Useful Reference Series No. 7

How to Plan a
Library Building
for Library Work

Prelude

Every public building should express, with dignity

Its individual type, use, place, and era.

A library is a prominent public building

As practical and technical as a schoolhouse;

A workshop for the future, not a relic of the past.

Seldom rich enough for its needs, it abhors waste.

Change and growth will soon supplant it.

Build it for use, not show; for now, not for ever:—

Tastefully, tactfully, thriftily, thoroughly.

To plan it, find an able librarian,

To construct it, get a skillful architect,

To control both, choose a wise committee.

These three, by patient study and debate,

Can satisfy taste without sacrificing use—

Achieving complete and felicitous success.

HOW TO PLAN
A LIBRARY BUILDING
FOR LIBRARY WORK

By CHARLES C. SOULE
A.B. Harv. 1862

Firmitas, Utilitas, Venustas

—Vitruvius de Architectura

BOSTON
THE BOSTON BOOK COMPANY
1912

Copyright, 1912
By CHARLES C. SOULE

The Riverdale Press, Brookline, Boston, Mass.

To
The Architect
who is the Librarian’s best friend
when they plan together
a sound, useful and beautiful building
this volume is inscribed

EDITORIAL PREFACE

Of the author of this volume it was said by President Hill at the 1906 A. L. A. Conference, “he has given the subject of Library Architecture more thought and attention, probably, than any other member.”

Mr. Soule is well known to older librarians. To introduce him to a younger generation and to architects, we would say that although he is a publisher and bookseller, and not professionally a librarian, he has had an effective training in library science. He joined the American Library Association in 1879, became at once a working member, has attended twenty Conferences, and has been elected to office, as follows:

• 1888-1899—Trustee of the Brookline (Mass.) Public Library.
• 1890-1908—Publishing Board, A. L. A.
• 1890—Vice-president.
• 1893-1896, 1900-1905—Member of the Council.
• 1894-1906—Trustee Endowment Fund.
• 1906-1912—Member of the Institute.

In 1890, when a prominent trustee had been quoted as saying, “it was no use consulting librarians about building, for no two of them agree on any one point,” he wrote, and the 1890 Conference unanimously adopted, “Points of Agreement among Librarians on Library Architecture.”

In 1892 he published in the Boston press an exhaustive series of nine letters, taking the side of the librarians of the country against what they thought to be radical errors in the management and building of the Boston Public Library.

In 1901 he wrote the article “Library,” for Sturgis’s Dictionary of Architecture.

In 1902 he wrote the A. L. A. tract on “Library Rooms and Buildings.”

For forty active years in business as a bookseller, he has handled and issued books.

For over thirty years of membership in the A. L. A. he has been intimate with leading librarians.

In the Boston controversy, he felt obliged to investigate thoroughly every point he criticized on behalf of the librarians.

When elected as a trustee in Brookline he found a very conservative board at the time the new developments of library progress were slowly gaining ground, and had to go to the bottom of every new method before the board could be persuaded to try it.

During the last five years Mr. Soule has frequently been called on as an expert, and has been through all the detail of building problems of several different grades.

All this educated him in such a school of experience that Mr. Dewey thus spoke of him at one of the A. L. A. Conferences: “When people ask who are the most active and efficient librarians in America we are almost sure to name two or three men who are not librarians at all; for instance, R. R. Bowker and C. C. Soule.”

After such experience, we can commend what the author has to say, to respectful attention.

Illustrations have been suggested, but have not been included in this volume lest they should increase the bulk and price too much. If they are asked for, we will issue a separate volume of illustrative plates.

FREDERICK W. FAXON,
Editor Useful Reference Series.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

On being asked to write on “Library Architecture” for this series I hesitated, knowing little about the subject except as applied to the insides of libraries. But on this limited branch I have had some experience which I am willing to embody under the narrower title finally chosen, for the benefit of librarians, architects, and building committees. I even venture to hope some chapters may get to the notice of trustees, donors, and other citizens interested in libraries.

The themes of this volume are:

• Preëminence of utility over display.
• The practical nature of library work.
• The importance and variety of its details.
• Their differentiation from other kinds of work.
• The vital need of consulting library experts.

The treatment adopted is, to cover every point and touch on every detail involved in building a large library of any class. I hope that readers interested in lesser libraries, even those of small grades, may be able to pick out hints to help them, or at least to look ahead to growth and larger problems yet to come.

I have not undertaken to discuss methods of library work, and only allude to them so far as they affect construction. Nor have I undertaken to recommend specific makes of furniture or fittings, although I have felt free in a few instances to suggest principles which should govern selection.

I have not trusted entirely to experience or to advice received from librarians and architects; but wishing to treat thoroughly so momentous a subject, I have spent six months in search through all authorities in England as well as in America, including back volumes of the library periodicals. I did not expect to get much help from England, where methods differ from ours, but I find the transatlantic writers are so thoroughly in accord with us as to the need of expert advice in planning, that I have cited their views copiously.

To all these sources, and to countless friends, I am so indebted for suggestions and advice that I look on myself as an editor of professional opinion, rather than as an original author. But I assume responsibility, while rendering sincere thanks to all authorities quoted or unquoted.

Within the limit of one volume it has been possible only to sketch principles without describing details under every subject as in a manual. I have been asked to illustrate this volume with views and plans, but the publishers find that this would double its size and price. They have therefore decided to wait and test the actual demand by inquiry. If enough purchasers wish a second volume, one will be issued.

For my general principles I expect endorsement from all librarians. As to details, I do not ask so much for endorsement as for criticism—not mere fault-finding, but helpful constructive criticism, pointing out something better than is herein advocated. If interest and discussion are stimulated, and library science is thereby in any degree advanced, I shall feel that my work has not been wasted.

CHARLES C. SOULE.

Brookline, Mass.

WORKS CITED

CONTENTS

A.
INTRODUCTION

In this Book

A cursory glance through history fails to throw much light on planning a modern library.

The motto of this work is elucidated.

The possibility of differences between librarian and architect is discussed.

And brief remarks are made about grades and kinds of libraries.

A.
INTRODUCTION

EVOLUTION OF LIBRARY BUILDING

[For the first chapters of this book, I am largely indebted to an interesting and scholarly volume by John Willis Clark, entitled “The Care of Books,” published in the year 1901 at Cambridge, Eng. I am emboldened to quote from it by noting how much later books and cyclopedias rely on it as their chief authority, and I commend to all readers both text and illustrations of this fascinating work.]

The Dawn of History

No precedents of buildings or fixtures loom out of the farthest past. Archæological excavations have found relics of libraries in early ruins, libraries of baked clay tablets, evidently once housed in separate rooms on upper stories of palaces or temples. This literature must have seemed imperishable. There were no fading inks, no crumbling paper, no danger from moisture or worms. But an older foe, still threatening libraries, lurked in that brick era of literature. Fire, both worshiped and feared, was finally fatal. Fire following conquest attacked the oldest libraries and dropped them in shattered fragments into prehistoric cellars, to lie for centuries awaiting exhumation. But even as now resurrected, they tell no tales of their housing or shelving or circulation. It would seem hopeless to grope among these shards for lessons in library science. And yet Dr. Richard Garnett[1] deduced from an Assyrian hexagonal book tablet the idea of hexagonal bookcases for the British Museum.

Ancient History

In the early days of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, libraries of papyrus and parchment rolls, stored on shelves, in pigeon-holes and in chests, were collected, at first by sovereigns, then by nobles, then by scholars. For centuries they occupied rooms in palaces and in temples. These rooms were only places of storage. Other rooms, or oftener colonnades, served for reading. The distinction between book rooms and reading rooms thus appeared at an early date.

The first mention of a separate library building is made in Egypt in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, the third century B.C. Two centuries before, Pisistratus, in Greece, had established a public library, whether or no in a house of its own is not noted. About 40 B.C., Asinius Pollio seems to have built the first library building in Rome. Augustus soon built two more, and thereafter public libraries and private library rooms abounded. In the fourth century A.D. there were twenty-eight “public libraries” in Rome. Although these were undoubtedly, while “public,” used mainly by scholars, having few of the functions which so highly diversify and differentiate modern public libraries, their buildings must have begun to assume some common arrangement which would tend to constitute a type. I am unable to reproduce, however, any clear picture of the architecture of these first buildings.

As to fixtures, Mr. Clark sums up a chapter:[2] “Unfortunately no enthusiast of those distant times has handed down to us a complete description of his library, and we are obliged to take a detail from one account, and a detail from another, and so piece the picture together for ourselves. What I may call the pigeonhole system, suitable for rolls only, was replaced by presses which could contain rolls if required, but were especially designed for codices (the first phase of parchment, in the modern book form). These presses were sometimes plain, sometimes richly ornamented. The floor, the walls, the roof were also decorated. As the books were hidden in the presses, the library note was struck by numerous inscriptions, and by busts and portraits of authors.”

This Roman conception of a library prevailed during the dark ages and has survived to our own time in its most sumptuous form, embodied in the Vatican library, whose interior has so often been represented in photographs and engravings.

With the close of the western empire, in A.D. 476, the ancient era of libraries may be said also to close without any lessons to us as to building.

Mediæval History

Thus far libraries were gathered and cared for by monarchs, princes, or prominent citizens. With the growth of Christianity literature fell to the care of the ecclesiastics. Their earliest collection, of which record remains, was shelved in the apse of a church. About A.D. 300, monastic communities began to cherish church literature. Existing records all indicate that cloisters were the first Christian libraries, perhaps because all the monks could assemble there. What few precious manuscript volumes the laborious brothers had fashioned, with others given or bought, were stored on shelves or in “presses” on the inner walls. The readers either took the books to their cells, or read them by the light of the windows in the outer wall. There were the reading room, the book room, and the lending room, all in one long, well-lighted cloister. Later, as more manuscripts accumulated, they were stored at first in niches in the wall, then in adjacent closets or small windowless rooms. Readers still studied by the best light. To follow Clark’s quotation:[3] “On the north syde of the Cloister (at Durham) in every window were ... Pews or Carrels where every Monk studyed upon his books. And in every Carrel was a deske to lye their bookes on.”

Elsewhere it is explained that each window was in three parts, with a carrel from one stanchell of the window to another.

This use of windows suggested to me a new convenience for research in our modern “stack,” which is described in a later chapter as the “stack carrel.”[4]

The growth of libraries slowly followed the development of monastic orders. The systematic care and use of books began with the precepts of S. Benedict in the sixth century, followed by similar rules in other brotherhoods. At the same time secular libraries and library buildings were devastated by the barbarians, while the Arabs, who developed large libraries, appeared to have housed them in mosques, so that library building science slumbered through the Dark Ages.

In the sixth and seventh centuries learning followed the first steps of Christianity into the British Isles. The earliest English “library movement” began in the monasteries of Ireland and Great Britain.

From that era onward, libraries all over Christianized Europe grew with the prosperity of religious brotherhoods. Of progress toward building, however, there is little record until the Cistercians moved theirs from the cloisters to other rooms in their monasteries, although some use of cloisters elsewhere lingered until the beginning of the seventeenth century. These rooms were at first directly over the cloisters, where alcoves first appeared, on the window side only. Still later libraries were assigned to the upper stories of separate buildings, the first put to this use since the time of the Cæsars in Rome.

These first mediæval libraries, of which several pictures are preserved, send to us the precedent of ample and aptly applied daylight admitted through long windows directly into each alcove. The exteriors remind us of our stack rooms. This arrangement of library rooms passed by imitation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from the monasteries to the colleges, and still survives in the older libraries of Oxford and Cambridge,—for instance, Merton College, a long, narrow room with bookcases between the windows, at right angles with the walls, forming well-lighted alcoves.

All of the earliest library rooms were long and narrow. Clark has preserved the measurements of several thus:—

A.D. 1289. Zutphen (Holland): A solid building separated from others (in case of fire): 120 feet long, 36 feet broad: 19 uniform windows east and west, “that plenty of daylight might fall upon the desks and fill the whole length and breadth of the library.”

A.D. 1422. The Franciscan House in London, “Christ’s Hospital” (the first building in England built expressly for a library?) founded by Sir Richard Whittington; 129 feet long by 31 feet broad, with 28 desks and 28 double settles.

A.D. 1508. At Canterbury: the library over the Prior’s Chapel was 60 feet long by 20 feet broad, and had 16 bookcases, each 4 shelves high.

A.D. 1517. At Clairvaux: in the cloister are 14 studies, where the monks write and study, and over it the new library, 180 feet long by 17 wide (probably this narrowness followed the shape of the cloister) with 48 benches, “excellently lighted on both sides by large windows.”

It will be noted that these bookshelves were about four feet “on centers,” and that great emphasis was laid on ample daylight.

From the thirteenth century comes this warning for us—“the press in which books are kept ought to be lined inside with wood that the damp of the walls may not moisten or stain them,” which is singularly like a caution in a recent American manual against leaving unpainted brick walls at the back of wall cases.

It seems singular that wall shelving, which was certainly used in Assyrian libraries and in the classical period, disappears in the monkish era and yields to “presses” or closed bookcases; to appear as a new device in the library of the Escorial in Spain in the year 1583. Sir Christopher Wren thought so much of this feature that he followed it in Trinity College (Cambridge) library in 1695, saying, “The disposition of the shelves both along the walls and breaking out from the walls must prove very convenient and gracefull: A little square table in each cell with two seats.”

The fifteenth century had been a library era throughout. In the sixteenth came the Reformation, which swept away “papistical” libraries. More than eight hundred libraries of monastic orders, in England alone, were dispersed or destroyed by this iconoclastic whirlwind. In 1540 the only libraries left were at Oxford and Cambridge and in the cathedrals. But at the same time, the invention and rapid spread of printing had superseded the slow processes of making manuscript books, and had opened a new life for libraries. The first library built under these new conditions was that of St. John’s College, which brought over from the monastic and early college era the alcove arrangement.

The renaissance of wall shelving spread rapidly. Compared with the chaining of books to the shelves, which it superseded, it was an open-access reform. To quote Cardinal Mazarin’s library motto, “Publice patere voluit.” It was quickly followed in France, but more slowly in England. In 1610 this form of shelving with a gallery was adopted in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (see illustration on p. 275 of Clark), the progenitor of our first distinctive American library interiors, now discredited and almost abandoned.

Modern History

From the beginning of the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, there is little to chronicle in the evolution of the library building. What libraries were built or altered followed either the monastic-collegiate alcove style, or the Escorial-Trinity wall shelving and gallery, or both. The best illustrations of libraries of this era are still extant at Oxford and Cambridge. A view of what he calls the oldest example of the combination of high wall shelving broken by a gallery, with the older fashion of alcoves, as they still exist at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, is shown by Duff-Brown on p. 2. A fine specimen may be seen at Trinity College, Dublin, interesting because of two modern attempts to burst the confines of old walls: first, as shown in the traces of sliding cases long antedating those of the British Museum; second, in the two-story wooden stack recently installed and already outgrown, in the cloisters below the library, which were originally open but were glassed in to protect the stack. (See illustrations, reproducing photographs taken by the author.[5])

The first appearance of the floor case, the precedent of the modern stack, appears in the library of the University of Leyden in 1610, of which a large illustration is given by Clark[6] and a smaller one by Fletcher.[7] Here is seen the utilization of the whole floor of a book room through parallel cases evidently open to access, although the books are all chained. The library is lofty and the shelves lighted not directly from stack-windows, but by chapel windows high in the wall, which appear to fill the room with ample diffused light. Some of the “broad-brims” pacing the floor may have been our Pilgrim ancestors, who, for the ten years subsequent to the date of this picture, were living at Leyden and frequenting the University.

The Radcliffe Library at Oxford, designed in 1740, seems to be the earliest example in England of a circular reading room lighted from the roof. This is said to have been suggested by the central reading room of the old Wolfenbüttel Library, built about 1710.

“The first architect,” says Duff-Brown[8] “to plan a library which in any way meets the modern requirements of giving ample accommodation was Leopoldo della Santa, who in 1816 published in Florence a quarto pamphlet, which is an attempt to construct a library building entirely from an utilitarian point of view.” The plan, which Brown reproduces, suggests Dr. Poole’s plan which was embodied in the Newberry Library of Chicago.

In 1835 Delassert proposed for the French National Library a circular plan of building, which perhaps suggested the present reading room of the British Museum. In 1885 Magnusson proposed an unending whorl as a good form for a growing library.[9]

While English libraries, and those of the continent, were developing these phases of old types, separate library buildings began to appear in America. The first one actually erected for library occupation still remains in use,—the Redwood Library of Newport, R. I., built in 1750. The main room is a hall 37 × 26 feet, 19 feet high, with two lean-to rooms at the sides. A massive portico gives an impressive front, but cannot be said to found a distinctive library style.

Our early proprietary associations and parochial libraries were stored in public buildings, or in buildings with no peculiar features. The school district libraries established by the state of New York in 1835, and similar libraries founded soon after in other states, seem to have been stored in schoolhouses, though intended for public use. The state libraries, first established as early as 1773, were deposited in the State Houses. The Young Men’s libraries of the early period were kept in rented rooms, or at best in rented houses. No special phase of library buildings was developed until about the middle of the nineteenth century, when colleges began to build. Gore Hall at Harvard (1841) was modeled after King’s College Chapel at Cambridge, Eng., and was even at that date said to be “ill adapted to the purposes of a library.” The University of North Carolina “erected” in 1850 a library in the form of a Greek temple, with hall 84 × 32 feet, 20 feet high. These essays at importing styles certainly developed no models worth imitation, but nevertheless they were imitated.

Our Own Era

Our own “library age” may be said to date from the middle of the nineteenth century. The parliamentary investigations which led to the first English library act in 1850, and the organization of the Boston Public Library with us in 1852, mark the beginning of the modern library movement. I will not try to trace the gradual evolution of library buildings abroad. I do not know enough about it to handle the subject well. I find, however, in Edwards’ Free Town Libraries,[10] London, 1869, a prototype of our own “Points of Agreement among Librarians on Library Architecture.” But as late as 1907 an English architect (Champneys[11]) says that “the examples of what a library building should not be are out of all proportion to those which are worthy to be followed.”

In America, building developed with the library movement, at first getting rather ahead of it. Indeed, there were few experienced librarians to direct it, and even these were mainly the old style conservators and bibliographers. The topic of building does not appear in the discussions of the library conference in 1853. The architects had to develop a precedent. The first distinctive type to appear was adopted in the Astor Library in New York (1853) and followed in the Boston Public Library dedicated in 1858. The exterior of the building had no peculiar features, but the interior was distinctly a type to be outgrown. The main room was a lofty hall, surrounded by galleried alcoves reaching to the ceiling, storing the books, while the readers occupied the floor, into the middle of which the main stairway arose among the tables. This impressive but wasteful interior was copied in large cities throughout the country, and was referred to in contemporaneous discussion as the “conventional style.” As it was tested in operation, and as its defects both for storage and administration became evident, the library profession, then getting together, unanimously condemned it. At the Cincinnati Conference of 1882, the A. L. A. resolved that “the time has come for a radical modification of the prevailing style of library building, and the adoption of a style better suited to economy and practical utility.”[12] At first there was no agreement on a successor. Richardson, the great architect, developed a library type which was severely criticized by librarians.[13] But in the rapid growth of libraries, the problem of close, economical and accessible storage of books became acute. How could these accumulating masses be stored and at the same time used? The solution came in the “stack,” at first fiercely fought by conservative librarians, but now so universally accepted as to form the distinctive feature of modern American library architecture.

In 1876 an impetus was given to library science, including building, by the government report of that year on libraries, and also by the formation of the American Library Association. The annual meetings of the Association, its discussions, the studies and reports of its committees, the formation and activity of state, city, and other local library associations, the establishment of library schools, have all tended to build up a consensus of opinion on important topics which has been recorded in the library journals, and has slowly but surely impressed itself on architects, on the public, and, not least of all, upon building committees.

A special impetus toward union among librarians was the controversy which arose over the building of the second Boston Public Library. The importation of its exterior design from Paris, and the attempt to build up an interior for it without any consultation with librarians either local or national, seemed such a marked snub to the profession just becoming conscious of power and unity, that it aroused renewed attention to the proper planning of library buildings. A trustee of the library having stated in public that “it was no use to consult librarians, for no two of them agreed on any point,” the American Library Association endorsed unanimously at its next conference the paper on “Points of Agreement on Library Architecture,” which has since been the accepted basis of all satisfactory plans. A series of nine letters to the Boston Herald, criticizing the building and the library management (republished in 17 L. J.), vindicated the library side of the controversy and brought about a change of management. And yet this façade of the library Ste. Geneviève in Paris has been repeated “with monotonous poverty of invention,” says an architect, in the mistaken belief that a building once labeled a library is a praiseworthy model to be copied.

Another spur to library building during these last years has been the Carnegie gifts. Their number and wide range, furnishing at the same time an incentive and a climax to both private beneficence and public liberality, finally convinced architects that in library buildings of all sizes and various purposes they had a theme worthy of their best work and highest genius. Mr. Carnegie’s first Public Free Library was founded in 1889, less than quarter of a century ago. Up to March, 1911, he had given funds for 2062 public and 115 college libraries.

Forecasting the Years

This rapid sketch has gleaned the records to show how the housing of libraries has grown through centuries toward a rapid development in our own age.

The Present. In looking back through the last sixty years, indeed through the last quarter-century, we contrast twenty-five years ago with the present time. We cannot fail to be satisfied with the advance in rational building. We know better what we want; we are called more into consultation with our trustees as to what is wanted; our opinions are listened to with respect by the architects. If every building is not as perfect as we could wish, how much larger is the proportion of serviceable libraries; how much smaller is the number of stately failures? Turn over the plans in Koch’s portfolio of Carnegie Libraries. See how much better is the average interior, how much more satisfactory the fenestration and proportions of the average exterior. In the “Points of Agreement among Librarians,” adopted as our chart in 1891, it was stated that “very few library buildings erected during the previous ten years conformed to all, and some of them conformed to none, of these axiomatic requirements.” Could we not say now that nearly all library buildings erected since 1891 conformed to most and many to all of what have seemed to us the requisites of construction?

The Next Quarter Century. What has the future in store for us?

In the first place, a swarm of buildings. Private beneficence, already aroused and stimulated, will continue for at least another generation even after Carnegie shall pass on to his reward. Public opinion in a large part of our country has come to believe in the library as it believes in the schools. Small libraries will follow railway stations into all growing and ambitious towns. Communities now inert will awake and, as instruments for good, demand libraries to stand beside their churches. The buildings of today will soon burst their bounds in the flood of library progress, and require enlargement or replacement.

The colleges will more and more recognize the relations of libraries to instruction and the relations of the building to the library. Large cities will experiment with large library buildings as the crown of their educational system.

Library science also will still progress ahead of its building problems. Where its developments are to end no one can foretell. What Bostwick[14] defines as the chief modern features of American libraries—freedom of access, work with children, co-operation with schools, branch libraries of all kinds, all such expanding activities—are sure to spread still further on the lines of social science, industrial education and good citizenship, reaching out, as Mr. Dana says, for the mechanic and the artisan.

In building there will be serious problems to be worked out. To college libraries will come the great question of the economical and effective distribution of department libraries. In all large libraries the problem presses of how to store closely and still handily the masses of accumulating books; underground stacks, central artificially lighted book rooms, sliding presses, mechanical carriers. In all large centers are impending the enormous warehouses[15] of the future for dead or moribund books, literary tombs or morgues.

