
conditions. Frequently there are courses of lectures given by charity
organizations or club meetings of sociological workers where the
problems of the city are discussed. Libraries having staff or
apprentice meetings frequently invite as speakers persons representing
some particular phase of work, and these occasions engender mutual
interest. In other cases librarians have added to their staffs former
kindergartners and charity workers that they might profit by their
special training and the knowledge of conditions gathered from their
former experiences. Much may be said of the undesirability of
distributing withdrawn books among institutions. But in libraries
where the maintenance of travelling collections is limited they afford
perhaps the only opportunity of reaching the children in orphanages,
reform schools and similar institutions. Such distributions should be
followed by visits to the institutions to talk, if possible, to the
children and to get an idea of their needs and tastes. Collections of
withdrawn books at the juvenile court are used by the children while
on probation and often after release, and by the grown people of their
families as well. In Cleveland the list of official parents and
paroled boys is furnished the library and booklists and information
about the nearest branch are sent them. In Washington the library
supplies the probation officers with application blanks. When a child
who has shown a taste for reading is to be discharged the officer on
the last visit to his home takes the application blank and secures the
parent's signature. The child brings the application to the library,
obtains cards immediately and is helped in his selection of books.
The attendance or truant officers of the schools know home conditions
better than teachers. They have a general knowledge of the city and
the peculiarities of the different sections that is most helpful in
the selection of places for home libraries or deposit stations. Their
knowledge of the home life of troublesome children will often throw
light on difficult cases of discipline. In Washington the attendance
officer issues permits under the child labor law. From this office may
be secured a list of stores and other places of employment for
children. The library should send notices to such buildings and place
at the office invitations to use the library to be distributed at the
time the permits for work are issued. The Cleveland Public Library
uses for a mailing list for publications pertaining to children's work
a card directory of social workers. This directory gives the name,
address and connection of each individual and includes board members
of set- tlement houses, associated charities, visiting nurses'
associations, pastors and their assistants, of churches conducting
club work, and others similarly engaged. In some cities this same
information may be gathered from the published directory of
philanthropic agencies and their reports. Lists such as those
published by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, "Stories to tell to
children," "Books for reading circles," "Games," or lists made
especially in connection with the activities of a settlement,
playground, etc., mailed to its club workers attract them to the
library. Rainy days when the hours drag and the children cannot be out
of doors are good times to visit summer camps and vacation homes.
There may be an opportunity to tell stories or for a talk to the
children which, when their vacation is over, they are glad to
remember. There are two special collections which it is well for the
children's department to have—one for the children and one for grown
people. It should follow Newark's notable example in putting into
form, adapted for children's use, all the information regarding the
city, its institutions, historic spots, etc. The collection of such
material informs the assistants, attracts the cooperation of those
from whom the information is sought and by acquainting the child with
the manifold features of the life of the city, helps to prepare him
for intelligent citizenship. It should collect, also, all material
relative to the children of the city. It should have reports of
settlements, institutions, summer camps and homes, day nurseries, work
with foreigners, mounted maps of the location of schools and
playgrounds, copies of the child labor law, compulsory education act,
in fact, any information obtainable about the conditions of the child
life of the city. Such material will draw interested people to the
library and thus open up opportunities for further cooperation. Such
are a few of the many ways in which the children's room may be tied to
other organizations working for children. Under the varied conditions
of different cities they develop indefinitely. Only a few could be
mentioned here. Even the work with schools and playgrounds, the
importance of which is generally established, has not been included.
As these relations grow closer and closer the library's work broadens
and deepens and the realization that all are workers in a common cause
brings encouragement and inspiration for the daily task.
The "possibility and duty," on the part of the children's library, of
being a moral force in the community, was discussed by Clara W. Hunt
in a paper presented at the Narragansett Pier Conference of the A. L.
A. in 1906. Seven years later, at the Kaaterskill Conference in 1913,
Miss Hunt again considered the influence of children's libraries as a
civic force. This later paper, representing more fully her point of
view, and embodying her later experience, is here reprinted. Clara
Whitehill Hunt was born in Utica, N. Y., in 1871. She was graduated
from the Utica Free Academy in 1889, and from the New York State
Library School in 1898. From 1893 to 1896 she was a public school
principal in Utica. She organized work with children in the
Apprentices' Library, Philadelphia, in 1898, and had charge of it in
the Newark, N. J., Free Public Library from 1898 to 1902. Since 1903
she has been Superintendent of the Children's Department of the
Brooklyn Public Library. Miss Hunt has been a lecturer and contributor
to magazines on children's literature, library work with children and
related topics, and has published a book on "What shall we read to the
children?" You are probably familiar with the story of the man who,
being asked by his host which part of the chicken he liked best
replied that "he'd never had a chance to find out; that when he was a
boy it was the fashion to give the grown people first choice, and by
the time he'd grown up the children had the pick, so he'd never
tasted anything but the drumstick." It will doubtless be looked upon
as heresy for a children's librarian to own that she has a deal of
sympathy for the down-trodden adult of the present; that there have
been moments when she has even gone so far as to say an "amen"—under
her breath—to the librarian who, after a day of vexations at the
hands of the exasperating young person represented in our current
social writings as a much-sinned-against innocent, wrathfully
exploded, "Children ought to be put in a barrel and fed through the
bung till they are twenty-one years old!" During the scant quarter
century which has seen the birth and marvelous growth of modern
library work with children, the "new education" has been putting its
stamp upon the youth of America and upon the ideas of their parents
regarding the upbringing of children. And it has come to pass that one
must be very bold to venture to brush off the dust of disuse from
certain old saws and educational truisms, such as "All play and no
work make Jack a mere toy," "No gains without pains," "We learn to do
by doing," "Train up a child in the way he should go," and so on. Our
kindergartens, our playground agitators, our juvenile courts, our
child welfare exhibits are so persistently—and rightly —showing the
wrongdoing child as the helpless victim of heredity and environment
that hasty thinkers are jumping to the conclusion that, since a child
is not to blame for his thieving tendencies, it is our duty, rather
than punish, to let him go on stealing; since it is a natural instinct
for a boy to like the sound of crashing glass and the exercise of
skill needed to hit a mark, we must not reprove him for throwing
stones at windows; because a child does not like to work, we should
let him play—play all the time. The painless methods of the new
education, which tend to make life too soft for children, and to lead
parents to believe that everything a child craves he must have, these
tendencies have had their effect upon the production and distribution
of juvenile books, and have added to the librarian's task the
necessity not only of fighting against the worst reading, but against
the third rate lest it crowd out the best. It is the importance of
this latter warfare which I wish mainly to discuss. We children's
librarians, in the past fifteen or twenty years, have had to take a
good many knocks, more or less facetious, from spectators of the
sterner sex who are worried about the "feminization of the library,"
and who declare that no woman, certainly no spinster, can possibly
understand the nature of the boy. Perhaps sometimes we are inclined to
droop apologetic heads, because we know that some women are
sentimental, that they don't all "look at things in the large," as men
invariably do. In view, however, of the record of this youthful
movement of ours, we have a right rather to swagger than to apologize.
The influence of the children's libraries upon the ideals, the
tastes, the occupations, the amusements, the language, the manners,
the home standards, the choice of careers, upon the whole life, in
fact, of thousands upon thousands of boys and girls has been beyond
all count as a civic force in America. And yet, while teachers tell us
that the opening of every new library witnesses a substitution of
wholesome books for "yellow" novels in pupils' hands; while men in
their prime remark their infrequent sight of the sensational
periodicals left on every doorstep twenty years ago; while publishers
of children's books are trying to give us a clean, safe, juvenile
literature, and while some nickel novel publishers are even admitting
a decline in the sale of their wares; in spite of these evidences of
success, a warfare is still on, though its character is changing.
Every librarian who has examined children's books for a few years
back knows exactly what to expect when she tackles the "juveniles" of
1913. There will be a generous number of books so fine in point of
matter and makeup that we shall lament having been born too late to
read these in our childhood. The information and the taste acquired by
children who have read the best juvenile publications of the past ten
years is perfectly amazing, and those extremists who decry the buying
of any books especially written for children are nearly as nonsensical
as the ones who would buy everything the child wishes. But when one
has selected with satisfaction perhaps a hundred and fifty titles, one
begins to get into the potboiler class—the written-to-order
information book which may be guaranteed to kill all future interest
in a subject treated in style so wooden and lifeless; the retold
classic in which every semblance to the spirit of the original is
lost, and the reading of which will give to the child that familiarity
which will breed contempt for the work itself; the atrocious picture
book modeled after the comic supplement and telling in hideous daubs
of color and caricature of line the tale of the practical joker who
torments animals, mocks at physical deformities, plays tricks on
parents, teases the newlywed, ridicules good manners, whose whole aim,
in short, is to provoke guffaws of laughter at the expense of
someone's hurt body or spirit. There will be collections of folk and
fairy tales, raked together without discrimination from the literature
of people among whom trickery and cunning are the most admired
qualities; there will be school stories in which the masters and
studious boys grovel at the feet of the football hero; in greater
number than the above will be the stories written in series on
thoroughly up-to-date subjects. I shall be much surprised if we do not
learn this fall that the world has been deceived in supposing that to
Amundsen and Scott belong the honor of finding the South Pole, or to
Gen. Goethals the credit of engineering the Panama Canal. If we do not
discover that some young Frank or Jack or Bill was the brains behind
these achievements, I shall wonder what has become of the ingenuity of
the plotter of the series stories—the "plotter" I say advisedly, for
it is a known fact that many of these stories are first outlined by a
writer whose name makes books sell, the outlines then being filled in
by a company of underlings who literally write to order. When we
learn, also, that an author who writes admirable stories, in which
special emphasis is laid upon fair play and a sense of honor, is at
the same time writing under another name books he is ashamed to
acknowledge, we are not surprised at the low grade of the resulting
stories. With the above extremes of good and poor there will be
quantities on the border line, books not distinctly harmful from one
standpoint—in fact, they will busily preach honesty and pluck and
refinement, etc., but they will be so lacking in imagination and
power, in the positive qualities that go to make a fine book, that
they cannot be called wholly harmless, since that which crowds out a
better thing is harmful, at least to the extent that it usurps the
room of the good. These books we will be urged to buy in large
duplicate, and when we, holding to the ideal of the library as an
educational force, refuse to supply this intellectual pap, well-to-do
parents may be counted upon to present the same in quantities
sufficient to weaken the mental digestion of their offspring beyond
cure by teachers the most gifted. There are two principal
arguments—so-called—hurled at every librarian who tries to maintain
a high standard of book selection. One is the "I read them when I was
a child and they did me no harm" claim; the other, based upon the
doggedly clung- to notion that our ideal of manhood is a grown-up
Fauntleroy, infers that every book rejected was offensive to the
children's librarian because of qualities dangerously likely to
encourage the boy in a taste for bloodshed and dirty hands. Now, in
this day when parents are frantically protecting their children from
the deadly house fly, the mosquito, the common drinking cup and towel;
when milk must be sterilized and water boiled and adenoids removed;
when the young father solemnly bows to the dictum that he mustn't rock
nor trot his own baby— isn't it really matter for the joke column to
hear the "did me no harm" idea advanced as an argument? And yet it is
so offered by the same individual who, though he has survived a
boyhood of mosquito bites and school drinking cups, refuses to allow
his child to risk what he now knows to be a possible carrier of
disease. The "what was good enough for me is good enough for my
children" idea, if soberly treated as an argument in other matters of
life, would mean death to all progress, and it is no more to be
treated seriously as a reason for buying poor juvenile books than a
contention for the fetich doctor versus the modern surgeon, or for
the return to the foot messenger in place of electrical communication.
It would be tactless, if not positively dangerous, if we children's
librarians openly expressed our views when certain people point
boastfully to themselves as shining products of mediocre story book
childhoods. So I would hastily suppress this thought, and instead
remind these people that, as a vigorous child is immune from disease
germs which attack a delicate one, so unquestionably have thousands of
mental and moral weaklings been retarded from their best development
by books that left no mark on healthy children. In spite of the
probability that there are to-day alive many able-bodied men who cut
their first teeth on pickles and pork chops, we do not question
society's duty to disseminate proper ideas on the care and feeding of
children. Isn't it about time that we nailed down the lid of the
coffin on the "did me no harm" argument and buried the same in the
depths of the sea? Another notion that dies hard is one assuming
that, since the children's librarian is a woman, prone to turn white
about the gills at the sight of blood—or a mouse—she can not
possibly enter into the feelings of the ancestral barbarian surviving
in the young human breast, but must try to hasten the child's
development to twentieth century civilization by eliminating the
elemental and savage from his story books. If those who grow hoarse
shouting the above would take the trouble to examine the lists of an
up-to-date library they might blush for their shallowness, that they
have been basing their opinions on their memory of library lists at
least twenty-five years old. We do not believe that womanly women and
manly men are most successfully made by way of silly, shoddy,
sorry-for-themselves girlhoods, or lying, swaggering, loafing
boyhoods; and it is the empty, the vulgar, the cheap, smart,
trust-to-luck story, rather than the gory one, that we dislike. I am
coming to the statement of what I believe to be the problem most
demanding our study today. It is, briefly, the problem of the mediocre
book, its enormous and ever-increasing volume. More fully stated it is
the problem of the negatively as the enemy of the positively good; of
the cultivation of brain laziness by "thoughts-made-easy" reading. It
is a republic's, a public school problem, viz.: How is it possible to
raise to a higher average the lowest, without reducing to a dead level
of mediocrity the citizens of superior possibilities? Our relation to
publisher and parent, to the library's adult open shelves of current
fiction enter into the problem. The children's over-reading, and their
reluctance to "graduate" from juvenile books, these and many other
perplexing questions grow out of the main one. I said awhile ago that
the new education has had a tendency to make life too soft for
children, and to give to their parents the belief that natural
instincts alone are safe guides to follow in rearing a child. I hope I
shall not seem to be a good old times croaker, sighing for the days
when school gardens and folk dancing and glee clubs and dramatization
of lessons and beautiful text-books and fascinating handicraft and a
hundred other delightful things were undreamed-of ways of making
pleasant the paths of learning. Heaven forbid that I should join the
ranks of those who carp at a body of citizens who, at an average wage
in America less than that of the coal miner and the factory worker,
have produced in their schools results little short of the
miraculous. To visit, as I have, classrooms of children born in slums
across the sea, transplanted to tenements in New York, and to see what
our public school teachers are making of these children—the backward,
the underfed, the "incorrigible," the blind, the anaemic—well, all I
can say is, I do not recommend these visits to Americans of the stripe
of that boastful citizen who, being shown the crater of Vesuvius with
a "There, you haven't anything like that in America!" disdainfully
replied, "Naw, but we've got Niagara, and that'd put the whole blame
thing out!" For myself I never feel quite so disposed to brag of my
Americanism as when I visit some of our New York schools. And yet,
watching the bored shrug of the bright, well-born high school child
when one suggests that "The prince and the pauper" is quite as
interesting a story as the seventh volume of her latest series, a
librarian has some feelings about the lines-of- least-resistance
method of educating our youth, which she is glad to find voiced by
some of our ablest thinkers. Here is what J. P. Munroe says: "Many of
the new methods . . . methods of gentle cooing toward the child's
inclinations, of timidly placing a chair for him before a disordered
banquet of heterogeneous studies, may produce ladylike persons, but
they will not produce men. And when these modern methods go as far as
to compel the teacher to divide this intellectual cake and pudding
into convenient morsels and to spoon-feed them to the child, partly in
obedience to his schoolboy cravings, partly in conformity to a
pedagogical psychology, then the result is sure to be mental and moral
dyspepsia in a race of milk-sops." How aptly "spoon-fed pudding"
characterizes whole cartloads of our current "juveniles"! Listen to
President Wilson's opinion: "To be carried along by somebody's
suggestions from the time you begin until the time when you are thrust
groping and helpless into the world, is the very negation of
education. By the nursing process, by the coddling process you are
sapping a race; and only loss can possibly result except upon the part
of individuals here and there who are so intrinsically strong that you
cannot spoil them." Hugo Munsterberg is a keen observer of the
product of American schools, and contrasting their methods with those
of his boyhood he says: "My school work was not adjusted to botany at
nine years because I played with an herbarium, and at twelve to
physics because I indulged in noises with home-made electric bells,
and at fifteen to Arabic, an elective which I miss still in several
high schools, even in Brookline and Roxbury. The more my friends and
I wandered afield with our little superficial interests and talents
and passions, the more was the straight-forward earnestness of the
school our blessing; and all that beautified and enriched our youth,
and gave to it freshness and liveliness, would have turned out to be
our ruin, if our elders had taken it seriously, and had formed a
life's program out of petty caprices and boyish inclinations." And
Prof. Munsterberg thrusts his finger into what I believe to be the
weakest joint in our educational armor when he says, "As there is
indeed a difference whether I ask what may best suit the taste and
liking of Peter, the darling, or whether I ask what Peter, the man,
will need for the battle of life in which nobody asks what he likes,
but where the question is how he is liked, and how he suits the taste
of his neighbors." What would become of our civilization if we were to
follow merely the instincts and natural desires? Yet is there not in
America a tremendous tendency to the notion, that except in matters of
physical welfare, the child's lead is to be followed to extreme
limits? Don't we librarians feel it in the pressure brought to bear
upon us by those who fail to find certain stories, wanted by the
children, on our shelves? "Why, that's a good book," the parent will
say, "The hero is honest and kind, the book won't hurt him any—in
fact it will give the child some good ideas." "Ideas." Yes, perhaps.
There is another educator I should like to quote, J. H. Baker in his
"Education and life." "Whatever you would wish the child to do and
become, that let him practice. We learn to do, not by knowing, but by
knowing and then doing. Ethical teaching, tales of heroic deeds,
soul-stirring fiction that awakens sympathetic emotions may accomplish
but little unless in the child's early life the ideas and feelings
find expression in action and so become a part of the child's power
and tendency. . ." Now we believe with G. Stanley Hall that, "The
chief enemy of active virtue in the world is not vice but laziness,
languor and apathy of will;" that "mind work is infinitely harder than
physical toil;" that (as another says) "all that does not rouse, does
not set him to work, rusts and taints him the disease of laziness
destroys the whole man." And when children of good heritage, good
homes, sound bodies, bright minds, spend hours every week curled up
among cushions, allowing a stream of cambric-tea literature gently to
trickle over their brain surfaces, we know that though the heroes and
heroines of these stories be represented as prodigies of industry and
vigor, our young swallowers of the same are being reduced to a pulp of
brain and will laziness that will not only make them incapable of
struggling with a page of Quentin Durward, for example, but will
affect their moral stamina, since fighting fiber is the price of
virtue. Ours is, as I have said, a public education, a republic's
problem. To quote President Wilson again: "Our present plans for
teaching everybody involve certain unpleasant things quite
inevitably. It is obvious that you cannot have universal education
without restricting your teaching to such things as can be universally
understood. It is plain that you cannot impart 'university methods' to
thousands, or create 'investigators' by the score, unless you confine
your university education to matters which dull men can investigate,
your laboratory training to tasks which mere plodding diligence and
submissive patience can compass. Yet, if you do so limit and constrain
what you teach, you thrust taste and insight and delicacy of
perception out of the schools, exalt the obvious and merely useful
things above the things which are only imaginatively or spiritually
conceived, make education an affair of tasting and handling and
smelling, and so create Philistia, that country in which they speak
of 'mere literature.' " In our zeal to serve the little alien,
descendant of generations of poverty and ignorance, let us not lose
sight of the importance to our country of the child more fortunate in
birth and brains. So strong is my feeling on the value of leaders that
I hold we should give at least as much study to the training of the
accelerate child as we give to that of the defective. Though I boast
the land of Abraham Lincoln and Booker Washington I do not give up one
iota of my belief that the child who is born into a happy environment,
of parents strong in body and mind, holds the best possibilities of
making a valuable citizen; and so I am concerned that this child be
not spoiled in the making by a training or lack of training that fails
to recognize his possibilities. It is encouraging to kind growing
attention in the "Proceedings" of the N. E. A. and other educational
bodies to the problem of the bright child who has suffered by the
lock-step system which has molded all into conformity with the
capabilities of the average child. The librarian's difficulty is
perhaps greater than that of the teacher, because open shelves and
freedom of choice are so essential a part of our program. We must
provide easy reading for thousands of children. Milk and water stories
may have an actual value to children whose unfavorable heritage and
environment have retarded their mental development. But the deplorable
thing is to see young people, mercifully saved from the above
handicaps, making a bee line for the current diluted literature for
grown-ups, (as accessible as Scott on our open shelves) and to
realize that this taste, which is getting a life set, is the
inevitable outcome of the habit of reading mediocre juveniles. We
must not rail at publishers for trying to meet the demands of
purchasers. Our job is to influence that demand far more than we have
done as yet. Large book jobbers tell us that millions and millions of
poor juveniles are sold in America to thousands of the sort we
librarians recommend. I have seen purchase lists of boys' club
directors and Sunday School library committees calling for just the
weak and empty stuff we would destroy. I have unwittingly been an
eavesdropper at Christmas book counters and have heard the orders
given by parents and the suggestions made by clerks. And I feel that
the public library has but skirmished along the outposts while the
great field of influencing the reading of American children remains
unconquered. Until we affect production to the extent that the book
stores circulate as good books as the best libraries we cannot be too
complacent about our position as a force in citizen making. An
"impossible" ideal, of course, but far from intimidating, the
largeness of the task makes us all the more determined. This paper
attempts no suggestion of new methods of attacking the problem. It is
rather a restatement of an old perplexity. I harp once more on a worn
theme because I think that unless we frequently lift our eyes from the
day's absorbing duties for a look over the whole field, and unless we
once and again make searching inventory of our convictions, our
purposes, our methods, our attainments, we are in danger of letting
ourselves slip along the groove of the taken-for-granted and our work
loses in power as we allow ourselves to become leaners instead of
leaders. May we not, as if it were a new idea, rouse to the
seriousness of the mediocre habit indulged in by young people capable
of better things? Should not our work with children reach out more to
work with adults, to those who buy and sell and make books for the
young? Is it not time for the successful teller of stories to children
to use her gifts in audiences of grown people, persuading these
molders of the children's future of the reasonableness of our
objection to the third rate since it is the enemy of the best? May it
not be politic, at least, for the librarian to descend from her
disdainful height and make friends with "the trade," with bookseller
and publisher who, after all, have as good a right to their bread and
butter as the librarian paid out of the city's taxes? And then—is it
not possible that we might be better librarians if we refused to be
librarians every hour in the day and half the night as well? What if
we were to have the courage to refuse to indulge in nervous
breakdowns, because we deliberately plan to play, and to eat, and to
sleep, to keep serene and sane and human, believing that God in His
Heaven gives His children a world of beauty to enjoy as well as a work
to do with zeal. If we lived a little longer and not quite so wide,
the gain to our chosen work in calm nerves and breadth of interest and
sympathy would even up for dropping work on schedule time for a
symphony concert or a country walk or a visit with a friend—might
even justify saving the cost of several A. L. A. conferences toward a
trip to Italy! This hurling at librarians advice to play more and
work less reminds me of a story told by a southern friend. Years ago,
in a sleepy little Virginia village, there lived two characters
familiar to the townspeople, whose greatest daily excitement was a
stroll down to the railroad station to watch the noon express rush
through to distant southern cities. One of these personages was the
station keeper, of dry humor and sententious habit, whom we will call
Hen Waters; the other was the station goat, named, of course, Billy.
Year after year had Billy peacefully cropped the grass along the
railroad tracks, turning an indifferent ear to the roar of the daily
express, when suddenly one day the notion seemed to strike his goatish
mind that this racket had been quietly endured long enough. With the
warning whistle of the approaching engine, Billy, lowering his head,
darted furiously up the track, intending to butt the offending
thunderer into Kingdom Come. When, a few seconds later, the amazed
spectators were gazing after the diminishing train, Hen Waters,
addressing the spot where the redoubtable goat had last been seen,
drawled out: "Billy, I admire your pluck—but darn your discretion!"
The parallel between the the ambitions and the futility of the goat,
and the present speaker's late advice is so obvious that only the
illogicalness of woman can account for my cherishing a hope that I may
be spared the fate of the indiscreet Billy.
This second paper on Values in library work with children, was
presented at the Kaaterskill Conference of the A. L. A. in 1913 by
Caroline Burnite. In it are discussed "departmental organization as it
benefits the reading child, and the principles and policies which have
developed through departmental unity." For inclusion in this volume it
has been somewhat condensed by the author. Caroline Burnite was born
in Caroline County, Maryland, in 1875; was graduated from the Easton,
Maryland, High School in 1892 and from Pratt Institute Library School
in 1894. From 1895 to 1901 she was librarian of the Tome Institute in
Port Deposit, Maryland. She was an assistant in the Carnegie Library
of Pittsburgh from 1902 to 1904, when she became Director of
Children's Work in the Cleveland Public Library, the position she now
holds. Miss Burnite is also an instructor in the Western Reserve
Library School. To elucidate principles of value, I shall use, by way
of illustration, the experience and structure of a children's
department where the problem of children's reading and the means of
bringing books to them has been intensively studied for some nine
years.... Probably about six out of ten of the children of that city
read library books in their homes during the year, and each child
reads about twenty books on the average. In all, fifty- four thousand
children read a million books, which reach them through forty-three
librarians assigned for special work with these children, through
three hundred teachers and about one hundred volunteers. Now, we know
that six out of ten children is not an ideal proportion of the total
number. We know also, inversely, that the volume of work entailed in
serving fifty-four thousand children may endanger the quality of book
service given to each child. Both of these conditions show that the
experience of each reading child should make its own peculiar
contribution to the general problem of children's reading and that the
experience of large numbers of reading children should be brought to
bear upon the problem of the individual. To accomplish this, work with
the children was given departmental organization. My concern in this
paper is with departmental organization as it benefits the reading
child, and with the principles and policies which have been developed
through departmental unity. We think ordinarily that one who loves
books has three general hallmarks: his reading is fairly continuous,
there is a permanency of book interest, and this interest is
maintained on a plane of merit. But in the child's contact with the
library there are many evidences of modifications of normal book
interests. Instead of continuity of reading, the children's rooms are
overcrowded in winter and have far less use in summer; instead of
permanency of book interest extending over the difficult intermediate
period, large numbers of those children who leave school before they
reach high school have little or no library contact during their first
working years, and without doubt the interesting experiences with
working children, which librarians are prone to emphasize, give us an
impression that a larger number are readers than careful investigation
would show. And as for the quality of reading of many children who are
at work we cannot maintain that it is always on a high plane. Such
results are largely due to environmental influences. Deprived for the
greater part of the year at least, of opportunity for normal youthful
activities, the child's entire physical and mental schedule is thrown
out of balance and he turns to reading, a recreation at his service at
any time, only when there is little opportunity to follow other
interests. Since the strain upon the ear and the eye, and back and
brain is so great in the shop, the tendency in the first working years
is too often toward recreations in which the book has no place. The
power of the nickel library over the younger boy and girl can be
broken by the presence of the public library, but the quality of the
reading of the intermediate is often due to the popularity of the
mediocre modern novel, with its present-day social interests. For
these and other reasons, the whole judgment of the results of library
work with children can not rest upon such general tests of normal book
interests as we have stated. Rather such variations from the normal
are themselves conditions which influence the structure of the work
and especially the principles of book presentation. Children with
pressing social needs must have books with social values to meet those
needs; chiefest of these are right social contacts, true social
perspective, traditions of family and race, loveliness of nature,
companionship of living things, right group association and group
interests. Starting with the principle that books should construct a
larger social ideal for the greater number of children instead of
confirming their present one, it was first necessary to find out from
actual work with children, what their reactions to books with various
interests are. Such knowledge was supplemented by the recorded
testimony of men and women of their indebtedness to children's books,
especially such as "Tom Brown" and "Little Women," and especially of
their youthful appreciation of the relationships and interdependence
of the characters. After we were able to evaluate books and to have
some definite idea of which were good and which poor, the question
arose: Should we have books with manifestly weak values in the library
as a concession to some children who might not read the better books,
or by having them do we harm most those very children to whom we have
conceded them? The gradual solution of this problem seems to me to be
one of the greatest services which a library can render its children.
A safe answer seems to be: No books weak in social ideals should be
furnished, provided we do not lose reading children by their
elimination. If such books are the best a child will read, and we take
them away, causing him to lose interest in reading, he is apt to come
under even less favorable influences. Another problem which arose was
that the cumulative experience of librarians working with children
showed that many books, weak in social viewpoint, lead only to others
of their kind, and that such books are the ones read largely by those
children which are most occasional and spasmodic in their reading.
Here was a determining point in the establishment of standards of
reading, for it brought us face to face with the question: Shall we
consider this situation our fault since we supply such books to
children who need something better vastly more than do children in
happier circumstances, or shall we merely justify our selection by
maintaining that those children will under no circumstances read a
higher grade of books? However, observation showed that other books
were read also by children with social limitations; books which,
although apparently no better, lead to a better type of reading, and
this prompted the policy of the removal of books which had little
apparent influence in developing a good reading taste. This was done,
however, with the definite intention that an increasingly better
standard of reading must mean that no children cease using the
library, an end only made possible by a knowledge of the value of the
individual book to the individual child. Now let us see what changes
have been evolved in the book collections in the department under
consideration: At first the proportion of books of the doubtful class
to those which were standard was considered, and it was seen that this
preponderance of the doubtful class should be decreased in order that
a child's chances for eventually reading the best might be improved.
It is obvious that the reading for the younger children should be the
more carefully safeguarded, and this was the first point of attack. As
a result, two types of books were eliminated: 1. All series for young
children, such as Dotty Dimples and Little Colonels. 2. Books for
young children dealing with animal life which have neither humane nor
scientific value, such as Pierson and Wesselhoeft. Also stories of
child life for young children were restricted to those which were more
natural and possible, and on the other hand, stories read by older
girls in which adults were made the beneficiaries of a surprisingly
wise child hero, such as the Plympton books, were eliminated. The
successful elimination of these books, together with the study of the
children's reading as a whole, suggested later, that other books could
be eliminated or restricted without loss of readers. In the course of
time, the following results were accomplished: 1. The restriction of
the stories of the successful poor boy to those within the range of
possibility, as are the Otis books, largely. 2. The elimination of
stories in which the child character is not within a normal sphere;
for instance, the child novel, such as Mrs. Jamison's stories. 3.
Lessening the number of titles by authors who are undeservedly
popular, such as restricting the use of Tomlinson to one series only.
4. The restriction of any old and recognized series to its original
number of titles, such as the Pepper series. The disapproval of all
new books obviously the first in a series. 5. The elimination of
travel, trivial in treatment and in series form, such as the Little
Cousins. 6. The elimination of the modern fairy tale, except as it has
vitality and individual charm, as have those of George McDonald. 7.
The elimination of interpreted folk lore, such as many of the modern
kindergarten versions. 8. The elimination of word books for little
children, and the basing of their reading upon their inherent love for
folk lore and verse. Without analyzing the weakness of all these
types, I wish to say a word about the series. This must be judged not
only by content, but by the fact that in the use of such a form of
literature the tendency of the child toward independence of book
judgment and book selection is lessened and the way paved for a weak
form of adult literature. The later policies developed regarding book
selection have been these: 1. Recognizing "blind alleys" in
children's fiction, such as the boarding school story and the covert
love story, and buying no new titles of those types. 2. Lessening the
number of titles of miscellaneous collections of folk-lore in which
there are objectionable individual tales, for instance, buying only
the Blue, Green and Yellow fairy books. 3. The elimination, or use in
small numbers, of a type of history and biography which is not
scholarly, or even serious in treatment, such as the Pratt histories.
4. The elimination of such periodical literature for young children,
as the Children's Magazine and Little Folks, since their reading can
be varied more wholesomely without it. Reports of reading sequences
from each children's room have furnished the basis for further study
of children's reading. These are discussed and compared by the
workers, a working outline of reading sequences made and reported back
to each room, to be used, amplified and reported on again. While
those books which are no longer used may have been at one time
necessary to hold a child from reading something poorer, we did not
lose children through raising the standard, and the duplication of
doubtful books in the children's room is less heavy now than it was a
few years ago. This is shown by the fact that there are more than
twice as many children who are reading, and almost three times as many
books being read as there were nine years ago, while the number of
children of the city has increased but 72 per cent. Furthermore, the
proportion of children of environmental limitations has by no means
diminished, and the foreign population is much the same—more than 74
per cent. Of course, the elimination of some books was accomplished
because there were better books on the subject, but the general result
was largely brought about because in the establishment of these
higher standards we did not exceed the ideals and standards of those
who were working with the children. The standards which they brought
to the work, and which they deduced themselves from their experience,
were crystalized through Round Table discussion, where each worker
measured her results by those of the others and thereby recognized the
need of constant, but careful experimentation. Experience has proved
that a children's department can not reach standards of reading which
in the judgment of librarians working with the children are beyond the
possibility of attainment, for with them rests entirely the delicate
task of the adjustment of the book to the child. A staff of children's
librarians of good academic education, the best library training, a
true vision of the social principles; a broad knowledge of children's
literature is the greatest asset for any library doing children's
work. But it is true, inversely, that in raising the standards of the
children the standards of the workers were raised. By this I mean
that with definite methods of book presentation in use, the worker
saw farther into the mental and material life of the child and
understood his social instincts better. This has been evidenced in the
larger duplication of the better books. Among the methods are those
which recognize group interest and group association as a social need
of childhood. Through unifying and intensifying the thoughts and
sympathies of the children by giving them great and universal thought
in the story hour, the mediocre is often bridged and both the child
and the worker reaches a higher plane of experience. Also by giving
children a group interest, not only children recognize that books may
be cornerstones for social intercourse and that there is connection
between social conduct as expressed in books and their own social
obligations, but what is also important, the worker learns that when
children are at the age of group activity and expression they can
often be more permanently influenced as a group than as individuals.
This prompted the organization of clubs for older children. Through
the recognition of the principle that there are methods of book appeal
for use with individual children and other methods for groups of
children, it was shown that the organization of the work as a whole
must be such that the chief methods of presentation of literature
could be fully developed. It was seen that, far less with a group of
children than with the individual child, could we afford to give a
false experience or an unfruitful interest, and that material for
group presentation, methods of group presentation and the social
elements which are evinced in groups of children should receive an
amount of attention and study which would lead to the surest and
soundest results. This could be fully accomplished only by recognizing
such methods as distinct functions of the department. In other words,
that there should not only be divisions of work with children
according to problems of book distribution, such as by schools and
home libraries, but there must be of necessity, divisions by problems
of reading. Whereas, in a smaller department all divisions would
center in the head, the volume of work in a large library renders
necessary the appointment of an instructor in story-telling and a
supervisor of reading clubs, which results in a higher specialization
and a greater impetus for these phases of work than one person can
accomplish. Here we have a concrete instance of the benefit that a
large volume of work may confer upon the individual child. With the
attainment of better reading results and higher standards for the
workers, it is obvious that the reading experiences of the children
and the standards of the workers must be conserved, and that the
organization should protect the children, as far as possible, from the
disadvantage of change of workers. Considerable study has been given
to this, and yearly written reports on the reading of children in each
children's room are made, in which variations from accepted standards
of the children's reading in that library, with individual instances,
are usually discussed. However, the children's librarian is entirely
free to report the subject from whatever angle it has impressed her
most. Also a written report is made of the story hour, the program,
general and special results, and intensity of group interest in
certain types of stories. This report is supplementary to a weekly
report in prescribed form, of the stories told, sources used and
results. All programs used with clubs are reported and semi-annual
report made of the club work as a whole. By discussion and reports
back to individual centers, these become bases for a wider vision of
work and a wiser direction of energy with less experimentation. The
connection between work with children and the problem of the reading
of intermediates, referred to in the beginning, should not be
dismissed in a paragraph. However, it is only possible to give a short
statement of it. Recognizing that the reading of adult books should
begin in the children's room, a serious study of adult books possible
for children's reading was made by the children's librarians, the
reports discussed and the books added to the department as the result.
A second report of adult titles which children and intermediates might
and do read was called for recently and from that a tentative list had
been furnished to both adult and children's workers for further study.
The increasing number of workers in the children's department who
have had general training, and in the adult work who have had special
training for work with children make such reports of much value. In
order to follow the standards of children's work, there is one
principle which is obvious, namely, a book disapproved as below grade
for juveniles should not be accepted for general intermediate work.
This is especially true of books of adventure which a boy of any age
between 12 and 18 would read. In conclusion, the chief means of
determining values in library work with children are these: An
intensive study of the reading of children in relation to its social
and informational worth to them; the right basis of education and
training for such study, on the part of the workers; the direction of
such study in a way that brings about a higher and more practical
standard on the part of the worker; the conservation of her
experience. These are the great services which the library may render
children and they can be most fully accomplished, I believe, through
departmental organization.
The section devoted to administration and methods records the
"expansion of the library ideal" in multiplying the sources from
which books may be borrowed; pictures the opportunities of the small
library; emphasizes the importance of personal work, since the "child
must be known as well as the book"; explains the library league as a
means of encouraging the care of books and as an advertising medium;
gives a thorough discussion of the use of the picture bulletin, and
suggests systematic work with mothers as an important and resultful
method. Four articles on reference work and instruction in library use
bring out the importance of careful cataloguing, of thorough
knowledge of resources, and of practical plans to enable the children
to help themselves. Three articles on discipline present this
sometimes difficult problem from varying viewpoints. It is said to
resolve itself "into the exercise of great tact, firmness, and, again,
gentleness." Again, "many of the problems of discipline in a
children's room would cease to be problems if the material conditions
of the room itself were ideal." The Wisconsin report is of special
value because it represents the experiences of small as well as of
large libraries. It lays stress on some of the points brought out by
Miss Dousman, who says: "In our zeal to control the child, some have
lost sight of the fact that it is quite as important to teach the
child to control himself; that if he is to become a good citizen, he
cannot learn too early to respect the rights of others."
Some of the principles of library work with children, and the
qualifications of a children's librarian were discussed by Miss
Eastman in the following paper read at the fourth annual meeting of
the Ohio Library Association held in Dayton in 1898. Linda Anne
Eastman was born in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1867; was educated in the
Cleveland Public Schools, and taught in the public schools of West
Cleveland and Cleveland from 1885 to 1892, when she became an
assistant in the Cleveland Public Library. In 1895-1896 she was
assistant librarian and cataloguer in the Dayton, Ohio, Public
Library, and in 1896 became vice-librarian of the Cleveland Public
Library, where she has since remained. Since 1904 she has been an
instructor in the Library School of Western Reserve University. She
was a charter member of the Ohio Library Association, and its
president in 1903-1904, Miss Eastman has made frequent contributions
to library periodicals. In the planning of a new library building, or
the remodeling of an old one, there is no department to which I should
give more thought in the working out of the details than in the
children's department, in order to best adapt the arrangement to its
use. Its location in the building is the first matter for
consideration. It should be easy of access from the main entrance,
or, better still, have an entrance of its own directly from the
outside, in order that the noise of the children may not become a
disturbing element in the corridors and in other parts of the library.
It would seem desirable, also, for many reasons, to have the
children's department not too far removed from the main circulating
department. The children's department in a large library should
contain at least two large rooms, one for the reading and reference
room, the other for the circulating books. The rooms should be light,
bright and cheery, as daintily artistic and as immaculately clean as
it is possible to make and keep them. Wall cases seem best for the
shelving of the books, low enough for the children to reach the
shelves easily. These low cases also allow wall space above for
pictures, and plenty of this is desirable. A children's room cannot
have too many pictures,[1] nor any which are too fine for it; choose
for it pictures which are fine, and pictures which "tell a story."
Provide, also, plenty of space for bulletins, for the picture
bulletins have become an important factor in the direction of the
children's reading. One enthusiastic children's librarian wrote me
recently that her new "burlap walls, admitting any number of
thumb-tacks" were the delight of her heart. There should be reading
tables and rubber- tipped chairs, low ones for the little children;
and wherever there is space for them, the long, low seats, in which
children delight to snuggle down so comfortably. [1] If this paper
were now open to revision, the writer would omit "cannot have too many
pictures." The reaction against bare, bleak walls may not make it
necessary to warn against over-decoration, but its undesirability
should he recognized.—L. A. E. As to the arrangement of the books, I
should divide them into three distinct classes for children of
different ages: (1) The picture books for the very little ones,
arranged alphabetically. (2) The books for children from seven to ten
or twelve years of age. While these books should be classified for the
cataloging, I should place them on the shelves in one simple
alphabetical list by authors, mixing the fiction, history, travel,
poetry, etc., just as they might happen to come in this arrangement. I
believe this would lead the children to a more varied choice in their
reading, and that they would thus read and enjoy biography, history,
natural science, etc., before they learned to distinguish them from
stories, whereas by the classified arrangement they would choose their
reading much more often from the one class only. (3) The books for
boys and girls from ten or twelve years of age to fifteen or sixteen.
These should be arranged on the shelves regularly according to class
number, in order that the children may become acquainted with the
classification and arrangement, learn to select their books
intelligently, and be prepared to graduate from here into the adult
library. Where it is possible to duplicate the simple and more common
reference books in the juvenile department, these should form a
fourth class. Then there should be all of the good juvenile
periodicals, with some of the best illustrated papers, such as
Harper's weekly, for the reading room. With many libraries a
children's department on such a scale is an impossibility; but if you
cannot give two rooms to the children give them one, and if you cannot
do that, at least give them a corner and a table which they can feel
belongs to them; and if you cannot give them a special assistant, set
apart an hour or two each day when the children shall receive the
first consideration—establish this as a custom, and both adults and
children will be better served. Whatever one's specialty in library
work may be, however far removed from the work with the children, it
is well to understand something of the principles which underlie this
foundation work with the children. It is only recently that these
principles have begun to shape themselves with any definiteness; the
children's department, as a fully equipped miniature library, and the
children's librarian, as a specialist bringing natural fitness and
special preparation to her work, are essentially the product of today;
but they have come to stay, and they open to the child-lover, and the
educator who works better outside than inside of the schoolroom
limits, a field enticing indeed, and promising rich results. It is to
the pioneers in this field, the earnest young women who are now doing
careful experimental work and giving serious study to the problems
that arise—it is to them that the children's departments of the
future will be most indebted for perfected methods. The library must
supplement the influence of the schools, of the home, and of the
church; with some children it must even take the place of these other
influences, and on its own account it must be a source of pleasure and
an intellectual stimulus. If it is to accomplish all or any great part
of this, not only for one, but for thousands of children, what serious
thought and labor must go to its accomplishment! The children's
librarian stands very close to the mother and the teacher in the power
she can wield over the lives of the little ones. No one who lacks
either the ability or desire to put herself into sympathetic touch
with child-life should ever be assigned to work in the juvenile
department, and the assistant who avowedly dislikes children, or who
"has no patience with them," will work disastrous results if allowed
to serve these little ones with an unwilling spirit —she should be
relegated to some department of the library to which the sunshine of
childhood can never penetrate, and kept there. I would name the
following requisites for the successful accomplishment of the juvenile
work: (1) Love for children. This being given, the way is open for
intimate knowledge and understanding of them, which are likewise
essential. (2) Knowledge of children's books. This is imperative if
one is to give the right book to a child at the right time.
Familiarity with the titles and with the outsides of the books is not
enough, nor is it sufficient to know that a certain book is
recommended in all of the best lists of children's books. A child will
often refuse to take what has been recommended to him as a good book,
when, if he be told some graphic incident in it, or have some
interesting bit pointed out or read to him, he will bear it off as
prize; with it, too, he will carry away an added respect for, and
sense of comradeship with, the assistant, who "knows a good thing when
she sees it," and he will come to her for advice and consultation
about his books the next time and the next, and so long thereafter as
she can hold his confidence. Carefully prepared lists are most
valuable in directing your attention to the best books, but after your
notice has been called to them read them, form your own judgment on
them, and if you recommend them, at least know why. What? some one
asks, attempt to read all of the best children's books? Yes, read
them, and do more than that with some; the children's classics, the
books which no child can grow up without reading and not be the
poorer, with these one should be so familiar as to be able to quote
from them or turn instantly to the most fascinating passages—they
should form a constant part of her stock in trade. Other books one
could not spend so much time on, nor is it necessary—the critical
ability to go through a book quickly and catch the salient points in
style, treatment and subject matter, is as essential for the
children's librarian as for anyone who has to do with many books, and
it therefore behooves her to cultivate what I once heard called the
sixth sense, the book sense. (3) Knowledge of library methods. In
any work, interest and enthusiasm go a great way, but they can never
wholly take the place of accurate technical knowledge of the best ways
of doing things. The more general knowledge of library work and
methods one can bring to the children's department, the better it will
be both for the work and for the worker; and given these methods, one
must have ability to fit them to the conditions and to the peculiar
needs to be accomplished, or, where they will not fit, to modify them
or originate new ones which are better for the work in hand. (4) A
thorough knowledge of the course of study of the public schools. This
is very necessary in order to intelligently supplement the work of the
schools. A child comes wanting information on some subject upon which
his ideas are exceedingly vague; for instance, he wants something
about the mayor—what, he cannot tell you, but he was sent by his
teacher to look up something about the mayor. You ask him what grade
he is in, and he tells you the fourth. Your familiarity with the
course of study should give you the clue at once, for the fourth grade
topics in conduct and government include lessons on the city
government, with its principal departments and officers, so you will
look up, if you have not already done so, an outline of municipal
government describing the position and duties of the mayor, which will
be within the comprehension of the child. It should not happen that a
dozen children ask for Little white lily, and be turned away without
it, before it is discovered to be a poem by George MacDonald which the
third grade children are given to read. This course of study the
children's librarian should—not eat and sleep with exactly, but
verily live and work with; it is one of her most valuable tools, and
she should keep it not only within reach, at her finger's end, but as
much as possible at her tongue's end, keeping pace with the assignment
of work in the different grades and studies from month to month, and
from week to week. She should know beforehand when a certain subject
will be taken up by a certain grade, and have all available material
looked up and ready, and new books bought if they will be needed and
can be had—not wait until several hundred children come upon her for
some subject on which a frantic search discloses the fact that the
library contains not a thing suitable for their use, and then ask that
books be bought, which, of course, come in after the demand is over,
and stand idle upon the shelves for a whole year, taking the place of
just so many more new books on subjects which will be needed later.
The course of study, too, will furnish more useful hints for
bulletins, exhibitions, reading-lists, and other forms of
advertising, than can come from any other source; and not only in
supplementing the school work, but also in directing the children in
their general reading, is an intimate knowledge of the course of study
an invaluable aid, as it gives you the unit of measurement for any
child which enables you to correlate his reading along certain lines
to that which has gone before, and to that which is to follow. (5) A
knowledge of the principles of psychology and of education. I have
placed last the requisite which I feel sure some theorists, at least,
would place first, because I believe that, as a rule, it will come
last in point of time, and will be worked up to through the preceding
stages of the development of the children's librarian; but her work
will not be grounded upon a firm foundation until she has consciously
mastered these principles, and clearly outlined her own work, this new
work of the book, in perfect harmony with them. There are many
features of the children's work which I should like to dwell upon in
detail, but I can do no more than mention a few of them. One of these
is the Library league, with its threefold object of training the
children in the proper care of books, of serving as an advertising
medium for the library among the children themselves, and of
furnishing a means of directing the reading of hundreds of children
who cannot be reached individually. The possibilities of the league
are beyond anything we have been able to realize. Another thing is
the necessity of guarding against letting children read too much, or
too entirely along one line. There is a habit of reading along lines
which deaden, instead of stimulating, thought, and the habit, if
carried to excess, becomes a mental dissipation which is utterly
reprehensible; but the pathway to this habit is entered upon so
innocently and unconsciously by the story-loving child that he
(perhaps more often she) must be guided very tenderly and wisely past
its dangers; the library which ignores this necessity may have much
harm laid at its doors. The importance of providing, either in the
school or the library, for systematic instruction in the use of books
was emphasized in the report of the library section of the National
Educational Association at Washington this summer; it is a necessity
which must be met somewhere and somehow. Of one more thing I should
speak because of its provision for the children—the expansion of the
library ideal; not so many years ago branch libraries and traveling
libraries were unknown; now we feel that one library is not enough for
a large city; it must have branch libraries and delivery stations to
take the books to the people, while traveling libraries carry them
into the scattered districts in the country. For the future, we have
visions of a system of libraries so complete that in no town or
country district of the state will a little child be deprived of the
pleasure of good books; and wherever it is possible to put a live,
warm-hearted, sympathetic and child-loving woman as the medium between
the library and the child, it will be done. Library work in its
entirety offers much play for the missionary spirit, but nowhere else
in its whole range is there such a labor of love as is hers who tries
to bring the children early to their heritage in the beautiful world
of books.
