Library Review

Library economy writers: The contemporary scene

W.C. Berwick Sayers
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To cite this document:
W.C. Berwick Sayers, (1940),"Library economy writers: The contemporary scene", Library Review, Vol.
7 Iss 5 pp. 198 - 203
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 198 LIBRARY REVIEW
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Library Economy Writers:

The Contemporary Scene*
BY W . C. B E R W I C K SAYERS.

NO ofattempt to survey the scene would be within miles

success which did not contemplate the almost
revolutionary effect of the coming of the county library
service. A few of its pioneers foresaw the possibilities of the
service which took practical shape, after much private but
necessarily limited experiment, with the publication of the
Adams Report. With it has come a large amount of
journalistic writing and some important books. The earliest
book was Duncan Gray's County Library Systems, 1922,1
which was followed almost immediately by Robert D.
Macleod's County Rural Libraries, 1923.2 They are pioneer
books on the technique of the new job, and Macleod goes well
into its social and educational problems and results as he, the
first librarian to the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, saw
* Continued from our Winter Number.
1 2
Grafton. Grafton.
 LIBRARY REVIEW 199

them in the birth and infancy of the scheme. Both are

distinctive men in quite different ways : Macleod is clearly
a Scot and, if Burns is to be trusted, the other is or ought to
have been !
These writers had a pre-1914 background. Change of a
radical kind came with the writers who were without it.
Study for example the fervid book by Miss E. J. Carnell,
County Libraries : retrospect and forecast, 1938,3 and note
how far even in thought from the pioneers their inheritors
have ranged. The author was the charming intelligent
librarian of the branch of the West Sussex County Library
at Bognor Regis on an evening when I first met her; and I
was struck with the vitality and attractiveness she had brought
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into a small unpromising building. Later I heard of her

as speaker and writer, and very trenchant were her accounts
of the shortcomings of libraries, but this only in order to
press good ideas of her own. She is now organizing librarian
in connexion with the rural libraries of New Zealand, and the
Dominion is fortunate. Anyway, her book is alive. These
writers were often somewhat unaware of the work their
elders had done, or preferred to tell it again in their own
fashion; this has led to a certain amount of repetition,
because the number of new ideas must be small. I get some
of this feeling, probably unjustified, when I read the work of
Eric Leyland who, in point of time, should come at the end
of my list. Leyland is still in the twenties and was barely
half-way through them when he wrote his The Public Library
and the Adolescent, 1937,4 in which he propounds with vigour
and at length one of the major special problems. He followed
this with a little book aimed at the greater public, The Public
Library: its history, organization and functions.5 It is
popularly and clearly written as was the earlier book, and my
brief, but quite valued, acquaintance with Leyland assures
me that he has qualities of observation, foresight and breadth
of mind which with his good cultural background should
make him a force for good. If you doubt this read his The
Wider Public Library, 1938,6 which I think has faults of
immaturity, overstress and to a minor extent as I think
doubtful reading of some of the facts ; but it has vision, and
enthusiasm, which give light to common matters.
Other writers have returned to specialism. Those of
us who know him appreciate the modest strength, the wisdom
3 4 5 6
Grafton. Grafton. Pitman. Grafton.
 200 LIBRARY REVIEW

and the knowledge of the present Director of the School of

Librarianship, John D. Cowley. In that capacity he wields
a wide influence upon our profession. Trained in a law
library, he undertook charge of the libraries of the great
county of Lancashire with conspicuous effect and was
particularly successful in the provision of small town branches.
We all know him as a rather slightly-built man with ex-
pressive eyes and a look of youth which is enviable, and as a
speaker whose effects are got by a restrained and clear
exposition of his facts. With his students he creates the
feeling that they are members of a family. Some of these
pleasant characteristics, of simple statement which is never
trivial, come out in his little manual, The Use of Reference
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Material, 1937,7 than which no better book could be placed

in the hands of a would-be reference librarian, especially for
its attitude towards the reader.
The most ambitious books by younger writers have been
on what may be called our scholarly subjects, both of them
hailing originally from Bermondsey Public Libraries. R. C.
Barrington Partridge undertook a great task for his diploma
thesis in The History of the Legal Deposit of Books throughout
the British Empire, 1938,8 and so well did he do it that this
rather unexciting subject becomes of real readability. He
has gathered his facts with assiduity, and moulded them into
a book which I think will be permanent. The other is a
venture which challenges dangerous comparisons. In
Paleography and Archives : a manual for the librarian, archivist
and student, 1938,9 H. G. T. Christopher undertakes a
formidable task, and one that I am not competent to assess.
It is certainly a book to be read with interest. It is some years
since John L. Thornton came to my own classes at University
College, London. He was exemplary in his work and his
equipment was adequate to write his Cataloguing in Special
Libraries, 1938,10 which is a book of a desirable sort in that it
brings together and compares in a practical manner the
cataloguing methods of all types of libraries. A study of it
by the librarians of special libraries might do much to unify
and clarify those methods. A much wider field is covered by
Dorothy May Norris's History of Cataloguing and Cataloguing
Methods, 193911; in fact its scope is seven and a half
centuries. A Library Association thesis, it is a model of
7 8 9
Grafton. Library Association. Grafton.
10 11
Grafton. Grafton.
 LIBRARY REVIEW 201