I see another question impending,—Cannot modern methods of steel construction help out the city problems of light and congestion? Is the massive masonry, which has made such dungeons out of most of our public buildings, necessary for libraries? In view of the universal opinion among librarians that every building will have to be changed, enlarged, or replaced within a short generation, in view of the fact that thick walls kill the light needed for readers, that masonry partitions hinder change, may not the structure that makes our modern stores and office buildings so light, cheerful and airy, be in some satisfactory way applied to our large libraries?

Of one thing we may be fairly sure. Intelligent alliance and the friendship of mutual respect between librarians and architects will so carry conviction to trustees that our buildings of the near future will seem workable to librarians, satisfactory to architects, and noble to the public.

For the remoter future our successors must plan. We do our share if we pass on to them bettered methods and finer buildings.

Firmitas, Utilitas, Venustas

The motto I have chosen for this work is the maxim embodying three essential qualities in building, as given by Vitruvius, the leading authority in his profession, in his work “De Architectura Libri Decem” issued over nineteen hundred years ago at the highwater tide of the classical style of architecture which some of his modern successors have copied too blindly, forgetting that the conditions of our firmitas and utilitas have essentially changed and modified the twentieth century venustas.

Even at that age, note the order in which the author arranged his attributes. Venustas last, even in that era of magnificent architecture.

A fair translation of the motto would be stability, usefulness, loveliness.

The second essential is the one as to which the librarian is peculiarly qualified to speak, and of which he is the especial champion, but he is greatly interested in the two other attributes for which the architect is more directly responsible, and perhaps the librarian can help even here by suggestions.

He can certainly serve throughout the processes of planning, in keeping, always and everywhere, all concerned to the spirit of this classical architectural precept so well rendered by the homely Anglo-Saxon adage, “Use before beauty.”

Firmitas

In the first place safety and strength of construction must be essentials to everyone of the interested parties, and must be planned for and closely watched by the architect.

I was first attracted to the apothegm of Vitruvius by the second item, but on dwelling on the subject I am not so sure that the first is not quite as apposite. In considering the Latin synonyms, I noticed that firmitas had been used rather than soliditas, and on pondering definitions in a lexicon, I found this under the head of firmitas—“the quality of the firmus;” and under the head of firmus—“strong, proper, suitable, fit.” Thus Vitruvius builded better than he knew for modern library building, and voted from the golden age of classic architecture two to one against venustas in a library building.

The librarian should constantly bear in mind first cost, and cost of care as well as of administration. There may be a choice between equally strong materials and methods of construction. There may be choice as to use of walls, floors, windows, partitions, lights, heaters. In all these points affecting construction his watchfulness should be constant and his practical advice should have weight. He must warn also against unnecessary heaviness and rigidity, and any methods which would hamper changes or needlessly outlast the probable life of the building. Massiveness is not now essential to strength, and in a library building is a detriment.

Utilitas

Here naturally the librarian must have pre-eminence. While the architect may well correct inexperience in construction, and may chasten poor taste in ornament, he and the building committee ought to defer to the librarian on all questions of administration, and only oppose or override him where he is clearly unripe, “faddy” or wrong. Certainly, in planning, the architect should try patiently to meet all needs of storage or service as presented by competent authority. Here is the core of the problem: by the test of usefulness this particular building is to be judged a success or a failure.

But the librarian should be sure rather than obstinate. While he must be clear what he wants to do, he should remember that there may be several ways of doing it. If he is really an intelligent as well as an expert librarian, he will often find in the architect a helpful inventiveness to which he should yield an equal adaptability. Some of the best library ideas are an architect’s development of a librarian’s idea;—witness the stack.

As to a union of use and beauty, I would quote the Alumni Committee on the Harvard University Library:[16] “Not only should the new library be as perfect in plan and equipment as a wise and generous expenditure can make it, it should also, avoiding any display of costliness, possess a beauty and dignity of its own, both within and without, that it may be a constant source of pleasure and inspiration to all who use it.”

Venustas

I was first tempted to translate epigrammatically strength, use, show, but show seemed just the effect to avoid, although the venus suggested it. The lexicon defines the meaning of venustas as loveliness, beauty, charm; and I take it beauty—plain beauty—is what we most wish to see in a library building.

“While it is undeniable that the more directly utilitarian requirements should take precedence, æsthetic treatment of a library building is no unimportant matter. A building which is a work of art is a powerful educational factor; a dignified structure commands respect; an attractive exterior and pleasing interior attract toward use of the building.”—Champneys.[17]

The eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, in its article on Architecture, says this: “The end of building is convenience, the end of architecture as an art is beauty, grandeur, unity, power.” “The most important qualities (it continues) are size, harmony, proportion, symmetry, ornament and color.” Of these, size will depend mainly on the scope of work of the library, and on the funds available. Ornament in a library is a questionable beauty. The other qualities are possible even in a small and inexpensive building. For harmony and proportion, the architect may well be allowed choice at the outset as to what general form of building would best suit the site, and accord with the environment.

I should add to the elements of beauty, material. In this the next choice after cost, should be appropriateness and possibilities of dignity and quiet beauty. Nor need the material be expensive. Expense does not always promote beauty; it often ensures ugliness. A good rule to follow is to take “the wine of the country,” as it were,—the stone of the state. Not necessarily stone, either. Unless in large libraries, why is not wood good exterior material, if the life of the building is likely to be only twenty-five years? Wood is a fine material for a small building, lending itself to easy alterations or repair, and capable of great beauty. Whoever has had the fortune to sail on Christiania Fjord or Puget Sound has brought away, as pictures of loveliness, a memory of the beautiful villas of those forest-rich shores. Even re-enforced concrete, with its vast possibilities of ugliness, has also possibilities of beauty: witness the business section of Leipsic, and the residence quarter of Hamburg. The different sections of America have various handsome and durable building stones. And every section is near enough to clay to have good brick,—by far the most sensible, and in good hands the most beautiful material for library building. Did you ever see the buildings of Harvard University? If so, you retain now in memory, not so much the gray granite of the library, as the soft, homely, beautiful, wholly satisfactory atmosphere of old Holworthy. If you can escape the bilious brick which just at present is considered æsthetic, and the other brick which exudes soda-blotches, and get the good old-fashioned kind which mellows to a ripe old age, you will please a large constituency.

As to marbles, if they are cheaper than stone or brick, all right. But if additional expense for marble will cripple or dwarf a single feature of convenience or service, I would fight it to my last breath. Perhaps I am prejudiced, by an early experience. Being in Washington some years ago, I wandered into the new Navy Department Building. Asking to see the library I was shown to a lofty, bare room paneled in marble from floor to ceiling. “Here you see specimens of all the marbles of the world, brought by vessels of the navy direct from their quarries,” said the custodian. “But where are the books to be?” I queried. “Oh, the books!” he answered, rather contemptuously; “in here;” and he showed me two slices of space, just the length of the main room, shelved on both sides thirty feet high, lighted only by a tier of single windows at one end, and each space only eight feet wide. Since then, marbles outside or inside a library have been associated for me with vulgar show, not with appropriate venustas.

As to the quality of grandeur, I am not sure that it is even appropriate to a library. Is it not some such effect that many architects have aimed at in our bad part? It seems to me that Beresford Pite was right in saying:[18] “A regard for symmetrical purpose, a largeness of proportion and form, simplicity of detail, and great restraint and refinement of moulding and ornament, are qualities characteristic of a library, internally as well as externally.... Libraries of all buildings should be freed from the trammels of a merely archæological architecture. The architect of the present day is apt to rely too simply on precedent.” Yes, witness some of our Greek temple libraries in new America.

After all, the material to be used on the exterior is largely controlled by the limit of funds and is a matter for the architect rather than the librarian, unless he thinks the cost of the outside will stunt his accommodations.

Is There an Irrepressible Conflict?

In the future must we face a continuous conflict between the architect and the librarian? Is it true, as was once said, that the architect is the natural enemy of the librarian? Was Dr. Garnett right when he said,[19] “Hence a continual conflict between the architect who desires a handsome elevation and the librarian who aims at practical convenience?” Yes and no. No, certainly, if we mean the word enemy in any but a Pickwickian sense. No, certainly, if we expect a bitter fight and bad feeling. But if we substitute the word “contest” for “conflict,” if we look forward to eager but friendly struggles, like athletic contests between colleges,—yes, certainly yes. If both sides are striving for the fine aims of Vitruvius, which I have taken as a motto—Firmitas, Utilitas, Venustas—there will be nothing but the amity and mutual respect of brotherly rivals. There will not at first be full accord as to any one of the three points. Sound construction, yes: but must that necessarily be the construction of precedent? Use, yes: but just the phases of use as seen by the untrained eyes of that particular librarian? Beauty, yes: but exactly the beauty of any conventional style?

“I do not believe there is a conflict between the librarian or the committee, and the architect. There is a common meeting ground.”—E. B. Green.[20]

“The hostility between beauty and utility is often more apparent than real.”—Patton.[21]

There will inevitably be differences, at first, even among consulting librarians. Get together! Let librarian and architect compare views until they find some way of satisfying both, then present a united front to the building committee. If, however, they cannot agree, formulate their difference clearly and present it to the committee for decision, as business trustees often present doubts as to their trust, in a friendly suit before a court.

But remember that it is a contest, and have the library side presented as ably as the architect’s.

Library Science

Modern library science is yet in its adolescence as compared with architecture, but it is a robust youth. It already knows definitely what it wants, and what it does not want. For guidance, it has a copious literature of first instance, scattered through various pamphlets and four score back volumes of periodicals. It is beginning to have a literature of last instance, in book form, like Duff-Brown in England and Bostwick in America; and even a formal literature about library buildings, Burgoyne and Champneys abroad, and now this volume here. It is very satisfactory to see how these three-thousand-miles-apart authorities agree. There are still differences of method to provide material for debate at the next international conference, but we are close enough together on principles, at least, to convince any doubting Thomas that there is a library science to govern library building.

And in building there is the greatest need of further developing library science. As Fletcher says in his preface:[22]—

“One need not visit all the libraries of the country to become painfully convinced that want of adaptation to use is by no means infrequent. With regard to buildings, Lord Bacon’s judgment seems very safe: ‘Houses are built to live in, and not to Looke on: Therefore let Use bee preferred before Uniformitie.’ If this is true for houses, then a fortiori for libraries.”

But the main reliance of architects and building committees should be the living interpreter, the experienced librarian who can expound, apply and extend the written word. Here is embodied library science face to face with us, to supplement every chapter of this book by the latest developments; to explain apparent anomalies and inconsistencies; to differentiate essentials from non-essentials; to concede where concession is possible; and to maintain with conviction the requirements to which the architecture of tradition must yield.

Nor are the books closed with this volume. As a writer in “The Dial,”[23] says: “The history of Library Science is not closed. There remain an indefinite number of interesting chapters still to be written which are not unlikely to prove even more significant than any that have gone before.”

Architecture

Architecture, on the other hand, is a very mature science. It is ages old, with a voluminous literature from Vitruvius down, with many learned and skillful votaries, who have thorough technical education. Indeed, to a layman it seems a bit too much fettered by education and precedent. But it has to tackle all sorts of jobs from temples to stables, and it is very much alive to modern progress. Witness its triumphs with “skyscrapers,” steel construction, and re-enforced concrete. It has an almost encyclopedic training and can deal with all problems of itself, if required. But for perfect work it needs a very clear and thorough statement of the technical requirements of each problem. Give him full information, and any good architect can do good work.

The Century Dictionary defines Architecture as combining the requirements of (1) use and convenience, (2) constructive necessity and fitness, (3) artistic excellence.

For buildings that are more practical than decorative, the first is paramount, and it is on this point alone that the librarian is qualified to speak with authority. The other two-thirds—the larger part of the building—he must leave to the architect. If all three points are combined in the result, the architect should have two-thirds of the credit, and if his library advice has been defective, he should have the whole. And what does he get in return, on a small building, except kudos? Did you ever think how small a money reward he gets? A lawyer or a surgeon may take, in a difficult case, all the client or patient has in the bank or can borrow. But an architect, no matter how difficult his problem, and how much he has to work it out for himself with incompetent help, is limited to a percentage suggested beforehand by a schedule of fees. For instance, Miss Marvin gives views and plans of a $10,000 library at Darlington, Wis., built by Claude & Starck of Madison, which she says meets perfectly the needs of a small library with one slight exception. She reports the architects’ fee to have been $379.85. For this they had to spend time and thought on the plans, studying library science as applied to that particular problem. They had to have many sittings with librarian and board. They had to pay draftsmen for elaborating several sets of plans. They had to prepare specifications, invite, examine and allot contracts, watch all the material that was put in and all the work that was done. Were they overpaid? In fact, were they fully paid for their work unless they acted as their own draftsmen? All they really got out of the job was the satisfaction of good work done, and a certain amount of reputation, which I am glad to help by this mention.

When an architect does such good work as this, as a result of giving proper consideration to the real needs of the library, he surely ought to have credit for it, and all librarians who know about it ought to give him thanks and wide public praise.

Where does the Library Come In?

Architecture, as I have said, deals with a wide range of subjects, from the pure idealism of tombs, monuments and memorial arches, to the pure realism of twentieth century workshops. The former are, so to speak, all outside, and proper themes for competition. The latter are nearly all inside, to be worked out by careful and special study of their uses.

Where, in this wide circle, does the library come in? All librarians will claim, and most architects will allow, that it lies very near the workshop; as near it surely as the schoolhouse. It certainly needs careful study and adequate expert advice.

The tombs, monuments, and memorial arches, are rich subjects for architectural taste and ornament,—for venustas.

For workshops, for schoolhouses, ornament is inappropriate. Good taste, shown in proportion, lines, color, material, is still demanded, but they belong clearly to the domain of utilitas.

The library comes, beyond doubt, in the latter group. There is a vast range of buildings between, more or less proper subjects of decoration and ornamentation.

But the library should incontestably be assigned to the utilitarian extreme.

What Conflict is Possible?

Are there any points where architect and librarian may clash? There will be many points of course where they will differ at first, and have to get together through argument. But are there any influences toward a deadlock?

On the part of the librarian there should be no prejudice. If he be immature, or conceited and opinionated, and only half informed, he may not deserve to win in such a contest of ideas, but his bias at all events would be professional, not selfish.

On the side of the architect, however, might there not be some bias? In the first place, professional bias toward some style he has got his mind set on? He may be too willing to sacrifice utilitas to venustas on this account. During the Boston Public Library discussion, an architect wrote to a daily journal: “Library buildings should be treated as monuments, not as workshops, and must be made beautiful even at the sacrifice of utility.” But if any architect or any trustees now have such views, the building committee is to blame if it employs him, or even admits him to a competition.

In two points, however, selfish considerations might bias an architect, if he were poor or ambitious. In the first place his remuneration is by percentage on the total cost. The more his client spends, the more pay he gets. This situation conflicts with economy. In the second place, his reputation and his future prosperity depend not so much on librarians as upon the general public, which admires size, costly material, decoration, show. Witness the constant reappearance in magazines of the worst libraries as examples of good architecture. Marching with his own artistic temperament, this conflicts with economy, utility, and simplicity.

As to the danger of such a conflict, I personally have little fear, if some care is taken in selecting the architect. I know many of the profession. All of them I believe would spurn the first temptation, as they would an open bribe. Some of them might be influenced insidiously by the second, under the guise of Pure Art. But if shown by an expert librarian, worthy of belief, that any architectural beauty would tend to cripple the work of the library, I believe that every one would yield his views promptly and willingly. Indeed, on the first point, I have known an architect to sacrifice his own interest knowingly.

See anecdote at the bottom of [p. 131] proximo.

What Contest is Likely?

Putting aside any question of such serious conflicts, are there any differences to be expected? Why not leave it all to the architect, with what information he can get from the local librarian? There are a number of points to be settled both in the interior plan and about the exterior as affected by the interior. The question, for instance, of the best size and collocation of rooms, and height of stories, for effective and economical administration. The questions of shelving and furniture, always differing somewhat from previous problems. Such questions as ornamental fireplaces and massive furniture, and ornamental as against effective lighting. Questions as to the irreducible minimum of entrance halls, passages and stairways. All these on the interior:—on the exterior, the height of the basement, the height of the front steps, the height of stories and the arrangement and shape of windows, expense of material and decoration as against more space and better facilities inside. All these questions are open to honest difference of opinion between a librarian and an architect whose motives and ends are the same. And the architect with preconceived ideas, and a bias toward architectural effect, ought to have library views explained to him by some librarian who is his equal in experience, education, ability and personality.

The conditions have bettered in recent years. “The librarian’s ideal and the architect’s ideal, years ago wide apart, are today coming closer together. Full comparison of views may lead to agreement.”—Hamlin (architect).[24]

Where Lies the Blame?

Where should the blame of bad buildings rest? Sometimes, certainly, on the architect. Perhaps he is incompetent, perhaps he has been wilful. Champneys (an architect himself) says of the English situation: “In many cases architects have wilfully sacrificed utility to æsthetic considerations.”[25] And so often in America. I have recently heard of an architect chosen to build a library with only a limited fund available, calling for twenty-five per cent more money for more expensive material, before he had begun to lay out the interior. Here the blame should rest on the architect, unless he acted under positive orders from the committee.

But the architect is not always to blame. Sometimes the librarian has not been strong enough or has not had enough experience to guide him aright. Sometimes a “faddy” librarian has led him to adopt features which the profession generally disapprove. More often the building committee have left the problem to the architect without proper instructions, or have actually instructed him to disregard librarians’ advice, and to make the building showy at any sacrifice of use.

The board of library trustees, not the librarian, is the architect’s client, whose instructions he must obey. In many cases the parties in fault have been the trustees, or ultimately the public. “The worst possible combination is that of board and architect, the librarian being ignored.”—Bostwick.[26]

So do not blame the architect for a poor, clumsy, extravagant building, unless you can surely place the responsibility on him.

Grades and Classes

Grades. In dealing with libraries, it will be well to grade them by size, or rather by cost, which will accomplish the same end; and to arrange them by scope.

Any grades must be arbitrary, but as some attempts at distinguishing small from large have already been made, rather loosely, I will try to group them as I think they can be treated. Thus:—

• Minimum, those costing under $5,000.
• Small, those costing from $5,000 to $20,000.
• Moderate, those costing from $20,000 to $75,000.
• Medium, those costing from $75,000 to $300,000.
• Large, those costing from $300,000 to $1,000,000.
• Very large, those costing more than $1,000,000.

Miss Marvin[27] seems to hint at $3,000 as the limit for very small libraries, but I note that $5,000 is a more frequent limit for Carnegie gifts, so I follow that guide.

The next grade I limit to $20,000, on a suggestion from Miss Marvin[28] that it is unwise to attempt a two-story building for less than that sum. The third limit, also, I assign because Miss Marvin says that it is unusual and unadvisable to have an architectural competition for buildings of less cost than $75,000. The other groups are deduced from my own experience.

I shall deal with only two of these groups at length, “Minimum” and “Very Large.” The very small, or “minimum” libraries are adequately dealt with by Miss Marvin, Eastman, and A. L. A. Tract No. 4. See, however, later under the heads of Plans, and also paragraphs under all heads which fit small libraries.

Classes. Arranging libraries according to their scope, I classify them thus:—

• Private.
• Club.
• Proprietary.
• Institutional.
• Professional.
• Scientific.
• Law.
• Medical, theological.
• Special business.
• Government.
• State.
• Historical and antiquarian.
• University.
• School.
• Public.
• Branches.
• Suburban.

Of these, I will treat Private and Club libraries in one chapter, Proprietary, Institutional and Professional in another, Government, State and Historical in a third, University, College and School in a fourth. To Public Libraries I will devote a separate chapter. “Branch” and “Suburban” I will consider in my chapter on Public libraries. To some one of these classes any collection of books may be assigned; any collection, that is, which might require separate treatment in this volume.

Mr. Belden, chairman of the Mass. Public Library Commission, writes me of the especial need of suggestions for small libraries, “which are springing up like mushrooms, most of them very poor specimens of what a good small library should be.... Trustees in small libraries are usually better planners than the librarian.”

Small Library Buildings

Minimum. For this grade of very small libraries having, on the Carnegie ten per cent basis, not much more than $500 a year to spend, there would seem to be still need of a special manual. Eastman has only two illustrations and Miss Marvin only one, in this grade, most of their plans being far more costly. In A. L. A. Tract No. 4, I gave about ten pages which would be especially useful to very small libraries. Eastman and Miss Marvin place the limits of a small library much higher than I do. It seems to me that a library—perhaps not the very smallest, but certainly one that could spare $10,000 for building—would know at least where to go for advice. But the minimum grade librarian would be apt to be an amateur or a novice, and her board would hardly know much about libraries or library personnel. To them clear, succinct, systematic suggestions, illustrated by just such views, floor plans and statistics as Miss Marvin has given, would be a very great help, especially in new and isolated communities.

If she, with Mr. Eastman’s assistance, could compile another manual or tract, confined to libraries which especially need specific advice, cannot afford to pay for it, and are situated at a distance from any experienced librarians, I think they would do very great good. Such libraries may even copy model plans if thus carefully selected and commended.

To condense here a few principles,—it is best to rent an inexpensive room and furnish it very simply, until the trustees have felt their way, know what to do and have say a thousand dollars in sight to build with and enough funds to run a building. But “it is desirable to get a library out of rented quarters as soon as possible.”—Utley.[29]

“A building is a good thing; it makes the library mean more to the public. Build to save light and coal, build to save work in keeping neat and clean, build to allow for growth, build so that one person can control and do all the work.”—Ranck.[30]

“A plain one-story wooden building built on posts, with only one room, heated by a stove, lighted by oil lamps, very simply lined with wall shelving, furnished with the plainest of tables and chairs, will do at first.”[31]

“The public library in a small town is usually its only intellectual center.”—O. Bluemner.[32] And it may become its pleasantest social center.

The first development would be to a one-story, one-room building on foundations, but not with finished cellar or basement. Perhaps a fireplace could be added, with more and better furniture and shelving, so planned that different corners and separate divisions of shelving, still under control from a central desk, could begin the rudimentary divisions of a library; reference, light reading, children. Serious reading would have to be postponed, or pursued under difficulties.

The next stage would still be confined to one open main floor, to be under one central supervision, built on the trefoil plan, center and two wings, in three rooms, or rather three parts of one room, divided by cords, rails, glass partitions or low bookcases. To this could be added at the back another projection, to be used as the reference library, or for open shelves. “In the trefoil plan, the end wall of the book room at the back might well be all glass, with no windows at the sides. This would be very easy to extend.”—O. Bluemner.[33] Up to this time, no provision need be made for a private room for the librarian.

But about this stage it is time to think of a raised cellar or basement, which will about double the available floor space and begin to allow division into departments, the first increase of force being a janitor who can act as supervisor of the lower rooms.

Soon after this a regular trefoil building can be erected with practicable basement, with the introduction of two small rooms at the inner corners of the back ell, where they need not block light from any room.

From this on to a two-story building with stairs, there are many alternatives, and no regular style of building can be prescribed.

When a town has no adviser at hand, it can apply to the state library commission, or if there is none in the state, to the nearest state commission, which at least can advise from what librarian it can get good advice.

Most of the very small libraries described in the 1899 Report of the Mass. Free Public Library Commission occupy a room or rooms in schoolhouses, town halls, churches, the librarian’s house, or public blocks. The smallest grade of separate library buildings seem to me more uniformly appropriate and beautiful than many of higher grades.

As I drive about seashore and mountain resorts and through small country towns, I see many beautiful little library buildings, usually closed at the time I pass, so that I cannot inspect the interiors. In the 1899 Report of the Mass. Free Public Library Commission, I find descriptions of several low-cost library buildings. For instance:—

with several others costing less than $5,000 and many costing $10,000 or less. Of some of these, exterior views are given in the report. I should much like to see interior views, floor plans, full statistics and comments of local librarians.

