Burr,
Anna Robeson. The Jessop Bequest (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907)
401 p.
Although
a librarian is not named the local public library provides the
setting for the meeting of two protagonists.
The
Chillingworth Library had successfully resisted all attempts at
modernization. From the building itself, a gray, palladian structure
standing back from the street in a weedy waste of garden, to the
old-fashioned stands and tables within, everything about it marked a
slumbering defiance of progressive methods. Books were still its main
furnishing, contrary to that modern custom which provides a library
interior only with desks, chairs, tablets, green lampshades, and
frescoes. Here, instead of filling out a slip asking your age, name,
income, creed, weight, and degree of myopia, which you deposit in a
pneumatic tube, to receive in return a predigested tabloid volume
such as library authorities consider befits your case, – here,
persons of ripe age and established morals were permitted to browse
undisturbed over the shelves. It is true you might or might not find
the book of which you were in search; but at least you spent a
desultory and agreeable half-hour.
The
catalogue methods of the Chillingworth library were such as to
discourage culture. There was a catalogue, a time-worn volume in
microscopic print, wherein “The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt” was
listed under “Anonymous,” and Swedenborg's “Heaven and Hell”
under “Works of Imagination and Fancy.” This superannuated
authority was backed up by a few drawers of cards, in which the
letter K stood represented by “Keats, John, Life & Works of,
61,107,590 AB, 2.” If you could remember this number and send it
in, you might be quite sure of receiving a copy of “Elsie
Dinsmore.” Repeated trials destroyed your confidence in catalogics,
if there is such a science, so you usually preferred to hunt your
book yourself. Such a hunt brought other game besides your quarry.
You wondered who it was kept out “The Mysteries of Udolpho,” that
prodigious monument of dullness, or why “The Anatomy of Melancholy”
was placed in the medical section.
It
was only the really busy, however, who complained, and it is conceded
a library is no place for them. The society in its walls is the only
leisure class in the world; its inmates have all time at their backs;
and we have no business to affront them by our hurried counting of
moments. One grew attached to the very faults of this place, to its
dusty, dusky, dingy interior. The main room was not large, with
twisted iron staircases running up to the book galleries. There were
battered, old-fashioned tables and book stands; dingy plaster busts
of Shakespeare and Sophocles, fly-specked water-colors of
revolutionary battles. Behind the counter presided an exhausted
librarian, who seemed tacitly to echo the weary cry of King Solomon.
(p. 59-60).
This
is where young Diana Jessop, who has aspirations beyond small town
life, comes to refresh her mind.
