Part 29

Boundary regions are always interesting. Close to the line separating two regions of fact or of thought cluster the examples that fascinate us. Kipling’s stories of India are so interesting because they tell of the meeting points of two civilizations--the boundary along which they come into contact, interact and fuse. The same is true of all tales of the white man and the red Indian, of the stories of early explorers, of the narratives of Spanish _conquistadores_ in the south and French Jesuits in the north. The student of mathematical physics will tell you that it is not in homogeneous regions, but along boundary lines that the application of his equations becomes difficult, and at the same time interesting. Our whole human life is conditioned by boundaries. It is possible only on a surface separating the earth’s mass from its atmosphere. It is limited by narrow conditions of temperature, nourishment, light, and so on. So we need not be astonished when we find that two related subjects of any kind acquire new vitality and new interest when we study the region along the line where they touch. This is especially true of the library and the museum.

I do not intend to dwell on the case where the books in a library are themselves treated as museum objects, although possibly this is the one that may first occur to the mind in this connection. Books that are curiosities on account of their rarity or for other reasons are limited usually to very large libraries. The Lenox Library in New York, now part of the Public Library, was almost entirely a book-museum and was so intended by its founder. The private libraries of great collectors, such as J. Pierpont Morgan, or the Huntingtons, are often largely book-museums, and in general, a book that brings a high price, brings it for its value as a curiosity, not as a book. The freer a book is the more value it has as a book; the more restricted it is the greater its value as a curiosity. Of course, even a small library may have one or two books that are worth display as curiosities, because they are old, or rare, or have interesting local associations either through the author, or the owner, or in some other way. The Hawthorne and Longfellow room in the Bowdoin College Library is an example of this latter case. But a book, or anything else, owned and displayed as a mere curiosity, is of not much real value, no matter what price it may bring at auction. The things that make a good museum what it is are not curiosities at all, in the vulgar sense. They illustrate some science or art and make its study easier and more interesting; they throw light on geology or history or sculpture. Once in a while we see a museum collection of books made for this object, to illustrate the art of binding or the history of printing, or the depredations of book-eating insects. The value of specimens like these has nothing to do with their rarity. Sometimes the smallest library may have books or pamphlets that may be displayed with this object, especially where the subject is local. It may for instance gather a collection of early pamphlets from local printing offices, or of books once the property of some eminent citizen.

These things belong to a museum pure and simple, which is the reason why I am mentioning them at first, to get them out of the way before treating my real subject, which is the debateable ground between library and museum. There is nothing debateable about a book-museum any more than about any other kind of a museum--a collection of historical or geological specimens, for instance, that often finds place in a library building, not because it is a library, but because it is a convenient place, or because it has been thought best to build a library and a museum under one roof, as has been done in Pittsburgh.

There is however a real debateable ground between library and museum, with somewhat hazy boundaries which I believe that either is justified in overstepping whenever such an act supplies an omission and does not duplicate. In other words, there is a boundary region between library and museum that may be occupied by either, but should not be occupied by both.

I shall try briefly to define this region and indicate how the library may occupy parts of it without legitimate criticism when the necessity arises.

Descriptive and illustrative material is to be found in both library and museum. Speaking generally, the former is of primary importance in the library and the latter in the museum. Many books consist of descriptive text alone, without pictures or diagrams, and on the other hand a museum might contain specimens without labels, although they would not be of much use. In general, text with illustrations belongs in a library and specimens with labels in a museum. The mere statement of the distinction as it has just been given, however, shows that it may be very difficult to draw a line between the two kinds of collections. A museum has been defined as “a collection of good labels accompanied by illustrative specimens.” Here the value of the descriptive text is emphasized, even in the museum collection. When descriptive treatises are shelved in connection with the specimens, as in some modern museums, we have an expansion of the label into the book; and the museum, in this one particular at least, crosses the dividing line between it and the library. No one would blame it for so doing.

Similarly the library may occasionally cross the line in the other direction without incurring blame. Let me repeat that both library and museum may contain descriptive and explanatory text and illustrative material. In the museum the text is usually in the form of labels, attached to the specimens, and these are generally material objects. In the library the text is in book form and the “specimens,” if we may so call them, are plates bound into the book.