In A. L. A. Library Tract No. 4 I said, and still think, that—

“A rough, unpainted, cellarless, one-room wooden building could be put together for say $250, and can be fitted up and made comfortable in all weathers for as much more.

“From $1,000 to $2,500 will pay for a tasteful wooden building amply sufficient for a library of not over 5,000 volumes.

“$2,500 to $5,000 will erect a similar building, to hold 10,000 volumes or more.

“From $10,000 up will provide for a brick building, and from $15,000 up a stone building for growing libraries of 15,000 volumes or more, with the varied functions that such a collection implies.”

These figures are only an approximation and will vary in different sections, with prices of material and labor, but they will do for rough guess to start with.

The only comments in Miss Marvin’s pamphlet which seem specially to apply to this grade are these:—

“A building costing $3,000 or less cannot have library rooms in the basement.” (p. 5.)

“A $5,000 building usually consists of one large well-lighted room, with basement for storage and workrooms.” (p. 5.)

“Small buildings will be the same as the $10,000 buildings in the points of light, shelving, etc.” (p. 5.)

Small Buildings. But the grade from $5,000 to $20,000, which probably will include a large majority of American libraries, would be apt to be more sophisticated, to have a bright and even a trained librarian, and one or two practical trustees who could seek advice intelligently, get at similar libraries in their neighborhood or state, pick out a good architect, and not need precedents quite so much. Their problems are much the same as those of larger libraries. Their need of features looking towards economy of administration and effectiveness of supervision with a small force would be greater; but they would begin to have many of the essential functions of larger libraries; especially, in our rapidly developing communities, the interior and exterior provisions for growth which require such intelligent forethought and careful planning. Whatever may be thought of larger problems, here is the place for an experienced library architect, one who has already built a small library which stands the test of use, some clever and sympathetic young architect, perhaps, who has already shown his skill as a builder and his taste as a designer, but who is not too busy to give some of his own time to the task. With such an architect, thoroughly commended by librarians who know his work, there may not be need of a paid library expert.

Koch gives illustrations of ten library buildings in this grade, besides several branch libraries whose cost is not stated. Miss Marvin gives twelve illustrations in this grade; Eastman ten.

In this “small” grade would come many branches and many suburban libraries.

Some English plans show a two-story head-house, with a one-story extension to the rear, lighted from the roof. Why would not this plan work well on narrow and deep city lots?

Since writing the above, I have had a letter from Miss Marvin, from which I quote, “I should like to suggest that you advise small libraries to consider their state library commissions as their official advisers in the matter of building. They could help in detail work, pass upon their plans, and above all prepare the instructions for the architect before he begins to draw. Out in our part of the country in smaller towns, there are very few competent architects, and a great many beginners, who do not ask or expect instructions from the library boards. They simply draw pictures of their ideas of interiors and exteriors of libraries.”

See Light, artificial, [p. 201]; and Ventilation, windows-system, [p. 210].

Moderate and Medium Libraries

Buildings to cost anywhere from $20,000 to $1,000,000 present much the same kind of problems, varied more by class than by cost, but growing more complicated, of course, with increased size and scope.

To quote again:[34]

“As a library grows, the rudimentary divisions still prevail, sub-divided according to special needs, such as Separation of books, as under art, music, patents, etc; Separation of work, as librarians, delivery, janitor, etc.; Separation of readers, as adults, children, serious and light reading, etc.”

The architect’s special parts of the problem, construction and exterior, grow rather less than the librarian’s. The latter’s problems increase with the number of departments and rooms, The principles remain substantially the same, but their application to the relations of books, administration and readers requires more study. The necessity for special experience and maturer judgment becomes greater and greater, and the librarian’s side of consultation needs strengthening with every thousand cubic feet of size to be apportioned rightly. With increased size the diversities of use between different classes of libraries become more technical and intricate. Unless the local librarian is expert and mature he needs an able and experienced adviser to be able to hold his own with the architect, who will wish his problem more thoroughly and authoritatively presented as it becomes more complex.

Very Large Buildings

The buildings to cost over a million dollars are likely to be in the state, public or university classes. Some of their peculiar phases will be discussed under those heads. The features they have in common are size, material and construction, entrances, stack, relation of stack to reading rooms, underground stories, stairs and elevators.

Material and construction are perhaps the most problematical. As has already been questioned, must libraries be of solid stone construction like most of our recent public buildings? Must they be gloomy dungeons like our typical custom-houses? One objection to massive and imposing build is the burden of shade imposed on the inside rooms and corridors by thick walls, deep window embrasures, rows of columns, porticos and overhanging cornices. Can they not be given sufficient dignity and yet be of modern steel construction, like our business blocks that are so light and airy? Or, if an imposing front be necessary, why not plan it with columns, portico and approaches, as a mere façade to mask three other exterior walls and partitions of light construction? One important consideration toward this end is the belief of librarians that every building may require alteration, enlargement, possibly replacement in less than a generation, and ought not therefore to be too solid.

Why not put the stacks on the front and sides, thus giving a light construction tone to the building?

If such a daring experiment could be made for a very large library, it would lead to omission of impressive outside stairs and rows of useless columns, which often incumber entrances and largely increase the cost of library buildings.

The stack, still in the course of development in smaller libraries, must be studied as the principal problem in a very large library.

Room to store enormous and continually enlarging stocks of books will be required. Where to put the reading rooms is a minor problem, the chief query being where to give them the best daylight, either outside, or on courtyards, or under the roof; to leave ample space for them, not too far from books and administration rooms. Could a large enough stack be built on what might be called the daylight fronts and the daylight stories? The question of dark, central or underground stacks will be discussed in a separate chapter. It is only outlined here as one of the chief problems of the very large building.

Elevators and mechanical carriers, house telephones or speaking tubes will furnish larger problems the larger the building is to be.

Inside stairs and passages, just large enough, no larger, than will be required for use, and so carefully placed as to unite, rather than separate, departments of the library, will in themselves be a special study both in service and in economy of space and cost. The more unnecessary cubic space, width, length and height, you waste on them, the more your library will cost to build, and the more will be the annual expense of caring for it and of repairing it.

CLASSES

Private and Club Libraries

Private libraries, while a frequent problem for architects (in the United States there were over a hundred thousand in 1870, averaging 250 volumes to a library, according to the ninth census) have not much to interest librarians, who are seldom called in to run them. A private library is oftenest a more or less casual collection for the use of the owner and his family. Occasionally it expresses some special taste in reading or collecting. But whatever it includes, it is at the same time a store room and a reading room for a very few persons, as it was in old Roman times, so that it would be fitting for the architect to take the old Roman tone in its treatment, the tone of the Vatican library in miniature. Wall shelving, open or glassed cases, carvings, free decoration, busts above the bookcases, friezes, whatever he thinks appropriate and cozy, may be used in it.

Gladstone in his interesting article on “Books and the Housing of Them”[35] describes an arrangement for twenty thousand volumes (evidently his own library) “all visible, all within easy reach, in a room of quite ordinary size.” He sketches a floor plan of shallow piers or alcoves all around a room 20 × 40, with most of the centre left open for furniture. This plan is worth looking up by an architect charged with planning so large a private or club library.

A club library is only an extension of the private library idea, to be used by many men rather than by a few. Here the tone may be the same, varied perhaps by the first formal monastic features.

Here alcoves might well be used, with no rigid steel stacks, but handsome wooden shelving.

Just few enough men could find quiet seats, with books all around them, a cozy window seat with a leaded window to look out of, not too many other readers or busy attendants to disturb their quiet by hunting books on the neighboring shelves.

A private or club library is a good subject for an architect to exploit, taking beautifully bound books as the key to his ornamental treatment. Quiet, artistic lights are appropriate, rich old woods and decorative rugs; everything that is taboo in a public library. The keynotes should be rest, comfort, literary cosiness, private proprietorship; if anything more, refined hospitality to personal friends.

Proprietary, Institutional

Proprietary. By these I mean what might be called literary clubs, owned in shares, and supported by dues, like Athenæums. Most of these combine some of the features of club libraries, and the reference and circulating functions of public libraries. Their constituency is smaller, however, more select, and usually has a higher degree of literary taste. In building, they will usually need rather more of the home or club atmosphere than other classes of libraries, and much less supervision. Here, for instance, the alcove and the window-nook might properly be used in reading rooms. The readers would be fewer, even in busy hours, and more homogeneous, so that a nervous man might pre-empt an alcove or a window seat and remain for hours comparatively undisturbed by either attendants or by other readers. Such societies will rarely build until they have a stable membership, many books and an accomplished librarian. From him the architect can learn the characteristics and habits of the members, and can begin planning by studying the features that will please them. As to the shelving of books, the administration and delivery, their problems will be much like other libraries, with perhaps more open access, especially to the new books for circulation.

The old-fashioned Mercantile Library, of which some survive in vigor, is similar in support, but more democratic in membership, and ought to be treated architecturally more like a public library, without children’s rooms or such social science features.

Institutional. Under this group I would include the libraries of endowed or charitable societies, such as Young Men’s Christian Associations.

If these are wealthy enough, they might have separate buildings or wings or stories for library use. Usually, however, they can only afford to set aside rooms or suites in buildings largely devoted to other purposes,—offices, class rooms, lectures, gymnasium. In such case, the library should be carefully planned to give it the best frontage and light.

Where there can be ample, and if possible separate elevator service, the upper floors, with some light through the roof, would probably offer the best opportunities. Rooms elsewhere in the building would give club facilities, so that feature of proprietary libraries might be omitted. The usual storage for books and good reference and light-reading-room facilities should be provided. If teaching is prominent in the plan of the institution, something like seminar rooms in colleges might be planned near the library, and private rooms for teachers and advanced students.

The administration of the library would probably be separate from that of other departments. The library might then be shut off from the rest of the building by sound-proof partitions, opening from a main corridor or from stairs and elevator, so as to be quiet and complete in itself.

Professional

This group might be sub-divided into scientific, medical, theological, law, and special or business; each requiring individual treatment and the advice of a librarian of mature experience in just that specialty. Here again the library will often be housed only in a room or a suite of rooms, to which should be assigned the best possible situation in the building, bearing in mind quiet, light and easy access. The users will be so select and responsible that they can be allowed full access to the shelves. Their use will be like that of professors or graduate students in a university. Wall shelving around rooms in which there are tables for readers; or where many books have to be assembled in one room, shallow alcoves and wall shelving opposite good light with tables near the windows; would be suitable arrangements for such rooms, with a minimum of service and supervision, and of florid ornamentation. Where a separate building is possible, other features might be added. Then, of course, general considerations would apply as to storage of books, administration and accommodation of readers.

Scientific. These would probably be libraries of separate or affiliated societies, in a building with club features; really specialized club libraries, for members only. They would be reference libraries almost entirely, without much circulation. Alcoves and wall shelving would be appropriate, with tables and racks for professional periodicals, and facilities for writing, without much probability of a great rush at any one time.

Medical. These would have much the same use as scientific, much the same quarters, much the same treatment. They would generally be larger, often with separate buildings. Special thought would have to be given to periodicals, the current numbers and back sets of which form a large proportion of the literature of this profession.

There were only thirty medical libraries listed in the government report of 1876, and very few of these appeared to have separate buildings. It would seem appropriate, in this class, to have a museum in the same building as the library, to illustrate the professional literature graphically.

Theological. The majority of such libraries would be attached to schools or colleges and partake of the treatment of departments in universities. There are a few large general theological libraries, however, with separate buildings. Quiet study, open access, slight supervision, inexpensive service, are their requisites. In theological schools it may be desirable to have class rooms near the library.

Separate rooms for quiet reading and writing would always be a convenience, if funds allow.

Where much attention is paid to the older literature of theology, a special provision of shelves for folios and quartos would be required.

Special and Business. As these libraries have recently formed a separate society or section of the American Library Association, they evidently have unique subjects to discuss, but few of them have attained the dignity of separate buildings.

They generally have to content themselves with a suite of rooms. Each one has its individual character, and can be ranked perhaps in the scientific and professional classes, except that any one library will probably have a more restricted group of readers, consisting of the partners and employees of the maintaining firm or establishment.

If the problem of providing such rooms comes to an architect, he should get instructions from the proprietor and librarian as to its special needs in shelving and other facilities.

In Chicago especially, where part of expense of such libraries is sometimes assumed by the Public Library, they cover a wide field of usefulness and assume proportionate importance.

Their number seems likely to increase rapidly as large firms differentiate, become wealthy, and can use technical libraries for the solution of manufacturing and commercial questions arising so frequently in every-day business that time and expense can be saved by having their own books handy instead of getting them from more public libraries.

Law. Literature of this class has such a peculiar use that law libraries need separate treatment and merit a special chapter. They are sometimes small, as county law libraries; or large—law-school, bar, city, state. They will usually be assigned to rooms in state capitols, city halls, or court houses, and trustees should exert early and strenuous efforts toward getting good and adequate locations assigned to them.

With good elevator service, it is certain that a whole top floor of the building, or the top floors of a roomy wing, will give the quietest, lightest, and most commodious quarters.

As both the study and practice of the law largely rest on precedents, the books which are most frequently cited have to be shelved close to ample table or desk facilities.

No matter how ample these are, every seat is apt to be filled during the busy hours of the day.

Lawyers like to look up, pick out, and themselves take to their desks, the books they want to use, and therefore there should be open access to all the shelves.

Alcoves are proper here, but more for extending shelf room—really wide open-access floor cases—than for study, which is better at tables.

Space enough is desirable on the main floor for all the books in common demand and for most of the readers.

The quarters recently obtained by the Social Law Library in the new extension of the court house in Boston, though not especially erected for the library, are very satisfactory. They comprise a long, lofty room, thoroughly lighted from high windows, with wall and alcove shelving opposite the light; with gallery possibilities for future growth; an opening to the main story of a stack; and a few rooms for hearings and quiet brief-making. The alcoves are wide enough for passing, but not for study at table. The long tables occupy that half of the length of the room which adjoins the outer wall and have ample diffused rather than direct daylight from windows high up in the wall.

One thing the Boston Social Law Library could not obtain space for, and which would be very desirable, is a sufficiency of private study rooms. In planning for the library, a circular with questions was sent to several large law libraries. One question was, “How many private rooms could you use?” All answers called for several rooms; one librarian would like to have fifty.

The tendency in all libraries is toward ample opportunities for quiet study, but in law libraries, authors, investigators, makers of briefs, especially need privacy and abstraction.

Government: Historical

U. S. Government. Libraries for the United States government are generally located in the national capitol. One has a separate building, the Library of Congress. The others are attached to the Departments and housed in the Department Buildings.

They may be treated much as law libraries are; indeed a large part of each of them constitutes a law library. Set aside for them well-lighted rooms with a good aspect, in a quiet part of the building. If the rooms are as lofty as the floors of the ordinary department building require, arrange for a two or three-story steel stack. There will be limited service to be provided for, limited circulation, and a rather limited and well-defined storage.

A special problem may soon come, in the form of legislation for a Supreme Court building, which must certainly provide for the consultation library of the Supreme Court, and perhaps for a great part of the Congressional Law Library. In the first instance, the collocation of court room, consultation room, judges’ private apartments, and library, will have to be carefully studied. If the main law library is to come to the new building, it will preponderate architecturally, with the necessary reading and study rooms for the bar. Strong common sense, and able library and juridical advice, will be required to avoid smothering the very definite uses of such a building in architectural embellishments.

State. Each state in the American Union has at least one “state library” at the capital, usually in the capitol, maintained at public charge primarily for the use of state officers, legislators and courts. Latterly they have become also central reference libraries for schools, colleges and citizens throughout the state, and traveling library centers, requiring special facilities for these services. They also require storage for public documents—very near dead literature, fit for close and perhaps dark storage. The growth of state libraries is phenomenal, largely from exchange of documents with other states and the United States, an immense and rapidly increasing literature (quadrupling every twenty-five years) which must be shelved in some form.

“There must be a division of a state library into law, documents, and miscellaneous, with a separate building for law and documents.... I am inclined to see the ideal state library as a great warehouse building. I want a dignified, simple, fireproof building; with heat, light, ventilation, conveniences for work, the very best that can be made, and without a dollar for elaborate display.”—Johnson Brigham, State librarian of Iowa.[36]

In building new state capitols, and in replacing old ones, there is considerable work ahead. In such an impressive and dignified building as the people want, the real needs of departments of the government, especially of the library, get scant consideration. To the library is often assigned some part of a prominent wing whose features, height of stories, size and arrangement of windows, style of shelving and furniture, are largely governed by supposed exigencies of the exterior, developed before the interior has been planned. It will require superhuman effort on the part of librarian to get model library quarters into such environment, but tact, early work, and persistence can often ameliorate conditions. Galleries and alcoves you will probably have to accept and do the best you can with, but it is open to some daring architect to build a stack in full sight, occupying the back half of the inevitable high room, with stack windows on the outside, giving an organ tone to the façade, and an open stack front within to give a similar tone to the interior.

Separate Library Buildings. Large states have already begun to give separate buildings to their general or at least to their law libraries (see [Law]). Such a segregation is to be commended, if space and money can be afforded, for here the library problems can be treated without prejudice, unhampered by traditions of American State Capitol Architecture.

“I am sure I would never put the State Library in the Capitol. The number of books the state legislature and officers use is very limited.”—Dewey.[37]

Simple construction, appropriate fenestration, interior planning beforehand with definite purposes, disregard of outside flights of steps and porticos, compression of inside passages to a minimum, quiet and restful shape and coloring, may yet produce buildings both useful and beautiful, which people of taste will come thousands of miles to see. Here is a fertile field for state librarians, state commissions, and talented architects.

Historical. Though not always on the same grounds as the state library, most such libraries are situated at the capitol, and have similar characteristics. They ought surely to have dignity and nobility of style, as they have in subject. They are entirely reference libraries, and should have preponderant accommodations for students and investigators, but in proportion to their size they have needs as to storage of books and for readers, very like those of other reference libraries. So far as they include antiquities, they need museum rooms and corridors in their buildings, usually assembly and lecture rooms, and always large fireproof safe rooms or vaults.

See full floor plans of the Wisconsin State Historical Society Building.—Adams.[38]

Genealogical and Antiquarian. So far as libraries are called distinctly antiquarian rather than historical, the museum function increases. Antiquities, even strictly literary, require different treatment from books. Glass doors for larger wall cases, glass cases for manuscripts and incunabula, merit wider corridors and rooms of different proportions, with different lighting. There must be more screens and free wall room for maps, engravings and pictures. There must be different service and supervision.

Genealogy has become such a favorite fad, and has so many societies which foster it, that separate space, perhaps separate buildings, will have to be provided for it. The features of such buildings, however, need have no marked distinction from historical and antiquarian libraries.

Educational

The library needs of all these educational institutions are similar. It has been said that there are three classes to be considered,—professors, graduate or advanced students, and undergraduates.

The ordinary youthful students do not get much time for general reading and do not need unrestricted access to all the shelves. If they can get at general and special reference books, their own text-books, and the books recommended by their instructors, it is all they want.

The professors and teachers, however, and to a certain extent advanced students, may wish to browse anywhere, and can be trusted to go anywhere. They want facilities for examining and selecting books in the stacks, they want quiet rooms to take books to (perhaps several books) where they can read, copy and write.

The professors want department and “seminar” rooms, shelved sometimes for permanent sub-libraries of their own technical books, always for books of present use in their daily classes. They also like to have individual rooms for study, and for their records.

The relation of these rooms to the general library is the peculiar and pressing problem of scholastic library building. Dr. Canfield said that the question, shall departmental libraries be included in the building of the general library? has not two sides, but a dozen.

School Libraries. These should not perhaps be treated here, as they rarely, perhaps never, have separate buildings. But as schools rise in grade, or are grouped in large buildings, their libraries may attain size and individual character, and the rooms assigned to them need careful planning. Good light first, with cheerful aspect; an accessible central position; wall shelving, combined perhaps with shallow alcoves opposite windows; spaces and tables for teachers and for scholars of different grades; a central space for general reference books, an attendant, and what passing to and fro is necessary; as good artificial light as the classrooms,—these would seem obvious desiderata.

College. Colleges and universities vary little except in size, and perhaps in the proportion advanced investigation and large departments bear to prescribed undergraduate study.

Rather open stacks, with carrels, would be preferable in a college; a good general reading room, or a suite of rooms slightly differentiated; nooks and private desks, with a private room or rooms for professors; wall shelving in professors’, class or seminar rooms, with shallow alcoves or floor cases at end of rooms for possibilities of enlargement.

Simple, central, inexpensive administration, with tubes or telephones to different rooms and departments; a central position in the college group or building, ample provision for growth, as gifts come in—these points suggest themselves.

At the St. Louis Conference in 1889, a suggestion was made that inasmuch as the library is the heart of a university, it should be given a central position from which the other buildings should radiate.[39]

University. Many universities are so large that most of their problems have been suggested in the chapter on Very Large Libraries.

Here the question of seminar or department libraries becomes acute. In some respects it is analogous to that of branches to a public library, but it is far more complicated.

How many departments are to be provided for; how far can they be served from the main library; if they are to have separate libraries, how large should these be; do they need permanent libraries, or only books sent from time to time; how far shall they duplicate the contents of the central library; how far shall they have department librarians under control of the general librarian? All these questions affect the planning of buildings.

Law and medicine generally have separate buildings and separate administration. As to other departments, systems vary in universities. Indeed, no two seem to have the same system. The one adopted at Brown is simple, inexpensive, efficient. This assigns all the departments to a separate building, not far from the central library, and connected with it by telephone, tunnel, and mechanical carrier. This building has a central room for one attendant. Round him are grouped the reference books needed by all departments, and any professor, through him, can call books at will from the delivery desk at the main library. In this arrangement each department can have its own shelving, and its head can have an adjoining private room, with convenient storage for his own books and papers.

A system, some variety of which seems common, provides wings or galleries on various floors for the seminar rooms, more or less conveniently served from the main library.

Other universities have their departments dotted around the grounds, wherever they happen to have been placed from time to time, without apparent reference to the library, and served from it only by messenger.

Others have seminar rooms built in various forms near the library building, with bridges or arcades between, by which they have access to their own branch of literature, stored in an adjacent part of the library.

Others again have rooms fitted more or less cleverly into the body or corners of a general stack. A very convenient location would be a special seminar story over the stack, with both top and side light, which would allow a large number of rooms of any required sizes.

Without the seminar complication, Mr. Patton[40] is perhaps right in saying that the college library presents a simpler problem than the public library, for it has less circulation, and no children to deal with; but with it, especially on a large scale, this is one of the most perplexing puzzles of library planning.

Mr. Patton also suggests[41] that the best location for a college library is one that does not require architectural façades on all sides, and that a slope backwards has advantages. The same may be said of many other kinds of libraries.

In a recent number of the Popular Science Monthly[42] it is suggested that a university might be built in a compact group, with a common façade, as beautiful as possible; offices and lecture rooms to be directly behind this show front; the library occupying a central position further back, flanked by the departments, all connected and all built on “the unit plan” for easy enlargement sideways, endways, up, or down.

In recent projects, there seems to be a tendency toward schemes for a college group, evolved evidently not from the use of the several buildings, but from desire for architectural harmony. Those interested in the library should strive to have it omitted from any such general scheme, and relegated to any modest position in the background, where its details could be worked out without any such exterior bias.

