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.Achild'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.