The first step taken by the library toward the line that separates it from the museum is when the plates, instead of being bound into a book, are kept separately in a portfolio. The accompanying text, corresponding to the “labels” of museum collections, may be on the same sheet as the plates (often on the reverse side) or on separate sheets, which may be bound into a book even when the plates are separate.

In the St. Louis Public Library about a thousand volumes, forming one third of the collection kept regularly in our art room, have separate plates. These are of course not usually on display but are in the cases ready to be used in the room on demand. They thus correspond, not with museum material displayed in cases, but with specimens packed away in such manner that they may easily be secured for study by those who want them. One may imagine a whole museum equipped for students in this way, with nothing on display at all--no popular exhibition features. Probably no museum was ever so administered, as an entirety; and as you know the large museums are making more and more of features adding to the attractiveness of the collection as a popular spectacle. The public visits the Museum of Natural History in New York, much as it turns the pages of the National Geographic Magazine--just to look at the pictures. This treatment of material is justified because it increases popular interest in the subject-matter and brings people to the museum who would not otherwise enter it. Also, it predisposes public bodies to more generous support of the museum. This is true again of such institutions as botanical and zoological gardens, which have always been show-places for the public as well as laboratories for the student. The library can not afford to neglect such an opportunity of attracting the public and of stimulating interest in its own subject-matter--books. It can not continuously display any great part of its separate prints, as a museum does with its specimens, but it can exhibit them from time to time, so that one or another of them is always displayed in this way. Simple screens can be cheaply made and the prints fastened thereto with thumb-pins, taking care not to injure them by perforating with the pin, but letting the edge of the head lap over the edge of the print to hold it, and using sheets of transparent celluloid for protection, where necessary. After beginning such displays in our own library, we found them so popular with our readers and so helpful in our own work that we are now holding thirty or forty yearly, sometimes two or three at once in different parts of the library, supplementing our own material with loans from interested friends.

The value of exhibitions of plates is so highly estimated by some librarians that they are breaking up valuable volumes so that the plates may be used separately. This is a second step toward the museum use of the library. I have heard a well-known librarian assert that if permitted by his Board he would dismember every art book in his library, in this way. Most of us, especially if we are interested in the exhibition side of library work--which is distinctly a museum side--will be inclined to sympathize with him.

But although we hesitate, perhaps, to tear to pieces good books, even for such a good purpose as this, there is much material that can be so treated with a clear conscience. Many duplicates of art works can be thus used, and there is hardly an illustrated book which when the librarian is ready to throw it away does not contain plates or maps which can be saved and used. In St. Louis when we condemn books they are never destroyed and consigned to the old-paper dealer before passing through the hands and before the eyes of all those who might use still usable fragments of this kind. Taking the item of maps alone, some of the best special maps are attached to volumes of travel or history, as folders or in pockets. So long as the book is usable, the map, of course, must go with it, but if the map has been reinforced with linen when the book is purchased, as it ought to be, it will probably be in usable condition when the book is worn out, and may at once be transferred to the map collection. The same is true of other plate than pictures--fac-similes of handwriting, for instance. A very fair autograph collection may be made of such detached plates--not originals of course, but originals are valuable merely as curiosities, in the way that we have already noted. Fac-similes are as good for any other purpose.

Of course all such torn up or detached material is very convenient also for reference use--easily filed and quickly consulted. It may be kept in vertical file cases, in loose-leaf binders or in ordinary portfolios. One of the interesting things about it is the facility of assembling it in different ways. In our own library we sometimes tear apart the leaves of an art book simply to group the plates in an order that will make them more valuable for reference purposes. This leads us to another nearly related, though I should call it a still further, step toward the museum region, which is taken when we deliberately create specimens by clipping and mounting. Most libraries are now doing this freely, both for reference work and for circulation. In many cases there are no separate labels here except a brief descriptive title, the material being classified according to its subject or its intended use. The similarity to the school museum or circulating museum--a very recent development of museum work--is striking. In this field the library has been ahead of the regular museums. The material clipped and mounted is usually book material--largely plates from books, magazines or papers. There is much other material that can be so mounted and used--the kind of thing that is familiar in memorabilia scrapbooks--theatre and concert programs, announcements, invitations, tickets of admission, badges, menus, photographs, advertising material, etc. It is usually a mistake to make permanent scrap-books of such material. When they need to be assembled in book form the separate mounts can be brought together in a loose-leaf binder. A permanent scrap-book ties the material together in a way that may prove embarassing. Suppose, for instance, that you are keeping printed material from three clubs in your town, as you ought. Clubs seldom do this for themselves. Several St. Louis women’s clubs have told us that they visit the library when they want to indulge in research into their own past doings. It might be natural to keep a scrap-book for each club and insert the material as it comes. But suppose you desire to display all your material on war activities and that some of the material in these scrap-books falls under this head. You will have to leave it out or tear out your scrap-book leaves.