The position of the general reading room is another major problem. In a small college it can be put, as a single room or a suite, almost anywhere within easy reach, near the main entrance, and preferably on the main floor. In a large university a one-story ground floor room in the center of the building, just back of the main entrance, not too high (lest the roof cut off too much light from the lower windows of the wings opening on the courtyard), would seem to be a good location.

Administration rooms, as in other libraries, should be central, well lighted, suitably collocated, and quiet. The delivery desk would better be separate from the reading room, unless it could be combined with the service desk in that room, and so placed toward the entrance end or side as not to let the stir and noise disturb readers.

Where to put the catalog cases adjoining both departments, with good light, is usually another puzzle inviting study.

Public Libraries

“For the American people the library of the future is unquestionably the free public library, established with private or public funds, and maintained wholly or in part at public expense under municipal control.”—Fletcher.[43]

“The ‘public library’ is established by state laws, supported by local taxation and voluntary gifts, and managed as a public trust. It is not a library simply for scholars, but for the whole community, the mechanic, the laborer, the youth, for all who desire to read, whatever be their rank or condition in life.”—William F. Poole.[44]

“The library of the immediate future for the American people is unquestionably the free public library, brought under municipal ownership and control and treated as part of the educational system.”—Dana, L. P.[45]

The building of the public library must recognize and serve these noble aims. The idea of public libraries is as old as Rome; their aims are essentially modern in their democracy.

“Modern ideas of the functions of a public library are,—lending books for home use; free access to the shelves; cheerful and homelike surroundings; rooms for children; co-operation with schools; long hours of opening; the extension of branch-library systems and traveling libraries; lectures and exhibits; the thousand and one activities that distinguish the modern library from its more passive predecessor.”—Bostwick.[46]

The impulse of these ideas should be practically felt in the planning of buildings. Precedents, models, the fetters of architectural style, must be thrown aside where they impede or hamper progress. Architecture must march side by side with Library Science, should even lead it and show it the most effective ways to work out the new idea.

In the first place, “cheerful and homelike surroundings” do not accord with lofty rooms, vast halls, and heavy architecture; and dazzling decoration must not repel the man in a working suit.

Popular features should not entirely banish books and accommodations for students. “Every public library should be a library of study. Besides professional scholars and teachers, even authors or editors among residents, there are students in the higher schools, university extension students, members of literary clubs, cultivated college graduates, lawyers, clergymen, who should find congenial facilities in a building meant for the whole community.”—Fletcher.[47]

On the other hand, it would be a shame to let such serious reading and literature crowd out any popular or educational features, or take an undue share of the construction or maintenance funds.

What should be especially planned for, is inviting and cozy provision for the ambitious young men or women who want to educate themselves either by general reading, or by the special literature of their occupation in life; and for the tired women whether housekeepers, workers or idlers, who can find in books or magazines or papers relaxation and recreation from their home burdens.

Children’s rooms, now always a principal feature to be planned, will have a separate chapter.

Branch. The branch library, as distinguished from distributing or delivery stations, has its own building, and deserves as careful study as the main library in a small city. Branches vary from merely local stations relying on main libraries for most of the administrative work, to branches practically independent. The problem of branch libraries has come into prominence recently, especially since Carnegie has made so many gifts in this direction. Most of them fall into the “small” grade, but in large cities many rise to the “moderate” and even “medium” figures. One branch library in Philadelphia, with special endowment, cost $800,000, but that is very exceptional.

The first question is site. Good authorities say that there ought to be branches about a mile apart; one, that is, within half a mile’s walk of any family. Crunden says,[48] “The ideal would be to have a branch library as often as we have a public school.” The average constituency of branches in Great Britain is said to be 60,000. In this country it has been suggested that there ought to be one for every 40,000 dense population, or one to 25,000 in opener districts. But there can be no invariable rule. Circumstances differ as well as available funds.

Chas. W. Sutton of Manchester, in an article on branch libraries,[49] summarizes:—

“There should be a lending library for every 40,000 in close populations, 25,000 or 30,000 in scattered communities.

“Placed on car lines in the thick of the population.

“Not more than a mile apart.

“Never more than 15,000 volumes in stock.

“A majority consider 10,000 volumes a great sufficiency even in a large city branch.[50]

“No library with less income than $7,500 should try branches. It would be cheaper to pay borrowers’ carfares to and from the main library.”

See Bostwick, “Branches and Stations.”[51]

A good general rule is to watch neighborhoods, especially outlying districts, and notice where schools or fire department buildings are demanded, and where little groups of local stores spring up. These groups usually form in the most accessible localities in new districts. It has been said that branches in residence quarters are more used than those in business centers. This is undoubtedly true of business sections in large cities, but, nevertheless, even locations in residence quarters should be chosen for ready access, and ready access with local demands has already selected such locations for stores in smaller places. A lot near a schoolhouse is always good: it is handy for the children.

Like other small libraries, branches have to be planned for easy supervision and economical service, hence, all departments should be on one floor, with high basement, if possible, for janitor, heating, toilet, and possible social service functions, like classes and lectures. Provide for delivery, a few quick-reference books, and a limited stock of books to be lent.

The number of books to be shelved will vary with the constituency, from 2,000 to 15,000 volumes—the fewer the better. When once settled, no growth need be provided for, as disused books can be sent back to the central library from time to time, to make place for new books. Nor will administration grow largely. But growth in the parts allotted to different kinds of reading, to children, and to social service functions must be provided for, inside the building preferably.

Corners, or railed-off parts of rooms, will separate periodicals and other light reading from children, reference books and delivery desk. Readers should be able to choose books and help themselves by absolutely open access, to minimize cost of service. Very little provision need be made for serious readers, who can be referred to the central library. If any cataloguing is to be done at the branch, a librarian’s room must be provided. If not, and there is only one attendant, an enclosed delivery desk is enough, and the space usually taken up by a librarian’s room can be given to books or readers.

The conditions in city branches will be very similar to those in small towns, with perhaps less of the neighborhood club, and more of the social service idea, without any problems of increased storage of books, and with more difficulties in foreseeing changes.

As to cost, a report to the city of New York recommended $5,000 for small branches, and up to $10,000 for large ones. But in Brooklyn and other cities, separate branches for sections as large as, and situated like, suburban towns, have cost as high as $150,000.

A very interesting case of establishing several branches at once may be found in a description of the Brooklyn plan.[52]

In New York city, to get more branches than could be afforded in buying expensive sites, and to get them where they were wanted, single buildings in the midst of blocks have been taken.

In England, many of the newer branches include “social center” functions, not only ladies’, boys’, ratepayers’, conversation, and attendants’ tea rooms, but even in one case a restaurant, which is expected “to provide a large share of the cost of maintenance.”

See Bindery, [p. 253].

See Bostwick, under Rooms for Classes, p. 325, prox.

Suburban. Suburban libraries differ on the one hand from country libraries in remote regions, and on the other from branches in cities. They are near enough for “team work” with the library system of the city in whose suburbs they lie, but they serve an independent community, often jealous of its privileges. They have not quite the problems of growth of the country library, because they can have an inter-library loan system with the city libraries, or can arrange to refer to them many inquirers and students. This possibility may limit the size and expense of their buildings, and the necessity of providing for unlimited growth.

Exceptional Cases

Middle of Blocks. Occasionally, as with the present Cincinnati Public Library, and with the New York City branch libraries, circumstances require the location of the building in a block. Of course this necessity is a handicap. The problem of giving all the departments good positions and full light is difficult when there is space all round the four walls, but when both side walls are blank, ingenuity is required in providing all the requisites for every department. Natural light everywhere is impossible, and artificial light must be largely relied on. Whatever features (like closets and stairs where there are no books to be picked out or read) can be assigned to the middle or waist of each floor, will leave more chance for front and rear use of clear daylight. The top floor can be all utilized with top light. A light well from the center of the roof will mitigate the dimness of illumination on staircases and entries. The experience of New York is valuable for such problems, and would doubtless be freely available. But it is a good rule to avoid such locations, if possible.

Top Floors. Exigencies of income may require a Board to rent part of their building, as in the case of many of the “Mercantile” libraries which still survive. While the St. Louis Public was a school-board library, it had this experience. In these days of roomy and rapid elevators, such a necessity is not so bad as it seems, especially if one or two rooms in a public library could be left on the ground floor. At the top there is usually good air, comparative quiet, coolness, and light, even in smoky cities. Modern methods of construction carry great weights safely, and it is possible to plan service and reading rooms on the top floor with one or two-story stacks beneath, giving fine accommodations with good business suites earning income, on floors beneath. Separate elevators for business and for library purposes are, however, essential.

Museums or Art Galleries in Same Building. There is so rarely enough money available to allow as much room as the library wants, and there is usually so much friction in operating more than one institution under one roof, that while there is general belief in the value of museums and galleries as public undertakings, there is great unanimity among American librarians that they are better apart. Few librarians with us have the training which would fit them to undertake the superintendence of such different departments, and fewer still would like to be superintended by a musician or scientist. Yet, if together in one building, there should be one superior officer for all, even if he be called only custodian. The difficulties of planning a building to provide properly and amply for more than one of these three functions are just three times the puzzle of planning for one. Where a city wants to try it, or a donor insists on it, it is far better to plan a group of three buildings on one large lot, with such connection by arcades as would give a pleasing architectural bond, without shutting out any light, at least from the library.

Those who are interested in such combinations are referred to the English library books and magazines, passim. The union of libraries and museums in England, indeed, is so common as to be recognized in the Library Acts. If art or other exhibitions are a feature of the library management, they can be provided for as suggested under the head of exhibitions elsewhere.

Alterations and Enlargements. Often existing residences or halls are presented for library use. The proverb, “Never look a gift-horse in the mouth,” does not apply in such cases. The gift building ought to be examined all over by experts—an expert librarian and an architect, if possible—before it is accepted. It will often be found to cost more for alteration, before the old building can be quite suited to library purposes, than a plain but satisfactory new building would cost. Certainly it is unwise to hamper library efficiency out of a sentimental regard for a donor, alive or dead.

If the building is found susceptible of inexpensive alterations, which would render it entirely suitable for such work as the library wants to do, it will evidently be unwise to trust the task to an architect, inexperienced in library alterations, or even to the advice of an immature librarian. Here, if ever, is there need, from the side of economy as well as the side of utility, of a wise library expert, for fear of making a botch.

So in making alterations in an old library building which requires enlargement, do not accept the hasty suggestions of even the most ingenious and confident trustee, or the prentice plans of a callow librarian or a young architect. Get the best plan you can secure from the best authorities. The best will be none too good for you. Justice to your successors and to the next generation requires the utmost care in piece work.

See an article by Miss Annie B. Jackson,[53] on items and expense of alterations at North Adams, Mass. The repairs there proved to outrun the estimate.

When you get your tentative plans and your rough estimates, get also a rough estimate for a new building. You will often be surprised to find how near the cost of alterations will come to that of building. If it turns out so, better wait and get your ideal rather than patch up a makeshift.

But if, after deliberation, you vote to alter, there is one wise end to aim at, that is, to spend as small a part of your available funds for mere alteration, and as large a part for features which could be utilized later for a permanent building, as may be possible. Witness, for instance, the recent experience of the Salem Public Library.[54] They had pressing need of more room, but could use only $70,000 for changes, not enough for such a new building as they wanted, or could afford while they had a perfectly sound old residence to use. But by ingenious planning, they have been able to get a stack with an administration head house, to which they can add later a main building when they need further enlargement. They have spent a minimum in temporary changes on their old dwelling-house, and have besides retained enough money to build a branch library.

Altering New Buildings. It is not only old buildings that need altering. Too frequently a good librarian, alive to progress, and faced with the problems of growth, finds himself promoted to a beautiful building of such recent erection as to be financially exhausted, and indisposed to spend money in necessary additions or alterations. The question confronts him, how get more room with the least cost?

In this fix, he will first look inside and see where he can house more books, more readers, more attendants. Here shortcomings of the architect may perhaps afford him at least temporary relief. The most likely fault he finds will be wasted space, perpendicularly or laterally. Two faults are bad; they cannot even be converted into virtues. These are domes and ornamental staircases. Domes, to be sure, can be circled with galleries to which unused books can be sent—a very brief palliative. And elevators or lifts may be cut into stairs. But such makeshifts will not serve.

More opportunities may be discovered in spacious vestibules, in wide corridors, in lofty stories. The vestibules and corridors can be narrowed to simply useful width, and their exuberance partitioned off into rooms. Mezzanine floors can also utilize waste upper spaces.

If money cannot be found for partitions and floors, for iron and wood and paint, I see a good use for sliding cases, in the form Professor Little has at Bowdoin—just two or more stories of this contrivance, set out in the corner or at the side or in the middle of any useless stretch of floor.

Tables and chairs can invite an overflow of readers in any space not needed for passage; temporary wooden shelving can be set against any corridor wall; administration desks can be protruded into any architectural waste. When you go to Washington, see what Mr. Bowerman has done at the Public Library there.

B.
PRINCIPLES

This Book groups together rather loosely, important considerations which as said at the bottom of [page 90] ought to be reiterated and hammered into the consciousness of all concerned.

B.
PRINCIPLES

SPIRIT OF PLANNING

Every new library building should be thoroughly planned with a view to its class, scope, size, funds, site, environment, experience, and cost of administration. True economy begins with a good plan. Not only present cost but future annual costs depend on it.

The main thing in beginning to plan, even in the first consideration of building, is to set your ideal high. If your funds are not yet provided do not take it for granted that they will be meagre. Study the scope of your library, look hopefully into its future. What work should it do now; what growth should it get in the next twenty-five years? What size and area are needed to meet your utmost possibilities in that time? Consider first only the essentials—they will be costly enough. When you have made careful calculation of actual needs (and nothing else) ask your donor, town or institution for what would cover them. Do not at first include expensive material or ornament. If the body that is to pay requires elegance, calculate cost of this and present it as a separate question.

Set your ideal of utility high, and ask enough to cover it. If you cannot get it, then and not till then will be time to decide what to surrender.

If the amount to be spent is already fixed, still study ideals first. Can we get all the requisites for this library within that sum? If it is evidently impossible; if building thus would stifle usefulness or stunt growth, ask for more. But if you cannot get it, or if you think the appropriation can be made to cover the work, the ideal to aim at is to pack into the building ample accommodation for every function you will need to cover.

Above all, make these calculations ahead. When the sum is finally fixed, resolve to plan so carefully that the final cost will come within the appropriation. Like a note to pay, this obligation is peremptory.

“The main ideas are, compact stowing to save space, and short distances to save time.”—Winsor.[55]

This axiom written a generation ago would serve to head this chapter now. Also this, “In building, as in management, the wants of the great masses of the public must be kept constantly in view.”—Poole.[56]

“The evolution of a design is not such a simple matter that the finished idea can be produced in a short time, but it must depend on a gradual evolution, based upon a thorough study of the local conditions.”—Patton.[57]

“A building can be made both beautiful from the architect’s standpoint and useful from that of its occupant, by constant consultation between them, by comparison of views at every point, and by intelligent compromise whenever this is found to be necessary.”—Bostwick.[58]

Taste, Tact, Thrift, Thoroughness

The spirit of planning is summarized in the apothegm on the frontispiece of this volume.

Tastefully. Although Vitruvius reckons beauty third and last among the requisites of building, I can put taste first, because good taste covers both beauty and use and should be the prevailing characteristic of every detail of a library building.

Tactfully. Webster defines tactful as a discerning sense of what is right, proper, or judicious, and this sense applied to the details of library planning would certainly tend to perfection.

Thriftily. “Economical management” should be the keynote embodied in every detail of library building.

Thoroughly. This should be the pervading and controlling spirit. Plan to the very end; aim for the very best; slight no least detail.

This is so essential to proper planning that it deserves a separate chapter. To lack of thoroughness on the part of building committees, much of the disappointing character of existing buildings is due. They choose an architect directly or by competition, and give him inadequate guidance in his task.

An architect knows much, especially where to look for knowledge, but it is too much to expect him to master in a month or a year, together with a score of other investigations, the intricacies of a complex and rapidly developing science in which only a few librarians are expert after a lifetime of study and practice.

The committees, not experts themselves, have not secured a library expert to formulate their problems thoroughly. Perhaps they have delegated to their own librarian a branch of library science which he does not know by experience, and cannot be expected to learn in a short time by study; especially as his normal duties of running the library fully fill all his waking hours, and part of his dreams. It is not so much a lack of thoroughness on the part of the committee as an entire lack of comprehension of how much there is to be thorough about.

Use Every Inch of Space. Begin at the foundation and study every detail. Study every entrance, passage, stairway, room, floor, piece of furniture, stretch of shelving, up to the roof; sketch as you go, sketch not loosely but to scale. Fit your parts together; leave no waste space, no dark corner unutilized. Measure zealously and save every inch of length, breadth and height; every useless cubic inch costs money and wastes room. Plan a closet under every open staircase. Watch especially the height of every story and every room. Do not allow any foot of height not imperatively demanded for light or ventilation. Allow nothing for mere architectural effect. Search even attic and ceiling to utilize unutilized corners. Do not blame the architect, blame yourself, the library expert, for any waste of space and money.

Economy Paramount

In public buildings, the duty of rigid economy is clear,—economy in cost, economy in space, provision for economy in administration. Even with a lavish donor, his generosity should be guarded by economy, especially if he does not endow his institution lavishly enough to provide for upkeep and efficient management. This is an age of extravagance, not only the extravagance of luxury, but that of necessity. With invention and improved comforts of living, the luxuries of our fathers have become the necessities of our children. This is just as true of libraries as of households. Even with larger incomes than our fathers, we have to be economical to live in health and comfort. With libraries and with families as their income increases their wants increase—they never have enough. Especially is forethought needed in building a larger house. Do not spend too much on it; do not build it beyond your means. But get everything into it you can reasonably afford to use. So with a library building. If you have a given sum to spend, plan very carefully to get all possible space and convenience for the cost. If you are planning to ask for an appropriation or a gift, plan carefully to ask for no more than you actually need;—your needs are sure to require as much as you can afford. The tendency to extravagance is even more marked in public buildings than in private life. Except in the case of rich men who feel the increased burden of taxation, the average citizen is apt to vote money for schools and libraries and city halls, without careful enough inquiry into details and with rather a liking for show. But every real friend of libraries ought to oppose extravagance as watchfully as he would oppose parsimony, and plan so that a given amount of money will do the most good. Use and not show should be his motto. Treat the library liberally, but do not allow the library building to take so much as to cramp the other good work of the community.

“One of the most difficult features of the problem is adapting the views of librarian and board to the cost limit.”—Hamlin.[59]

“Plan well within your limit; extra wants will come up as you progress.”—Eastman.

Cost of Running

Not only first cost but future annual cost of administration, depends upon careful planning of the building. Care and repairs of expensive material and ornament; cleaning, heating and lighting useless floor space or height; inconvenience in use; separation of departments, will require more attendants and more money, with worse service to the public.

“Extravagance in library building is not so often found in lavish ornament as in that unfortunate arrangement of departments which requires three attendants to do the work of one or two.”—Eastman.[60]

“The salary of an extra attendant represents the interest on a sum which would go far to make the arrangement of the parts of the building what it should be.”—Fletcher.[61]

Duff-Brown[62] calculates that lighting, heating, repairs and cleaning cost from 13 to 16 per cent of the annual appropriation for a library. This percentage can be kept to its lowest limit by good planning, or increased by bad planning.

“A plan most economical in cost of building is often most economical in cost of working.”—Champneys.[63]

“A simple plan is better and more economical.”—Eastman.[64]

Not only economy of construction but economy of administration is imperatively demanded.

The Worst Extravagances

The very worst possible waste in building a library is doubtless unduly expensive material and unnecessary ornament. These items often mount up into tens and even hundreds of thousands. They are worse than mere waste, they are positive detriments.

The next worst is perhaps architectural competitions, which are spoken of at length elsewhere.[65] They are sure to cost a deal: payment for an advisory architect, payment of prizes, payment of the jury. Here again there is more than waste, there is delay, a false start, deliberate care to put exterior before interior.

The third common extravagance is parsimony in experts’ fees. Champneys[66] in speaking of architects’ errors, says that “to this fact must be attributed the suggestion that librarians should dispense with the services of architects, and design their buildings for themselves.” This suggestion may have been made in England, but never in America, even in acute periods of despair over the trend of building. No American librarian, no building committee, would think of dispensing with an architect, though they might try to economize by getting a cheap one.

But it is just as wasteful to cheapen your library adviser as your architect. Because it has a librarian already, or because the architect chosen is willing to tackle the job without expert advice (perhaps more readily because he resents advice), or because it is inclined to contemn and resent advice itself, the committee often commits willful extravagance at the outset, saving at the spigot to waste at the bung, by going poorly equipped into a serious task.

Economy of Expert Advice

But “penny wise is pound foolish.” Saving first cost is not always true economy. It would be foolish indeed to save on architect’s fees. For a little one-room wooden building, to be sure, a local carpenter might do, under the supervision of a clever librarian or a practical trustee. But as soon as the building gets complex, get an architect. His fees will save enough in convenience, in comfort, in grace, in beauty, in actual money outgo to contractors, to prove themselves the best economy. Just so, as the problem gets still larger and more complex, get the advice of an expert librarian to help present it to the architect. He will more than earn his fees by keeping down useless waste of space; by pointing out how to economize in running expenses; by aiding the architect to enhance the beauty of the building; by promoting and thus expressing its true purposes.

I have now had some personal experience in this matter which I will put into percentages. From what I have seen, I not only believe, but know, that one per cent of the cost of building, put into employing a really competent expert librarian, will save from ten per cent to forty per cent on the cost, in space, convenience and material. If you doubt, why not verify the facts by inquiring of some trustees or donors who have tried the experiment? They are surely unprejudiced and credible witnesses. One per cent spent in saving ten per cent is a net economy, worth at least considering.

This principle, first applied to library matters by Henry J. Carr in 1891, has been recognized recently by the Mayor of Rochester. Having in hand the establishment of a central library and a system of branches, he sent for a leading librarian of great experience, got his advice, for which a liberal fee was paid, and no doubt thus saved for the city thousands of dollars which might otherwise have been wasted in experiments and bungling.

“The internal arrangements should be devised by a person practically acquainted with the working of such a library as the building is intended to accommodate, and not by architects or building committees” (or inexperienced librarians) “without such experimental knowledge.”—Fletcher.[67]

“There is an increasing disposition in planning libraries, to turn to experts,”—Foster.[68]

No experienced librarian would allow without vigorous protest such waste of space and money as is referred to in the Boston Transcript[69] thus: “The increased cost of administration in some of the newer palatial library buildings is alarming. In one, the cost was nearly threefold, in another nearly fourfold what it was before.” This might have been saved, or at least largely reduced, by paying a modest fee to a good expert.

Calculate the cost of each cubic foot of wasted space, the cost for twenty years to come of lighting, heating, cleaning and repairs for useless space; the salary of additional attendants to care for unnecessary processes, and you will find that economizing on advice will waste thousands of dollars.

Problem Always New

It is folly to try to copy except perhaps in a minimum grade library—in embryo or rudimentary form. Perhaps in a very small and remote community, without a trained librarian, with no experienced librarians near, and far from a library commission, it would be safe to ask a local builder or carpenter to duplicate some small building pictured in such a manual as I have suggested, by Miss Marvin and Mr. Eastman. But never except in the smallest grade.

Even among the libraries usually called small, there are differences of site, location, community, state of development, size, methods, aims, funds, prospects of growth, which will distinguish or should distinguish each new building from all other buildings. As soon as a library begins to have a character of its own—and this development comes early in America—its library problem merits and absolutely requires independent study. Every community, every institution, wants to have a library suited exactly to its characteristics, and the library should have a building suited exactly to its character.

