The Library in Our Town

by DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER

1

BY LAW, by long life in union, by reason of lighting-rapid modern intercommunication, these Federated States are one country. By tradition, still, each state knows mighty little in detail about the way its sister states keep house. We know — from photographs in the rotogravure section of the newspapers — what the governors of other states look like. What the rural schools look like m Nevada, the man in Louisiana can’t imagine. And as to the smaller public libraries—!

I’m asked to se1 down here some account of the small Vermont public library I know best.

When a Vermonter describes something, he can’t limit himself to its present condition. He would think that not meaningful, unless he also sets down how it happened to get that way. So I’ll have to begin this description of our small library in Arlington, Vermont, by a brief history of the town itself. For in our state, the libraries (in towns where there is one) grow out of the community where they stand. They are not superimposed by a central authority any more than anything else in Vermont.

in the 1760’s, at the end of what we Americans with naively self-centered egotism call “The French and Indian War,” a Canfield ancestor of mine, a young Colonial officer from Connecticut, was mustered out in Quebec, and started with three or four Army comrades to make his way back to his home stale from Canada. The little party of young men came down through Vermont—then untracked, uninhabited Indian hunting ground — and one late afternoon, happening to come to the pleasant green valley where Arlington village now stands, made their overnight camp here. Three or four years later (time enough to get the hegira organized) a group of young Connecticut people from his town (New Milford) came cheerfully back, led by Israel Canfield, to settle.

Like nearly all who settled Vermont in the second half of the eighteenth century, they were young married folks mostly, with little children; they were mostly literate (the spelling on eighteenth-century Vermont letters, deeds, memoirs, is so much better than George Washington’s that it can’t be compared); not poor, as they all had household gear enough to make themselves comfortable in those first log cabins; and — this is the vital point — they seem to have been children of the Great Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, not children of the church-going, psalm-singing Puritans. In many towns they established a school almost the minute a roof was over the first cabin; later, after a school, an “academy” for higher (high school grade) learning; then a library; and then, sometimes eighteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, a church.

You need to know this in order to understand one clause in the “constitution” of our Arlington library. This constitution, the formal crystallization into a “ regular” organization of the book-reading habits of Arlington people, was written in 1803, when our town was no more than a random collection of small wooden houses and cabins in the forest. We still have it — as William Allen White said in impatient astonishment about Vermonters, “Why, they never throw anything away!” —the well-bound old book with its fine-quality linen paper as good as the day it was bought, its round, black handwriting, page after page of it, accurately spelled, well punctuated, carefully phrased. A group, a large group, of Arlington people (the names of all our ancestors of a hundred and forty years ago are set down at the end of the document, in the swinging, easy signatures of people to whom the pen was a familiar tool) banded themselves together to buy books for reading such as they could not, individually, have afforded to own the “library idea,” no less.

As in the compact signed on the Mayflower they made rules for themselves before the communal effort began. Here are a few samples: no reader was to keep a book more than such-and-such a time, and if he did, he paid such-and-such a fine. (Did you ever hear of a rule like that before?) Any spot of tallow dropped from a candle on a page was to be paid for by such-and-such a fine if the tallow drop was of the size of a thumbnail. If larger, a larger fine. (That’s a new one, for you, I imagine.) A leaf turned down at the corner, such-and-such a fine. (Don’t you wish your librarians could enforce such a rule now?)

But — this is most characteristic of the young settlement of younger generation escapees from the severe atmosphere of the older states to the south — one clause in the constitution was that at no time should more than one thirty-fifth of the money available for books be spent on works of divinity. No sermons! The vigorous young people, still chopping down trees to make clearings to plant a little corn, still wearing buckskin and linsey-woolsey, had heard the great wind blowing from eighteenth-century France and England, which ended by blowing theology and dogma out of our daily lives. 2

WHAT books did they buy? Well, I can give you, in illustration, a little incident, quite recent in date, from one of the meetings of the board of directors now running the library. They were depressed by the large number of detective stories and mysteries which Arlington people take out from the library. “Why,” asked this unprofessional board, “can’t they take out more of the good books, the serious ones, the histories, the works on agriculture?”

