NEWS OF THE MONTH. SEE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY NEWS OF THE MONTH. SUBMARINES, A FOREWORD To the List of REFERENCES ON SUBMARINES, A LIST OF REFERENCES IN THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY WEITENKAMPF, FRANK. THE Making of a LITHOGRAPH WEITENKAMPF, FRANK. OLD PRINTS IN THE PRINTS DIVISION OF THE NEW 87 BULLETIN OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS VOLUME 22 JANUARY 1918 THE JOYS OF LIBRARIANSHIP BY ARTHUR E. BOSTWICK Librarian of the St. Louis Public Library An Address delivered before The New York Public Library Staff Association NUMBER I JOY OY is a by-product. It is futile to go in search of it. When a machine runs smoothly, — when every cog and lever is properly adjusted and there is a minimum of friction and lost motion, its work is done quietly. There is no creaking, no slamming and banging, and if the machine were sentient, it would be joyous. Its joy is a symptom, an indication that it is doing its work well and that it is in harmony with all about it. This condition, in a conscious being like ourselves, is accompanied in consciousness by what we call pleasure, - an indication that we are fitting into the scheme of things and are doing well something that we are capable of doing and that needs to be done. The worker who thus succeeds in fitting himself and his activity into the system of the universe experiences pleasure, -- joy; and it is the only way in which he can obtain it. When we get pleasure from recreation, it is because recreation is a legitimate and necessary part of our activities. Led by instinct, we seek it, and our joy is its result. But if we are misled and seek the joy when we no longer need the recreation, our goal recedes before us. This is how Robbie Burns puts it: "But pleasures are like poppies spread — A moment white, then melts for ever; Or like the borealis race, That flit ere you can point their place; This is not a treatise on psychology, but we must realize that if librarianship, or anything else, has joys, they are to be found in the perfect adaptation of the worker to the work and that this adaptation is what we must seek, letting the joy come as a by-product, as it surely will. I desire to exclude at the outset the joy that consists in the simple accumulation of as large a sum of money as possible. Creature comforts are necessary and the joy that attends their acquisition is a legitimate by-product, but we should not use it as a measure of the relative desirability of occupations. We Americans have been derided as dollar-chasers. It must be said for us that if we do chase the dollar occasionally our zest for it seems to end when we have caught it. We part with it easily and generally to good purpose. But even in the matter of chasing, I think we have been misjudged. Our love for the dollar arises often from a mistaken idea that the ability to get it is a general measure of capacity. This is surely not so. The money-making instinct is a useful one, not to be despised, but it is only one of many kinds of capacity for human service. A born money-getter would make just as great a mistake to go into library work as a born librarian would to undertake the pursuit of the dollar. What are the elements in librarianship favoring adaptability? First it deals with books, which are the records of life and its products, and with making these records available to men, who are life itself. Can you think of any subject matter more likely to contain within itself something to correspond with the needs and abilities of a particular person? It is like the flutter of sounds at the lip of an organ pipe which has the ability to excite resonance in a column of air of any length and volume, producing a note of any pitch. In the mass of flue-pipes contained in a great modern organ, the primary noise produced by the air at the lip of each is precisely the same, and yet from each the corresponding pipe picks out the vibrations of the proper frequency and speaks out with its own note. So every worker, no matter whether his desires. and capabilities are pitched high or low, may find in the library something to which he may respond. For in the first place he must be interested in some subject, and that subject is of course represented in the library. It may be a broad one, such as history, or science, or literature; it may be narrow, like coins or gymnastics or the building of bird houses. Work in a library enables him to give it scope, to call the attention of others to it, and to get in touch with those who also love it. I know of nothing better for a library than to count among its workers specialists who are interested in expanding and improving parts of its collection in which they take a personal interest, and I know of nothing better for the members of a library staff than to cultivate such |