Librarians in Chicago

Librarians in Chicago

Last week Chicago had one of its quietest gatherings of the year in the conventions of the American Library Association (1,000 delegates) and the International Federation of Library Associations (2,000). The librarians tiptoed about the Hotel Stevens, lunched and dined, visited the Century of Progress, listened to speeches. A featured guest at the conventions was Hervey Allen, whose Anthony Adverse is so much in demand that some librarians regard it as blight rather than blessing. Author Allen said he rejoiced in the quiet of libraries, deplored the fact that some" show motion pictures. This was argued by English Professor Howard Mumford Jones of the University of Michigan, who urged rooms where readers could burst into ''loud guffaws," rather than those "suggestive of a general funeral establishment."

A survey made public at the conventions indicated 43,890,548 persons in the U. S. --38% of the populace--are without library service of any sort. Most bookless state: Arkansas. The South has the fewest libraries, New England the most. A big city like Chicago or New York, librarians agree, should have one and one-half books per resident; a city with 10,000 to 200,000 population should have two; smaller towns three. To pay for them, libraries should get at least $1 per capita per year.

The prison libraries section of the Association was told by Miss E. Kathleen Jones of Massachusetts that the books most in demand among prisoners are W. B. Gibson's Houdini's Escapes and a symposium on Five Hundred Criminal Careers.

Book circulation has increased 40% in the past three years, with between 4.000,000 and 5,000,000 new library-users. More young people than old, more uneducated than educated people use libraries. Aliens read more seriously than the U. S.-born. Librarians like to guide the young in reading, take credit for having weaned them from Horatio Alger. But, said Editor Frederic G. Melcher of The Publisher's Weekly, "Young people resent their parents' intimation that they don't know good reading when they see it."

The librarians scanned with interest a space-saving bound volume of the New York Times, printed on rag-paper with type so small that a reading glass is necessary. They heard from Eastman Kodak Co. of a method of photographing eight full-size newspaper pages on a strip of film 1 3/8 in. by 12 in.

The monks of the Middle Ages, working over Greek and Roman manuscripts, made possible the rise of modern Europe; the librarians who preserved such documents as Ptolemy's theory of the rotundity of the earth made possible the discovery of America. So, in Chicago last week, recalled Monsignor Eugene Tisserant, the jovial, brown-bearded librarian of the Vatican. Librarian Tisserant told interviewers that the wing of the library which collapsed in 1931, now rebuilt, is the most modern in Europe, with all-steel stacks. Associated with the Vatican library since 1908, he remarked calmly that recataloguing its 500,000 volumes, a job to be undertaken with the help of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, will take 40 years. Librarian Tisserant enjoys fine brandies, speaks 16 tongues, takes in his stride such tasks as rewriting in good French a scholarly work written in North Africa in bad French by a German priest.

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