In Search of the World's Best Library

A TRIBUTE TO BAKER LIBRARY AND ITS LIBRARIAN REPRINTEDFROM THE "LIBRARY BULLETIN" FOR MARCH

TWO OR THREE years ago I had a good opportunity for discovering the world's best library. Under the gratefully vague terms of a fellowship, I set out to read certain manuscripts and society publications amassed chiefly in London, Singapore, and Honolulu. In such circumstances, anyone who had his wits about him (which was not the case with me) could have arranged an itinerary permitting stops for refreshment at most of the major libraries of the world.

Unfortunately for the furtherance of this Pierian project, my plans at outset went no further than to make provision for an initial period of two months at the British Museum, exploring the "large outlines" of my subject. Older and wiser pokers into the past have made the same error of starting with a "general review" at the British Museum: a disingenuous institution. Its title does not sound like that of a library, and it is so arranged as to minimize any suspicion that there might be books in the building. Numbers of persons can always be seen reading in the rotunda; but the hocus-pocus by which their books are acquired is so secretive—and, it must be owned, so efficient—that the casual visitor has no consciousness of their source or arrangement.

STACKS OPEN IN BAKER

This is bad. Here in Baker, one can go back into the stacks, count the number of shelves allotted to one's subject, multiply by twenty-one, and thus arrive at a rough idea of the time needed to review the available material, at an average of an hour a book. But at the B.M. there is no means for staring at the gathered backs of the books in prospect, and thus of giving one's self what is often badly needed: pause.

Day by day, insidiously, books pertinent to my subject appeared on my reading desk. Every evening, in sending them back, I filled out slips for the morrow, including new titles discovered by collateral reference during the course of the day. My private bibliography of books-to-be-tackledlater grew prodigiously. My original two months lengthened into five. Then an incident occurred which broke the chains.

An attendant, noticing that I was an American, and thus to be forgiven for not knowing what I had done, pointed out to me that while there was no rule to invoke, it would none the less be more in keeping with the ancient traditions of the B.M. if I were to choose some other desk than the one at the extreme end of limb "R" of the tree-like system of studying-places that radiates from the catalogue in the center of the rotunda. I had made for that desk automatically, or for the nearest one vacant, because of its proximity to certain anthropological reference works on the wall adjoining. Often, however, if I happened to be ten or fifteen minutes later than usual, a little man with a square gray beard would have got to my favorite desk first.

The little man's name was Frazer, the guard told me. He had been sitting at the end of that particular golden bough practically every day for the past fifty years. I paused to consider that the last four months of my poking into the past had slipped by more rapidly than the first week. Mere months would turn into years and decades before I knew it. Hastily I pointed for Cockspur Street and booked a passage to Singapore.

If I never saw the Bodleian or the Bibliocheque Nationale, the British Museum was to blame.

The libraries in my other chief working places—the Raffles Museum of Singapore and the Bishop Museum of Honolulu have no claim to world eminence. They are friendly and uncongested. In the latter case much of the more valuable manuscript material is abominably arranged. But there is a good excuse for that. The sources of anthropological knowledge in the Pacific are vanishing before our eyes. All available energies and funds must be applied to the acquisition of fact. There will be plenty of time for classification later on.

On my way home from Honolulu to New England I made perfunctory pauses in several libraries, did rather a lot of digging in the New York Public, and then headed north-northeast as fast as I could go. My data were incomplete—admittedly. But I had made what might be called a fair sampling of the world's libraries, big and small, general and special, and I knew in my heart that the world's best library was ironically located at the precise point where my travels had commenced.

Of course, so far as blind conviction went, I really had known the same thing before ever I started; but it was pleasant to have the conviction confirmed by all observed facts.

A GOOD LIBRARY DEFINED

For a change I am being serious. A good library is more than a collection of books: it is a plaQe in which to use books intelligently and rewardingly. I have seen no evidence anywhere of another institution that is the equal of Baker in these two particulars. It is no aid to intelligent research to put five million books into vaults whence they can be summoned only by automatons carrying rote numbers on a slip of paper; nor is it helpful to have them catalogued in hundreds of antiquated folios full of pasted slips that take only an opportunist notice of alphabetical order-folio folios supplemented by volumes of addenda issued yearly, monthly, and three-amonth. It is a bit shocking to discover that one of the two premier libraries of the world has no title index at all, and that its subject index, in separate volumes, is slovenly and admittedly incomplete.