Somebody said, “Let’s look up in the old records and see what was the first book taken out from the town library.” So they did, and found that the first book circulated from the new community collection, and one which was incessantly on the go after that, was The Mysteries of Udolpho. Since then we have laid the high rate of adventure stories to human nature rather than to a degeneration in our local intellectual fiber.

The “good ” books — the Biography of Mr. George Washington, Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the works of Bossuet, the history and geography of this or that town or region of New York (which happened to have an active local historian), the Universal History — were taken out and read too — about in the proportion which Douglas Waples’s devastating studies of the American reading public show they are read now. Conquering the wilderness with axe and oxcart, or going in Ford cars to the movies, Arlingtonians seem to have been about the same.

In another way they have remained the same, too — they keep the management of their community library in their own hands, and keep those hands active. This is the way our library is run. I like to tell professional librarians about it, and watch them shudder and turn pale. As for us, we do the shuddering when we hear about the way such small, homegrown libraries are run in other states.

We run our library ourselves. We pay for the books that are bought, we are the ones who read them, why shouldn’t we be the ones who decide which books should be on the shelves? So we do. Our board of directors numbers twenty-four. When you consider that our town has had, from the time of the American Revolution, around 1400 inhabitants, you can see that our board is a very large one, in relation to the population. It needs to be large, because every kind of Arlingtonian is represented on it — men, women, young, old, country people, industrial wage earners, Protestants, Catholics, a retired professor of Latin, the wife of the plumber (one of our finest, most useful members), the account-keeper in the local factory, and the one in the lumberman’s office, the principal of the high school, one of the teachers, a boardinghouse keeper, respected and admired descendant of those long-ago Arlingtonians who signed the original constitution in such fine flowing handwriting, the wife of the manager of the factory, everybody in fact.

This board meets once a month, and almost everybody comes to all the meetings. Nobody wants to miss one of those free-for-all discussions. Every other month the meeting is a supper, managed in the labor-saving rural way of coöperative effort. Everybody brings one article of food.

Our motley collection sits down, as sharp-set for the discussion of books as for the admirable homecooked food laid out in profusion — scalloped potatoes, chicken-and-noodles, cabbage salad, homebaked rolls and butter and jelly and pickles, baked macaroni in tomato sauce — maybe, in season, cold sliced ham from somebody’s recent hog-butchering — hot, hot coffee and real yellow cream, and then pie — mince pie, apple pie, pumpkin pie. If you have ever been to a country “covered dish supper” you know what the meal is like.

This appetizing and substantial food is eaten to a roaring accompaniment of clattering talk, for the members of this group have been working together for many years, and there are innumerable threads to be picked up at these monthly get-togethers. A question which everybody has asked himself is: Why is the sociable contact with one’s fellow men and women so much more satisfactory at such a meeting than at a tea party or dinner party, where the purpose is wholly sociable, where the contact is the purpose of meeting, not the by-product? The answer is simple, proved by any first-hand experience of the ways of human group life: people enjoy meeting together in a common effort, more than just meeting together. The anxious attempts of the hostess at a party to placate by lots of food, drink, and ready-made entertainment the innate moroseness of people who resent being brought together just to be together—how that feeling vanishes into alert eager enjoyment of effortin-common, if only the house gets on fire and all the guests have to carry out furniture and pass buckets of water!

Well, our local library board makes an effort-incommon all right, when the meal is eaten, the dishes are taken off, the trestle tables stacked away, and the two dozen members drawn together to consider what books to buy that month. For the decision they are to make is one which, really and truly, they and they only have the necessary data to make. They are to decide not which arc the good books published during the last month, but which of the good books are the best ones to buy for their own community. Looking out over the library world in astonishment, we Arlingtonians wonder how anyone, except a sizable and representative group of responsible citizens, can decide which of the good books presented by the publishing world are suitable for their community?