The blessings rather than the limitations of the small library are
portrayed and the "possibility of personal, individual, first-hand
contact with the children" is emphasized in this paper presented by
Miss Clara W. Hunt at the Niagara Conference of the A. L. A. in 1903.
A sketch of Miss Hunt appears on page 135. As the young theological
student is prone to look upon his first country parish as a place to
test his powers and to serve as a stepping-stone to a large city
church, so the librarian of the country town who, visiting a great
city library and seeing books received in lavish quantities which she
must buy as sparingly as she buys tickets for expensive journeys out
of her slender income, a beautifully furnished, conveniently equipped
apartment especially for the children, for the student, for the
magazine reader, evidences everywhere of money to spend not only for
the necessities but also for the luxuries of library life—so it is
quite natural for such a visitor to heave a deep sigh as she returns
to her library home and contrasts her opportunities, or limitations as
she would call them, with those of the worker in a numerically larger
field; and quite natural is it for her to long for a change which she
feels would mean a broadening and enlarging of outlook and
opportunity. It is encouraging sometimes to look at our possessions
through other people's spectacles, and perhaps I may help some worker
in a small field to see in what she calls her limitations, not a
hedging in but an opening, by drawing the contrast from another point
of view—from that of one who is regretfully forced to give up almost
all personal, individual work with the children and delegate to others
that most delightful of tasks, because her library is so large and she
has so much money to spend that her services are more needed in other
directions. With a keen appreciation of the privilege it is to have
charge of a small library, I am going to enumerate some of my reasons
for having this feeling. I should explain, in this connection, that
my thoughts have centered about the small town library, the library
whose citizen supporters do not yet aggregate a population large
enough to admit to dignifying their place of residence with the name
of a city, a place, therefore, where the librarian may really be able
to know every citizen of prominence, every school principal and
teacher, the officers of the women's clubs, many of the mothers of
the children she hopes to reach, and a very large number of the
children themselves. What are the attractions in a spot like this, the
compensations which make up even for the lack of a large amount of
money to spend? Let me begin first with the less apparent advantages,
the "blessings in disguise," I should call them. The first is the
necessity for economy in spending one's appropriation. I imagine your
astonishment and disapproval of the judgment of a person who can count
the need of economy as any cause for congratulation. But let us look
for a moment at some of the things you are saved by being forced to be
"saving." The greatest good to your public and to yourself is that you
must think of the ESSENTIALS, the "worth while" things first, last and
always. You cannot afford to buy carelessly. Every dollar you spend
must bring the best return possible and to the greatest number of
people. Every foolish purchase means disappointment to your borrowers
and wear on your own nerves. So, instead of being able to order in an
off-hand way many things which may be desirable but which are really
not essential, one gets a most valuable training in judgment by this
constant weighing of good, indifferent and indispensable. To apply
this to the principle of the selection of children's books—and
nothing in work with children, except the personality of the worker
with them is so important as this, we cannot buy everything, we must
buy the best, and we therefore have an argument that must have a show
of reasonableness to those borrowers who advocate large purchases of
books you tell them your income will not cover. What are the
essentials in children's books if your selection must be small? Our
children can grow up without Henty. They must not grow up without the
classics in myth and fable and legend, the books which have delighted
grown people and adults for generations, and upon the child's early
acquaintance with which depends his keen enjoyment of much of his
later reading, because of the wealth of allusion which will be lost to
him if he has not read aesop and King Arthur and the Wonder Book,
Gulliver, Crusoe, Siegfried and many others of like company, in
childhood. Then the librarian cannot afford to leave out collections
of poetry. Her children must have poetry in no niggardly quantity,
from Mother Goose and the Nonsense Book to our latest, most beautiful
acquisitions, "Golden numbers" and the "Posy ring." And American
history and biography must be looked after among the first things and
constantly replenished. So must fairy tales, the best fairy
tales—Andersen, Grimm, the Jungle books, MacDonald, Pyle, "The rose
and the ring." Much more discrimination must be exercised in selecting
the nature and science books than is usually the case. But, of course,
most of the problems come when we are adding the story books. Here,
most of all, the necessity for economy ought to be a help. It is a
question of deciding on essentials, and having nerve enough to leave
out those books whose only merits are harmlessness, and putting in
nothing that is not positively good for something. The threadbare
argument that we must buy of the mediocre and worse for the children
who like such literature (principally because they know little about
any other kind) will look very thin when we squarely face the fact
that by such purchases we shut out books we admit to be really better,
and when we honestly reflect upon the purpose of the public library.
The sanest piece of advice that I ever heard given to those
librarians who argue in favor of buying all the bootblack stories the
boys want, was that of Miss Haines at a recent institute for town
libraries. She asked that those men and women who enjoyed Alger and
"Elsie" in childhood and who are arguing in their favor on the
strength of the memory of a childish pleasure, take some of their old
favorites and re-read them now, read them aloud to their young people
at home, and then see if they care to risk the possibility of their
own children being influenced by such ideals, forming such literary
tastes as these books illustrate. Most of us desire better things for
our children than we had ourselves. If a man was allowed to nibble on
pickles and doughnuts and mince pie and similar kinds of nourishment
before he cut all his teeth, miraculously escaping chronic dyspepsia
as he grew older, he does not for that reason care to risk his boy's
health and safety by allowing him to repeat the process. A child's
taste, left to itself, is no more a safe guide in his choice of
reading than is his choice of food. What human boy would refuse ice
cream and peanuts and green pears and piously ask for whole-wheat
bread and beefsteak instead? Or choose to go to bed at eight o'clock
for his health's sake, rather than enjoy the fun with the family till
a later hour? It seems such a senseless thing for us to feel it our
duty to decide for the children on matters relating to their temporary
welfare, but to consider them fit to decide for themselves on what may
affect their moral and spiritual nature. Not only in the selection of
books as to their contents, but in the study of the editions the most
serviceable for her purposes, will the town librarian gain valuable
training from the necessity of being economical. The point is worth
enlarging upon, but the time is not here. It will perhaps be harder
to look upon the impossibility of having a separate room for the
children as a blessing which enforced economy confers. It will
doubtless seem heresy for a children's librarian to suggest the
thought. Yet while we recognize the great desirability, the absolute
necessity in fact, for the separate room in order to get the best
results in a busy city library, we can see the many advantages to the
children of their mingling with the grown people in the town library.
It is good for them, in the public as in the home library, to browse
among books that are above their understanding. It is better for the
small boy curiously picking up the Review of Reviews to stretch up to
its undiluted world news than to shut into his Little Chronicle or
Great Round World. It is good for the American child to learn just a
little of the old fashioned "children should be seen and not heard"
advice, to learn at least a trifle of consideration for his elders by
restraining his voice and his heels and his motions within the
library, saving his muscles for the wildest exercise he pleases out of
doors. The separate children's room is too apt to become a place for
so persistently "tending" the child that he loses the idea of a
library atmosphere which is one of the lessons of the place he should
NOT miss. I am of the opinion that, while we want to do everything in
the world to attract the children to the library and the love of good
reading, they should have impressed upon them so constantly the
feeling that the children's room is a reading and study room that when
a child is wandering around aimlessly, not behaving badly but simply
killing time, he should be, not crossly nor resentfully, but
pleasantly advised to go out into the park to play, as he doesn't feel
like reading and this is a LIBRARY. I know that this has an excellent
effect in developing the right idea of the purpose of the place.
Sometimes the town library has a building large enough to admit of a
separate room for the children, and books and readers in such numbers
as would make the use of this room desirable, but there is not money
enough to pay the salary of an attendant to watch the room. Here
indeed is a blessing in disguise. This idea that the children must be
watched all the time, that they cannot be left alone a minute, is
fatal to all teaching of honor and self-restraint and self-help. It
will take time and determination and tact, but I know that it is
possible to train the children—not the untrained city slum children
perhaps, but the average town children—to behave like ladies and
gentlemen left almost entirely to themselves through a whole evening.
I must hardly allude to further blessings which to my mind the need
of economy insures. It all comes under the head, of course, of forming
the habit of asking "What is most worth while?" before rushing
headlong into thoughtless imitation of the larger library's methods,
regardless of their wisdom for the small one. The town librarian will
thus be apt to use some far simpler but equally effective style of
bulletin than the one that means hours of time spent in cutting around
the petals of an intricate flower picture, or printing painstakingly
on a difficult cardboard surface what her local newspaper would be
glad to print for her, thus making a slip to thumb tack on her board
without a minute's waste of time. The question of having insufficient
help gives an excuse for getting a personal hold on some of the bright
older boys and girls who can be made to think it a privilege to have a
club night at the library once in a while, when they will cut the
leaves of new books and magazines, paste and label and be useful in
many ways. Of course they have to be managed, but you can get a lot of
fine work out of assistants of this sort, and do them a great amount
of good at the same time. Another of the blessings for which the town
librarian may be thankful is that her rules need not be cast iron, but
may be made elastic to fit certain cases. Because the place is so
small that she can get to know pretty well the character of its
inhabitants, she need not be obliged to face the crestfallen
countenance of a sorely disappointed little girl who, on applying for
a library card, is told that she must bring her father or mother to
sign an application, and who knows that that will be a task impossible
of performance. The town librarian may dare to take the very slight
risk of loss, and issue the card at once, enjoying the pleasure of
making one small person radiantly happy. Then there is the
satisfaction of doing a little of everything about your library with
your own hands and knowing instantly just where things are when you
are asked. To illustrate from a recent experience of my own. At one of
the small branches or stations rather, of the Brooklyn Public Library,
a certain small boy used to appear at least two or three times a week
and ask the librarian, "Have you got the 'Moral pirates' yet?" And
over and over again the librarian was forced wearily to answer, "No,
not yet, Sam." Now, although the library's purchases of children's
books are very generous, running from 1,500 to 2,000 volumes a month
for the 20 branches, of course with such large purchases it is
necessary to systematize the buying by getting largely the same 50
titles for all branches, varying the number of copies per branch
according to each one's need. The branch librarian of whom I am
speaking did not feel like asking often for specials, realizing that
she was only one of many having special wants, and knowing that we
would in time reach the "Moral pirates" in the course of our large,
regular monthly purchases. But one afternoon I went up to this station
and helping at the charging desk, this small boy appeared asking me
for the "Moral pirates." The librarian told me of the hopeful
persistence of his request, and it did not take long after that to get
the "Moral pirates" into the small boy's hands. I only hope the
realization of a long anticipated wish did not prove to him like that
of many another, and that his disappointment was not too unbearable in
finding a pirate story minus cutlasses and black flags and decks
slippery with gore. The point of this tale is, that in a great system
it is impossible often to get as close to an individual as in this
case, while the town librarian, who does everything from unpacking
her books to handing them out to her borrowers, can many a time have
the personal pleasure of seeing a book into the right hands. I have
only indirectly alluded to the greatest joy of all, the possibility of
personal, individual, first-hand contact with the children whom you
can get to know so well and to influence so strongly, and another joy
that grows out of it—seeing results yourself. We are so ready to be
deceived and discouraged by numbers! The town librarian reads of a
tremendous circulation of children's books in a city library, and
straightway gets the blues over her own small showing. But I beg such
an one to think rather of what the QUALITY of her children's use of
the library may be as compared with that of the busy city library. A
great department must be so arranged for dispatching a large amount of
work in a few minutes of time, that in spite of every effort,
something of the mechanical must creep into its administration. The
town librarian may know by name each child who borrows her books. Not
only that, but she may know much of his ancestry and environment and
so be able to judge the needs of each one. She will not be so rushed
with charging books by the hundred that she cannot USE that knowledge
to help him in the wisest, most tactful manner. But the joy of
watching her children develop, of seeing a boy or girl whom she helped
bring up, grow into a manhood and womanhood of noble promise, of
feeling that she had a large influence in forming the taste of this
girl, in sending to college that lad who wouldn't have dreamed of such
a thing had he not been stirred to the ambition through the reading
taste she awakened in him—these are pleasures the city children's
librarian is for the most part denied. The latter can see that her
selection of books is of the best, she can make her room as attractive
as money will admit, she can choose her staff with great care. She
knows that good must result in the lives of many and many a child from
contact even in brief moments with people of strong magnetic
personality, and from constantly taking into their minds the sort of
reading she provides. But very rarely will she be permitted to see the
results in individual cases that make work seem greatly worth while,
and that compensate in a few brief minutes, for weeks and months and
years of quiet, uninspiring, plodding effort. And so I congratulate
the worker with children in the small library. It would be a delight
to me if I could feel that my appreciation of the blessings that are
yours might help you to look upon your opportunity as a very great and
worthy one. The parents of the small town need your help, the teachers
cannot carry on their work well without you, the boys and girls would
miss untold good if you were not their friend and counselor, the
library profession needs the benefit of the practical judgment your
all-round training gives. And so you may believe of your position that
though in figures your annual report does not read large, in quality
of work, in power of influence it reads in characters big with
significance, radiant with encouragement.
"The whole secret of success is really to be in sympathy with
children, quick to see their needs and to look at things from their
point of view; but above all to have a genuine, common-sense love for
them." This point of view is expressed in the following paper on
Personal work with children, read by Miss Rosina Gymer before the Ohio
Library Association annual meeting in 1905. Rosina Charter Gymer was
born in Cleveland, Ohio; received a special certificate from the
Training School for Children's Librarians in 1904; was children's
librarian in the Cleveland Public Library from 1904 to 1907;
supervisor of children's work in small branches from 1907 to 1910, and
since that time has been a branch librarian. Work with children is so
large in its scope and so rich in its possibilities that we shall only
consider work in the library proper, passing over home visiting,
school visiting and cooperation with social settlements and like
institutions, all of which, however, are of the greatest importance to
the work as a whole. Work with children may be grouped under three
heads— that with girls, that with boys and that with little children.
While in each group the work differs in nearly every point, one point
they have in common—the choosing of fiction according to the
individual child, boy or girl; the choosing of classed books for the
book itself. In giving fiction, the child must be known as well as the
book, his character and needs, for it is on the character that fiction
has most influence. In classed books, on the other hand, the book is
the thing to know, for if a child wants to know something about
electricity or carpentry, he is not being influenced so much in
character as in education. If the book is not as good as some other,
it will not injure him especially as to morals and character, but of
course he should have the very best you can give him that he can
mentally understand. Girls almost always become interested in books
through the personality of the children's worker. While it is very
desirable to use this regard as a means of influencing their reading,
care must be taken to guard against a merely sentimental attitude on
the part of the girls toward the worker. As a rule, girls want stories
about people, other girls, school stories and so forth, and will take
a book that you say is a good one without looking into it. If she
likes it she will come to you to select another, and in this way you
can lead her from pure fiction to historical fiction and biography and
so on up to good literature, all through, at the first, knowing a book
that would please and attract her. This is done, in great measure,
through the girl's liking for the worker and also through her interest
in people rather than things. Boys, on the other hand, are not so
much interested in people as in things, and when they ask for a book
it is usually on some specific subject—electricity, carpentry, how to
raise pigeons, how to take care of dogs. When the book is given them
they usually examine it pretty thoroughly to see whether or not it is
what they want or can use. To know what book will give the boy what
he wants to know and in the most interesting way is to gain that boy's
confidence. To sum up: Boys like you through the books you give them,
while girls learn to like good books through their liking for you. The
result is the same in either case—the personal influence of the
worker with the children. The problem of managing children is much the
same everywhere. Wherever they are there are sure to be some restless
and disobedient boys and girls whose confidence and good will must be
gained. A willing obedience must be sought for untiringly. The
children's worker must be for and not against the child. To win is
far better than to compel. Conquering may do for those who are
expected to remain as enemies, but friends are won. While a display
of authority should be avoided, a firm attitude must at times be
taken, but it should be an attitude of friendship and fairness. If a
loss to the child of some coveted pleasure can be made to follow his
fault it is an effectual punishment. For instance, if a boy never
misses the story and yet his general behavior in the library leaves a
good deal to be desired, do not allow him to attend the story hour for
one or two weeks. In extreme cases the plan of not allowing the boys
to come to the library for a number of days or weeks has been tried
with good results. An endeavor should be made so far as possible to
follow the inclinations of children. Every boy likes the idea of
belonging to a club and if advantage is taken of this fact it will
prove a great help in discipline. When a gang of boys comes to the
library night after night, apparently for no reason except to make
trouble, the best solution of the problem is to form them into a
reading circle or club. They usually prefer to call themselves a club.
A good plan in starting is to ask three or four of the troublesome
boys if they would like to come on a certain evening and hear a story
read. An interesting story is selected, carefully read and cut if too
long, and at the end of the evening the boys are invited to bring some
of their friends with them next time. It is well to begin in this
small way and thus avoid the mistake of having too many boys at the
start or of getting boys of different gangs in the same club, for this
will always cause trouble. Seven o'clock is a good time for them to
meet. If the hour is later the boys who come early get restless and
it is difficult for them to fix their attention. It is better to take
the boys to a separate room as their attention is easily distracted
from the reading by people passing back end forth. It is a great
effort for boys with, one might say, wholly untrained minds to
concentrate for any length of time, and it is well not to ask them for
more than half an hour at first. Unless the selection holds their
interest they will disappear one after another, for they simply refuse
to be bored. For this reason, begin with popular subjects, such as
animal stories, Indian stories, fire stories, railroad stories,
gradually leading them on to more solid reading. That this can be done
was proved by the boys' attention to Sven Hedin's account of his
search for water in his Through Asia. The incident is most graphically
told of the repeated disappointments, of the sufferings of the caravan
and the dropping out of one after another until only the author is
left staggering across the sand hills in his search for the precious
water. The boys listened breathlessly until one boy finally burst out,
Ain't they never going to find no water? Very often the subject of the
next evening's reading is determined by the boys themselves who, if
they have been particularly interested, will ask for another story
"just like that only different." If possible, have good illustrated
books to show them on the subject of the evening's reading. This
serves two purposes —it fixes the awakened interest of the boys and
it also prevents the rush for the door they are apt to make to work
off the accumulated energy of the hour of physical inactivity. In
libraries where there are few assistants it ought not to be difficult
to find some young man or woman interested in work of this sort to
come and read to the boys once or twice a week, but the same person
should have the club regularly. Work with little children is important
because in a year or two they are going to be readers, and yet they
are a problem to the busy librarian from the fact that they require a
good deal of attention. Perhaps the best plan is to set a time for
them to come to the library, say Saturday morning at ten, when they
can feel that the children's worker is all their own. They like to be
read to, but they love to hear stories told. Telling stories to them
is a great pleasure to the story-teller, because of their
responsiveness, their readiness to enjoy. But besides the enjoyment
of the children there is something far higher to work for—the
development of the moral sense. The virtues of obedience, kindness,
courage and unselfishness are set forth over and over again in the
fairy tale. The story East o' the sun and west o' the moon, is nothing
but a beautiful lesson in obedience, The king of the golden river in
unselfishness, Diamonds and toads, kindness— and many others could be
named, all with a lesson to be learned. Little children love
repetition and when a story pleases them ask for it again and again.
They do not see the lesson all at once, but little by little it sinks
into their hearts and becomes a part of their very life. This is
where the fairy tale, properly and judiciously used, does its great
work. Be most careful to give children stories that are wholly worthy
of their admiration. Know your story thoroughly and in telling it
present strong, clear pictures. Tell the story in such a way that the
child's heart swells within him and he says, I can do that, I could be
as brave as that. But let not the children's worker labor under the
delusion that when she closes the door of the library her work is
finished. On the contrary, another phase of it is only beginning, for
she is constantly meeting the children on the street, in the stores,
in fact almost everywhere she goes, and it behooves her to be on the
watch for friendly smiles, to listen with interest when Johnny tells
her that Mary is coming out of the hospital tomorrow, or when Mike
calls across the street, Did you know Willie was pinched again? to
make a note of it and take pains to find out whether Willie is paroled
under good behavior or whether he has been sent to a boys' reformatory
school; or, when she is waiting for a street car and a newsboy rushes
up and says he can't get his books back in time and will she renew
them for him, the children's worker takes his library number and
renews the books when she returns to the library. If the worker is at
all earnest in her work she can not help but have her heart wrung time
and again by the sufferings of the children of the poor. Not that they
complain—they take it all as a matter of course, but by some
unconscious remark they quite often throw an almost blinding light on
their home conditions showing that family life for a good many of them
is anything but easy and pleasant. Children of the poor often have
responsibilities far beyond their years, and the library with its
books, pictures, flowers and story-telling means much more to them
than to a child who has all these at home. One little girl about 10
years old came one afternoon and was so disappointed to find there was
to be no story. On being told to come at ten o'clock next morning, she
said: What, do you think I can get here at ten o'clock with four kids
to dress! As first heard, funny; but after all showing a pathetic
side, a childhood without childhood's freedom from care. The whole
secret of success is really to be in sympathy with children, quick to
see their needs and to look at things from their point of view; but
above all to have a genuine, common sense love for them so that we may
feel as did the little girl who missed one of the assistants, and
asking for her was told that she was taking a vacation. I love her,
said the child, and then, fearing she had hurt the feelings of the one
to whom she was speaking added, I love all the library teachers, 'cos
we're all childs of God.
The interesting experiment of conducting a Library League is
described by Miss Linda A. Eastman in the following account of the
children's work in the Cleveland Public Library. A sketch of Miss
Eastman appears on page 159. Work with the children assumed its first
real importance in the Cleveland Public Library when the library
began, about 10 years ago, to issue books to the teachers for reissue
to their pupils. This brought the books to the hands of thousands of
children who had never drawn them before, although at no time has the
library been able to furnish all of the books asked for by the
teachers. The next step came with the establishment of our branches,
where it was soon noticed that a most important part of the work done
was that with the children, and that very few of these children had
ever used the main library. Early in 1897 a notable change was made at
the main library in bringing all of the juvenile books together in
what was known as the juvenile alcove, but which heretofore had
contained the juvenile fiction only, the classed books having been
shelved with the other books on the same subject. This change meant
much planning and shifting in our cramped quarters, and writing of
dummies and changing of records for every book; but it proved to be
well worth all the work, for the children seldom went beyond this
alcove, and those who had been reading fiction only, began to vary it
with history, travel, science, until about half of the books issued
from the department are now from the other classes. During the
Christmas holidays, 1896, we advertised "Children's week," and the
numbers and evident enjoyment of the children who then accepted the
invitation to visit the library or its branches, led to similar plans
for the spring vacation. At this time we were able to put into
circulation about a thousand bright new books, and the desire to
impress upon the children the necessity for their proper care resulted
in starting the Library League, the general plan of which is so
familiar that I need not go fully into the details concerning it.[2]
[2] For accounts of the Library League, see Library Journal October
and November, 1897. Without question, the labor spent upon the Library
League has been more than repaid in the greater care which the
children take of their library books. Dirt is at a discount; it is
noticed that many more children than formerly now stop to choose the
cleanest copy of a book, and many are the books reported daily by the
little people as being soiled or torn. A boy, not long ago, brought a
book up to the information-desk, reported a loose leaf, then very
seriously, by way of explanation, opened his overcoat and displayed
his league badge; another replied in all good faith to a query about a
damaged book, "Why, I belong to the Library League"—proof quite
sufficient, he thought, to clear him of any doubt. Most of the
children stop at the wrapping- counter before leaving the library, to
tie up their books in the wrapping paper which is provided, and which
saves many a book from a mud-bath on its way to or from the library.
But aside from the better care of the books, the Library League has
done much as an advertising medium among the children; the league now
numbers 14,354, and many of its members had never used the library
until they joined the league. Something has been accomplished through
it, too, in directing the reading of the children, as it gives
opportunities, in many ways, for making suggestions which they are
glad to accept. At the South Side branch a club-room has been finished
off in the basement, and two clubs formed among the members of the
league: one, a Travel Club, is making a tour of England this winter;
the other is a Biography Club, which is studying great Americans; the
children who compose these two clubs are largely of foreign parentage,
almost without exception from uncultured homes, and the work our
earnest branch librarian is beginning with them cannot fail in its
effect on these young lives. A boy's club-room is to be fitted up at
the new West Side branch, in addition to the children's room, which
is already proving inadequate. The Maxson book marks have been very
useful in connection with the league, and have suggested a series of
book marks which will also serve as bulletins for league notes, little
lists of good books, suggestions about reading, etc. The color will be
changed each time, as variety is pleasing to children. The
================================================== Cleveland Public
Library. LIBRARY LEAGUE BOOK MARK NO. 1. Boys and Girls: How would you
like to have a new book mark every month or two with Library League
news, and suggestions about good books? That is what the Library is
going to try to give you. Read this one through, use it until you get
the next one, which will be Library League Book Mark No. 2; then put
No. 1 away with your League certificate and keep it carefully as a
part of your League records, that some day you will be proud to own
and to show. League Report: The Library League was started March 29th,
1897. On December 31st, 1897 it numbered 14,074. How large is it going
to be on its first birthday anniversary? What the League has done: It
has brought many children to the Library who never used it before. It
has taught many boys and girls to love books and to handle them
carefully with clean hands. Many books have been reported which were
in bad condition, and the juvenile books are now in better shape than
before the League began its work. Library League Reading Clubs: Some
of the League members have been starting reading clubs. One of these
clubs is a Travel Club, and another is a Biography Club. The Library
assistants will be glad to tell League members about these clubs if
they would like to form others. Library League Motto: Clean hearts,
clean hands, clean books. (OVER)
================================================== The other side of
this book mark contains a list of the juvenile periodicals in the
library. No. 2 gives the beginning of a little serial, in which a
thread of story will weave in hints on reading and on the care and use
of books. At our main library the children have come in such numbers
after school and on Saturdays, that it has been impossible to push the
work much this past winter, for fear the adults should suffer. It was
finally decided that we must achieve the impossible, and by shifting
about and putting up glass partitions, have a separate children's room
instead of the open juvenile alcove. This room, while not half so
large as it should be to meet the needs of the work, is indeed a great
improvement in giving the children a place which they feel to be
really their own; the change has involved the re-registration of the
children having cards here, but it is affording much needed relief at
the general receiving desks, and will greatly facilitate the service
to adults, at the same time making it possible to do much more for the
little people. The library is endeavoring to co-operate more and more
closely with the schools. More books have been issued to the teachers
this winter than ever before. A new course of study having been
published, all of the books referred to in it were looked up, and if
not in the library or its branches, were purchased as largely as
seemed desirable or possible. A list of "References for third-grade
teachers," compiled by Miss May H. Prentice, training teacher in the
Cleveland Normal School, has recently been published by the library.
It was given to all of the third-grade teachers of the city, and sold
to others. This is, we believe, the most comprehensive list ever
prepared for a single grade of the common schools. We are hoping that
it will prove so helpful to third-grade teachers that all of the other
grades will demand similar ones for themselves, and that somehow the
way will be found to meet the demand. The list of books noted by Miss
Prentice for the children's own reading has been reprinted, without
the annotations, in a little folder and 5,000 copies of it have just
been distributed among the children of this grade. Recently our school
children were treated to the largest exhibition ever made in the
United States to photographic reproductions of the masterpieces in
art; to the work of the library in circulating pictures to teachers
and children for school-room decoration and for illustration, is due
no small share of this new interest in art. While the children come
to the library daily to look up subjects in connection with their
school work, very little attention can be given to training them to
use reference books as tools. Somewhere, either in the school or the
library, this systematic teaching should be given. It is one of the
things which is not being done. And another thing is not being
done—we are not reaching all of the children; in spite of our
branches, our stations, our books in the schools, our Library League,
there are many children who sadly need the influence of good books,
who are not getting them—whole districts shut off from the use of the
library by distance and inability to pay carfare. And we cannot give
them branches or send books—for lack of funds. It is a growing
conviction in my own mind that the library, aside from its general
mission, and aside from its co-operation with the schools in the work
of education, has a special duty to perform for the city child. No one
can observe city life closely without seeing something of the evil
which comes to the children who are shut up within its walls; the
larger the city the greater is the evil, the more effectually are the
little ones deprived of the pure air, the sweet freedom of the fields
and woods, to be given but too often in their stead the freedom of the
streets and the city slums. The evil is greater during the long
vacations, when the five-hour check of the school room is entirely
removed, and many a teacher will testify to the demoralization which
takes place among the children who are then let loose upon the
streets. For these the library must to some extent take the place of
Mother Nature, for under present condition it is through books alone
that some of them can ever come to know her; books must furnish them
with wholesome thoughts, with ideals of beauty and of truth, with a
sense of the largeness of life that comes from communion with great
souls as from communion with nature. If this be true, the school
vacation ceases to be the resting time of the children's librarian;
she must sow her winter wheat and tend it as in the past, but she must
also gather in her crops and lay her ground fallow during the long
summer days when school does not keep; she must find ways of
attracting these children to spend a healthy portion of their time
among the books, always guarding against too much as against too
little reading. For this work the individual contact is needed, and
there must be more children's librarians, more branch libraries. This
necessity and the problem of meeting it require grave consideration by
the librarian of to-day.
The practical usefulness as well as the artistic merit of picture
bulletins is discussed in this report prepared for the Club of
Children's Librarians for presentation at the Waukesha Conference of
the A. L. A. in 1901. It is based upon answers received in response to
a circular letter sent to various libraries. Mrs. Mary E. S. Root was
born and educated in Rhode Island, studied art before her marriage,
became interested in children's literature through her own children,
and organized the children's work in the Providence Public Library,
where she still has charge of this work. She has held many offices in
educational and civic organizations, and has lectured on children's
literature. For two summers she conducted a course in children's work
in the Simmons College Library School. Mrs. Adelaide Bowles Maltby
was born in New York City, and was graduated from a private school in
Elmira, New York, in 1893, with an equivalent of one year's college
work. After completing the regular course in Pratt Institute Library
School in 1900, she spent six months in the Pratt Library, at the same
time taking lectures in the second-year children's course. For four
and one-half years she was head of the Children's Department in the
Buffalo Public Library. She then became a member of the New York
Public Library staff, first as special children's worker in Chatham
Square Branch, then as branch librarian there, and later as librarian
of the Tompkins Square Branch.
There has been a rather marked difference in activity between the
eastern and western libraries on this subject of picture work, we of
the east seeming more conservative, somewhat prone on the whole,
because there is not time for elaborate work, to doubt its practical
usefulness. The questions upon which this report is based were sent
out in a circular letter to different libraries. These questions with
their answers may be considered in order: Question 1. If you make
picture bulletins in your library, what is your object in so doing?
To supplement school work, advertise the books, stimulate non-fiction
reading and celebrate anniversaries are the four answers which the
majority give. There is no question but bulletins made for school
helps are useful, help teacher, pupil and library; but we are all
studying to do away with suggestions of a school atmosphere in our
rooms as far as possible, so, primarily, these bulletins should give
pleasure. They offer a strong point of contact between the children
and the librarian, and if too strongly labelled with "school work," do
we not rob the child of the one place where he could have the
indescribable charm of learning what his natural tastes prompt him to
acquire? It is easy enough in our libraries to teach without calling
it teaching. Again, a bulletin to "advertise our books," especially
new ones, seems misdirected energy, as the new books are always
eagerly sought and there is often need of checking in some way the
desire for the new just because it is new. If the books to which the
attention is directed by the bulletins enlarge the child's experience,
well and good, but we do not need to post a bulletin merely to
circulate the books or with the feeling of advertisement in any sense
of the word. Question 2. Are these bulletins used only to illustrate
books owned by the library or are they general, commemorating
anniversaries, etc? The majority of bulletins seem of the most
general character —book bulletins, illustrations of school work,
holidays and anniversaries especially dear to childhood. Miss Putnam,
of the library at Los Angeles, offers a most serviceable suggestion in
her guide to the books in the children's room: "This is composed of
pictures, each representing a book clipped from the publisher's
catalogs, each author kept separate mounted on large sheets of
tagboard, and when the author's picture, call number, criticism of
books are added, the sheets are kept on the tables for the children's
use." At Detroit there is constantly on the walls a bulletin board
about 28x32 in. covered with dark green burlap on which are placed
lists of books, pictures of their authors, illustrations, current
events, public affairs, etc., not of sufficient interest to demand a
separate bulletin. Some change is made in this every week, keeping two
lists of books, taking down one and moving the other as a fresh list
is added. Question 3. Of what material and by whom are your bulletins
made? The best material is classified clippings and pictures from
duplicate magazines and illustrated papers. Braun Cie photographs,
Perry prints, bird portraits from Chapman's "Bird manual," and from
Birds and All Nature, Fitzroy prints and Perkins' Mother Goose
pictures can also be used to advantage. Card board can be obtained at
slight cost, in some cities at $4.20 per hundred. Pulp board, book
cover paper and charcoal paper, all can be utilized for this purpose.
Where the book cases are low enough to admit of it, red denim
stretched above the top of the cases makes an effective background for
the bulletins. Where the cases are five feet in height this is not
practicable, as the pictures must be opposite the eyes of our small
readers. In the Providence Public Library an excellent substitute for
this is in the shape of a six-panelled mahogany bulletin surrounding
the large circular pillar in the center of the room. The mahogany
serves as an excellent frame to the panel and the many sides offer
opportunities for a series of bulletins on a given subject, each
simple in itself and conveying one idea to the child, which seems far
preferable to us than trying to crowd all on one bulletin. Other
libraries use a stationary framework across the tables, with glass
each side, so that pictures may be slipped in between. At Minneapolis
Public Library an interesting experiment was tried with success by
Mrs. Ellison. Arrangements were made with the Director of Drawing to
have the pupils furnish the picture bulletins, Mrs. Ellison furnishing
the subjects and doing the reference work. The making of bulletins in
most cases devolves on the children's librarian, but we hear from
several libraries where different members of the staff take their
turn, all showing a keen interest in gathering material. Questions 4
and 5. Do you have more than one bulletin at a time? Have you noticed
any poor results from exhibiting more than one at a time? The returns
as to this point were not all that had been hoped. Two bulletins seem
to be an accepted number, but more than that a question. We do not
desire to confuse our children, or to detract in value from a bulletin
when once posted, and most certainly not to cheapen our rooms; but if
the standard is held high in each case, the number would not matter.
Take for instance a hero bulletin. Here is a wealth of material which
overwhelms us, and even when we have selected with the utmost thought
our heroes and placed them side by side, we realize we have more or
less of a jumble and have not told our story simply enough. Some
division is absolutely necessary. We saw a bulletin on this subject
grouped under three excellent heads: When all the world was young; In
the glorious days of chivalry; Heroes of modern times. We should like
to adopt this suggestion, but instead of one, offer three bulletins,
as a safeguard against confusion. Question 6. Can you show by citing
cases that this picture work is of sufficient practical use to the
children to pay for time and money spent? One library—and this is an
eastern one—gives us an encouraging, inspiring reply: "Case after
case, actually hundreds of letters from teachers thanking us for the
work." A general summary of reports from all the libraries shows an
increased demand for the books on the subject posted. The perfectly
evident pleasure of the little ones in the mere looking, to say
nothing of their joy in telling at one time or another something they
have seen before, shows with what keenness they observe. At the
Buffalo Public Library there have been on exhibition some excellent
silhouette pictures made by cutting figures, trees, etc., from black
paper and pasting them on white backgrounds. "The pied piper" was one
subject illustrated. To appreciate this it should be understood that
the figure of the piper and of each little rat, some not more than a
half inch high, were cut with scissors, without any drawing whatever.
These were labelled "Scissors pictures. Can you make them?" When they
had been up a week, one of the boys, 14 years old, brought in four,
one of which was better in composition than any of those exhibited.
This was posted as showing what one boy had done, and this boy is
studying drawing and designing this summer, with good promise. Another
library cites a case in relation to school work, where the
superintendent of schools offered rewards in each school of five of
Landseer's pictures for the best five compositions on Landseer and his
work. A collection of his pictures was gathered, a bulletin made with
lists, which at once attracted the boys and girls, set many earnestly
to work, who would not otherwise have given it much thought, and
finally received the hearty commendation of the superintendent. Miss
Clarke, of Evanston, says: "We have no children's room, and have not
done enough of bulletin work to be able to speak very surely of
results." Yet she can give us this, which speaks for itself. "An
Indian exhibit which we gave, where among the Indian curios and Navajo
blankets I had all our books on Indian life and customs and our best
Indian stories displayed, aroused a great demand for the books. I
kept the list of Indian books and stories posted for some months, and
it was worn out and had to be replaced by a new copy, owing to its
constant use. Our boys at that time really read a great deal of good
literature on the subject, including Mrs. Custer's books and those by
Grinnell and Lummis." These are but a few of the many interesting
illustrations, yet we all know there is a great part of our work of
which we can see no results, but if these bulletins beautify the room,
offer some new thought to the child and give pleasure, then the time
and work spent on them is a small factor, and even in that we are the
gainers, as we unconsciously acquire in the making of these bulletins
much general information, and an ability to present subjects in their
relative value to each other which is invaluable. Question 7. Are
these bulletins allowed to circulate? In most cases, no. Several
libraries allow them to go to schools and a few make duplicates for
both library and school, and in Indianapolis the bulletins are sent to
other libraries in the state. This should prove very helpful to small
libraries which are open but a few hours in the week. The bulletins
may wear out, but a bulletin once planned, three quarters of the work
is accomplished, and it is little labor to make the duplicate one.
Question 8. Please describe the exhibit which has proved of the
greatest interest in the past year. We wish that time and space would
allow a repetition of all the replies to this question. Miss Hewins
says: "The exhibit which has proved of the greatest interest is on
Queen Victoria. Within an hour after we heard the news of her death we
had the bulletin for her last birthday and 40 portraits of her on our
walls. I made one bulletin on her for the children out at Settlement
Branch, and gave them a little talk about her. In this bulletin there
were pictures of the dolls' house and toys that she gave the nation
and I told the children how careful she must have been of them to be
able to keep them so many years, and something about how careful she
was taught to be also of her spending money, and that even although
she was a princess and lived in a palace, she never could buy anything
until she had the money to pay for it. I made a Stevenson bulletin for
them on his birthday, and we had Stevenson songs and a talk about him
and his childhood, his lovableness, courage and cheerfulness." At
Buffalo the most popular exhibit was one illustrating the changes of
the last century, taking the post-office methods, transportation of
all kinds, i.e., carriages, boats, railroads, electricity in all its
uses and those which could be appreciated by the children—guns,
lifesaving methods, diving, etc. In each instance an old and a new
type was shown. The children swarmed around the boards every day for
the two months it was up, one of the pages who was interested in
numbers having counted 60 an hour. Nature exhibits are always popular
with children. "Our own birds" was the title of a bird- day bulletin
at Evanston. A green poster board, on which were tied bunches of
pussy-willows, among whose twigs were perched some of the common birds
around Evanston, was used. The plates used were the nature study bird
plates, brightly colored, which were cut out and pasted on the board
in such a way that the effect was very lifelike. Much the same idea
was carried out in Providence, only in this library the title is
"Procession of the birds and flowers," each bird being added as it
arrives. At the same time in the class room adjoining this library
there was an exhibit of 150 photographs called "Joy in springtime,"
all being charming pictures of flowers, birds and happy children,
with appropriate selections of poetry affixed. The long windows were
hung with tranparencies, a framework being built in which to slide the
tranparencies, that they may be changed from time to time. Invitations
were sent to all the schools, and the exhibit was a great delight to
the little ones. Miss Moore, of Pratt, tells of a picture bulletin
illustrating life in Porto Rico and a companion bulletin illustrating
the Porto Rican village at Glen island (a summer resort accessible to
the children), with objects such as water jugs, cooking utensils made
from gourds, etc., a hat in the process of making, musical instruments
made from gourds, such as were used by the native band at Glen Island.
The objects were carefully selected with the aid of the gentleman who
instituted the village at Glen Island, and who had made a study of
the country and people of Porto Rico. "The bulletin led not so much to
the reading of books, because there are few on the subject, but it
gave the children a very clear idea of the manner of living of the
Porto Ricans and drew the attention of many visitors to Glen Island,
as an educational point as well as a pleasure resort." Question 9. Do
you do anything with Perry pictures, scrap books, etc., for the little
children? At Medford scrap books are made by the children themselves,
much to their delight. Several librarians make their own scrap books,
Miss Hammond, of St. Paul, sending perhaps the best description of
work of this nature. For the little children she always keeps on hand
several scrap books made from worn out books, by Howard Pyle and
Walter Crane. Other scrap books enjoyed alike by the older children
and the little ones are "Colonial pictures" and "Arctic explorers,"
the last especially liked by the boys. Miss Hammond also cuts whole
articles from discarded magazines, putting on heavy paper covers,
labelling and arranging in a case according to subject for the use of
teachers and pupils. Question 10. Mention five examples of pictures
suitable for a children's library. The pictures suggested are given
in order, according to the number of votes assigned to each one.
Raphael, Sistine Madonna, 6 Watts, Sir Galahad, 6 Guido Reni,
Aurora,
4 Bonheur, Horse fair, 4 King Arthur, (Chapel of
Innspruck), 3 Corot, Landscape, 3 Hardie, Meeting of Scott and
Burns, 2 St. Gaudens, Shaw monument, 2 Murillo, Children of the
shell, 2 Stuart, Washington, 2 Van Dyck, Baby Stuart,
2 The selection of these pictures must, of course,
depend on the library, but there are a few other suggestions which are
worthy of mention: Regnault, Automedon and the horse of Achilles.
Raphael's Madonna of the chair. Reynolds, Penelope Boothby. Question
11. In preparing your lists of books to accompany bulletin, do you
prepare an analytical list or refer to book only? An analytical list
seems preferable where any list is used, although some librarians seem
to question the advantage of lists. Miss Brown, of Eau Claire, says:
"I have, however, decided for myself that the bulletin that pays is
the one which tells something of itself and has no long list of books.
If the child is interested in the bulletin it is no sign that he will
take a book listed, but if he gets a fact from looking at it he has
gained something and you lose the bad effect of having him get into
the habit of skipping the books on the bulletin, which he usually
does." On the other hand, lists help the systematic reader and relieve
the librarian. In closing we will quote a criticism of an eastern
librarian, as a thought on which we all need to dwell: "From the
artistic point of view such bulletins as I have seen are commonly too
scrappy, ill arranged and given too much to detail. One or two
pictures on a large card, with a brief descriptive note, all conveying
one idea or emphasizing one point only, is the best form. In
bulletins, as in many other things, the rule to follow first of all
is simplicity."
One of the newer developments of organized work is with mothers who
can be interested in the books their children read, although informal,
individual work has always been a part of library work with children.
This paper was read at the joint meeting of the Michigan and Wisconsin
Library Associations in July, 1914, by Miss May G. Quigley, children's
librarian of the Public Library, Grand Rapids, Michigan. May
Genevieve Quigley was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was
graduated from the Grand Rapids High School. Soon after this, she
began work in the Grand Rapids Public Library and has been Head of
the Children's Department since it was organized in 1907. You ask me
how to interest mothers in children's reading. I began by being
invited to the different mothers' meetings held in the schools;
public, parochial and private, the churches and women's clubs. At each
institution, the mothers, coming from widely different circles are
always attentive listeners, and many frequently remain to have a word
in private, as to whether I consider fairy tales good for their
children and to get my personal opinion about detective stories, or
some other subject important to them. I always take with me our
Monthly Bulletin, in which are printed the new books for children.
This list is talked over with the mothers and books for children of
different ages specified. If there is time, I frequently tell the
story the book tells or an interesting incident which occurs in some
one of the chapters. After such an introduction there is apt to be a
"run" on the Children's department the next few days. Boys and girls
come in numbers to ask for the book "You told mother about yesterday."
These talks at the different schools, clubs and churches are the
means of bringing the mothers to the library. They are interested now
in wishing to see the place where the "fine English books are kept,"
as one little foreign mother always says. I find that the foreign-born
mothers are intensely alive to the fact that their children must get
the English language if they are ever to succeed, and they too, these
foreign mothers, ask intelligent questions as to the books on history
and civics for their boys and girls. Birthdays and holidays are also
strong factors, by means of which the library can interest the
mothers. We have not as yet printed a list of books suitable for
birthdays, but we did print a Christmas list in our November Bulletin
of last year, and like Mary's little lamb, this book was with me
wherever I went during the Christmas season. It was an exceedingly
valuable list, because prices were given. There were books suitable
for every taste and every purse. I talked the list over with 250
mothers, whom I met at the various schools. A large number came to the
library to see the books before buying. Then too, ways and means are
always suggested by which they can obtain additional information,
namely the telephone, post card, and by appointment with me at the
book store, if they desire it, to say nothing of the many times advice
is given outside of library hours. On three different occasions we
have had exhibits of books at the schools. This perhaps is the ideal
way to interest mothers. I remember at one school the disappointment
manifested when it was announced that orders were not taken for the
books, but that the same could be obtained at the book store. Our
annual Conference on children's reading, which is held on the first
Saturday in May, brings together still another group. The mothers are
represented on the program and they take part in the discussion. The
subject at these conferences is always some phase of children's
reading. The discussions are interesting and educational, not only for
the mothers, but for the library as well. If you are able to speak
one or two languages besides English, the way is open for you to the
foreign mothers' clubs. I have frequently been a guest at the Italian
mothers' club, where in a small way I have been able to tell them
about the library and the books—English and Italian. Not often do
these mothers come to the library, but they are sure to send their
children, and through these useful little citizens I hope some day to
see the mothers frequent visitors at the library. I would not have
you think that these mothers are not interested because they are not
able to come to the library. It is strange and they are often too
busy. When I go to the store or they meet me on the street they will
ask about the books and express their appreciation of what we are
doing for their children. Three-fourths of the mothers, regardless of
nationality, social position or education, have no definite idea as to
the kind of books their children ought to read. If you would succeed
in this movement, be interested, know your books, and be ready to have
a human interest in every child's mother, be she rich or poor,
American or foreign born. Success will then attend your efforts.
The importance of reference work with children is indicated in the
next article by the fact that "the subjects on which children seek
information are as varied as those brought by older people, and the
material is equally elusive." Miss Abby L. Sargent contributed this
article to the Library Journal for April, 1895. Abby Ladd Sargent
received her training under her sister, Miss Mary E. Sargent. She
reorganized the Wilmington Library Association Library in 1890-1891.
From 1891 to 1895 she was librarian of the Middlesex Mechanics
Association. In 1895 she became reference librarian and classifier of
the Medford Public Library, where her sister was librarian. In 1910,
after her sister's death, she became librarian of the Medford Public
Library. In 1900 she organized and purchased books for the Owatonna,
Minnesota, Public Library. She has been instructor in the Expansive
Classification in Simmons College Library School since its opening.
