The Library and Society: Reprints of Papers and Addresses. Various
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other nations, the craving for books is the propensity of one class, with us it may be fairly described as the propensity of all classes. A certain tincture of bookishness has pervaded the American people from the beginning. Perhaps the most decided quality of American civilization has been its effort to unite the practical with the ideal; its passion for material results ennobled by the intellectual and the spiritual; its fine reverence for studiousness, even amid the persistent fury of dollar-hunting.
And not only was this bookish trait visible in our colonial infancy but it may be said to have had an ante-natal origin. The two Englishmen who in the latter half of the 16th century did most to make possible the birth of American civilization in the first half of the 17th, were Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh; and both were men possessed by this large zest for ideas as well as for deeds; both were contemplative men as well as active men. The last glimpse that any surviving mortal had of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, before his ship went down in the sea, was of that stern hero sitting calmly on the deck, with a book in his hand, cheering his companions by telling them that heaven is as near by water as by land; and the last labor of Sir Walter Raleigh, before his judicial murder in the Tower, was to write one of the learnedest and stateliest books to be met with in the literature of modern men.
And this flavor of bookishness which belonged to these two great pioneers and martyrs of American colonization, seems to have passed on to the men who successfully executed the grand project in which they had failed. When you run your eyes along the sturdy list of the great colony-founders of the 17th century—the men who carried out the fierce task of conveying English civilization across the Atlantic, and of making it take root and live in this wild soil—Captain John Smith, and William Bradford, and Winslow, and Robert Cushman, and the Winthrops, and Dudley, and Hooker, and Davenport, and Roger Williams, and William Penn, you will find them all, in some special sense, lovers of books, collectors of books, readers of books, even writers of books.
And what is true of the leaders of that great act of national transmigration is true also of the men of less note who followed in it. The first American immigrants were reading immigrants—immigrants who brought in their hands not only axes and shovels, but books. Their coming hither was due to the restlessness inflicted by the possession of ideas. Books were to them a necessary part of the outfit for the voyage and the settlement. And so rare and so precious were books in those days that they were cherished as family treasures, and handed down as heirlooms; nay, they were so dealt with in wills and in contracts as if they rose almost to the dignity of real estate. In fact, in those days, the possession of an unusual number of books, with the reputation of using them, constituted a sort of patent of gentility, and seemed to bridge the chasm between the most widely separated classes in society; as when, in 1724, a young mechanic, named Benjamin Franklin, arriving in New York on a sloop from Newport, is invited to the house of the Governor of New York and is honored by him with a long and friendly interview, for no other reason than that the captain of the sloop had told the governor of a lad on his vessel who had with him “a great many books.” “The governor received me,” says Franklin in his autobiography “with great civility, showed me his library, which was a considerable one, and we had a good deal of conversation relative to books and authors. This was the second governor who had done me the honor to take notice of me, and for a poor boy, like me, it was very pleasing.” So I think I am justified in saying that we started on our career as a people with this underlying intellectual quality—a pretty general respect for books, love for them, habit of using them; and this is the impelling moral force which prompts to the several efforts which society has made for providing itself with books. Now, the first stage in the process of library evolution—and I have called it that of private libraries—was the prevailing condition of the American colonies during the whole of the 17th century and the first third of the 18th. This is the picture: Everywhere books, but few, costly, portly, solemn, revered, read over and over again; every respectable family, however poor, having at least a few hereditary treasures in the form of books, as in that of silver and choice furniture; and here and there up and down the colonies, an occasional luminous spot, drawing to itself the wide-eyed wonder of the surrounding inhabitants, the seat of a great private library, belonging to some country gentleman, or clergyman, or publicist, like that of Colonel William Bird, of Westover, or of the Reverend James Blair, of Williamsburg, or of Dr. Cotton Mather, of Boston, or of James Logan, of Philadelphia, or of Cadwallader Colden, of New York.
This is the first stage of library evolution. And, of course, it has its pleasant aspects; but surely there is here no adequate provision for the intellectual wants of the entire community. Very few persons in any community are rich enough to buy and own all the books they ought to have access to; and the existence of great private libraries in a few wealthy households can no more supply this general need of books than the great private dinners which are given in the same households can keep the entire community from going hungry.
Accordingly, the second stage in the evolution of libraries is away from mere private ownership and use, and is toward complete public ownership and use; but it stops far this side of it; it is the stage of special scholastic libraries, collected by colleges and other learned corporations, and intended for the particular use of the learned class—students, investigators, and specialists. The earliest library of that sort ever formed in this country was begun at Harvard College in 1638; near the close of the 17th century, another was begun at William and Mary College, and still another at Yale; thenceforward, and especially during the past eighty years, such libraries have been multiplying in the land, so that at the present moment there are more than three hundred of them, and a few of them are now really vast library collections. The value of these libraries—who can doubt? Yet their direct value is only for a class; they are scholars' libraries, not people's libraries. This will not suffice; society cannot rest satisfied, and will not rest satisfied until everywhere good books for all are placed within the reach of all. The complete popularization of books is the goal.
So we come to the third stage of library evolution—that of libraries gathered and controlled by voluntary associations of people, e.g., joint stock associations, but of course for the use only of those who subscribe to them and share in the expense.
Here we have a natural step forward; a goodly step; a step in the right direction, but still not far enough. We shall all agree that this is the strong and hearty modern method of doing difficult things—the method of clubbing together to do something; it is self-reliant, social, cooperative, mutually, helpful, What the individual cannot do alone a club of individuals can do together. Thus the hardest and grandest achievements of our time have been brought about—vast railroads, vast manufacturing and commercial enterprises. And so men and women, who could not singly get the books they wanted, have joined forces and have got them by combination.
It is a notable fact, however, that this third stage of library evolution was not reached until more than a hundred years after the first colonies had been settled.
Many of you, doubtless, in wandering about Philadelphia—perhaps during our great centennial visit to that city—may have noticed the venerable building of the Philadelphia Library company, and in the walls of it an old tablet with this inscription: “Be it remembered in honor of the Philadelphia youth (then chiefly artificers) that, in 1731, they cheerfully, at the suggestion of Benjamin Franklin, one of their number, instituted the Philadelphia Library, which though small at first, is become highly valuable and extensively useful, and which the walls of this building are now destined to contain and preserve.” Now, in reality, that year 1731, when that first subscription library was started in America, begins a new epoch in the intellectual life of the American people, the epoch of systematic cooperation for the procurement by the people of the great intellectual and spiritual boon of books. Immense results have followed from that example set in 1731. Therefore, let us stop a moment longer, and listen to Benjamin Franklin's own account of the way in which he came to think of that capital project. “At the time I established myself in Pennsylvania, there was not a good bookseller's shop in any of the colonies to the southward of Boston. Those who loved reading were obliged to send for their books from England; the members of the Junto had each a few. We had left the alehouse, where we first met, and hired a room to hold our club in. I proposed that we should all of us bring our books to that room; where they would not only be ready to consult in our conferences, but become a common benefit, each of us being at