“The problem presented to an architect by a library board is always essentially new.”—Mauran.[70]

“Special and local conditions place a new problem before the builder every time.”—O. Bluemner.[71]

Plan Inside First

Librarian and architect should collaborate from the beginning in every interior detail. The exterior should not even be considered until the interior has been entirely mapped out.

This elemental maxim does not appear to have been laid down until the formulation of the “Points of Agreement.” Indeed, the first mistakes in building libraries, and the mistakes still too often made, may be attributed largely to the search for precedents in style, the formulation of the exterior before what it is to hold or express is defined. Most architectural competitions (except those held to dodge responsibility in selecting an architect) arise from an impression on the part of the building committee and the board and community they represent, that the looks of the library building, the effect it makes on the public, is the main thing to secure, not so much the proper housing and handling of the books.

The whole argument of this volume is that a library is a library, a book- and study-workshop or factory; only incidentally an ornament; no more, certainly, than a schoolhouse needs to be. If so, its motives are all utilitarian, to be studied out first of all, thoroughly and faithfully, before a thought is given to exterior conditions, or any details of exterior or interior ornament. This consideration should be reiterated and hammered into the consciousness of all concerned—architect, committee, community.

“Taking into account the practical uses of the modern library, it is readily seen that it needs a building planned from inside and not from without, dictated by convenience rather than taste, no matter how good.”—Fletcher.[72]

“Consider the plans first, rather than the elevation. The outside of the library building is its least important feature.”—Duff-Brown.[73]

The buildings planned thus, by gradual development of ideal interior arrangements, are very likely in the hands of a skillful architect to turn out architecturally beautiful. For the designer, as he has advised about structural points has gradually evolved from these details a harmonious conception of what the library is to be and do, the relation it holds to its surroundings and to the public, until an ideal scheme of proportion and sympathy flashes into his mind, and Utilitas has led him up to complete Venustas.

Never Copy Blindly

I should not suppose that any building committee would be senseless enough to “convey” an exterior from another building labelled “library,” and try to cram their own institution into it, but in reading a recent number of The Librarian of London, I found this paragraph:[74] “Within the last few weeks the surveyor was instructed to draw plans from a photograph of another institution.... Without knowing all the factors going to the making of the plan of a library in another part of the country it would be impossible to say, without consultation, that they would be suitable for the particular circumstances of this one.” But it is not necessary to go so far abroad for a warning. We all remember that eminent trustees and a distinguished architect went farther to appropriate a design, and imitate it here in America—not often accused of poverty of invention. The cult that admired it, admired it so much as to copy their borrowed work for buildings they labelled “libraries” all over the United States. If you do not realize the fidelity of this “copy,” and if you own Champney’s “Public Libraries,” look at page 134, “The Boston Public Library,” and then turn to “Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève, Paris,” opposite page 139. And if you have Burgoyne’s “Library Construction,” read pages 255 to 257, which reflect in mild and courteous terms the criticisms of American librarians on this architectural plagiarism. To recall the criticisms of Winsor, or Poole, or Cutter, would not be so mild.

As a result of similar mistakes, librarians are united as to slavish imitations of exteriors or interiors, but perhaps some small libraries might be willing to copy an interior arrangement more or less closely. Before doing so, however, they should secure overwhelming testimony as to the practical merits of the plan as adapted to new needs; and even then a practical librarian and architect could probably find modifications which would make it more thoroughly fitted to all local conditions. Certainly another plan ought not be copied until after careful consideration of all present and anticipated requirements of the problem in hand.

“No library can be successfully imitated from another.”—W. A. Otis (architect).[75]

“No model plan can be said to be best.”—Burgoyne.[76]

“It is useless to attempt setting forward an ideal plan.”—O. Bluemner.[77]

“A building committee is not likely to secure what it wants by copying or even by competition.”—Eastman.[78]

Study precedents always and thoroughly, but do not try to follow any of them implicitly, nor expect to find a type or model you can imitate.

Study of Other Libraries

By Visit. The best preparation for planning, and later the best test and corrective of your plans, will lie in visits to other libraries of like grade, size, character, and constituency as your own, especially if their librarians are intelligent, experienced, and thoroughly frank about both the merits and the faults of their buildings, and will tell you what to avoid as well as what to imitate. Observe carefully (with note-book and pencil in hand) size and collocation of rooms; height of walls; dimensions and make of furniture; suitability and finish of all materials; effect of coloring; placing and size of windows; distribution, effectiveness, and economy of artificial lights; all the various points which will aid you in solving your own problems. Carry a measuring tape, and get all dimensions down to scale. If your architect can go with you, at least on a second or review trip, so much the better. If he cannot do this, have specific recommendations ready for him at your next conference.

Examining Plans. Next to personal visits, intelligent inspection and comparison of plans will help you after you have gone some way toward formulating your own plans. I would not advise too premature, or too promiscuous study of plans. There are so many accessible to a searcher, of so many different grades, and such varying degrees of excellence, that indiscriminate and reckless inspection is very apt to bring on mental dyspepsia.

Disregard at first exteriors, which distract attention from essentials. Confine yourself to floor plans and interiors of libraries of your own size and class. Preferably take modern plans, certainly those of leading libraries in all sections which are imbued with the modern progressive ideas. You will find no lack of material. If you use it wisely and eclectically, it will help clarify your ideas. Note the plans which seem to you best; go back to them again and again; at each study discard those which are less satisfactory; and when you have reduced your list to a few very nearly right, compare them with your own sketches until you are quite sure that you have incorporated all their best points.

You will not perhaps have much access to English books. If you do you will find interesting views and plans in Duff-Brown, Burgoyne, Champneys, and Cotgreave; but they will hardly help you much, because English methods are somewhat different from ours. Some late plans for large libraries, given in “The Librarian,” seem to show wasteful attempts at architectural effect. Three things in the plans of small English libraries, you will note, and should learn from—the clever adaptation of irregular sites, the effective use of top-light, and the economy of space in entrance halls.

In America there are plans in plenty. The most helpful are the most recent.

Koch has over a hundred plans from all parts of the country, including branches, most of them costing from $10,000 to $50,000. But as yet he has no letter-press to explain the plans.

Miss Marvin gives exterior and interior views and floor plans, with full descriptions of twenty libraries, costing from $2,600 up to $75,000. No one should plan a library of any size without giving her pamphlet a careful reading.

Eastman gives exteriors, interiors and floor plans of twenty-five libraries, ranging in cost from $1,170 to $80,000.

H. B. Adams has twenty-five exteriors, forty interiors and only thirteen floor plans. Bostwick has seven floor plans.

The Massachusetts Public Library Commission Report for 1899 shows one hundred and twenty exteriors, with letter-press giving costs, but no interiors or floor plans.

The Boston Public Library Index to Plans of Library Buildings, second edition 1899, refers to over twelve hundred illustrations in various books, pamphlets and periodicals, of which the largest number are only exteriors, a few are interiors, one hundred and twenty only are floor plans.

There are many exteriors of libraries, usually without interiors or floor plans, published in popular and in architectural periodicals, but very few of them furnish valuable suggestions as to planning. Indeed much plan hunting will rather daze than instruct an investigator. A common defect in plans is the total absence of information about the height of rooms—a vital measurement. Indeed every plan should tell, both the height of each story, floor to floor, and the height of each room, floor to ceiling.

There are many interesting plans, with descriptions, scattered among annual or special library reports, but these have not been indexed together in any one place. If one of the library-schools could compile as a thesis, an index to plans of library buildings in books and magazines, distinguishing between exteriors, interiors, floor plans and letter-press information, and if someone like Mr. Eastman or Miss Marvin could supply comments as a guide through this mass of material, it would be a good thing for the A. L. A. Publishing Board to father. The A. L. A. itself once attempted to get a collection of floor plans and got about a hundred sets as a start, but I believe has never prepared any such card-index of features, with such comments as would make them valuable. I believe the Library Bureau has also a considerable collection of plans.

The Life of a Library Building

This is a crucial question in problems of building. In a recent discussion as to how much should be appropriated a trustee soberly urged that the library should have the finest, the most impressive, the most beautiful building in town, and that it should be built solidly enough to last hundreds of years, like the mediæval cathedrals. But besides the question of first cost, how far can a town afford to go in its expenditure for a library, while it has schools to build, roads to improve, sewers to lay, parks and playgrounds to develop? Besides this comes the question whether it is wise to erect such barriers to change as the walls and partitions of a too solid building would offer.

Opinion of librarians is practically unanimous to the effect that growth or change of methods will bring need of alterations, additions, or entire rebuilding, in all active libraries in less than a generation. Thus,—

“Librarians are among the most progressive of the world’s workers and a library building, however well arranged, may be out of date in a year or so.”—Edward B. Green.[79]

“You cannot foresee the future. Provide for ten years” (in a small library).—Miss Marvin.

“Estimate growth for twenty years.”—Eastman.

“It is not only unnecessary but unwise to plan for more than thirty years ahead, because library administration may radically change.”[80]

“Twenty-five years will probably find your building out of date, out of place, and a burden.”—Dana.[81]

“In England the Manchester library outgrew its building in forty-three years; at Leeds, in twenty-three years; at Glasgow, in twenty years; at Birmingham, in thirty years.”—Burg.[82]

My own calculations have been made for twenty-five years and I should call this the life of the average library building. Unless in very stagnant institutions and communities, there is sure to come, in much less than that time, say in five or ten years, growth in books or in use, requiring enlargement; again, equal growth in the next five, or ten years. Then the enlargements become entirely inadequate to new conditions or new management, and by the time the building has been occupied twenty-five years the trustees are fortunate if they have so little money invested that they can afford to pull it down and build a more modern building, arranged according to the latest ideas for the latest wants.

On the other hand an institution or a town may have money given it by a donor who wants a handsome and solid building. The question will then arise, “How compromise between certainty of change, and desire for permanence?” Why not in such case do what has been suggested for college libraries—put up a fine façade, to last a century or more, and use modern methods of light construction for all behind it; thus combining architectural effect with ease of alteration?

The Time to Build

Don’t Build too Soon. All authorities warn against building prematurely.

“It is a risky undertaking for a board to erect a building in the first stage of their enterprise. Better wait until its wants are developed in temporary quarters.”—Wm. F. Poole.[83]

“Don’t build until you have the library, the librarian, and the money.”—J. C. Dana.[84]

“Get your librarian, books, and methods first. Use rented rooms until you know what you want. Almost any rooms can be made to serve as a beginning, and can be so planned that the fixtures and furniture are all available for a new building. Experience will then teach just the kind of building that is needed for that particular town and library.”[85]

Alter Sparingly. In a building given you already occupied, make such not too expensive enlargements or alterations as growth absolutely demands, but take a long look ahead toward rebuilding. With the changes in library methods developing so rapidly, a patched old building soon becomes hopelessly out of date, and clogs progress. Better save up money and cultivate opinion in favor of building anew. Looking a generation ahead, economy alone will demand, at some not distant time, a building in which economy of time and service will be possible. Do not go down to posterity in patched-up old clothes.

But Begin to Prepare Early. As soon as your librarian is selected, your books bought, and your method started, it is never too early to think and talk building. It will take a long time of fixed purpose to work up to a gift or an appropriation. To canvass merits of sites, to study precedents of management, to calculate chances of development, to educate your librarian, to watch and ask about architects, to pick out deliberately the ideal building committee, will occupy many interesting hours at board meetings and consume months or years of preparation. While you are about it, time so taken will allow you to accumulate a lot of information, and to mature your judgment. If you have your librarian get him to look up the files of the library journals, and the annual reports of libraries of your grade and class, and such as are rather ahead of you, who have already realized what your future may be. In these you will pick up here and there many useful hints of experience. If you go to library club meetings and talk with trustees and librarians with similar problems to yours; if you take an occasional leisurely jaunt to well-managed neighboring libraries, you will absorb and be able to digest ideas which a hurried search, after beginning to build, might not elicit just when you want to use them.

And do not Put Off too Long. But when you are ready, go! Patient preparation has fitted all for wise decision and prompt action. There is a psychological moment at which public or donor may be carried by storm, and the necessary funds can be secured. He who hesitates then, is surely lost. When the money is secured, and sufficient experience or advice has been accumulated, the sooner you decide to begin to plan, the better. Beginning to plan, however, is remote from actual building. “Well lathered is half shaved” is a homely proverb, and the analogy holds in library planning, even for the smallest building. Months to formulate and fit together the first sketches, months to work them out practically with the architect, many conferences with the building committee, time after decision to prepare working plans, time still to invite and compare bids, then the slow processes of building,—there is a deal of delay ahead after the decision is made to build. You have just about got half through when you finish these preliminaries.

The time to build is therefore when you are very sure everything is ripe for action;—methods, preparation, plans, enthusiasm, harmony, good advice, suitable agents, sufficient funds.

Size and Cost

At the outset either the cost must be estimated as the first step toward getting an appropriation, a subscription, or a donation; or the cost has already been provided for, and the first step must be to see how large a building it will allow.

In the former alternative, it is necessary to ascertain how many books are to be provided for, how many readers there may be in the several departments to be covered by the work of that particular library, and how large a staff can be afforded, with ample elbow room for them all. The figures thus collected will enable an expert to give the number of rooms and passages required, with a maximum and minimum size, and a tentative location of each room. By deciding on the number of stories and the height of each, the architect can then pack all into the least possible space and calculate first the area of each floor and the cubic contents and cost of an adequate building, to be verified by the average cost of similar libraries in similar locations, built under similar conditions. A rough but surprisingly close estimate of the proper limit of cost may be reached through reversing Carnegie’s stipulation for a pledge of an annual ten per cent on cost for running expenses; and taking ten times what the library costs a year to run, or will take after completion. The result is testimony to the wisdom of Mr. Carnegie’s library advisers.

In the latter alternative the librarian and architect can at once get an approximation to a size which the cost will allow by dividing the sum available by the same pro forma cost per cubic foot. Having thus arrived at the maximum of size, they can tentatively assume the height and divide the cubic contents by it, to find how many square feet can be afforded to a floor. After this comes the puzzle how to get into this space the proper collocation of all the rooms wanted, as large as they ought to be.

See interesting calculation as to number of users to be provided for in the different departments (in England, not quite the same as ours) for towns of various sizes, by Champneys,[86] quoting Duff-Brown. His tables may suggest a basis of calculation here. See also Duff-Brown in his own book.[87]

The Cubic Cost. This question is not difficult, if you can reach a fairly exact standard for cost per cubic foot. Of course this will vary with the material used, and with the cost both of material and labor in different localities. Various authorities quote it variously. In the problems I have personally investigated, in eastern New England, I have found that thirty-five cents cost per cubic foot, for a simple warehouse-construction building, including stack and furniture, was not too much to allow. But Miss Marvin[88] says that in the Middle West the building proper will cost from 11 to 14 cents per cubic foot, or large solid buildings 20 to 25 cents, plus 10 per cent of the total for fees, furniture and finishing. As I always include these items in my calculations, the estimates are not far apart.

Our English brethren are able to do somewhat better if Champneys is correct—he ought to be, he is an architect. He says, “As a general rule, 1s. per cubic foot is probably about the right allowance in London, if all fixtures are included, while 9d. or 10d., or less, is sometimes sufficient in the provinces.”[89] Perhaps, however, he does not include fees and furnishing.

To calculate cubes, outside measurements of the walls should be taken for the square area, and the height should be measured from the floor of the basement to the roof, or to half-way from eaves to ridge-pole, if the roof is not flat.

Limiting Annual Outlay. In planning remember to watch not only first cost, but future expense of running your library. The more expensive your material, the larger its maintenance will probably be for care and repair. The larger your halls and stairways, the more diffuse your rooms, the farther departments are separated, the more wasteful your heating and lighting, the more your service will cost. Good planning may easily save you ten per cent on first cost, and twenty per cent every year for the life of the building—a whole generation. Calculate this saving for yourself, and be careful!

“It is impossible to have good administration without a building properly planned,”—The Libr. Asst.[90]

An architect generally overlooks those essentials which may appear trivial, yet are of the greatest importance.—Ibid.

Cutting Down Cost. From the first a wise planner will study to limit expense in every detail. After all possible economy, however, the wants will so outrun the possibilities, that when architect and librarian and adviser have agreed on a plan and it has been accepted by the building committee, the first experimental estimates will go beyond the limit.

On what points will it be possible to cut down, without serious sacrifice, from the library point of view?

In the first place, size. As cost is largely in proportion to cubic contents, every cubic foot saved pares down expense. It will generally be hard to spare floor area anywhere, but there can often be reduction of height in rooms or floors. The only real library requisites of height are air-capacity, and reach of light from windows across rooms. The architect often wants certain heights for architectural effect,—but always try to pin him down to what is actually necessary for comfort in every room, and point out where mezzanine rooms would serve in high stories.

In the next place comes ornament, exterior and interior. In the John Hay library at Brown University, several thousand dollars’ expense was saved by omitting the cornice around the outside rear wall of the stack room, without sacrifice of effect. In the Brookline cut-down,[91] several thousand dollars were saved by omitting two ornamental but superfluous gardens outside.

In a city, try to get the park department to assume the cost of laying out the library grounds.

Then the entrance and halls and staircases, as originally sketched, will be often found unnecessarily large when tested by library requirements. At Brookline the larger part of the saving was made on such extras. Outside steps, platform, columns, cornices, balustrades and the like, are often superfluous.

On material, again, much permissible saving can be made. Inquiry of the architect will elicit that less expensive material or finish will give as much strength, durability and also as good effect as the first choice.

“Shingles instead of slate, plain glass instead of plate glass, cheaper brick, cheaper finish, omitting fireplaces, using wood floors instead of tile.”—Miss Marvin.[92]

“Don’t waste money in too substantial construction and fireproofing.”—Stanley.[93]

When the inquiry is made of him, the architect will usually prove to be suggestive as to economies. He will be much more interested in savings than in extravagance, and he knows just where savings can be made without real sacrifice of strength, utility, or beauty. In fact, it is here and in suggestion of alternatives in meeting library needs, that a practical architect will often surprise the librarian.

Indeed, I have been surprised myself in finding how keen an architect can be when this question comes up. One would think he would hate not only to forego any of his commission, but also to give up what seem to be essential elements in a harmonious scheme. But in all economies of this kind in which I have taken part, the architect has thrown himself into problems of saving with as much zeal as if he were to benefit rather than the owner.

Open Access

The admission of readers freely to the shelving, both readers who want to select books to borrow for home-reading, and those who wish to select from the shelves books for serious reading in the building, has become a common policy of libraries under the name of “open access.”

For the benefit of borrowers of new books, popular books or late fiction (in children’s rooms, children’s books), open-access rooms are usually provided with wall or floor shelving, or alcoves so widely spaced as to allow free inspection of the books. Where there is not a separate room or suite of rooms, there is a corner of the light-reading room shelved for this use.

See “Carrels”[94] as to open access to the stack.

“Let the shelves be open, and the public admitted to them. Give the people such liberty with their own collection of books as the bookseller gives them with his.”—Dana.[95]

This development of use has changed the problems of planning in our generation more than any other new idea, as will be realized in looking at floor-plans of any of the old libraries.

The decision of the librarian and the trustees as to what policy is to be adopted in all parts of the building in relation to open access will largely govern planning of all the departments. Even after a decision is given, the question will arise, “Ought provision be made for possible changes of method in future?”

Light, Warmth, Fresh Air

After the library is finished, the staff will have to work and the public to read in it.

The eyesight of everyone that enters the building is dependent on the steady soft incidence, reflection, diffusion, concentration, abundance, of natural and artificial light supplied; their comfort summer and winter depends on the amount of heat tempered or admitted; the clearness of their brains, their ability to read and comprehend depends on methods of ventilation; the permanent health of all obliged to stay any length of time in the library may be seriously affected by the care or neglect of those who plan these vital elements of construction. Better have the building plain, even ugly, with these essentials perfect, than impressive and elegant without them.

From the very first, in planning small or medium, the large, or the largest libraries—in corridors, rooms, hails, or stacks,—ponder these needs as you go on, seek defects or merits in these directions as you visit other buildings; set aside sufficient time for special and deliberate study and review of these problems, librarian, adviser and architect in solemn conclave, and resolve to have your building, in these particulars at least, the best one not only in your own state, but in America and in the world.

As is elsewhere urged again and again, spend what money you have to spare, in such essentials, rather than in the luxuries of unnecessarily expensive material, decoration, or furniture.

See special chapters, later on, on [Lighting], [Heating, and Ventilation].

Faults to be Looked For

In visiting other libraries or looking at other plans, the virtues are sometimes hard to detect, but there are some faults even a novice can see. For instance—

• Heaviness or embellishment of exterior, unsuited to a library.
• Arched or pointed, mullioned or leaded windows, obstructive of light.
• Domes, with rotundas beneath.
• Columns and porticoes.
• Overhanging roofs or cornices.
• Stories, corridors, or rooms, unnecessarily high in the walls.
• Waste of floor space.
• Ornamental and excessively broad or massive stairways.
• Stairs and corridors separating rooms which should adjoin.
• Poor light anywhere; light in the eyes of readers instead of on the backs or pages of books.
• Drafts, or absence of air.

These are a few common faults; any good librarian can suggest others from his or her own experience.

As the classes of library schools go about visiting libraries, it would be well to have some expert instructor or guide point out obvious faults of construction. The local librarian could best show merits. Special reports or theses on buildings would advance the cause of rational planning among the coming generation of librarians.

Frankness Among Librarians

A certain amount of reticence among librarians in talking about faults of their own buildings to visitors, leads me to write this chapter. Whether it is due to diffidence in posing as critics without enough experience, or more likely to a spirit of loyalty to their institution, I have not been able to determine. But certainly such a spirit is disloyal to the cause of library science. No progress can be made in building if every librarian must act only on his own experience for his own building. Every sensible man can see the good, the bad and the indifferent among the tools put into his hands. Every practical man can suggest corrections of faults, perfection of the mediocre, even improvement of the good. When a brother-librarian who is about to build comes to ask advice and look over methods and means, the largest loyalty is due to one’s profession and the public, and the incumbent ought to give full benefit of his experience and his opinion to the visitor, under the pledge of silence if he wishes, but concealing nothing. His opinions may be mistaken, his experience slender, but the very statement will challenge the judgment of the inquirer and enlarge the scope of his vision.

So the visitor in his turn, after going through his planning, and occupying his new library, ought to pass the methods he has selected, minutely in review, and speak or write of them to visitors, at clubs, or in professional periodicals, with like frankness. If he will be candid about his own experience, a librarian who has just built may be the wisest critic possible, and may doubly help those who follow in his path.

He who has experimented with a new device or a new method, if he tests thoroughly, impartially and sanely, can be especially useful to his fellows by frankness in reporting his praise or criticism.

Indeed, every experienced librarian who is also ingenious, ought to try experiments as he has the opportunity, not only in methods but in appliances. A hundred bright minds, working in the same direction, will be sure to hit upon new devices which will simplify processes and better the building and furnishing of years to come.

Service and Supervision

These are underlying elements of library planning which only a librarian who has practised them thoroughly understands. Even the “library architect” may fail to grasp these on a new problem.