Miss Sargent was joint editor and compiler of Sargent's "Reading for
the young," and its supplement. Let us suppose that the momentous
problem is solved of persuading children to use the library for more
serious purpose than to find a book "as good as 'Mark the match boy,'
" and that we are trying to convince children that the library is
infallible, and can furnish information on whatever they wish to know
about—whether it is some boy who comes on the busiest morning of the
week, to find out how to make a puppet show in time to give an
afternoon exhibition, or some high-school girl who rushes over in the
20 minutes' recess to write an exhaustive treatise on women's
colleges. It is unnecessary to say that the fewer books the library
can supply the more must those few be forced to yield. A large
library, with unlimited volumes, meets few of the difficulties which
beset smaller and poorer institutions. If the librarian can name at
once "a poem about Henry of Navarre," or tell who wrote "by the rude
bridge that arched the flood," and on what monument it is engraved,
can furnish material for debate on "the Chinese question," "which city
should have the new normal school," "who was Mother Goose," or on any
possible or impossible subject, she gains at once the confidence of
the severest of critics, and is sure of their future patronage. The
subjects on which children seek information are as varied as those
brought by older people and the material is equally elusive. Perhaps
the hardest questions to answer are about the allusions which are
found in literature studies, and which frequently the teacher who has
given the question cannot answer. I find it helpful whenever I come
across material of this nature to make a reference to it in the
catalog, and, in fact, to analyze carefully all juvenile books, not
fiction, whose titles give no hint of the contents. A great many books
otherwise valueless become thus most useful, especially if one is
pressed for time. Mr. Jones, in his "Special reading lists," gives
many such references to juvenile literature. Books like Ingersoll's
"Country cousins," which contains an article on shell money, also an
account of Professor Agassiz's laboratory at Newport; Mary Bamford's
"Talks by queer folks," giving many of the superstitions prevalent
about animals; the set of books by Uncle Lawrence, "Young folks'
ideas," "Queries," and "Whys and wherefores," recently republished
under the title "Science in story," and others of this sort, if
carefully indexed, answer many of the questions brought every day by
children, and amply repay for the trouble. For even if juvenile books
are classified on the shelves, much time is wasted in going through
many indexes. A wide-awake teacher often gives his pupils the events
of the day to study, and if they cannot grasp the situation from the
daily papers, juvenile periodicals furnish the best material. For this
a classified index is indispensable; it makes available accounts of
the workings of government, the weather bureau, mint, and other
intangible topics. Until the recent publication of Capt. King's "Cadet
days," I knew of no other place to find any description of West Point
routine outside of Boynton's or Cullum's histories. One glimpse of
either would convince any boy he would rather try some other subject.
A short article often suffices to give the main facts. My experience,
both as teacher and librarian, persuades me that the average child is
eminently statistical. "A horse is an animal with four legs—one at
each corner," is fairly representative of the kind of information he
seeks. When he becomes diffuse, we may feel sure he has had help.
Sissy Jupes are of course to be found, who cannot grapple with facts.
Working on this principle, I have made liberal use of a book issued
by the U. S. Government—"The growth of industrial art." It gives, in
pictures, with only a line or two of description, the progress of
different industries—such as the locomotive, from the clumsy engine
of 1802 to the elaborate machinery of the present day; the evolution
of lighting, from the pine-knot and tallow-dip to the electric light;
methods of signalling, from the Indian fire-signal to the telegraph;
time-keeping, etc. A child will get more ideas from one page of
pictures than from a dozen or more pages of description and hard
words. If lack of space compels one to deny the privilege of going to
the shelves, it seems to me more essential for children to have ready
access to reference-books, and especially to be taught how to use
them, than for grown-up people. The youngest soon learn to use
"Historical notebooks," Champlin's Cyclopaedias, Hopkins'
"Experimental science," "Boys' and Girls' handy books," and others of
miscellaneous contents. If they have a mechanical bent they will help
themselves from Amateur Work or "Electrical toy-making"; if musical,
from Mrs. Lillie's "Story of music" or Dole's "Famous composers"; if
they have ethical subjects to write about, they find what they need in
Edith Wiggin's "Lessons in manners," Everett's "Ethics for young
people," or Miss Ryder's books, which give excellent advice in spite
of their objectionable titles. They can find help in their nature
studies in Gibson's "Sharp-eyes," Lovell's "Nature's wonder workers,"
Mrs. Dana's "How to know the wild flowers," or turn to Mrs. Bolton's
or Lydia Farmer's books to learn about famous people, if they are
encouraged to do so. These, of course, are only a few of the books
which can be used in this way. As the different holidays come round
there are frequent applications for the customs of those days, or for
appropriate selections for school or festival. Miss Matthews and Miss
Ruhl have helped us out in their "Memorial day selections," and
McCaskey's "Christmas in song, sketch, and story," and the "Yule-tide
collection" give great variety. If the juvenile periodicals do not
furnish the customs, they can, of course, be found in Brand's "Popular
antiquities," or Chambers's "Book of days." It is necessary sometimes
to use the books for older people, since there is a point where
childhood and grown-up-hood meet. I was recently obliged to give quite
a small child Knight's "Mechanical dictionary," to find out when and
where weather-vanes were first used, and to give a grammar-school girl
Mrs. Farmer's "What America owes to women," for material for a
graduating essay. A few excellent suggestions for general reference
work are given in Miss Plummer's "Hints to small libraries"; but in
spite of all the aids at command there come times when our only
resource is to follow the adage, "look till you find it and your labor
won't be lost," and to accept the advice of Cap'n Cuttle, "When found,
make a note on't."
Another report based on answers received from various libraries in
reply to a list of questions suggests that we are "concerned not so
much to supply information as to educate in the use of the library."
This report was presented by Miss Harriet H. Stanley at the Waukesha
Conference of the A. L. A. in 1901. Harriet Howard Stanley is a native
of Massachusetts. After completing a normal school course and teaching
for a few years in secondary schools, she entered the New York State
Library School, where she was graduated in 1895. She served for four
years as librarian of the Public Library at Southbridge, Mass., and
thereafter was for eleven years school reference librarian in the
Public Library of Brookline, Mass. Since 1910 she has had positions
in the Library of the U. S. Department of Agriculture and the
Providence (R. I.) Athenaeum, and was for a year librarian of New
Hampshire College. At various times she has taught in summer library
schools—Albany, India and McGill University. She is now on the staff
of the Public Library of Utica, N. Y. Preliminary to preparing this
report, a list of 15 questions was sent to a number of libraries in
different parts of the United States, from 24 of which replies were
received. So far as space would permit, the facts and opinions
obtained have been embodied in this paper. Reference work with grown
people consists in supplying material on various topics; we consider
it sufficiently well done when the best available matter is furnished
with as little cost of time and trouble to the inquirer as is
consistent with the service we owe to other patrons of the library. To
a certain extent this statement is true also of reference work with
children, but I think we are agreed that for them our aim reaches
further— reaches to a familiarity with reference tools, to knowing
how to hunt down a subject, to being able to use to best advantage the
material found. In a word, we are concerned not so much to supply
information as to educate in the use of the library. Seventeen of the
24 libraries reporting judge children to be sent to them primarily, if
not wholly, for information. One of the first steps towards improving
and developing reference work with children will have been taken when
the teacher appreciates the larger purpose, since the point of view
must materially affect the character and scope of the work. Another
forward step is for the library to have definitely in mind some plan
for accomplishing these ends. Whatever the plan, it will in likelihood
have to be modified to accord with the teacher's judgment and deeds,
but a definite proposal ought at least to give impetus to the
undertaking. Six libraries state that a considerable part of the
inquiries they receive from children are apparently prompted by their
individual interests, and not suggested by the teacher. These
inquiries relate chiefly to sports, mechanical occupations and pets.
This paper is confined to the discussion of reference work connected
with the schools.
In selecting reference books for the purpose, certain familiar ones
come at once to our minds. Beyond those there have been suggested:
Chase and Clow's "Stories of Industry," "Information readers," Brown's
"Manual of commerce," Boyd's "Triumphs and wonders of the 19th
century," Patton's "Resources of the United States," Geographical
readers, Youth's Companion geographical series, Spofford's "Library of
historic characters," Larned's "History for ready reference," Ellis's
"Youth's dictionary of mythology," Macomber's "Our authors and great
inventors," Baldwin's "Fifty famous stories," "Riverside natural
history," Wright's "Seaside and wayside," bound volumes of the Great
Round World, and text-books on various subjects. A dictionary catalog
will be useful in teaching the child to look up subjects for himself.
If a separate catalog is provided for children, the question arises
whether it is wiser to follow closely the A. L. A. headings or to
modify them where they differ from topics commonly asked for by
children or used as headings in text-books. This question suggests
also the advisability of a modified classification for a children's
library. Last and not least, children should have room and service
adapted to their needs, so that they may not constantly have to be put
aside in deference to the rightful demands of adult readers. So far
as the writer knows, the Public Library of Boston was the first
library to open a reference room expressly for children, well equipped
and separate from the children's reading room or circulating
department, and from the general reference department for adults.
Many libraries report that they find the topics habitually well
chosen. The gist of the criticisms is as follows: (a) The teacher
should make clear to the child just what he is to look up and how to
ask for it. An eastern library furnishes this incident: "I want a
book about flowers." "Do you want a special flower?" "Yes, I want the
rose." A book on the cultivation of roses is handed her. Her
companion, looking over, exclaims, "Why she wants the Wars of the
roses!" The same librarian was invited to provide something on
American privileges; whether social, religious, political, or
otherwise, the child did not know. (b) The teacher should be
reasonably sure that there is on the topic something in print, in
usable shape, that can be gotten at with a reasonable amount of labor.
(c) The subject when found should be within the child's
comprehension. The topic Grasses is manifestly unfit for children,
since grasses are difficult to study, and the description of them in
encyclopedias and botanies is too technical. An eight- year-old had to
investigate the Abyssinian war. Pupils under 16 were assigned the
topic Syncretism in the later pagan movement. A western librarian was
asked by some girls for Kipling's "Many inventions" and "Day's work."
Both were out. "Well, what other books of Kipling's on agriculture
have you?" "Why, Kipling hasn't written any books on agriculture; he
writes stories and poems." "But we have to debate on whether
agriculture or manufacturing has done more for the welfare of the
country, and we want a book on both sides." (d) The topic should be
definite and not too broad, and should be subdivided when necessary.
The briefest comprehensive description of Rome is probably that in
Champlin's "Persons and places," where the six columns, already much
condensed, would take more than an hour to copy. A young girl came to
find out about Italian painters. None of the several encyclopedias
treated them collectively under either Italy or Art. Mrs. Bolton's
book of 10 artists includes four Italians, but it takes some time and
skill to discover them, as the fact of their nationality does not
introduce the narrative. How should a sixth grade pupil make a
selection from the 60 painters in Mrs. Jameson's book? Three names
were furnished by the librarian, and the child made notes from their
biographies. The next day she returned and said she hadn't enough
artists. (e) The question should preferably be of such nature that the
child can be helped to find it rather than be obliged to wait while
the librarian does the work. One inquiry was, "What eastern plant is
sometimes sold for its weight in gold?" This is not in the book of
"Curious questions." (f) The topic should be worth spending time upon.
The genealogy of Ellen Douglas will hardly linger long in the average
memory.
Suppose the topic to be good and suitable material to have been
found; for older children there are two good ways of using it—one to
read through and make notes on the substance, the other to copy in
selection. Children need practice in doing both. The first method
suits broad description and narration, the second detailed
description. There seems to be a prevailing tendency to copy simply,
without sufficient neglect of minor points, a process which should be
left to the youngest children, since it furnishes little mental
training, uses a great deal of time, keeps the writer needlessly
indoors, and fosters habits of inattention, because it is easy to copy
with one's mind elsewhere. The necessity for using judgment after the
article has been found is illustrated by the case of some children who
came for the life of Homer. Champlin, in about a column, mentions the
limits within which the conjectures as to the time of Homer's birth
lie, the places which claim to be his birthplace, and tells of the
tradition of the blind harper. The children, provided with the book,
plunged at once into copying until persuaded just to read the column
through. "When you finish reading," I said, "come to me and tell me
what it says." They came and recounted the items, and only after
questioning did they at all grasp the gist of the matter, that nothing
is known about Homer. Even then their sense of responsibility to
produce something tangible was so great that they would copy the
details, and from the children who came next day I judged that the
teacher had required some facts as to time and place and tradition.
While it is true that we learn by doing and it is well that children
should rely upon themselves, it is evident that young pupils need some
direction. Even when provided with sub-topics, they often need help in
selecting and fitting together the appropriate facts, since no
article exactly suits their needs. About half of the reporting
librarians are of the opinion that it is the teacher's business to
instruct pupils in the use of books; they consider the library to have
done its share when the child has been helped to find the material.
The other half believe such direction as is suggested above to be
rightly within the librarian's province; several, however, who express
a willingness to give such help, add that under their present library
conditions it is impracticable. We can easily see that time would not
permit nor would it be otherwise feasible for the teacher to examine
every collection of notes made at the library, but there ought to be
some systematic work where the topics are thoughtfully chosen, the
librarian informed of them in advance, and the notes criticised. A
moderate amount of reference work so conducted would be of greater
benefit than a large quantity of the random sort which we now commonly
have. Five librarians state that they are usually given the topics
beforehand. Several others are provided with courses of study or
attend grade meetings in which the course is discussed.
While a general effort is being made to instruct children
individually, only a few libraries report any systematic lessons. In
Providence each visiting class is given a short description of books
of reference. In Hartford an attempt at instruction was made following
the vacation book talks. In Springfield, Mass., last year the senior
class of the literature department was given a lesson on the use of
the library, followed by two practice questions on the card catalog.
In one of the Cleveland branches talks are given to both teachers and
pupils. At the Central High School of Detroit the school librarian has
for the past three years met the new pupils for 40 minutes'
instruction, and test questions are given. A detailed account of
similar work done in other high school libraries is to be found in the
proceedings of the Chautauqua conference. Cambridge has given a
lecture to a class or classes of the Latin school. In the current
library report of Cedar Rapids, Ia., is outlined in detail a course of
12 lessons on bookmaking, the card catalog, and reference books. The
librarian of Michigan City, Ind., writes: "Each grade of the schools,
from the fifth to the eighth, has the use of our class room for an
afternoon session each month. Each child is assigned a topic on which
to write a short composition or give a brief oral report. When a pupil
has found all he can from one source, books are exchanged, and thus
each child comes into contact with several books. At these monthly
library afternoons I give short talks to the pupils on the use of the
library, the reference books, and the card catalog, accompanied by
practical object lessons and tests." At Brookline our plan is to have
each class of the eighth and ninth grades come once a year to our
school reference room at the library. The teacher accompanies them,
and they come in school hours. The school reference librarian gives
the lesson. For the eighth grade we consider the make-up of the
book—the title-page in detail, the importance of noting the author,
the significance of place and date and copyright, the origin of the
dedication, the use of contents and index. This is followed by a
description of bookmaking, folding, sewing and binding, illustrated by
books pulled to pieces for the purpose. The lesson closes with remarks
on the care of books. The ninth grade lesson is on reference books,
and is conducted largely by means of questioning. A set of test
questions at the end emphasizes the description of the books. In these
lessons the pupils have shown an unexpected degree of interest and
responsiveness. The course brought about 400 children to the library,
a few of whom had never been there before. These were escorted about a
little, and shown the catalog, charging desk, bulletins, new book
shelves, etc. Every one not already holding a card was given an
opportunity to sign a registration slip. The following year the eighth
grade, having become the ninth, has the second lesson. With these
lessons the attitude of the children towards the library has visibly
improved, and we are confident that their idea of its use has been
enlarged.
The inquiry was made of the reporting libraries whether any
bibliographical work was being done by the high school. The question
was not well put, and was sometimes misunderstood. Almost no such work
was reported. At Evanston, III., one high school teacher has taught
her class to prepare bibliographies, the librarian assisting. At
Brookline we have ambitions, not yet realized, of getting each high
school class to prepare one bibliography a year (we begin modestly) on
some subject along their lines of study. Last May the principals of
two grammar schools offered to try their ninth grades on a simple
bibliography. The school reference librarian selected some 60 topics
of English history—Bretwalda, Sir Isaac Newton, East India Company,
the Great Commoner, etc. Each bibliography was to include every
reference by author, title and page to be found in the books of the
school reference collection of the public library. The pupils
displayed no little zest and enjoyment in the undertaking, and some
creditable lists were made. Observation of the work confirmed my
belief in its great practical value. Pupils became more keen and more
thorough than in the usual getting of material from one or two
references on a subject. Such training will smooth the way and save
the time of those students who are to make use of a college library,
and is even more to be desired for those others whose formal education
ends with the high or grammar schools. The practice of sending
collections of books from the public library to the schools is
becoming general. When these collections are along the lines of
subjects studied, it would seem as if the reference use of the library
by pupils might be somewhat diminished thereby. No doubt it is a
convenience to both teacher and pupils to have books at hand to which
to refer. The possession of an independent school library also tends
to keep the reference work in the school. But in neither case ought
the reference use of the public library or its branches to be wholly
or materially overlooked, since it is on that that pupils must depend
in after years, and therefore to that they must now be directed. We
recognize that the people of modest means need the library. As for the
very-well-to-do, the library needs them. Other things being equal, the
pupil who has learned to know and to know how to use his public
library ought later so to appreciate its needs and so to recognize the
benefits it bestows that he will be concerned to have it generously
supported and wisely administered. Even we librarians claim for our
public collection no such fine service as is rendered by those private
treasures that stand on a person's own shelves, round which "our
pastime and our happiness will grow." Books for casual entertainment
are more and more easily come by. But so far as our imagination
reaches, what private library will for most readers supplant a public
collection of books for purposes of study and reference? Is it not
then fitting that we spend time and effort to educate young people to
the use of the public library? Do not the methods for realizing this
end seem to be as deserving of systematic study as the details of
classification and of cataloging? We have learned that to bring school
authorities to our assistance our faith must be sufficient to convince
and our patience must be tempered by a kindly appreciation of the
large demands already made upon the schools. Have we not yet to learn
by just what lessons and what practice work the reference use of the
public library can best be taught to children?
The necessity of close cooperation between school and library in the
practical use of books as tools in order that we may have "our grown
people more appreciative of the value of their public library and
better able to use it" is clearly brought out in this article written
by Miss Elizabeth Ellis, Peoria Public Library, for Public Libraries,
July, 1899. Miss Ellis says: "It was written at a time when we had no
children's department and was an account of my pioneer efforts made
entirely as a side issue from my own work as general reference
librarian." Elizabeth Ellis spent one year in the New York State
Library School, later taking three months of special work. With the
exception of organizing a library at Wenona, Illinois, her work was
with the Peoria Public Library. She is not now in library work. Since
the public school of today is the source from which must come our
support tomorrow, it behooves us to give some attention to the proper
training of our school children if we would have our grown people more
appreciative of the value of their public library and better able to
use it. We cannot begin too early, and if the children fall into line
there will be no trouble with the coming generation. But they must
learn to really use the library; to feel that they are standing on
their own feet and using their own tools, not merely that there is a
pleasant room where a good story may be had for the asking. They must
grow up in such familiar use of the library in all its departments
that it will come to be an actual necessity to them in the pursuit of
knowledge. There are music, drawing, and physical culture teachers for
our schools; may we not have a few lessons in how to use a library to
the best advantage as part of the course? This field for instruction
may be worked to advantage by the librarian, with comparatively little
expenditure of time after the first round has been made. Teachers
often feel that they have themselves already more outside work than
they can accomplish, but they are really glad to have this instruction
given in their schools, and in our experience they have invariably
taken great interest in it and have done all in their power to further
our efforts. There is certainly no library work which sends in its
returns more promptly, for children feel an instinctive sense of
ownership in their library, and take a personal interest in anything
pertaining to it. They give the most flattering attention and put
their instructions into immediate practice. I believe they really take
more interest in the subject when presented by "a lady from the
library" than if it were only an additional school lesson taught them
by their teacher. Most of the practical instruction must come in the
grammar grades and high school, but it is well to begin as early as
the third year, and possibly with the second, if there are found to be
many children in a room who have already begun to take books and if
there is no age limit. If it should so chance that only a small
number in a room are library members, it is better to give only the
general interesting library talk, leaving the specific instruction
till a second visit, when the fruits of the first will probably
appear. There is one point for the lowest room which it may be well to
mention. See to it that they are learning to say their A B C's in the
good old-fashioned way, for upon this depends all familiar use of
catalogs and indexes. Any child who can write can fill out a call
slip, and this we teach them to do from the very first, either from a
catalog when help in selection must be given, or from a special list
of books for little children. It must be impressed upon them that if
they do not understand the general instruction you are always ready
and glad to explain further. If they feel that you are really
interested, even the smallest ones will work with enthusiasm to
prepare their own call slips instead of asking each time for just any
good book. The intermediate grades, the fifth and sixth, and sometimes
the fourth, are quite able to understand the general catalog. I
should not advise much explanation at the school, at least in these
grades, of the card catalog, if the library has a printed list. The
use of a classed catalog, with its index, is easily comprehended, and
there are many whole classes of books which these children will enjoy
knowing about; boys, I should say, perhaps, for it is the pages
containing electricity, photography, boat-building, and hunting, which
are worn and crumpled. It is the classed catalog which they will use
most, but they should understand the difference between it and the
author list. In all schools it is a good plan to give quizzes, even
on a first visit, to draw the children out. Those who are already
patrons of the library are delighted to show their knowledge.
Afterwards it would be well before the day of the visit, with the
teacher's consent, to send a short set of questions which would be
answered and returned for correction, thus giving you an idea of what
points need dwelling upon. These questions would vary from the
simplest points in filling out library numbers, giving authors to
titles and vice versa, to questions on arrangement, use of dictionary
catalog and of various reference books. In upper grades and high
school add a simple explanation of the card catalog as being the most
complete record, trusting to their interest in coming to the library
to use it practically. If there is no printed catalog this explanation
will have to be given to fifth and sixth years also. They should be
advised to use both kinds, and particularly the dictionary catalog for
biography, as the short analytical references are most often what they
want. Children, boys again particularly, take to the card catalog with
a confidence often lacking in their elders. I have seen them even
make out their fiction lists from the cards in preference to the
printed catalog, though for what reason I cannot explain, unless it
is their innate desire to explore the unknown. It is a good plan to
have sample cards plainly written in large form on a sheet of paper,
in addition to using a section of the catalog itself if it seems
advisable to take it. In lower rooms a blackboard talk holds the
attention better. The use of the guide card, which misleads so many
grown people, the heading in red, and the see and see also cards in
the dictionary catalog, and the arrangement of biography in a classed
list are a few points, which may need dwelling upon, and which I
mention as having been found in our experience to be pitfalls for the
unwary. In the upper grade rooms, and particularly in the high school,
comes the use of the encyclopedias and reference books. I have found
it hard to hold the attention of sixth-year pupils in this part, but
they ought to be familiar with a good encyclopedia and biographical
dictionary, and the gazeteer. Tell them about Harper's Book of facts,
Hayden's Dictionary of dates, the Century and Lippincott reference
books and so on; also Chambers' Book of days, and the mythological
dictionaries, in addition to the best encyclopedias, leaving at each
school a descriptive list of these books for their further use. Call
especial attention to the biographical dictionaries—few persons know
how to use a set whose index is in the last volume; also note
difference between table of contents and index in general books, and
accustom them to use the latter. If there is a very large reference
room it might be well to have some of the best books for school use
collected on one shelf, and of course every children's room should be
thus supplied. Poole's index may be explained for the principle, but
practically people are so sure to select the very volume you have not
that it is well to use a little discretion with regard to it, unless
you have made an index of all your own periodicals which are included
in Poole, and can induce children to be patient enough to use it as a
key to the other. The Cumulative index is rather better to teach them
the use of periodicals, since it does not contain so many, and also as
it gives such a very good idea of the dictionary catalog. The back
numbers can be used in your explanations in the schoolroom for both
purposes. Find out whether there is a debating society, and if so
bring out Briefs for debate, Pros and cons, and tell them specially
about the periodical indexes for late subjects. Care must be taken
not to crowd too much into one lesson, or to make it too technical;
this latter point we must specially guard against, and experience in
teaching comes into good use here. Their individual work with these
books will have to be overlooked for some time, even though they are
not conscious of it; and one must be ready to fly to the rescue and
lend a helping hand without a special request, which I have found some
children too timid to make. In the first year of this kind of work
the grammar grades and high school would need some of the instruction
given in the lower grades, and after the system is really in working
order there would be no actual need to go beyond the grammar grade, as
the aim should be to have all really necessary instruction given then
as so large a majority of pupils never go farther; but in the high
school, if advisable, a course in bibliography could be introduced,
based on their school work. The use of the reference room, or
reference desk, is a thing to be taught as much as the books
themselves, and in this matter those libraries in which there is not
an entirely separate children's room may have an advantage. I am told
that there is a certain feeling of timidity in entering a reference
room which is sometimes hard to overcome in children accustomed to a
special room and attendant. Whatever the arrangement, they must be
made to feel that the reference room, its appliances and its
attendants, are part of their school outfit, an annex to the school as
it were, however much we, carrying out the idea of Dr. Harris, may
think the school an annex to the library. Accustom them as far as
possible to use reference books at the library, and perhaps the coming
generation will not invariably demand a book to take home, no matter
how small the subject or how large the number of applicants for the
same. In this, as in all other school work, we must look to the
teacher for aid after the technical use of our tools is taught. The
average child does not so much need the encouragement to read which
may come from the library as constant guidance, which, to a large
degree, must and does rest with the teacher, and in this matter of
instruction much must depend on her even though the teaching itself is
not imposed upon her as part of her duties. Explain to her your ideas,
get her individual interest, and I can testify that she will assist in
many ways. Children take their tone from their teacher, and the battle
is half won if we have her hearty cooperation. A catalog should be
placed in every school, and this she will help her pupils to use in
nature work, history, and geography, and at the different holidays;
also for their selections in speaking. Particularly can she help in
regard to their use of the reference room. She will remind them from
time to time to go there instead of to the general delivery counter
for special school topics. She will furnish a weekly memorandum of her
essay work, this especially in the high school. She will send a
warning note when her whole class is to descend upon us in a body at
the busiest part of the afternoon, thereby probably saving our
reputation in the minds of these young people whom we are laboring to
convince that the library is an inexhaustible storehouse of
information, equal to any demand which may be made upon it. Now is
the time for them to put their theoretical knowledge into practice,
and we must often turn them loose with the reference books to find
their own way, if we would be able in the future to deny the
accusation that we are fostering laziness by having the very page and
line pointed out. I really believe that when the present library and
school movement, has had time to exert its influence over even one
generation, unlimited possibilities will unfold. Think what it will
be to have our legislatures and city councils, our school and library
boards and corps of teachers, drawn from the ranks of those who have
grown up in the atmosphere of the public library to a true
appreciation of its value.
Principles and methods and the part of the public library in giving
library instruction are presented by Gilbert O. Ward, Supervisor of
High School Libraries, Cleveland, Ohio, in Public Libraries, July,
1912. This and its allied subjects are more comprehensively treated in
several of the articles included in the first volume of the present
series, entitled "Library and School." Gilbert O. Ward was born in
1880 in New York City, and was educated in the New York City public
schools. He was graduated from Columbia University in 1902 and from
the Pratt Institute Library School in 1908. In 1908- 1909 he was an
assistant in the Pratt Institute Free Library. Since 1909 he has been
a member of the staff of the Cleveland Public Library, as librarian of
the Technical High School in 1909-1910, and as technical librarian
since 1910. From 1911 to 1913 he served as Supervisor of High School
Branches. Mr. Ward has published "Practical use of books and
libraries: an elementary textbook for use with high school classes."
The term "elementary library instruction" is limited here to any
instruction given in the technical use of books and libraries to
students under college or normal school grade. The object of this
paper is to review briefly, (1) the reasons for giving such
instruction, (2) subjects and some methods suitable for grade and high
schools, (3) the part of the public library in giving such
instruction. The subject of bibliographical instruction for school
children has become more important in recent years because of changes
which have taken place in school methods. Schools now place much less
reliance than formerly upon text-books, while on the other hand they
require of the student more collateral reading and reference work.
This is especially true in courses in English and history; for
instance where the high school student formerly studied about Chaucer
in a textbook, he is now more likely required to read a selection.
This method while more fruitful in results than the old text-book
method presents new difficulties both to teacher and to student. On
the teacher's part, it is no longer sufficient to assign 10 pages for
study and have done with it. References must be consulted and assigned
to the students for written or oral report. With the troubles of the
teacher however, we shall have nothing to do in the present paper. On
the student's part, instead of being able to sit down to a compact
account in a single book, he is required to use perhaps a dozen books
in the course of a month, to say nothing of possible magazine
articles. In fine, instead of a single book, he must use a library.
The practical effect of this condition is that without some
understanding of the scientific use of books and of the possibilities
of either high school or public library, the student wastes his time
and finds these studies an increased burden. The ordinary student is
ignorant of how to handle books. The primary purpose of formal library
instruction is clearly then to do away with the friction which hinders
the student in his or her work. There is no charm in bibliographical
information as such and no excuse for attempting to teach a child
merely curious or interesting facts for which he has no natural
appetite or use. An example of this mistake is the attempt to acquaint
the student with very many reference books, or go deeply into the
subject of classification. The subject of library instruction in
public schools conveniently divides itself into two parts, (1)
instruction in grade schools, (2) instruction in high schools. I have
elsewhere rather full tentative outlines by way of suggestion, and
limit myself at this point to more general discussion. In elementary
classes, the subject matter must be simple, first because the needs of
the student are simple, and secondly because it is more easily and
willingly taught if simple. The subjects which suggest themselves are:
(1) The physical care of a book, (2) printed parts of a book, (3) the
dictionary, (4) the public library. The physical care of a book comes
naturally first because children have to handle books before they can
read them for pleasure, or need to use them as reference helps. The
subject is important both to librarian and to school boards because it
affects the question of book replacement, and hence the expenditure
of public money. Speaking broadly, it is a question of conservation.
The ordinary book, not the reference book, is the one with which the
student will always have most to deal; therefore as soon as he is old
enough, or as soon as his text books can serve for practical
illustration, the important printed parts of the ordinary books can be
called to his attention. It should be sufficient to include the title
page (title, author's name, and date), table of contents and index.
The study of the dictionary (the first reference book) should be
taken up first with the pocket dictionaries when these are used in
class and the children should be practiced in discovering and
understanding the kinds of information given with each word. Then,
when the unabridged is attacked later, the essentials will be
familiar, and the mind freer to attack the somewhat complex problems
of arrangement and added information, e.g., synonyms, quotations, etc.
After proper care of books, and the use of an ordinary book, and the
use of a simple reference book, the next natural step is to the use of
the public library. The talk on the public library obviously includes
some description of the library's purpose and resources both for use
and amusement, a very general description of the arrangement of the
books, possibly some description of the card catalog—personally I am
somewhat skeptical as to the utility of the card catalog for grade
pupils—and finally, possibly an explanation of the encyclopedia. The
instructor for all the subjects mentioned excepting the public library
is logically the teacher, because the subjects must be introduced as
occasion arises in class. For instance the time for teaching the
physical care of a book is when a book is first put into the child's
hands. For the talk on the public library, the library itself is
obviously the place, and the children's librarian the instructor Some
special methods which suggest themselves are as follows: for the
physical care of a book, a class drill in opening, holding, shutting,
laying down, etc., rewards for the cleanest books, etc.; for the card
catalogue, sample sets of catalogue cards (author, title and
subject). The latter method is successfully used by the Binghamton
(N. Y.) public library. In high school, students vary in age from the
grammar school boy on the one side, to the college freshman on the
other, and the subjects and methods of instruction vary accordingly.
In the matter of bibliographical instruction this greater range is
reflected in a closer study of reference tools, including those parts
of an ordinary book not taken up in the grades, (e.g., copyright date,
preface, peculiar indexes, etc.), the unabridged dictionary, selected
reference books, card catalog, magazine indexes, etc. The intelligent
care of books can be re-emphasized by an explanation of book structure
from dissected examples. The specific subjects to be taught will vary
with the time available, the class of the student, the subjects taught
in school and the method of teaching them, and the material on hand
in the public or school library. As to general methods of
instruction, these also must vary to suit the subject, the age of the
student and the time available. Straight lecturing economizes time but
makes the class restless and inattentive. An oral quiz drawing on the
student's own experience is useful in getting the recitation started
and revives interest when interspersed through a lecture. Each point
should be illustrated by concrete examples from books themselves when
possible, or from the blackboard. The lesson should be concluded by a
written exercise, not too difficult, which should be marked. For
example, the dictionary might be illustrated from the sample sheets
issued by the publishers; and the class should then be given a list of
questions to be answered from the dictionary. The questions can
frequently be framed so as to be answered by a page number instead of
a long answer, and each student should as far as practicable have a
set of questions to answer different from every other student's. If
the high school possesses a library, much of the instruction is most
logically given there. This save the time of the class in travelling
back and forth from the school to the public library, particularly if
the course is an extended one. But why does the instruction of school
children in the use of books and libraries concern the public library?
Because if children learn to use ordinary books intelligently it
means a saving of the librarian's time by her not having to find the
precise page of every reference for a child. It means a diminished
amount of handling of books. It means less disturbance from children
who do not know how to find what they want. Other results will
doubtless suggest themselves. It is not proposed to train the student
to be a perfectly independent investigator. That would be
impracticable and undesirable. It is simply proposed to give him such
bibliographical knowledge as will be distinctly useful to him as a
student now, and later as a citizen and patron of the library. But
what part may the public library play in this instruction? It
obviously may play a very large part in high schools, the librarian
of which it supplies, as in the city of Cleveland. In high schools
when the librarian is appointed by the school authorities, it can
cooperate with the school librarian by lending speakers to describe
the public library, by furnishing sets of specimen catalogue cards for
comparison—for public library cataloging may differ from high school
cataloging—by lending old numbers of the Readers' Guide for practice
in bibliography making, etc., etc. Where there is no high school
library and instruction must be given by the teacher or the public
librarian, again the opportunities of the public library are clear.
First there are teachers to be interested. English and history
teachers most obviously, and department heads of these subjects are
strategic points for attack. The subject of course should never be
forced and a beginning should be made only with those teachers who
seem likely to take interest. In the Binghamton public library before
referred to, the librarian contrived to get the teachers together
socially at the library, and the plan was then discussed before being
put into operation. In laying the foundation for such a campaign, the
librarian should have a simple, but definite plan in mind, based on
her experience with school children so that when asked for suggestion,
she can advance a practicable proposition. Finally, under any
circumstances, the public library can always be open for visits from
classes, and ready to give class instruction in either library or
school room as necessity or opportunity suggests. These methods are of
course well known. Much informal instruction can also be given to
students on using the index of an ordinary book, or the encyclopedia
as occasion arises. Summing up the chief points of this superficial
review, we have seen (1) that the change in teaching methods has made
the subject of library instruction important. (2) That the subjects of
such instruction should be simple, and that both subjects and methods
must be adapted to the occasion, (3) and finally that the public
library is interested in the subject from a practical point of view
and is able to take an influential part in shaping and administering
courses.
The first article quoted on the subject of discipline was contributed
to The Library Journal, October, 1901, by Miss Lutie E. Stearns, who
gives the experience of a number of librarians and interprets them
from her own standpoint. Lutie Eugenia Stearns was born in Stoughton,
Mass.; was graduated from the Milwaukee State Normal School in 1887,
and taught in the public schools for two years. From 1890 to 1897 she
was in charge of the circulating department of the Milwaukee Public
Library; from 1897 to 1914 she was connected with the Wisconsin
Library Commission, part of the time as chief of the Travelling
Library Department. Miss Stearns now devotes her time to public
lecturing. In these days of children's shelves, corners, or
departments, or when, in lieu of such separation, the juvenile
population fairly overruns the library itself, the question of
discipline ofttimes becomes a serious one. The pages of library
journals, annual reports, bulletins, primers, and compendiums may be
searched in vain for guidance. How to inculcate a spirit of quiet and
orderliness among the young folks in general; how to suppress
giggling girls; what to do with the unruly boy or "gang" of boys
—how best to win or conquer them, or whether to expel them
altogether; how to deal with specific cases of malicious mischief or
flagrant misbehavior and rowdiness—all these questions sometimes come
to be of serious importance to the trained and untrained librarian.
It was with a view of gaining the experience of librarians in this
matter that letters were recently sent to a large number of
librarians, asking for devices used in preserving order and quiet in
the library. The replies are of great interest, the most surprising
and painful result of the symposium being the almost universal
testimony that the leading device used in preserving order is the
policeman! One librarian even speaks of his library as being "well
policed" in ALL of its departments. Personally, we think the presence
of such an officer is to be greatly deplored, believing him to be as
much out of place in a library as he would be in enforcing order in a
church or school room. The term of a school teacher would be short
lived, indeed, who would be compelled to resort to such measures. In
several instances, janitors do police duty, being invested with the
star of authority; and in one case the librarian, who openly confesses
to a lack of sentiment in the matter, calls upon the janitor to
thrash the offender! "The unlucky youth who gets caught has enough of
a story to tell to impress transgressors for a long time to come,"
writes the librarian. "The average boy believes in a thrashing, and it
is much better in the end for him and for others to administer it and
secure reverence for the order of the library." In one state at
least, Massachusetts, there is a special law imposing a penalty for
disturbance; and one librarian reports that he has twice had boys
arrested and tried for disturbing readers. Another librarian does not
go as far as this but adopts the device of showing unruly boys a
photograph of the State Reform School and the cadets on parade. "The
mischief is quite subdued before I am half through," she writes, "and
they frequently return bringing other boys to see the photograph. This
fact undoubtedly acts as a check upon the boys many times." A
pleasing contrast is offered to such drastic and unwholesome methods
as these by the gentle and cheery methods pursued by a librarian who
says, "The children in this library talk less than the grown-ups. When
they do raise their voices, I go up to them and tell them in a very
low tone that if everybody else in the room were making as much noise
as they, it would be a very noisy place. That stops them. If children
walk too heavily or make a noise on the stairs, I affect surprise and
remark in a casual way that I did not know that it was circus day
until I heard the elephants. This produces mouse-like stillness at
once. Really, I know no other devices except being very impressive and
putting quietness on the ground of other peoples' rights." But it is
not always such smooth sailing. One librarian writes: "We have had no
end of trouble in a small branch which we have opened in a settlement
in a part of our city almost entirely occupied by foreign born
residents. A great many boys have come there for the sole purpose of
making a row. We have had every sort of mischief, organized and
unorganized. We have had to put boys out and we have had many free
fights, much to the amusement and pleasure of the boys. We have never
resorted to arrests, but instructed the young man who acted as body
guard to the young lady assistants to hold his own as best he could in
these melees. I finally resorted to the plan of taking the young man
away and letting the young ladies be without their guard. This has
resulted most satisfactorily. The order has been much better, and
while I cannot say that we are free from disorder, nothing like the
state of things that before existed now obtains. The manager of the
Settlement House overheard a gang of these very bad boys consulting on
the street a few nights ago, something in this wise: 'Come, boys,
let's go to the library for some fun!' Another boy said, 'Who's
there?' The reply was, 'Oh! only Miss Y——; don't let's bother her,'
and the raid was not made. Of course we have done everything ordinary
and extraordinary that we know about in the way of trying to interest
the boys and having a large number of assistants to be among them and
watch them, but nothing has succeeded so well as to put the girls
alone in the place and let things take their course." The experience
of another librarian also furnishes much food for thought. She writes:
"I could almost say I am glad that others have trouble with that imp
of darkness, the small boy. Much as I love him, there are times when
extermination seems the only solution of the difficulty. However, our
children's room is a paradise to what it was a year ago, and so I
hope. The only thing is to know each boy as well as possible,
something of his home and school, if he will tell you about them. The
assistants make a point of getting acquainted when only a few children
are in. This winter I wrote to the parents of several of the leaders,
telling them I could not allow the children in the library unless the
parents would agree to assist me with the discipline. This meant that
about six boys have not come back to us. I was sorry, but after giving
the lads a year's trial I decided there was no use in making others
suffer for their misdeeds. A severe punishment is to forbid the boys a
'story hour.' They love this and will not miss an evening unless
compelled to remain away. To give some of the worst boys a share in
the responsibility of caring for the room often creates a feeling of
ownership which is wholesome. Our devices are as numerous and unique
as the boys themselves. Some of them would seem absurd to an outsider.
The unexpected always happens; firmness, sympathy and ingenuity are
the virtues required and occasionally the added dignity of a
policeman, who makes himself quite conspicuous, once in a while."
Another reply is a follows: "Miss C—— has turned over your inquiry
concerning unruly boys to me to answer. I protested that every boy
that made a disturbance was to me a special problem—and very
difficult; and I can't tell what we do with unruly boys as a class. I
remember I had a theory that children were very susceptible to
courtesy and gentleness, and I meant to control the department by
teaching the youngsters SELF control and a proper respect for the
rights of the others who wanted to study in peace and quiet. I never
went back on my theory; but occasionally, of a Saturday afternoon,
when there were a hundred children or more and several teachers in the
room and I was trying to answer six questions a minute, I did have to
call in our impressive janitor. He sat near the gate and looked over
the crowd and when he scowled the obstreperous twelve-year- olds made
themselves less conspicuous. A policeman sometimes wandered in, but I
disliked to have to resort to the use of muscular energy. I learned
the names of the most troublesome boys and gradually collected quite a
bit of information about them, their addresses, where they went to
school, their favorite authors, who they seemed 'chummy' with, etc.,
and when they found I didn't intend to be needlessly disagreeable and
wasn't always watching for mischief, but credited them with honor and
friendly feelings, I think some of them underwent a change of heart. I
made a point of bowing to them on the street, talking to them and
especially getting them to talk about their books; had them help me
hang the bulletins and pictures, straighten up the books etc. Twice an
evil spirit entered into about a dozen of the boys and my patience
being kin to the prehistoric kind that 'cometh quickly to an end,'
after a certain point, I gave their names to the librarian, who wrote
to their parents. That settled things for a while and they got out of
the habit of talking so much. A serious conversation with one boy
ended with the request that he stay from the library altogether for a
month and when he came back he would begin a new slate. Once, within a
week, he came in, or started to, when I caught his eye. Then he
beckoned to another boy and I think a transaction of some kind took
place so that he got his book exchanged. But he saw I meant what I
said. The day after the month was up he appeared, we exchanged a
friendly smile and I had no more trouble with him." We deem the
question of banishment a serious one. Unruly boys are often just the
ones that need the influence of the library most in counteracting the
ofttimes baneful influence of a sordid home life. It is a good thing,
morally, to get hold of such boys at an early age and to win their
interest in and attendance at the library rather than at places of low
resort. To withhold a boy's card may also be considered a doubtful
punishment— driving the young omnivorous reader to the patronage of
the "underground travelling library" with its secret stations and
patrons. Before suspension or expulsion is resorted to, the librarian
should clearly distinguish between thoughtless exuberance of spirits
and downright maliciousness. "If we only had a boys' room,"
plaintively writes one sympathetic librarian, "where we could get
them together without disturbing their elders and could thus let them
bubble over with their 'animal spirits' without infringing on other
people, I believe we could win them for good." A number of librarians,
however, report no difficulty in dealing with the young folks. Some
state that the children easily fall into the general spirit of the
place and are quiet and studious. "We just expect them to be
gentlemen," says one, "and they rarely fail to rise to the demand." In
such places will generally be found floors that conduce to stillness,
rubber-tipped chairs, and low-voiced assistants. "Our tiled floors are
noisy—not our children," confesses one librarian. The use of
noiseless matting along aisles most travelled will be found helpful.
But one library mentions the use of warning signs as being of
assistance, this being a placard from the Roycroft Shop reading, "Be
gentle and keep the voice low." In a library once visited were found
no less than eighteen signs of admonition against dogs, hats,
smoking, whispering, handling of books, etc., etc.—the natural
result being that, in their multiplicity, no one paid any attention
to any of them. If a sign is deemed absolutely necessary, it should be
removed after general attention his been called to it. The best
managed libraries nowadays are those wherein warnings are conspicuous
for their absence. Next to the officious human "dragon" that guards
its portals, there is probably no one feature in all the great
libraries of a western metropolis that causes so much caustic comment
and rebellious criticism as that of an immense placard in its main
reading room bearing in gigantic letters the command, SILENCE—this
perpetual affront being found in a great reference library frequented
only by scholarly patrons. Such a placard is as much out of place
there as it would be in a school for deafmutes. The solution of the
whole problem of discipline generally resolves itself into the
exercise of great tact, firmness, and, again, gentleness. There should
be an indefinable something in the management of the library which
will draw people in and an atmosphere most persuasive in keeping them
there and making them long to return. A hard, imperious, domineering,
or condescending spirit on the part of librarian and assistants often
incites to rebellion or mutiny on the part of patrons. As opposed to
this, there should ever be the spirit of quietude, as exemplified in
the words previously quoted—"Be gentle and keep the voice low."
The following paper embodies practical suggestions for helping to
give the children's room a "natural, friendly atmosphere." It was
read by Miss Clara W. Hunt before the Long Island Library Club,
February 19, 1903. A sketch of Miss Hunt appears on page 135. So many
of the problems of discipline in a children's room would cease to be
problems if the material conditions of the room itself were ideal,
that I shall touch first upon this, the less important branch of my
subject. For although the height of a table and width of an aisle are
of small moment compared with the personal qualifications of the
children's librarian, yet since it is possible for us to determine the
height of a table, when mere determining what were desirable will not
insure its production where a human personality is concerned, it is
practical to begin with what there is some chance of our attaining.
And the question of fitting up the room properly is by no means
unimportant, but decidedly the contrary. For, given a children's
librarian who is possessed of the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of
Job, the generalship of Napoleon, and put her into a room in which
every arrangement is conducive to physical discomfort, and even such a
paragon will fail of attaining that ideal of happy order which she
aims to realize in her children's reading room. The temper even of an
Olympian is not proof against uncomfortable surroundings. Children
are very susceptible, though unconsciously to themselves, to physical
discomfort. You may say you do not think so, for you know they would
sit through a whole morning and afternoon at school without taking off
their rubbers, if the teacher did not remind them to do it, and so,
you argue, this shows that they do not mind the unpleasant cramped
feeling in the feet which makes a grown person frantic. But while the
child himself cannot tell what is wrong with him, the wise teacher
knows that his restlessness and irritability are directly traceable
to a discomfort he is not able to analyze, and so the cause is not
removed without her oversight. While the children's librarian will not
have the close relations with the boys and girls that their
school-teachers have, she may well learn of the latter so to study
what will make for the child's comfort, that, in the perfect
adaptation of her room to its work, half the problems of discipline
are solved in advance. Let us suppose that the librarian is to have
the satisfaction of planning a new children's room. In order to learn
what conveniences to adopt and what mistakes to avoid, she visits
other libraries and notes their good and weak points. She will soon
decide that the size of a room is an important factor in the question
of discipline. Let a child who lives in a cramped little flat where
one can hardly set foot down without stepping on a baby come into a
wide, lofty, spacious room set apart for children's reading, and,
other conditions in the library being as they should the mere effect
of the unwonted spaciousness will impress him and have a tendency to
check the behavior that goes with tenement- house conditions. We of
the profession are so impressed with the atmosphere that should
pervade a library, that a very small and unpretentious collection of
books brings our voices involuntarily to the proper library pitch. But
this is not true to the small arab, who, coming from the cluttered
little kitchen at home to a small, crowded children's room where the
aisles are so narrow that the quickest way of egress is to crawl
under the tables, sees only the familiar sights—disorder, confusion,
discomfort —in a different place, and carries into the undignified
little library room the uncouth manners that are the rule at home. In
planning a new children's room then, give it as much space as you can
induce the librarian, trustees, and architects to allow. Unless you
are building in the North Woods, or the Klondike or the Great American
Desert you will never have any difficulty in getting small patrons
enough to fill up your space and keep the chairs and tables from
looking lonesome. The question of light has a direct bearing on the
children's behavior. Ask any school teacher, if you have never had
occasion to notice it yourself, which days are the noisiest in her
school-room, the bright, sunny ones, or the dingy days when it is
difficult to see clearly across the room. Ask her if the pencils
don't drop on the floor oftener, if small feet do not tramp and
scrape more, if chairs don't tip over with louder reports, if tempers
are not more keenly on edge, on a dark day than a bright one. I need
not say "yes," for one hundred out of a hundred will say it
emphatically. So, if you cannot have a room bright with sunshine, do
at least be lavish with artificial light, for your own peace of mind.
