On the Value and Use of Libraries.

A LIBRARY is the scholar’s workshop. To the teacher or professional man, a collection of good books is as necessary as a kit of tools to a carpenter. And yet I am aware that many persons are engaged in teaching, who have neither a library of their own, nor access to any other collection of books suitable to their use. There are others who, having every opportunity to secure the best of books,—with a public library near at hand offering them the free use of works most valuable to them,—yet make no effort to profit by these advantages. They care nothing for any books save the text-books indispensable to their profession, and for these only so far as necessity obliges them to do so. The libraries of many persons calling themselves teachers consist solely of school-books, many of which have been presented them by accommodating book-agents, “for examination with a view to introduction.” And yet we hear such teachers talk learnedly about the introduction of English literature into the common schools of the country, and the necessity of cultivating among the children a wholesome love and taste for reading. If inquiry were made, we might discover that by a study of English literature these teachers understand some memoriter exercises in Shaw’s “Manual” or Brooke’s “Primer,” and that, as to good reading, some there are who are entertained more deeply by Peck’s “Bad Boy” than by Shakspeare’s “Merchant of Venice.” Talk not about directing and cultivating the reading-tastes of your pupils until you have successfully directed and cultivated your own! And the first step towards doing this is the selection and purchase of a library for yourself, which shall be all your own. A very few books will do, if they are of the right kind; and they must be yours. A borrowed book is but a cheap pleasure, an unappreciated and unsatisfactory tool. To know the true value of books, and to derive any satisfactory benefit from them, you must first feel the sweet delight of buying them,—you must know the preciousness of possession.

You plead poverty,—the insufficiency of your salary? But do you not spend for other things, entirely unnecessary, much more every year than the cost of a few books? The immediate outlay need not be large, the returns which you will realize will be great in proportion to your good judgment and earnestness. Not only will the possession of a good library add to your means of enjoyment and increase your capacity for doing good, it may, if you are worldly-minded,—and we all are,—put you in the way of occupying a more desirable position and earning a more satisfactory reward for your labors.

There are two kinds of books that you will need in your library: first, those which are purely professional, and are in the strictest sense the tools of your craft; second, those which belong to your chosen department of literature, and are to be regarded as your friends, companions, and counsellors. I cannot, of course, dictate to you what these books shall be. The lists given in the chapters which follow this are designed simply as suggestive aids. But in a library of fifty or even thirty well-chosen volumes you may possess infinite riches, and means for a lifetime of enjoyment; while, on the other hand, if your selection is injudicious, you may expend thousands of dollars for a collection of the odds and ends of literature, which will be only an incumbrance and a hindrance to you.

“I would urge upon every young man, as the beginning of his due and wise provision for his household,” says John Ruskin, “to obtain as soon as he can, by the severest economy, a restricted, serviceable, and steadily—however slowly—increasing series of books for use through life; making his little library, of all the furniture in his room, the most studied and decorative piece; every volume having its assigned place, like a little statue in its niche, and one of the earliest and strictest lessons to the children of the house being how to turn the pages of their own literary possessions lightly and deliberately, with no chance of tearing or dog’s-ears.”17

And Henry Ward Beecher emphasizes the same thing, remarking that, among the early ambitions to be excited in clerks, workmen, journeymen, and indeed among all that are struggling up in life from nothing to something, the most important is that of forming and continually adding to a library of good books. “A little library, growing larger every year, is an honorable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessaries of life.”

“How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?” asks another enthusiastic lover of books, already quoted. “If a man spends lavishly on his library, you call him mad,—a bibliomaniac. But you never call any one a horse-maniac, though men ruin themselves every day by their horses, and you do not hear of people ruining themselves by their books.... We talk of food for the mind, as of food for the body: now, a good book contains such food inexhaustibly; it is a provision for life, and for the best of us; yet how long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it! Though there have been men who have pinched their stomachs and bared their backs to buy a book, whose libraries were cheaper to them, I think, in the end than most men’s dinners are. We are few of us put to such trial, and more the pity: for, indeed, a precious thing is all the more precious to us if it has been won by work or economy; and if public libraries were half as costly as public dinners, or books cost the tenth part of what bracelets do, even foolish men and women might sometimes suspect there was good in reading, as well as in munching and sparkling; whereas the very cheapness of literature is making even wise people forget that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.”

“The truest owner of a library,” says the author of “Hesperides,” “is he who has bought each book for the love he bears to it,—who is happy and content to say, ‘Here are my jewels, my choicest material possessions!’—who is proud to crown such assertion thus: ‘I am content that this library shall represent the use of the talents given me by Heaven!’ That man’s library, though not commensurate with his love for books, will demonstrate what he has been able to accomplish with his resources; it will denote economy of living, eagerness to possess the particles that compose his library, and quick watchfulness to seize them when means and opportunities serve. Such a man has built a temple, of which each brick has been the subject of curious and acute intelligent examination and appreciation before it has been placed in the sacred building.”