How can a professional librarian, no matter how skilled technically, be in touch with the many, many kinds of people in her town, intimately enough to know what books they will read. What she does as we see it — is what we consider only the first step in selecting books. She decides from the available evidence which are books ol good quality. Whether in this list there will be books which will interest such-and-such a special group of people in town, how can she tell?

On our board, those who work in the factory know from day-long contacts with their fellows what things interest them. Those who live in the country know from years of life-in-common what their farmer neighbors will take from books. Our schoolteachers speak from close professional experience and classroom observation about children’s books, and it is from home observation the fathers and mothers make their decisions. The old people know what the people in their age-group like. The young people have an intuitive hunch about, what speaks from the printed page to them. Church-goers know instinctively what will be acceptable to their friends. Hunters and fishermen likewise. How in the name of human nature, we often ask ourselves, can one professionally trained man or woman, shut up in the library mostly, living with books, take the place of such a citizens’ committee?

But you will want to know more in detail about our procedure at these animated discussion meetings. Here it is: we have a book committee which, before the board of directors assembles, meets with our librarian — for we have a librarian. Haven’t I mentioned this before? Yes, sure, we have a librarian, with whom we are on the best of terms; and who, as far as we can judge, likes our way of managing all right.

The book committee, with the librarian, has done what all librarians do, I assume; has studied the reviews in the Sunday New York Times and Herald Tribune, in the Book-of-the-Month Club News, in the A.L.A. lists, and in the commercial booksellers’ lists, and from them has culled a list of books that are obviously of good enough quality to be suitable for our shelves. As the list is read out at the meeting of the directors, each member of the book committee (there are six of them, with the librarian seven) in turn gives a brief description, from these reviews and reports, of the book and author. The description can be very brief, you must understand, for these twenty-four people are practiced in thinking about books. A few phrases are enough.

. just another Faith Baldwin.”

“. . . powerful, sincere, very depressing picture of

anti-Jewish prejudice in New York City.”

“. . . by the man who wrote The Keys of the Kingdom.”

“... wild fantasy by Franz Werfel about life a hundred thousand years from now.”

“... another story of Mormon life.

. . a Vermont boy keeps the home farm going while his older brother is in the Army.

“... good book about Japan.”

You get the idea.

Then with the budget set-up almost visibly before our eyes — a pretty small one, as you can imagine from the size of our village — we start in to cut our coat according to the cloth.

3

HERE are a few of the books about which there have been, in recent years, long, hammer-and-tongs discussions. The Lost Weekend. Of course now everybody is talking about this strange and powerful book. When we rural volunteer book-choosers first came across the name and description of the book, it was just a book about a man, otherwise decent, who couldn’t help drinking to excess. Would Arlington people be interested in reading about such a case? Some people on the board cried out vehemently, “No, indeed, there is plenty of that in real life without reading about it.” Others said, “But, look, we have all known nice families where there was one such person.” (A decent silence while we all vividly remembered cases both past and present.) “Modern doctors and psychologists have something very different to say about drinking from the W.C.T.U. ideas. Maybe it would do us good to read a modern book about it.”

“Who wants to read a book about a drunk!”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to, for fun. But there’s a whole lot in life besides fun.”

The never-ending, never-to-be-ended discussion goes on between those who think of books as substitutes for ice-cream sodas or cool bottles of beer, and those who think of books as thoughtful invitations to reflect on human life and its meanings. To get it all out — each in his own voice - - does everybody good, stimulates everybody s brain, arouses his interest in books. By and by when the supply of breath and words is running low, the chairman asks if they are “ready to have the question put” — the basic formula for New England community life. The vote is taken. The ayes have it. The secretary notes that the book is to be bought.

And do you, reading this account of a rural library, please note that a book which has been loudly discussed like that in a gathering representative of all kinds of the people in town will be read when it appears in the library. Curiosity, if nothing more, has been aroused. And there is more.

A novel, also powerful and vivid (consensus of the reviews) about social injustice done to American Negroes comes up. The same kind of lively discussion takes the floor.

“It is one of the rawest questions of our times. We must not ignore it.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sakes, that’s one problem we don’t have to fight. Hardly a Negro in our state. There are enough troubles we face every day, without looking for more.”