Floors rendered noiseless by some good covering help wonderfully to
keep voices pitched low. I have seen this illustrated almost amusingly
in Newark, where frequent visits of large classes were made from the
schools to the public library. The tramp of forty or fifty pairs of
feet in the marble corridors made such a noise that the legitimate
questions and answers of children and librarian had to be given in
tones to be heard over the noise of the feet. The change that came
over the voices and faces as the class stepped on the noiseless
"Nightingale" flooring of the great reading room was almost funny. The
feet made no noise, therefore it was not necessary to raise the voice
to be heard, and no strictures of attendants were needed to maintain
quiet in that room. Under the head of furniture I will give only one
or two hints of things worth remembering. One is that whatever you
decide upon for a chair, in point of size, shape, or style, make sure,
before you pay your bill, that it cannot be easily overturned. If you
have a chair that will tip over every time a child's cloak swings
against it, your wrinkles will multiply faster than your years
warrant. And reason firmly with your electrician if he has any plan
in mind of putting lamps on your tables of such a sort that they
positively invite the boy of a scientific (or Satanic) turn of mind to
astonish the other children by the way the lights brighten and go out,
all because he has discovered that a gentle pressure to his foot on
the movable plug under the table can be managed so as to seem purely
innocent and accidental while he sits absorbed in the contents of his
book. I would also ask why it is that librarians think we need so MUCH
furniture, when our rooms are as small as they sometimes are? We seem
to think it inevitable that the floor space should be filled up with
tables, but, as Mr. Anderson remarked in his paper at Magnolia, if we
saw a family at home gathered around the table, leaning their elbows
upon it and facing the light, we should think it a very unnatural and
unhygienic position to adopt. Why should we, in the library, encourage
children to do just what physiologists tell us they should not do? Why
provide tables at all for any but those actually needing them as desks
for writing up their reference work? For the many who come merely to
read, why is not a chair and a book, with light on the page of the
book, and not glaring into the child's eyes, enough for his comfort?
This is worth thinking about, I am sure, and worked out in some
satisfactory, artistic little back-to-back benches perhaps, would
change the stereotyped appearance of the children's room, and give the
extra floor space which is always sadly needed. It is an axiom in
library architecture that perfect supervision should be made easily
possible. In a children's room this should be taken very literally.
There should be no floor cases, no alcoves in the room, no
arrangements by which a knot of small mischief makers can conceal
themselves from the librarian for she will find such an error in
planning, a thorn in the flesh as long as the room stands. So much
time devoted to the planning of the children's room, may give the
impression that the room is of more importance than the librarian. It
is a platitude, however, to say that the ideal children's librarian,
with every material condition against her, will do a thousand times
more than the ideal room with the wrong person in it. The
qualifications necessary to make the right sort of a disciplinarian
are, many of them, too intangible for words, but a few things strike
me as not always distinctly recognized by librarians. In the first
place, no librarian should compel that member of his staff who
dislikes children to do the work of the children's department. While
on general principles to let an attendant choose the work she likes to
do would be disastrous, since the person best fitted for dusting might
choose to be reference librarian, in this one particular at any rate,
the wishes of the staff should be consulted. For while all may be
conscientious, faithful workers wherever placed, mere
conscientiousness will not make a person who frankly says children
bore and annoy her, a success in the children's room. Love for
children should be the first requisite, and the librarian who puts a
person in charge of that work against her will, will hurt the
department in a way that will be surely felt sooner or later. While
love for children, sympathy with, and understanding of them are all of
the first importance in the composition of a children's librarian,
some experience in handling them in large numbers (as in public
school teaching, mission schools, boys' clubs, etc.) is extremely
desirable. To deal with a mob of very mixed youngsters is a different
matter from telling stories to a few well-brought up little ones in
your own comfortable nurseries. The best qualification for the work of
children's librarian is successful experience as a teacher, in these
happy days when it is coming to be the rule that law and liberty may
walk side by side in the school-room, and where firmness on the
teacher's part in no wise interferes with friendliness on the child's.
The children's librarian should have the sort of nerves that are not
set on edge by children. This does not mean that she may not be a
nervous person in other ways, indeed she must be, for the nerveless,
jelly-fish character can never be a success in dealing with children.
But I have seen people of highly nervous organization who were really
unconscious of the ceaseless tramp, tramp, of the children's feet, the
hum and clatter and moving about inevitable in a children's library.
Visitors come into the room and say to such a person, "How can you
stand this for many minutes at a time?" and the librarian looks round
in surprise at the idea of there being anything hard to bear when she
hears only the little buzz that means to her hundreds of little ones
at the most susceptible age, eagerly, happily absorbing the ennobling
ideals, the poetic fancies, the craving for knowledge that are going
to make them better men and women than they would have been without
this glimpse into the realms beyond their daily surroundings. To
attempt to enumerate, one by one, the qualities that combine to make a
wise and successful disciplinarian would be fruitless. We can talk
endlessly about what OUGHT to be. The most practical thing to do to
obtain such a person, is not to take a raw subject and pour advice
upon her in hopes she will develop some day, but to hunt till you find
the right one and then offer her salary enough to get her for your
library. And this suggests a subject worthy of future discussion, that
head librarians should reckon this to be a profession within our
profession, just as the kindergartner is a specialist within the
teaching body, demanding a higher type of training than is the rule,
and PAYING THE PRICE TO GET IT. Just a word about what degree of
order and quiet to expect, and to work for, in a children's room. Are
we to try to maintain that awful hush that sends cold chills down the
spine of the visitor on his first entering a modern reading room, and
tempts him to back out in fright lest the ticking of his watch may
draw all eyes upon him? I should be very sorry to have a children's
room as perfectly noiseless as a reading room for adults. It is so
unnatural for a roomful of healthy boys and girls to be absolutely
quiet for long periods that if I found such a state of affairs I
should be sure something was wrong—that all spontaneity was being
repressed, that that freedom of the shelves which is a great educator
was being denied because moving about makes too much noise, that the
question and answer and comment which mark the friendly understanding
between librarian and child, and which make a good book circulate
because one boy tells another that it is good, were done away with in
order that no slight noise might be heard. If there were such a thing
as a meter to register sound to be hung in a children's room beside
the thermometer, I should not be alarmed if it indicated a pretty high
degree, provided I could look around the room and observe the
following conditions: a large room, full of contented children, no one
of whom was wilfully noisy or annoying, most of them being quietly
reading, the ones who were moving about asking in low tones the
children's librarian or each other, perfectly legitimate questions
that were to help them choose the right thing. It is inevitable that
heavy boots, young muscles that have not learned self-control, the
joyous frankness of childhood that does not think to keep its eager
happiness over a good "find" under decorous restraint, will result in
more actual noise than obtains in the adults' reading room. And yet,
while the "sound meter" of the children's room would register farther
up, it might really be more orderly than the other room, for every
child might be using his room as it was intended to be used, while the
adult department might contain a couple of women who came in for the
express purpose of visiting, and yet who knew how to whisper so softly
as not to be invited to retire. We must remember that, if children
make more noise, they do not mind each other's noise as adults do. The
dropping of a book or overturning of a chair, the walking about do not
disturb the young student's train of thought; and while I do not wish
to be quoted as advocating a noisy room, but on the contrary would
work for a quiet one, day in and day out, I do feel that allowances
must be made for noises that are not intended to be annoying, and that
we should not sacrifice to the ideal of deathly stillness the good we
hope to do through the child's love for the room in which he feels
free to express himself in a natural, friendly atmosphere.
The Wisconsin Library Bulletin for July-August, 1908, is given up to
the presentation of widely varying experiences in regard to
discipline, in a report by Mary Emogene Hazeltine and Harriet Price
Sawyer, who sent a list of ten questions to 125 librarians, and
incorporated the replies. Mary Emogene Hazeltine was born in
Jamestown, N. Y., in 1868, and was graduated from Wellesley College in
1891. She was librarian of the James Prendergast Free Library in
Jamestown from 1893 to 1906, when she became Preceptor of the Library
School of the University of Wisconsin, the position she now holds. She
has given much help to small libraries. Mrs. Harriet Price Sawyer was
born in Kent, Ohio, received the degree of B. L. from Oberlin College:
was an assistant in the Oberlin College Library 1902-1903; was
graduated from the Pratt Institute Library School in 1904; was
librarian of the State Normal School at New Paltz, N. Y., 1904-1905; a
student in the University of Berlin, Germany, 1905-1906; Library
Visitor and Instructor, Wisconsin Library Commission, 1906-1910. Since
that time she has been chief of the Instructional Department in the
St. Louis Public Library, including charge of the training class. In
1917 this class was expanded into a library school, with Mrs. Sawyer
as principal. In March, a list of questions concerning the problem of
discipline in the library was sent out to 125 librarians. The answers
show a most interesting variety of experiences and conditions. A few
report that it is no longer a "vexed" problem, and one librarian
thinks that it is "only a well-maintained tradition," but most of the
writers agree with Miss Eastman of Cleveland, who says: "You will note
that while conditions vary somewhat in the different branches,
discipline is a question which we have always with us whenever we work
with children. I do believe, however, that each year places the
library on a little higher and more dignified plane in the minds of
the children as well as the public generally; and that the question of
discipline becomes more and more a question of dealing with
individuals." As to disturbance without the library, there is but one
opinion, viz., to turn the matter over to the policemen, and this is
reported in every instance to have put an end to the trouble. Any
serious misbehavior within the library has been treated by the
suspension of library privileges, ranging in severity of sentence from
one day to a month or, in a few cases, even longer. The variation,
however, in the manner of carrying out the sentence forms an
interesting study, from the lightest form reported, at Chippewa Falls,
where the child may draw a book, but remains in the library only long
enough to secure it, to the drastic measures taken at Sheboygan where
the students were ordered out of the library en masse even in the
midst of preparation for a test in history. Miss Wood's plan is an
interesting one, but the tactful helpers are difficult to find. The
card system at Kenosha will no doubt solve the difficulty for many
librarians who find the initiative in the disciplining of the older
visitors at the library most difficult to undertake. In some
communities, the personal letter or visit to the parents has proved
most helpful, and, doubtless, the plan reported by Miss Lord of asking
the boy to sign his name will find favor in the larger libraries. The
aim of discipline, according to educators, is the moral foundation of
character. The library as well as the school has to make up for the
lack of moral training in many homes, and good conduct must be taught
by the librarian as well as by the teacher. The whole matter is very
well summed up by Miss Dousman of Milwaukee. "It seems to me that
order and good behavior are absolutely imperative in the library. Good
manners, that outward and visible sign of the respect for the rights
of others, should be expected of children. How? By never failing
yourself to treat them with respect, courtesy and justice. To
distinguish between unavoidable disturbances and those made with
mischievous intent. To see and hear only the things you can prevent,
else your nerves will get the better of your judgment. "Allow
children as much freedom as possible, consistent with the rights of
others—and don't nag. "In case of bad behavior, make a tactful and
pleasant appeal to the child first, thereby giving him a chance to
reinstate himself. This appeal failing, reprimand in no uncertain
terms. Dismissal from the room is the natural punishment for refusal
to obey regulations. Obedience as a virtue has not entirely gone out
of fashion. Suspension for a definite or indefinite period, according
to the offense is necessary for the maintenance of good discipline.
Limitation as to the number of times a week a mischievous child may
visit the library has a good effect. A suspended sentence of permanent
dismissal on failure to behave has a most salutary effect. Reinstate
as soon as there is an evident desire to improve. "In our zeal to
control the child, some have lost sight of the fact that it is quite
as important to teach the child to control himself; that if he is to
become a good citizen, he cannot learn too early to respect the rights
of others." At a meeting of the Massachusetts Library Club, reported
in Public Libraries, v. 12, p. 362 (Nov. 1907), Miss Harriet H.
Stanley of Brookline said of "Discipline in a Children's Room," that
unnatural restraint was to be avoided, but the restraint required for
the common good was wholesome, and that children were more, rather
than less, comfortable under it, when it was exercised with judgment
and in a kindly spirit. "Judgment comes with experience. ... As far as
you are able, be just. If your watchfulness fails sometimes to detect
the single offender in a group of children and you must send out the
group to put an end to some mischief, say so simply, and they will see
that they suffer not from your hard heartedness, but from the
culprit's lack of generosity or from the insufficiency of their
devices for concealing him. Be philosophical. Most disturbance is
only mischief and properly treated will be outgrown. Stop it
promptly, but don't lose your temper, and don't get worked up. To the
juvenile mind, 'getting a rise' out of you is no less exhilarating
than the performance which occasions it. Habitually deny them this
gratification and mischief loses its savor. "Talk little about
wrongdoing. Don't set forth to a child the error of his ways when the
'ways' are in process of being exhibited, and the exhibitor is fully
conscious of their nature. Choose another time—a lucid interval—for
moral suasion. "When children are intentionally troublesome, the
simplest means of discipline is exclusion from the room; when
necessary, formal exclusion for a definite period with a written
notice to parents. The authority of the library should be exercised in
the occasional cases where it is needed, both for the wrongdoer's own
good and for the sake of the example to others. "Provided you are
just and sensible and good-tempered, your patrons will respect the
library more and like you none the less for exacting from them
suitable behavior. We talk a good deal about the library as a place of
refuge for boys and girls from careless homes, and they do deserve
consideration from us, but to learn a proper regard for public law and
order is as valuable as any casual benefit from books. The children of
conscientious parents whether poor or well-to-do also deserve
something at our hands, and we owe it to them to maintain a
respectable standard of conduct for them to share. Let us be
hospitable and reasonable, but let us be courageous enough to insist
that the young citizen treat the library with the respect due to a
municipal institution." It has been impossible to publish in full all
of the replies to the circular letter sent out, but as much as
possible has been incorporated in this report, believing that each
situation delineated may give helpful hints toward the solution of
this general difficulty. The list of questions is given in the
synopsis appended to the admirable and helpful report contributed by
the chief of the children's department in Pittsburgh. Miss Frances
Jenkins Olcott, Pittsburgh After ten years of experience we find our
most difficult question of discipline arises when the older boys and
girls come into the library. They usually come in the evening and we
have the greatest trouble with the boys. Sometimes we suspect that our
trouble with the boys is due to the influence of the girls, who know
how to keep quiet and yet make confusion! The question of discipline
depends largely on the district in which a branch is placed and also
on the planning and equipment of the children's room—in fact of the
whole branch building, and on the personal attention of the branch
librarian toward the children. In answer to question ten I might say
that everything depends on the children's librarian's judgment and
also on the children. Some children come into the library to be sent
home. They wish to see how many times they can make mischief, and it
is really a pleasure to them to have you send them out. In other cases
children are much mortified by being sent from the room. It is
necessary that the children's librarian and her assistants should
know the children individually, especially their names and something
of their home conditions wherever possible. The handling of "gangs"
takes a great deal of tact and sympathy with boys. On the whole,
given a well-planned and equipped children's room, plenty of books, a
sufficient number of the right kind of children's librarians who are
firm, tactful and sympathetic (having a sense of humor and a wide
knowledge of children's books) and by all means a sympathetic branch
librarian, the question of discipline will usually smooth itself out.
We have one room in a crowded tenement district where the right young
woman has produced unusual order. The children come in and go out
happy and interested in their books, and there is little need for
reproof. This is due largely to the fact that we started in with a
determination to have reasonable order and the children learned that
to use the room it was necessary to be orderly, and they are much
happier and get more from the library.
1. At what hour is the discipline most difficult? Discipline is most
difficult during the busiest time, the evening, our branch libraries
being open until 9 o'clock. 2. With what ages do you have the most
trouble? The greatest trouble is with children from 10-16. 3. With
boys or girls, or both? Both boys and girls, but the greatest trouble
with boys. 4. Are the scholars from the High School a special trouble?
It depends on the district in which the branch is situated and the
social conditions of the people visiting the branch. 5. Do any use the
library as a meeting place, or kind of club? This also depends largely
on the district. 6. Do they come in such numbers that they over-run
the library and keep the older people away because of the consequent
confusion, noise, and lack of room? No, excepting under conditions
produced by bad planning of buildings. 7. Do you ever ask for help in
the discipline—from the trustees, police, or others? The branches
which have guards have less difficulty in discipline, otherwise in
some of the crowded districts the janitors and police are occasionally
called in. 8. Do the teachers help by talking to the scholars on the
necessity of behavior in public places? As far as our knowledge goes,
only occasionally. 9. Have you ever addressed the schools on this
topic? No, with one exception, where it proved satisfactory. 10. Do
you ever send unruly children (either older or younger ones) home? If
so, with what result in the case of the individual? With what effect
on the whole problem? For how long do you suspend a child? What are
the terms on which he can return? (a) We always send unruly children
home, procuring their name and address first whenever possible. If we
have to send the same child from the room frequently, a letter is sent
to the parent stating the reason. (b) This has worked well with but
three exceptions in four years. The crucial point is to find the name
of the child. (c) We have never suspended a child for more than two
months unless he were arrested for misbehavior. (d) An apology to the
librarian and good behavior following. (Hazelwood) We send children
from the library. In this district we have two classes of disorderly
children. Those who came from homes where they have had no restraint
of any sort, and have too recently come to the library to have
acquired reading-room manners; and those who know very well how to
conduct themselves, but enjoy making a disturbance. We do our best to
help the former to learn how to conduct themselves quietly—the
essential means of course is to interest them in books and to make
them feel the friendliness of the room. But when a child of the second
class is disorderly, he is first made to sit quite by himself; if he
is persistently noisy, he is sent from the room. The length of time he
is suspended depends on his previous conduct and on the offense in
question; from a day to a month or more. A child usually behaves like
an angel when he first comes back after being out of the library for
any length of time. We have a good many restless children, especially
in winter, whom it is difficult to interest in reading, but who enjoy
pictures. And we have found it useful to have plenty of copies of
especially interesting numbers of illustrated magazines like Outing
and World's Work to give them. And we have a desk list of especially
interesting illustrated books that we find useful for these children.
(East Liberty) Mr. Walter L. Brown, Buffalo, N. Y. Our work, even in
the branches, does not offer much suggestion so far as library
discipline is concerned. I have talked the matter over with all those
having charge of the branches, the work with the children in the main
library, and the depositories at the settlement houses, and they all
agree, without hesitation, that they are having no trouble whatever
with the children of any size. The William Ives Branch, which is in
the district occupied by the Polish and German people, had some
trouble when it occupied a store opening on the street. For a few
weeks after this branch was opened, the rough boys in the neighborhood
bothered by shouting, throwing things in the doors, and forming in
large crowds around the front of the building. The police helped out
by giving us a guard for a brief period. As soon as the novelty of
the library had worn off, and the children began actually to use the
books and get acquainted with the attendants, all trouble seemed to
stop. We also had some trouble at one of the depositories when it was
first opened, this being in a rather unruly district in the lower
part of the city. All is now quiet here, and has been for a number of
years. The consensus of opinion of our staff seems to be that when any
slight disturbance, which is all that we ever have now, occurs that
it is caused by one, two, or three boys. The problem of preventing its
repetition is solved by recognizing these boys, and when matters are
quiet, having a talk with them, gaining their confidence and
friendship. This, of course, is after any punishment is administered.
This has been done in a number of instances, and has always been
successful. Some of the library's best friends among the older boys
have been gained in this way. The only discipline that is exerted is
by sending the children away from the library, and if they are told
that they must stay away for two or three days or a week, this is
final and they are not allowed to return until the time has expired.
If a child is using the Library, this seems to be all the punishment
that is necessary. We should say that in a library where there is any
continued trouble with the young people, it is not their fault, but
the fault of the library, and we should solve it by changing the
library methods. Miss Clara F. Baldwin, Minnesota. Of course we all
know that almost everything depends on the personality of the
librarian, and it has been my observation that the librarians of
strong, winning personality, who make friends with the children and
young people from the start, have little trouble with discipline. Your
question relating to the co-operation with the teachers seems to me
very pertinent. In some cases where discipline in the schools is not
properly maintained, there has been corresponding difficulty in the
library. Does it not all come back to personality, tact, and strength
of character, just as every problem of success or failure does? My
theory is that order must be maintained even if the police have to be
called in, but do not drive the offenders away from the library if you
can possibly help it. They are probably just the ones who need it
most. Sometimes it may mean personal visits to the parents, but I
wouldn't lose a boy or girl if I could possibly hang on to them. Mr.
George F. Bowerman, Washington, D. C. We have your circular letter
inquiring about the discipline in our library as related to school
children. In general I would say that we have very little trouble in
this direction. Most of the trouble we have comes from the colored
element which forms about one-third of the population. We are
striving to get Congress, from which all our appropriations come, to
give us a regular police officer. I am a great believer in the moral
influence of brass buttons. At the present time, our engineer and
fireman are both sworn as special police officers. They both have
police badges, which they can display on occasions. I would, however,
like to have a regular officer in uniform. Miss Isabel Ely Lord,
Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. The difficulties of discipline in this
library arise almost entirely from the nature of the building, as the
chief disturbance with us is the noise of laughing and talking in the
halls. This is done quite innocently because people do not realize
that the big hall, with its beautiful stairway is really a part of the
building and that noise made there echoes through into the various
departments. The children have to cross a wide stretch of intarsia
floor, and any natural, normal child is seized with a desire to run.
For this reason we have the janitor stationed in the lower hall from
twelve to one and three to six each day. When he is there, there is
very little difficulty. In the library rooms we do not have the
trouble that occurs in a community where the constituents of the
Library know each other well. In a big, shifting population like ours,
people meet usually strangers and there is no temptation to disturbing
conversation or to flirtation In the children's room, as indeed in
the adult department, the matter is almost entirely controlled by
personal knowledge of people who offend. A child is spoken to by name
and is made to realize that it is a distinct individual matter if he
or she has offended. There have been occasions in the children's room
when a crowd of the older boys has come in, with evident intention of
making a little disturbance. Miss Moore established the custom, in
such cases, of asking each of these boys to sign his name and address
to a slip—or a separate sheet of paper— and this had usually a
sufficiently quieting effect to obviate the need of anything further.
Occasionally the children's librarian has gone to visit a child's
parents, and so has the librarian. We also have asked some times
fathers and mothers to come to the library to "hold court," but this
has been in cases of theft and suspected theft, and I suppose you do
not include that in your questions of discipline. We lay great
stress, especially in the Children's Room, on the importance of a
perfectly quiet and controlled manner in the assistants. The training
that our children have received in the Story Hour, we feel, to be very
valuable to them. This is a special privilege to which they are
admitted and they recognize it as such. They have learned to come in
and to go out on Story Hour evenings with as much quietness as one can
expect from a body of children, and they are very courteous in the
Story Hours, saying a quiet "Thank you" to the story-teller instead of
indulging in clapping of hands, stamping of feet, etc. These things
help, I think, in the general control of the room, and I think that
Miss Cowing (who is not here now to speak for herself) has occasionaly
disciplined some child by refusing a Story Hour ticket because of
misbehavior in the room. Mr. A. L. Peck, Gloversville, N. Y. This
institution has been in existence over twenty-eight years and during
all this time, there has been no trouble with discipline. I am not
willing to say that our young people or even our older ones, are
better than those of other places, but from the very beginning
everybody was given to understand that they had to live up to a
certain decorum, that is, men and boys have to take off their hats and
disturbing conversation is not permitted. While we do not hesitate to
speak to any who need reminding that reading rooms are for serious
purposes, in all these years we have sent out of the rooms, three
adults and five boys. Our janitor is sworn in as a special policeman
and everybody knows that not only prompt ejection from the room, but
also discipline before the recorder in the city courts would be
forthcoming in consequence of any serious breach of order. I have
never hesitated to make it known that the readers' rights must be
respected and that reading and studying is serious work and our people
have always supported me in this, fully as much as the board of
directors. I do believe that as soon as people understand this, there
will be no trouble, but there must be no vacillating policy. The
trouble we have occasionally with boys, mainly, is that they try to be
smart and will deliberately put books on the shelves bottom side up,
but one of the youngsters was caught in the act and promptly sent
home. His father was notified and fully agreed with us that the
library was no place for such mischief and promised that his youngster
would behave henceforth. This had a wholesome effect on all the others
and there has been no trouble since. I also have to say that our
children's room is 45 feet away from the adult department and we do
not permit young people under 14 to roam about the building, we keep
them strictly in their own room. As soon as young people are admitted
to the high school, we at once admit them to the entire library even
if they should be under 14 years of age. They consider this a great
privilege and we thus far have had no trouble. The high school
students come here for study as well as for reference work and make
proper use of the library. They know from experience that we do not
allow any nonsense and under no consideration would we permit the
library to be a place of rendezvous for promiscuous visiting. Our
institution seems to discipline itself without any difficulty. The
principle upon which we work is very simple. "Readers demand quiet,
therefore, conversation even in low tones, is strictly prohibited."
This is literally carried out and not the least exception is made.
Posters, with the rule quoted above printed on small cards are
distributed through the rooms, placed on the tables and renewed from
time to time. As soon as the public realizes that it is the intention
of the Board of Managers and their representative officers to live up
strictly to this rule and to carry it out at all hazards, they soon
learn to behave and not much difficulty is experienced. Mr. A. L.
Bailey, Wilmington, Del. The discipline in this library while
occasionally bothersome, does not on the whole cause us much
annoyance. The offenders are chiefly students from the high school who
use the library in the afternoon and forget at times that the reading
room is a place of quiet. No special measures have been taken to
preserve quiet. Generally once speaking to the offender will prove
sufficient to stop whispering or loud conversation, but if he is
persistent in talking or whispering, we request that he leave the
room. This always has a good effect, for its seldom happens that we
have to expel the same person more than once. In asking readers to
leave the reading room, we realize that we run the risk of making them
so angry that they will never again make use of the library but we
believe that the great majority who are quiet and well-behaved shall
not be annoyed if we can prevent it. While the older children from the
schools are the chief offenders, perhaps the most exasperating are the
influential women of the city who come to the library on market days
(Wednesday and Saturday mornings) and visit more or less with each
other. This is a custom established long before the library became
free, and owing to the prominence of the offenders and their real
interest in and intelligent use of the library, one with which it is
hard to deal. A sign placed in the reading room requesting readers to
refrain from all unnecessary conversation has had a most noticeable
effect on this class of readers and the annoyance is much less than it
was three years ago. The juvenile department occasionally has to call
upon a policeman to help keep order. This, however, is due to the fact
that there is a large hallway and broad stairways just outside the
rooms which the library occupies. Discipline in this part of the
building is a cause of great annoyance. We cannot afford to pay a
guard to stay in the hall and as the police force is not sufficient
for the city's needs, a policeman can only spend a few moments as he
passes by on his beat. In the juvenile room itself we have trouble
only with gangs of young negroes and this only occasionally. When they
come to the library it is hard to interest them and the demoralizing
influence that they introduce compels us at times to expel them and
even to forbid them to return. We have only once sent special word to
the schools asking teachers to request children to preserve order. We
believe that the teachers, so far as they are able, try to inculcate
principles of right behavior in public places, but we believe that
the discipline of this library is entirely in our own hands, and until
the situation becomes one with which we can not cope, we prefer not to
call upon the schools for assistance. Miss Caroline M. Underhill,
Utica, N. Y. One of the problems in guiding these intermediate readers
does not pertain to their reading, but to controlling the lawlessness
which is frequently manifested. General restlessness, a desire for
fun always and everywhere, characterizes many of the young people who
frequent our libraries. A difference in locality brings different
problems, but this one is universal. In Utica our new building brought
increased opportunity to those inclined to fun. The strangeness of it,
access to the stack, curiosity concerning the glass floors, the
book-lift, the elevator, and even the electric lights, with the
constant moving about of people who came simply to see the building,
increased this tendency to restlessness among the young readers. In
addition to this came the everpresent problem of the flirtatious boy
and girl. Our wish to let them enjoy all possible liberty was soon
interpreted to mean license. Finding that they did not yield to
ordinary methods, it was decided, as an emergency measure, to issue
"stack cards" through the second year in High School. These were small
cards having Utica Public Library printed at the top: then space for
name and address, followed by "is hereby granted the privilege of
using the stack for reading and study." These gave permission to use
the stacks for selecting books and for reading at the stack tables.
Before issuing these cards, each boy and girl was instructed as to
the right use of a library and the consideration due from one reader
to another, and then asked to sign a register in which they promised
to use the library properly whenever they came. These cards were to be
shown each time they wished to go into the stacks, but in no way did
they interfere with drawing books at the desk, if they had neglected
to bring them. Any mis-behavior took away this stack card until they
were again ready to fulfill their promise. This plan was entirely
foreign to our theories, our wishes, or our beliefs, but in an
emergency proved helpful in making the boys and girls realize we were
in EARNEST when we said we wished to have it more quiet. Best of all,
it gave an opportunity for a little personal talk with each one, and
though of necessity this took much time, we considered it well worth
while. Decided improvement made it unnecessary to continue the use of
the card. To the older boys and girls we take pains to explain why we
ask them to respect the place and the rights of others. Occasionally
we have written a letter to those who offend continually, signed by
the librarian and a member of the library committee. In the majority
of cases this brought about the needed reform— if not, the privileges
of the library were taken away. Miss Mary A. Smith, Eau Claire, Wis.
I am quite interested in your questions about discipline, as we feel
we have reached a very comfortable stage in the problem after
considerable agitation and I have wondered some times what plan others
followed. Our whole argument with young people—(that means high
school here as they seemed the only disturbing element) was
consideration for other people. When talking to grade pupils that
were soon to come into high school, we explained that we could have
only two grades in a public library, children and grown people. When
they entered high school and used the main library almost entirely, we
classed them as grown people and must expect from them the same
carefulness, as older people were much more easily disturbed. The
discipline we found, as usually is the case, one of individuals. We
first spoke to the transgressor. If he did not pay sufficient regard
as shown in action, we suspended him usually for a week, with a very
definite explanation, that before he returned, he must give a pledge
in place of the one on the registration card which he had broken. He
knew these pledges were filed away as part of the library record. If
that pledge was broken it meant that the case would be referred to the
Library Board. This had to be done but once and that had an excellent
effect. The Board suspended for several months with the understanding
that return then depended on pledges made to the librarian. There
must be one person who is making the standard for conduct and that
person must be on hand during hours when trouble is likely to arise;
that means the librarian. Assistants must be in sympathy, watch, help
and report cases, but not take active part in discipline. The penalty
must be a very certain thing, as sure a law in the public library as
violation of law on the streets. There must not be nagging of young
people nor wasting of words. When a transgressor is told to do
anything, it must be done in such a manner, and without anger or
annoyance in voice, if possible, so that a librarian can turn away and
know the order will be obeyed. I believe it is possible to establish a
standard of conduct in a public library, which a young person will
feel and know if he is not within that standard. It can not be done in
a week nor a month. I hope we have one here now. I mean by that also
that a librarian can leave the library and not feel that any advantage
is going to be taken of an assistant because she is not there. I do
not believe in a librarian popping in any time during her off hours
making the young people feel she is ready to spring upon them at
unexpected moments. The above states what we have been doing, and we
seldom now have to think of discipline. If we see signs of
carelessness, we nip them in the bud. One must discriminate between a
moment's thoughtlessness in a young person and the beginning of a
wrong library habit. That may not seem clearly put. A firm, steady
glance in his direction and the way he takes it will usually diagnose
the case. I think the object of discipline in a Public Library is much
more than to keep young people quiet. It seems now-a-days one of the
few public places where they may mingle with older people and show
them consideration. A quiet library ought to be an antidote for
unseasonable boisterousness suffered by young people. No librarian
need fear she is driving people away, if she tightens up all along
this line. That at least has not been our experience, as we grew
rapidly while we were the most strenuous. People have more respect for
an institution, where each person will be held to his privileges, and
not be allowed to interfere with another's. I was amused the other
night when a high school boy, who had needed suggestion himself two
years ago, came to me and said he thought two younger boys were
disturbing an older gentleman in the reference room. These younger
boys who were only talking more than was necessary, had not used the
reference room and did not clearly understand that the same amount of
conversation was not allowed there as in the other room. I spoke to
them and when I returned suggested to the older boy that he might keep
an eye on them, as I much preferred they stay there and think of the
older man than come into the other room. He reported that they gave no
more trouble. Our reference room discipline has been very much
assisted by a signing of the simple agreement: "I promise to refrain
from all unnecessary conversation in the reference room." All high
school students sign before using the room. The paper lies on the loan
desk so at a glance we expect to be able to tell who is there. The
room is away from the desk and can not be watched from it.
"Unnecessary" was not in when we began. It was absolute, but we found
we could give more liberty. Whenever this pledge was violated, which
was not often even at first, no explanation was accepted, a word had
been broken: "A bad thing," we said, "for a young person in a public
library. Don't sign what you cannot keep." One must be even and not
allow one day what one lets pass the next and that is not an easy
thing to do. Do not start to evolve an orderly library out of a
disorderly one and expect to escape all criticism. Be ready to explain
fully to the parent whose child has been disciplined. I have wondered
sometimes if the disorderly library did not have more than one cause.
If you wish orderly conduct you must also have an orderly library, a
place for everything and everything in its place. We have not a
perfect library yet in Eau Claire and we hope we may obtain some
suggestions from other libraries to help on that glad time. Miss
Harriet A. Wood, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The difficulty can be largely
overcome by giving the active boys something to do. We let them put up
books and even slip the books, if they are careful, put in labels,
etc. We have a Boy's Club recently organized. Now the girls are
clamoring for one. A trustee has charge of it. I believe that the
librarian should make more of an effort to know the boys and girls
personally. During the past two months, we have been working along
this line with good results. The boys are simply full of spirit; they
are not bad. We never ought to expect to eliminate noise entirely,
unless we drive out the children. Our library is open without
partitions between the children's room and the other rooms. Boys that
have been troublesome in the past, come in now that they are older,
and read like gentlemen. Many of the boys, we find upon inquiry, are
orphans. some without fathers, some without mothers. The probation
officer of the Juvenile court works with us. One of her boys is an
ardent helper in the children's room. We have found it much better to
speak to a boy quietly when he is not with his companions. He is more
likely to respond. We try to make the boys and girls feel that we are
interested in them. If they come to us to use the library as a meeting
and perhaps a loafing place, we should be glad. If we have not the
time and strength to seize this opportunity for social betterment, we
should enlist tactful men and women in the city who can help with the
problem. Miss Mary A. Smith, La Crosse, Wis. At the branch, the
discipline is the great difficulty. The branch took the place of a
badly managed boy's club so we really did not have a fair start. The
discipline in the room is still a problem not entirely solved. A large
number of the most restless boys had no respect for authority and had
the impression that the library, being a free and public institution,
was a place where they could act as they pleased. Through the kindness
of Mr. Austin and Mr. Hiller, who have given their time to read aloud
to the boys two evenings a week and have personally interested the
boys in the books at the library, this impression has changed and in
its place has come an attempt on the part of some of the boys at a
system of self government. Next fall we hope to establish clubs among
the boys, giving them the use of the room back of the reading room and
any assistance they may need, but leaving the organization in their
hands. The reading aloud has been most successful and has had a
constant attendance of about 50 boys. With the children lies our chief
hope of developing the reading habit and love of good books. Through
the children also we look for the increase in adult readers. This
grows slowly at the branch for the reason that older people do not yet
come to read the magazines kept on file in the room. Mr. Henry J.
Carr, Scranton, Pa. To send unruly children out of the building and
forbid them to come again until prepared to behave properly is our
strongest "card," and it proves effective, too. No definite period is
assigned. Administration of all discipline promptly, pleasantly, but
no less firmly and without relaxation, on the least sign of its need,
we find to do much towards obviating the necessity. Miss Maude Van
Buren, Mankato, Minn. I make occasional visits to all the schools, and
the first talk of the year usually includes a word on conduct, but I
am careful to have the young people feel that I know their
shortcomings in this matter are only those of thoughtlessness, never
of mischief nor meanness; that the only reason for requiring perfect
quiet in a public library is a consideration of other's rights. It is
all a matter of the librarian's attitude. Miss Grace D. Rose,
Davenport, Iowa. When the children's room was in the basement in a
room much too small for the numbers which came, there was a great deal
of noise and confusion. Since the removal to the large, beautiful room
on the second floor, the order has been much improved. The children
seem impressed by the dignity and quiet of the room, and even upon
days when they come in large numbers, there is no confusion and very
little of the former playing. At present, we have several children who
are allowed to draw books but must transact their business as quickly
as possible, and cannot exchange them under two weeks. Miss Ethel F.
McCullough, Superior, Wis. The question of library discipline is not
so much a question of troublesome and disorderly patrons, as it is a
question of library administration. Given a quiet, attentive staff, a
building arranged for complete supervision, noiseless floors and
furniture intelligently placed—given these five essentials, a well
ordered library must be the inevitable result. With any one of these
lacking, the problem of discipline becomes a complicated one. Mrs.
Grace K. Hairland, Marshalltown, Iowa. The matter of discipline, in a
small public library, where the loan desk with its unavoidable
attendant confusion, is so near the Reading Room as to furnish a cover
for the whispering and fun—is not the easiest problem in the world to
solve. There is nothing we desire more than to have every man, woman,
and child love the library. To wet blanket the enthusiasm with which
they seek our sanctuary the instant school is over, surely would not
be good administration. The majority come to do serious work; it is
only a few who use it as a trysting place and who disturb the
"Absolute silence" which we profess to maintain, (and of which we
have tangible reminders conspicuously posted) and yet we realize that
those few irrepressibles may prove most annoying to serious readers.
Tact is necessary and methods must be devised to correct this without
using so much severity or nagging, as to drive away the thoughtless.
Often we have arranged to do some reference work, looking up material
for club programs perhaps, at the hour just after school when the
older children flock into the reading room. This can be done at the
tables and "sitting in their midst" has a salutary effect. Of course
it could not be done with a staff of one or two. During this last
winter the high school arranged for seven debates. The unbounded
enthusiasm of those taking part resulted in a total ignoring of the
rules; groups of debaters stood about hotly contesting points, causing
consternation to the staff until the plan of giving over to them the
newspaper room, (not used by the public) was carried into effect.
Every effort is made to keep the good will of the older boys and
girls, and it is only with these that there is any suggestion of
trouble. The children's room, especially since we have had a
children's librarian, is under perfect discipline. There are dissected
maps, quiet games, and stereopticon views on their tables beside
Caldecott's and other picture books and they are so well entertained
that there is no occasion for mischief. Extreme measures are not
resorted to among the older boys and girls except on rare occasions.
If, after being spoken to once or twice and perhaps sent out, they
still prove obstreperous, they are suspended for a month and this has
always resulted in reform. In no case have we found it necessary to
resort to aid from the police. I should like very much to have a club
room, or "conversation room" perhaps it might be called. The shelves
of the newspaper room are filled with magazines for binding and these
are often misplaced and even torn and lost when that room is used;
besides it is in the basement and out of sight. The ideal room would
have glass doors and the occupants in sight of the staff all the time.
Then the high school students could come from the strict discipline
and restraint of the school room and have a quiet discussion of their
work or even a social chat and be in a much better place than the
cigar stores or post office. Miss Grace Blanchard, Concord, N. H.
When a librarian is much "dressed up" and can take time to play that
she is an agreeable hostess, all children, whether little aristocrats
or arabs, enter into the civilized spirit of the occasion and become
more mannerly. Miss Lucy Lee Pleasants, Menasha, Wis. To achieve the
best results, the librarian should never make an enemy and should lose
no opportunity of making a friend. If children talk at the tables,
separate them by asking them politely to change their seats. If they
have really something to talk over, such as a lesson or a sleighride,
permit them to go into another room to discuss it. They will
appreciate the privilege and will behave better in consequence. I
have known a gang of little boys, who had the habit of coming to the
reading room to make a disturbance, completely won over and converted
into agreeable patrons by being captured red handed and told an
amusing story. Children who come to the library are like everybody
else—very apt to treat you as you treat them. Mrs. C. P. Barnes,
Kenosha, Wis. About a year ago, I submitted a rule to the Board for
their approval, and asked permission to have it printed on cards, for
use on the tables in the reading room. It was worded as follows:— "A
rule has been made that no whispering nor talking shall be allowed in
the reading room, even for purposes of study. For the good of the
public, this rule will be strictly enforced, and anyone failing to
observe it will be requested to leave the building. By order of the
Board of Directors." It has been more effective in promoting order
than any other experiment. Of course it occasionally happens that the
card is overlooked or unheeded, but it is a very simple matter to hand
one of these cards to the offender, and with a pleasant smile say, "We
have no choice but to enforce this rule" and the deed is done. Miss
Helen L. Price, Merrill, Wis. When we know our young scamp and always
speak to him in a spirit of good fellowship when we meet him, and take
an opportunity in the library some time when there is no one to be
disturbed, to discuss postage stamps, chickens, rabbits, or, best of
all, dogs with him, he will soon lose all desire to torment, and when
it is only exuberance to contend with, then that is easy. For
malicious disturbance, we send the offender out, quickly and surely
and discuss the matter with him later, if at all. "Go— quickly and
quietly—and no noise outside if you want to come back." Miss Agnes
Dwight, Appleton, Wis. We do not have absolute quiet all the time and
I do not aim to have, but it is a favorite place for all ages to come.
I, myself, never tell a boy that if I have to speak to him again I
shall send him out. He goes the first time if it is necessary to speak
to him at all. That sounds savage, but it is a long time since I have
had to be so cruel. We have the goodwill of the small boy, that is for
the time being, they may begin to act up at any time. Mrs. W. G.
Clough, Portage, Wis. Judging from the impression made upon people
from other libraries I should infer that our library is in a pretty
well ordered condition in the matter of discipline. From the opening
of our library we have impressed upon the public the necessity for
quiet and order. We do not permit any talking aloud, a rule to which
there are very few exceptions. The use, even, of subdued tones in the
routine of selecting and exchanging books is not allowed among
children and is discouraged among adults. The public understand and
appreciate the fact that the library is no place for visitation or
conversation. It has been necessary to pursue this course as we have
but one large room for stacks, reference books, reading tables,
children's department and charging desk. We have in a measure to
contend against the noise attendant upon hard wood floors, and we are
disturbed at times during the last hour of the evening from the room
above which is the armory of the city company of the national guard.
This, however, in no way affects the discipline of the library,
excepting as it makes discipline there more essential. Miss Deborah
B. Martin, Green Bay, Wis. Occasionally we have had difficulty from a
crowd of boys entering the room in a body with a great deal of noise,
annoying the librarian and readers by making a disturbance at the
tables and altogether proving themselves a nuisance. We found that the
most effective means for putting a decisive stop to the trouble was to
write a polite note to the parents of each offender, saying that as
the boy was proving an annoyance to library patrons, it might be well
if he was kept away from the library until he was old enough to
understand its uses. The parents have never resented this notice and
after a reasonable time, the youth has returned to the library
chastened and pleasant and there has been no further trouble with him.
High school boys and girls do make the library a meeting place, and
two years ago it became so noticeable that the Principal of one of the
high schools, in a communication to the parents of scholars, spoke of
the public library as a rendezvous. It is certainly not the province
of the librarian unless these young people prove an annoyance to the
reader, to discipline them or tell them what company they should keep.
At a meeting of the Woman's club, the librarian was asked to speak to
the club on the Public Library and its Work. This gave an opportunity
to bring in the question of library discipline in its relation to the
young people who flocked there less for study than for pleasure. The
talk in this instance fortunately reached the right people, who
perhaps had never thought the matter over before, and the library is
not now, to any extent, used as a meeting place for high school
students, although they still use it largely in their reference work.
Miss Nannie W. Jayne, Alexandria, Ind. A few boys and girls from the
high school and eighth grade have made two or three attempts to use
the library as a meeting place. These meetings have been promptly
broken up and a private talk with each offender has been the means
used to prevent a repetition of the offense. A special effort has been
made to impress the girls with correct ideas on this point, and in
almost every case, these talks have resulted in an apology from the
girl for her behavior. If all general conversation be prohibited, the
library offers but little attraction to those who would come merely
for a good time. Miss Martha E. Dunn, Stanley, Wis. We have had some
experience with the older scholars making the library a meeting place.
I mentioned the fact to the library board, and the president, who was
the editor of our local paper at that time, made mention of it in the
next issue. Since then, there has been no trouble. Our local paper has
done much toward helping to put down any annoyance in and around the
library building. It is a good thing to have the editor of the paper
on the library board. Miss Anna S. Pinkum, Marinette, Wis. Our
problems of discipline are, in some respects, peculiar to local
conditions and in other respects, are the results of a larger movement
which seems to be sweeping the entire country. Broadly speaking, two
causes which make discipline such a difficult task stand out
prominently: 1. Local causes. A 9 o'clock curfew law and that not
enforced; parents allowing their children to roam the streets at
night; misdemeanors winked at by those in authority, particularly the
police; a general laxity on the part of parents and city officials in
correcting offences. 2. Universal movement. Loss of parental
authority. This is not peculiar to Marinette, but it is a deplorable
state of affairs which is being brought to light all over the country.
We find that moral suasion does not work effectively. Theoretically
probably none of us believes in being caught wearing a frown, but most
of our boys and girls respect sternness and assertive authority when
they will not respond to any sort of kindly advice or appeal to their
better natures. After the study of this problem for some time, the
conclusion reached is this:—With one assistant, we can control any
situation that may present itself within the library and by so doing,
in time, may create the habit of quiet and orderly conduct; but until
parents realize that their children need guidance, correction, and
above all need to be kept from roaming the streets at night, the
problem of discipline will be an ever present one both in the schools
and in the library at Marinette. Mrs. Anna C. Bronsky, Chippewa Falls,
Wis. We have had only a few occasions when it was necessary to deny
pupils the privileges of the library. In such cases, the suspended
one may come to the library for any books needed in school work, but
is not allowed to remain longer than is necessary and may not go in to
the reading room. This has been found helpful in most cases. I dislike
very much to send a child out of the library, and only do so when it
is imperative; for while they may be trying at times, they are the
very ones who need the help that the library can give. Often the
mischievous mood is of short duration, the attention is arrested by
something in one of the books before him, and suddenly, your noisy boy
is transformed into a studious youth. It is a great satisfaction to
know that while the small child is in the library, he is not only
safe from the evil influences of the street but is deriving a double
benefit—the enjoyment of the book that absorbs him for the time
being, and the habit of reading that is unconsciously being formed.
Mr. R. Oberholzer, Sioux City, Iowa. If a real disturbance is made
which seems clearly intentional, a quick dismissal follows. Reproof is
never repeated—once speaking in that way is enough. Reproof is always
made in an undertone, and the command to go home, while imperative, is
in a few words and followed by absolute silence until obeyed. This is
much more impressive than any amount of talk. Dismissal is only for
the day. I have never suspended anyone, and only once did I write to
the lad's mother that it would be better if her son did not come to
the library for a time. If a child really wants to come to the library
he learns to conduct himself so as not to offend the people who are in
other ways such good friends of his. If he only comes for mischief, he
soon concludes that the game is not worth the candle. The desire to
"show off," always a strong element in a mischievous child, is not
gratified, and the whole atmosphere is against him. To keep things
going in this way is not easy except by eternal vigilance, both for
the public who have to be taught some things over every day, and for
library workers who have to learn to be good natured but unyielding,
obliging but arbitrary, eternally patient but abnormally quick. In
short, discipline in a library is, as everywhere, a matter of
atmosphere rather than method, and atmosphere always means a group of
forces expressed through personality. Miss Nelle A. Olson, Moorhead,
Minn. Before our library opened, I visited all the rooms of all the
schools of the city to talk library. I tried to awaken interest and
enthusiasm, and to make perfectly clear to the students beforehand the
purpose of a library and what was expected of them there and why.
