Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/257

Rh even see the person who does see them. He must depend on lists, telephones, pneumatic tubes, and traveling baskets—and this in the most expensive and most extensive and most lauded library in the United States to-day.

What, now, the open-shelf method of administration being decided upon, should be the character of the building in which the public library is housed? The storehouse idea must be discarded at once. What is wanted is a workshop, a place for readers and students, not a safety-deposit building. The men and women who visit the library and use it—their convenience and comfort must be first consulted; how the books are to be stored is another and a secondary question. Nor can the monumental idea be for a moment maintained. The library, if it is to be a modern, effective, working institution, can not forego the demands of its daily tenants for light, room, and air, and submit to the limitations set by calls for architectural effects, for imposing halls, charming vistas, and opportunities for decoration. The workshop, the factory, the office building, the modern business structure of almost any kind, these, rather than the palace, the temple, the cathedral, the memorial hall, or the mortuary pile, however grand, supply the examples in general accordance with which the modern book laboratory should be constructed. It is a place, is this book laboratory, in which each day hundreds and thousands of visitors must, for ten minutes or as many hours, use their eyes in reading type of all degrees of excellence and badness. First, then, every sacrifice must be made to secure all possible daylight in every corner. It is a place, again, in which many of the daily visitors will wish to go, at the same time, to the same shelves, the same cases, the same alcoves, or the same rooms, and the same desks and tables. Space—well-lighted, well-ventilated floor space—then, should be given to the public with the utmost prodigality. There is no room left, unless economy in construction and administration be entirely disregarded for architectural display, except as it is the natural outcome of plans based primarily on utility.

The power of a library lies first in its books. Up to a certain variable limit, varying with their character and with the time and the place, quantity of books is of first importance. As the library supported by compulsory taxation is justified only as it serves to make the ignorant citizen wise and the wise citizen wiser still, its first care should be for its supply of tools—its implements for cultivating wisdom—its books. The library building, as of the second and not of the first importance, should therefore be economical in its construction. It need not be, it should not be, penurious in its appearance. To a limited extent it may speak to the passer-by of the generosity of the community, of the respect in which its builders hold the business of education. But if solid