WHAT MAKES A LIBRARY?

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 23, 27 January 1923, Page 12

WHAT MAKES A LIBRARY?

THE BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE

IN PARIS.

A library, I suppose, must be supplied with numbers of excellent: books and have an efficient cataloguing system, but the really important thing for it to have is atmosphere, says a correspondent m the "Christian Science. Monitor." After all, you can find books in a railway station and card catalogues almost anywherej what you want from a library is the subtle conviction, • or reassurance, that books, are the most important thing in the world and reading them the pleasantest and worthiest of occupations. Now and ag-ain faith wavers on that point; it is the duty of libraries to reestablish it. You cannot, unless you have inherited an ancestral mansion, get the necessary conviction from your own library where most of the reading hae been done by you yourself, possibly under a misapprehension; you can get it, soothingly and stimuatingly, from a-room where people have been reading for genei'ations, where they havo-read'so hard and so lovingly that all the place is coloured with their bygone thoughts and dreams.

There are a few libraries, even in yountf America, which offer, the reader the consolation of which we are speaking; there are many in England, particuj larly in the Oxford colleges, where Busty sunlight slants across oak shelv.es and thick brown volumes with their guarding chains; but the perfect example of the library fulfilling its atmospheric function is the Manuscript Room of the Bifoliotheque Nationale in Paris. It is not necessary even to step inside it; yoiT~have only to stand on the threshold, and look through the glass door. There is the past, the past of all French research and scholarship, of men who have loved books and the making .and the reading .of them above all that the world had to offer. It seems to^emanate. that gathered thought, in a sort of' gold-brown radiance, not only from the books and walk, as it does in the Oxford libraries, but from the readers themselves who are certainly not of this modern world, but would appear to h?.ve 'been miraculously preserved, reading, from century to century. It is a long room, high end narrow. Down one side tall windows witih beautifully -carv.ed frames are set in the panelled, wall, a wall pf deep soft brown. The other side is lined from floor. to * ceiling with books, beautiful old "books, red and brown and blue, mellow with use and time. Between the books and the windows run heavy carved tables with carved wading stands and- high.backed chairs. At .one table a little man with a black skull cap and big spectacleo is poring over a 'huge volume propped up on one of, the carved stands. In the centre of the room a ponderous tome lies open on a table. A man with a shiny bald head, and' spectacles, ai man with' a little black skull cap and spectacles, a man with a lonff white beard and spectacles, all three dressed in black, are disputing: wildly over the tome. They wave their hands and talk very 'fast,' thrusting then- ancient noses down into the pages that they may read the better. And over them all the golden haze. ■ That is a library.