“Have the building convenient for both work and supervision, where many a costly building fails. Have all departments in harmonious relations, so as to serve the public best, and at least cost in money, time, and labor.”—Eastman.[96]

Service. Short lines for every process are the essential. There has been rather a tendency among architects to imagine that modern contrivances can overcome space, but every step, every motion, takes time; every step, every motion saved, promotes efficient service, and keeps the public waiting a second less. If you use pages or “runners,” plan to shorten their runs. If you use mechanical substitutes, speed them up, run them on straight lines, avoid complications and corners. Study every motion, every handling of a book in all the processes of a library, and save a second here and a second there. In sizable buildings, you will thus be able to save not only minutes but often hours through every work day of their future. “Many a mickle saves a muckle,” is true of packing, passing, cataloguing, handling, cleaning, collecting, distributing.

Do not be deceived by the suggestion that labor-saving devices change principles. A yard is more than a foot, by machine as well as by boy. Save time on machines as on pages. Your needs will soon outrun both.

Supervision. “Helpfulness should be aimed at, rather than supervision,” says Champneys,[97] and certainly it should be aimed at with supervision. Accessibility to helpless inquirers invites as well as facilitates easy inquiries. But in America we find that supervision deters as well as detects disorder, noise, mutilation, theft.

Duff-Brown[98] calls attention to one aid not often thought of,—the supervision of one reader over another. This acts where students and serious readers congregate, but somewhat fails in periodical and light-reading and children’s rooms. There supervision is more necessary.

In small libraries, supervision from the delivery desk is all that is generally possible. It can be facilitated by open floors, glass screens, avoidance of corners or projections, and radial bookcases. In larger libraries, provision for attendants at strategic points, such as corners which command adjoining rooms, can be so arranged as to help and supervise with minimum service. A well-arranged desk for each attendant placed thus on picket, will enable him or her to pursue any assigned desk work, without interfering with supervision or information.

Supervision of doors, entrance halls and stairways, is most necessary;—in small libraries, from the desk; in large libraries, through hall porters, who can also watch art treasures and exhibition cases, as well as direct visitors, and avert undesirables.

Decoration: Ornament

Ornament is the last thing to think of about a library. Noticeable exterior ornament is not needed for dignity, and conflicts with simplicity, two appropriate library qualities. “Outside ornament is often vulgar,” says Champneys.[99] Even statuary is not in keeping unless the building has memorial purposes, for which additional funds have been provided. Inside attempts at ornament are often grotesque. Marble columns are out of place, marble walls and staircases showy rather than sensible, wall or ceiling frescoes distracting, floor inlays disconcerting. If funds allow, such features and portraits in vestibules, passage-ways and conversation rooms do not interfere with reading or service. Portraits of donors or deceased trustees or librarians may do in delivery-rooms or light-reading rooms in which exigencies of use require high enough walls and few enough windows to leave available wall space. But in rooms for serious reading, there should be no features of any kind to interfere with reading or attract non-readers. Burgoyne comments,[100] “In Boston, the decorative art makes the public rooms art galleries instead of places for study. The two objects are quite incompatible. The crowds who gather to inspect the decorations are a nuisance to the student who comes to study.” See also the Report of the Examiners of the Boston Public Library in 1895.

“In the reading rooms, ornament which attracts the eye and creates interest, is a hindrance to the usefulness of the rooms.”—Beresford Pite.[101]

“Interior decoration should be subordinated to the use of the building.”—Champneys.[102]

Isadore, Bishop of Seville[103] (A.D. 600) says that “The best architects object to gilded ceilings in libraries, and to any other marble than cipollino for the floor, because the glitter of gold is hurtful to the eyes, while the green of cipollino is restful to them.”

From this it appears that the architects of that age were more considerate of readers than some in our own generation.

Coloring. I would draw a distinction between ornament and decorous decoration. If as much attention be given to the æsthetic influence as to the irradiating and ophthalmic effects of shades of color on wall and ceiling, the resulting beauty would at the same time charm, soothe and satisfy all visitors. Sufficient study is rarely ever given to this element of “Venustas.” In one of my own early problems, I employed a young artist who had a reputation as a colorist, to select tints for different rooms, with a result which fully justified the small fee he charged.

See four tints suggested at page 15 of the Boston report, mentioned under “Light, Artificial.”[104] From that report,[105] I quote:—

“For bright, sunny rooms a very light green is probably the best shade.”

“For darker rooms, a light buff.”

“The ceiling should be white, or slightly tinted.”

“The woodwork should be of a light color such as that of natural woods. Under no circumstances are dark walls and woodwork permissible.”

(This applies to schoolrooms, but what applies to scholars equally applies to readers in libraries, and these precepts apply to furniture as well as to the other woodwork.)

Miss Marvin[106] suggests that,—

“Green, yellow, terra-cotta, light brown, and tan are good.”

“No decoration is necessary except tinting.” [Excellent.]

“Corticene or burlap is good background for pictures.”

“Only one color is desirable for the interior of a small library.”

Reflection of light. Not only is color of walls and ceiling a prime element in decoration, but it also plays a large part in the cheerfulness and effectiveness of diffused light, both natural and artificial; especially in systems of indirect lighting. To select colors bright enough to reflect, and soft enough not to dazzle, is one of the nice problems of planning.

Architectural Styles

I dislike to stray upon the architect’s province, but this subject affects planning so radically, that I will venture to allude to it here, not as advice to architects but as a warning to building committees. In many conditions for competitions and in many discussions among trustees where there happen to be amateurs in architecture on the board, I see directions or hear suggestions about this or that style. To formulate any specific direction to the architect on this point at the outset seems to me a fatal mistake. The style ought to develop from the needs of the particular problem in hand. Until the architect knows just what he has to construct, to prescribe any conventional style only cramps him. Neither practical libraries nor American architecture can be developed by such swaddling clothes. Select an architect who can be regarded as competent and let him choose or create a style without lay dictation, after he comprehends his whole problem. Remember, you are not burying an old style; you are in at the birth of a new one.

“The most noticeable thing about architectural styles is the spontaneity of their growth, developing from the obvious conditions of building.”—Russell Sturgis.[107]

“Having agreed on a good plan, you cannot properly say to the architect, ‘We must have a classical building.’ It is the most difficult of all styles; formal symmetry requiring exceptional skill in the architect.”—W. A. Otis.[108]

Montgomery Schuyler writes, in his article on the “United States,” for Sturgis’s Dictionary of Architecture,[109] “For more than a generation, scarcely a public building was erected which was not at least supposed by its builders to be in the Grecian style. Nothing could have been practically more inconvenient than the requirement that one or more parts of a building divided into offices should be darkened by the projecting portico. In many cases this difficulty was sought to be obviated by converting the central space into a rotunda,—a wasteful arrangement.” Such is an architect’s comment on a feature which has been the librarian’s bête noir.

To quote further from this interesting article:—

“The United States had thus nothing to show in current building but copies of a pure and refined architecture, implicated with dispositions entirely unsuitable to almost all practical requirements.

“Even the most thoughtful of revivalists were apt to take mediæval architecture as a more or less literal model, rather than as a starting point for modern work.

“The later graduates (of the French school) devoted themselves, not to developing an architecture out of American conditions, but to domesticating current French work.”

(By the Chicago World’s Fair) “classic, in one or another of its modes, was re-established as the most eligible style for public buildings. No architect would now think of submitting in competition a design for a public building, in any other style than that officially sanctioned in France.

“There is no longer any pretence of using the selected style as a basis or point of departure to be modified and developed in accordance with American needs and ways of thinking, and with the introduction of new material and new modes of construction.... In civic buildings it may be said as a rule that there is no longer even an aspiration toward a national architecture.”

After discussing at length modern commercial buildings, Mr. Schuyler concludes with a sentence which may well be applied to libraries: “Out of the satisfaction of commonplace and general requirements may arise the beginnings of a national architecture.”

Will there ever be evolved a distinctive library architecture? I hardly think so. It will be possible to recognize a library as you can now tell a schoolhouse; but libraries if well planned will have more individualism, I think, more characteristic charm, than the generality of schoolhouses, but not a uniform architecture.

It is possible indeed that library loveliness will be developed as a recognizable type.

Amateurs Dangerous

In looking back on the experience of thirty years, I am inclined to think that most danger in library planning lies in amateur interference. Not so much in amateur librarians. When a trustee gets interested in library methods he often graduates into the profession, and becomes a leader. For instance, Justin Winsor, who began as a trustee, became a librarian, and by vigorous work did more to make his occupation a profession than any other one American. Even when the trustee stops short of this, he may sometimes worry his librarian by half-knowledge and undue interference in administration, but such a man is not apt to impede in building, for his library zeal will move him to support the practical side in any discussion.

But when a trustee (or, alas! a librarian) is an amateur architect, one of those laymen who spend an English vacation all in cathedral towns, and a French tour all in the château district, he is apt to be troublesome, and to want what he considers good style in architecture rather than good methods of administration. If he is put on the building committee, and it selects a too artistic architect, one who magnifies “Venustas” unduly at the cost of “Utilitas,” the library is doomed. Its new building may be widely pictured in the magazines, but it will not be so much used by readers, or praised by librarians. Better modest ignorance, with common-sense, than too much half-knowledge and pseudo-taste in art or architecture.

Dry-rot Deadening

One of the greatest dangers in building is dry-rot—not in material or books, but human desiccation.

There is not much to fear from the architect. Unless he is too much wedded to precedents and styles, he will be progressive enough, under good advice. But a board of trustees, often composed of elderly men, may be ultra-conservative, remembering and clinging to the memory of library methods and especially old styles of library buildings, current when they were young. If they are wise enough, however, to choose a building committee of sane and open-minded men, whose recommendations, founded on expert advice, they will listen to, these votaries of tradition will not prove too obstructive.

After all, the real danger is from the local librarian who has stopped growing. Just as there are children in school who are bright scholars only up to a certain point, where they seem to stop growing, there are men and women librarians, very progressive at first, who come to an age of suspended growth, and absolutely exclude either new ideas or the comprehension of future development. They may have served so well in the past, or be so popular personally, or discharge many of their functions so well, that they are retained in their positions as librarians. They may still be useful in the every-day service of the public, but such stunted progress will utterly unfit them to act as building advisers, who require a large view of the future. If you have such a one as your local librarian, it is your first duty to get him the best expert you can find to spur him up. Unless the reactionary is also impracticable or jealous, he may work well in harness with an adviser, by giving full presentation of local needs.

C.
PERSONNEL

In this Book are discussed the various phases of the personal equation which affect the success or failure of library planning.

C.
PERSONNEL

The Public

The root of library opinion and support is public sentiment. Indirectly, it nourishes the spirit which inspires the private donor. Directly, it supplies the impulse which founds the library; the enthusiasm which supports it liberally; the civic wisdom and pride which erect buildings; the large and democratic taste which approves adequate facilities, sound construction, quiet and appropriate beauty in building.

The aim in the United States is to make the library an essential part of education, not only in acting with the school system, but in carrying on the graduate to a larger education at home, not only literary and social, but industrial as well, so as to develop law-abiding and useful citizens. There is a further aim, akin to that of parks and playgrounds, in providing a sober recreation to rival the attractions of saloons and street corners and dance halls.

When the public can be convinced that its library works to these ends and is economically and efficiently managed, the community will support it generously. When the time comes for building, sufficient funds can generally be got without trouble. The voters will not forget Washington’s injunction, “Promote, as objects of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge,” and they will rank the library first among such institutions.

“There is probably no mode of spending public money which gives a more extraordinary and immediate return in utility and innocent enjoyment.”—Stanley Jevons, quoted by Crunden.

In library building, realize that the public, which pays, should get every possible service in its best form, service for educated and uneducated readers; for workmen and workwomen, as well as for scholars, for the children of all, and for the teachers of the children. Especial thought should be given to those citizens who can have no large libraries of their own. Your library should be made so simple and homelike that it will invite them as a home or a club they own.

Wise Election of Trustees. The town can begin to provide for wise building by paying some attention to selecting suitable trustees. The position is an honorary one in most towns, and is usually given to clergymen, lawyers, men of literary taste, each of whom is, as it were, citizen emeritus, retired from active life, and remote from the wants of the public. The board is apt to become a cosy club, and to get into a rut. Especially is this so if it is in-breeding; allowed to select its own members, and to become a clique. If Harvard College cannot allow its overseers to serve more than two terms successively, towns should not allow any town board to become perpetual. Especially may this autocracy work harm in building. Men chosen for literary taste are not always the most practical. There ought to be on the board of trustees representatives of every section and every large element in the town. Among them there should be enough wise, level-headed men to make up a building committee, just the kind of men who would naturally be selected as building committee of a bank or church, men of judicial temperament who can weigh the argument of librarian and architect, and of sober judgment to curb extravagance in either. It is the part of the public to elect such men, and to defer to their judgment when selected. Literary taste is not needed on building committees. The librarian ought to know how to handle books; his judgment will suffice. Artistic taste is not needed; a good architect ought to have that in his training.

Judgment. In one final point the public can help good planning; in their expression of opinion, their criticism or approbation of the building after completion.

Even the stranger who flashes through the town in his automobile can carry away into his own community an intelligent lesson. If the building has been properly planned, he should say, “That is evidently a library, a good library; just suited to this town (or institution), and evidently doing good work here.”

The citizen of the town should criticize its exterior not so much for splendor as for appropriateness and good taste. Does it suggest to him, and invite him to, the study of books or the recreation of reading? Even then, better suspend judgment until he sees or hears how the new library works as a library. If he can educate himself to this degree, his lay comment will have some share in the progress of library science.

Place of the Library Among Buildings

A great deal of doubt prevails in communities as to just how much money they are justified in putting into a library building. In some towns, a disposition is shown by local economists, to give it a low relative position. They will grant liberal appropriations for a florid town hall, for a large high school, for a commodious grammar or primary school, for a handsome headquarters for the fire department, even for a granite police station, but they hesitate at a roomy building for the public library. This is a narrow way to look at it, for many more residents are served and largely served by a library of the modern active type, than by any one school or other institution. It has often been said forcibly, that the library should rank just ahead of the high school, and have a better building and better support.

Site. Though the choice of the site falls to the trustees, liberality in buying it and public spirit in offering sites at a low price, are incumbent on citizens, as well as discouragement of squabbles arising from desire to benefit real estate in different localities. A large charity should be extended to the trustees, under their perplexities, and a ready confirmation of their choice.

Ornament. There is often an opinion in the community, perhaps even among the trustees, in favor of more solid construction or more ornamental features than are necessary or appropriate in a public library building. This should be stoutly contested by the more sensible citizens, on the ground that a library is no more the object of unnecessary expense or elaboration, than a schoolhouse. It is a fairly well settled idea that schoolhouses should not be extravagant, on the ground both of economy and good taste. It should not be hard to persuade a community to the same conviction as to libraries. If, however, the opinion is obstinate, the suggestion might be made that a sum be appropriated sufficient to provide an ample but simple library building, and then offer a vote of an additional sum for architectural elaboration. This would bring the question squarely before the people.

The trustees ought to be left to work out their own problem first and ask for the necessary funds. If their request seems proper, and the trustees have the confidence of the public, the funds should be promptly voted. If not, a committee which has the confidence of the public can be appointed to report, but when they report the trustees should be left to plan the library. They will have to run it. If they still lack your confidence, change them at the next election.

The Donor

More striking even than the library movement itself, and than public liberality toward libraries, are the constant and generous gifts of private citizens, not only to their native towns, and as memorials to friends, but even to needy communities alien to the giver.

“The most wonderful phenomena in American social development.”—H. B. Adams.[110]

Of these donors Andrew Carnegie has been the chief and the exemplar. His generosity has been wise, helpful, discriminating. He has avoided pauperizing his beneficiaries and has stipulated that they also help themselves, sometimes in building, always in supporting. He has carefully apportioned his gifts to the size and needs of each institution or community. Most other donors have followed his example, and the library movement has been judiciously forwarded by these public-spirited friends. Of the buildings reported in the Massachusetts 1899 Report, 103 were gifts (10 old buildings, 93 new) from private donors, and 19 more part public, part private. It is not always possible to praise the libraries they have built; it is wise sometimes to ignore their motives; but the wisdom of their intentions deserves high praise and lavish gratitude. This generosity has not been confined to America. Edwards[111] notes that out of 180 special libraries he enumerates from all countries, 164 were gifts. Fletcher[112] listed 60 such gifts in America when he wrote, without counting Carnegie. The best gifts are those which give a sum for building and another for books and care. Thus John Jacob Astor[113] left to the Astor library, $175,000 for a building, $120,000 for books, and $205,000, the interest to go to maintenance.

This tide of benefactions may last even through the generation which will follow Carnegie and his fellows, and will doubtless parallel the progress of public building for many years to come.

All donors, however, have not been as wise. Some of them have overweighted quiet communities with grotesque piles. Some of them have impoverished poor communities by expensive piles without endowment.

“There is a small library building in a Connecticut town, designed on a lavish classical scale. Its centre is formed by a large, round and empty vestibule fit rather to receive a swimming tank than a delivery desk. A beautiful dome covers this vestibule, and makes the exterior look like a mortuary chapel. Such a mistake has cost $300,000, besides the expense of administration.”—O. Bluemner.[114]

But this bizarre feature was not all the architect’s fault, it was mainly the donor’s. A prominent architect told me that this commission was first given to him. He studied the needs of the town, and its characteristics, and following his instructions not to spare cost, he designed as fine a library as he thought would suit and serve such a place. On taking his sketch to the donor, he was met with the contemptuous speech. “If that is the finest library you can get up, I will find an architect who can do better.” And he did. “Thus,” said my friend, “I learned a lesson not to cut down my fee by being too conscientious.”

The worst mistake a donor can make is to give the building of the library to some protegé, or favorite architect, without engaging a library expert to advise him. There is one prominent university where all the buildings are useful and beautiful but one. This a donor gave, but got a young friend to design it in New York, without seeing the site, or consulting the professors in charge. The result is a blot and a shame.

A Library no Taj Mahal. If any millionaire sees this whose affection for a lost friend leads him to build a library as a memorial, let me earnestly beg him to make his building very modest and practical,—with a commensurate endowment, if he will. But if he wants to build a beautiful tomb, as he has a right to do, let him select some other more appropriate form. A library, of all institutions, is alive and always busy. The work it can do might be a lasting memorial to a lovely and useful character, but not if it is smothered and deadened by an architectural snuffer. I would suggest that a fine gift to a small town would be a group of buildings, say a town hall, a library and a high school, the three separate but connected by arcades, a noble but not oppressively grand and out-of-place trio; each simple and perfect for its use and place.

The library, properly criticised by Mr. Bluemner, cost $300,000. The town in which it is situated had at the time its library was given, about 4,000 population. In looking over the list of Carnegie gifts, I note that a town of 6,000 was allotted $15,000 as his idea of a suitable building for so small a place. Twenty libraries of this size could be built for the cost of the Connecticut misfit.

The Institution

Any library owned by an institution and not by the public, ought to have as good and as thorough advice as it can get from the wisest and most experienced librarians of similar institutions, which its own librarian or any expert will know how to elicit. It will be fortunate if it can secure as its own expert, some such librarian who has recently gone through the whole experience of building.

The officers of the institution should define beforehand, just what scope its library is to cover; just how it is to serve members, special students and visitors; how much money will be required for suitable building and thorough equipment; where enough money is to come from; what site (if site is not already chosen) is most central for probable readers and will lend itself most readily to the purposes of the association.

If its library is sufficiently large for a suite of rooms, but not large enough to demand a separate building, its trustees and architects should devote to the library, if possible, a separate floor or a separate wing or special ell, with provisions for differentiation, change, and growth, and should so locate other departments that are most closely affiliated with the library, in the closest juxtaposition.

Indeed, where the library has begun to be important, rooms need expert advice in location and details almost as much as the building. But when it has attained the dignity of separate housing, all that is said elsewhere about expert advice applies with double force to a highly specialized institution.

The Trustees

To the trustees falls full and final responsibility for all library building. They formulate the needs of the library, get the funds from the proper body, choose the site, elect the librarian, and select the architect. After hearing the librarian and architect, they decide on all its exterior and interior features. With them should really rest either praise or blame for the result. Unlike the librarian and architect, they serve without stipend. They deserve every consideration and full support.

But not every trustee is an archangel. Boards of trustees may harbor many faddists, many cranks, many busy-bodies. How to head these off from meddling with building is a problem in tact. There is often a member who “knows it all,” and cannot be moved by any expert advice. He is just the man who wants to take control. He is dangerous.

“More buildings are spoiled by clients than by architects.”—E. B. Green.[115] And this kind of trustee is the client who is most apt to spoil the library.

“The trustee will be careful not to consider himself an expert.”—Dr. Jas. H. Canfield.[116] But if there is a sane majority who realize the seriousness and extent of their task, they can at least select their sanest three to serve as a building committee, delegating to them details of investigation, reserving to the full board only important points reported by the committee.

In small communities the trustees will probably be men of greater experience in affairs than their librarian, and better able to make investigations than he. They will also be better able to deal with the architect, and to judge the soundness of his advice. As the library is larger, large enough to have a mature and trained librarian, the board need not take an active part but may be content to serve as a court of appeal.

Experience of the past has shown that there are two prevalent dangers: first, the idea that the board has a primary function to make their building an ornament to the town or institution; second, the delusion of some member that a little dabbling in architecture or building has made him competent to advise the architect.

If a library can be made both practical and beautiful within the appropriation by expert advice, free from amateur experience, it is enough for the trustees to take pride in, that they have furnished wise guidance to such a happy result. Interference with technical details on their part is very unwise. The board should realize that they are trustees of the library, not an Art Commission, and that the special trust committed to them, the trust to which they must be true, is the use of books, not the abuse of architecture.

The Building Committee

Pick out the building committee very carefully, for fitness, not out of courtesy, or because certain members want to serve on it.

A judicial disposition, common sense, an open mind, are necessary; for they have to consult and instruct the architect and the library expert, to ratify their recommendations and decide where they differ.

The constitution of this committee is really the crux of building. On their judgment rests the event of success or failure in planning. Their chief duty is to weigh the advice of experts.

“The Building Committee usually has very vague ideas [at first] about size, location or requirements.”—Bluemner.[117]

Once constituted, this committee should relieve the board of minutiæ of planning. If they are wise, they will throw the burden of all inquiry, inspection and initial steps on librarian and architect. If these agree, the committee may take steps to verify their conclusion, but need not be themselves active. Their function is like that of a “struck jury,” to report from time to time to the full board for ratification of their decisions. Perhaps their most difficult function will be to curb the architect in expense and unnecessary ornament.

They will have all they ought to try to do, in deciding various questions which will arise in planning, and in their services as umpires they can earn the thanks of their fellow-citizens.

Free Advice

If you hesitate to pay money for an expert to give special study to all your problems of planning, you can get good advice from many sources in driblets. In the first place, your librarian will naturally contribute all he knows without extra charge. In England, Duff-Brown suggests that at the outset candidates for librarianship should be asked, “Do you possess any practical knowledge of library planning?”[118] This qualification is not often considered in America; and the ordinary library education and experience do not develop it. But your librarian may happen to have served through building problems in some previous position. If such an expert has thus been fortunately secured in advance, his advice will be freely given. Even if not, any fairly good librarian ought to know where to look in books for information, and to gradually formulate his ideas, to be put into such brief and pointed queries as he is justified in propounding to other librarians.

If you have a state library commission, you are allowed to ask counsel from them. In some states the law provides that they shall give expert advice on building, when asked for it. In all states such a custom prevails. If there is no commission in your state, the commission of a neighboring state would doubtless be glad to advise.

To good librarians everywhere, even to those who have become paid experts, you can always look for such gratuitous consideration as does not make too much demand on their time. Their experience and judgment will be generously given free. “If there be any profession in which there is community of ideas,” says Miss Plummer, “it is that of librarianship.”[119] But always remember that librarians whose advice is worth asking, are very busy with the work of their own libraries.