During the first few weeks I managed to spend a good deal of time in
their room, moving about among them, helping them, and ready with a
word of reminder the very moment a boy forgot himself. I tried in
every possible way to help them to form correct library habits from
the first. They all seemed anxious to conform to the library spirit
when they understood it. Now, when a boy does something a little out
of the way, I try to pass over it as much as possible at the time,
then when he comes in again some time, perhaps having forgotten his
feeling of irritation, I try to talk kindly with him about it and I
find he usually takes it kindly then, and does not trouble again. I
have tried always to take it for granted that the boy did not mean to
annoy but forgot himself or was a little careless. I have no set
procedure, but try to settle each little difficulty as that particular
case seems to warrant and never to let it go on until it becomes a
great one. Miss Kate M. Potter, Baraboo, Wis. The burning of our high
school, two years ago, made the library the only place of general
meeting for the scholars. While it was an added trouble at the time, I
am not sorry for the experience either for the scholars or myself.
Classes were held downstairs and study periods in the reading rooms.
The children were made to realize they were under the same discipline
as in the assembly room and while it took our time, it taught them the
proper use of the library and we gained in the experience. First:—In
regard to the children coming in such numbers as to keep the older
readers away. The older people make such little use of the books in
comparison, I believe in giving the time and room to the children.
Second:—As to their making it a meeting place. In smaller places the
children have no other place to go. Is it not better to attract them
to the library? Third:—As to discipline. We find one thing
essential—not to let them get started in the wrong way. A boy or girl
spoken to at first, generally does not repeat the offense. While this
all takes the librarian's time I feel that it is spent, in the
greatest good to the greatest number, after all. Miss Gertrude J.
Skavlem, Janesville, Wis. The Janesville Public Library is so arranged
that the desk attendant has almost no supervision over the Reading and
Reference Rooms. The matter of discipline in those rooms was a source
of considerable trouble until an attendant took charge there in the
evenings. We find it necessary to have this attendant only during the
winter months, when more High School students use the library than at
other times. It is not the policy of the Library Board to enforce any
strict rules as to quiet in the rooms. Rules are very lenient and the
enforcement more by inference than in any other way. An attendant if
she has the requisite personality, may, simply by her manner ensure
quiet and orderly conduct, at least that has been our experience
during the past year. Various other means were tried before the one
which we now find so successful. Talks were given in the High School
by the superintendent, and at one time a police officer had the
Library on his regular beat. None of these methods were permanently
successful. Miss Jeannette M. Drake, Jacksonville, Ill. I have never
hesitated to take what measures seemed necessary to have a quiet
library, otherwise how near can we come to fulfilling the purpose of a
library? Since the first few weeks that I was here as librarian I have
had no trouble in regard to the discipline. I feel sometimes that I
am too strict, but I cannot have patrons say "I cannot study at the
library because of the confusion, etc." The only solution of the
problem that I know of is to ask every one not to talk, unless he can
do so without disturbing others in the least. When it is necessary for
people to talk about their work, except to us, we give them a vacant
room in the building and often have people in every vacant space and
the office at the same time. We encourage such use of the rooms; try
to be courteous in our demands; interested in all; do everything in
our power to get material for patrons and the result is that they feel
that the library is a place of business. The boys who used to come
"for fun" come now and read for several hours at a time and are always
gentlemanly and are our friends. I know of none who ceased to come
because of the order we must have. At first, if we had spoken to
anyone and they still were not quiet, we asked them to leave the
building and to come back when they wanted to read or study. We always
saw that they left when we told them to do so, and no one has been
sent from the building for unruly conduct for two years. If I needed
help I would call on the police as I would not want either teachers or
students to feel that we could not manage our patrons when they were
in the library. Of course we are always on the alert as we realize
that the matter would get beyond us if we were careless for a time. It
is not easy for librarians to carry out these rules, but it pays in
the reputation of the library. Mrs. Alice G. Evans, Decatur, Ill. We
have had very little trouble with discipline since moving into our own
building, the rooms being so arranged that excellent supervision over
them is possible from the loan desk. Then too, the children's and
reference rooms have their own attendants and any disturbance may be
quickly settled. Perhaps the most disturbing element comes from the
boys preparing debates, who often forget and talk somewhat above a
whisper, and it is sometimes necessary to request them every fifteen
minutes, to lower their voices. As to making the library a meeting
place, this is done, I suppose, to some extent but we rarely have any
particular trouble from it. I think the main reason for the order in
our library is the separation of the different departments, as we used
to have a great deal of trouble when we had but one room for readers,
students and children. Miss Elizabeth Comer, Redwood Falls, Minn.
When I first came here, I sent both boys and girls home; it was
seldom necessary to send the same child twice for the same offense.
Some of the boys tried a new tack after being sent home once and were
then told to stay away until they could conduct themselves properly on
the library premises, with the result that I have not been obliged to
send a child away from the library for months. Miss Marie E. Brick,
St. Cloud, Minn. The question of discipline has always been such an
easy matter with me and never a problem that it seems rather difficult
to state just how the good results are accomplished. We have none of
the disfiguring printed signs of warning about; we do not need them.
A glance, a word, a motion, at the least sign of uneasiness or noise,
and all is quiet. Any good disciplinarian will say that her methods
are the same. It is not what she says or does, but her entire
attitude, her manner, her commanding personality, that secure the
desired results. Our High School pupils never give us any trouble.
They enjoy too many privileges as students to abuse them. The school
is in the next block, so near that the teachers almost daily excuse a
number of them to do supplementary reading in the library during
school hours. They hand me a printed slip or pass on entering, which
I sign with the time of coming and leaving. These are returned to
their respective instructors on returning to the school room. This
pass acts as a check on anyone disposed to loiter by the way. Miss
Ella F. Corwin, Elkhart, Ind. We never have had a great deal of
trouble with the discipline. We try to make the children and young
people feel that we depend upon them to assist in keeping up the
standard of good behavior. We reach the younger children partly
through the children's hour, not by talking to them on these subjects,
but by winning them to us through the stories we tell and in our
treatment of them. With the High School boys and girls, it is more
difficult. The suspension of two boys had a beneficial effect, but the
principal of the High School is our greatest help with them. Miss
Bertha Marx, Sheboypan, Wis. The matter of discipline has not been of
sufficient importance in our library to be classed as a problem. This
may be due to two facts: First, the atmosphere discourages rowdyism,
loud talking and visiting; secondly, an unwritten rule is that there
must be quiet in the library but not necessarily absolute silence. It
seems to me where the order in a library is not what it would be, the
staff is lacking in its sense of discipline. If by chance, a group of
people happens to make too much noise, we never hesitate to step up to
them and in a courteous manner request them to be quiet. Such
disturbance is usually caused through thoughtlessness, not from any
desire to break a library rule, and after people have been cautioned
they rarely commit the offense again. I will admit this must be done
in a tactful way, for a grown person does not wish to be dictated to
in the library as though he were a child in school. There are a few
old men and women who persist in talking in a loud tone of voice; we
know it would hurt their feelings if they were told to be quiet and
therefore we wait upon them quickly, even ahead of their turn and so
get rid of them as soon as possible. The boys and girls of the High
School have to be spoken to quite frequently as they are so imbued
with a sense of their own importance that they have very little regard
for the order of the library. The most effective appeal which can be
made to them is to suggest that every one has equal rights in the
library and that when other people come who wish quiet in the reading
rooms, the High School pupils have no right to deprive them of it.
One evening the pupils were unusually noisy, we had cautioned them in
vain to be quiet, and finally I ordered them all to leave the library.
They were simply aghast for they were to have a test in history the
following day and the material could only be procured from our
reference shelves. I was aware of this at the time but felt drastic
measures must be taken to show them that the three readers who shared
the room with them had a right to undisturbed order. They plead with
me in vain, and finally admitted that they deserved their punishment.
It is needless to say that their history teacher approved my actions
and that for weeks afterwards we had no more trouble with High School
students. The library is never used as a club or meeting-place by
people for we discourage all attempts at visiting among our patrons.
It is not often found necessary to discipline the children in their
reading-room as their behavior is on the whole, very good. When they
become mischievous or noisy, it is generally because they have
remained in the library too long and have grown restless, so they are
advised to go out-doors and play for a time. We have practically none
of the rowdy elements to deal with and when such children do come, we
find that the attractive surroundings seem to have a quieting effect
upon them. Miss Mary J. Calkins, Racine, Wis. The problem of
discipline in the Library, is one which is "ever with us," and I do
not feel sure that I have solved it to my satisfaction. We have tried
"signs" and no signs; gentle persuasion and stern and rigid rules; and
still we cannot always be sure of order, and a proper library
deportment on the part of either children or grown people. I have come
to the conclusion, that the character of the individual has everything
to do with it. Children who defy rules both at home and at school,
will also give trouble in the library, and nothing but a complete
withdrawal of privileges will do any good. We have had very little
trouble during the past year, but the children themselves seem to be
different, the rougher class not coming to the library to make
trouble, as they did formerly. The High School students are much more
of a problem than the younger children; and cause much more
disturbance, as far as my experience goes. When they are engaged in
preparing their debates, it is necessary to have one of the staff sit
in the room with them, and keep constant supervision, or the whole
library will be disturbed. Miss Margaret Biggert, Berlin, Wis. During
the past winter, for the first time since we have been in our new
library it has been a question how to manage the situation without
antagonizing the offenders, for it seems to me a librarian must avoid
appearing in the guise of ogre even at the expense of perfect order.
Scholars from the schools use the library constantly in their school
work—including reference work for their three debating societies and
it is with these pupils that the problem has been, the reference room
becoming quite noisy— though more from thoughtlessness and high
spirits than otherwise. I feel certain a cork carpet would help to
solve this problem in our library—with the unavoidable noise of heels
on hard wood floors, it is hard to make people realize they are
disturbing others. My own system of dealing with the problem has been
to warn them as pleasantly as possible that they are forgetting
themselves and then to impress on them individually as the chance
offered, the necessity of remembering that the library is a place for
reading and study—not a "conversation room" as an irate gentleman one
day said a group of ladies seemed to think. Though it is very seldom
that people who meet friends, either by chance or appointment cause
any annoyance by remaining to carry on conversation. No signs
enjoining silence are in evidence. The younger children have their own
reading room and have given very little trouble. This I believe to be
in a measure due to the influence of their teachers, who keep in close
touch with the work of the library. One lad of about ten, the
ringleader of a group, was sent from the library for misbehavior. I
was pleased but surprised to have him appear at my home one morning
and say: "I am sorry I cut up at the library and I'll never do it
again." He never has and he comes regularly. We were at one time
troubled with boys gathering outside the library evenings, making
considerable disturbance with malicious intent. I was forced at length
to call a police officer, who took the names of the offenders and
walked through the reading rooms effectually quelling any budding
aspirations toward hoodlumism in the children seated at the tables and
we have had no trouble of that kind since. Miss Molly Catlin, Stevens
Point, Wis. The matter of discipline has not been a difficult one with
us, of course we have a good deal of noise, the adults are very apt to
forget and talk noisily but as far as real trouble is concerned we
have not had it. The Boys' Club room is a great help, in that the boy
who just comes down town for fun and not to read goes into that room
from preference. The girls and little children are often times noisy
but with a glance or gentle reminder of some kind, they seem to be all
right. The discipline of the Boys' Club Room is, however, a different
matter, it really is hard to discipline, but the reason is that we
never yet have gotten just the right kind of an attendant to care for
the room, we need one who is interested in boys, who can mingle with
them and teach them games, etc. We now have a young man, well educated
and a good man but he is lax in discipline and careless about the
room. Nevertheless I think the Boys' Club room a success, for during
the months of February and March we have sometimes between fifty and
seventy boys in attendance at one time and they seem to enjoy it.
Miss Ella T. Hamilton, Whitewater, Wis. I suppose I have found much
the same difficulties as others in regard to discipline. Our High
School pupils, especially when working on their school debates, for
which they get much of their material from the library, do sometimes
find it easy to work together to the annoyance of their neighbors, but
as they are, on the whole, well intentioned young people they usually
take kindly the reproof. I do not mean to say that they do always
after remember and act accordingly. Who of us do? And my experience as
a teacher has taught me that some lessons have to be often repeated.
There is, however, a kindly feeling between the young people who use
the library and those who have charge of it, for we try to help them
to whatever they need and they appreciate the fact; and this fact I
think helps in the matter of discipline. The main reading room seems
sometimes rather full with them, but there are places for but sixteen
at the tables and that partly explains it. I have had occasionally the
difficulty of young people making the library a meeting place. Only
two weeks ago, I told a young Miss and her attendant, that we could
dispense with their presence in the library; they have both been back
since, but not in any way to our annoyance. We were at one time much
troubled by some boys from ten to fourteen. Sending home didn't help
for very long, and I finally went to the parents of the ring-leaders
with very good results. Perhaps the fact that complaints came to them
from several other sources helped. But I am sure parents can aid the
librarian as well as the teacher. The only notices I have ever had up
in my library in regard to order are two neatly printed signs,
"Silence is golden." I think they have been more suggestive and
effective than the ordinary sign. Miss Grace E. Salisbury,
Whitewater, (Normal School.) In answer to your circular just received,
I hardly know what to say. We have practically no disciplining to do.
Of course conditions are not the same as in a public library. At the
beginning of the school year every evidence of disorder is nipped in
the bud, and after a few weeks we are entirely freed from any
annoyance from visiting or other disorder. The children from the
model school some times show a little inclination to talk too much in
getting their books. If a word does not quiet them, the ring leader as
it were is sent down to his department room which is the worst
possible punishment as they love to come to the library. This never
happens more than once or twice a year. The greatest help I have at
the opening of the school year in creating the spirit I wish in the
library, is the small work room opening out of it. If students visit,
or get to talking over their work, I ask them if they will please take
their work into the work room where they can talk things over without
disturbing any one. They never resent that, when many times they would
resent almost anything else in the way of reproof. If they talk too
loud in there or seem to be still disturbing, I call attention to the
fact that others are trying to work, and find it difficult to do so
under the conditions. After the first few weeks of the year, I think I
have to speak to a student not oftener than once in several weeks if
that. I think the student body recognize the library as a place where
they can find absolute quiet, and welcome it in that light, and most
of them are glad to help to keep it so. Mrs. Alice A. Lamb,
Litchfield, Minn. Our library opened four years ago. An acquaintance,
through teaching, with most of the children of the town has been of
great assistance. Possibly, mature years with a reputation for strict
order in school have been of value. At any rate disorder is almost
unknown. We started with the idea of perfect quiet in the building.
The text "Be gentle and keep the voice low" was given a prominent
place on the walls of the children's room for the first year and I'm
sure was helpful. If the little children get to visiting, usually a
glance or a shake of the head is sufficient. To the older children it
has been necessary a few times to say quietly, "We must have perfect
quiet here." This of course is said privately so that no one but the
offender hears. Sending home seems a legitimate punishment and if
judiciously used ought to produce good results. The good will of the
children, with good nature and firmness on the part of the librarian
would seem the chief essentials to good order. If disorder has once
become a habit the problem is a serious one. In small libraries with
but one person in charge it would seem wise to hire an assistant or
have an apprentice to do the desk work during the evening hours or
whenever disorder is likely to occur, and let the librarian be free to
go about the rooms and use her best efforts to establish order, by
every tactful means possible. Our building is so arranged that every
part of it can be seen by the librarian at her desk. This doubtless is
a very great aid in discipline, and perhaps explains why we have never
been troubled by the boys and girls making a "meeting place" of the
library. Miss Agnes J. Petersen, Manitowoc, Wis. Reading over your
questions on the subject of discipline in the library, brought back
very vividly to my mind, the first years of our library work. From
the first day of opening, absolute quiet was made one of the rules of
the library, and many boys and girls went home early in the evenings
before they would recognize the rule. The fact that no disturbance of
any kind would be tolerated was so impressed upon everybody, but,
especially upon the children, that now, though the supervision is not
so strictly kept, the same good order is easily maintained. A word or
look of warning is at most times sufficient now to keep a roomful of
75 children in order except on rare occasions. We did practically I
believe what every librarian does. The offender was warned concerning
his conduct, and if, after several warnings, he still "dared us" he
was sent home, not permitted to return to the library, nor draw books
for a week or two as the case might be, only returning after
promising good behavior in the future. When, as it happened a few
times, the offender did not respond to this treatment, the president
of our Library Board sent a note by the chief of police to the
offender's parents, and that inevitably ended the matter. Only one boy
was suspended for two weeks during this past year, and he gives a
great deal of trouble at school, also.
The function of the story hour as a recognized feature of library
work with children has been variously discussed. The five papers
given below represent these different points of view, and the
experience of several libraries is included in the report of the
Committee on Story- telling given at the Congress of the Playground
Association of America in 1910. Another group method, which has been
adopted as a means of introducing children to books and of securing
continuity of interest, is that of the reading club. The three
articles given show the influence of the direct, personal effort of
Miss Hewins, and the carefully organized work of somewhat different
types in two large library systems. The early history of home library
work with children as conducted by the Boston Children's Aid Society
and a consideration of the place of this method in extension work of
libraries in general are included. Library work in summer playgrounds
is one development of cooperation with other institutions. The first
article included may be supplemented by a statement made by Miss
Frances J. Olcott in an article on "The public library, a social force
in Pittsburgh," printed in the Survey magazine, March 5, 1910. She
states that "Perhaps the most important phase of the library's work
with children which is being developed at present is that of
playground libraries. ... Now that the Playground Association is
establishing recreation centers for winter as well as summer,
arrangements have been made with the library to supply books, the
Association providing the necessary reading rooms in its new
buildings." Practical difficulties in administration are discussed in
the second article. The last group of articles brings together several
unrelated phases of work. Two special kinds of children's libraries
are mentioned, one a type—the Sunday School library—and one a
library organized for specific work in connection with the Children's
Museum in Brooklyn. Work with colored children in a colored branch
library is described. The last paper gives a vivid picture of work
with children in a foreign district of a large city.
The paper by Edna Lyman Scott, printed in the Wisconsin Bulletin for
January, 1905, was said to be introductory to a talk which she was to
give at Beloit at the Wisconsin State meeting, February 22, 1905. The
author looks upon the inauguration of the story hour as but the
grasping of an opportunity in working with children in the library, as
a means of cultivating the love of literature and of introducing the
child to books. Edna Lyman, now Mrs. Scott, was born in Illinois,
educated in the schools of Oak Park, Ill., and at Bradford Academy,
Haverhill, Massachusetts. At the time this paper was written she was
the children's librarian in the Oak Park Public Library, then known
as Scoville Institute. Her work in story telling became known outside
the immediate field of its activity, and in 1907 Miss Lyman severed
her connection with this library to give time to special preparation,
and later to become a lecturer on literature for children and
story-telling, and a professional story-teller. She spent portions of
three years as Advisory Children's Librarian for the Iowa Library
Commission, and during that period published her book "Story-telling:
what to tell and how to tell it." She holds the position of
non-resident faculty lecturer on Work for Children in the Library
School of the University of Illinois, and the Carnegie Library School
of Atlanta, Georgia, and lectures regularly in other library schools,
before teachers' institutes and normal schools, women's clubs and
study classes throughout the country. When we touch the question of
guiding the reading of children in our libraries we have opened the
consideration of a subject which is one of the great arguments for the
existence of public libraries. All about we see and feel the utter
indifference of parents to what their children are reading, or whether
they are reading at all, and the results of this indifference appear
on every hand, in the character of the books which content the child,
or in his determination to bury himself in a book to the exclusion of
every other interest. The librarian sees this indifference and its
fruit and realizes that it adds another responsibility to her already
long list, and another opportunity to serve. She may doubt whether her
province is to educate the taste of the public at large, but there can
be no question that in the case of the children the choice is not
left for her to make; the only reason for the child's reading at all
is that he may grow mentally and spiritually. There is no way to
protect the child against worthless books except by giving him a
decided taste for what is good. Hamilton Mabie says that "tastes
depend very largely on the standards with which we are familiar," and
if these standards are acquired hit and miss, without training, they
are likely to be of a most doubtful character. The love of
literature, like the love of any of the fine arts, is susceptible of
cultivation and is strengthened by constant contact with the beauty
and greatness which can compel it. "They are exceptional children who
read everything regardless of its character and come out all right. We
do not know that any child is of such a make-up. We must deal with him
as though he were not the exceptional but the normal child." The
influence of all that he reads upon the mind of the child is
sufficiently appalling, but it is not to be compared with the
influence on his character. Henry Churchill King says: "It is his
susceptibility to the faintest suggestion that makes the child so
marvelous an imitator." The significance of this truth lies not only
in the fact that he responds to the example in manners and morals of
those about him, but equally, and perhaps even more exactly, to the
heroes who live within the covers of his books. If the dangers are
great, our response must be as forceful and our search untiring for
the influence which will most surely lead the child to the best. And
what means shall be found? The answer seems ready to hand in the use
of one of the oldest, yet one of the newest arts, the art of
story-telling. You may talk to a child about books, he will give a
certain kind of response, particularly if he respects your judgment
because of previous experience, but tell him a story and you have
fastened him with chains he does not care to resist. The inauguration
of the story hour then is but the grasping of an opportunity, first of
all to give keenest joy to the child, and at the same time to set his
standard for judging the value of other stories by those he hears, to
give him a love for beautiful form, to introduce him to books he might
never choose for himself and to bind him to the friend who tells him
stories, so that he will feel a confidence in her suggestions. Before
choosing our stories for telling it will be well to remind ourselves
of our purpose in telling stories, namely, to give familiarity with
good English, to cultivate the imagination, to develop the sympathy,
and to give a clear impression of moral truth. With this purpose in
mind we shall gather our children into groups whose ages are near, and
will be reached by the same tales. We must be methodical in this as in
all our library work, and have our campaign well planned before we
begin. Not everyone has the gift of telling stories, but if one is not
gifted with the art himself, there will doubtless be someone who is,
who can be secured for the purpose, if we only feel that the need is
great enough. The way is open to the minds and hearts of the children.
Shall we neglect it because it is old, or because it is new, or
because we seem somewhat hampered by existing conditions? Why not
follow the successes of others, and then find our own? The above
paper by Miss Lyman is offered as introductory to a talk which she
will give at Beloit at the Wisconsin state meeting, February 22, 1905.
The story hour has been most successfully conducted in a few of our
libraries. To be sure every librarian is not qualified to conduct a
successful story hour, but it is usually possible to find someone in
the community who will tell the stories. The story hour requires a
good deal of preparation. In Pittsburgh the librarians who were to
tell stories had special training under Miss Shedlock, a well-known
English story teller, and gave thorough study to the subject before
attempting to interest the children. This library has published a
pamphlet on Story telling to children from Norse mythology and the
Nibehulgenlied. This pamphlet contains references to material on
selected stories, an annotated reading list for the story teller and
for young people, a full outline of a course, and many valuable
suggestions. The same library published in its bulletin, October,
1902, the following outlines: LEGENDS OF KING ARTHUR AND THE KNIGHTS
OF THE ROUND TABLE Story 1. Merlin the Enchanter Story 2. How Arthur
won his kingdom and how he got his sword Excalibur. Story 3. The
marriage of Arthur and Guinevere and the founding of the Round Table.
Story 4. The adventure of Gareth Story 5. The adventure of Geraint.
Story 6. The adventure of Geraint and the Fair Enid. Story 7. The
story of the dolorous stroke.
Story 8. How Launcelot saved Guinevere; or, The adventure of
the cart. Story 9. Launcelot and the lily-maid of Astrolat.
Story 10. The coming of Galahad Story 11. The quest of the
Sangreal Story 12. The achieving of the Sangreal. Story 13. The
passing of Arthur.
Story 14. The adventures of Ogier the Dane. Story 15. More
adventures of Ogier the Dane. Story 16. The sons of Aymon. Story 17.
Malagis the wizard Story 18. A Roland for an Oliver Story 19. The
Princes of Cathay. Story 20. How Reinold fared to Cathay. Story 21.
The quest of Roland Story 22. In the gardens of Falerina. Story 23.
Bradamant, the warrior maiden. Story 24. The contest of Durandal.
Story 25. The battle of Roncesvalles. This regular story course will
be broken into at the holidays when stories appropriate to the season
will be told. Their bulletin for November, 1904, gives the program for
1904-5 on Legends of Robin Hood and Stories from Ivanhoe. The outline
follows:
Story 1. How Robin Hood became an outlaw. Story 2. How Robin
Hood outwitted the Sheriff of Nottingham Town. Story 3. A merry
adventure of Robin Hood. Story 4. How Robin Hood gained three merry
men in one day. Story 5. The story of Allin a Dale. Story 6. The
story of the Sorrowful Knight.
Story 7. The Queen's champion. Story 8. Robin Hood and Guy of
Gisborne. Story 9. How King Richard visited Robin Hood in Sherwood
Forest. Story 10. Robin Hood's death and burial.
Story 11. The tournament at Ashby-de-la-Zouche. Story 12. The
second day of the tournament. Story 13. The siege of Torquilstone.
The following extract on the children's story hour is taken from the
Pittsburgh bulletin of December, 1901. THE CHILDREN'S STORY HOUR The
Library story hour for the children began in a very modest way at our
West End branch. It has passed through the experimental stage and is
now a part of the regular routine of our six children's rooms. At
first disconnected stories were told but when we found how much the
stories influenced the children's reading, we began to follow a
regular program, which has proved more effective than haphazard story
telling. Last year we told stories from Greek mythology and Homer and
had an attendance of over 5,000 children. The books placed on special
story hour shelves were taken out 2,000 times. This year the stories
are drawn from the Norse myths and the Niebelungen Lied. They are told
by the children's librarians and the students of our Training school
for children's librarians, every Friday afternoon from November first
to April first. As the hour draws near, the children's rooms begin to
fill with eagerly expectant children. There is an atmosphere of
repressed excitement, and when the appointed minute comes, the
children quickly form into line and march into the lecture room where
the story is told. Once there, the children group themselves on the
floor about the story teller, and all is attention. It may be that
the story is a hard one to tell, the process of adapting and preparing
it may have been difficult, but in the interested faces of the
children and in the bright eyes fixed upon her face, the story teller
finds her inspiration. Extra copies of books containing Norse myths
have been provided for each children's room. Since few of these books
are for very young children, we tell these poetic stories of our
Northern ancestors to the older boys and girls only. For the younger
ones there are such stories as The Three Bears, Hop-o'-my-thumb, and
other old nursery favorites. At Thanksgiving, Christmas and a few
other holidays, the program is dropped and one full of the spirit of
the season is told instead. That the children enjoy and appreciate the
stories is seen by the steadily increasing attendance, and by the fact
that the same children return week after week. Teachers say the very
worst punishment they can inflict is to detain a child so late on
Friday that he misses his story hour. During the summer months, and
early fall, when no stories were being told, there were many anxious
inquiries as to when the story hour would begin. At our West End
branch the children clamored so for their stories that the work was
commenced a month before the time for beginning the regular program.
And what is the use of story telling? Is it merely to amuse and
entertain the children? Were it simply for this, the time would not
seem wasted, when one recalls the bright and happy faces and realizes
what an hour of delight it is to many children oftentimes their only
escape from mean and sordid surroundings Col. Thomas Wentworth
Higginson once said that to lie on the hearth rug and listen to one's
mother reading aloud is a liberal education, but such sweet and
precious privileges are only for the few. The story hour is intended
to meet this want in some slight degree, to give the child a glimpse
beyond the horizon which hitherto has limited his life, and open up to
him those vast realms of literature which are a part of his
inheritance, for unless he enters this great domain through the
gateway of childish fancy and imagination, the probability is that he
will never find any other opening. To arouse and stimulate a love for
the best reading is then the real object of the story hour. Through
the story the child's interest is awakened, the librarian places in
his hands just the right book to develop that interest, and gradually
there is formed a taste for good literature.
In the following article, contributed to Public Libraries for
November, 1908, Mr. John Cotton Dana protests against the popular
idea of library story-telling and advocates instruction given to
teachers both in story- telling and in the use of books as a better
method "as to cost and results." John Cotton Dana was born in
Woodstock, Vermont, in 1856, received the degree of A.B. from
Dartmouth in 1878, and studied law in Woodstock from 1878 to 1880. He
was a land surveyor in Colorado in 1880-1881, was admitted to the New
York bar in 1883, and spent 1886-1887 in Colorado as a civil engineer.
He was Librarian of the Denver Public Library from 1889 to 1897; of
the City Library, Springfield, Mass., from 1898- 1902, and since 1902
has been Librarian of the Free Public Library of Newark, N. J.
Story-telling to groups of young children is now popular among
librarians. The art is practiced chiefly by women. No doubt one
reason for its popularity is that it gives those who practice it the
pleasures of the teacher, the orator and the exhorter. It must be a
delight to have the opportunity to hold the attention of a group of
children; to see their eyes sparkle as the story unwinds itself; to
feel that you are giving the little people high pleasure, and at the
same time are improving their language, their morals, their dramatic
sense, their power of attention and their knowledge of the world's
literary masterpieces. Also, it is pleasant to realize that you are
keeping them off the streets; are encouraging them to read good books;
are storing their minds with charming pictures of life and are making
friends for your library. In explaining its popularity I have stated
briefly the arguments usually given in favor of library story-telling.
There is another side. A library's funds are never sufficient for all
the work that lies before it. Consequently, the work a library elects
to do is done at the cost of certain other work it might have done.
The library always puts its funds, skill and energy upon those things
which it thinks are most important, that is, are most effective in the
long run, in educating the community. Now, the schools tell stories
to children, and it is obviously one of their proper functions so to
do at such times, to such an extent and to such children as the
persons in charge of the schools think wise. It is probable that the
schoolmen know better when and how to include story-telling in their
work with a given group of children than do the librarians. If a
library thinks it knows about this subject more than do the schools,
should it spend time and money much needed for other things in trying
to take up and carry on the schools' work? It would seem not. Indeed,
the occasional story-telling which the one library of a town or city
can furnish is so slight a factor in the educational work of that
town or city as to make the library's pride over its work seem very
ludicrous. If, now, the library by chance has on its staff a few
altruistic, emotional, dramatic and irrepressible child-lovers who do
not find ordinary library work gives sufficient opportunities for
altruistic indulgence, and if the library can spare them from other
work, let it set them at teaching the teachers the art of
story-telling. Contrast, as to cost and results, the usual
story-telling to children with instruction in the same and allied arts
to teachers. The assistant entertains once or twice each week a group
of forty or fifty children. The children—accustomed to schoolroom
routine, hypnotized somewhat by the mob-spirit, and a little by the
place and occasion, ready to imitate on every opportunity —listen
with fair attention. They are perhaps pleased with the subject matter
of the tale, possibly by its wording, and very probably by the voice
and presence of the narrator. They hear an old story, one of the many
that help to form the social cement of the nation in which they live.
This is of some slight value, though the story is only one of scores
which they hear or read in their early years at school. The story has
no special dramatic power in its sequence. As a story it is of value
almost solely because it is old. It has no special value in its
phrasing. It may have been put into artistic form by some man of
letters; but the children get it, not in that form, but as retold by
an inspired library assistant who has made no mark in the world of
letters by her manner of expression. The story has no moral save as it
is dragged in by main strength; usually, in fact, and especially in
the case of myths, the moral tone needs apologies much more than it
needs praise. To prepare for this half hour of the relatively trivial
instruction of a few children in the higher life, the library must
secure a room and pay for its care, a room which if it be obtained and
used at all could be used for more profitable purposes; and the
performer must study her art and must, if she is not a conceited
duffer, prepare herself for her part for the day at a very
considerable cost of time and energy. Now, if the teachers do not know
the value of story-telling at proper times and to children of proper
years; if they do not realize the strength of the influence for good
that lies in the speaking voice—though that this influence is
relatively over-rated in these days I am at a proper time prepared to
show—if they do not know about the interest children take in
legends, myths and fairy tales, and their value in strengthening the
social bond, then let the library assistants who do know about such
things hasten to tell them. I am assuming for purposes of argument
that the teachers do not know, and that library assistants can tell
them. I shall not attempt to say how the library people will approach
the teacher with their information without offending them, except to
remark that tactful lines of approach can be found; and to remark,
further, that by setting up a story-hour in her library a librarian
does not very tactfully convey to the teachers the intimation that
they either do not know their work or willfully neglect it. With this
same labor of preparation, in the room used to talk 30 minutes to a
handful of children, the librarian could far better address a group of
teachers on the use of books in libraries and schoolrooms. Librarians
have long contended that teachers are deficient in bookishness; and it
is quite possible that they are. Their preparation in normal schools
compels them to give more attention to method than to subject matter.
They have lacked incentive and opportunity to become familiar with
books, outside of the prescribed text-books and supplementary readers.
They do not know the literature of and for childhood, and not having
learned to use books in general for delight and utility themselves
they cannot impart the art to their pupils. As I have said, librarians
contend that this is true, yet many of them with opportunities to
instruct teachers in these matters lying unused before them, neglect
them and coolly step in to usurp one of the school's functions and
rebuke the teacher's shortcomings. This is not all. A library gives of
its time, money and energy to instruct 40 children—and there it ends.
If, on the other hand, it instructs 40 teachers, those 40 carry the
instruction to 40 class rooms and impart knowledge of the library, of
the use of books, of the literature for children and—if need be—of
the art of story-telling, to 1,600 or 2,000 children. There seems no
question here as to which of these two forms of educational activity
is for librarians better worth while.
The National Child Conference for Research and Welfare was organized
at a meeting held at Clark University, Worcester, Mass., in July,
1909. Several papers on library topics were presented at this meeting,
one of the most interesting of which was given by Miss Olcott. In this
paper she presents the story hour as a method of introducing "large
groups of children simultaneously to great literature," and asserts
that "the library story hour becomes, if properly utilized, an
educational force as well as a literary guide." Frances Jenkins
Olcott was born in Paris, France; was educated under private tutors,
and was graduated from the New York State Library School in 1896. From
1898 to 1911 she was Chief of the Children's Department of the
Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. In 1900 she organized and became the
Director of the Training School for Children's Librarians. Since 1911
Miss Olcott has contributed to library work with children by writing
and editing books for parents and for children. The library is a
latter day popular educational development. It supplements the work of
the church, the home, the school and the kindergarten. Its function is
to place within the reach of all the best thought of the world as
conserved in the printed page. This being its natural function, all
methods selected by the library should tend directly to arouse
interest in the best reading. Methods which do not do this are, for
the library, ineffective and a waste of valuable energy and public
funds. The library movement has grown with such startling rapidity
that it has not been possible to codify the best methods of library
work, but there has been an earnest endeavor to establish a body of
library pedagogy by careful experimentation. Unfortunately during this
experimental stage methods have been introduced which do not produce
direct library results. Many of these methods, which in this paper it
is not expedient to enumerate, are interesting and appeal to the
imagination; they may impart knowledge, but they are not, strictly
speaking, library methods. As childhood and youth are the times in
which to lay the foundation for the habit of reading and of
discrimination in reading, it falls to the library worker with
children to build up a system of sound library pedagogy leading to the
increased intelligent use of the library. The library worker has to
deal with large crowds of children of all ages, all classes and
nationalities. In a busy children's room she is rarely able to
provide enough assistants to do the necessary routine work and help
each individual child select his reading, therefore it becomes
necessary for her to direct the children's reading through large
groups and to adapt for this purpose methods used by other educational
institutions. But these methods have to be adapted in a practical,
forceful way, otherwise they become sentimental and ineffectual. For
instance, a method useful in the kindergarten for teaching ethics, in
the public schools for teaching geography, science or history, if
rightly applied by the public library, may be useful in arousing
interest in good books and reading. Such is the story telling method,
one of the most effective, if rightly applied, which the public
library uses to introduce large groups of children simultaneously to
great literature. On the other hand, if the library worker uses story
telling merely as a means of inculcating knowledge or teaching
ethics, the story fails to produce public library results and the
method becomes the weakest of methods, as it absorbs time, physical
energy, and library funds which should be expended to increase good
reading. The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh began systematic story
telling to large groups of children in 1899. After a few months a
decided change was noted in the children's reading. The stories were
selected from Shakespeare's plays and there came an increasing demand
for books containing the plays, or stories from them. It became
evident that if a story was carefully prepared with the intention of
arousing interest in reading, it could prove a positive factor in
directing the reading of large groups of children. The method was
adopted throughout the library system and extended to the various
children's reading rooms, home libraries, playgrounds and city
schools. In order to make the story telling effective and systematic,
a subject was chosen for each year, stories being told every Friday
afternoon in the lecture rooms of the Central and Branch libraries and
at varying intervals in the other agencies. Large numbers of
duplicates of children's books containing the stories were purchased
and placed on story hour shelves in the children's rooms.
Announcements of the story hours were made in the public schools and
notices posted on the bulletins in the children's reading rooms. The
children responded so eagerly that it became almost impossible to
handle the large crowds attending weekly and it was quite impossible
to supply the demand for the books which, previous to the story hour,
had not been popular. The story hour courses are planned to extend
over eight years and are selected from romantic and imaginative
literature. For the first two years nursery tales, legends, fables and
standard stories are told. For the following years—Stories from Greek
Mythology; Stories from Norse Mythology and the Nibelungenlied;
Stories of King Arthur and the Round Table, and legends of
Charlemagne; Stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey; Stories from
Chaucer and Spenser; Stories from Shakespeare. At the end of the
eight years the cycle is repeated. The story hours are conducted most
informally. The stories are told, not in the children's rooms, as this
would interfere with the order and discipline of the rooms, but in the
study and lecture rooms of the library buildings. As far as possible a
group is limited to thirty-six children. When stories are told to
children over ten or twelve years of age, the boys and girls are
placed in separate groups. This enables the story teller to develop
her story to suit the varied tastes of her audience. The children sit
on benches constructed especially for the story hour. The benches are
made according to the following measurements: 14 in. from floor to top
of seat; seat 12 in. wide; 3 benches 9 ft. long, one bench 7 ft. long.
Benches made without backs. Four benches are placed in the form of a
hollow square, the story teller sitting with the children. In this way
the children are not crowded and the story teller can see all their
faces. It is more hygienic and satisfactory than allowing the
children to crowd closely about the story teller. The story hour
benches are so satisfactory that we are introducing them as fast as
possible into all of our library buildings. Each story is carefully
prepared beforehand by the story teller. In the Training School for
Children's Librarians conducted by this Library, all the students are
obliged to take the regular course in story telling which includes
lectures and weekly practice. Informality in story telling is
encouraged. Dramatic or elocutionary expression is avoided, the
self-conscious, the elaborate and the artificial are eliminated; we
try to follow as closely as possible the spontaneous folk spirit. The
children sit breathless, lost in visions created by a sympathetic and
un- self-conscious story teller. In closing I should like to dwell
for a moment on what have been called the "by-products" of the Library
story hour. Besides guiding his reading, a carefully prepared, well
told story enriches a child's imagination, stocks his mind with poetic
imagery and literary allusions, develops his powers of concentration,
helps in the unfolding of his ideas of right and wrong, and develops
his sympathetic feelings; all of which "by-products" have a powerful
influence on character. Thus the library story hour becomes, if
properly utilized, an educational force as well as a literary guide.
The possibility of library story telling in schools as a means of
interesting a larger number of children than is possible at a story
hour held in a library is suggested by Miss Alice A. Blanchard in the
following paper, also given at the Conference at Clark University in
1909. Alice Arabella Blanchard was born in Montpelier, Vermont; was
graduated from Smith College in 1903; from the New York State Library
School in 1905, and was a special student in the Training School for
Children's Librarians in 1905-1906. From 1906 to 1908 she was the head
of the children's department of the Seattle Public Library; in 1909
the head of the school department of the Free Public Library, of
Newark, N. J.; from 1910 to 1912 the head of the Schools division of
the Seattle Public Library; from 1913 to 1915 the First Assistant in
the Children's Department and the Training School for Children's
Librarians in the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and since that time
has been supervisor of work with schools and children in the Free
Public Library of Newark, N. J. The subject which the printed
programme for this morning's session assigns to me is How to guide
children's reading by story telling. I must begin my talk by an
apology; for I shall speak upon only a limited phase of that subject.
The subject of guiding children's reading by story telling is a pretty
broad one. Tell a good story to a child and he wants to read the book
from which it comes. This simple statement means that wherever the
child is, at home, at school, in the playground, in the library, in
Sunday School, in the settlement, we can exercise a very direct
influence upon his reading taste by the stories we tell him. Story
telling is a most excellent method of advertising the good books of
the world. I shall consider it as a means of advertising books from
the librarian's point of view, and treat it simply as a library
method, calling it, if you will let me, a library tool. Story telling
is becoming widely popular in schools, in libraries and as a
profession by itself. We know that it is an effective method of
reaching and influencing children, and that as a method it has
advantages over the printed word. Libraries are considering it a part
of their work and are using it on a more or less elaborate scale. It
may be too soon, for we have not been using it very long, to know just
what place story telling should take in the work of the library; but
some of us feel that we are not considering the subject with
sufficient care, that we are letting our enthusiasm run away with our
common sense in the matter, a little too much in the manner of our
friend who has the automobile fever and forgets that life can hold
anything else. It is evident that since no public library ever has
enough time and money at its disposal for the work it has to do, it
cannot afford to undertake story telling or any other activity which
does not further this work. We say that the function of public
library work with children is to give them an intelligent love for
the best books, and in trying to do this we must reach the greatest
number of children at the least expense. If story telling can be an
effective tool, enabling us to reach with books more children at less
expense than any other method at our command, then it has a legitimate
place in library work. If it cannot do this we should let it alone.
Most of us feel that school and libraries have experimented with
story telling long enough now to prove that it has its place as a
legitimate and valued tool of the library. At the same time we see
these facts, however; many libraries do not understand what this place
is; many libraries are using story telling as a tool for another's
work at the expense of their own; and some libraries are using story
telling when, because of their peculiar situation, another tool would
better answer their purpose. If the library is to use story telling it
must be to bring children and books together. This it can do
successfully. Library reports show that it has interested thousands of
children in the library, increased greatly the general circulation of
books from the children's shelves, and created popularity for the
books from which the stories were selected. Incidentally, the Story
Hour makes a delightful form of entertainment, for the average child
loves to hear stories told. It also establishes a very pleasant
personal relation between the children who hear the story and the
person who tells it. Herein lies a danger for the library of which we
take too little account. Because she can by her stories so
delightfully entertain her audience and thereby win their affection
the story-teller is tempted to lose sight of the purpose of her
stories, namely, to guide the children's reading. If she does forget
this purpose, her stories, although they may bring the children week
after week in throngs, will leave them where they were before, so far
as their reading taste is concerned. The fact that the Story Hour
makes a delightful form of entertainment, the fact that it
establishes a pleasant personal relation between story teller and
children, must not be the reason for its adoption by the library. The
story teller must tell stories from books which are to be found upon
the library shelves and she must tell the children that they are
there. Unless the Story Hour advertises the best books, and results in
an increased use of them, the library is wasting time and money in its
story telling—to put the matter in its most favorable light. In the
second place, many libraries are making the mistake of trying to do
too many things with the story telling tool. They forget that the
school tells stories, that it can give the child thereby plenty of
facts in science, history, geography, and what not; that it teaches
him by means of stories, morals and politeness. They forget that the
city does not pay them for doing this school work or for doing the
work of the playgrounds and parks in keeping children off the streets.
Much can be done by the library in all these ways; but it happens that
the work which belongs peculiarly to the library and which no other
institution can at present do for it, is to give good books to all the
children in the city—a task which of itself is enough for any
library to hope to do. Therefore we should discard from our story
telling all the lessons we are trying to teach, our Christmas tree,
our May poles, our fancy costumes and whatever pretty games we play,
and simply tell the children stories from books. Fortunately a good
story from a book is enough to delight a child without any
accompanying frills, so that the time we save by discarding them does
not in the least detract from its efficiency. And we must tell the
stories to children. It has been said of one library and, moreover,
with some pride, that the story hour was so popular that many grown
people came to it; indeed sometimes there was little room left for the
children! Thirdly, the average library does not sufficiently consider
whether in its particular case, story telling is the best tool at its
command. What is a good tool in one case may not be in another and a
given library may be sacrificing much better work when it takes time,
as it must always do, from something else for the story hour. Often a
small library has no story teller upon its staff, but it may be doing
effective work with children through its work with teachers, its
visits to schools and its children's room. It has a small staff and no
room adapted for telling stories at the library. Obviously such a
library has no need for the story telling tool, yet many libraries
like this are struggling hard to use it. Once a week or oftener they
are allowing all the usual routine of the library to be upset to
accommodate the Story Hour, the story teller has spent many hours of
preparation and is under a strain that is little short of misery, and
the children, because of the general difficulty of the whole
situation, are deriving no greater love for books nor respect for the
library. Such a library would do better to give up story telling and
put its energy into what it could do more effectively. But here let
me say that often the small library thinks it has no use for story
telling as a tool when as a matter of fact it has. Children's
librarians in large or small libraries count school visiting as part
of their work. The school visit offers the best of opportunities for
the work of the Story Hour. A story told at the end of an informal
little talk about the library will bring the children flocking to the
library the minute school is over. The small library which has no
Story Hour room but which has a story teller can take advantage of
this opportunity and do much with it. The story teller can visit three
schoolrooms on different days, tell stories to forty children each
time, and because the story telling is distributed over the three
days, manage with comparative ease the influx of 120 children who may
come for books as a result. More than this, the story teller can have
told three stories instead of one, so that only one-third of the
children will clamor for the same book. This last point is important
as all who have had story-hour experience know. And it is not always
the small library which might better tell its stories in school.
Consider the city library which has a story teller who tells stories
at a Branch. She gets crowds of children, it is true, but many more do
not come. She has too many for her story room. Even if she repeats her
story until all the eager children get in eventually to hear it the
results are of doubtful benefit. It has meant a fearfully strenuous
day for the story teller and for the whole Branch; the chances are
that the last children to hear the tale gained little from it because
the story teller was too tired to tell it well; many of the children
have spent most of the afternoon in the scuffle of trying to get in
and having to wait when they might have been out of doors playing; and
practically all the children were the same ones who always come. And,
as in a small library, all the children want the same books, if the
stories were good. School people, as a rule, are very cordial to the
library story teller. Since they are, this method seems preferable to
the Story Hour at the library. The story teller, besides being spared
the difficulty of managing the story hour at the library, has a
better opportunity to keep in touch with school work; can reach all
the children instead of the same group week after week; interests
teacher as well as the children in the books from which the stories
are told; and saves the library considerable money in janitor work and
heat and light bills. Probably the story teller has neither time nor
strength to tell stories both in school and library. Would she not be
wise in such a case to tell her stories in the schoolroom? There is
another thing that should be said of story telling as a library tool.
If we aim by stories to advertise the best books, how shall we tell
the stories to make the books seem most attractive and to get the best
results? We say that the impression the child gets from a story told
is greater than that gained from a story read. Then we proceed to
tell him in our own words stories which we adapt from the books we
think he should know, trusting that he will want the books themselves
as a result. Well and good for those books which depend for their
value upon subject matter, regardless of style; for folk-lore, for
many of the fairy tales and other stories, but not equally well and
good for books that are valuable for their literary forces. If a story
is dramatic enough for the telling and is written by a master, is it
not a shame to give it to a child in an inferior form when he might
have it as it was written? If a master did it, it is every bit as
dramatic and as easy for the child to understand in the form in which
the master wrote it as in the story teller's version, and many times
more beautiful. Why do children's librarians spend so much time in
the preparation of their own versions of the good stories of the
world when they have so much material which they can use at first
hand? The theory is, that a story has more life if told in the story
teller's words, that it is likely to be stiff and formal if she must
confine herself to the author's words. This need not be so. If the
story teller enjoys the story, as a story teller always must, if she
appreciates the charm of its expression as the author wrote it, and
sees the value of this charm, the author's words will come easily from
her lips with all the life of the original. She may have had to cut
the original more or less, but that can usually be done without
perceptibly marring the story. If the tale does not lend itself to
this kind of treatment and she feels that she must adapt the whole
thing for her audience, she can at least quote paragraphs. If the
story teller gives the child her own version, the child wants the
story because or in spite of what she put into it. He gets the book,
fails to find the story teller part of it and, as that is all he is
after puts the book down or finds the real thing and thinks the teller
didn't know it very well, for "She left out some of the best parts."