Those who work in Baker should be sent occasionally to Great Russell Street for an appraisal of their blessings. The British Museum, for all its enormous resources, has not even the virtue of approximate completeness. It has been cluttered by crank bequests, but apparently it has never had adequate funds to fill in the gaps by study and purchase. Here in Baker, any wanted book in print, and within reason, is promptly acquired. Did you ever try that in Great Russell Street? I needed a file of Pacific Affairs in my own work; but this really vital learned quarterly (on file in Baker) happens to be published in Honolulu. No free copies go to the 8.M., and the 8.M., for all the vital interests of Britain in the Orient, was not interested in purchasing any.

And there is the catalogue, to the disadvantages of which I have made a much too temperate allusion. We are so used to card indexes on this side of the Atlantic that the stubborn British adherence to the clumsy and antiquated folio method seems shocking. The first printed folio catalogue of the B.M. was commenced in 1881, five years after the American Library Association had established the value of the card index. That error of judgment can be condoned. But the sight of the beautifully made volumes of the new B.M. catalogue, commenced in 1931, and—at the present rate of publication—not to be completed before 1999, is heartbreaking. Every volume is of course obsolete before it is issued.

But in Baker, where things are done sensibly, an effort is being made to atone. The monthly lists of addenda and corrections to the new B.M. catalogue are being cut up and pasted on cards of a single catalogue, which will give Hanoverians a quicker and more convenient means of discovering what is in the B.M. than the director of that institution can have himself.

Consider a few other points of comparison. In Hanover, if Sir James Frazer were to turn up to do a bit of research, the chances are that he would be supplied with a workroom of his own, and would not be put to the inconvenience of having his working habits interrupted by the thoughtlessness of an irreverent younger generation. He would not be distracted by a sixfoot-six Zulu chieftain, feathers and all, studying British jurisprudence at one elbow, or by an entirely too pretty Malay lassie on the other side of him, probably studying the very same thing. Such cosmopolitan aspects of the B.M. reading room certainly have their attractions, but they are not conducive to application to one's own work.

BAKER BEST PLACE TO WORK

No, the best place I know of to work is in Baker, and I cannot down some measure of curiosity over the reasons why this should be so. In the first place, the provision of financial resources to build a modern plant, at the height of a period of research into library methods, was a blessing. In the second place, as Professor Anderson has recently pointed out in The Dartmouth, the wisdom of President Hopkins in using every effort to secure a maintenance fund as large as the original building grant became gratefully clear with the arrival of the depression.

To Mr. Larson, and his consulting architects, who found ways of providing light, space, and order in accordance with the demands of use rather than of usage, too much commendation cannot be given.

But it seems to me that there was something more fundamental and more pervading at work—something more vital than even these indispensables. There was in Hanover a guiding intelligence, a tradition, a symbol of what a library should be In the miserably inadequate old days 0£ Wilson Hall it was evident; and when the time came, and the resources were made available, Dartmouth was incomparably fortunate in having such humane wisdom at hand to direct operations.

This guiding intelligence, of course, was that of Dartmouth's librarian. As a matter of concrete fact I know nothing whatever about his demands, his desires, his actual counsel in detail. But I know the man, and from having spent most of my working hours in it for several years I know the workshop that evolved under his titular direction. There are no important discrepancies between the symbol and the fact. A librarian who could be pound wise and penny foolish, who could risk the theft of a few books by fools rather than hoard all books to the detriment of the wise, was the only sort of person who could have made Baker what it is today.

Now, upon the twenty-fifth anniversary of his connection with the College, I think it fitting that not only Dartmouth men, but that the scholarly world in general as well, should join in thanking Nathaniel L. Goodrich as the man chiefly responsible for giving the world a life-size working model of the sort of structure and institution in which books can be put to their richest use.

NATHANIEL L. GOODRICHWho is being congratulated, this springupon completing twenty-five years as librarian of the College.