“It’s a part of American life. Just because we live in Vermont ...”

“We can’t take on all the headaches there are.” After a while the question is put, the vote taken. The noes have it. Many of us don’t like this decision. But those who are outvoted waste no time in resentment, but turn, with the practiced ease of old habitués of the democratic process, to the next question.

The next book is Focus, that poignant fictionportrayal of the savage sufferings caused by antiJewish feelings. And here we cannot say that the problem is outside our personal field. For alas! Vermont, like most places where the social aspect of real-estate values is important from a cash point of view, is not free from the ignominy of anti-Semitism. So, soberly, it is voted to buy Focus. We know we need to read it.

Then The Wisdom Tree is brought up. Somebody explains quickly what it is — not only a history of the different religions of the world, but an interpretation of the religious impulse in humanity, from the cave age on.

Instantly around the circle runs that chorus (which you have probably often heard) of “Too high-brow! Absolutely over the heads of our readers. You can’t get them to read serious books. All they want is detectives.” These familiar remarks are interspersed with comments such as, “I should like to see it, but they ...” “Sounds interesting to me, but most people ...”

After a time the chairman of the board (no, I’m not the chairman. Never have been), instead of asking if they are ready for the question, raps for order and asks them a question, “How many of those here would themselves like to read this book?”

Instantly every hand shoots high. And a murmur of good-natured self-mockery follows, “Well, who are we, any different from other people in this town?” “If We’d like it, why, we are ‘most people.’”

The vote is taken. The ayes have it. The book about comparative religion is bought. And — you may be interested to hear— is being widely read in the tiny Vermont hamlet. Would it have been read, we wonder, if a professionally trained librarian had chosen it, accessioned it, put it on the shelves and its name in the county newspaper in a list of “ Books purchased by the Arlington Library this month?”

Of course we do not by any means discuss only books of value. Like any other librarians, professional or volunteer, we always set aside a percentage of our money to buy (by the yard, as it were) detective stories, Westerns, mysteries, and happy-lovestories with wedding bells ringing. But those we spend little time on. That is almost like attending to a material detail, such as getting the floor of the library varnished (our chairman finally did that with her own hands) or washing the dishes after our communal supper.

What we remember are such discussions — how the fur did fly that night! —as the one over the Bible, illustrated comic—strip fashion. You have probably debated that question yourselves and know what can be said pro and con. Everything that can be said pro and con was said, I assure you, that evening. Everybody argued in circles. That was the only time we did not stick to orderly procedures. We never did vote on that question. But (you may be interested to know) that Bible was never bought.

We remember too the evening when a quiet voice suggested that the rule be revoked that no book from the Harvard Classics (one of our prides is to own that fine collection) might be taken from the library. After a momentary surprised pause several people ran off glibly the traditional answers to such a question. “Why, those are reference books.” “You never allow reference books to be taken out.” “Suppose one should be lost? You’d never be able to replace it.”

That member of the board who was asking the question (it was the youngish man who runs one of our grocery stores) asked, “Which would be better — to lose one, maybe? Or never to have them read?”

He went on to say he thought those rules about reference books were meant for big libraries with lots of people coming and going. “Here,” he said, “we want to be able to take a book home to our own desk and chair and light. Those rules were made, weren’t they, for people who live in hall bedrooms. And if anybody else needs the book that’s been taken out, our librarian knows just who’s got it. She can telephone and get it back again in ten minutes.”

There was a long pause while we pondered these revolutionary ideas. Then somebody said, “Why yes, this is our library. We keep it up. We can have its rules any way we think it will fit our life best. We don’t have to have other people’s rules.”

The question was put. The board of directors, free Americans, voted to run their library as best suits the needs of the community they are a part of. “Harvard Classics” can be taken out.

And maybe you think this matter was not talked over, with all its implications, at dozens of local breakfast tables the next morning, and in more dozens of stores and offices and kitchens as the day went on.

That’s what it is, we think, to have the books in the local public library chosen and the rules made by representatives of the citizens — all the citizens of the town. We think that is why our books really circulate.