I am not saying that the story teller's version is worthless. It is
good as far as it goes. I am only saying that by it we often miss an
opportunity to give the children something better. None of us can tell
the Andersen or the Kipling stories as well as the men who wrote them.
Why not give them to the children "straight out of the book," as the
children say, and why not, for instance, when we are telling stories
of the Trojan War, give them passages verbatim from Bryant's Iliad?
This kind of story telling may take more time for preparation than the
other for some people, it is true, but the resulting benefit is
greater. The librarian who has once told an Andersen story in the
words of a close translation will never want to do it in her own
again. In spite of all we say about giving him the best books, are we
not giving the child too little credit for literary appreciation? Are
not some of our simplified versions of the good stories of the world a
little too simple? We refuse to leave upon our shelves such foolish
things as the Hiawatha primer, or the Stevenson reader (this gives
upon one page a poem from the child's garden and on the opposite page
a neat translation!), and yet do we not offend sometimes in the same
way in our story telling? Let us not run the risk of spoiling the
atmosphere and beauty of a good tale by over-adapting it. If it is
beyond the child's comprehension in the beginning, let us leave it for
him to find when he is older. If our library story telling has been
what it should be, the road will be an easy one for him to follow.
Story-telling in playgrounds, settlements and libraries as it is
carried on in various communities, is described in the following
comprehensive report which was made by the Committee on
story-telling, Miss Annie Carroll Moore, Chairman, at the Fourth
Annual Congress of the Playground Association of America. It was
printed in the Playground, August, 1910, and an abridgement appeared
in the Library Journal (September, 1910). A sketch of Miss Moore
appears on page 113. "Is she a Fairy, or just a Lady?" A little
Scotch girl asked the question after a story hour in a children's
library. "She made me see fairies awful plain." "She made me see
fairies, too," answered the children's librarian with whom the child
had shared her doubt. "Let's go and find her and make sure." On the
way they spoke of the story they had both liked best. It was about an
old woman who lived long ago in Devonshire, who loved tulips and
planted her garden full of them, and tended them with great care
because they seemed to her so beautiful. After the old woman died some
extremely practical persons came to live in her house and they
considered it very foolish to grow tulips for their beauty when the
garden might be turned to practical account. So they dug up the garden
and analyzed the soil, and planted carrots and turnips and parsnips
and just such vegetables as promised to yield speedy and profitable
returns. By and by a wonderful thing happened. Tulips no longer grew
in the garden; there was no room for them and nobody had time to look
after such useless things. But on the spot where the old woman was
buried the most beautiful tulips sprang up of themselves, and every
night in the Springtime the faries may be seen bringing their babies
to rock them to sleep in the tulip bells. The little Scotch girl
wondered whether there was "a book in the library with the tulip story
in." She wanted to read it to her grandmother, she said, because her
grandmother was "always speaking about her garden in Scotland," and
she wondered if the tulips in Scotland had fairies asleep in them.
The storyteller, who was Miss Marie L. Shedlock, looked wonderfully
happy when asked whether she was a "Fairy" or "just a Lady." She said
she supposed she was really "just a Lady," but she had become so
intimate with fairies through listening to stories about them, and
thinking about them, and telling fairy tales to children and grown
people in England and America, that she felt almost like a fairy at
times, and she had come to believe with Hans Christian Andersen, whose
stories she loved best of all, that life itself is a beautiful fairy
tale. Then she told the little girl that the tulip story was not in a
book, and that she must tell it to her grandmother just as she
remembered hearing it, and that having seen the fairies while she
listened would help her to remember the story better. She could see
pictures all the time she was telling stories, she said. The little
girl had never thought of making pictures for herself before. She had
only seen them in books and hanging on walls. This unconscious tribute
to the art of the storyteller made a lasting impression on the
children's librarian. If a child of less than eight years, and of no
exceptional parts, could so clearly discriminate between the fairy
tale she had heard at school and the tale that made her "see the
fairies," there was little truth in the statement that children do not
appreciate artistic storytelling. She went back to her children's room
feeling that something worth while had happened. The children who had
listened to the stories now crowded about the book shelves, eager for
"any book about fairies," "a funny book," or "a book about animals."
The little girl who had seen the fairies was not the only one who had
fallen under the spell of the storyteller. "I always knew Pandora was
a nice story, but she never seemed like a live girl before," said one
of the older girls. "I liked the Brahmin, the Jackal and the Tiger
best," exclaimed a boy. "Gee! but couldn't you just see that tiger
pace when she was saying the words?" "I just love The Little Tin
Soldier," said a small boy who hated to read, but was always begging
the children's librarian to tell him stories about the pictures he
found in books. "Didn't she make him march fine!" Before the end of
the day the children's librarian had decided that even if there could
be but one such story hour in the lifetime of an individual or an
institution it would pay in immediate and far-off results. But why
stop with one; why not have more story hours in children's libraries?
Other children's librarians were asking themselves the same question,
and then they asked their librarians, and those who recognized in the
story hour a powerful ally in stimulating a love of good literature
and a civilizing influence wherever the gang spirit prevailed, gave
ready assent. Ten years have passed and the story hour is now an
established feature in the work of children's libraries. Miss Shedlock
came to America to tell stories to children and to their fathers and
mothers. She returned year after year to remind the schools and
colleges, the training schools and the kindergartens, as well as the
public libraries, of the great possibilities in what she so aptly
called "the oldest and the newest of the arts." In her lectures upon
"The Art of Storytelling;" "The Fun and the Philosophy; The Poetry and
the Pathos of Hans Christian Andersen," and in the stories she told to
illustrate them, Miss Shedlock exemplified that teaching of Socrates,
which represents him as saying: "All my good is magnetic, and I
educate not by lessons but by going about my daily business." The
story as a mere beast of burden for conveying information or so-called
moral or ethical instruction was relieved of its load. The play spirit
in literature which is the birthright of every child of every nation
was set free. Her interpretation of the delicate satire and the wealth
of imagery revealed in the tales of that great child in literature,
Hans Christian Andersen, has been at once an inspiration and a
restraining influence to many who are now telling stories to children,
and to others who have aided in the establishing of storytelling. It
is now three years since Miss Shedlock was recalled to England by the
London County Council to bring back to the teachers of London the
inspirational value of literature she had taken over to America.
Interest in storytelling has become widespread, reaching a civic
development beyond the dreams of its most ardent advocates when a
professional storyteller and teacher of literature was engaged to
tell stories to children in the field houses of the public recreation
centers of Chicago. Mrs. Gudrun Thorne- Thomsen has been known for
some years in this country as a storyteller of great power in the
field of her inheritance, Scandinavian literature. It is very largely
due to her work that the city of Chicago has been roused to claim the
public library privileges so long denied to her children, and to make
the claim from a point that plants the love of literature in the midst
of the recreational life of a great city. No one who was present at
those meetings of the New York Playground Congress, conducted by Miss
Maud Summers, will ever forget her eloquent appeal for a full
recognition of the value of storytelling as a definite activity of the
playground. She saw its kinship to the folk dance and the folk song in
the effort to preserve the traditions of his country to the
foreign-born child. And she saw the relation of the story to the
games, the athletics, and the dramatics. More clearly than anything
else, perhaps, she saw the value of the story in its direct appeal to
the spiritual nature of the child. Miss Summers' interest and
enthusiasm made the work of the present committee possible. As one of
her associates, its chairman pays grateful tribute to her memory and
links her name with a work to which she gave herself so freely in
life, that her death seems but the opening of another door through
which we look with full hope and confidence upon childhood as "a real
and indestructible part of human life." There is a line of Juvenal
that bids the old remember the respect due to the young. It is in that
attitude, and with some appreciation of what it means to be a growing
boy or girl of the present time, that the subject of this report has
been approached and is now presented for the consideration of the
Playground Association of America. We know only too well that we
cannot give to childhood in great cities the simple and lovely ways we
associate with childhood. We CAN give to it a wonderful fortification
against the materialism and the sensationalism of daily life on the
streets, against the deadly monotony of the struggle for existence, by
a revival of the folk spirit in story, as well as in song and in
dance, that will not spend its strength in mere pageantry, but will
sink deep into our national consciousness. It should be clearly
stated that the field of storytelling, investigated, relates to
children above the kindergarten age and to boys and girls in their
teens. The investigation lays no claim to completeness and has not
included storytelling in public nor in private schools. An outline
covering the main points of this report was sent to representative
workers in thirteen different cities, to several persons
professionally engaged in storytelling, and to other persons whose
critical judgment was valued in such connection. The outline
called—First, for a statement of the extent to which storytelling is
being carried on in playgrounds, public libraries, settlements, and
such other institutions, exclusive of schools, as might come to the
notice of the members of the committee. Second, for information
concerning the persons who are telling stories, whether their entire
time is given to storytelling and preparation for it; whether it forms
a part of the regular duties of a director or an assistant; and,
finally, whether volunteer workers are engaged in storytelling.
Replies to these inquiries with a brief statement of results have
been grouped by cities,[3] as follows: [3] Owing to space
limitations, in general the formal reports from cities represented in
the discussion are omitted in the body of the report. BOSTON
Storytelling in the playgrounds is under the direction of a special
teacher appointed in 1909. The teacher of storytelling works in
co-operation with the teachers of dramatics and of folk dancing. The
visits of the special teacher added interest and novelty, but it is
felt that every playground teacher should be able to tell stories
effectively. Storytelling, therefore, is considered a part of the
daily work of the playground assistant. In the Boston Public Library,
storytelling is not organized as a definite feature of work with
children, but has been employed occasionally in some branch libraries,
regularly in others, by varying methods. It is regarded as markedly
successful in districts where library assistants are closely
identified with the work of the neighborhood. Co-operation with
settlements in which storytelling has been carried on for some years
has been very successful. Rooms have been furnished by the library;
the settlements, and sometimes the normal schools, have provided
storytellers. The work of a settlement leader with a large group of
boys was especially interesting one winter, as he told continued
stories from such books as "Treasure Island" and "The Last of the
Mohicans." In the sixty home libraries conducted by The Children's Aid
Society, storytelling and games are carried on by regular and
volunteer visitors on the days when books are exchanged. (For full
information concerning home libraries refer to Mr. Charles W. Birtwell
of The Children's Aid Society, Boston, with whom this work
originated.) Settlements and libraries report great improvement in the
quality of reading done by the children as well as keen appreciation
and enjoyment of the stories to which they have listened. They
remember and refer to stories told them several years ago.
In the children's room of the Pratt Institute Free Library,
storytelling and reading aloud have had a natural place since the
opening of the new library building in 1896. Years before this
library was built the lot on which it stands was appropriated as a
playground by the children of the neighborhood—a neighborhood that
has been gradually transformed by the life of the institution which is
the center of interest. The recognition of the necessity for play and
the value of providing a place for it— children now play freely in
the park on the library grounds— exercised a marked influence on the
conception of work to be done by this children's library and upon its
subsequent development. The children's librarian was never allowed to
forget that the trustees had been boys in that very neighborhood and
remembered how boys felt. It was evident from the outset, that the
children's room was to be made of living interest to boys and girls
who were very much alive to other things than books. Probably more
suggestions were gained from looking out of windows, and from walks in
the neighborhood and beyond it, than from any other sources. Fourteen
years ago there were no other public libraries with rooms for
children, in Brooklyn; and boys frequently walked from two to five
miles to visit this one. During the past six years a weekly story hour
with a well-defined program based upon the varied interests of boys
and girls of different ages has been conducted from October to May of
each year. The children's librarian plans for the story hour, and does
much of the storytelling herself; but from time to time some one from
the outside world is invited to come and tell stories in order to
give the children a change, and to give breadth and balance to the
library's outlook upon the story interests of boys and girls.
Listening as one of the group has greatly strengthened the feeling of
comradeship between children's librarian and children, and the stories
have been enjoyed more keenly than as if one person had told them all.
The evening on which Mr. Dan Beard told "Bear Stories" is still
remembered, and another evening is associated with the old hero tales
of Japan told by a Japanese, who was claimed by the boys as one of
themselves, and known thereafter as "The Japanese Boy." Pure enjoyment
of such a story hour by children whose homes offered nothing in place
of it already gives assurance of results rich in memories and
associations, since men and women who were coming fourteen years ago
as children are now bringing THEIR children to look at picture books.
The institutions in connection with which storytelling is carried on
are: The Chicago Public Library, the municipal parks and playgrounds,
social settlements, vacation schools, institutional churches,
hospitals, and the United Charities. The private organizations
supporting the storytelling movement financially, by the employment of
special storytellers, are: The Library Extension Story Hour Committee,
the Permanent School Extension Committee, the Library Committee, the
Daughters of the American Revolution, and various women's clubs of
Chicago. A league has been formed of those who are telling stories
under the auspices of the public library. The league holds meetings
once a month for the purpose of upholding the standard of story work
and to strengthen the co-operation with the library. Stories from
Scandinavian literature, and stories of patriotism related to the
different nationalities represented in the story hour groups, have
been notably successful in Chicago. The following statements are made
by (1) Mr. E. B. De Groot, director of the playgrounds and field
houses. "I think that the story hour is the only passive occupation
that should be given an equal place with the active occupations. I see
in the story hour, not only splendid possibilities but a logical
factor in the comprehensive playground scheme. The place of the story
hour, I believe, is definite and comparable with any first choice
activity. It is unfortunate that we are unable to secure as
playground teachers, at the present time, good story hour men and
women." (2) Mr. Henry E. Legler, Librarian of the Chicago Public
Library: "We are now engaged in developing the branch library system
of the city, and no doubt storytelling will be made incidentally a
feature of the work planned for the children's rooms. This work must
be done by the children's librarians, the storytelling growing out of
library work and merging into it in order that its most effective side
be legitimately developed." (Mr. Legler states his views with regard
to storytelling and other features of work for children in an article
entitled "The Chicago Public Library and Co-operation with the
Schools." Educational Bi-Monthly, April, 1910). (3) Mrs. Gudrun
Thorne-Thomsen: "As to the future of the movement I believe the
purposes are best served by the storyteller being an integral member
of the organization she serves. I believe that if the organizations
which express themselves so sympathetic toward the work would
co-operate and give definite instruction in storytelling to their
workers, and also give them a fair amount of supervision and
direction, the whole movement might be placed on a dignified and
wholesome basis."
Storytelling has been carried on in the playgrounds and summer
schools for several years. Since 1907 the work of playground leaders
has been supplemented by storytelling done by public library
assistants who visit the playgrounds by invitation, and who are
scheduled for this work as a part of their regular library duties. In
the Cleveland Public Library storytelling and reading clubs have been
widely developed under the guidance of the director of work with
children. In each of the branch libraries two story hours a week are
usually held. Storytelling is regarded as a part of the equipment of
the children's librarian, and time is allowed from the weekly schedule
for the preparation of stories. Definite neighborhood co-operation is
the aim of each branch library. Storytelling visits are therefore made
to the public schools, social settlements, day nurseries, mission
schools, and other institutions of a neighborhood. Requests for such
visits are more numerous than can be supplied. Storytelling in the
settlements is done by club leaders and volunteer workers mainly in
connection with club work. Stories were told last season in the
children's gardens connected with the social settlement by an
assistant from The Home Gardening Association. Positive results of
the effect of storytelling in the Cleveland Public Library are shown
in the favorable direction of the reading of large numbers of children
by a strong appeal to their spontaneous interests, and by the many
requests for library storytellers. The total number of children who
listened to stories told by library assistants in 1909 was 80,996. The
Cleveland Public Library publishes an illustrated "Handbook"
containing a full account of its storytelling and club work.
One playground has been opened in the Borough of Queens. Storytelling
was introduced into the branches of the public library in 1908 and was
at first carried on entirely by the supervisor of work with children
as a means of putting herself in touch with the children and library
assistants. An experience of some years at the head of the children's
department in the public library of Portland, Oregon, had given her a
full sense of the social opportunities presented in telling stories.
The branch libraries of Queens Borough are situated chiefly in
separate towns and at seaside resorts. The children in some of these
communities are inclined to be lethargic and lacking in initiative;
or, the commercial instinct is abnormally developed in them. Habits of
visiting a library for pleasure had not been established except in the
case of older girls and boys who regarded it as a meeting place.
Girls whose reading was as flippant and as vulgar as their conduct on
the streets have become interested members of "A Girl's Romance Club."
Stories appealing to their love of romance have been told and books
have been familiarly discussed with them. Library assistants as well
as the supervisor of children's work now hold weekly story hours.
There has been a great improvement in the quality and extent of the
reading done by the children. Storytelling visits have been made to
public schools and to the Jewish Home for Crippled Children. A library
storyteller is sent to the playground opened in Flushing in 1910.
Storytelling in the playgrounds of New York City is considered an
important feature of the work of playground assistants wherever the
conditions are favorable to carrying it on. In the Parks and
Playgrounds Association the leader of the Guild of Play tells stories
herself and is supplemented by regular assistants and volunteer
workers with whom she holds conferences on storytelling. The work of
the Guild of Play is extended to hospitals for Crippled Children, to
homes for Destitute Children and to settlements. (See Handbook and
Report of Parks and Playgrounds Association.) In the playgrounds and
vacation schools maintained by the Board of Education, storytelling is
carried on by the supervisors and assistants. The Nurses' Settlement,
Greenwich House, Union Settlement, Hartley House, and Corning-Clark
House, report weekly story hours, frequently held on Sunday
afternoons. Storytelling is carried on in other settlements and by
several church houses, St. Bartholomew's Parish House reporting a well
attended story hour following a mid-week church service. In the New
York Public Library, storytelling, under the general direction of the
supervisor of work with children, is in special charge of a library
assistant who has been a student of dramatic art as well as of library
science. Storytelling is not required of library assistants. Any
assistant who wants to tell stories is given an opportunity to do so
and to profit by criticism. Her trial experience is made with a group
of children. If she proves her ability to hold their interest, she is
then allowed to make up her own program for a series of story hours,
basing it upon her spontaneous interests, her previous reading, and
the special needs of the library where the story hour is to be held.
The fact that storytelling has been regarded as a potent factor in the
unification of work with children in the rural districts, as well as
in the congested centers, where branch libraries are situated, has
greatly influenced the present organization of the work. Racial
interests have been considered, and on such festival days as are
observed by the Hungarians, the Bohemians, and the Irish, special
story hours have been held. In each case a volunteer storyteller of
the nationality concerned lent interest to the occasion. Weekly story
hours are now held in most of the branch libraries. In some of them,
two or more story hours are held. Story hours in roof reading-rooms
are held irregularly during the summer. Marked results of storytelling
after three years are shown by a very great improvement in the
character of the recreational reading done by the children, and in
their sense of pleasure in the children's room. The keen enjoyment of
the library assistants who have been telling stories, and the interest
of other workers in the library, indicates a valuable contribution to
the work, by bringing its people together in their conception of what
the library is trying to do for children. Repeated requests for
library storytellers have been received from institutions for the
Blind, the Deaf Mutes, the Insane, from Reformatory institutions, as
well as from settlements, church houses, public and private schools,
parents' meetings, and industrial schools. Three branches of The
National Storytellers' League hold meetings in New York City. (A full
account of the National Storytellers' League is given by its founder
Richard T. Wyche, in the Pedagogical Seminary, volume 16.) Courses in
storytelling are given at several schools and colleges, at The Summer
School of Philanthropy, and at The National Training School for Young
Women's Christian Associations.
Storytelling in the Pittsburgh playgrounds has a unique organization
in that it is entirely under the direction of the Carnegie Library of
Pittsburgh. All storytelling in the playgrounds is done by Children's
librarians or by students of The Training School for Children's
Librarians on the days books are exchanged. The organized story hour,
developed as a direct method of guiding the reading of children,
originated with this library and has been carried on in connection
with home library groups as well as in the branch libraries, the
public schools, the playgrounds, and the social settlements of
Pittsburgh, for a period of eleven years. The Carnegie Library of
Pittsburgh issues printed lists of the stories used and a pamphlet
entitled "Storytelling—a Public Library Method" by Miss Frances
Jenkins Olcott, Chief of the Children's Department and Director of the
Training School for Children's Librarians.
In the playgrounds one regularly employed storyteller, who also
assists in directing the games, tells stories throughout the season.
Storytelling is also carried on by playground assistants and by
volunteer storytellers. The interest shown by parents who frequently
join the story hour groups in the parks, is considered a significant
gain in sustaining neighborhood interest in the playground. In one
settlement house, the head worker meets the storytellers at the
beginning of the season and plans and directs the work for the entire
year. Storytelling in the St. Louis Public Library has been carried on
for several years by children's librarians of branch libraries who
have visited playgrounds, settlements, and public schools, as visiting
storytellers, and have told stories at mothers' clubs and teachers'
meetings. Since February, 1910, it has been under the direction of the
supervisor of work with children, who was formerly one of the visiting
storytellers and assistants to the supervisor of work with children in
the New York Public Library. Storytelling is regarded by her as a
valuable aid in the unification of the work with children in a system
of libraries.
The reports received represent only a small part of the storytelling
that is being done in different parts of the country. In New Jersey,
the organizer of the State Library Commission has found her ability to
tell stories and to choose books containing a direct appeal to the
people who are to read them, or to listen to the reading of them, an
open sesame in the pine woods districts, the farming communities, and
the fishing villages, where grown people listen as eagerly as
children. In a paper entitled, "The Place, the Man, and the Book,"
Miss Sarah B. Askew gives a vivid picture of the establishment of a
library in a fishing village. (Proceedings of the American Library
Association. 1908.)[4] [4] Reprinted as a pamphlet by The H. W.
Wilson Company. Recognizing a similar need for the interpretation of
books to the communities where libraries had already been established,
the Iowa Library Commission appointed in 1909 an advisory children's
librarian, who is also a professional storyteller and lecturer upon
children's literature. In the Public Lecture courses of New York City,
it has been found that storytelling programs composed of folk tales
draw large audiences of grown people who enjoy the stories quite as
much as do the children. In various institutions for adults as well
as for children, where the library has been a mere collection of books
that counted for little or nothing in the daily life of the
institution, storytelling is making the books of living interest, and
is giving to children, and to grown men and women, new sources of
pleasure by taking them out of themselves and beyond the limitations
of a prescribed and monotonous existence. Just as the games and folk
dances are making their contribution to institutional life, so
storytelling is bringing the play spirit in literature to those whose
imaginations have been starved by long years of neglect, and is
showing that what is needed is not an occasional entertainment, but
the joy of possessing literature itself. Professional storytellers
who have recently visited towns and cities of the Pacific Coast, the
Middle-Western, the Southern, and the Eastern States, not covered by
this report, bear testimony to an interest in storytelling that seems
to be as genuine as it is widespread. It is apparent that more thought
is being given to the subject than ever before. Wherever storytelling
has been introduced by a "born storyteller" who has succeeded in
kindling sparks of local talent capable of sustaining interest and
accomplishing results, storytelling is bound to be a success. All
reports testify to the need of a well defined plan for storytelling
related to the purpose and the aims of the institution which
undertakes it, and to the varying capacities and temperaments of the
persons who are to carry it on.
The professional storyteller has played a large part in the
successful establishment of storytelling, and is destined to play a
still larger part in the future development of the work in playgrounds
and other institutions, by raising the standards of the playground
library, or settlement worker, who is expected to tell stories. This
she will do not by elaborating methods and artifices to be imitated,
but by frank criticism of native ability, by inspiring courses in
story literature, and by proper training of the much neglected
speaking voice. The sooner we cease to believe that "anybody can tell
a story" the better for storytelling in every institution undertaking
it. A candidate for a given position may be required to have
storytelling ability, but no assistant should be required to tell
stories as a part of her duties unless she can interest a group of
children who have voluntarily come to listen to her stories. Repeating
simplified versions of stories is not storytelling. Exercises in
memorizing may be as helpful to the storyteller as the practice of
scales to the piano player, but neither is to be regarded as a source
of pleasure to the listener. Listening as one of a group is a valuable
experience in the training of an assistant who is telling stories in
the playground, the library, or the settlement. Herein lies the
advantage of a visiting storyteller who does not take the place of the
playground or library assistant, but who enlivens the program for the
children and makes it possible for the regular assistant to listen
occasionally and to profit by the experience. (The professional
listener is delightfully characterized in "Miss Muffet's Christmas
Party," by Dr. Samuel McChord Crothers.)
The outline sent to the members of the Committee on Storytelling
called for the mention of specific stories and for personal
experience in group formation, taking into account age and sex, time
and place, and for a statement of results, in so far as such results
could be stated. From five hundred different stories mentioned a
composite list of "Fifty Stories for the Playground" has been made.
This list is chiefly composed of fairy and folk tales, Indian legends,
and animal stories, as making the strongest appeal to playground
groups and to library groups unaccustomed to listening to stories. It
also represents the story literature most easily commanded by the
storyteller who has not read widely. Stories from the Norse and Greek
Mythology, from the Niebelungen Lied, the Arthurian legends, and from
Robin Hood; stories of Roland and of Charlemagne; stories from the
Faerie Queene, and from the Canterbury Tales; historical and
biographical stories are generously represented in the five hundred
titles, but such stories should not be attempted without sufficient
reading and feeling for the subject to enable the storyteller to bring
it vividly and naturally before such a group as she is likely to meet
in her daily experience. Satisfactory festival stories are reported as
exceedingly difficult to find. Several stories growing out of personal
experiences, such as a "Christmas in Germany," a "May Day in
England," "Fourth of July in the Garden of Warwick Castle," (The
Warwick Pageant of 1900) are mentioned. Atmosphere and festival
spirit are often lacking in stories listed under Festivals and
Holidays. Poetry and verses are repeated or read at many of the
library story hours. Lear's nonsense rhymes and certain rhythmical
story poems are especially enjoyed by the children. Outlines of
stories or selections from books designed to lead to the reading of an
entire book are mentioned in connection with Dickens, Kipling,
Stevenson, Scott, Victor Hugo, and other authors. In addition to the
list of "Fifty Stories for the Playground" a list of "Books to Read on
the Playground" has been prepared. Nearly all of the public libraries
mentioned in the report send books to playgrounds when the playgrounds
desire it. The use of books in the roof reading-rooms of libraries is
very similar to their use in the playgrounds. Here and in children's
reading-rooms boys and girls are free to choose the books they really
want to read. In his book entitled "The American Public Library," Dr.
Arthur E. Bostwick makes this statement: "There are no intellectual
joys equal to those of discovery. The boy or girl who stumbles on one
of the world's masterpieces without knowing what anyone else thinks or
has thought about it, and reading it, admires and loves it, will have
that book throughout life as a peculiar intellectual possession in a
way that would have been impossible if someone had advised reading it
and had described it as a masterpiece. The very fact that one is
advised to read a book because one ought to do so is apt to arouse the
same feeling of repulsion that caused the Athenian citizen to vote for
the banishment of Aristides just because he had grown so weary of
hearing him always called 'The Just.' "
Groups for storytelling are usually assembled in separate rooms in
the libraries and are made up by an approximate but variable age
limit, dividing the children under ten or eleven years old from the
boys and girls above that age. In the settlements the group is usually
determined by the club organization. On the playgrounds, the
experience of a storyteller in Providence is probably typical of many
other workers and is quoted as suggestive for group formation in
playgrounds. "During the summer of 1909 the stories I told on the
Davis Park Playground were costly fairy tales and folk stories.
'Grimm's Fairy Tales' was the favorite of both boys and girls and
through the summer I told every story in the book. The boys also liked
'The Merrie Adventures of Robin Hood,' 'The Three Golden Apples,'
'The Golden Touch,' 'The Golden Fleece,' and all the old Indian
legends. While the girls, if offered a choice, always called for a
fairy tale with a Prince Charming in it. Neither boys nor girls would
listen to historical stories saying they were too much like school.
"The first day to gain an audience I went up to a group of children
who were playing together and asked them if they would like to hear a
story. Four or five replied that they would, while some fifteen or
twenty disappeared as though by magic, and I decided that they were
not interested. I then took the children who wished to listen, over to
a large tree in one corner of the grounds, and told them that for the
rest of the summer that tree would be known as 'the storytelling
tree.' They would, I told them, find me there every day promptly at
half-past one, and that I would tell stories for a half hour to the
whole playground. Then from half-past two until three I would tell
stories to the older girls. The first day I had a very small audience,
the next day it doubled, and then increased daily until I had from
eighty to a hundred children in a group. As to forming a group, I
think it is impossible in playground work, for a group worth having
must form itself, the reputation of the storyteller being the
foundation of its formation, and this reputation can only be gained
through constant systematic labor, and a thorough knowledge of your
daily audience. That is why I think a professional visiting
storyteller would be a failure in playground work, as in visiting each
playground once or twice a week it would be impossible for her to gain
that intimate personal knowledge of her audience, which is so
necessary to the playground storyteller, as she must appeal to a
different class of children on each playground. "The experience of a
professional storyteller with a group of boys, already assembled as a
club, is also quoted for its valuable suggestion and independence of
method in gaining the interest of boys who had been much experimented
upon. "The most interesting experience I have had in a developed
series of stories was with the Boys' Club of Greenwich, Connecticut,
last year. The club is supported by the wealthy women of the place,
and is an outgrowth of a rather serious and perplexing boy problem. A
number of picture shows, pool rooms, cheap vaudevilles, etc., have
crept into the town, and life on the street is most attractive. "The
head worker of the club wrote that they had failed to hold the boys in
everything but manual training and baseball; that the boys were
insubordinate and unresponsive, and that their school reports were
very poor. I found the conditions even worse than I had anticipated.
It was necessary to train eighty boys to listen, as well as to
interest them, and so, I told very short stories at first. I chose the
ones that were full of dramatic action, that had little or no
description, and a good deal of dialogue. The stories were strongly
contrasted, and there was no attempt at literary or artistic finish. I
used a great many gestures and moved about on the platform frequently;
it is the quickest way of focusing laggard attention. To be absolutely
honest, I had to come very close to the level of the moving picture
show, and the ten-cent vaudeville, at first. "The fourth night I
eliminated all but a few gestures, and told the stories sitting down.
I also used less colloquial English; and from then on, until the end,
when I told the stories from Van Dyke in his own words, there was a
steady growth in literary style. I append the programs in the order
they were given:
1. Irish Folk-tales. 2. Stories from Scandinavian Myths. 3.
The Rhinegold Stories. 4. German Folk-tales.
5. Arthurian Tales. 6. Stories of Charlemagne and Frederick
Barbarossa. 7. Tales of American Indians. 8. Negro Tales. 9.
Stories of the Carnegie Heroes. 10. Kipling—Captains Courageous,
Jungle Stories. 11. Van Dyke—A Friend of Justice, The Keeper of the
Light. 12. Irish Folk-tales (Requested). "The practical results were
very satisfactory. The books in the club library were used more, the
boys' composition and recitation work at school improved, and they
acquired the habit of polite, attentive listening."
The importance of a definite time and place for the story hour, for a
prompt beginning and for an ending before it becomes tedious, cannot
be too strongly urged. The storyteller should "size up" the conditions
and suit the story hour to them. If she is simple, natural and
unaffected, and sufficiently resourceful to vary her program to suit
the interests of the children, the story hour will be successful.
Various practical forms of co-operation have been suggested, notably
in the visits of library storytellers to playgrounds wherever the
public library is actively interested in storytelling, and such visits
are desired by the playground. The story hour season in most libraries
ends in April, making it possible in some libraries to release
assistants once or twice a week to visit playgrounds. The benefit
derived from such visits is mutually endorsed by playground and
library assistants. Conferences of groups of workers interested in
storytelling, under the leadership of a professional storyteller, who
also understands the practical conditions and limitations under which
the playground and library assistants do their work have proved
stimulating and suggestive in a number of places. Volunteer workers
who have the ability to tell stories and who can so adapt themselves
to their surroundings as to make their story hours effective, can do
much for storytelling. This is especially true of men who have had
actual experience of the life from which their stories are taken and
can make these experiences of absorbing interest to their listeners.
In conclusion, the committee recommends that wherever practicable,
storytelling in playgrounds be placed under a leadership corresponding
to that now given to games and to folk dancing. That a clear
distinction be preserved between storytelling and dramatics, as
differentiated, though closely related, activities of the playground
and the settlement. That the story hour be valued as a rest period;
for its natural training in the power of concentration, and in that
deeper power of contemplation of ideal forms in literature and in
life. That storytelling in settlements be more widely developed as a
feature of social work worthy of a careful plan and of sustained
effort. That storytelling in libraries be made more largely
contributory to storytelling in other institutions by a thoughtful and
discriminating study of story literature, and by effective means of
placing such literature in the hands of those who desire to use it.
The committee also suggests that the subject of storytelling is
worthy of the consideration of the universities, the colleges, and
the high schools, of the country, to the end that students may
appreciate and value the opportunities for service in a field of such
possibilities as are presented to those who possess, and who have the
power to communicate, their own love of literature to the boys and
girls of their time.
Another method used successfully by a number of libraries to interest
older boys and girls as they grow away from the story hour is that of
the reading circle or reading club. Miss Caroline Hewins' contribution
to the Child Conference at Clark University in 1909 was an account of
this work in the Hartford Public Library, of "book-talks at entirely
informal meetings." A sketch of Miss Hewins appears on page 23. The
boys and girls who are growing up in libraries where story-telling is
a part of the weekly routine, at thirteen or fourteen are beginning to
feel a little too old to listen to fairy tales or King Arthur legends,
and look towards the unexplored delights of the grown-up shelves. Many
librarians are taking advantage of this desire for new and interesting
books to form boys' and girls' clubs with definite objects. One whom I
know after a training with large numbers of children in a city branch
library, became librarian in a manufacturing town where there were no
boys' clubs, and soon formed a Polar Club, for reading about Arctic
exploration. She was fortunate in having an audience hall in the
library building, and before the end of the winter the boys had
engaged Fiala, the Antarctic explorer, to give a lecture, sold tickets
and more than cleared expenses. This, be it remembered, is in a town
with no regular theatre or amusement hall, and the librarian is young,
enthusiastic, and of attractive personality. The branch libraries in
Cleveland have been successful in their clubs, and in back numbers of
the Library Journal and Public Libraries, you will find records of
organizations of young folk who meet out of library hours, under
parliamentary rules, for more or less definite courses of reading.
For the reason that the experiments are in print and easily
accessible, I shall merely give you a record of my own book-talks at
entirely informal meetings. Long ago, before there were library
schools, Harlan H. Ballard, now librarian of the Pittsfield Athenaeum,
used St. Nicholas as the organ of the Agassiz Association, which had
been in existence for several years with about a hundred members in
Berkshire County. The Association grew and soon had chapters all over
the world. In the number of St. Nicholas for December, 1881, I find
the record of ours, and the name of the first secretary, then a boy
of ten or twelve years, now a prominent citizen, a member of the Board
of Park Commissioners and School Visitors. We used to go out of doors
looking for birds and insects through the spring and fall, and meet in
the library in winter for reading from authors like John Burroughs,
Dr. C. C. Abbott and Frank Buckland, or the lives of Thomas Edward,
Robert Dick, Agassiz and other naturalists, or sometimes a story from
a grown-up magazine like one of Annie Trumbull Slosson's or an account
of real pets like Frank Bolles's owls. The children in "A. A. Chapter
B" all had good homes, good vocabularies and reading fathers and
mothers, and listened with interest to books that are far in advance
of the children of their age who began to come to the library after
it was made public. The chapter lived long enough to admit the
children of at least one of its original members, and only died
because Saturday morning, the only morning in the week when children
are free, had important business engagements for the librarian, who
feels that "Nature-study," too, plays an important part in schools
now-a-days, and that in the language of "My Double", "there has been
so much said, and on the whole so well said," that there is less need
than there used to be of such a club, although it is a great
deprivation not to have the long country walks and the Saturday
readings and talks with the children. A librarian or a settlement
worker who sees only children from non-English speaking homes is in
danger of forgetting that there are others who can use books in
unsimplified form. This is the only club connected with the library
which had a formal organization, but in giving a talk one day several
years ago to the upper grades of a school, I asked how many boys and
girls were going to stay in town through the summer, and invited all
who were to come to the library one afternoon a week for a book-talk.
The next year I sent the same invitation to several schools, and gave
in both summers running comments and reading of attractive passages
from books on Indians, animals, the North Pole, adventures, machines,
books of poetry, stories about pictures and some out-of-the-way story
books, with a tableful of others that there was not time to read from.
The titles of the books are in Public Libraries, June, 1900, and are
largely from the grown-up shelves. This was five or six years before
our boys' and girls' room was opened and the children had free access
to all their own books. The third year the programme was a little
varied. Some of the subjects were "Books that tell how to do things,"
"A great author and his friends (Sir Walter Scott)," "Another great
author and his short stories (Washington Irving)." I have always made
a great deal of the friendship between these two authors, and as most
of our children are Jewish, I have often told the story and shown the
portrait of Rebecca Gratz, the Philadelphia Jewess, who was too true
to her religion to marry a Christian, and whose story as told by
Irving, whose promised wife had been her friend, gave Scott his noble
ideal of the character of Rebecca. One year we had an afternoon about
knights and tournaments, and by an easy transition, the subject for
the next week was "What happened to a man who read too much about
knights," giving an opportunity for an introduction to Don Quixote.
After that two dream-stories opened the way to a fine illustrated
edition of the Pilgrim's Progress, and stories from Dante. The next
year, I tried stories of English history, in nine or ten different
periods, reading from one book every week and suggesting others. After
the opening of the boys' and girls' room, the book-talks for one or
two summers for seventh and eighth grade pupils, were upon some of the
pictures in the room: Windsor Castle, Kenilworth, Heidelberg Castle,
the Alhambra, the Canterbury Pilgrims and some Shakespeare stories.
Afterwards, "What you can get out of a Henty book" gave a chance for
interesting picture bulletins, and the use of other books referring
to the times of "Beric the Briton," "The Boy Knight," "Knights of the
White Cross," "Bonnie Prince Charlie," "In the Reign of Terror." Last
year and this I have been reading Scott and Dickens aloud. We have
some of the Detroit colored photographs of places of historic
interest, Windsor Castle for which I used Lydia Maria Child's story of
"The Royal Rosebud," although most of the little princess's early life
was passed in sanctuary at Westminster. On the afternoon when
Kenilworth was the subject, I read all of Scott's novel that we had
time for. Once on the Alhambra day, we have had Irving's story of the
Arabian astrologer, and again a description of the palace and the
Generalife who had just come from Spain. There was little in print
about Heidelberg that I could use, and I had to write out the whole
story of the Winter King and his Queen, James First's daughter
Elizabeth, ancestress of the present king of England and mother of a
large family. Two years ago, in the interim between one children's
librarian who was married in June and her successor who could not come
till September, I spent most of the summer in the boys' and girls'
room, and learned two things. Some of the children thought that they
had read all the books on the shelves, and were asking for grown-up
cards. They were kept in the room by transferring some duplicate
copies of novels best worth reading from the main library and putting
red stars on the back and the book-card. Then I was able to talk with
girls who had read all of Laura Richards's Hildegarde books, but had
never thought of looking up one of the poems or stories that she
loved, or one of the pictures in her room. I have sometimes read the
description of the room to a class in a schoolroom, and put on the
blackboard all the names of places, persons, books and poems in it.
One year I invited girls to form a Hildegarde Club for reading these
very things, and in writing to Mrs. Richards on another subject,
mentioned it. She wrote me an answer that I have had framed for the
girls to see. The Club lived for a few months and used to meet on
Saturday afternoons for reading "The Days of Bruce," but at the
Christmas holidays the girls went into the department stores for a few
weeks and forgot to come back. However, I am very happy to tell the
story of another Hildegarde Club that is still flourishing. The
teacher of a ninth grade class loves books, and was quick to seize the
hint of such a club, which she organized from the girls in her room,
and asked permission to bring to my office for its weekly meetings.
She is keeping them up to their work because she sees them every day,
and they are interested and learning how much they can find in a book
besides the story. Besides this, they are observant and appreciative
of whatever they see on the walls of my room. The girls to whom I
gave a general invitation by means of a newspaper article were not
from the same school and did not all know each other. It is better in
organizing a club to have some common ground of interest and begin
with a small number. It cannot always be done in a city in or through
the library, except indirectly, by means of a Settlement or other
club. One that I know does very good work in its meetings with the
Settlement headworker and has a small collection of books and pictures
from the main library for six months, and a more elementary bookshelf
for a younger club with whom one of the members is reading the same
subject. A librarian or library assistant can do some of her best work
in a Settlement club either in connection with the Settlement library
or independently. Readings from Dickens can be illustrated by scenes
acted in pantomime, with very simple properties. Indeed, we had not
even a curtain when Miss La Creevy painted Kate's miniature, when the
Savage and the Maiden danced their inimitable dance, when Mrs. Kenwigs
and Morleena held a reception for Mrs. Crummles, the Phenomenon and
the ladies of their company, when after they had recited from their
star parts, Morleena had the soles of her shoes chalked and danced her
fancy dance, and Henrietta Petowker took down her back hair and
repeated "The Blooddrinker's Burial." The old man looked over the
wall, too, and threw garden vegetables and languishing glances at
Mrs. Nickleby who encouraged his advances. There was no time for the
girls to learn the parts in the busy, crowded, late-open holiday
evenings of department stores, but they all entered into the pantomime
and interpreted the reading with spirit, as they did at another time
in some of the Shakespeare scenes, Rosalind, Celia and Touchstone,
Hamlet and Ophelia, Bottom and Titania, with attendant fairies, and
Shylock and Portia. The Dickens scenes were repeated for a younger
club, just trying its dramatic wings in charades, and when May-time
came these younger girls of twelve to fifteen gave a very successful
representation of an old English May-day with Robin Hood and his merry
band, a Jester, a Dragon, a Hobby-horse and Jack in the Green, Maid
Marian and the Lord and Lady of the May on the library green. The
opportunity of a library in a small town, where there is more leisure
than in a city, is in the formation of young people's clubs. One day,
a year or two ago, I visited three libraries on the Sound shore in
Connecticut. In one, the librarian had made her basement useful out of
library hours by organizing a class of chair-caning for boys who were
beginning to hang around the streets, and were in danger of being
compelled to learn the art in the Reform School if they did not
acquire it as a means of keeping their hands from mischief at home. In
the next town, the librarian mounted and identified all the moths and
butterflies that the children brought to her and gave them insect
books. In the library beyond, the children were formed into a branch
of the Flower Mission in the nearest city. The club need not always be
for reading, but must depend on the resources or interests of the
boys and girls. There is no need of debating clubs in our library,
for the city is full of them, but they may be the very best thing that
the librarian in the next town can form. A reading club must not
necessarily be a club for the study or enjoyment of stories, history
or poetry. Under the guidance of the kind of librarian who aims far
above her audience, it may turn into something like Mr. Wopsle's
quarterly examinations of his great aunt's school, "when what he did,"
says Pip, "was to turn up his cuffs, stick up his hair and give us
Mark Antony's oration over the body of Caesar. This was always
followed by Collins's Ode on the Passions, wherein I particularly
venerated Mr. Wopsle as Revenge, throwing his bloodstained sword in
thunder down, and taking the war-renouncing trumpet with a withering
look." There may be a club for making things out of the Beard books,
for the study of sleight-of- hand, for exchanging postcards with
children in other countries and reading about the places on them. It
may make historical pilgrimages to places of interest in the town or
may collect stones and clay nodules, and read about them. The
important thing is to find children of nearly the same age and
neighborhood with interests in common, and let them decide whom they
shall ask to join the club after it is formed. Better yet if they ask
for the club in the first place. One not very long-lived Settlement
club which I knew was of boys who wished to read and act Shakespeare,
but a very few evenings convinced them that as they could not even
read the lines without stumbling, they were not on the road to the
actors' Temple of Fame. They were boys who had left school at fourteen
in the lower grades, except one, who had taken his High School
examinations and is now at the head of a department in a large
department store and a prominent member of a political study club.
The others, who had expected to play prominent Shakespearean parts
with little or no work, were easily discouraged, dropped off and were
seen no more. The reading of very simple plays at first is a good
stepping-stone to a study of Shakespeare later, but the plays must be
interesting enough to hold the attention of boys who do not read
fluently.
The usefulness of the reading club as an opportunity of broadening
the interests of the child is emphasized in the following paper,
printed in the Library Journal, May, 1911, which gives an account of
the organization of clubs under the direction of a supervisor in the
Cleveland Public Library. Marie Hammond Milliken was born in
Pittsburgh, Pa., was graduated from Wellesley College in 1905 and from
the Training School for Children's Librarians in 1907; was children's
librarian in the Cleveland Public Library from 1907 to 1910;
Supervisor of reading clubs from 1910 to 1912, and since that time has
been a branch librarian. The 13-year-old president of one of the
Cleveland library clubs said recently, in explaining the purpose of
the club to a new member, "The idea of this club is to give you what
you couldn't get anywhere else." This is a rather ambitious program. I
should be slow to say that any club I have known has succeeded in
doing that for its members. Considering the character of the
communities in which the public library is generally placed,
particularly the branches of a large library system, I am inclined to
think, however, that clubs organized and conducted by the library
offer to the children some things they are, at least, not likely to
get anywhere else—and to the library another means of strengthening
its effectiveness as an educational and social center in the
community. In speaking of library clubs, I have in mind the organized,
self-governing club, with a small and definite membership, as
distinguished from the reading circle. Definite organization means a
constitution, officers, elections, parliamentary procedure —all the
form and ceremonial so attractive to children of the club age. From
the first meeting, when the constitution of the club comes up for
discussion, the organization begins to develop the child's sense of
responsibility. A simple form of parliamentary procedure will not only
prove conducive to orderly and business like meetings, but, especially
with young or immature children, delight in its formalities will help
to hold the club together while interest in other phases of the club
work is being developed. The chief advantage of the self-government
of the club is as a first lesson (frequently) in the principles of
popular government. In the club the too-assertive child learns
wholesome respect for the will of the majority, while his more
retiring brother discovers that one man's vote is as good as
another's. When one has seen a club of ambitious lads who, when they
first organized, cared only for success, reject a boy who is a good
debater and athlete on the ground that in another club he had shown
that "he was a sorehead and couldn't seem to understand that the
majority's got to rule," one is tempted to feel that organization can
do so much for the children that an organized library club justifies
itself on that score alone. Club work is a very effective means of
extending the active educational work of the library. In the clubs
conducted by the Cleveland Public Library, the plan has been to
encourage the children themselves to make suggestions for the club
work. Then a tentative program is made out, based on some general
interest shown in the suggestions made by the club. As far as
possible, the program is planned with the idea of stimulating broad,
as well as careful and intelligent reading. The program is, of
course, subject to changes which may suggest themselves to the club
or to its leader. Travel in foreign lands, the study of the lives of
great women, nature study, the reading and discussion of Shakespeare's
plays, in the girls' clubs, and, in the clubs for boys, debating and
reporting on current events, have been the subjects most successfully
worked out for club consideration, probably on account of the variety
of interest which they present. Travel means not only the manners and
customs side of the country—it means the art, the literature, the
history, the legend; biography, not simply the life of the individual
studied, but the period and country that produced it. The subjects
discussed in the debating clubs are almost always of the boys'
choosing, and represent a broad field of interest, economic, social,
moral and political. They range from "Resolved, That Washington did
more than Lincoln for his country," "That civilization owes more to
the railroad than the steamboat," "That the fireman is braver than the
policeman," in the clubs of boys from the sixth and seventh grades, to
the discussion of municipal ownership, tariff commission,
establishment of a central bank, and commission government for cities,
in clubs composed of high school boys. Aside from what practice in the
form of debating means to the boys in developing ability to think
clearly and to speak to the point, discussion of vital questions of
national and municipal interest encourages the boy to turn to more
trustworthy sources of information than the daily press. He learns to
refer to books and the better sort of periodicals for his authority,
and, gradually, through reading and discussion, begins to substitute
convictions for inherited prejudice or indifference. The club's
greatest usefulness lies in the opportunity it presents of broadening
the interests of the child, of opening to him, through books and
discussion, new fields of thought and pleasure. Compared with this,
information acquired and number of books read are comparatively
unimportant. The smallness of the group with which he has to deal and
the children's invariable response to his special interest in them
create an unusual opportunity for the club leader. In the informal
discussions in the club he may pass on to the children something of
his own interests, and direct theirs into channels which would
probably never be opened to them otherwise. From our experience in one
of the branches of the Cleveland Public Library, where club work has
presented great difficulties, I know that, given a leader who
understands, girls whose standard of excellence has been met by
boarding- school stories, can be interested in studying and reading
in their club the plays of Shakespeare or in listening to extracts
from Vasari's "Lives of the painters" or Ruskin's "Stories of Venice."
