THE PUBLIC AND ITS PUBLIC LIBRARY. 251 



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, em- 

 bracing 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 inexpe- 

 rienced. 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 o 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 supple- 

 mented 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 adminis- 

 tered 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 ; his- 

 torical lists, like that of the Boston Public Library ; annotated 

 lists, like that of the San Francisco Public Library ; critical jour- 

 nals; 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 de- 

 scriptions of notable scenes and historical events ; in which are 