arrangement and exposition. It is one earnest of the fine

work that the Birmingham Public Libraries turn out to-day,
and could only have come from a student with access to the
many sources a city such as Birmingham possesses.
We get back to the theme of McColvin's important
book in a significant one by Harold V. Bonny, A Manual of
Practical Book Selection for Public Libraries, 1939,12 in which
the approach is in an elementary way the psychological one.
Such a book can be interesting and useful; indeed it is
impossible to exhaust the subject. I regard Mr. Bonny's
book in that light, and I hope he will be encouraged to continue
and to expand his study.
R. D. Hilton Smith has written two thin little volumes
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on Library Lighting, 1937-1939.13 He is a busy man, and

as honorary editor of The Library Association Record has
for some time had (to be paradoxical) a crowded leisure. The
books are worthy of their author. That, to us who know
him, is saying much. Hilton Smith has been in many
libraries, and he worked with me as librarian-in-charge of the
then new Ashburton Library at Croydon. He was an admir-
able colleague, fertile in expedients, eloquent in speech, a
good writer and a sound lover of books. He has independence
of thought and for years has been a leader of the younger men.
The contemporary scene shows a group of younger
writers, clever, eloquent and abundantly critical. The day
has been one in which men speak their minds, and I am not
sure that anyone is the worse for it, although we were happier
when we could really believe that our elders were wiser
guides, at least in some things, than ourselves. Nil admirari
is not a glad motto. The group has been naturally most
articulate in articles in the library journals and particularly
in The Library Assistant where a certain court of criticism
has been set up, the value of which I for one desire to acknow-
ledge. Smartness in vocabulary is essential, and in reading
these writers one gets the impression that as a preliminary
they write in their natural manner and then elaborate with
the help of dictionary or thesaurus. To this there can be
little objection, as a writer ought to use art in his utterances.
This was the sort of impression I gained from the critical
essays, called " Valuations," which I believe Stanley Snaith
began, in company with T. E. Callendar, F. Seymour Smith,
S. G. Holliday, D. H. Halliday and a few others who write
12 13
Grafton. Gravesend: A.J.Philip
 202 LIBRARY REVIEW

exceptionally well. Some of them have gone on to The

Library Association Record where they sit in grave judgment
on their contemporaries with scintillating words and an
assurance which is a sheer delight. W. B. Stevenson and
R. L. W. Collison are specially to be remarked ; they have
ideas and style—a good equipment for a writer. There are
other library journalists ; my old friend James Ormerod,
and the clever anonymous Old Stager, who writes in The
Librarian. I have often thought that much of the style of
modern library journalism is drawn from "Zenodotus," under
which pseudonym began twenty-five years ago " Letters on Our
Affairs" in The Library World, which have been continued
by other writers to this day ; but that style in its turn was I
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think drawn from J. D. Brown's rare but inimitable reports

in the same journal of the meetings (often mythical) of the
club of librarians, the Pseudonyms. After all, as I have said
elsewhere, all writing is part of a chain. In their own
libraries our younger men have been effective, partly as a
result of work with the A.A.L. An influence has been
Frank M. Gardner whose pre-occupation with books as
physical objects has been as great as with their intrinsic
character. Typography has been almost an obsession, and
has had its extravagances, as when it seems that the whole
of English composition and punctuation are handed over to
the sometimes " arty " preferences of the compositor, and
when stops and capitals are ignored, letters are exaggerated
and tiny bizarre lists are offered instead of those to which
we are used ; but on the whole the results have been good.
Recommended Books is one of their works and an ambitious
one; as a selection of current works which have impressed
younger men and women, we older men are grateful for it.
It has never led them away from the principle that it is our
business to exploit books and not only new books; a short
account of a classic, written with skill, is a feature of each issue.
Another leader, Stanley Snaith, in a remarkable and uncon-
ventional catalogue of last year's books, threw the comments
upon them into a quasi-dramatic dialogue between borrower
and librarian. This was piquant, and, as I thought, critically
sound, but other librarians should be wary of the method,
which requires the uncommon gifts which Snaith undoubtedly
possesses. Moreover, the catalogue is based carefully upon
the study of a particular locality—a study imperative in all
directional cataloguing.
 LIBRARY REVIEW 203

So, even if there is a critical spirit abroad, there is vitality

and there is enthusiasm. The young folk will not fail the
profession. But to-day they are on the knife-edge of enormous
destiny, and even as I write the abyss yawns which makes
most of the common day seem quite unreal. I recall in 1914
how we blamed the old who had not kept the world from
catastrophe ; now we in our turn may be blamed for events
we could control as effectively as an insect can control the
wind that blows it where it will. The young, by the cruelty
of life, have to bear the sins of the fathers, conscious or
otherwise. To them for a time writing must be a minor
matter. But we and they, however grim the hours, do not
really believe in the extinction of our ideals. There will be
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dark times, difficulties, set-backs, but the great turning

towards books which seems general is a prophecy that when
the world's great age begins anew libraries will emerge,
perhaps into a future surpassing anything we have known.