Gladys Hunt on Library Blessings

Editor’s Note: The American Library Association may be a perpetrator of much mischief in children’s publishing, but we can be grateful for libraries!

In praise of libraries

Originally published on the Tumblon website February 6, 2009

I write in praise of libraries! We can take them for granted and forget what a privilege they are–especially libraries that contain Children’s Books.

Did you know that children were once routinely turned away from libraries? Andrew Carnegie, bless him, underwrote construction of more than sixteen hundred public libraries across the U.S. between 1881 and 1917. But these library buildings and their books were for grown-ups. Most followed the policy of the Boston Public Library, opened in 1854, that said you had to be sixteen to enter. The Astor Library required users to be fourteen and a boy to enter its sacred halls.

Why? I think mostly because they believed children had to be protected from being morally corrupted by books, especially novels written by people like DeFoe and Dickens. So few books for children were in print that precocious children were reading whatever they could get their hands on.

Furthermore, stories were suspect. In fact, when Samuel Tilden, who gave over two million dollars to establish a free library in New York, learned that ninety per cent of the books checked out in the Boston Public Library were fiction, he nearly changed his mind about giving the money.

Then someone asked, “What if libraries were to set aside a special room for children, staffed by librarians who actually liked children?” In 1896 Anne Carroll Moore was asked to create just such a Children’s Library at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. The children lined up around the block to get in.

Anne Carroll Moore made it a big occasion. She kept a big black ledger; if you could sign your name you could borrow a book. Before signing, the child read: “When I write my name in this book I promise to take good care of the books I use in the Library and at home, and to obey the rules of the Library.” It was a sacred trust to take out a book. The story is that soldiers on leave from the two Great Wars later climbed those library steps and asked to see the black ledgers so they could find their name in the book and remember.

Story lovers may find that hard to believe, but if you saw the movie Miss Potter you got some insights into what a risk Beatrix Potter’s publisher took to put her stories with their wonderful drawings into print. Her first book appeared in bookshops in 1902. Now more than a hundred years later they are still enchanting children three and older.

I hope your children are enjoying her marvelous books (all twenty-three of them) with their extraordinary vocabulary. I remember hearing our little boy “implore his friend to exert himself one day when they were climbing a fence, and I knew that the birds’ urgent words that helped Peter Rabbit escape Farmer McGregor had taken root in his heart. Of such things is the imagination made!

© Gladys M. Hunt 2008-10, reissued in 2022 with minor adjustments with permission of the Executor of the Literary Estate of Gladys M. Hunt (4194 Hilton SE, Lowell, MI 49331). Used by permission. All rights reserved.

More at Redeemed Reader:

• We published an earlier post from Gladys Hunt with recommendations for Your Next Visit to the Library.
• Loving Your Library: Janie and Emily explain our problems with the ALA, while libraries themselves remain quite loveable.
• Get ready for more reading time! Megan lays out Five Ways to Maximize Your Library This Summer.
• Library Week: a roundup of posts from library weeks past.