Beyond his opportunity to interest the club in better reading, the
leader may help the children in a general way, by unconsciously
presenting to them his standards of thought and conduct. Through him
they may become aware of finer ideals of courtesy, bravery and
honesty. Not the least important contribution of club work to the
library is the direction of the reading of boys and girls of the
intermediate age—always such a difficult problem. Most of the
children of the age when clubs begin to appeal to them strongly
—from 12 years on—have reached a stage of mental development at
which they should be reading, under direction, books from the adult
as well as the juvenile collection. In the Cleveland Public Library
clubs books from the adult collection are used whenever possible in
connection with the club programs, and the leaders are encouraged to
recommend books from that collection for the personal reading of the
children. The result is that the children are gradually made
acquainted with the adult department, and come to feel as much at home
there as in the children's room. The club very seldom fails to
establish a feeling of friendliness and personal interest in the
library among its members. It has proved itself, in this way, a very
decided aid in reducing the librarian's "police duty." Moreover, the
club is a privilege, and as such not to be enjoyed by those who
habitually break the law, so that what it fails to accomplish in one
way may be brought about in another. As this paper is based on
experience gained in the Cleveland Public Library, it would not be
complete without mention of one important phase of the club work
there. To a very great extent the club work in the Cleveland Public
Library owes its growth in size and efficiency to the time and
interest given to it by the volunteer club leaders, of whom, during
the year 1910, there were 60. Looking over the work of the boys' clubs
for the year, it is interesting to note the influence of the leader's
interests upon the boys. All but one of the boys' clubs whose leaders
are attorneys devoted their club meetings to debating, mock trials and
parliamentary drill. Among the clubs under the leadership of students
in Western Reserve University (and these represent more than half of
the total number of boys' clubs) the predominant interest is in the
discussion of current events, the subjects for occasional debates
being suggested by these discussions. In two or three clubs too young
for such discussion, the leaders, who were especially interested in
civics, were able to interest the boys in the study of the work of
the various departments of our city government. In another instance a
leader, a business man, deeply interested in the history of Cleveland
and its industries has succeeded in holding the interest of his club
boys in this subject for three months, though these were boys whose
indifference to anything but "Wild West" stories was proverbial in the
branch library. Clubs for boys and girls in the Cleveland Public
Library are under the direction of a club supervisor, who organizes
the clubs, secures the services of the volunteer leaders, and helps
them in preparing programs for the clubs. The work has been conducted
in this way for three years, and has become a vital part of the work
of the library as a whole.
The successful development of reading clubs by the New York Public
Library is evidenced by the fact that at the time the following paper
was written, in 1912, there were reported twenty-five boys' clubs and
seventeen girls' clubs. The paper is by Anna C. Tyler, and was read
before the New York meeting of school librarians in Brooklyn, N. Y.,
May 25, 1912. Anna Cogswell Tyler was born in Detroit, Michigan, and
was graduated from the Hartford, Conn., High School in 1880. She
attended Mrs. Julie Goddard Piatt's boarding school in Utica, New
York, from 1880 to 1882, and Mademoiselle Taveney's school for girls
at Neuillysur- Seine near Paris from 1883 to 1885. She was graduated
from the Pratt Institute Library School, taking the two-year course,
1904-1906. She was an assistant in the Pratt Institute Free Library
from 1906 to 1908. In 1908 she was made assistant in charge of
story-telling and library reading-clubs in the New York Public
Library. The library reading clubs have sprung into being as a natural
result of the library story hour, and for two very potent reasons
—the boys and girls of from twelve to fifteen years old, however
much they enjoy listening to a good story, are extremely afraid of
being classed as children. Therefore when such a boy or girl comes to
the branch library which he uses and sees a very attractive little
notice reading "Story hour this afternoon at four o'clock for the
older children" he shakes his head and goes his way saying, "Oh, they
don't mean me, that's for the kids!" But when he sees a notice reading
"The Harlem Boys' Club" meets such a day and hour his attention is
immediately arrested, and he asks, "What do you have to do to join
this club?" This is the first reason for the rapid growth of these
library reading clubs, the magic contained in merely the sight or
sound of the word "club"—the spur it gives to the imagination of even
the apparently unimaginative child, and the stigma it removes from
the mind of the adolescent boy or girl of being considered a child. By
conferring upon him the dignity of membership in a club we can make it
possible for him to enjoy to the extent of his capacity the pleasure
the majority of children so delight in—the listening to a good story
well told or well read. His mind is at peace, his dignity
unquestioned, for, since no stripling likes to be taunted with his
green years, his being a member of such a club or league has forever
precluded such a possibility. The matter of joining these clubs is
made as simple as possible, and the great democracy of the public
library spirit is kept uppermost in the minds of librarians who have
charge of this work, and by them instilled into the minds of the
children as rapidly as possible. Any boy or girl is welcome to the
club who wishes to come, provided he or she is of the right age or
grade to enjoy the stories, reading, or study that is interesting the
others. Boys and girls who are doubtful are invited to come and see
what the club is as often as they will, until they have quite made up
their minds whether or not it is something they want. The only thing
required of them is to follow the one general rule underlying all the
clubs of the library—the Golden Rule, that their behavior shall in no
way interfere with the pleasure or rights of the other members. Some
of them stay only a short time, but on the other hand we have many
children who were charter members when the clubs were formed four
years ago, and they have attended the meetings regularly, though they
have long since passed from the grammar schools and have reached the
heights of the third year in high school. The difficulty of finding
stories which will interest in the same degree mixed groups of older
children is the second reason for the growth and popularity of the
library reading clubs. Some of the great stories of the world, like
"The Niebelungenlied," "The Arthurian cycle," Beowulf, and a few
others may be used, or the life of a great man or woman may be told,
and listened to with interest, provided there is plenty of romance in
the life, and the book which contains the story is attractive in
appearance and tempts one to read it at first glance. One can also
find good material for club programs in the romance of some period in
the history of a country not our own. The difficulty of choosing
story literature suitable and interesting for mixed groups of boys
and girls and the difference in their reading tastes make the
segregation of the library reading clubs a wise method. The boy during
these years is eager to acquire information on all subjects—one can
appeal to his love of adventure, of heroes, and mystery. The girl is
full of romance—poetry and drama make their appeal. The difficulty
of maintaining and controlling successful library reading clubs is
frequently lost sight of because of the ease with which they can be
formed. Our experience has taught us that in planning the library
activities of the New York Public Library the reading clubs must come
last—they must only be established when they can take their place as
one of the regular functions of the library. The librarian who is to
be club leader must be able to interest, influence and control the
club members as well as to tell a story. The club season lasts from
the first of October to the end of May, and at present we have
twenty-five boys' clubs and seventeen girls' clubs reported. Some of
these are formal in organization with regularly appointed officers
chosen, of course, by the boys and girls themselves. These officers
hold their office for periods of varying length, some clubs electing
new officers each month, others at the beginning of each club season.
Some of the clubs are clubs only in name—entirely informal, but
meeting regularly once or twice or oftener each month throughout the
season to listen to the stories. Many of the clubs are entirely
selfgoverning and they also arrange their own programs. The librarian
who is the club leader is present as a member, but takes no active
part in the entertainment of the club unless invited to do so. And
now just for a moment let us consider the kind of literature we are
trying to interest the youngsters in. Being a radical it pleased me
very much recently to come across the following passage in an
interesting new book by Miss Rosalie V. Halsey, entitled "Forgotten
books of the American nursery." Miss Halsey says: "Reading aloud was
both a pastime and an education to families in those early days of the
Republic. Although Mrs. Quincy made every effort to procure Miss
Edgeworth's stories for her family, because, in her opinion, they were
better for reading aloud than were the works of Hannah More, Mrs.
Trimmer and Mrs. Chapone, she chose extracts from Shakespeare, Milton,
Addison, and Goldsmith. Indeed, if it were possible to ask our
great-grandparents what books they remembered reading in their
childhood, I think we should find that beyond somewhat hazy
recollections of Miss Edgeworth's books and Berquin's 'The looking
glass for the mind' they would either mention 'Robinson Crusoe,'
Newberry's 'Tales of Giles Gingerbread,' 'Little King Pippin,' and
'Goody Two-shoes' (written fifty years before their own childhood), or
remember only the classic tales and sketches read to them by their
parents." Now it seems to me that our great-grandparents were very
lucky to have been so delightfully introduced to the great things in
literature, and in these days when the art of reading aloud is almost
a lost art how can we expect the modern child to turn with a natural
appreciation to the best in literature when he is almost submerged by
the mediocre and vulgar inside and outside the home, his appreciation
undeveloped, not old enough in years or intelligence to comprehend the
beauty we so delight in. We are disappointed when he does not respond,
and wonder why. Is it not the result of forcing him to use these
things before he is ready, and thus only fostering his distaste?
Believing this to be so, I have gone to work to try to induce the
boys and girls to read more widely, and cultivate appreciation, by
using this old-fashioned method of reading aloud or telling a part of
the story and reading here and there bits of the text, thus letting
the author tell his own story, and as far as we have been able we have
tried to give the children the KIND of story they wanted—WHEN they
wanted it—but in the best form in which it could be found. For
instance Poe's "The purloined letter" when a detective story is asked
for, followed by a story from Stevenson's "New Arabian nights" or
"Island nights' entertainments." In eleven of the boys' clubs we have
been using this year special collections of duplicate books, on topics
suggested by the boys themselves. These collections have been kept
together for from four to six weeks, and the stories that have been
told or read from these books are mentioned in the notice, with a list
of all the books in the collection and posted near where the books are
shelved. The topics suggested by the boys are as follows: railroad
stories; ghost stories; humorous stories; adventure on land; heroes;
adventure on sea; history stories, this last topic including Italy,
France, England, Scotland, Germany, Canada, and "The winning of the
West" in American history, and each group decided on which country
they would read about. On the lower West side, where the
Irish-Americans live in large numbers, where street fights and fires
contribute a constant source of excitement, there is a library club of
girls who have been meeting twice a month for two years. Last year we
studied Joan of Arc, completing our study by reading Percy Mackaye's
play. This year, not feeling satisfied that I was on the right path,
I called a meeting to make sure. After trying in vain to get an
expression of opinion I finally asked the direct question, "What kind
of books do you really LIKE to read?" and for a moment I waited in
suspense, fearing someone would answer to please me by mentioning some
classic. But to my great relief one girl replied at last timidly, but
decidedly, that she liked "Huckleberry Finn." This gave another the
courage to add that she had enjoyed the chapter on whitewashing the
fence in "Tom Sawyer." My clue had been found—a reading club of
adventure was formed, and though we began with the "Prisoner of Zenda"
we have wandered with "Odysseus," and sighed over the sacrifice of
"Alcestis," and thrilled over the winning of "Atalanta" this winter.
A girls' club on the lower East side have been reading the old
English comedies—"She stoops to conquer," "The rivals," "Lady
Teazle"; then there is a flourishing Shakespeare club, which to honor
the Dickens centenary this year, voted to make the study of the great
writer a part of this year's program. This club meets once a week, and
at one meeting the outline of one of the great tales was told by the
librarian. This was followed by the girls reading one or more of the
most famous chapters or dialogues. At the alternate meetings the girls
read plays, varying the program by choosing first a Shakespeare drama
and then a modern play. Each act is cast separately, so that all the
girls may have a chance to take part, and in this way we read "Twelfth
night," "Romeo and Juliet," "The taming of the Shrew," "Macbeth," "The
bluebird," "The scarcecrow," and "Cyrano de Bergerac." Away up in the
Bronx there is a "Cranford Club," so named by the girls because of
their interest in the story to which they were introduced four years
ago. This club is really a study club and contains a good proportion
of its original members. They meet twice a month, and a leader is
appointed for each meeting, who chooses her committee to report on the
topic for the evening's study. The topic is sub-divided and each girl
does her part in looking up the bit assigned to her. In this way they
have studied the English poets Tennyson and Milton, although after
spending an evening on Comus the club voted unanimously to change to
Dickens. They have also studied Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell and
Whittier, and the girls were sufficiently familiar with these poems to
recite many from each poet. Then the lives of three English queens
were studied—"Bloody Mary," "Queen Elizabeth," and "Mary, Queen of
Scots"; this year the Norse myths and stories from the Wagner operas.
The librarian's part is to suggest the best books in which to find
what they want, to get any book they may need, sometimes suggest a
line of subjects to choose from, etc, but the work of preparing the
material is done entirely by the girls. When a book is being read and
discussed, they sit around a table and read in turn the bits that have
been selected for them by the librarian, who tells them the thread of
the story between selected bits read by the girls. Thus they have read
"Cranford," "Pride and prejudice," "Old curiosity shop," "David
Copperfield," and "Twelfth night." The teacher of English where most
of these girls attend school was recently an interested visitor at the
club, and she says she has noticed for a long time a difference in
the school work done by these girls, from a broader viewpoint and
outside atmosphere they brought to the class by their intelligent
comments and criticisms, showing that they were reading outside and
beyond the other girls of the class. She noticed also a difference in
their composition work. One of the girls from that class was sent by
this teacher to visit the library for the first time and when asked
what she liked to read replied, "Wooed and married" and "How he won
her" were nice books. The book given her instead of her favorites was
Mary Johnston's "To have and to hold." It was read and enjoyed. Then
she took Howells' "The lady of the Aroostook," and after the outline
of the story had been told her seemed to read it with real pleasure.
Next Owen Wister's "Virginian" was given her, but this she did not
seem to care for. As a result of this reading her taste in a better
kind of reading seems to have been pretty well established, as her
librarian assures me that she has continued her reading along the line
indicated by the above titles. The Belmont Club, the best boys' club
for debating in the school, have challenged the "Cranford Club" to
meet them in a debate on "Woman suffrage," to be held in the library
at an early date. The girls have accepted the challenge, and the fact
that the boys question their ability to equal them is sufficient spur
to make them work every moment they can spare from their school
duties to prepare for this important event. Added to this is the fact
that every one of them is an ardent "suffragette." The need of social
centers in the schools and libraries is becoming insistent. The
increasing demand on the part of children for clubs of all kinds shows
plainly their desire for some place other than the street, where they
can be amused and occupied in the natural desire for self-development
and expression. Early last fall in one of the libraries the librarian
met by appointment a group of girls from eleven to fourteen years old.
These girls were wayward and troublesome, had formed a "gang" which
was more difficult to control than the usual gang of boys. There was a
room in her library quite apart from the rest of the building where
they could meet as a club if it should prove desirable. "What would
you like to do?" she asked. "Dance!" was the reply. "Well, then,
dance, and show me what dances you like," replied the librarian, and
immediately the girls formed for a figure of a folk-dance, and each
girl humming softly the tune they danced it through. "The Girl Scouts"
Club was formed, and in a day or two the secretary of the club
submitted the following program for the librarian's approval: Program.
1. Chapter from the life of Louisa M. Alcott; 2. Recitations; 3.
Games, Flinch; 4 One folk dance. From this beginning six other clubs
have been established: two for the older girls, two for the boys, one
for the little girls from eight to eleven years old, and one for a
group of troublesome young men from sixteen to twenty years old. So
keen has been the interest of these young people in these clubs that
the "gang" spirit has long since disappeared, and at the end of the
club season an open meeting was held, a program arranged in which
members from each club took part, and the ushers and guards of honor
were some of those same troublesome young men. There was no place in
this community where the young people could meet for any kind of
simple amusement, the only "social centers" being the cheap vaudeville
theater, the usual moving picture show and the streets, until the
little branch of the public library opened its doors, and so popular
has the library become that 960 children have taken cards at the
library since the first of September and are borrowing books on these.
Besides the large number of card holders there is a still larger
number of children who do all their reading and studying at the
library. Although they may not know the old English verse from which
the lines are taken they feel them:
"Where I maie read all at my ease, Both of the newe and
olde, For a jollie goode booke whereon to looke
Is better to me than gold." The outline I have given will
give you some idea of how we are developing the story hour and reading
clubs in the New York Public Library. This work is made possible by
the splendid cooperation on the part of the branch librarians and
their assistants, without whom it would be impossible to carry on a
work of such proportions.
The history of the home library movement in its beginnings is
recorded in a paper read before the Congress of Charities held in
Chicago, June 15, 1893, by Mr. Charles W. Birtwell, general secretary
of the Boston Children's Aid Society, who claims for it a "natural and
simple origin," a method of multiplying the personal work which he was
doing among the poorer children of Boston. Another paper on the same
subject was read by Mr. Birtwell at the Lake Placid Conference of the
A. L. A. in 1894. Appreciation of this work is expressed in the 1915
report of the Children's Aid Society: "The most important service we
render as a society is to show that the constructive forces within the
average family, if properly directed, are tremendous in their power
and effect. The home libraries do a work for children in their homes
that is quite distinct from all the other services we render as a
society." Charles Wesley Birtwell was born in Lawrence, Mass.,
November 23, 1860, and graduated at Harvard in 1885. He was general
secretary of the Boston Children's Aid Society from 1885 to 1911. He
has been prominent in social and charitable work, and in 1887
originated the "home library" system of the Children's Aid Society,
the first general plan of this kind on record. The first Home Library
was established by the Boston Children's Aid Society in January, 1887.
Now it has seventy libraries here and there throughout Boston, and
regards them as an important department of its work. The origin of the
plan that has found so much favor in our eyes was simple. I had been
connected with the Children's Aid Society but a short time when many
avenues of work opened up before me, and it was quite perplexing to
see how to make my relations to the various children I became
acquainted with real and vital. Among other things the children ought
to have the benefit of good reading and to become lovers of good
books. Indeed, a great many things needed to be done for and by the
children. Out of this opportunity and need the Home Library was
evolved. A little bookcase was designed. It was made of white wood,
stained cherry, with a glass door and Yale lock. It contained a shelf
for fifteen books, and above that another for juvenile periodicals.
The whole thing, carefully designed and neatly made, was simple and
yet pleasing to the eye. I asked my little friend Rosa at the North
End, Barbara over in South Boston, and Giovanni at the South End, if
they would like little libraries in their homes, of which they should
be the librarians, and from which their playmates or workmates might
draw books, the supply to be replenished from time to time. They
welcomed the idea heartily, and with me set about choosing the boys
and girls of their respective neighborhoods who were to form the
library groups. Then a time was appointed for the first meeting of
each library. The children who had been enrolled as members met with
me in the little librarian's home, and while one child held the lamp,
another the screwdriver, another the screws, and the rest did a heap
of looking on, we sought a secure spot on the wall of the living-room
of the librarian's family and there fastened the library. I remember
that to start the first library off with vigor, and secure the benefit
from the beginning of a little esprit de corps, I went with the
children the evening before the establishment of the library to see
the Cyclorama of the battle of Gettysburg. We rode in a driving
snowstorm in the street-cars from the North end, and had a gala
evening. We got a bit acquainted, and on the next evening, the time
appointed for the laying of the cornerstone of the whole Home Library
structure, the first library, you may be sure the children without
exception were on hand. I believe we had to wait a little while for
Jennie, who lived across the hallway from Rosa, to "finish her
dishes"; then up went the library. Very quickly the second library was
established in South Boston, the third at the South End, and before
long some neighborhoods were dotted with libraries. The idea at the
beginning was that the groups should be made up of fifteen children,
but later we adopted ten as a better number. So the family in which a
library was placed would have the books always within reach, and a
handful of children from the same tenement-house or near neighborhood
would have access to the books at the time set for their exchange, and
when a group had extracted the juice from one set of books we would
send them another. It was understood at the start that the children
outside of the librarian's family should exchange their books only
once a week. I dropped in on the children when I could, but soon saw
that the effectiveness of the work would be increased by regular
weekly meetings of each group. As it would be impossible for me to
visit them all myself, volunteers were sought to take charge each of a
single library. Quickly the visitors began to come to me with all
manner of puzzles—how to get the children to keep their hands clean,
how to induce them to read thoroughly, what to do for a child who was
ill, or a lad who was playing truant. Out of these interviews with
individual visitors grew naturally the thought of a monthly conference
of the visitors; and from an early period in the history of the
libraries we have met once a month, except during the summer, and
spent an hour and a quarter in discussing a great variety of
questions, some general and some particular, that arise in connection
with the libraries. I must dwell a moment on the selection of books.
The aim was to put really good literature into the hands of the poor
in such a way that they would grow to love that literature. People,
after all, are not so unlike. A really good book, a book that is
human, that touches our sense of rugged reality, or the fancy or
imagination which is native to us and as real as anything in us, is
sure of a welcome among all classes of people, if it is couched in
intelligible terms. I chose some books that I happened to have read
myself, but soon coming to the end of the list of which I was
perfectly sure, and finding it impossible to review enough books
myself, I secured the volunteer help of a number of ladies who
understood the children of the poor and knew how to pass judgment on
books proposed for their reading. It was definitely understood that
every book should be read by the reviewers from cover to cover. We
would not depend upon advertisements, hearsay, or vague recollections
of books read by ourselves years ago, but every book should be read
from beginning to end with the immediate question in view of the
admission of the book to the little libraries to be read by the poor
in the homes of the poor. Publishers and book-dealers sent us books
for examination. Upon a careful consideration of the written reviews
of the volunteer readers, prepared according to certain canons, was
based the decision as to their acceptance or rejection. It seemed
clearly not worth while to take to the poor books not really worth
their reading. If good books would not be read, then the plan should
be given up. Had we been careless in the selection of books we easily
might have done no little harm, and should not have learned that
clean, unsensational, vigorous books that are loved by children in the
homes of the well-to-do are welcome to children in the homes of the
poor. The way to good taste in reading is not, as some curiously
declare, through the mire of the dime novel and the sensational story,
but straight along the clean, bright path of decent literature.
Although, by reason of the natural preference of some visitors, or
the effect of changes in groups at first made up of both sexes, some
groups are wholly made up of boys and others of girls, the ideal group
is a mixed one as regards both sex and age—ten boys and girls from
seven or eight to fifteen or sixteen years of age. Thus we provide for
a healthful, unconscious association of the sexes and the training of
the younger and older in their behavior toward one another, and in
general touch the maximum range of relations, difficulties and
services. It follows from this make-up of a group that our books must
be varied in order that in each set there shall be food for each
child. So every library is made up of fifteen volumes, running the
whole gamut from the nursery tale to Tom Brown at Rugby or Uncle Tom's
Cabin, and also selections from juvenile periodicals suited to
children of different ages, there being five collections of
periodicals in each library, each collection comprising a bound
portion of the annual issue of some periodical. You will readily see,
therefore, that in order to select a new library it is necessary to
have forty or fifty approved and unassigned books to choose from, and
never is a set made up with its fairy tales, pictures of sweet
domestic life, stories of adventure, simple history and biography,
short stories, long stories, fact and fancy, humor and pathos—never
is a set made up, preliminary to starting out upon its first visit,
without my mouth watering to read them all myself. To put the books
to an interesting test, but more especially to induce the children to
read appreciatively and really use their minds as they read, a form
was made out on which the librarian or visitor should record the
opinion of each child in regard to each book he returns. The evolution
of these opinions from the obnoxiously frequent "nice" and "very
nice," or the occasionally refreshing "no good," of the early history
of a group into really intelligent and discriminating opinions, is one
of the sure marks of progress and value in the work. A set of books
usually remains with one group of children ten weeks or three months
before it is exchanged for a fresh set and in turn goes to another
group. So you see the Home Libraries stand for nothing less than a
perennial and constantly fresh stream of good literature. To make
sure of the parents being back of us in our relations to the children,
we have a little blank application for membership, which is signed by
the parent or guardian as well as the child. It is noticeable that on
many of these cards the children write not only their own names but
the names of their parents, the latter, themselves unable to write,
affixing their cross. The volunteer visitors, as opportunity offers,
on cards placed in their hands for the purpose, make a record of
information concerning the family, their history, condition, habits,
their reading at the inception of the library, and subsequently such
items as may reveal their further history and the possible relation
of the library to their life. Close upon the heels of this effort to
make books mean to poor children what they mean to the more fortunate,
followed the idea of bringing to them a knowledge of those ways of
having a good time within the walls of one's own castle that are so
familiar in families where parents have leisure and ingenuity, and
that make our childhood seem to our adult years, of a truth, a golden
age. Without the elbow-room that some kinds of fun require, without
money to buy games, without leisure to play them or to teach them to
their children, forever held down by drudgery, forever pressed upon by
the serious hand-to-hand fight to keep the wolf from the door, is it
strange that the poor know next to nothing of the commonest home games
and diversions? To the Home Libraries, a name sweet and dear to us who
have had to do with them, came this further idea of Home Amusements.
After the exchange of books, conversation about them, the recording of
opinions, perhaps also reading aloud by the visitor or the children,
they turn from books to play. It is the duty of the visitor to be
informed in the art of merriment, and to teach the children all sorts
of ways of having fun at home. Nor is it a slight advantage that thus
inducement comes to the grown-up folks to look on and laugh too. But
as naturally as the rose-bush grows and more than a single bud appears
and turns to blossom, so came another unfolding from the Home
Libraries stock. "The destruction of the poor is their poverty." Might
we not add to the home reading and home amusements inducements to Home
Thrift? We began to get the children to save their pennies. Presently
the Boston Stamp-Savings Society was established. So we purchase
stamps from that society and supply them to visitors. The visitors in
turn sell them to the children at the weekly meetings. The children
are supplied with cards marked off into spaces in which they paste
the pretty stamps as they buy them. When a card is filled, or when the
total value of the stamps on a card is sufficient to make it worth
while, perhaps fifty or seventy-five cents or a dollar, the stamps are
redeemed, and the visitor goes with the child to open an account at
some regular savings bank. The collection of pennies is resumed, to be
followed by another redemption of the stamps and the swelling of the
account at the savings bank. I hardly need tell you that the
Christmas festivities of the children are largely held under the
auspices of the little libraries, or that in the warmer season you
will find the visitors and children taking excursions together to the
lovelier spots in the woods and at the shore. Once a year, too, we
have a sale of plants. Last spring we sold three hundred and
eighty-three plants to the children for windows and gardens. We have
promised that all who will appear this autumn with live plants shall
have a treat. Through the visitors, too, we hear of cases of
destitution, truancy, waywardness and moral exposure, of unfit
dwellings, and illegal liquor-selling. Such things we report to
suitable agencies—the other departments of our Children's Aid
Society, the Associated Charities, the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children, the Board of Health, the Law and Order League.
From all of this you will easily see why we think that ten children
are enough for a single group or visitor. We expect the visitor to
know not only the children of the group, but the families to which
they belong, and as the children grow older, and are graduated from
the little libraries, to follow them still as their friends. It is a
highly important function of the Home Library to bring with good books
a good friend, whose advice the children will seek, whose example they
will aim to follow, and whose esteem they will not wish to forfeit.
We are having to face more and more the question of the graduates of
the libraries. One thing we propose for them is a printed list of
selected books that are in the Public Library with the numbers that
they bear. These lists in the hands of our graduates we think will
continue to guide them to the choice of good reading. So, too, we hope
to see our graduates go from the little libraries into the working
girls' clubs, the associations for young men, and the workingmen's and
workingwomen's clubs. And we want the love of good books, and all that
good books stand for, to follow them. We have now, about six years
and a half since the first library was established, seventy libraries
scattered throughout Boston, with sixty-three volunteer visitors and a
membership of six hundred and thirty-four children. Since June, 1889,
one paid assistant, a lady who was among the first volunteers in the
work, has been employed, and has rendered most interested and
efficient service. For the past two years we have employed also an
extra summer-assistant, as so many of the visitors are away during
that season, and as we try to give every library group at least one
outing during the midsummer months. A committee of the Board of
Directors of the Boston Children's Aid Society have acted as
volunteer visitors, and promoted and strengthened in various ways
this department of the Society. From the beginning it has seemed best
to let the experiment work itself out somewhat fully before attempting
to say too much about it. A widespread demand, however, for fuller
information has arisen, and home libraries are being established in
various cities I hope that before long a full record of the
establishment and growth of the Home Libraries in Boston may be placed
at the service of any who seek to adopt this form of philanthropic
effort among the children of the poor.
One of the first librarians to give to library work with children a
full appreciation of its possibilities in extension work was Salome
Cutler Fairchild. An address given by her on January 10, 1898, before
the New York Library Association and the New York Library Club on the
development of the home library work in Albany describes some
modifications of Mr. Birtwell's plan, and is especially interesting
because it indicates the relation of this method of extension work to
the "new philanthropy." Mary Salome Cutler was born in Dalton, Mass.,
in 1855, was educated at Mt. Holyoke Seminary, and received the degree
of B.L.S. from the University of the State of New York in 1891. In
1897 she was married to the Rev. Edwin Milton Fairchild. From 1884 to
1889 she was cataloguer in the Columbia College Library and Instructor
in the Columbia College Library School. She became Vice-Director of
the New York State Library School in 1889 and remained there until
1905. Since that time she has been a lecturer on selection of books
and American libraries. Mrs. Fairchild was chairman of the committee
in charge of the library exhibit of the World's Columbian Exposition
in Chicago in 1893 and was identified with the publication of the A.
L. A. Catalog. It is probable that some of the readers of the Journal
are unfamiliar with the idea of the home library. In a few words,
this is its motive and its plan: To help the children of the poor in
developing and ennobling their lives by giving them books and a
friend. The home library idea was evolved, not by a librarian, but by
Mr. Charles W. Birtwell, secretary of the Children's Aid Society in
Boston, a very old non-sectarian society. It grew up in a most
natural way. He fell into the habit of lending books to poor children
of his acquaintance and of talking with them about the books after
they had been read. This took time, and the result was organization.
The children were formed into little groups, books were bought
systematically, and his friends were interested to form regular
visitors. And so a home library involves a group of 10 poor children,
a library of 20 carefully selected books placed in the home of one of
the children and circulating among them all, a visitor, who should be
a person of rare wisdom and sympathy, who meets the children once a
week, talks over the books with them, and during the hour gives them
all possible help in any way she chooses. Each group contains both
boys and girls from eight to fifteen years of age. There are several
groups of children and several little libraries. Once in three or four
months the libraries pass from one group to another. The personal
element supplied by the visitor is quite as valuable as the influence
of the books. It is hard to tell just what the visitor does. It is
perhaps simplest to say that she is a friend to the children and that
she studies how to help them. That means a great deal. The plan is
elastic and each visitor chooses her own methods. Doubtless many
librarians listened to Mr. Charles Birtwell's paper on home libraries
at the Lake Placid conference, September, 1894, and are thoroughly
familiar with the central thought and its application in the parent
libraries in Boston. To such I would like to call attention to some
modifications of the plan in the Albany libraries, to a few new points
which we have worked out and old ones which we have emphasized. It
goes without saying that each book is read carefully by at least one
member of the selection committee with special reference to the home
libraries. It is not enough that a competent judge has read it without
having that in mind. We are constantly tempted to give these readers
books a little too old for them. They enjoy books which children who
have always been familiar with books would be ready for three or four
years earlier. Visitors should be prepared for disappointment in the
quality of the reading that is done. At the beginning of my work with
the children I was delighted with their enthusiasm over the books. To
be sure their choice was often determined by the attractiveness of
the cover or big type, or the bigness or littleness of the book. I
soon found that it was a rare thing for a child to read a book
through. They would often say with pride "I read 30 or 60 pages" and
were unwilling to take the book again, though claiming to like it. It
is a slow process, but now after over two years they read with much
more enjoyment and thoroughness. It was a long step ahead when the
brightest child in the group began to read the continued stories in
the St. Nicholas and to watch eagerly for the next number. I wonder
if these children are not in a way a type of the readers in our larger
libraries. We fondly hope that there will be an immediate and hearty
acceptance of the good things which we have spread out with such
lavish expenditure of our own life, later we learn that even among the
educated classes the genuine reading habit is the heritage of the few
and among the many must be the result of a slow and steady growth. I
think we have improved on the Boston plan in dealing with the
magazines. They take nine different periodicals and break the year up
so that with one library of 15 books the children have parts of five
periodicals. We put 18 books in each library and subscribe regularly
for each group of children for St. Nicholas and Youth's Companion. In
some of the groups the children have not cared for Youth's Companion.
It has been given a fair trial since July, 1894, and we have just
substituted Harper's Round Table as an experiment. Other groups,
however, are devoted to the Youth's Companion. St. Nicholas is a prime
favorite with all. We do not buy cheap editions. Grimm's "Fairy tales"
is selected in the tasteful Macmillan edition with illustrations by
Walter Crane. Hawthorne's "Wonderbook" is given to them in the
exquisite illustrated edition of Houghton, Mifflin Co. We consider the
illustrations and the dainty covers a part of the educative value of
the book. We do not cover the books permanently, but give them covers
which slip on and off easily that they may use them at their pleasure.
A good deal of pride is developed in each group of children in having
the little library clean when it passes on to the next group. An
effort is of course made to balance the libraries, putting in each a
volume of history, one of light travel, and a book about animals like
Mrs. Jackson's "Cat stories," "Buz," "Sparrow, the tramp." Stories of
course predominate. Fairy-tales are by all odds the most popular and
get the hardest wear. I have noticed that this is also true in the
children's travelling libraries sent out by the New York state
library. In one group of home library children Grimm's "Household
tales" was such a favorite, and they called for it so persistently,
that an extra copy was bought for their benefit and is almost
constantly in use. They much prefer it to Andersen. The naming of the
libraries and of the groups of children is a new feature. Of our nine
libraries five are named for children. Any person, or number of
persons, giving $25 (the cost of a new library with its bookcase) is
entitled to name the library. The plan is a popular one and several
gifts of that sort have been received. In one case a small framed
picture of the child for whom the library is named goes with it and
the children seem to have a positive affection for the picture. The
children choose for themselves some hero to give the name to their
club, or group. We have the Washington, the Columbus, the Anthony
Wayne, the Lincoln, and the Edison groups, and one more recently
formed, not yet named. It is a significant fact that the children knew
and admired Anthony Wayne because they read about him in Coffin's
"Boys of '76." One beauty of the home libraries is the simplicity of
the central idea and the natural relations between the children and
the visitor. It is quite possible to combine with this much direct
educational work. Games are almost always used by the visitors. The
skilful visitor, who should have the spirit of the kindergarten and
might well have also her training, may develop through the games
attention, concentration, and courtesy, qualities in which these
children are especially lacking. It is an interesting study to watch
the development of the game of 20 questions; e.g. from a wandering,
haphazard medley asked in a slow and painful way by self-conscious
children, to quick, intelligent, carefully planned questions To
illustrate more specifically an attempt at educational work, the
Columbus group may be taken as an example. There is a badge consisting
of a bronze medal with the head of Columbus, fastened with a knot of
red, white, and blue ribbon. The rule of the group is the rule of the
majority; e.g., when games are to be played a vote is taken and all
are expected to enter heartily into the one chosen by the majority. By
constant application of this plan and the discussion which it
involves, those children have come to understand pretty well the
nature of a vote. There is a child's life of Columbus and a scrap-book
containing pictures of him. The Columbus group are appropriately
discoverers, and as they have set out to find out everything possible
about their own city, once a month the group goes out together for a
long walk. They have visited the capitol, geological hall, city hall,
the Schulyer mansion, etc. Every week 10 minutes are spent in studying
the city, the name and location of the streets, the city buildings,
the government of the city, its history and antiquities, the
cleanliness of the city, etc. Many problems of city government which
are taking the attention of the best minds to-day can be studied in
simple form here. And this is real study. It is simple and elementary,
but not haphazard, and what they get is definite and organized. It is
not merely amusement, though they are interested and take hold
heartily. A simple statement of each lesson is duplicated and put
into the hands of the children. These will be combined into a
handbook useful for all children in the city and suggestive for other
cities. I hope that some line of study may be taken up by the other
groups, each visitor choosing that which she can best develop. Light
science would be attractive to some and of real service to the
children. Music, always a powerful agent in the development of life,
is specially useful in this city because the music taught in the
public schools is purely technical. All the children have met on
Saturday afternoons in the kindergarten room of one of the public
schools to sing under the direction of a competent director of music
who loves children and takes genuine pleasure in the work. This gives
them a little repertoire of choice children's songs to take the place
of the street songs which was about all they knew before, helps to
soften their voices in speaking, and also serves as an excuse for
bringing together the children of the various groups about once a
month and making a little esprit de corps, which is desirable. It is
wonderful when they are inclined to be boisterous and unmanageable in
their games what a humanizing influence a sudden call for one of these
songs will produce. It is proposed to circulate games suitable for
playing at home, also small framed pictures after the plan of the
Milwaukee Public Library. The books are often read by the parents and
older brothers and sisters. The games and pictures would help in like
manner to sweeten and ennoble the home life. But why should you be
interested in the home library and in allied movements? Is it simply
because they are an extension of the book power to which you have
pinned your faith? There is, I think, a deeper reason. The movement
known as the new philanthropy is one of the strong factors in our
civilization to- day. The life of the community is the study of the
man who serves the public as librarian. Nothing which is an essential
part of that life is foreign to him. As distinguished from the old-
fashioned charity which relieved individual suffering without regard
to its effects on society, the new movement is characterized by two
tendencies: 1. A scientific study of the principles of philanthropy:
information before reformation. 2. A spirit of friendliness: not
alms, but a friend. Men and women of singular ability, of the best
training and devoted to noble ideals, have given their lives to
studying the problems of the poor, and so we have colleges and social
settlements, free kindergartens, home libraries and a score of other
new activities, one in spirit and in aim. But there are not enough
trained specialists. The philanthropic work of our cities is largely
done by young ladies of the leisure class, quite a proportion of them
graduates of colleges, and with a splendid mental, moral, and social
equipment for the work. But they are raw recruits for lack of
discipline. Caught in the wave of enthusiasm they plunge zealously
into work with very little understanding of underlying principles. I
have given a good deal of thought to this difficulty and am persuaded
that there is a way out. I want to present it here because, if it
appeals to you as wise, you will be able to help in putting the plan
to the test of experience. As the difficulty is ignorance, the remedy
is study. A class in philanthropy should be organized, for serious
study in the scientific spirit and by the scientific method, under the
direction of as competent a teacher as can be secured. Only those who
are determined to do serious work and who have ability to cope with
these problems should be admitted. Every attempt to popularize the
course should be discouraged. The class might be carried on under the
auspices of a church, a charity organization society, or even of a
library. The initiative should be taken by some one person with the
requisite discrimination, tact, and organizing skill. According to my
outline a two- years' course is needed, involving an hour of class
work once a week, with, if possible, five hours a week of study, and
for nine or ten months in the year. Laboratory work, that is,
investigation of local conditions, should be carried on throughout the
course. Lectures combined with seminar work seem to me the best
methods of instruction. The literature of the subject is rich and
helpful. At the end of the first course there would be two or three
new persons competent to instruct, and these might organize other
classes. If this class in philanthropy could be carried on in any
city for 10 or 15 years, the charities of the city would feel the
effect of the work. Instead of crudity there would be strength,
enthusiasm would be supplemented by wisdom. The result would be the
strengthening of the personal character of the poor and the enrichment
of the whole city life. For we rise or sink together. The higher
groups of society cannot develop without a corresponding development
in the lower groups. And so I call you to study the problems of
philanthropy, to follow intelligently the history of home libraries,
to approve this plan of training if it be wise, if not to work out a
better one. Neither is this to go outside your natural course on the
ground of sentiment. You are to study the community on broad lines
that you may give back to the community through many channels that
abundant life which is the highest service.
The Monthly Bulletin of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh for
October, 1901, includes an account of summer playground work which
was begun three years before. Playground libraries as an introduction
to regular library agencies are described by Miss Meredyth Woodward.
Meredyth Woodward, now Mrs. J. Philip Anshutz, was born in Waterloo,
N. Y., in 1869, and was educated in the schools of Tecumseh, Michigan.
She took special work in the State Normal School at Oswego, N. Y., and
later studied in the Law Froebel Kindergarten Training School at
Toledo, Ohio, and in the Chicago Kindergarten College. After teaching
in this institution she became Principal of the San Jose Normal School
in California. After this she studied in the Leland Stanford
University. She took charge of the Home Library Work in the Carnegie
Library of Pittsburgh in 1901, where she remained until 1904, part of
the time acting as assistant in the Training School for Children's
Librarians. The work of supplying the summer playgrounds with books,
begun as an experiment three years ago, was continued this summer as a
part of the work done by the Children's department of the Library for
the children of this city. During the initial summer, five playgrounds
were supplied, the total circulation being about 1,600. Last year the
needs of seven playgrounds were met, with a result of 1,833 in
circulation, while the present year nine playgrounds have given a
circulation of 3,637 volumes, and this during one day in each of six
weeks. At a joint meeting of the Library workers with the
Kindergartners who had charge of the playgrounds, it was decided to
set apart this day as Library day, and as high as 117 volumes have
been issued in a single playground on that day, while one week every
available book was issued in spite of a drenching rain outside.
Through the courtesy of the school directors and principals, the
library was enabled to place the books, take registrations, and fill
out cards, several days before the day for circulation. Thus much
valuable time was gained, and the work begun and carried out more
systematically. Boxes of books carefully selected from the best
juvenile literature, comprising attractive stories of history,
biography, travel, nature, poetry and useful arts, as well as fiction,
picture books and the ever popular fairy tales, were sent to each
playground. Each kindergartner also received for her special use a
list of stories bearing on the thought she wished to emphasize each
week, with the books containing these stories. Charging stations were
improvised out of desks, tables, or chairs, in some vacant room, or
corner of a hallway. Walls dismantled for the summer cleaning were
made more attractive by gay flags, or picture bulletins illustrating
the books to be circulated. One morning spent at a playground on
Library day would be enough to convince the most sceptical that the
children fully appreciated their opportunities. As one of the
kindergartners remarked, "You'd think they had never seen a book
before." They swarmed about the windows and doors of the circulating
room, and at one school, when the impetuous but good-natured line
became too eager, they were restrained by the commanding voice of the
policeman to "Back up." Even the charms of an exciting game of
base-ball had no power over a wonted devotee, when pitted against the
attractions of an interesting book. Kindergartners from five
playgrounds agreed that by far the largest attendance was on Library
day, many of the older children coming on that day only. They felt
"too old to play," but never too old to read. The signature of one of
the parents, with that of the child's, entitled him to draw books. One
little tot begged hard to have a "ticket," and be allowed to take
books home, insisting with many emphatic nods that she could write her
name. On trial only a few meaningless scratches resulted, and the
tears that filled her eyes at her failure were banished only when the
librarian promised that she might come each week, and look at the
picture books. Another child asked for a card for his little friend
who had rheumatism, and couldn't come to the playground. A mother of
the neighborhood took a card that she might draw out picture books,
and books of rhymes and jingles for the little one at home. The
"little mothers" invariably saved a place on their cards for a book to
please the baby brother or sister tugging at their skirts, or, it
might be, for some older member at home. Very often the whole family
read the books. One boy waited till nearly noon on Library day for his
father to finish the "Boys of '76." Another said he wished he might
take three books, because there were four boys at home, and he would
like to have enough "to pretty near go 'round." In another family
three of the children were drawing books. Still the older sister had
to come down to get a book for herself, saying the others never gave
her a chance to read theirs. In these miniature libraries not only do
the children become familiar with library regulations, but more
judicious and intelligent in the selection of books. At first they
choose a book because it has an attractive cover, large print, "lots
of talk" (conversation), or because it is small and soon read. "I
tell you, them skinny books are the daisies," said one, while the
opinion of another was, "These ain't so bad if they'd only put more
pictures in to tell what they're about." Later they select a book
because the title tells of interesting subject matter, or because a
playmate has recommended it as "grand," "dandy," or "a peach." A
popular book often has as high as ten or fifteen reserves on it, the
Librarian being greeted in the morning with a chorus of, "Teacher
please save me"—this or that book. So, from having no idea of choice,
the children finally have such a definite idea of what they want, and
why they want it, that, unless the particular book is forthcoming,
they "guess they don't want any book to-day." One small girl took out
"Little Women," and wanted "Little Men" on the same card. When she
understood that only one book of fiction could be taken on one card,
she inveigled her little sister into taking it on her card. Then she
tucked the books under her arm, remarking, with a sigh of
satisfaction, "Now, we'll have 'em both in our family." In striking
contrast to the excitement attending the selection of books is the
lull that follows. Here and there are interested groups looking at the
pictures— delightful foretaste of what is to follow in the text—or
comparing the merits of the different books. Some have already made an
absorbed beginning in the story which will be finished at home, on the
door step, or by the evening lamp, when the more active games of the
day are over. Nor are these absorbing books always fiction. The
statistics show that stories of travel, lives of great men, and books
on natural history were fully as popular as the fiction. The fiction
per cent of last year was reduced from 60 per cent to 52 per cent
this year. And so the work for the season has closed, leaving many a
young reader not only trained but enthusiastic to enjoy regular
library privileges. The general verdict of the children was that they
were "Sorry it was over." Four lads from the South Side begged that
they might get books from the Main Library, and one boy presented his
card the very day after the playground closed. Nearly all the branches
have gained new adherents from their respective districts. On the
whole we feel well pleased with the season's work, although, as is
natural, the work done by the two new Branches was not so successful
as that elsewhere owing to the fact that the work was new to the
district. When compared with that done in the districts where it has
been carried on for three years, it gives a striking example of the
growth and development which has taken place since the beginning. As a
result of the work, at the West End Branch alone, fifty-two children
from the Riverside playground have taken out library cards. The
children are better trained in library usages, and more intelligent as
to what they want, often counting from one year to the next upon
getting a certain book. Out of this enthusiasm there naturally result
the Home Library groups and clubs which furnish books during the
winter. One notable outgrowth of last summer's playground was the
Duquesne School Club, whereby the children of the Point were enabled
to get books through the winter. This has since been superseded by the
introduction of the School-Duplicates, and now the children hold
elections for their various officers, while the wide-awake principal
has gotten out a neat little catalogue of the books in their
collection. Unemployed and uninterested children are fallow ground for
the seeds of mischief and crime. The half-day playgrounds do wonders
toward solving the problem of the vacation child. Do not the
interesting, wholesome, juvenile books made so accessible to the
children also play a large part in this good work?
At the Pasadena Conference of the A. L. A. in 1911, Miss Gertrude
Andrus led a discussion on library work in summer playgrounds, in
which she considered some simple methods of administration. Gertrude
Elisabeth Andrus was born in Buffalo, N. Y., acted as an assistant in
the Buffalo Public Library in 1900-1901; was a student in the Training
School for Children's Librarians in Pittsburgh from 1902 to 1904;
children's librarian in the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh from 1903
to 1908, and since that time has been head of the children's
department in the Seattle Public Library. The library in a summer
playground serves a double purpose; it supplies books in a district
not otherwise reached by the library and it acts as a lure to the use
of the main library. If the books are attractive, the children will
follow them to the main library and thus become permanent borrowers.