“Information on specific points is freely given by librarians, but in the midst of pressing official duties it is often a severe tax on their time. It is also impossible, in the brief space of such a reply, and without learning the resources at command, to give much useful information.”—W. F. Poole.[120]

Boil down your queries, into pointed questions which can be briefly answered. Draw them off in a list, with spaces for answers, which can be filled in and returned without labor of copying, and enclose a stamped return envelope. So will you not “ride a free horse to death,” and will preserve your adviser fresh for further usefulness.

But be Sure to Get Good Advice

Either from your own librarian or his friends, or from a library commission, get thorough advice and special study for every point in every department as you plan, and before allowing any exterior features to be settled. Do not put too heavy a burden of responsibility on the architect.

“He should not be expected to furnish the idea of the building. Its planning is a separate problem to be solved. It is the business of the owner, not of the architect, to decide this.”—Patton.[121]

“Do not rely entirely on an architect, however great his artistic and technical qualifications.”[122]—Duff-Brown.

“Most of the unsuitable buildings are due to unstated problems. Too much of the lay trustee, too much of the librarian himself sometimes, who thought he knew, but didn’t, have been the causes.”—B. R. Green.[123]

Indeed, rather than trust to incompetent library advice or an inexperienced architect, I would suggest going to the Library Bureau and giving them charge of building. They would at least know where to go for competent advice, and would not charge any more profit on what they expended than experts deserve. So thinks B. R. Green.[124]

“Many librarians are burdened with repeated calls for information which more properly ought to be obtained from an independent expert.”—H. J. Carr.[125]

But, remember, in getting such advice from busy librarians, you are getting only their opinions, founded on experience and impressions, but not on careful and minute study of conditions involved in your problem, to which they cannot afford to give due consideration.

The fable of the lawyer is here germane, who, when reproached by a friend, “That advice you gave me was worth nothing, absolutely nothing,” replied, “Well, isn’t that just what you paid me for it?”

The off-hand answer of a librarian, even an expert, may or may not fit the case. He is certainly not to be blamed if it does not fit, unless he has been duly retained, and has taken time for mature study of all the facts.

The Local Librarian as Expert

“No plan should be drawn up or accepted without the skilled guidance of a thoroughly trained expert.”—Duff-Brown.[126]

Is your own librarian such an expert? It is assumed that you have one, for some sort of a librarian is a prerequisite of even a rudimentary library.

“First appoint your librarian: the rapid growth of library interests has necessitated expert service in a multitude of essential details.”—Professor Todd.[127]

“Should be a scholar and a person of executive ability, versed in all departments.”—Fletcher.[128]

The local librarian is undoubtedly expert in most processes of librarianship, but is he or she such an expert—not theorist, but expert—in building, that other librarians look up to him for expert advice on that subject? If not, does not your problem deserve the advice of some librarian in whom others have confidence? Do you not need the best advice you can get?

Has your librarian the natural aptitude for planning, which would have made him a good architect?

Has he the presence and force which would lend weight to his opinions against a positive architect?

“Has he a mind broad enough to argue on equal terms with an experienced architect?”—Mauran.[129]

Should you consider him “a capable man of business,” as Mr. Hallam suggested thirty-two years ago?

Is he too young to teach, or too old to learn?

“A very good librarian may yet have no great fitness for the task of planning a building.”—Miss West (now Mrs. Elmendorff).[130]

And a junior librarian need not feel hurt if he is not trusted as an expert. As the best English authority[131] says: “Do not expect too much from a low-priced librarian.” To this I should add, “Do not expect too much of any librarian, even a leader in the profession, and do not expect omniscience of leaders.”

And it is, of course, superfluous advice not to take your local librarian at his own valuation. He is most likely to assume the function of an expert in building when he is least fitted. The really experienced librarian is apt to be modest and to ask assistance, in the belief that “two heads are better than one.” It will not be difficult, through a little quiet inquiry, to find where you can get the best advice, at home or elsewhere.

The Library Adviser

“No library board should attempt building without taking counsel of someone who has made the subject a special study, and has had experience in library management.”—Poole.[132]

If you want to get a really good library, which can be worked easily, economically and effectively for years to come, and if you are not quite satisfied to leave the entire responsibility to the librarian you happen to have, or the architect you happen to get, there is a chance for you to employ, for a far less sum than a competition would cost, such a library expert as will be able to give you aid just where and when everyone may need it most; an adviser who can limit expense of construction, augment capacity, provide for the best and cheapest service, explain your needs to the architect, avoid friction, and bring to the best issue the countless puzzling queries which will arise after the plans are settled, the contracts let, and you plunge into the pitfalls of building and furnishing. Contract with this adviser for the whole problem, from start to finish,—you will want him to appeal to, up to the very end, and it is poor economy to try to scrimp on trifles.

“Committees who work without a trained adviser are certain to spend many times more ... in futile and expensive experiments.... No plan should be drawn up or accepted without the skilled guidance of a thoroughly trained librarian.”—Duff-Brown.[133]

“In this era of the establishment of so many new libraries, and the gift of so many hundreds of buildings, there is decided need for the effective service of a consulting librarian. Many serious mistakes are made, especially in building, for want of a competent professional adviser.”—H. J. Carr.[134]

As two or more counsel are often called in to the trial of a case at law, the importance of library planning demands strong reinforcements for the local librarian. An architect, usually a mature man of affairs, experienced not only in building, but also with men, should be met with equally experienced library advice, lest the library side be overborne. Experience will respect experience, but hesitate to yield to half-knowledge.

It will be possible to get such aid in any part of the country. I should say that there are at least fifty able librarians in the United States who have had such experience in building as would qualify them as experts. Their names could be learned from any library commission, or from any good librarian. “Authoritative recognition of experience and learning stamps a man as trustworthy.”—(Libr. Asso. Record.) Few, perhaps, have worked through all the problems of a very large library. Many have built libraries or branches in the other grades. In the branches, large librarians have faced the requirements of small libraries and would be competent advisers for any grade. The experts in any particular class (except public libraries) are fewer, but could be easily found. With demand, experts will multiply. No new library need lack a suitable adviser, if the local librarian will ask for one, and trustees can see their way to employ him.

As to the fee, the need is so new, that no professional scale has been prescribed. But for service from start to finish, as I have recommended, one per cent on the total cost would not seem too large for the time demanded, the services rendered, and the ends gained.

(To compare library advisers’ fees with architects: The American Institute of Architects have set as a minimum fee, six per cent on the total cost of the building. For preliminary studies alone, one fifth of this fee is to be charged. This would be over one per cent. The library adviser has very little to do with structural planning or construction. His work corresponds fairly well with “preparing preliminary plans,” so that one per cent would seem to be a fair fee to offer. If he is competent he can save ten times this by pointing out better methods and practical economies.)

It will be always an open question whether the expert, when chosen, can spare and be granted time from his duties in his own library. His board, however, would usually feel moved by courtesy to grant such time as he needed, beyond his free evenings and holidays.

Briefer consultations would merit special fees, to be agreed upon. In view of the expert character of the service they should be as liberal as can be afforded.

Selecting an Architect

In some states or cities, laws or public conditions may compel competition, and even where there is no such necessity, solicitation, especially from relatives and friends, makes a direct choice embarrassing. But trustees who have the courage, as they have the clear right, to make a choice, will certainly save money, gain time, be sure of a good working library and of an appropriate and pleasing exterior, and stand a better chance of pleasing everyone, by letting librarian, architect and building committee get to work at the plans as soon as the site has been chosen.

So when you have got a good librarian as a champion, the next step is to get an architect. You need one—

• To advise on site;
• To help plan the interior;
• To consider material and construction;
• To design the exterior;
• To draw working plans;
• To invite bids;
• To prepare and let the contract;
• To superintend construction.

For this you must have on such an important and technical building as a library, thorough professional education, experience in designing and building, knowledge of men; and of course, intelligence, tact, tractability, ingenuity, sagacity, and honesty.

Consider all these qualities in your choice. If your library is beyond the small stage, and especially if you have secured an expert library adviser, you do not so much need an architect who has built libraries. You do not need him for library advice as much as for the duties scheduled above. He needs advice about the special requirements of this problem. Possibly previous ill-advised experience might leave him stubborn in bad ways.

“If it be practicable to engage an architect at the outset, it is the better course,” and remember, “The most competent architect is not likely to seek employment most aggressively.”—Bernard R. Green.[135]

“It is best to select the architect before the site is selected. His advice will be useful. Commissions or librarians who have built can suggest one.”—Miss Marvin.[136]

But the most important question in regard to an architect is, does he belong to the school which exaggerates Venustas in all building, or the better school which accepts Utilitas as the key to library problems?

I heard President Faunce of Brown at a building committee meeting ask of the architect whom they were “sizing up,” this question: “Do you believe in planning the exterior or the interior first?” The answer came, prompt and decided, “I want the interior fully planned first; in no other way can I evolve appropriate architecture.” A year later, at another meeting, President Faunce asked the architect, “How are you satisfied with your library, now that you see it built?” “Very well,” was the answer. “I ought to be, because I have never had a problem so thoroughly presented.”

A similar question ought to be asked every architect before finally engaging him. If he wants to plan the exterior first, he belongs to the class of architects who ought to plan tombs, not libraries. Reject him, however famous or influential or persistent he or his friends may be.

Base of choice. It is wise, in the first place, to disregard pressure. The best architects will rarely try to use it, or allow it to be used for them. A dignified letter, with reference to work they have done, will be all they would allow. Distrust activity in application.

“Announcement brings letters of solicitation from architects or their friends, and all sorts of intrigues. In private work, it is usual to appoint the architect outright.”[137]

If you have a satisfactory expert as a librarian or adviser, any architect who has done good work will do, even if he has had no direct experience with libraries.

“The number of libraries an architect has built makes little difference.”—Marvin.[138]

Prominence, though, is not necessary. A good authority already quoted, says: “The best of architects, standing at the head of their profession, have failed in practical library designing, some of them to a ridiculous degree.”[139] We all could point out such men.

Get an energetic, young architect for a small library; the large firm must turn over details to a subordinate.

“A local architect, if competent, may be better than one at a distance.”—Bostwick.[140]

If you think it best to try to save on a library adviser and yet do not fully trust the experience or the persuasiveness of your own librarian, it will probably be best, especially in small buildings, to find an architect who has already built satisfactory libraries, and who ought to know at least how to avoid bad blunders. But here again do not take his unsupported testimony to his experience. Make private and careful inquiry of the librarians he has worked with, and those librarians who have had to operate his buildings.

“Look around, inquire about different men; make inquiries from those who have worked with each. Select him before he has been allowed to make a single stroke of the pen on the plans. You will work with him much better from the beginning.”—W. A. Otis.[141]

Choose the man, with a good reputation on his own profession, who has shown willingness, reasonableness and ingenuity in getting all requirements satisfactorily packed inside a dignified exterior.

“Take a man willing to listen to the librarian’s point of view.”—W. R. Eastman.

It is not impossible to do this.

The American Institute of Architects, in their Circular of Advice, says that “the profession calls for men of the highest integrity, business capacity and artistic ability. Motives, conduct and ability must command respect and confidence.” This is the type of man who will represent architecture in your contest. See that the library champion is in the same class.

A Word to the Architect

Here seems to be a good place to slip in an aside to any architect who chances on this book.

You will see that the keynote of the volume is belief that the library is more akin to a workshop than to Grant’s Tomb; perhaps akin to a literary workshop, like a school, would be a more correct definition, and you know how your profession grapples the schoolhouse problem, I have seen many new schoolhouses through the country, and have noticed how many of them are simple but effectively beautiful. All librarians believe that a perfect library inside, can be made charming outside, through taste such as has been shown in these schoolhouses. They ask architects to accept their workshop theory rather than a monumental conception.

The building committee are your real clients, not the librarian. To their decision you must bow, even if you have to assume blame for a poor inside. But if they give you a free hand and a library adviser, defer to him. If he is not up to his job, if he is callow or antiquated or faddy, be patient with him. With the tact your profession knows how to exercise, interpret what advice he tries to give, supplement his failings with your own study of the subject, and plan the best library possible under these circumstances. So shall you win a crown of glory among librarians.

But if they give you a mature and wise adviser, welcome him as a friend and lend ear to his experienced advice. You will become a better architect in one branch of your profession, he will broaden much in his, and together you will advance both library science and architecture.

If you are altruistic, there can be no better opportunity to serve the public than by curbing your artistic ambition and devoting all your training and ability to making this building a better library than has yet been devised.

If you thus plan truly from inside outward, I will predict that you will satisfy the public and yourself far more than if you had thrust an unwilling library into an inadequate shell, or had prostituted your genius by forcing a false type of architecture on your helpless clients.

As you must have gathered from glancing through this book, I am a firm believer in the practical genius and taste of the best American architects. I believe that they can create consummate beauty out of the most unpromising conditions, and I hope you will thus grapple library problems.

Which Should Prevail?

The Building Committee chooses site, appoints adviser, selects architect, defines scope of the library, is final arbiter of everything, with appeal to the full board. Every point which remains in dispute after conference among all the advisers, should be formulated in definite questions, with clear reasons pro and con, and submitted to the committee. Except in a very small library, where one of the trustees is virtual director in default of a skilled librarian, the building committee can serve best by keeping their minds free for such decision, if called for, on such presentation. The advocates, if unanimous, should receive unanimous approval; if divided, the committee must decide on the weight of the arguments presented.

The local librarian will have to run the library after it is built, and if he has sufficient sense and experience to know what he wants, he ought to have his choice in any possible alternatives.

The library adviser, as he has the wider range of experience, should carry great weight with the local librarian, the architect, and the committee. He can often point out more than one satisfactory way to reach a desired end. When he and the librarian agree after discussion, as they generally will, the architect should have very strong convictions before opposing them.

The architect, on points of construction, is supreme. Neither librarian or adviser will want to oppose him here, although both may be able to advise. When the plan is fixed, they must confide to him its clothing in architectural form, and its execution. During planning it is wise to consult him at every step, for his training, his experience, his genius, will improve on many ideas, and will show ways of overcoming many obstacles. Before he gets through, indeed, he will get to be very much interested, and become something of an expert himself in library science.

But the architect and librarian should not disagree. When a point of difference arises, as it may, talk it over amicably, patiently, thoroughly. The aim of all should be, to build a good working library. When all the reasons are presented (here is where the librarian or library adviser should be a clear and persuasive advocate), the architect may come to see the matter in the same light. If not, he has got to present more powerful arguments. Perhaps he can show the librarian how he can gain his end in a more correct architectural way. If they still disagree, each side will be ready to present its reasons to the building committee, with odds in favor of the librarian. Champneys (an architect)[142] acknowledges that “architects should not be considered competent arbiters on questions of library administration.” But, if it is a structural question, or a question of taste, the architect’s advice ought to be preferred.

Architectural Competitions

As to libraries, the American authorities seem unanimously opposed to competitions.

The American Institute of Architects at their 1911 convention, said: “The Institute is of the opinion that competitions are in the main of no advantage to the owner. It therefore recommends, except in cases in which competition is unavoidable, an architect be employed upon the sole basis of his fitness for the work.[143]”

“Sketches give no evidence that their author has the matured artistic ability to fulfill their promise, or that he has the technical knowledge necessary to control the design of the highly complex structure and equipment of a modern building, or that he has executive ability for large affairs or the force to compel the proper execution of contracts.

“I will add, that an architect’s established reputation and the excellence of what he has already built, are far better proofs of his ability to undertake a library, than any guess he can make in a competition. Competition descends into a guessing match as to what will please the committee.[144]”

“The whole matter of employing professional men in this way is absurd. The architect should be called in at the very commencement of the work. His opinion is as much needed in the choice of a site, and the first formation of the owner’s ideas, as in the preparation of working drawings.”—Sturgis.[145]

The practically unanimous opinions of architects and librarians who have written or spoken on building, are strongly against competition. In an excellent paper read at the Waukesha Conference by an architect, Mauran,[146] he said: “Appoint your architect. It is a popular notion among laymen that a competition will bring out ideas, but I know of only one building erected from competitive plans, without modification. Aside from the needless expense and loss of time entailed, a greater evil lies in the well-proven fact that most architects endeavor to find the board’s predilections.” (Instead of trying to work out a perfect plan.)

“Avoid the competitive method.”—E. N. Lamm.[147]

“A plan that has nothing in its favor, and everything against it.”[148]

“Of three methods, open competition, limited competition, and direct choice by the board, the last is far the simplest, and much less expensive.”—Mrs. Elmendorf.[149]

“Trustees are not likely to get what they want by competition.”—W. R. Eastman.[150]

“After the requirements have been sent out to competitors, there can be no more consultations between them and the librarian until the award is made.”[151] (This cuts out the librarian just at the critical part of planning.)

“It is not usual or advisable for buildings costing less than $75,000.”—Marvin.[152]

Out of twenty-two libraries included by Miss Marvin only two had competitions. One library[153] reports: “It was the intention of the board to choose by competition, but none of many plans submitted was satisfactory. Committee finally decided on architect and worked with him.”

“What little good there is in competitions is not to the advantage of the client, but rather to the advantage of the architect. The young men have a better chance to win, before their time. An architect directly selected grows up with the committee, educates them, and learns from them.”—Edward B. Green.[154]

“The committee had thought of having an architectural competition, but in deference to the advice of the librarian and his adviser, they selected an architect without competition, so that every step in planning, from the outset, could be discussed from the standard of the architect, as well as from that of the librarian. To this is to be attributed the success of the building.”—John Hay Library Report.[155]

If any doubt remains, after reading these quotations, I will add that all my study and experience for over thirty years, in many hundred concrete cases, have led me to the profound conviction that the surest way to spoil and stifle a library is to invite an architectural competition. I have so great confidence in the talent and genius of American architects, that I believe any one of them, true to the traditions of his profession, would take the conditions presented by librarians, and out of them, work up a library much more practical and far more beautiful than could be ensured by any method of competition.

If law, or public demand, or fear of assuming responsibility, prevent a board of trustees from choosing an architect at the outset, they should first choose an architectural adviser (see next chapter), whom they will have to pay handsomely, as well as to pay premiums and prizes for the competition (I see that the University of California laid aside $50,000 for this purpose); and have him formulate the requirements, superintend the competition, and assist in judging (“assessing” it is called in England) the results.

But I wish that he might be able to shut out from any award those competitors whose plans would exceed the prescribed cost. I remember in my callow days having gone to a friend who was a prominent architect, and proposing to prepare joint plans in a great library competition then impending. He laughed and said, “Yes, I would like to do it as a matter of study, but we will not win a prize. Ours will doubtless be a fine library inside, but there will be no librarian among the judges of award. We will have a fine exterior, but we shall try to keep within the desired cost. Some other architect will plan a larger and more florid and more expensive building, which will fascinate the public eye so much it will win the prize, and the donor will be asked for more money, which he will meekly contribute.” My friend was right. Just this result followed.

In the recent Springfield (Mass.) competition, each architect was required to submit with his plans an estimate of their cubic contents, as a basis for calculating how much they would cost. This was an excellent precaution against just this danger.

In England a competition is apparently accepted as a necessary evil.[156] I cannot find anything on the subject in Burgoyne, but the architect Champneys[157] says that the architect is in most cases selected by open competition. He adds that this “gives openings to those whose abilities would otherwise escape recognition,” and rather faintly concedes some advantage in selection.

“It is almost impossible to make instructions (in a competition) so comprehensive that an architect can be taught this very special branch of his art.”—Champneys.[158]

It should be also recognized that competitions are very costly and delay work on a library several months. What is saved by not having a competition would pay ten times the expense of getting the very best library expert.

Judges of Competition

The advising architect, necessary in case of a competition, and often called in when another architect has been selected for a very large problem, is generally taken from among the heads of architectural departments of universities or technical schools, though one authority suggests that sometimes a prominent architect in actual practice might be a more up-to-date judge. As has been already said, he formulates and guides the competition and acts as chairman of the jury to award prizes. Sometimes more than one architect is asked to serve on this jury, with unprofessional citizens of artistic taste.

But very rarely is any prominent librarian, almost never a considerable number of expert librarians, named for the jury. Here, however, they ought to have especial influence. They can at least prevent bad blunders. As a librarian who had recently served on such a jury confided to me, “All we could do, of course, was to pick out the plans which had the fewest faults from the library point of view.” The least a board of trustees could do, it would seem, after handicapping their library by a competition, would be to let expert librarians have a large share in picking out the plan. But perhaps they would want utility too much, and the real object of a competition is only outside show, of which the librarian is not a better judge than the average man.

If the trustees wish above all to have a good working library, they ought to ask to serve on the competition jury, one prominent librarian who has built, and one prominent librarian of some library of the grade and class which is to be built, and give especial weight to their opinions.

Order of Work

The building committee having been chosen, the librarian being in charge, the adviser selected, the architect appointed, the cost provided for, and the site chosen, it is time for planning to begin.

The first step should be to inspect the site together, and let the architect (without letting his mind anticipate details) say what form of building would best suit site and neighborhood,—tall or low, broad or narrow, four equal-sided, or front and rear, occupying whole lot, or leaving skirts for air, light, and quiet.

If the committee should approve his first impressions, the next thing to do is for librarians to find the cubic contents that funds will allow (see chapter on Cost[159]), get from the architect his idea of how many stories there would better be, with the height of each (including basement), and possible pitch of roof. Then, getting tentatively the height of the building, divide the cube by the height, to approximate the floor area.

The next important question is, which shall be the main floor? The second floor is sometimes considered; if the ground falls off rapidly, what is basement on one front, and ground floor on the other, may be eligible. (In comparing English with American plans and descriptions, remember that their first floor is our second.) Almost invariably, the first or ground floor will assert itself as the main floor, into which, in all buildings but the largest, it will be desirable to dovetail as many departments of active service as possible.

Having already calculated the available area of the floor, you are prepared to make a list of the rooms you want to get on it, and to define the size of each. You will already have arrived at some prepossessions about this, but before you finish planning you will probably have to modify them considerably. To be thorough, it will be wise to make your own list of the rooms needed for the kind and extent of work you want to do, then look over a lot of plans, and perhaps read the printed architectural requirements issued for libraries of your grade and class, in order to be sure you have not overlooked any of your own needs.

As you get to know the size of your delivery-room and main reading-rooms, it is time to confer again with the architect about his general ideas as to suitable proportions for building, whether it will have a distinct front and rear or will require outside effect all around; and as an element in that case, where you shall put the stack, if you have got to have one.

Then comes the most interesting part of planning, the putting together of your picture puzzle. Mr. Foster of Providence actually cut out of paper and grouped together his proposed rooms. I have found it better to get the architect, with paper, pencil and foot-rule, and draw to scale many successive sketches of each floor, assembling and transferring rooms, working out the passages, and calculating stairs. As you proceed, the architect will be evolving his exterior, and now, before he gets his mind fixed, is the time for mutual concessions.

When the rooms are fairly co-ordinated, their required furnishing has to be plotted in, especially the shelving. How many books and readers, how related, do you want in each room? Are wall-shelves better, or full floor cases, shallow or deep alcoves, low floor cases, partitions, railings, what not? Have you provided for full supervision and quick service everywhere?

The stack requires separate study. Is it necessary to have one? Where shall it best be put,—along one side? at the top? at the bottom? or as a projection from the building? As to details, see chapter on [Stack].

When the rooms have been settled and their requirements defined, the architect’s special duties begin. He has to settle the necessary height of rooms, the provision of sufficient light for each by day and by night, the arranging provisions for heat and ventilation, not to interfere with books or shelving, or tables or desks. All this before the exterior is considered,—all spent in planning that interior which the exterior must conform to.

