The yearly sum spent on it is
entirely inadequate to keep it up to date. A fraction of its activity is
beneficial, as much to the artisan as to members of the crust. But the
chief result of the penny-in-the-pound rate is to supply women old and
young with outmoded, viciously respectable, viciously sentimental fiction.
A few new novels get into the Library every year. They must, however, be
"innocuous," that is to say, devoid of original ideas. This, of course, is
inevitable in an institution presided over by a committee which has
infinitely less personal interest in books than in politics or the price
of coal. No Municipal Library can hope to be nearer than twenty-five years
to date. Go into the average good home of the crust, in the quietude of
"after-tea," and you will see a youthful miss sitting over something by
Charlotte M. Yonge or Charles Kingsley. And that something is repulsively
foul, greasy, sticky, black. Remember that it reaches from thirty to a
hundred such good homes every year. Can you wonder that it should carry
deposits of jam, egg, butter, coffee, and personal dirt? You cannot. But
you are entitled to wonder why the Municipal Sanitary Inspector does not
inspect it and order it to be destroyed.... That youthful miss in
torpidity over that palimpsest of filth is what the Free Library has to
show as the justification of its existence.
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