So it is plain that the books we place in our summer playgrounds must
be of the most popular type. Easy books, picture books, fairy tales,
stories, histories, books of travel, and books on games and manual
arts are the ones most in demand. A knowledge of the district in which
the playground is located is also necessary. If the children have a
school library and are accustomed to reading, the books sent to the
playground will differ from the kind sent to one in a foreign district
where little reading has been done. As the library room is invariably
used for other work on other days, the books must be locked up. A
satisfactory solution of this is a built-in bookcase with adjustable
doors which may easily be lifted from their sockets and set aside when
access to the books is desired, and may be replaced and padlocked when
the day's work is done. The arrangement of the room and the charging
desk should always be made so that the exit can be very carefully
supervised. In order to conserve our time so that we may have leisure
to give attention to individual children, we must arrange to have the
mechanical part of the work as systematic as possible. Playground
library work is a life of stress and strain. Everything comes in
rushes. There is always a mad dash for the door as soon as the
library is opened, for each child is sure that unless he is the first
he will miss the good book that he is convinced is there. This rush of
course makes it difficult to discharge the books, slip them, shelve
them, and at the same time charge the ones the children have selected,
to say nothing of helping the children in their choice. We have
therefore found it best to collect the books beforehand, discharge
them and distribute the cards among the children before opening the
library doors. When the Newark system is used, however, and a child
has drawn two books, this may result in considerable confusion, for
the books may be separated and one may not be sure that both charges
on the card should be cancelled. When our first playground library in
Seattle opened, we used the Browne system of charging and this proved
so satisfactory that we have continued to use it in the others.
According to this method, each borrower receives two cards. When a
book is borrowed, the book slip is drawn and put with one of the
borrower's cards in a small envelope. It is readily seen how easy it
is to avoid complications when the books are gathered before the
opening of the library, for the slip of each one is with the
borrower's card, and if the borrower returns no book, no card is given
him. After the books are discharged and shelved and the cards
distributed, the children are admitted. In this way much of the
confusion incident to opening is eliminated and more time is secured
to help the children make their choice. In order that the care of the
books may not interfere with the children's play, we have devised a
checking system by means of which the children may leave their books
in charge of the librarian until they are ready to go home. This not
only allows the children freedom in play but obviates the possibility
of loss of books through their being left on benches and swings. The
playground is a place of freedom and fun and good fellowship, and the
library's rules should be made as inconspicuous as possible. The
librarian should be not only willing, but anxious to enter into the
life of the playground as far as her duties permit. One way in which
she will be able to make herself popular not only with the children
but with the instructors is by means of story telling. Joseph Lee says
that story telling is the only passive occupation permissible on a
playground and the librarian thus finds her work ready to her hand.
She is able to advertise her books, make friends with the children is
a most effective way, and at the same time relieve the playground
instructor of a duty which is sometimes found irksome. She must
remember that she is an integral part of that playground, not a weekly
visitor, and she must throw herself into the interests and activities
of the children with all the enthusiasm at her command.
In the following article taken from the Library Journal of October,
1882, Mr. S. S. Green says that his "principal object is to show how
books are selected and how children are interested in books in the
Sunday-school in which I am a teacher." It is interesting to know that
in a recent letter written to the editor in regard to the use of this
article Mr. Green says: "As I read it over, it seems to me that the
advice given in it is still much needed." Samuel Swett Green was born
in Worcester in 1837, and was graduated from Harvard in 1858. In 1890
he was appointed by the Governor of Massachusetts an original member
of the Free Public Library Commission. He was one of the founders of
the A. L. A., and also a life member, and was chosen its president in
1891. From 1867 to 1871 he was a trustee of the Worcester Public
Library, and he was librarian from 1871 to 1909, when he was made
librarian emeritus. Mr. Green has published several books on library
subjects. It is gratifying to notice that the movement started several
years ago by certain ladies connected with the religious body known
as Unitarian Congregationalists, who organized themselves under the
name of the Ladies' Commission for the purpose of reading children's
books and preparing lists of them suitable for Sunday-school
libraries, has led within two or three years to the formation of a
similar organization in the Protestent Episcopal Church, and more
recently to that of one among Orthodox Congregationalists. Individual
clergymen and others have also lately shown a great interest in the
work of selecting and disseminating good lists of books suitable for
Sunday-school libraries. It is unnecessary to say that it was high
time that this work was entered upon earnestly. The officers of the
more intelligently administered public libraries had come to reject,
almost without examination, books prepared especially for the use of
Sunday-schools, and without consideration to refuse works admission
to their shelves issued by certain publishers whose business it was to
provide for the wants of Sunday-school libraries. It had become
obvious, among other facts, that the same objections that were made to
providing sensational stories for boys and girls in public libraries,
lay equally against the provision of books usually placed in
Sunday-school libraries. The one class of books was generally moral in
tone, but trashy in its representations of real life; the other,
religious in tone, but equally trashy in its presentations of pictures
of what purported to be the life of boys and girls. Both classes of
books were good in their intention, both similarly unwholesome.
Gratifying, however, as are the results of this movement, there is
something more that needs to be done. Libraries must be purified from
objectionable literature; new books must be properly selected; but
after this kind of work has been done, a very important work remains
to be attended to, namely, that of helping children to find out the
books in the library that will interest them and pleasantly instruct
them. Every child should be aided to get books suited to its age, its
immediate interests, and its needs. The Library Journal, in its
number for June gave the title of a catalogue of the books in the
Sunday-school library of the Unitarian church in Winchester,
Massachusetts. In this catalogue short notes are added to the titles
of some of the books to show, when the titles do not give information
enough, what subjects are really treated of in the books annotated.
Something beside this is desirable, however. Children need much
personal aid in selecting books. I have been conservant of the work
of a minister who, about a year since, after examining carefully all
the books in the Sunday-school library of his church, and after taking
out such volumes as he considered particularly objectionable and
adding others which he knew to be good, set himself the task of
talking with the children of his school about their reading. The
school has a superintendent, but he, as minister, also takes an
interest in it and has spent the time he has given to it, recently, in
talking with the children, one at a time, about books, finding out
from them their tastes and what they had been reading, and
recommending to them wholesome books to read and interesting lines of
investigation to pursue. My principal object in writing this article
is to show how books are selected and how children are interested in
books in the Sunday-school in which I am a teacher. It seems to me
that its methods are wise and worthy of being followed elsewhere. The
Sunday-school referred to is that connected with the Second
Congregational (1st Unitarian) Church in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Thirteen or fourteen years ago the library of this Sunday- school was
carefully examined and weeded. Every book was read by competent
persons, and the poorest books were put out of the library. This
weeding process has gone on year by year; as new books have been added
others not representing a high standard of merit have been removed
from the shelves. Great care has been taken to examine conscientiously
new books before putting them into the library. The result is that the
Sunday- school now has an excellent library. It has found the
catalogue of the Ladies' Commission of great aid in making selections,
but has not found all the books recommended in it adapted to its
purposes. A competent committee has always read the books recommended
by the Commission, so as to make sure that such volumes only were
selected as would meet the actual needs of the Sunday-school we have
to provide for. Books are now bought as published. A contribution of
about a hundred dollars is taken up annually. This money is put into
the hands of the Treasurer of the Library Committee, and the
sub-committee on purchases get from a book-store such books as it
seems probable will answer our purposes, read them carefully, and buy
such as prove desirable. The sub-committee consists of two highly
cultivated young ladies. When they have selected two or three books
they make notes of their contents. The books are then placed on a
table in the minister's room, and the superintendent of the school
calls attention to them—reading to scholars a short description of
each book prepared by the sub-committee, and inviting the scholars to
examine the books after the close of the current session of the school
or before the opening of the school the following Sunday. After these
two opportunities have been given to the children to look at the books
and handle them, they are put into the library and are ready to be
taken out. This sub-committee has taken another important step within
a year or two. The members have read over again all the books in the
library and made notes descriptive of their contents, and the school
has elected one of the ladies as consulting librarian. She sits at a
little table in the school-room during the sessions of the school, and
with her notes before her receives every teacher or scholar who wishes
to consult about the selection of a book, and gives whatever
assistance is asked for in picking out interesting and suitable books.
She is kept very busy and is doing a work of great value. It is
gratifying to me to find that this work of bringing the librarian into
personal contact with readers and of establishing pleasant personal
relations between them, which has been so fruitful in good results in
the public library under my charge in Worcester, has been extended to
Sunday-school work with so much success.
The interesting and unusual work of the library of the Children's
Museum of the Brooklyn Institute is described by its librarian,
Miriam S. Draper, in an article published in the Library Journal for
April, 1910. Miss Draper says: "Contrary to the general impression
[the library] is not composed entirely of children's books, but of a
careful selection of the best recent books upon natural history in the
broadest use of the term." Miriam S. Draper was born in Roxbury,
Mass., and taught for a brief period in the public schools there. She
studied in Mr. Fletcher's school at Amherst in the summer of 1893, and
was graduated from the Pratt Institute Library School in 1895. In the
next five years she filled the following temporary positions:
Cataloguer, Public Library, Ilion, N. Y.; Organizer, first branch of
the Queens Borough Library at Long Island City; Librarian of a branch
of the Pratt Institute Free Library until its discontinuance;
Cataloguer, Antioch College Library, Yellow Springs, Ohio; one of the
Classifiers in the University of Pennsylvania Library during its
reorganization. When the Children's Museum was opened in 1900, she
became its librarian, the position she now holds. The Children's
Museum may be considered unique, because so far as we know, there is
no other museum in this country or elsewhere that is devoted primarily
to children and young people; in which a whole building is set apart
for the purpose of interesting them in the beautiful in Nature, in the
history of their country, in the customs and costumes of other
nations, and the elementary principles of astronomy and physics, by
means of carefully mounted specimens, attractive models, naturally
colored charts, excellent apparatus, and finely illustrated books.
Many of the children come to the museum so often that they feel that
it is their very own, and take great pride as well as pleasure in
introducing their parents and relatives, so that they may enjoy the
museum and library with them. It may be called a new departure in work
with children, for although it was started ten years ago, it was for
some time in the nature of an experiment, but has now fully
exemplified its reasons for existence. The Children's Museum is
pleasantly located in a beautiful little park, which adds greatly to
its attractiveness and educational value. While situated in a
residential portion of the city, amid the homes of well-to-do people,
it is quite accessible by car lines to other parts of the city. In
fact, classes of children accompanied by their teachers frequently
come from remote sections of Brooklyn, and from the East Side of New
York. We are within walking distance of thickly populated sections,
such as Brownsville, and large numbers of Jewish and Italian children
avail themselves of the privileges offered. It is hoped that in time
each section of the city may have its own little Children's Museum, as
a center of interest and incentive to broader knowledge. We are well
aware that excellent work has been done for children during the past
ten years in many other museums, and perhaps the first beginning in
this direction was made by the Children's Room in the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington. The American Museum of Natural History in
New York City provides an instructor to explain some of its beautiful
and interesting exhibits to children, and a similar work has been done
in the Milwaukee Museum. Children have been made especially welcome in
other museums, such as those at Charleston, S. C., St. Johnsbury, Vt.,
and the Stepney Borough Museum in London. All librarians are so
familiar with the excellent work done in the Children's Departments
of public libraries, which have developed so rapidly in almost every
town and city throughout the country during the past decade, that it
is not necessary to refer at length to them. Suffice it to say, that
the work of the Children's Museum and its library are quite different
in plan and scope from any of the museums and libraries to which
reference has been made. Before describing in detail the work of this
unique little museum, it may be of interest to know something of the
early history of an institution which had its origin in connection
with the first free library in Brooklyn. As long ago as August, 1823,
a company of gentlemen met together to discuss the question of
establishing a library for apprentices in the "Village of Brooklyn."
Shortly after, the "Apprentices' Library Association" was organized
"for the exclusive benefit of the apprentices of the village forever."
The library was first opened in a small building on Fulton street, on
Nov. 15, 1823, On the Fourth of July, 1825, the corner-stone of a new
library building was laid, on which occasion General Lafayette took
part in the formal exercises. It is interesting to note that a year
or two later, courses of lectures in "natural philosophy" and
chemistry were given for the benefit of members; and the early records
tell us that in illustrating a lecture on electricity the instructor,
"Mr. Steele, showed a metallic conductor used by Dr. Franklin in
making experiments." Later, lectures on astronomy were given for the
benefit of readers, and drawing classes established for a similar
purpose. A few years later the Library Association sold its building
and removed to Washington street, where it remained for a long period
of years. In 1843, the Association was reorganized under the name of
the Brooklyn Institute, and privileges were extended to "minors of
both sexes," the library being called at that time the "Youth's Free
Library." At the same time the custom was established of awarding
premiums to readers on Washington's Birthday. Silver medals and prizes
of books were given for the best essays upon geography, natural
history, hydraulics, architecture, and history, as well as the best
pieces of workmanship and most accurate mechanical drawings presented
by readers. It seems a notable fact that courses of lectures, which
have had a prominent part in the work of the Children's Museum, were
also an important factor in the earlier educational work connected
with the library; and also that a "Library fund," established sixty
or more years ago, still provides all books and periodicals for the
Children's Museum Library, with the addition of a small annual gift
from the state of New York, the cost of maintenance being assumed by
the city of New York. The establishment of the Children's Museum came
about in this wise. After a serious fire in the Washington street
building, and the subsequent sale of its site, the Brooklyn Institute
of Arts and Sciences secured an indefinite lease of a fine old mansion
located in Bedford Park, which had been recently acquired by the
city. The collections of birds, minerals, and other natural history
objects were placed on exhibition for a few years in this old mansion,
and the library, which now numbered several thousand volumes, was
stored in the same building. On the completion of the first section of
the new Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, in
1897, the major part of the natural history collections were installed
in the new museum. At length the idea occurred to one of the curators
that the old building could be utilized to advantage by establishing a
museum which should be especially devoted to the education and
enjoyment of young people. The first beginnings were made by the
purchase of natural history charts, botanical and zoological models,
and several series of vivid German lithographs, representing
historical events ranging from the Battle of Marathon to the
Franco-German War. Some collections of shells, minerals, birds and
insects were added, and the small inception. of the Children's Museum
was opened to the public Dec. 16, 1899, in a few rooms which had been
fitted up for the purpose. A large part of the Brooklyn Institute
Library, which had been stored in the building, and which was no
longer useful here, was sent to other libraries in the South, leaving
such books as were suitable to form the nucleus of the Children's
Museum Library as well as the Library of the Central Museum. With
such modest beginnings the Children's Museum has developed within ten
years, until the present building has become entirely inadequate for
present needs. The collections now fill eleven exhibition rooms and
adjacent halls; the lecture room is frequently overcrowded, the
lecture being sometimes repeated again and again; and the space set
apart for the library has long been taxed to its utmost. There are no
reserve shelves for books, and when new books are added the least-used
books are necessarily taken out and placed in temporary storage in a
dark office on another floor. In busy times after school hours and on
holidays, the reading room is frequently filled to overflowing, many
of the children being obliged to stand, or perhaps turn away for lack
of even standing room. The number of visitors is steadily increasing,
and numbered 14,637 in the month of February, 1910; just about
one-third of this number, or 4,925, made use of the library during the
month. A new building is therefore urgently needed, and it is ardently
hoped that a new fireproof building which is adequate for the purpose
may soon be provided, to relieve the great stress now so apparent in
many parts of the building, as well as to preserve its interesting
collections and valuable library. It seems evident that an institution
which stands primarily for earnest endeavor to awaken an interest in
Nature, is really necessary, especially in cities where many children
live so closely crowded together that they hardly know what wild
flowers are, and whose familiarity with birds is confined principally
to the English sparrow. Moreover, the nature study of the public
school course, though good as far as it goes, is too often
perfunctory, either from lack of interest or enthusiasm on the part of
teachers, it being an added subject to an already crowded curriculum.
Another seeming drawback is that the nature work is attempted during
the first few years only, and then is dropped entirely for the
remainder of the elementary course. A comparatively small number of
children continue their studies in high schools; and even so, the
study of botany and zoology is made so largely systematic and
structural that any desire of becoming acquainted with the birds and
flowers and trees is frequently eliminated. Although entirely
independent of the Board of Education it is along just such lines that
the Children's Museum is able to make a place for itself in
supplementing the work of the school. Its aims have been defined by
the curator to be as follows:
1. To employ objects attractive and interesting to children,
and at the same time helpful to teachers, in every
branch of nature study. 2. To secure an arrangement at once
pleasing to the eye and expressive of a fundamental truth. 3. To
avoid confusion from the use of too many specimens and the consequent
crowding in cases.
4. To label with brief descriptions expressed in simple
language and printed in clear, readable type. In addition to the
common species of birds, insects, and animals, there are many groups
that have special attraction for children. For instance, among the
"Birds we read about" are the flamingo, cassowary, condor, and
quetzal; the eagle owl is contrasted with the pygmy owl, and the
peacock, lyre bird, albatross, swan, and pelican are displayed. In
the Insect room the child's attention is naturally drawn to the
brilliantly-colored butterflies and moths, the curious beetles from
tropical countries, and the "Strange insects, centipedes and
scorpions." There is an extremely interesting silk-worm exhibit, and
the children who visited the museum two or three summers ago had the
pleasure of watching some of the identical silkworms while spinning
their cocoons. Young collectors are shown exactly "How to collect and
preserve insects" by examining the object lesson which was especially
designed for their help. Among the realistic "Animal homes" which
appeal especially to the child's mind are the hen and chickens, the
downy eider ducks, the family of red foxes, and the home of the
muskrat. "Color in nature" is effectively illustrated by grouping
together certain tropical fishes, minerals, shells, insects, and birds
in such a manner as to bring out vivid red, yellow, blue, and green
colors. Here and elsewhere in the museum are placed appropriate
quotations from poets and prose writers. In almost every room there
are attractive little aquaria or vivaria containing living animals and
plants. There is always a pleasure in watching the gold fish, or the
salamanders, chameleons, mud-puppies, alligators, horned toads, tree
toads, and snails. For three or four years an observation hive of bees
has been fixed in a window overlooking the park, and children have
watched the work of the "busy bees" with great delight. The uses of
minerals and rocks are shown by means of pictures of quarries, and of
buildings and monuments, and lead pencils are seen in the various
stages of manufacture. A small collection of "Gems" was recently
donated, and the legends connected with the various birthstones are
given in rhyme. A black background has been used with pleasing effect
to exhibit the various forms of shells. The process of making pearl
buttons and numerous articles made of mother-of-pearl add largely to
the charms of the Shell room. Perhaps the most attractive room to the
younger children is the History room, in which the beginnings of
American history are typified not only by charts and historic
implements, but by very real "doll houses." A member of the staff
devised and cleverly executed the idea of representing the early
settlers by six colonial types, viz., the Spanish, French, Cavalier,
Dutch, New England and Quaker types. Some of the special scenes
illustrated are labelled "Priest and soldier plan a new mission,"
"Indians selling furs to Dutch trader at Fort Orange" and "The
minister calls on the family." The study of geography is aided by
means of small models of miniature homes of primitive peoples; as for
instance, an Eskimo village with its snow igloos, the tents of the
Labrador Eskimos, the permanent home of the Northwestern Eskimos, and
the houses and "totem poles" of the Haida Indians. Some of the more
civilized nations are typified by a "Lumber camp in a temperate
zone," and by a series of "Dolls dressed in national costumes." The
library of the Children's Museum now numbers about six thousand
volumes, and, contrary to the general impression, is not composed
entirely of children's books, but of a careful selection of the best
recent books upon natural history in the broadest use of the terms.
The range is from the simplest readers to technical manuals. The
library is thus unique in its way, supplementing the work of the
museum in various ways, such as the following: 1. Providing books of
information for the museum staff in describing the collections, and
preparing lectures for children. 2. Furnishing information to visitors
about specimens models or pictures in the museum, and giving
opportunity to study the collections with the direct aid of books. 3.
Offering carefully chosen books on almost all the subjects of school
work, thus forming a valuable "School reference library," at the same
time showing parents and teachers the most helpful and attractive
nature books to aid them in selecting such as best suit the needs and
tastes of children or students. Although it is not a circulating
library (for many of the books need to be on call for immediate use),
there are, of course, many interesting stories of heroes, scientists,
explorers, statesmen, and other great leaders among men, of great
events in history, of child life in different countries, of birds and
animals, and the great "world of outdoors." A constant effort is made
to foster a reading habit in the children, even though the time for
reading is very limited. Last summer some simple bookmarks were
printed, by the use of which many children have been encouraged to
read books continuously. The reverse side of some of the bookmarks
show that individual children have read eight or ten books through
recently. In place of the "Story hour" which is so popular in
children's libraries, the Children's Museum provides daily half-hour
talks, illustrated by lantern slides, which are given in the lecture
room. The subjects are selected with relation to the school program,
and include a variety of nature topics, the geography of different
countries, history and astronomy. Twice a week a lecture is given on
elementary science, and is illustrated by experiments. On some of the
holidays such as Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays the lecture is
naturally devoted to the national hero, whose birthday is thus
commemorated. This year there were so many children who wanted to
learn about Washington that the lecture was given nine times during
the day. On Lincoln's birthday there were several repetitions of the
lecture, and the library was thronged with readers all day, at least
one hundred children reading stories about him. The children looked
with interest at the picture bulletins, comparing the pictures with
those they had seen in the lecture. Hundreds of patriotic poems were
copied during the month, the number being limited only by lack of
space and writing materials. During the March vacation there were so
many visitors that special lectures were given each day upon some
subject pertaining to nature. It is proposed this season to give
additional special lectures appropriate for "Arbor day" and "Bird
day," and probably one with relation to the "Protection of animals."
Lectures are occasionally given for the benefit of Mothers' Clubs,
and members of the clubs accompanied by their children are shown the
objects of interest in the museum. The library is also visited, and
picture bulletins and books are enjoyed by mothers and children
together. Last winter several Nature books were loaned for a special
exhibit of Christmas books, which was arranged for a regular meeting
of the Mothers' Club at a neighboring school. A part of the museum
equipment of especial benefit to boys in high schools is the wireless
telegraph station, which was set up and is kept in working order by
boys. It furnishes a good field for experimenting in sending and
receiving wireless messages, and a good many boys have become so
proficient that they have been able to accept positions as wireless
operators on steamers during summer vacations. The museum has
considerable loan material, consisting of stuffed birds, boxes
containing the life histories of common butterflies and moths, also
minerals, charts, etc., which are loaned to public and private schools
whenever desired. The question is frequently asked "What influence
does the museum exert on the minds of growing children?" "Does it
really increase their powers of observation and broaden their
horizon?" The relation between the members of the staff and many
children becomes quite intimate, and although all attendance is
entirely voluntary, it is often continued with brief interruptions for
several years. The experience of one young man may be cited to
demonstrate how the advantages offered by the museum are put to
definite use, while friendly relations continue for a period of years.
When quite a small boy, a frequent visitor became interested in
collecting butterflies and moths, learning how to mount them
carefully, and using our books to help identify his finds. As he grew
older, he commenced experimenting in a small way in wireless
telegraphy, inviting the members of the staff, separately, to go to
the basement and listen to the clicking of his little instrument,
which was the beginning of successful work in that direction.
Throughout his high school course he continued to experiment along
wireless lines, doing very creditable work. Upon his graduation, he
received an appointment as wireless operator on a steamer. In this
capacity he has visited several of the Southern states, Porto Rico,
Venezuela, and portions of Europe. He has improved his opportunities
for collecting while on his various trips, as a creditable little
exhibit, called the "Austen M. Curtis Collection of Butterflies and
Moths" in the Children's Museum, will testify. Some definite
advantages gained in another field are worthy of mention. Last summer
one of the high school boys commenced during the vacation to read all
he could about astronomy; as the summer advanced, another boy became
interested in the subject also, especially in the study of the
constellations. Diagrams and star maps were carefully made and the
names of all the important stars noted. In the fall a little club of
eight or ten boys was formed. The members meet almost every pleasant
evening at the home of the founder of the club and make use of two
telescopes which have been secured to the roof. (Incidentally, may we
add, that one of the boys with considerable pride recently showed the
books on astronomy in the library to his aunt who was visiting from
another city.) No astronomy is at present included in the public
school course, with the exception of a little elementary study in the
grammar school, so that an opportunity is here provided to supplement
school work. Children frequently make long visits, sometimes spending
the greater part of a day, and bringing their luncheon with them to
eat in the park. Sometimes whole families come together, father or
mother, or both, accompanying the children. Frequently the little
"mother" of the family who is having temporary care of four or five
little ones, is not much larger than her little charges, and yet is
anxious to read some of the books. Under such conditions, when the
little folks become too restless to remain longer in the library or
museum, the privilege of reading in the park is occasionally
permitted, the book being returned to the library before leaving for
their homes. The publication of a monthly paper was started in 1902 as
a means of communication with the general public and especially with
schools. In April, 1905, the Children's Museum united with the larger
Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, in publishing
the Museum News. This journal is sent not only to every public and
private school in Brooklyn, but to every museum in this country and
abroad; to every library in Brooklyn, and to libraries generally
throughout the country. An excellent "Guide to the trees in Bedford
Park" has been printed in a separate leaflet, being at first a
contribution to the Museum News. It may be noted here that a series of
lectures upon Trees will be given at the Children's museum commencing
April 11th by Mr. J. J. Levison, arboriculturist, the author of the
"Guide"; and that a fine collection of the best tree books may always
be consulted in the library. In connection with the "Hudson-Fulton
Celebration" in the fall of 1909, a handsome "Catalogue of the
historical collection and objects of related interest at the
Children's Museum" was prepared by Miss Agnes E. Bowen. It furnishes a
concise outline of American history, is printed in attractive form,
and illustrated by photographs of the historical groups already
mentioned. Special picture bulletins were also exhibited in both
museum and library, and objects having relation to Hudson and Fulton
and their times were indicated by a neat little flag. It is perhaps
needless to add that many teachers and children found great assistance
by consulting the "Hudson-Fulton Bookshelf," and that the museum
exhibit was very attractive to the general public. The library has
prepared various short lists from time to time whenever needed, but
has thus far printed only one. This was prepared at the request of the
Supervisor of Nature Study in the Vacation Schools of Greater New
York, and is a short annotated list entitled "Some books upon nature
study in the Children's Museum Library." The list will be sent free to
any librarian or teacher upon application. The Children's Museum is
open daily throughout the year, the hours on weekdays being from 9
a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and from 2 to 5:30 p.m. on Sundays. The library is
open on the same hours as the museum with few exceptions, such as
Thanksgiving Day, Christmas, and the Fourth of July, and Sunday
afternoons during the summer, from June 15th to September 15th. To
sum up, the Children's Museum constantly suggests the added pleasure
given to each child's life by cultivating his powers of observation,
and stimulating his love of the beautiful in nature by means of
attractive exhibits, half-hour talks, and familiar chats with groups
of children. The library calls attention of individual children and
classes to the flowers, birds and trees through its picture bulletins
and numerous books; and children are urged to visit the Aquarium, the
Zoological Gardens at Bronx Park, and see the natural beauties of
Forest Park, whenever opportunity offers.
Many of the generally accepted methods of children's libraries have
been adapted to work with colored children, whose particular interests
are described in the following article by Mrs. Rachel D. Harris,
contributed to the Library Journal for April, 1910. Mrs. Rachel D.
Harris was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1869, and was graduated
from the Colored High School in 1885. She taught in the public schools
for fifteen years, and was appointed assistant in the Colored Branch
of the Louisville Free Public Library when it was opened in 1905. At
the time this article was written she was in charge of the library
work with colored children. About five years ago, when it was
proposed to establish a branch for colored people, it was regarded
apprehensively by both sides. We knew our people not to be a reading
people, and while we were hopeful that the plan would be a success, we
wondered whether or not the money and energy expended in projecting
such an enterprise might not be put to some other purpose, whereby a
good result could be more positively assured. The branch, however,
was opened in the early part of the autumn of 1905, in temporary
quarters—three rooms of the lower floor of the residence of one of
our own people. We began with 1,400 books, to which have been added
regularly, until now we have 7,533 volumes on the shelves of our new
building, which we have occupied since October, 1908. The problem at
first which confronted us was: How to get our people to read and at
the same time to read only the best. We used in a modest way the plans
of work already followed by successful libraries—the story-hour,
boys' and girls' clubs, bulletins, visits to the schools, and public
addresses. A group of boys from 9 to 14 years of age, who visited our
rooms frequently, was organized into the Boys' Reading Club. Their
number increased to 27 earnest, faithful little fellows, who were
rather regular in attendance. They met Friday afternoon of each week,
elected their own officers, appointed their own committee on
preparation of a course of reading for the term, the children's
librarian always being a member of each committee appointed. There
were only a few boys in this number who had read any book "all the way
through," except their school books. The first rule made for the club
was, that at roll-call each boy should respond by giving the title,
author and a short synopsis of the book read the preceding week. This
proved to be the most interesting part of the meeting, and was placed
first on the program to insure prompt attendance. Often the entire
period was taken up with the roll-call, the boys often calling for the
entire story of a book, the synopsis of which appealed to them. This
method was thought to be a good way to get the boys interested in the
books on our shelves. Our first course in reading was Lamb's "Tales
from Shakespeare." Much profit was derived from the discussion brought
about by assigning each character to a different boy and having him
give his opinion of the same. We modified the program to include
several debates during the term, using the "Debater's Treasury" for
topics. The following year we read the plays "Merchant of Venice,"
"Macbeth," "Midsummer night's dream." A large per cent of this first
club are still patrons of the library. Six of the original number are
now in college, and most of those remaining are connected with the
Boys' Debating Club. Shortly after the organization of the Boys' Club
the girls of the sixth, seventh and eighth grades insisted upon having
a club, and a Girls' History Club was organized with about 30 girls.
At the urgent request of some pupils of the freshman and sophomore
classes of the High School a club was formed for them, and also one
for the members of the junior and senior classes for the study of
mythology. Very few of the members of any of these clubs had read much
beyond their class books and the same general plan was followed in
each, with the result that the library has been successful in creating
a love for the reading of books that are worth while. The story-hour
has outgrown itself and our limited supply of assistants. We started
with a very small group of little folks, and now we tell stories to
between 150 and 180 children each week in our building. The story-hour
begins at 3 p.m., and children who are dismissed at 1:30 p.m., come
directly from school and wait patiently till the children's librarian
returns from her station work at 3 p.m. The majority of our children
have never had stories told to them, their parents being compelled to
work out from home all day, and during the evening they have not the
time, though they may have the stories to tell, and the little ones
have been deprived of every child's birthright—a generous supply of
good stories. Boys and girls from the High School have begged for
permission to come to the story-hour, and have come from long
distances to hear the stories and enjoy them as much as the younger
ones do. Last year when we decided to tell stories from English
history to this mixed group of little folks we felt that probably the
stories would not be received with the same interest as were the
stories of the previous year. Strange to say, these stories appealed
keenly to the children, and our number increased weekly and interest
did not wane. Many copies of English histories were placed on our
shelves, and these were eagerly read. Even now it is difficult to find
an English history in our children's room. A remarkable feature of the
work at our branch is the small amount of fiction read, only 45 per
cent. We had a decided advantage here, because our children had never
learned to read fiction. Having read but very little, their power of
concentration was small, and the book that contained a story that
"went all the way through" did not appeal to them. Their great regard
for "teacher's" opinion helped us at the library to please them by
giving them non-fiction. For instance, when the boys came, as most
boys do, with a request for a story about Indians, we gave them
Grinnell's "Story of the Indian," or Wade's "Ten Big Indians," the
binding and high sounding title of which would attract them, and they
would find their way to the shelf where the Indian books were and
would read nearly all we had there. They were then prepared to
thoroughly enjoy our Indian stories in fiction. Ours is an emotional
race, and as religion appeals much to this element in our nature, our
parents have always been church- goers, and the reverence for sacred
things which our children manifest is inherent. Therefore it is no
cause for wonder that the stories of the Old and New Testament find
children anxious to read them. Our children read more biography than
would be supposed. That book that will tell them about a boy who,
though poor and otherwise handicapped, struggled, overcame and became
famous, appeals to them; therefore "Poor boys' chances" and Bolton's
"Poor boys who became famous" are called for constantly. There are
few of our boys and girls who will not gladly take a copy of the life
of Abraham Lincoln, or Booker T. Washington and read them over and
over, their parents often having them read the same to them also. The
self-made element in the lives of these men strikes a responsive chord
in the hearts of our young people. They are easily led from the lives
of these to the life of Napoleon, Edison, Washington and others.
During the school months the tables of our reference room are usually
crowded. The pupils of the High School, near by, often deluge us,
after the closing of school, with anxious requests for information on
every topic from "the best mode of pastry making to Halley's comet."
The Library Board has been generous in granting our request for more
and more books. Our supply, however, is still far too small for the
demand made upon it, our circulation having increased from 17,838 to
55,088 for the present year. We have two library stations and 35 class
room collections, all demanding more books. When we look back now at
the time of our beginning we see that our fears were unfounded. Our
people needed only an opportunity and encouragement. The success of
the branch has exceeded the hope of the most sanguine of those
interested in its organization, and we feel justly proud of the
results attained.
Present-day conditions in a branch library in a crowded district of a
large city are pictured in the last paper to be included in this
compilation, with special emphasis on the necessity of understanding
the traditions and customs of foreign peoples in order to know how to
appeal to them. It was read by Miss Josephine M. McPike before the
meeting of the Missouri Library Association at Joplin, Missouri, in
October, 1915. Josephine Mary McPike was born in Alton, Illinois, and
studied in Shurtleff College, Upper Alton, and in the University of
Illinois. She became a member of the staff of the St. Louis Public
Library in 1909. In February, 1917, she resigned from the position of
First Assistant at the Crunden Branch to become the librarian of the
Seven Corners Branch of the Minneapolis Public Library. Crunden
branch is the kind of place, the thought of which makes you glad to
get up in the morning. It is an institution a state of mind. And as we
workers there feel, so do the people in the neighborhood. We have
heard over and over again the almost worn-out appellation "The
people's university"; Crunden has a different place in the thoughts of
its users. It is really the living-room of our neighborhood—the place
where, the dishes having been washed and the apron hung up, we
naturally retire to read and to muse. True, it is a large family
foregathered in this living-room of ours, much greater in number than
the chairs for them to sit upon, but, as in all large families, there
is much giving and taking. In the children's room, crowded to
overflowing, the Jewish child sits next to the Irish, and the Italian
and the Polish child read from the same book. Children of all ages;
babes from two and a half years to boys of twenty who spend their days
in the factory, and are still reading "Robinson Crusoe" and the
"Merry adventures of Robin Hood." There too, sometimes comes the
mother but lately arrived from the "Old Country," wearing her
brightly colored native costume. Unable to read or to write, she
feels more at home here with the children whom she understands, and
beams proudly to see her little "Izzey" reading "Child life" or
"Summers' reader." Some social workers report that their greatest
difficulty in dealing with the children of the tenement district is
absolute lack of the play spirit. Our observations have been quite to
the contrary; in all of the children there is a fresh and healthy
play- fulness—indeed, we feel at times that it is much too healthy.
Our constant attendance is needed to satisfy them all, insatiable
little readers that they are. But the question of discipline becomes a
real problem only in dealing with the mass spirit of the gang. There
is one more or less notorious gang in the neighborhood which is known
as the "Forty Thieves." To gain admittance into this friendly crowd it
is necessary for the applicant to prove to the full satisfaction of
the leaders that he has stolen something. En masse they storm into the
children's room, in a spirit of bravado. We gradually come to realize
that at such a time as this the library smile—that much used and
abused smile—touches some of the boys not at all, and the voice of
authority and often the arm of strength are the only effective
methods. We believe that we have found a most satisfactory way of
meeting this situation. The children's librarian induces all of the
older boys to come down stairs to a separate room and for a half hour
tells them tales of adventure and chivalry, thus quieting the
children's room and directing the energy of the boys into more
peaceful channels. This story in the evening takes the place of the
story hour for older children during the daytime, which on account of
the scarcity of boys and girls of suitable age has been discontinued.
The younger children still have their fairy stories told them, and
there, ever and anon, the frank spirit of the family manifests itself.
That child who all through one story hour sat weaving back and forth
muttering to herself, and when pressed for an explanation, remarked
that she "was counting 'til you're done"—is a happy and independent
contrast to the usually emotional type that embraces and bids its
indescribably dirty and garlic tainted little brothers—"Kiss teacher
for the nice story." The young library assistant comes to Crunden
branch graciously to teach—she stays humbly to learn. Full of new
theories and with a desire to uplift—a really sincere desire—she
finds in a short time much to uplift her own spirit. Since ours is a
polygot neighborhood consisting mostly of Russians, Jews, Poles, and
Italians, with a light sprinkling of Irish, it brings us into contact
with such different temperaments that before we can attempt to satisfy
them we must needs go to school to them. We know to some extent the
life of our American child and with a little thought we can usually
find the way best to appeal to him. But the peoples who have come from
across the water have brought with them their traditions and their
customs, and have each their own point of view; and it is with these
traditions and customs that we must become familiar and sympathetic in
order to understand the little strangers. There is the eager, often
fearful Jewish child; the slower, stolid Pole; the impulsive Italian;
each must be approached from a different angle and each with a
different inducement. At first this task is rather appalling, but
gradually it becomes so interesting that from trying to learn from the
child in the library we listen to the mother in the home, and often to
the father from the factory; and from these gleanings of their life in
the home and their habits of thought we try to understand the nature
of the strange child and grope about for what he most needs and how to
make the greatest appeal to him. In the last two or three years the
children's librarian has herself gone after each book long overdue,
and with each visit she has seized the opportunity not only to recover
the book, but to become acquainted with the mother and to gain her
often reluctant confidence. Most of the readers live in tenements,
many of which open into one common yard. The appearance of the library
assistant usually causes much commotion, and she is received often
not only by the mother of the negligent child but also the mothers of
several other children as well—and, the center of a friendly group,
she holds conversation with them. By this time the library assistant
is well known in the neighborhood, and unlike the collector and the
curious social uplifter who are often treated with sullenness and
defiance, she receives every consideration and assistance. Now at Yom
Kipper, Rosh Hashana, Pasach and other holidays, we are invited to
break matzos and eat rare native dishes with the families of the
children. We find the home visit invaluable. The Jewish, the Italian,
and even the Polish mother gains confidence in us, tells us all the
family details—and feels finally that we are fit persons to whom she
may entrust her children. Probably our most attractive-looking child
is the Italian, a swarthy-skinned little creature, with softly curved
cheeks, liquid brown eyes and seraphic expression—that seraphic
expression which is so convincing and withal so misleading. Child of
the sun that he is, his greatest ambition in life is to lie
undisturbed in the heat of the day and so be content. He has learned
to take nothing seriously, the word "responsibility" has no meaning
for him. Nor has the word "truth." With his vivid imagination he
handles it with the lightest manner in the world, he adds, he expands,
he takes away in the most sincere fashion, looking at you all the
while with babyish innocence. He is bewildering! His large brown eyes
are veritable symbols of truth; to doubt him fills you with shame. I
say he is bewildering; never so much so as when, for no apparent
reason, he changes his tactics, and with the same sweet confidence
absolutely reverses his former statements. What can we do with him?
There seems to be no appeal we can make. He swears by the Madonna! He
raises his eyes to Heaven, and when he finally makes his near- true
statement, he is filled with such confessional fervor that to reward
him seems to be the only logical course left. He is certainly a child
of nature, but of a nature so quixotic that we are non-plussed. To
many of our dark-skinned little friends "Home" originally was the
little island across from the toe of Italy. These are, I fear,
somewhat scorned by the ones whose homes nestled within the confines
of the boot itself. We know how many refugees fled to that little spot
in the water, and that dark indeed have been the careers of some of
them. Whether the hunted feeling of their fathers of generations back
still lurks in these young Sicilians, I do not know, but certainly
their first impulse is one of defense. At the simplest question there
appears suddenly, even in the smallest child, the defiant flash of the
dark eyes and the sullen setting of the mouth. The question—what does
your father do?—or, what is your mother's name?—arouses their
ever-smoldering suspicion, and more than likely their quick rejoinder
will be—"What's it to you?" When we explain impersonally that it is
very much to us if they are to read our books, and that after all to
reveal their mother's name will be no very damaging admission, the
cloud blows over and there is no more trace of the little storm when
they indifferently give us all the details we wish. So sudden are
their changes and moods, so violent their little outbursts, that we
must needs be on the qui vive in our dealings with them. But yet they
are so lovable that we can never be vexed with them for long. It
cannot be far amiss to put into this paper a picturesque Sicilian
woman who has grown old in years but is still a child in spirit. She
loves a fairy story as much as she did sixty years ago, and listens
with the same breathless credulity. One night about twilight as I sat
on the front steps with her and several little Italian children,
listening to her tales of the old home country, there came a silence
in our little group. Suddenly Angel Licavoli asked, "Teacher, what is
God like?" With a feeling that our friend of riper experience could
give us more satisfaction, I repeated the question to her. Her sweet
old face surrounded by the white curls was a study in simple faith as
she assured us, "Maybe She is like the holy pictures." When I
approach the subject of the Russian Jew, I do it with a great
humbleness and fear lest I do not do it justice. So much have they had
to overcome, and such tenacity and perseverance have they shown in
overcoming it! Straight from the Pales of Kief, Ketchinoff, and Odessa
they come to settle in the nearest to a pale we have to offer. Great
has been their poverty; a long-standing terror with them, and along
with it in many cases, persecution, starvation, and social ostracism.
Poverty in all but spirit and mind. The great leveler to them is
education, and it is no uncommon thing for the Jewish father to
sacrifice himself in order to better his son, to take upon himself
that greatest of sacrifices, daily grind and deprivation. Not only
this generation, but the one before and the one before that. They
cannot keep up such a white-hot search for learning without sooner or
later finding out what is wisdom—real wisdom. Stripped of all but
bare necessities, they come to possess a sense of value that is
remarkably true. We come into contact then with the offspring of such
conditions, simple and direct in manner and having a passionate
impersonal curiosity. Always asking, searching for the real things,
eager for that which will render them impervious to their sordid
surroundings, they have thrown aside all superfluous mannerisms and
get easily to the heart of things. Accustomed to the greatest
repression, and exclusion from all schools and institutions of the
sort, the free access to so many books is an endless joy to them. They
browse among the shelves lovingly, and instinctively read the best we
have to offer. Tales from the ancient Hebrews, history, travel —these
are the books they take. But what they read most gladly is biography.
It is just as difficult to find a life of Lincoln on the shelves as it
is to find an Altsheler—and of comparisons is that not the strongest?
Heroes of all sorts attract the Jewish child, heroes in battles,
statesmen and leaders in adventure, conquest, business. If a hero is
also a martyr, their delight knows no bounds. We know now that we
need be surprised at nothing; extreme cases have come at Crunden to be
the average, if I may be permitted to be paradoxical. We were
interested but not surprised when Sophie Polopinsk, a little girl but
a short time from Russia, wheeled up the truck, climbed with great
difficulty upon it and promptly lost herself in a volume of Tolstoi's
"Resurrection," a volume almost as large as the small person herself,
and formidable with its Russian characters. In telling you of Sol
Flotkin I may be giving you the history of a dozen or so small Russian
Jews who have come to Crunden. At the age of ten, Sol had read all of
Gorki, Tolstoi, Turgenev and Dostoievski in the original and then
devoured Hugo and Dumas in the language of his adoption. The library
with Sol became an obsession. He was there waiting for the doors to
open in the morning, and at nine o'clock at night we would find him on
the adult side, probably behind the radiator, lost to us, but almost
feverishly alive in his world of imagination that some great man had
made so real for him. It was to Crunden branch that the truant officer
came when the school authorities reported him absent from his place.
It was there, too, his father came, imploring, "Could we not refuse
Sol entrance?" The Door man demanded, did we know that at twelve and
one o'clock at night he was often compelled to go out and find the
boy, only to discover him crouched under the street light with a copy
of "War and peace" lovingly upon his young knees? And there are many
others like Sol. Is it not inspiring to the librarian to work with
children who must be coaxed, not to read good books, but to desist
from reading them? Among the Jewish people the word "radical" is in
high favor —it is the open sesame to their sympathy. For the ordinary
layman, radicalism, for some unexplained reason, is associated with
the words Socialism, Anarchism, etc. The deep dyed conservative, to
whom comes the picture of flaunting red at the mention of the word,
would be surprised to learn in what simple cases it is often used. We
have, for instance, an organization meeting once a week under the head
of the "Radical Jewish School." When the secretary came to us for the
first time we asked him what new theory they intended to work out.
Their radical departure from custom consisted only in teaching to the
children a working Yiddish in order that the Jewish mother might
understand her amazingly American child, in order to lessen the
tragedy of misunderstanding which looms large in a family of this
sort. They are setting at defiance the old Jewish School which taught
its children only a Hebrew taken from the Talmud, a more perfect but
seldom used language. Not so terrifying that. Children who are forced
to forage for themselves from a very early age, as most of our
youngsters are, develop while yet very young a sense of responsibility
and a certain initiative seldom found in more tenderly nurtured
children. It is the normal thing in the life of a girl in our
neighborhood when she reaches the age of eight or nine years to have
solely in her charge a younger brother or sister. When she jumps rope
or plays jacks or tag she does it with as much joy as her sister of
happier circumstances—but with a deftness foreign to the sheltered
child she tucks away under her arm the baby, which after six weeks
becomes almost a part of herself. Often we will fearfully exhort her
to hold the baby's back, etc. Invariably the child will smile
indulgently at us, as at a likeable but irresponsible person, and
change the position of the infant not one whit. She is really the
mother, she feels, with a mother's knowledge of what the baby needs;
we are only nice library teachers. Their pride in the baby and their
love for it sometimes even exceeds that of the mother who is forced to
be so much away from the little ones. From five years of age the boys
are expected to manage for themselves—to fight their own battles,
literally—and to look out for themselves in general. Naturally they
possess a self-reliance greater than other children of their age. We
come into contact with this in the library in the child's more or less
independent choice of books and his free criticism—often remarkably
keen— of the contents. Another place where the children show
initiative is in the formation of clubs, which is a great diversion
of theirs. Seldom does a week pass without a crowd of children coming
to us petitioning for the use of one of the club rooms. Often these
clubs are of short duration, but some of them have been in existence
for years. Sometimes they are literary, sometimes purely social—but
more often dramatic. In the dramatic club the children, starved for
the brighter things of life—can pretend to their hearts' content, and
their keen imagination can make it all vividly realistic for them.
They choose their own plays, draw the parts, make their costumes and
carry out their own conception of the different roles. Astonishingly
well they do it too. Is it any wonder that with their drab unhappy
lives in mind, fairies and beautiful princesses figure largely? It
seems to me that a singularly pathetic touch is the fact that yearly
the "Merry Making Girls Club" spends weeks and weeks of preparation
for an entertainment given for the benefit of the Pure Milk and Ice
Fund for the poor babies of St. Louis, they themselves being the most
liable to become beneficiaries of the fund. A very small thing is
sufficient to fire their imagination. The most trivial incident will
suggest to them the formation of a club —a gilt crown, an attractive
name, etc. An amusing instance has lately come up in this connection.
Several boys of about thirteen or fourteen asked the use of one of the
club rooms for the "Three C's." Very reticent they were about the
nature of this organization. Finally amid rather embarrassed giggles
the truth came out—a picture show in the neighborhood had distributed
buttons bearing the picture and name of the popular favorite, which
buttons were sufficient reason to form the "Charlie Chaplin Club."
When we think of many foreigners of different nationality together,
there comes to most of us from habit the idea first suggested by Mr.
Zangwill of amalgamation. I think most of us at Crunden do not like to
feel that our branch and others like it are melting pots; at any rate
of a heat so fierce that it will melt away the national
characteristics of each little stranger—so fierce that it will level
all picturesqueness into deadly sameness. Rather, just of a glow so
warm that it melts almost imperceptibly the racial hate and
antagonism.