“Work on your plan, finish your plan. When that is perfect, the rest will come.”—Mauran.[160]

Then you may take a month or two for the preliminary conferences between the librarian and his adviser; a month or two for conferences between them and the architect; a month or less for inspection of other libraries. At some time during this process two trips may be taken to other libraries, the first rather early, as soon as your ideas have taken form enough for you to know what you want to look at; the other toward the end, when your need of further information is fully defined. Where to go, whom to take on your tour of inspection, will depend on what funds you can spare. Details of furniture, location of lights, and so on, may be deferred, to be taken up during building. A month or less is needed to submit results to the committee. After their approval has been obtained, the architect must prepare working drawings and specifications, invite bids for work, wait two or three weeks for them, and even then you are ready to break ground on your building in half the time and with half the expense, for fees, traveling, and all, that a competition would have required.

Extras. One good result of this thorough study of every detail in advance should be, that no new wants or serious omissions occur to you when you come to build.

But if you do not plan so thoroughly as to cover all contingencies, expect to find something to be changed or added as you go on, confronting you with those “extra charges” which often appall builders of dwelling houses. Still if your oversights follow to plague you, your architect can here help you with the contractor, and can generally find savings enough in “perfectly good” alternatives in labor or material to balance the cost of the extras. If they finally get ahead of you, and materially increase the cost, either architect or librarian is at fault—someone did not plan well ahead.

Model. The last step of planning may well be the preparation by the architect of a sketch-model in clay for the building committee. This shows the proportions and visualizes all features far more clearly then floor plans, elevations and sections on paper can do. If the sketch-model can show both elevation and sections, it will bring to the librarian his allocation of rooms in final review, and bring out to all concerned, librarian, architect, committee and public, just how the building will “work” and how it will look.

D.
FEATURES

This Book contains considerations which affect the whole building. Note especially Light, Heat, Ventilation.

D.
FEATURES

Site

If the site is given by a donor, or chosen by some other authority, and has been accepted by the board, the only thing to do is to make the best of it. Adapt your plan to it, improve whatever opportunities it may offer, and overcome its defects as best you can.

If it is open to choice, there are often embarrassing conditions. Owners of lots more or less eligible (usually less) are anxious to unload at good prices, and besiege the board with importunities; or owners of real estate not immediately eligible, exert all their direct and indirect influence to get the library building in their district or on their “side.” Even after the choice has been narrowed down to two or three acceptable lots, and has been freed from “pull,” selection is difficult because of different pros and cons.

The main consideration for central library or branch is accessibility for the largest number of users. Retail centers, not so much geographical as practical, well served by car lines, point out the proper neighborhood, but main streets are often too noisy, and good lots on them are too expensive and not easy to get. If there is a quiet street next back of, or close to a main street, especially with an adjoining public square or small park, it will furnish an ideal spot for a library. Good vistas of approach afford opportunities for effect, and bring the library into view and notice.

Space all around the building, and adjoining streets on as many sides as possible, give light, isolation from dangers of fire, more quiet, less dust, than positions directly on a main street.

A wholesale business section, whose occupants only come during business hours of the day, is not a good location. Edges of vast open spaces are not so good as actual centres of residence or of small retail trade to which residents are attracted.

If a site among high buildings must be chosen it would seem wise to build the library high, with reading rooms up toward air and light.

By all means try to foresee and provide for future developments as they may affect immediate surroundings and future accessibility. The neighborhood of schools is always good. Bear in mind that certain noisy or smoky occupations are bad neighbors, and slums only suitable for charitable work.

A lot too high above the street grade may offer architectural advantages, but is bad for public library purposes. Popular departments ought to be directly at street grade, and the necessity of climbing steps hinders rather than attracts readers. A lot sloping upward requires objectionable and expensive approaches, one sloping sideways is unbalanced, but one sloping backwards is often good, for it allows a light basement at the rear, or a stack above and below the main floor at street grade.

It goes without saying that a wet soil is to be avoided where books are to be stored.

In a large city a favorite site for the central library is on some municipal square, near other public buildings. But in such a prominent place, especial care is necessary to escape a heavy architectural style which would darken the building, and divert cost from library facilities to expensive material.

In smaller cities and towns, better sites in proportion may be obtained. Here, where land is cheap enough to allow more space, always provide for growth and future extensions of the building. It has been advised to get enough land for future development, even at expense of the first building.

“The worst site is a deep one, of irregular shape, with only one frontage. If offered, don’t buy, or even accept it as a gift.”—Burgoyne.[161]

But a deep and irregular lot, with a possibility of light on all sides, may not be unfavorable for a building with a stack at the rear. Narrowness in a stack, if somewhat unfavorable to short lines of communication with the desk, give possibilities of excellent daylight everywhere.

Provisions for Growth and Change

It cannot be too strongly urged that a chief caution in planning should be to anticipate and provide for that rapid growth which may strike any American community, large or small, urban or rural; and that development or change of methods which will come even if there is no growth of population. When or how or just where it will come, it is always difficult to foresee. The tide, indeed, seems world-wide. Champneys warns, “Forecast, if possible, and plan in advance. If not, it will be hard to preserve in future a workable home.”[162] Van Name said at St. Louis in 1889, “The present rate of library growth requires far larger provision for the future, in space and in economizing space.”

“Every library in America must continue to grow.”—Eastman.

“One cannot observe the rapid growth of libraries during the last half century without being led to ask in wonder what is to be the result in the future. There is a law affecting the growth of libraries not unlike that of geometric progression. By the principle of noblesse oblige, a library which has attained a certain size is called upon to grow much faster than when it was small. It is difficult to foretell. For years to come libraries will grow rapidly. Ingenuity will bring into use new methods and new apparatus.”—Fletcher.[163]

“Libraries designed to serve the needs of decades to come prove too small before they are fairly occupied.”—Dana.[164]

“The model building of today will be quite out of date tomorrow.”—Marvin.[165]

Perhaps rate of growth cannot be calculated, but it can be shrewdly guessed. It is hard to be too sanguine. Growth in American libraries has oftener been underestimated than the reverse. In an established library you can multiply recent annual growth by twenty-five, for the probable life of the building, and subtract possible withdrawals. But moving into a new building, and growth of the population served, will tend to make needs for space increase in geometrical ratio rather than merely arithmetical, and there are always gifts to be anticipated. So let the sanguine members of your board reckon growth.

Exterior. Provision can be made by buying a lot larger than you will need at first. A plan can be drawn with future wings suggested, or more stories, or an ell. This will require stronger walls, and study of features which could be matched in making changes.

In large libraries, use of sub-cellars, especially for stacks, can be looked to, and sunken stacks, or at least subterranean caves for fuel, can be arranged under that part of the lot outside the building, or even in some cases under the street or an adjoining park. If the experiments now making in various places are successful, this growth downward may be almost as available as growth upward. But see “[Stacks Underground],” and “[Stack Towers],” in later chapters.

Interior. There are several ways for providing for changes inside. If you have enough money, build largely, and space out. Provide more space for books and readers than you can use at once. Make your floor-cases movable, and set them wide apart, to be closed up later as required. Set tables and chairs generously apart, and crowd them together when otherwise you would have to turn away readers. Provide attic and cellar so built and prepared for subsequent finish that they can be used to some purpose when more rooms are wanted.

That reminds me to say that a wise provision is to have as few rigid partitions anywhere, as possible. If you must have any, make them so light, even if sound-proof, that they can all be swept away when it becomes desirable to change.

“Plan a library so that it may be susceptible of inner development,” says Dr. Garnett.[166]

It is always well to plan your shelving so generously as to leave room everywhere for many years’ growth, and so avoid necessity for early rearrangement.

In small libraries, if the book-rooms are built high enough, provision can be made for a second tier of wooden or metal shelves above that first installed. Better always leave them thus high in the projection, side, or corner devoted to floor bookcases.

With very large libraries interior provisions, except in leaving floors or rooms unoccupied at first, and avoiding rigid partitions, will be difficult.

Limitations. In some libraries it is possible to set a limit for desirable growth. For instance, the faculty of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass., could say that they never should want more than seventy-five scholars or 50,000 volumes.[167] In branch libraries it is usual to decide in advance how many books are needed, and to keep this number the same, by withdrawing as many volumes as are added from time to time. Suburban libraries can reduce the normal limit of growth by arranging with their neighboring urban libraries for a co-operative and interloan system, or may unite with them in some such system of segregating useless books in a common catacomb as has been suggested by President Eliot. (See Fletcher.[168])

File Your Plans. Too often, plans for growth carefully made in planning, have not been preserved. When need comes for them, perhaps often when librarian and trustees have been changed, these provisions are not remembered, or if faintly remembered have been laid away where they cannot be found. The wise way is to file your plans away in the library after using them, and include in the portfolio your provisions for change, both card catalogued so fully that they cannot be missed. Even if conditions have changed before alterations are demanded, the original forecast will be found suggestive in making new plans.

Approaches: Entrances

Where the lot is large enough, there will be room for simple landscape gardening which can add greatly to the attractions and architectural effect of the building, without adding largely to the cost. This is, however, in the architect’s province. As is elsewhere suggested, the park board or institution may assume or share the cost of such embellishment.

Outside Steps. In small buildings, the nearer the main floor gets to the street level the better. If the site is so high that there must be more steps to surmount the basement, a few of these set inside the portico or vestibule will prevent the building from being all stairs in front. In larger buildings, flights of steps, however sightly they are, are a hindrance to entrance or exit, just so many steps to be surmounted in every visit to the library; as bad as an unnecessarily large vestibule, or long corridor—effort and cost wasted. From a library point of view they are all wrong.

Porticoes. These are unnecessary for library use, and where economy is an object, are objectionable. They spoil front light in the centre of the building, where it is most needed. They give a heavy tone to the library, and a suggestion of outgrown methods. If they must be, utilitas requires that some use should be found for them, and for the kind of vestibule they require. In very large buildings, where architectural effect is wanted, they offer an opportunity to concentrate it there, and leave the rest of the outside walls to be treated for inside light and convenience. Behind the columns, unheeding their shadow, are places for a vestibule and rooms above which do not require much daylight.

Vestibule. In libraries of average size only a small vestibule is needed, and a lofty vestibule is a waste of overhead space. All that it is needed for is to check drafts and exclude dust, and to give chance for the stir of removing wraps. A vestibule is often the best place for stairs up or down. It should be under supervision from the desk, through glass. In a large library, behind a portico, it can be used as a reception, exhibition, conversation, and waiting-room, being in a position which need not separate departments, or usurp space more needed for other rooms.

“Compact central vestibules, from which all departments open in plain sight from the entrance, are better than long corridors.”—Champneys.[169]

Front Door. This is generally the main, often the only public entrance and exit, and should be always under supervision; in small libraries, from the desk; in large libraries, from special attendants, who may also serve as information clerks, umbrella checkers, and special policemen.

A Revolving Door, though expensive, serves some of the purposes of a vestibule, or a storm door.

Other Outside Doors. A separate staff entrance is often advisable, a janitor’s door (usually to the basement) is necessary; separate doors for the newspaper room, the children’s room, and some groups of allied departments are needed in large libraries. In libraries of moderate size, where there are no such doors, the municipal fire regulations may require special emergency exits.

Swing all Doors Well and Wide. Outside doors, and doors from rooms for many occupants, should naturally swing out, for escape in case of fire or panic. The swinging of every door is a matter for special study, for not only passage, but wall space and convenience depend on it. And have every door wide enough for the maximum audience to come and go through. As I was shot into a crowded room in the New York Public Library recently by pressure from a throng so insistent that it checked those who wanted to get out, a librarian whispered in my ear, “Every doorway should be wide enough to avoid such a mob as this.”

No Doors Between Rooms. In fact, next to having a floor without partitions, it is sometimes well to have only wide openings through partitions, without doors. Doors are only necessary when drafts are to be checked, noise is to be excluded, or passage to be discouraged.

Height of Doors. Unnecessarily high doors are a waste; doors low enough to make a tall man dodge are a nuisance; 6 feet 6 inches is about right.

Storm Doors. The librarian of a very large library reminds me of the necessity of storm doors for winter in our climate, and says that architects seem unwilling to plan them. Certainly every architect of every library, large or small, should include such a structure in his plans, to harmonize in shape and color with the effect of the building. In small libraries, it will be the only portico, or vestibule. In large buildings, under a portico, it bars snow and weather and tempests from direct invasion of the vestibule. Good taste can make such an inexpensive structure sightly, but unless the architect foresees the need and supplies the taste, some carpenter hastily summoned when the need arrives, may spoil a fine entrance with an ugly excrescence.

Halls and Passages

Too much space wasted in these and in entrances, is a bad fault frequently found in libraries, but easily avoided in making plans.

“Should be sufficient, but not wasteful. Redundant corridors show bad planning.”—Champneys.[170]

The English Building Act prescribes a width of 3 feet 6 inches to 4 feet 6 inches, for from 200 to 400 persons likely to pass. Duff-Brown[171] thinks they should not be less than four feet wide for “public traffic.” And Champneys doubts they need exceed nine feet in width.

Are these passages absolutely necessary for library purposes, in length, width, and height, is the test to put. Can they not be omitted entirely?

In small libraries, it is a merit to have all rooms open out of the noisy space which must be left in front of the delivery desk. In larger libraries, passage through reading-rooms is never allowable, and separate entries are necessary. In very large libraries such passages can hardly be avoided. In wings or ells, to utilize light for rooms on both sides it may be necessary to have long corridors lighted on top floors above, on other floors from transoms.

The height of passages needs to be watched as keenly as their other dimensions, for more than 6 feet 6 inches or 7 feet is a waste of space which might in some way be utilized in rooms or on other floors. Nine or ten feet, however, may be required for light, ventilation, or height of stories.

Stairs

Ornamental flights of stairs are usually wasteful and disjunctive, especially in the centre of the building. “They are never used by anyone; all go up in elevators.”—Dewey.[172]

See an excellent article by W. K. Stetson[173] criticising the Newark Public Library.

A good rule is to have just so many flights of stairs as may be required by the probable use of rooms on each story, and to have them no wider or more massive than passage demands. Stack stairways may be only two feet wide; other service stairways not over three feet, which allows passing of single users. Indeed, flights six feet or wider should have a central rail, to keep climbers apart from descenders. When floors are much used, two separate narrower flights, for which room can generally be found symmetrically, will be better than one broader flight.

No stairs should be slippery or have projecting obstacles to trip climbers, or be too steep or high-set for old persons.

Treads. Easy treads are essential to serve all comers well. 5½-inch rise and 13-inch tread, will be generous; 6½ × 11, tolerable. Brooklyn directions specified 4-inch risers.

If any material is used which is, or will wear, slippery, be sure to have some rubber or other stair-pad, well secured, so that even the most unsteady climber cannot trip or slip.

Material. Stone wears down unevenly, and all kinds of stone split and fall in case of fire. Marble is slippery. Iron wears slippery. Wood splinters. Concrete or stone, the treads covered with hardwood or rubber, is probably best, all things considered. But in small libraries, hardwood serves.

Handrails. Dr. Billings sends warning that large, ornamental stairs, outside or inside, should have some form of practical handrails, and after trying to climb in winter the outside steps of the New York Public Library, and Columbia University, I heartily concur with him.

Indeed, bearing in mind the feeble men and women who have a right to use a library, I plead for a “practical” handrail for all stairs. Many flights have no rail at all; the more ornamental they assume to be, the more dangerous they are. Many flights have only marble “rails,” too massive for hand use. All “architectural” staircases are in fact deterrents of use.

Landings. More than a dozen steps are tiresome to most people, and in long flights landings ought to be provided. If a seat can be provided on each, it will be welcome to old persons. A window seat, in the windows used to light flights of stairs, can be made a decorative and also useful feature.

Circular Stairs. About the most inconvenient, useless, dangerous, and unnecessary feature which has come down to us from antiquity is the corkscrew stair, which still persists—I saw one in a plan only yesterday. It is inconvenient because only half of each tread is available. I measured one recently in a library: the wide outside of each tread was twelve inches deep, and it narrowed down to two inches at the central post. The nine-inch width (about the least allowable for a stair tread) was fifteen inches from the post, and only eight from the outside. The usable part of the tread was eight inches wide, the wasted segment was two-thirds of the width, and served only as a trap to stumblers.

This dangerous and inconvenient futility was unnecessary, because a straight stair, with short flights doubling on narrow landings, could be planned to occupy no more floor area, with much greater practicable width, and be infinitely more convenient and less dizzy.

Try to carry an armful of books up or down such a flight, and remember the lesson. A ladder would occupy less space, and be just about as useful as a winding-stair. Why such a traditional inconvenience persists in modern libraries is an enigma.

Stories and Rooms Generally

Height of stories is a main factor in planning. The fewer and lower they can be, bearing in mind full light and ventilation, the less cost will go into unnecessary bulk in building.

Tell the architect what rooms and floors you want, with definite area and height for him to try to suit together. Never let him dictate what dimensions you must pack the rooms into.

In small libraries and in most branches, one story with practicable basement, is the standard. The height of this story is suggested by Miss Marvin as 12 feet, or better, 13 feet; or 16 feet if a second tier of floor cases must be provided.[174] She very sanely says that higher rooms are not necessary from any point of view, and this remark might be extended to most rooms in most libraries.

Where there is a stack, the desire to have as many floors of the building as possible, coterminous with stack floors, determines the height of stories at 14 or 15 feet, as the 7 or 7½-foot stack is chosen, and this will make rooms whose heights, plus thickness of floors (unless some use can be found for mezzanine rooms), are exact multiples of stack heights.

In a larger library (but still small), a second story over part or the whole of the main floor, can be lighted from above and be used for many purposes.

Basement. The height of a basement will depend on the uses contemplated for it. An auditorium requires more height than small rooms for storage, vault, or janitor service. Miss Marvin advises a height of 10 feet, so that it can be used in any way wanted in future.[175]

“A failure to use it is a defect.”

It must be absolutely dry, and fairly warm.

“A well-lighted basement gives more dignity of elevation to a small building.”—Bluemner.[176]

On a sloping site, a basement becomes ground floor, and a cellar becomes basement, for part of the building, with dark cellars and sub-cellars for the other part, which will come handy for heating plant, fuel, storage, and other functions. As the stack can run up and down from the main floor, such a site can be made useful in many ways.

Upper stories become more and more difficult to use unless there are elevators, which are costly to install and costly to run. In old houses, coming as a gift, the upper stories can be used for storage, study rooms, class rooms, trustees, and other departments infrequently needed.

The top floor, where there are elevators, may be one of the most useful stories, the most useful next to the ground floor, because the possibility of good top light allows every square foot to be used. If there are only three stories, the top may be used for many purposes without elevators, if the stairs are easy and ample. The principal uses are, for serious reading rooms, exhibitions, small study or class rooms, historical rooms, special libraries or departments.

Use of Various Stories. The assignment of rooms will be governed by the exigencies and policy of the library. A careful study of the use to be best made of the floors will be of vital importance toward economical and effective administration. In case of doubt as to the size or location of rooms, inspection of existing libraries of similar grade and class, and study of plans, will be helpful to stimulate ideas.

“It is a mistake to have the library on the second floor, at least the reading room and circulating department, which should have easy access and publicity.”—Fletcher.[177]

Correlation of Parts. Guides to arrangement will be consideration of processes, relation of users, and convenience in all steps of use or service. A recent English writer suggests arranging, in sequence from the entrance, newspaper reading, magazine and light reading, delivery, and quiet reference or reading rooms.

One great desideratum is continuous flooring on each story, even into the stacks, so that trucks can be rolled without jolt, and readers can pass without the discomfort of two or three steps up or down, here and there, as in many existing libraries. This irregularity of floor level is one of the worst faults possible.

Mezzanine Floors. Supposed architectural exigencies so often demand stories of greater height than library uses require, that it is well to have in mind what mezzanine floors can be interposed here and there, and what rooms can be assigned to them. Many staff rooms (for instance, stenographers’ and others not crowded), and many readers (e.g., private students, small clubs, teachers, classes, debating teams) do not require large or lofty rooms, and would be much better if they had only half the height of the large rooms. Only light and ventilation may require much height of walls, and even these only when many persons must use the same room.

Not Thoroughfares. By no means make any reading room a passageway to any other room, or allow stairs to run up into it or up from it. Some of the worst faults to be found in existing libraries lie just here. Whatever increases movement in such rooms and disturbs students is a library crime.

Attics and Cellars. In old houses, the occupation of these unfinished spaces requires ingenious planning. But attics furnish dry storage, cellars dark storage, which can be utilized without expensive alterations.

In new buildings a cellar is essential, as a foundation at least, but may be glorified into a practicable basement without much cost; or may be minimized to an air space in small buildings; or shared by air space at one end and heating at the other. An attic is not so necessary, except a shallow air space. But even shallow attics can be utilized for storage-room by a trap door, and it is marvellous how much need of such room will be developed after occupancy.

If you have them at all, plan attics and cellars for some future use, even if they are left unfinished for the present. I remember an early experience of inspecting a library building with a view to alteration, and finding the attic so weakly trussed, and the cellar so solidly partitioned, that neither could be altered for improvement. Two-thirds of the building were thus wasted, which could have been used if it had been wisely planned.

“A building should stand high enough on its foundations to give the basement both light and dryness throughout.”—Winsor.[178]

Walls, Ceilings, Partitions

The exterior walls come mainly into the province of the architect, subject to chastening by librarian and building committee as to material, decoration, massiveness, and cost. “The ideal building has no breaks or jogs and few corners.” The interior walls and ceiling have been considered under the subjects of Height of Stories and of Coloring. Under the latter head they materially influence illumination also. In the decorative scheme they should harmonize with the woodwork and furniture.

The walls and ceilings not only play a star part in the cheerfulness and beauty of the building, but they materially affect the eyes and health of the reader. On their coloring and the character of the reflection they cast, largely depend the effectiveness of all diffused light, and the best part of reading light. They form a subject of especially important study.

Panelled ceilings which are often planned for decorative purposes, especially in large and lofty rooms, interfere injuriously with reflection of light, by intercepting it with numerous shadows.

All authorities agree that there be as few partitions as possible in small libraries, where departments can be indicated, or readers separated, by railings, cords, low bookcases, or screens of glass or light material, which do not interfere with general supervision.

Many rooms can be arranged with sliding or folding partitions, to be used for larger or smaller audiences, as required.

In large libraries, necessary partitions can be of such light construction that they can be changed or removed at will. Some partitions are essential; for instance, those of reading rooms to exclude noise, and of music rooms to shut it in.

All partitions should match the other coloring and style of rooms and furniture, to produce a quiet and pleasing effect of harmony.

“Buildings costing less than $10,000 cannot afford space for partitions.”—Eastman.[179]

Floors and Floor Coverings

Floors should be substantial, durable, cleanly, dry, warm, noiseless, slow-burning, and not slippery.

Any uncovered floor will be noisy.

Stone, tile, mosaic, and concrete are noisy. Glass and marble are slippery.

Hardwood, or softwood covered with linoleum or corticene, will answer in most rooms and passages.

Variations of cork, or cork on a solid foundation, are now common, and have been found satisfactory. Invention is at work on this style of floor, and may evolve something near perfection, if fairly cheap. Linoleum wears badly, except in the best grades, and seems to be going out of favor.

The new Springfield (Mass.) library has sawdust concrete as a one-inch base for a cork carpet. The St. Louis building just dedicated has wooden strips over concrete to which a thick cork top is nailed.