Mounting takes time, and it is not necessary to mount everything. Material used only occasionally may be left unmounted. For instance, much newspaper-clipped material may be kept loosely in heavy manila envelopes. Again, some material may be made more accessible if not mounted, especially if in card form and in standard sizes. Such is the postal card. The amount of valuable material obtainable in postal-card form will astonish those who have not looked into the matter. Besides the usual views of localities, embracing buildings, monuments and scenery, good collections of sculpture, architecture, portraits and many other things may be made in postal-card form. Postal cards are all of the same size and very compact, so that they may be filed in trays and treated very much like catalogue cards, guides being used with them as in an ordinary catalogue. The amount of usable material that can be stored to the square foot in this form is probably greater than any other.

In all material of this sort, the similarity of collection, treatment and use may be so close that the passage from the picture to the object seems almost negligible; yet many persons apparently consider that here we must draw the definite boundary line between the collections of the library and those of the museum. They would say for instance that it is perfectly legitimate for a library to acquire, preserve and use a plate bearing a printed fac-simile in natural colors, of a piece of textile goods, but not a card mount bearing an actual piece of the same goods, although the two were so similar in appearance that at a little distance it would be impossible to tell the colored print from the actual piece of textile. Librarians will not be apt to attach much importance to this distinction, and those whose collections include treatises on textiles with colored plates will not hesitate to supplement them with mounted specimens of the actual textile with typewritten descriptions.

Generally manufacturers are only too happy to furnish samples of their current output, and older specimens, sometimes of historical interest, can be bought from dealers.

There are precedents for the treatment of this sort of thing as library material. Probably Hough’s well-known work on American Woods will occur to everyone. No library, so far as I know, has ever thought of barring this from its shelves because it contains actual thin sections of the various woods instead of pictures thereof.

The peculiar adaptability of this kind of material to library use is a physical one, and is shared by every flat specimen that may be mounted on sheets. Instances will occur to every one. An actual flower or leaf, for example, is generally cheaper than a color reproduction of it, and takes up little more room when mounted. A good descriptive botany with inadequate pictures may well be supplemented by a herbarium of this kind. Historical material is quite generally flat--often written or printed on card or paper--old programs, menus, railroad tickets, dancecards, timetables, cards of admission, souvenirs of all kinds. One of the most interesting exhibitions I ever saw was of foreign railway material--timetables, tickets, dining-car menus, etc. Many Chinese and Japanese specimens were included. A treatise on forms of railway tickets, with fac-simile illustrations, would be eagerly sought by libraries; why should not the objects themselves be equally valuable? Librarians were glad to have Miss Kate Sanborn’s book on old wall papers, with its realistic reproductions, but how many of them thought of the possibility of making their own books of specimens, using the papers themselves, instead of photographic facsimiles thereof?

This point of view may be commended to the makers of decorated bulletins in libraries. Much laborious hand-work is often done in the preparation of these, and the results are seldom worth the trouble. Even when a work of art has been produced it may be questioned whether the time withdrawn from other library work has been employed to the best purpose. By the use of what has been called above “museum material” time may be saved and better results reached. For instance, I once saw, in an exhibition of picture bulletins one bearing a list of books and articles on lace. It was made in white ink on black cardboard, and bore a most realistic representation of lace, done with the pen, probably at a vast expenditure of time. The most that could be said for this really clever bit of work was that it looked enough like a real piece of lace, mounted on the cardboard, to deceive the elect at a short distance. Why then did not the maker mount a real bit of inexpensive lace on the board, at an expenditure of a few minutes’ time? It should not require much thought to see that bulletins prepared in this way are usually better and more effective than elaborate decoration with pencil and brush.

