Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/261

Rh shelves, perhaps above all others, should be open to the public. If they are thus open, the question of how low in the scale of literature the library must descend in its selection of novels to attract as many readers as its income will permit it to supply will almost solve itself. Liberty to go to a collection of novels, embracing the best works of the best writers of all countries and all ages, will be attraction enough. It will not be necessary to put on the shelves books of the South worth, the Roe, and the Mary J. Holmes school to draw to the library the ignorant and inexperienced. Such readers are wedded to their literary idols, not because they find them best, but because they know no others. They will not often take the evidence of expert or of catalogue that there are other good novels than those of which they have heard from fellow-readers in their own walk in life. But the book itself of the unknown writer, placed in easy reach, with attractive title, cover, and illustrations, will prove irresistible. Liberty to see, touch, peep into, and taste the new and heretofore untried will set the known and the unknown on the same plane in the mind of the inexperienced; and the unknown, if the better book and if selected with an eye to the library's constituency, will gain the day. The horizon of the inexperienced reader will, in such a library, soon widen. The devotee of mush and slush will, under her own guidance, following her own sweet will, almost unconsciously rise to a higher plane. She will be proud to think that she has found possibilities of pleasure in good authors whom she herself has had the wit to discover. The fiction list then will be long, but it will be select. Four to five thousand titles, many times duplicated, will cover the field.

With the shelves open, with full liberty of choice given, the obliging attendant will be all the more appreciated. He will obtrude no opinions and no advice, but will be ready and able to give both, if asked, or if opportunity offers. He will be supplemented with catalogues. And just as the library will make its fiction department—the department in which it will first reach, by which perhaps it can alone reach, from sixty to eighty per cent of its visitors—the most attractive and most carefully administered of all, so will it for this department best equip itself with aids and guides. It will have here catalogues of the most varied kinds—special lists, descriptive lists, like those of Griswold; historical lists, like that of the Boston Public Library; annotated lists, like that of the San Francisco Public Library; critical journals; and books and essays on the novel, its development and uses. In addition to all these things, it will tell the inquirer in which novels he can find set forth great historical characters and the prominent personages of fiction; in which he will find descriptions of notable scenes and historical events; in which are