THE PUBLIC LIBRARIAN. There is one species of the Book-Worm which is more pitiable than the Bookseller, and that is the Public Librarian, especially of a circulating library. He is condemned to live among great collections of books and exhibit them to the curious public, and to be debarred from any proprietorship in them, even temporary. But the greater part this does not grieve a true Book-Worm, for he would scorn ownership of a vast majority of the books which he shows, but on the comparatively rare occasions when he is called on to produce a real book (in the sense of Bibliomania), he must be saddened by the reflection that it is not his own, and that the inspection of it is demanded of him as a matter of right I have often observed the ill concealed reluctance with which the librarian complies with such a request; how he looks at the demandant with a degree of surprise, and then produces the key of the repository where the treasure is kept under guard, and heaving a sigh delivers the volume with a grudging hand. It was this characteristic which led me in my youth, before I had been inducted into the delights of Bibliomania and had learned to appreciate the feelings of a librarian, to define him as one who conceives it to be his duty to prevent the public from seeing the books. I owe a good old librarian an apology for having said this of him, and hereby offer my excuses to one whose honorable name is recorded in the Book of Life Much is to be forgiven to the man who loves books, and yet is doomed to deal out books that perish in the using, which no human being would ever read a second time nor “be found dead with.” These are the true tests of a good book, especially the last. Shelley died with a little Æschylus on his person, which the cruel waves spared, and when Tennyson fell asleep it was with a Shakespeare, open at “Cymbeline.” One may be excused for reading a good deal that he never would re-read, but not for owning it, nor for owning a good deal which he would feel ashamed to have for his last earthly companion. But now for my tribute to THE PUBLIC LIBRARIAN. His books extend on every side,
And up and down the vistas wide
His eye can take them in;
He does not love these books at all,
Their usefulness in big and small
He counts as but a sin.
And all day long he stands to serve
The public with an aching nerve;
He views them with disdain—
The student with his huge round glasses,
The maiden fresh from high school classes,
With apathetic brain;
The sentimental woman lorn,
The farmer recent from his corn,
The boy who thirsts for fun,
The graybeard with a patent-right,
The pedagogue of school at night,
The fiction-gulping one.
They ask for histories, reports,
Accounts of turf and prize-ring sports,
The census of the nation;
Philosophy and science too,
The fresh romances not a few,
Also “Degeneration.”
“They call these books!” he said, and throws
Them down in careless heaps and rows
Before the ticket-holder;
He’d like to cast them at his head,
He wishes they might strike him dead,
And with the reader moulder.
But now as for the shrine of saint
He seeks a spot whence sweet and faint
A leathery smell exudes,
And there behind the gilded wires
For some loved rarity inquires
Which common gaze eludes.
He wishes Omar would return
That vulgar mob of books to burn,
While he, like Virgil’s hero,
Would shoulder off this precious case
To some secluded private place
With temperature at zero.
And there in that Seraglio
Of books not kept for public show,
He’d feast his glowing eyes,
Forgetting that these beauties rare,
Morocco-clad and passing fair,
Are but the Sultan’s prize.
But then a tantalizing sense
Invades expectancy intense,
And with extorted moan,
“Unhappy man!” he sighs, “condemned
To show such treasure and to lend—
I keep, but cannot own!”
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