“Every man should have a library!” exclaims William Axon. “The works of the grandest masters of literature may now be procured at prices that place them within the reach almost of the very poorest, and we may all put Parnassian singing-birds into our chambers to cheer us with the sweetness of their songs. And when we have got our little library we may look proudly at Shakspeare and Bacon and Bunyan, as they stand in our bookcase with other noble spirits, and one or two of whom the world knows nothing, but whose worth we have often tested. These may cheer and enlighten us, may inspire us with higher aims and aspirations, may make us, if we use them rightly, wiser and better men.”18

Good old George Dyer, the friend of the poet Southey, as learned as he was benevolent, was wont to say: “Libraries are the wardrobes of literature, whence men, properly informed, may bring forth something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use.” “Any library is an attraction,” says the venerable A. Bronson Alcott; and Victor Hugo writes—

John Bright, the great English statesman and reformer, in a speech at the opening of the Birmingham Free Library a short time ago, remarked: “You may have in a house costly pictures and costly ornaments, and a great variety of decoration; yet, so far as my judgment goes, I would prefer to have one comfortable room well stocked with books to all you can give me in the way of decoration which the highest art can supply. The only subject of lamentation is—one feels that always, I think, in the presence of a library—that life is too short, and I am afraid I must say also that our industry is so far deficient that we seem to have no hope of a full enjoyment of the ample repast that is spread before us. In the houses of the humble a little library, in my opinion, is a most precious possession.”

Jean Paul Richter, it is said, was always melancholy in a large library, because it reminded him of his ignorance.

“A library may be regarded as the solemn chamber in which a man can take counsel of all that have been wise and great and good and glorious amongst the men that have gone before him,” said George Dawson, also at Birmingham. “If we come down for a moment and look at the bare and immediate utilities of a library, we find that here a man gets himself ready for his calling, arms himself for his profession, finds out the facts that are to determine his trade, prepares himself for his examination. The utilities of it are endless and priceless. It is, too, a place of pastime; for man has no amusement more innocent, more sweet, more gracious, more elevating, and more fortifying than he can find in a library. If he be fond of books, his fondness will discipline him as well as amuse him.... A library is the strengthener of all that is great in life, and the repeller of what is petty and mean; and half the gossip of society would perish if the books that are truly worth reading were read.... When we look through the houses of a large part of the middle classes of this country, we find there everything but what there ought most to be. There are no books in them worth talking of. If a question arises of geography, they have no atlases. If the question be when a great man was born, they cannot help you. They can give you a gorgeous bed, with four posts, marvellous adornments, luxurious hangings, and lacquered shams all round; they can give you dinners ad nauseam, and wine that one can, or cannot, honestly praise. But useful books are almost the last things that are to be found there; and when the mind is empty of those things that books can alone fill it with, then the seven devils of pettiness, frivolity, fashionableness, gentility, scandal, small slander, and the chronicling of small beer come in and take possession. Half this nonsense would be dropped if men would only understand the elevating influences of their communing constantly with the lofty thoughts and high resolves of men of old times.”

The author of “Dreamthorpe,” filled with love and enthusiasm, discourses thus: “I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden’s roses yet lingers in it, while it vibrates only to the world’s first brood of nightingales and to the laugh of Eve. I see the pyramids building; I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander; I feel the ground shake beneath the march of Cambyses. I sit as in a theatre,—the stage is time; the play is the play of the world. What a spectacle it is! What kingly pomp, what processions file past, what cities burn to heaven, what crowds of captives are dragged at the chariot wheels of conquerors! I hiss, or cry ‘Bravo,’ when the great actors come on, shaking the stage. I am a Roman emperor when I look at a Roman coin. I lift Homer, and I shout with Achilles in the trenches. The silence of the unpeopled Assyrian plains, the out-comings and in-goings of the patriarchs,—Abraham and Ishmael, Isaac in the fields at eventide, Rebekah at the well, Jacob’s guile, Esau’s face reddened by desert sun-heat, Joseph’s splendid funeral procession, —all these things I find within the boards of my Old Testament. What a silence in those old books as of a half-peopled world,—what bleating of flocks, what green pastoral rest, what indubitable human existence! Across brawling centuries of blood and war, I hear the bleating of Abraham’s flocks, the tinkling of the bells of Rebekah’s camels. O men and women, so far separated yet so near, so strange yet so well-known, by what miraculous power do I know you all? Books are the true Elysian fields, where the spirits of the dead converse; and into these fields a mortal may venture unappalled. What king’s court can boast such company? What school of philosophy, such wisdom? The wit of the ancient world is glancing and flashing there. There is Pan’s pipe, there are the songs of Apollo. Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural. They are not collections of printed pages, they are ghosts. I take one down, and it speaks with me in a tongue not now heard on earth, and of men and things of which it alone possesses knowledge. I call myself a solitary, but sometimes I think I misapply the term. No man sees more company than I do. I travel with mightier cohorts around me than did ever Timour or Genghis Khan on their fiery marches. I am a sovereign in my library; but it is the dead, not the living, that attend my levees.”