Another point of resemblance between this kind of library material and that utilized by museums is the fact that its value is so often a group-value--possessed by the combination of objects of a certain kind, rather than by any one in itself. For instance, a common earthenware jar designed by John Jones in the Trenton potteries may have little value, but if you add to it a thousand other earthenware jars, or a thousand pieces of any kind designed by John Jones, or a thousand other specimens made in Trenton, the collection acquires a value which far exceeds the average value of its elements multiplied by thousands. The former may be five cents--the latter five thousand dollars. In the same way an illustration by Mary Smith, clipped from a trashy story in a ten-cent magazine, has little value--zero value, perhaps. But a thousand such illustrations showing the published work of Mary Smith from the time she began until she acquired standing as an illustrator, is worth while.

It should not be necessary to tell librarians that the best way to make such a collection as this is not to search for each element by itself but to gather miscellaneous related material in quantity and then sort it. If you have a pile of slips to alphabetize, you do not go through the whole mass to pick out the A’s, and then again for the B’s and so on. You sort the whole mass at once, so that while you are segregating the A’s you are at the same time collecting the B’s and all the rest of the alphabet. Likewise, if you want the illustration work of Jessie Wilcox Smith, for instance, you need not hunt separately for bits from her pen; you need only clip all the illustrations from magazines and papers that would be otherwise discarded. Then you sort these by the names of the illustrators, and you have at once collections not only of Miss Smith’s current work but of that of dozens of other illustrators. This is applicable in a hundred other fields.

It should be noted that this group value is potentially present in many large collections of material, whether classified or not into the particular groups in question. For instance, we have a large collection of locality post-cards, filed by cities and towns. Here are groups ready for use. If anyone wants views of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, or Stockton, Cal., to show to a class, or for use with a reflectograph, or to copy for newspaper work, they are already assembled. But also if someone is going to lecture on court houses, it is the work of only a few moments to assemble from the file a temporary collection of fifty or sixty examples. The same is true of buildings of any other type, say college dormitories, railway stations, libraries or warehouses, of parks, mountain scenery and industrial processes and of a hundred other things. The value here is a true group value; it is created by assemblage and becomes dormant again when the items are distributed to their proper places in the file.

The same is true of lantern-slides to an even greater degree, for slides are practically never used except in groups. As a collection of slides may be grouped in scores of ways, it is better to file them in some order that will admit of quick selection, than to form groups arbitrarily at the outset and keep these together. A slide in such a group is practically withdrawn from the possibility of assemblage in some other group. For instance, a view of Michael Angelo’s “Moses” might find a place in a group to illustrate a talk on Michael Angelo, or Renaissance Sculpture, or The Art Treasures of Rome, or Old Testament Worthies, or any one of a dozen others. If we place it arbitrarily in any one of these and keep the group together, we shall of course spare ourselves a little trouble if anyone wants that particular assemblage of slides, but we shall not only make it more difficult to assemble the other groups, but practically put them out of the running. Several years ago we had a valuable gift of a collection of slides illustrating phases of city-planning, given by the Civic League of our city. They included many foreign views now difficult or impossible to obtain. The donors had assembled them in groups to go with lectures prepared in advance and we maintained this arrangement for a time, although it was not in accord with our general plan. But we soon found that persons who asked for slides on London or Munich or Milan were missing some of our best material, simply because we could not always remember to look through the city-planning groups for something that might be there. Consequently we broke up these groups and distributed their slides to the proper places in our file, which is in trays arranged precisely as if the slides were catalogue cards, with proper guides and cross-references on cardboard slips. We have memoranda of the slides that belong in each lecture group and these can be quickly assembled if wanted. Of course we allow the public to go directly to the trays if they desire and assemble for themselves any group that they choose.

This is all borderland material between library and museum. There is much of it analogous to the lantern slide that libraries have not taken up yet, but that they might handle to good advantage. I do not see why we should not, for instance, circulate microscope slides or photographic negatives. Stereoscopic pictures are now commonly handled by libraries owing to skilful and perfectly legitimate exploitation.